Torture and Taboo

DEATH IN THE 20th century has lost its intimacy. Its personal implications have been lost in the shift from home to hospital, from hand-to-hand combat to nuclear devastation. We have dehumanized death with statistics and body counts, with causes and philosophies. We have replaced religious rationale with scientific mysticism, and continued to shroud the language of death in platitudes, acronyms, and euphemisms. Ultimately we have institutionalized death.

When our conception of death becomes more remote, somehow our repugnance of killing diminishes. We do not lose the fear of our own death, but disassociate it from the death of others. And yet, we seem to be ashamed of our objectivity. There are few serious books on death in modern society, fewer on killing.

Pavel Kohout's The Hangwoman details the effortlessness of killing in modern society. By setting his satiric novel in a school for executioners, Kohout presents a brutal and vivid image which he masks in the lightness of his writing. The school, the seven students, and the two directors become metaphors for the interactions of society, humanity, and bureaucracy.

Sixteen-year-old Lizinka Tachezy, the title character, is the "femme fatale" par excellence. Drifting through the book in the innocent stupor of childishness, she neither acts nor reacts to the other characters. Her presence stimulates them, while she remains passive. When a shy, poetic classmate of hers feels that his love for Lizinka has been repulsed, he commits murder and then suicide. Later, Assistant Professor Simsa becomes attracted to his pupil, but finds that his impotence is directly proportional to his desire. In a brutal and surreal scene, he takes Lizinka to a prison and tries to rape her while he hangs a prisoner--a mass rapist and murderer--from the gallows. Throughout, Lizinka is unmoved.

Lizinka is the living equation of death with sex. Pardoxically, she is the epitome of what Professor Wolf, the director of the school, seeks to produce: a humanitarian executioner. "This girl could stand before a camera and do anything, even bury people alive, and viewers' hearts would bleed at the thought that she might get a blister."

Kohout adopts a harsh, cynical style, over-whelming us with facts about medieval torture and penological fictions. In the first pages of the novel, Wolf's description of the role of the executioner, as the last judge rather than as a murderer, intrigues with its exuberance and simplicity, and tempts with its logic.

The force of Wolf's argument makes humanity's apparent ease at distinguishing between murder and execution, torture and punitive action, no longer troubling. We recognize man's abhorrence of murder and violence, and, at the same time, applaud his acceptance of the legitimacy of those acts when performed by the Government. We are seduced by the obvious distinctions.

KOHOUT ATTACKS THE coexistence of bureaucracy with the "just following orders" mentality in modern society. Most novelists would make a treatise out of the novel, but Kohout's gallows humor sharpens the images and situations in our minds.

In one chapter, Wat and Simsa use code words when planning the school's curriculum, to disguise its purpose. Here, the language of death is couched in apparently harmless acronyms: CURMODEX for 'Curriculum in Modern Execution,' GENTO for 'General Torture,' HANAP and TINA for 'hanging apparatus' and 'guillotine', respectively. A proposed weekly schedule contains such course topics as CURMODEX, 'computing voltage (by both methods) and practice with simulator; PSYCH, 'torture at Christmas time' or 'importance of humor.'

When Kohout describes Wolf and Simsa's pasts, the commonness, the very ordinary aspects of these people, is striking. They weren't born with a natural talent for killing; they didn't commit sadistic acts on their siblings. They are now executioners because they were good at following orders, at working within and for the system. They could just as well be gardeners.

Kohout ironically places Wolf within an anti-Nazi resistance group while a high school teacher in a small Czech town. Called into the office of the local Commandandt, Wolf is easily intimidated and betrays the other members of the group, including his own brother. From them on, everything is easy for the executioner: he must hold no allegiance but to the state, have no love but for the state, take no orders but from the state. The government in power doesn't matter. The executioner owes his life and soul, not to politics, but to the essence of the state; not to ideology, but to the permanence of the bureaucracy.

The executioner, as the model of modern man, learns to see the beauty of killing with precision, the simplicity of a perfected technique that kills a hanging man within 30 seconds. These are the values by which Kohout's characters live; stripped of their extremes, they do not seem far removed from our own.

What is intriguing about Kohout's characters is not their present status as executioners, but their past: they are not aberrations or monsters, but the perfect products of their society. And their society is our own.

Not until the end of the book do we realize the intricacy of Kohout's style. By leading us with anecdotes and facts about methods of inflicting pain, and by tempting us with the logic of killing, Kohout has made us his characters' accomplices. We find ourselves in the same position as Lizinka's father, who, originally opposed to her planned course of study, at the end accepts Wolf as a future son-in-law. By our interest in Kohout's society and our inactivity in our own, we remove ourselves from our humanity.

We have lost our moral innocence. As our sense of the individuality of death vanishes, so do the last human restraints. Stripped of that personal awareness that understanding, we are naked before the truth: No longer bound by a repugnance of death, we are all capable of killing.