The Necessary Evil

by André Couvreur

  If so, the title of the story probably referred, when first invented, not to any general necessity, but to the very specific necessity of Dr. Bordier’s dilemma, when he discovers Madeleine’s pregnancy and has to decide what to do about it. In that context, the necessity of the evil derives simply from the fact that it is the lesser of two. Madeleine’s situation is catastrophic; the possibility of a happy outcome is long gone, and the only outcome toward which Bordier can direct his efforts is the one that does the least damage. The fact that that option requires him not merely to let evil take its course and triumph, but actively to co-operate in it, and then to offer himself up as a further lamb to its ritual slaughter, merely adds a couple of extra turns of the screw.

  That is, of course, a harsh conclusion, arguably one of the most brutal ever attached to a work of fiction. Most readers tend to agree with Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism in thinking that that, in the conclusion of a story, the good should end happily and the bad unhappily, because that is, in a sense, what fiction means. The author of a story—a “secondary creator,” in Alexander Baumgarten’s terminology—is omnipotent; he is the sole determinant of what happens in his story; he merely has to write it for it to occur. Readers know that, and therefore tend to be resentful if a writer refuses to use his omnipotence to punish the evil done within his story and save the innocent from disaster. It is precisely because that does not seem to happen often in the real world that readers often feel a powerful desire for compensation and consolation in fictional worlds… and precisely because it does not seem to happen often in the real world that authors sometimes feel that, if they meekly satisfy the reader demand in question, they are committing a different kind of moral treason, by misrepresenting the world as it is.

  Not all works of fiction do end happily, of course; there is an entire genre of “tragedy,” which attempts to make hearers and readers feel sad about the horrid state of the real world, in which the innocent routinely suffer the consequences of dire fate and human evil. The sense of tragedy is, however, predicated on the feeling of the hearer/reader that it shouldn’t really be that way, and the knowledge that, in fiction at least, it needn’t be. Le Mal nécessaire is, not, however, a tragedy. It belongs to a different literary counter-tradition, particularly strong in France, in which the writer’s purpose is not so much to make readers feel sad as to make them feel sick. Writers of that kind of fiction attached many different labels to it; two of the earliest consistent practitioners, S. Henry Berthoud and Petrus Borel, employed the labels contes misanthropiques [misanthropic tales] and contes immoraux [immoral tales], but the one that is now most frequently cited is Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s contes cruels [cruel tales], which has the seeming advantage of not being sarcastic, in that such stories, while not really being misanthropic or immoral, really are cruel.

  Berthoud’s tales were not misanthropic and Borel’s were certainly not immoral; both writers shared with their readers a perfectly clear sense of what would count as a heart-warming and morale-building ending, and their refusal to provide such endings did not derive from the fact that they were misanthropic men rejoicing in the triumph of evil—quite the reverse. They were writing books of lamentations, but not the often-lachrymose and somewhat-resigned lamentations of tragedy; they were writing savage lamentations in which the cruelties of humans and nature were presented cruelly, hurled in the reader’s face with an intention to startle and offend rather than laid out for somber contemplation.

  The most extreme of all writers of that ilk, in France or anywhere, was the Marquis de Sade, whose works were banned because they were so very extreme in their calculated indecency and repulsiveness, encouraging the assumption on the part of unsophisticated readers that their author must, in fact, be immoral, misanthropic and cruel, or at least mad. Perhaps he did experiment with such sentiments, but the fact that Sade was sacked from the Revolutionary Tribunal for excessive leniency—in effect, for flatly refusing to behave as his characters did, even when those around him were—suggests that his extremism was a rhetorical strategy, intended not to make the intolerable seem attractive, but to emphasize its intolerability.

  At its most basic, the rhetorical strategy in question is known as irony, or sarcasm: the use of a statement in such a way that the hearer is intended to take an inference opposed to the literal meaning of the words employed. It has two names because its use varies according to a spectrum of subtlety, sarcasm generally being less delicate, or more brutal, than irony. Anyone unaware of, or insensitive to, the existence of sarcasm is likely make terrible blunders, not merely in everyday social life but in reading fiction—and, for that matter philosophy. Unfortunately, readers of philosophy are often prone to that kind of misunderstanding, and there are few bigger idiots in the world than people who assume a priori that Plato, Decartes, Leibniz, Hume, the Marquis de Sade and countless other great thinkers always meant what they said literally.

  Philosophers are, of course, particularly relevant to the present argument because philosophers have frequently been obliged, by tradition and social pressure, to deal with the problem of the necessity of evil. Rationally, the problem in question probably does not exist, and the real answer can be summed up, as it often is nowadays, with the observation that “shit happens.” The fact that the world is a bad place where the innocent routinely suffer and evildoers routinely thrive probably has no further explanation, and the fact that people want one results from the conceptual error of thinking that the real world is like a work of fiction, that it has a creator who could make things turn out better but is, for some strange or mysterious reason, refusing to do so. That is an essentially stupid idea, so it is not at all surprising that lots of people have espoused it, or that they tend to turn exceedingly ferocious when its stupidity is pointed out—which is why philosophers, being mostly mild-mannered as well as attempting to be rational, have mostly chosen diplomatic and delicate ways of endeavoring to disabuse them of it, routinely taking advantage of the fact that irony and sarcasm offer “potential deniability.” The principal salvation of atheists throughout history has been the ability to assert publicly that God exists while really meaning the opposite.

  One of the most notorious attempts to deal with the philosophical “problem of evil” was made by Leibniz in his Theodicy, in which he pointed out that if one wants to reconcile the notion that God is good with the existence of evil, then one has to surrender the notion that God is also omnipotent, ultimately reaching the conclusion that although he was doing his best to construct a good world, he was let down by the poor quality of his materials and ended up with a ramshackle one.

  Voltaire, who probably knew that Leibniz was being sarcastic and that the conclusion he actually hoped that his readers would draw is that the notion of a good God is an infantile fantasy, nevertheless took the trouble to put the boot into the argument more crudely with his own sarcastic fantasy, Candide, in which Dr. Pangloss struggles with futile heroism to sustain the hypothesis that the world we live in is the best of all those possible, while the horrors of the Thirty Years War unfold around him, further intensifying the routine inhumanity of man to man (and especially to woman).

  The contrast between Theodicy and Candide illustrates one of the great problems of sarcasm as a rhetorical strategy: its essential and irremediable unreliability. When it is subtle, it can easily pass unnoticed, as in Theodicy; but even when it is too blatant to be mistaken, removing all margin of doubt, it cannot be satisfactory, because “shit happens—or, in the case of Candide, “we have to go work in the garden”—is not a satisfactory answer, precisely because it is no answer at all. In exactly the same way, the conclusion of Le Mal nécessaire is essentially and inherently unsatisfying, precisely because it argues the impossibility of providing an answer. Indeed, the final chapter, by providing two further ironic twists to the story, adds two further brutal wrenches to its inherent unsatisfactoriness.

  In fact, there is a third cruel twist—arguably the cruelest of all—in the fact
that the last chapter of Le Mal nécessaire is the last. The plot has no coda; the reader is left deliberately uninformed as to the outcomes beyond the ending, which leaves Bordier, Madeleine, Aline and many of the minor characters in essentially sticky situations, without any possibility of a fortunate result. For them, it seems, things can only go from bad to worse, and the reader is offered not the slightest crumb of reassurance that the worse in question might not be as totally terrible as seems all too likely.

  André Couvreur was not merely content to say no more that he actually said at the end of Le Mal nécessaire, but insistent upon it. Even though he went on to write a sequel featuring the further exploits of Armand Caresco, he was careful therein not to say a single word about any of the other characters in the earlier novel, consigning them to the same cruel silence forever. Nevertheless, he did write a sequel. He felt obliged, or at least irresistibly tempted, not to let Caresco rest in peace. That was not because he wanted to add the “moral settlement” painfully lacking at the end of the first novel, but quite the reverse; he wanted to extrapolate the character’s ambitions and achievements to the limit, and to address the question of the necessity of evil in a much more extravagant fashion.

  Caresco surhomme is not an extended conte cruel but a Voltairean satire, in which Caresco becomes a kind of god intent on outcompeting the one he refers to as “the Other” by really creating the best of all possible worlds, with the aid of the better working materials provided to him by surgery and science. He is provided with a rather down-at-heel philosophical adversary in Zéphirin Choumaque who, while counting Leibniz a hero, has his own doctrine with which to account for the problem of evil. Choumaque, on behalf of the author and the reader alike, engages Caresco in a contest of ideas that does not lack interest, even though it is obvious from the very start that some drastic intervention by his secondary creator will be required if he is not to end up simply crushed like a bug.

  Caresco surhomme does not end in the same fashion as Le Mal nécessaire, but its rounding out did not put an end to any controversy so far as the author was concerned. He went on to do other things in his novels, but he could never let the problem of evil alone for long, no matter how satisfied he might have been in his own mind that it was a problem that did not and could not have a viable solution; that only made it more interesting to him. Nor could he let Caresco alone, even though he killed him off. He killed Professor Tornada too, but in fiction, death is not terminus: a secondary creator can always work a miracle of resurrection simply by saying so, with or without an explanation or a change of name. Caresco stayed dead after Caresco surhomme, but only in name; in essence, he was simply absorbed into Tornada, and kept on, and on, carrying out his extravagant surgeries and making his scientific discoveries, never knowing himself whether what he was doing was reasonable or benevolent, or whether it was mere madness—or whether, in fact, there was anything in the perversely malevolent world but mere madness.

  Inevitably, and appropriately, Couvreur’s ideative exploration never reached a goal. He never did “solve” the problem of the necessity of evil, or find a way to settle for the philosophically-correct but psychologically-unsatisfying non-answer of “shit happens,” although there is certainly a sense in which all his literary endeavor was work in the garden, with all the virtues that might imply. One of those virtues is that Couvreur’s particular literary garden is unusually exotic, quite unparalleled in the history of imaginative fiction. It is by no means a neat and tidy garden, although it is far from a wilderness, nor is it a pretty garden, although it is certainly not devoid of color, but it is a garden whose cultivator was always restless, always innovative, and always—most essentially of all—devoted to the cause of sarcasm.

  As everyone committed to that cause knows very well, it has its own phases of development. Once you have a reputation for sarcasm, no one to whom you speak will ever be entirely sure what you actually mean by what you say, and eventually, you will no longer be entirely sure yourself—and that is the point at which philosophy and fiction become genuinely exploratory, and even more interesting than before.

  Brian Stableford

  Notes

  1 translated respectively as The Human Microbes and The New World and available in Black Coat Press editions, ISBNs 978-1-61227-116-3 and 978-1-61227-117-0.

  2 The author capitalizes Tripière [tripe-merchant] to emphasize that what the person in question is famous for selling is access to her own entrails. The wordplay is idiosyncratic, not borrowed from commonplace argot.

  3 Yes he did, in a fervently erotic poem in Les Fleurs du mal entitled “Femmes damnées” [Doomed Women]—a title whose ominous quality Madeleine evidently does not appreciate.

  4 It is not obvious that a vasectomy would have any effect on a hypertrophied prostate, but prior to 1899 prostate problems had sometimes been treated surgically by castration, albeit without any discernible benefit, and vasectomy—which was beginning to attract attention as a method of sterilization potentially applicable in eugenic programs that were then being ardently promoted—probably seemed to be a kinder option, especially to patients worried about the side-effects of castration.

  5 Coxalgia, as the word suggests, means a pain in the coccyx or general pelvic area, and is nowadays used in that conscientiously vague sense. At the time when the novel was written, however, it carried a heavier burden of implication, being linked by contemporary conviction with tuberculosis, as were many symptoms that can now be recognized as having various causes.

  6 It is easier, in French, to confuse dix and six, than a parallel mistake would be in English.

  7 “Corrosive sublimate” (mercuric chloride) was widely used at the time as an antiseptic, but its use was abandoned because of its excessive toxicity to humans.

  8 In 1899 blood typing had not yet made transfusions feasible during operations, so blood-loss was often a critical factor in determining their success or failure, lending some plausibility to Caresco’s claim that his operational speed is a great asset.

  9 Movement of the arms and traction of the tongue were the standard methods of “artificial respiration” at the time, as futile as many other commonplace methods.

  10 A clyster-pump is more commonly known in English as an enema pump, prudishly ignoring the fact that it is equally useful for administering vaginal douches. Simpler variants of the mechanism use a funnel that has to be raised in order to take advantage of hydrostatic pressure. One assumes that only Parisian prostitutes of a certain prestige possessed a gold-plated version equipped with a pump, which could be displayed in the drawing-room as a status symbol.

  11 The Théâtre de Belleville still exists and is nowadays perfectly respectable, but in 1899 it would have been regarded as a rather louche establishment, Belleville then being regarded as one of the most disreputable quarters of the city.

  12 A satirical literary pun on the phrase noblesse de robe, which referred to a particular section of the aristocracy in the days of Louis XIV, entirely dependent on his favor. The ennobling “de” in Mathilde’s name is, of course, a blatant fiction.

  13 The Hungarian physician David Gruby (1810-1898), who worked in Paris, nowadays remembered for his pioneering work in microbiology and his early adoption of anaesthesia by means of chloroform. During his lifetime he was more celebrated for “curing” famous patients, including Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexandre Dumas, Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and Franz Lizst, by means of suggestive methods applied to what would now be considered psychosomatic ills.

  14 Anton Mesmer, who notoriously employed a curative baquet [wooden tub] in his “magnetic” treatments.

  15 This reference is slightly puzzling; it probably refers to Claude Bernard, for whom Louis-Napoléon created a special chair during the Second Empire, but Bernard was not Jewish. Caresco might be taking the wrong inference from his surname; Couvreur was probably acquainted with the writer and velodrome manager Tristan Bernard, who was Jewish.

  16 As, indeed, he might, the Lat
in word in question meaning to want—or, more precisely, to be without.

  17 Although the existence in France of localized Facultés de Médecine did not provide the measure of protection proved even then in England by the General Medical Council, established in 1858, the fact that medical practitioners already swore oaths—although the modern version of the so-called Hippocratic Oath did not come into use until 1948—surely makes it odd that the idea of such an Order should seem “utopian” even to Berger. Subsequent history has, however, demonstrated very clearly that Savre’s optimism regarding the results to be obtained from such a system is not entirely justified.

  18 Savre surely cannot really believe that the fin-de-siècle fashionability of hysterectomies in the Parisian demi-monde (mostly carried out on women who would have been rendered infertile by venereal diseases anyway) had a significant effect on the national birth-rate—at least, by comparison with the factor he does not mention at all, in spite of having seen the golden clyster-pump on Mathilde’s mantelpiece. It testifies to the strength of the taboo in question that that a text so willingly to be deliberately shocking in other ways refuses to mention birth control, even when it is a salient point of argument.

  19 Literally “painful white oedema”—a consequence of deep vein thrombosis associated with the clotting problems consequent to some cancers. The supplementary term that Cartaux also uses, phlebitis, is nowadays used to refer to a less serious condition involving superficial veins.

  20 Armand Trousseau (1801-1867) had a long career in public health administration, supervising the hospitals of Paris, where he built a reputation as an outstanding teacher and helped to develop many new treatments; he died of pancreatic cancer, for which he had previously indentified a crucial diagnostic sign.