The Secret Hero

In heroic times morality reigns, and one dies for abstractions – no, better, one lets others die for abstractions. They are called values, though in truth they are of course interests, rather primitive ones as a rule. So far, so old. The heroes are summoned to save the world from evil, whatever the current fashion – or the current interests – make that out to be. In heroic times the either-or reigns. In between there is nothing. A choice is demanded, and choosing the one means at the same time the destruction of the other. The third way – or peace – is not an option.

What is a figure like Falstaff doing in such a scenario? A boozing, brawling, fat knight who, in grandiose self-overestimation, chases women and makes himself a laughingstock in the process.

Sir John Falstaff is a knight, yet his knightly duties trouble him little. He is no hero, not even an anti-hero. He is held to be a coward, a corrupter of youth. What is he doing in the sphere of power, of high politics, among the kings and princes (in „Henry IV.“), when he wants nothing to do with power and politics? No, Falstaff is a kind of counter-event to politics, one who muddles through, a rogue, a shirker. In other words: Falstaff is a scamp, a trickster.

„Falstaff’s a rogue, yet he warms the heart“ (A.R. Humphreys)

He hides in baskets and behind folding screens. In a fight he would rather play dead than die a hero’s death – which, given his clear inferiority, would have been certain. Falstaff is no hero – and stays alive. Falstaff, the trickster, draws his vital energy from all that is humanly possible, which is at home in the great, wide robes of the universe and which, imposed within a deadly either-or, is wretchedly smothered.

Or rather to practice the art of creative subversion, however inelegant it may be.

Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word, honour? What is that honour? Air. (…) Honour is an mere scrutchion (painted shield).
(Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1, Act V, Scene 1)

Honor, freedom, democracy – they all turn to air in heroic-warlike times. But what does freedom mean when there is ever more morality and ever less bread? Morality and values and kindred plastic words warm for a short while the cold souls of those who condemn others to war and heroic death, until they too must realize that morality has always been a treacherous ally – and that you cannot eat it.

Fussiness about honor is not the only convention Falstaff calls into question. Instead of assembling a proper company for the war, he recruits ragged mercenaries – and dismisses this ragtag army again at once. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?

But what is he doing there? Is that political reason? What is that supposed to be? Does political reason mean waging war? Wanting to have the feeling of being allowed to play with the big boys – who, by the way, are even more treacherous than morality? Falstaff knows that in war there are no winners and that destroying enemies is far from giving one’s own life any kind of meaning or sense.

The notorious Hobbesian invention is a description of events in his shattered England, an invention that pins the cruelties on the „human“ wolf, while the true evildoers and profiteers get away.

Falstaff, the comical non-hero, does not care one bit about lofty morality and abstract values. In comedy, and sometimes even in the royal drama, the Falstaffs of this world display the human capacity to survive and to celebrate the continuation of life itself. They display an utterly unheroic form of resistance, one that is decidedly subversive, that knows how to deceive and to dissemble, and that reaches its goal by many hidden paths, a resistance that makes no headlines and that concerns itself with survival, which is by no means trivial. Nor is comedy trivial, least of all the picaresque novel, which has its origin in times of war and bitterest poverty, of the criminalization of poverty and the persecution of witches, a time that a well-known European tale of self-assurance calls the „Renaissance“.

In such times a community is in deadly danger.

Heroic times, with their abstract morality of principles, with their under-complex friend-foe dichotomies, their forgetfulness of history, their defamations and slanders and their will to annihilation, are in truth pitiful times full of dull refusal of civilization by primitive figures with primitive needs, times full of cowardice and fear of real life, of its cacophony and its unpredictable unmanageability.

Toward the end of the Iliad, the outsized hero Achilles meets Hector, who tries to end a quarrel in a civilized manner. But Achilles has no interest in peace. He rebuffs Hector by summarily denying him his humanity. There are no binding oaths between men and lions, wolves and lambs, Achilles lets him know. The hero, who well into the modern age served as a role model for young men of rank, insists on being the hunter and Hector his prey – a prey that is not human. But if the prey is not human, Achilles can ignore all rules and let go of all restraint in blind frenzy.

Achilles, the beast is what the wrathful hero is called in Christa Wolf’s „Kassandra“ – which, in the almost exclusively male-staffed field of classical philology, led to violent gasping for breath. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay found in the Iliad illuminating things about berserker rage and the dissolution of personality through war trauma in veterans of the Vietnam War. Nothing new, wherever you look.

Falstaffs and his friends in the republic of scamps, who always find the way out through the back door, who deliberately sit down between all the chairs, who laugh when it is especially serious, who dare more anarchy, who steer clear of the morally gifted, who in times of blanket manipulation turn the tables and write tall tales and practice subversive presumption of personality. They are the crack through which the light comes in (compare Madita Hampe on „Anthem“ by Leonard Cohen).

Scamps and tricksters exist everywhere in the world – unlike heroes. In wise cultures they are let to do their work. One part of it is to show the heroes how thundering dumb they are. As Falstaff’s friend Yossarian does, too, in Joseph Heller’s „Catch 22“.

You talk about how the war can be won, and I talk about how the war can be won and I can stay alive.

„Quite right“, Clevinger replied quickly and smugly. And which, do you suppose, is more important?
„More important to whom?“, Yossarian shot back.

„Open your eyes at last, Clevinger. A dead man couldn’t care less who wins the war.“

What is honour?

I thank Ugo d’Orazio for the musical advice.