“Shoot me, I tell you. That’s your trade. Listen closely: the head of a family is never really the head of a family. An assassin is never really an assassin. They play at it, you understand. While a dead man is really dead. To be or not to be, eh? You see what I mean. There’s nothing I can be but a corpse under six feet of earth. The rest, I tell you, is clowning. And this too is clowning. All of it! All that I said here. Maybe you think that I’m desperate? Not at all: I’m acting out the comedy of despair.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
(Dirty Hands)
At the moment, I have been reading the Reprieve, but I’m kind of disappointed. I think I expect too much of Sartre whenever I read him, which is not right. And the thing is…Sarte has never disappointed like Aeschylus. Oh God he was a thorough disappoint! I still don’t have the courage to read him again even after 5 years.
But then I thought of going through this play once again. Dirty Hands is one of my favourites. It’s a political drama set during World War 2 & you can’t ignore Hugo’s character. But I don’t think everyone can understand him. He abandoned his family & class & yet he had to hear crap that he didn’t know what it’s like to hungry. He was deceived by the party as well.
At one point, Hugo says:
“It’s an idiotic story, like all stories. If you look at it from a distance, everything holds together, more or less; but if you get up close to it, it busts apart. One action is over too quickly. It seems to happen almost spontaneously & you don’t know whether you did it because you wanted to or because you couldn’t hold it back.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
Dirty Hands is actually the kind of play that not only makes you think, but you can actually go ahead than that & you would know it only if you have done that. They say once you start thinking, there's no going back. That's superb, but I think it's more fun when we go further than what we have been doing. However, it's altogether another thing that people prefer following rather than thinking at all.
