Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: these ancient words still rumble like thunder through our hills and valleys, not least because the gluttonous act of giving in to enticements, initially against our will, is made to feel morally questionable by the survival deep in our hearts of the belief that we are mere mortal sons and daughters of a fallen apple-eater. Our imagery of temptation is originally religious. That is why the lingering association of temptation with evil has ensured it an important place in the world of power, despite various attempts to reduce the art of governing others to a merely technical or cynical art. Temptation is a thoroughly political matter. Everyone who mixes with power and its resources — property, fame, sex, advantage — knows temptation, whose eventual poisonous fruits are confusion, self-pity, corruption, ruined reputations. Less obviously, temptation is an important resource in the arsenal of those who exercise power over others. It has often been observed that those who rule over others do so by means of guns, money, charisma, sex or law. Missing from such lists is the quietest and often most effective ally of power: temptation.
Before the long spell in prison Havel had known his share of temptations, from cigarettes and booze to sexual infidelities. But more than anything else it was his two spells in prison — the brief one in 1977 and then the extended sentence from 1979 — that dragged him before the devil, threatening to transform him into a toad before power. The dynamics were complicated but they conformed exactly to the rules of temptation. Temptation is a game of seduction whose stakes are high. From the point of view of those who are exercising power, tempting others with advantage — a lighter than expected sentence or material privileges, for instance — must perforce be based on careful calculation. Tight reins must be kept on the advantage offered to the victim, for otherwise they might think that they have scored a victory. The whole point of tempting a victim is to victimize them or seduce them into conformity; in either case, they must be moved to do what they would otherwise not have done. The act of taking the king’s shilling normally heaps anguish upon the tempted. They feel in two minds, stretched in several directions, sometimes to breaking point. Guilt and shame are their accomplices. If they succumb, they feel for ever haunted by their own duplicity. If they refuse temptation, then they are left with gnawing doubt about their own capacity for judgement under duress. They are gripped by the feeling that they have unwisely martyred themselves into disadvantage. Either way, the outcome feels unsatisfactory. Giving in to temptation involves cavorting with the devil. Yet the price of integrity is further suffering — and possibly even revenge by the powerful.
From the time of the launch of Charter 77, Havel found himself constantly haunted by this dilemma. His first spell in prison, which followed the launch of the Charter, was hard to bear. ‘I didn’t know what was happening outside, all I could see was the hysterical witch-hunt against Charter 77. I was deceived by my interrogators, and even by my own counsel. I fell victim to curious, almost psychotic moods.’ He was wracked especially by the feeling that his defiance of the authorities made him directly responsible for the misery that now befell his fellow Chartists. ‘It seemed to me that, as one of the initiators of the Charter, I had brought terrible misfortune on a large number of people. I of course was trying to shoulder an excessive responsibility, as if the others had not known what they were letting themselves in for, as if it was all just my fault.’ Despondency nourished by guilt was fed by his growing awareness that the authorities were preparing a trap for him. During one of his appeals against detention he had made a casual remark about how he felt guilty for the harm he had brought to others — so implying that he regretted his role in Charter 77. The police instantly twisted and hurled it like a dagger back into his heart. Knowing their skill at ruining reputations, Havel panicked. He saw no way out of the trap that his own naivety had helped to set. He caught a glimpse of what it was like to be tempted. He even began to wrestle with the accusation, put about by the authorities, that he had actually succumbed to temptation. ‘I had strange dreams and strange ideas. I felt I was being — quite physically — tempted by the devil, that I was in his clutches. I realised that I had somehow got tangled up with him. The fact that something I had written, something I had really thought and that was true, could be misused in this way brought it home to me yet again that the truth is not only that which one thinks, but also under what circumstances, to whom, why and how one says it.’297
As if to pay penance for his brush with temptation — to spite the authorities’ rumour that the world-famous playwright and dissident Václav Havel had accepted that his attempts to defy power were imprudent and ultimately futile — he wrote a new play called Temptation (Pokoušení [1985]). The drafting process went slowly. Numerous fragments went into the bin. Whole sketches of the individual scenes — Havel’s preferred way of writing plays — were also jettisoned. Suddenly, during October 1985, inspiration rushed through his fingers. The play took him only ten days to write, as if it was an act of self-preservation. Driven by the desire to shake off despair and to withdraw from the Faustian pact the authorities had prepared, he wrote ‘in a state of increasing feverishness and impatience, you might almost say in a trance’.298 In prison, he had been sent a copy of Goethe’s Faust and Thomas Mann’s novel on the same subject, Dr Faustus, but the script he scribbled out feverishly was unique — and arguably one of Havel’s very best.
The play, Havel later observed, is about ‘structures’ and the fate of people within them. It draws upon the old medieval legend of a man who sold his soul to the devil, and who became identified with a sixteenth-century necromancer named Dr Faustus, in order to tell the story of Dr Henry Foustka, a respected scientist working within a research institute. Life within the organization is all dull-grey ritual. Its white-coated staff are in the habit of hardly noticing one another. Their hearts seem blind. Their bodies are numbed by routine. Their brains are geared to the central task of producing and deploying and protecting the Truth, which contrasts oddly with the staff’s immersion in an endless farrago of pointless chit-chat and joking, punctuated by requests for coffee and ‘Did you sleep well?’, the Director’s preferred question of his staff. Bureaucratic thinking reigns, or so it seems. Until it is announced, to a flutter of controlled excitement, that there will be a staff social evening. But that event, and the preparations for it, serve as an absurd canvas on which Havel paints a profound crisis lurking within the organization itself.
The Director makes an official announcement, whose surprising content comes wrapped in language resembling anaesthetic before the knife. ‘As you probably know,’ he begins, ‘there have lately cropped up complaints that our institute isn’t fulfilling its tasks in keeping with the present situation.’ He continues: ‘We’re being urged, with increasing insistence, that we go over to the offensive, that is, that we should at last somehow try to implement a programme of extensive educational, popular-scientific and individually therapeutic activity.’ The arse-licking Deputy Director, always eager to impress, adds wisdom. He says that the programme should be firmly in the spirit of the scientific Weltanschauung. But he is cut short by his pompous superior, who continues to explain to his workers that these are modern times. He appeals to them ‘to counter the isolated but nevertheless alarming expressions of various irrational viewpoints which can be discerned in particular in certain members of our younger generation and which owe their origin to the incorrect ... interpretation of the complexity of natural processes and the historical dynamism of human civilization, some of whose aspects are taken out of context, only to be interpreted, either in the light of pseudo-scientific theories ... or in the light of a whole range of mystic prejudices, superstitions, obscure teachings and practices spread by certain charlatans, psychopaths and members of the intelligentsia.’
The soliloquy is interrupted several times — by the late arrival to work of a breathless scientific worker carrying a bag of oranges, the Deputy’s revelation that typewritten copies of the works of C. J. Jung are circulating among youth, plus a discussion of the daily soap ration. But the interruptions prepare the way for a scene in the dingy, book-lined apartment of Foustka, who is discovered kneeling in the middle of a dimly lit room, in his dressing gown, surrounded by burning candles, another in his left hand, while in his right is a piece of chalk with which he draws a circle round himself and the candles.
There is suddenly a knock at the door. It is Foustka’s landlady, informing him that a stranger has come to see him. Foustka is instantly suspicious — his life outside the institute is evidently a risky business — but curiosity gets the upper hand. Enter Fistula, looking like a figure straight from a Beckett play, but actually a stool-pigeon, the secret agent of power who has come to tempt his victim. Fistula is a small, slender man with a limp caused by chronic athlete’s foot, he clutches a paper bag containing a pair of slippers, and grins vacuously. Foustka, the secret opponent of the institute, its power over others and all that it symbolizes, stares at his surprise guest with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion and revulsion. So begins the sordid business of temptation.
Foustka reacts initially by scrambling to hide his private life from his unexpected guest: lights are switched on hurriedly, candles are removed, an attempt is made to rub out the chalk circle. Ritual politesse is followed by a warning by the tempter Fistula, who is in the habit of grinning a lot, that the encounter should be kept a secret. Foustka is puzzled, then realizes quickly that his unsolicited visitor knows much about him, which makes him angry. ‘Out!’ he shouts. ‘Leave my flat at once and never show your face here again.’ Fistula rubs his hands together contentedly, sensing that Foustka’s resistance is perhaps a prelude to co-operation. The cunning hunter tries to calm his victim by acknowledging that his host has every reason for suspecting that Fistula is an agent provocateur. Fistula, always on the move, then boldly confronts Foustka with three choices: ‘You can continue to consider me an agent provocateur and insist that I leave. Secondly: not to think of me in those terms but instead to trust me. Thirdly: not to make your mind up in this matter just yet and to adopt a waiting posture, which means not to throw me out but on the other hand to say nothing which, if I were an agent provocateur, I might be able to use against you. If I may,’ concluded the slippery Fistula, ‘I’d recommend the third alternative...’
Foustka from here on makes a string of fatal mistakes common to all those who succumb to temptation: pacing up and down the room, he hesitates, then agrees reluctantly to the third possibility. He chooses to be ‘flexible’ — unwittingly he prepares to welcome the devil — and is greeted with the flattery of a fox. Fistula praises his caution, sharp intelligence, and ready wit, all of which, he goes on to explain, suggest that the two men can work well together. The suggestion upsets Foustka, who moves once again to shake off his tempter by denying he has anything to hide. ‘I am a scientist and hold a scientific world view, working in a very responsible position in one of our foremost scientific institutes. If anyone comes to me with ideas that can be defined as an attempt to spread superstition, I shall be forced to act according to my scientific conscience.’
The tempted hangs on to respectability. Everything is at stake, but the unfolding hypocrisy subverts his claim to purity. Fistula, always looking for points of weakness to exploit, responds with riotous laughter, quickly apologizes so as not to repel his victim, then prepares the final trap by offering himself up to Foustka for scientific experiments designed to combat the spread of mysticism. Foustka agrees, then wriggles. The tempter in effect exposes the double standard of the tempted: at a certain stage in the process of temptation, the tempted is required to make the painful acknowledgement that he or she is a hypocrite. That Foustka does silently, at which point he becomes clay in the hands of his master. ‘So what’s to become of our agreement,’ he asks Fistula sheepishly. ‘That is entirely up to you,’ replies the grinning Fistula.
Back in the company of his colleagues at the scientific institute, Foustka tries to recover his dignity by leading a normal life. He talks philosophy, charms a woman, acts politely in the company of the Director, whom he otherwise assiduously avoids. At one point, daringly, he even lectures the guests at the institute’s social evening about the dangers of nihilism: ‘When man drives God out of his heart, he makes way for the devil,’ says Foustka. ‘What else is this contemporary world of ours, with its blind, power-crazed rulers and its blind, powerless subjects, what else is the catastrophe that is being prepared under the banner of science — with us as its grotesque flag-bearers — what else is it other than the work of the devil? It is well known that the devil is a master of disguise. Can one imagine a more ingenious disguise than that offered him by our modern lack of faith? Doubtless he finds he can work best where people have stopped believing in him.’ Foustka’s talk of the devil is a moment of honesty. It is shortly afterwards followed by a private confession: ‘Something is going on inside me — I feel I’d be capable of doing things that were always alien to me. As if something that had lain hidden deep inside me was suddenly floating to the surface.’ He knows that those who sup with the devil must use a long spoon, and that his is too short. He grows angry with what he himself has done, brutally striking to the floor, and then kicking, a female colleague.
Honesty, confession, anger provide no hope for the tempted. The deed has been done, and only the public exposure of his temptation remains to be carried out. Like mice fondled by a hungry cat, the tempted are usually tormented by their tempter. So Foustka begins to feel fingers of power around his throat. The Director, reminding his colleagues that the institute is a lighthouse of true knowledge (‘What we think today, others will live tomorrow!’ he remarks), turns a finger in Foustka’s direction, accusing him of indulging pre-scientific deviations, but promises that, since these are modern times, there will be no staged witch-hunts. ‘Let the manner in which Dr Foustka’s case is handled become a model of a truly scientific approach to facts, which will provide inspiration for us all. Truth must prevail,’ he concludes, threateningly, ‘whoever suffers in the process.’
The naive Foustka feels relieved. He tries to lie his way out of danger, claiming that he was only acting as a lone soldier doing battle against mysticism. Nobody believes him. He now knows that his days are numbered, and so he grows angry at his tempter, Fistula. ‘You’re a devil,’ he shouts, ‘and I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.’ Fistula replies that he has been no more than a catalyst, and that the honest truth is that in the final analysis Foustka himself chose to be tempted. Foustka becomes morose. He confesses his ‘unforgivable irresponsibility, for my having succumbed to temptation’, but Fistula resorts to sarcasm, diagnosing his victim as suffering from the Smíchovský Compensation Syndrome: a ‘hangover’ of masochistic self-accusation and self-chastisement caused by the liquors of temptation.
None of this matters. Foustka is done for. He confesses to his indulgence of hermetic rituals; recognizes that he has been too clever by half, and that he has come a cropper by believing that he could play both ends of power against the middle and get away with it. He sees that, in the eyes of those who wield power within the organization, his ultimate crime can be summarized in the devilish maxim: To lie to a liar is fine; to lie to those who speak the truth is permissible; but to lie to the powers who ensure that we can lie with impunity — this is unacceptable and cannot go unpunished. The play does not reveal whether Foustka is promptly fired, made an example of, publicly disgraced, completely destroyed by his act of giving into temptation. He does sing a swan song of opposition to his opponents, railing against ‘the destructive pride of intolerant, all-powerful and self-regarding power, which uses science as a handy bow with which to shoot down everything that might put it in jeopardy’. His speech is applauded sarcastically by the head of the organization, after which Foustka’s clothes are set on fire, sending him running to and fro in panic across a stage quickly enveloped in smoke. The only player to take a bow is a fireman, fresh on the scene, fully uniformed, looking anxious, a fire extinguisher in hand.