According to Abel, Eichmann must have thought about Nazism politically since he thought about Zionism. But Eichmann’s “thought” was a parody of the idea of thinking. Had Mein Kampf been his “Bible,” he might have pressed a flower in it. His Zionist “studies” had a function; they made him an expert, at least in the circles he moved in. They made him “stand out” from his co-workers—the life-object of all mediocrities. As a specialist in Jewish emigration, he was perfectly fitted, when the time came, to arrange Jewish emigration to the next world, to Abraham’s bosom. Among his fellow-bureaucrats, he might have passed highest in a vocational aptitude test for the new job. A sadist, monster, or demon would not have qualified for the position; these “undesirables” had their place in the Nazi system as jailers and editors of periodicals, but a man with Eichmann’s responsibilities could not be a Beast of Belsen or a Julius Streicher. The fact that Eichmann was squeamish, could not bear the sight of blood, was even an “idealist” permitted precisely that distancing from reality that facilitated the administrative task—a distancing that reflected the physical and psychic space between the collective will of the German people in the homeland and its execution in the east. If Eichmann seems to have been cordial, rather than the block of ice described by one witness, this was good public relations, for one of his duties was to allay the suspicions of the Jews and other foreigners he came in contact with, so that they too would be distanced from reality.

What satisfaction would it have given Abel and others if Miss Arendt had accepted the word “monster” from the prosecutor’s lips? Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils (“a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness,” OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural being is more horrible to contemplate than an Eichmann—that is, aesthetically worse—but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling and therefore was impassible to conscience. Abel quotes a saying of Kierkegaard on Judas, which shows Judas as comical, and he seems to think this bears out his argument, since Judas, according to him, was a monster. But Judas was not a monster, though his act was monstrous; he was a man, the twelfth part of humanity, and his sin was that he could betray for thirty pieces of silver, like any common informer. Jesus was uncommon, not Judas. And Judas, unlike a monster, knew that he had sinned and went and hanged himself with a halter. Eichmann too knew himself to be guilty somehow, somewhere (“before God,” as he put it), though he kept this knowledge in a separate pocket of his mind, far from the actual trial, and was helped in this by the prosecutor, who by charging him with acts of cruelty he did not commit allowed him to feel innocent. What is horrible in Eichmann is his ordinariness, including the prompt ability to feel innocent when you are charged with a crime you did not commit though you did something infinitely worse, like a person who is accused of murder and robbery and feels put upon because it was not he who stole the victim’s watch—he “only” committed the murder.

On the other hand, contrary to what Abel says, Miss Arendt never presents him as a “dutiful clerk”; his work was important, indeed crucial, in the Nazi scheme, and he could feel that he, as an individual, was making a significant contribution to the Fuehrer’s task. He may or may not have conceived of himself as irreplaceable; if he did this was one of his delusions—a delusion no doubt shared by other Nazi functionaries, each of whom, on the lower levels, was replaceable while all of them together were not. Eichmann was free to quit his desk and his “great responsibilities” at any time, as Miss Arendt shows; no one forced him to do this particular work. Yet his staying on the job and the zeal he brought to it do not prove that he liked killing Jews, even at a distance. He liked being a functionary and “necessary,” and if this entailed a certain amount of self-sacrifice he liked it even more, for he saw it in the preliminary terms Kant laid down in formulating the categorical imperative: that a virtuous action is one done against inclination. That an act done against inclination is therefore virtuous was Eichmann’s mistaken understanding or perhaps his rationalization. As Miss Arendt sums up in a terrible flash of insight, “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.” In this passage, it seems to me, rereading her book, Miss Arendt’s scorn and contempt for Eichmann were mingled with a kind of pained, wry-mouthed pity. Eichmann at this time—it was at the end of the war—was pressing for the continuation of the extermination policy, in obedience to the supreme “law” of the Fuehrer’s will, long after many of his colleagues and superiors had seen the end coming and were seeking to save their skins by “saving” Jews. What she pities in Eichmann (if I do not misread her) is the extent to which he could go on doing evil when all careerist motives had disappeared and against his personal desires—to have stopped the transports to Auschwitz, in his blinkered view, would have been to yield to a temptation. If Abel wants a dramatic parallel for Eichmann, he ought to open his Ibsen. There he can find “idealists” as pernickety, as literal-minded, and nearly as dangerous to humanity. Like the simpletons in Ibsen who talk of the “demands of the ideal,” Eichmann was a fool, and what is pitiable in the Eichmann Miss Arendt sees is his foolish consistency, the way in which his inner mechanism, his “soul,” continued to tick like some trusty middle-class alarm clock, unaware that it had become an infernal machine and listening only to the sound of its own reliability, signifying that everything was normal.

As a sample of moral fineness on the part of Miss Arendt’s critics, I offer the following sentence from Abel’s piece: “If a man holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend, the man with the gun will be aesthetically less ugly than the one who out of fear of death has killed his friend and perhaps did not even save his own life.” Forces him to kill his friend? Nobody by possession of a weapon can force a man to kill anybody; that is his own decision. If somebody points a gun at you and says “Kill your friend or I will kill you,” he is tempting you to kill your friend. That is all.

No Gentile who was an adult in the years of the Final Solution can read Eichmann in Jerusalem without some remorse and self-questioning. American Jews, far from the scene then and now, may feel certain misgivings too, reading the book, especially the richer ones who paid large sums of money to the Nazis for the ransom of their relatives and did not concern themselves too greatly with the fate of “ordinary” Jews. Miss Arendt’s harshness on this point may seem to them unkind and inappropriate in what they still think of as a time of mourning; it is like somebody who criticizes at a funeral. But the question is whether those who merely grieve for their fellow-beings show more compassion than those who in retrospect seek remedies, since to seek remedies implies a continuing concern that what happened shall never happen again. The State of Israel promises that to Jews, politically, by offering them a homeland, an army, and a foreign policy. “You are safe now,” it tells them. Miss Arendt is not interested in the safety of Jews but in the safety of humanity. Trying to learn from history, she is thinking ahead on behalf of other “superfluous” people who may be the next “Jews” on someone’s list for “resettlement in the east.” Yet the official Israeli lesson supposedly taught by the trial—the need for a strong national state—is at very sharp variance with any parable for the Gentiles, i.e., not only non-Jews but all the tribes and the peoples.

All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen, the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe seduces Emma in the woods. “What a delicious thing writing is—not to be you any more but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion.” It is hard to imagine another great novelist—Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Balzac—who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity. Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion—to be their mistress’ sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined in a gigantic, throbbing partouze while Flaubert’s pen flew. He was writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was reading one. “What a delicious thing reading is—not to be you any more but to flow through the whole universe you’re reading about...” etc., etc.

Rodolphe is superior to Léon, in that his triteness is a calculation. An accomplished comedian, he is not disturbed, at the agricultural fair, by the drone of the voice awarding money prizes for animal flesh, manure, and flax, while he pours his passionate platitudes into Emma’s fluttered ears. “Tell me, why have we known each other, we two? What chance has willed it?” His view of Emma is the same as the judge’s view of a merino ram. She is flesh, with all its frailties, and he is putting her through her paces, noting her points. Yet Rodolphe is trite beyond his intention. He is wedded to a stock idea of himself as a sensual brute that prevents him from noticing that he actually cares for Emma. His recipes for seduction, like the pomade he uses on his hair, might have been made for him by a pharmacist’s formula, and the fact that they work provides him with a ready-made disillusionment. Since he knows that “eternal love” is a cliché, he is prepared to break with Emma as a matter of course and he drops a manufactured tear on his letter of adieu, annoyed by a vague sensation that he does not recognize as grief. As for Léon, he is too cowardly to let himself see that his fine sentiments are platitudes; he deceives himself in the opposite way from Rodolphe: Rodolphe feels something and convinces himself that it is nothing, while Léon feels nothing and dares not acknowledge it, even in secrecy. His very sensuality is timid and short-lived; his clerkly nature passively takes Emma’s dictation.

Emma does not see the difference. She is disappointed in both her lovers and in “love” itself. Her principal emotions are jealousy and possessiveness, which represent the strong, almost angry movement of her will. In other words, she is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is only remarkable for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling. Emma is trite; what happens to her is trite. Her story does not hold a single surprise for the reader, who can say at every stage, “I felt it coming.” Her end is inevitable, but not as a classic doom, which is perceived as inexorable only when it is complete. It is inevitable because it is ordinary. Anyone could have prophesied what would become of Emma—her mother-in-law, for instance. It did not need a Tiresias. If you compare her story with that of Anna Karenina, you are aware of the pathos of Emma’s. Anna is never pathetic; she is tragic, and what happens to her, up to the very end, is always surprising, for real passions and moral strivings are at work, which have the power of “making it new.” In this her story is distinct from an ordinary society scandal of the period. Nor could any ordinary society Cassandra have forecast Anna’s fate. “He will get tired of her and leave her. You wait,” they would have said, of Vronsky. He did not. But Rodolphe could have been counted on to drop Emma, and Léon to grow frightened of her and bored.

Where destiny is no more than average probability, it appears inescapable in a peculiarly depressing way. This is because any element in it can be replaced by a substitute without changing the outcome; e.g., if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have found someone else. But if Anna had not met Vronsky on the train, she might still be married to Karenin. Vronsky is necessary, while Rodolphe and Léon are interchangeable parts in a machine that is engaged in mass production of human fates. Madame Bovary is often called the first modern novel, and this is true, not because of any technical innovations Flaubert made (his counterpoint, his style indirect libre) but because it is the first novel to deal with what is now called mass culture. Emma did not have television, and Félicité did not read comic books in the kitchen, but the phenomenon of seepage from the “media” was already present in every Yonville l’Abbaye, and Flaubert was the first to note it.

In Emma’s day, mass-produced culture had not yet reached the masses; it was still a bourgeois affair and mixed up, characteristically, with a notion of taste and discrimination—a notion that persists in advertising. Rodolphe in his château would be a perfect photographic model for whiskey or tobacco. Emma’s “tragedy” from her own point of view is her lack of purchasing power, and a critical observer might say that the notary’s dining-room simply spelled out the word “money” to her. Yet it is not as simple as that; if it were, Emma’s head would be set straighter on her shoulders. What has happened to her and her spiritual sisters is that simulated-oak wallpaper has become itself a kind of money inexpressible in terms of its actual cost per roll. Worse, ideas and sentiments, like wallpaper, have become a kind of money too and they share with money the quality of abstractness, which allows them to be exchanged. It is their use as coins that has made them trite—worn and rubbed—and at the same time indistinguishable from each other except in terms of currency fluctuation. The banalities exchanged between Léon and Emma at their first meeting (“And what music do you prefer?” “Oh, German music, which makes you dream”) are simply coins; money in the usual sense is not at issue here, since both these young people are poor; they are alluding, through those coins, to their inner riches.

Through Charles, Emma acquires poetry. But he could not possibly put into words what she means to him, and if he could have articulated a thought on the subject, would have declared that she had brought poetry into his life. This is so. There was no poetry with his first wife, the widow. Emma’s beauty, of course, is a fact of her nature, and Charles has responded to it with worship, which is what beauty—a mystery—deserves. This explains why Charles, though quite deceived by Emma’s character, is not a fool; he has recognized something in her about which he cannot be deceived.