Augusto Pinochet's coffin, flanked by the former dictator's supporters. Photograph: Elisio Fernandez/Reuters.
The death of Augusto Pinochet, on International Human Rights Day, brought what pop psychology has taught us to call "closure" to millions, not just in Chile, but worldwide. While the ashen-faced aficionados of military precision filed past the open casket, others took to the streets with bottles of champaña, roaring and spurting a joy so provocative that a six-hour riot ensued.
This burlesque mixture of choking sobs and cheering relief reminded us that life rarely delivers to us occasions on which the death of some emblematic individual puts a moral period to his or her life. That is the preserve of literature and the narrative arts, although even here death as a just desert for a lifetime of evil is comparatively rare. Shakespeare's villains are more often than not still alive at the end of the action. Surviving those whose ruin they have brought about, the faltering arm of justice finally pinions them alive - either still raving like the Sadeian Aaron in Titus Andronicus, or defiantly mute like Iago.
What we want, though, is not some final Hercule Poirot flourish of accusation, but to see the buggers dead. The action has impelled us in that direction, and only a swift and decisive demise seems merited. It was left to prose fiction to furnish us with this, and then only fastidiously.
Dickens gives us the hypothetical death of Scrooge in the Christmas to Come, where a coven of indigents contend over the old skinflint's meagre material leavings, and even the tearing down of the curtains from his deathbed elicits only a momentary cluck of soon stifled disapproval. For all the anti-festive froideur of his life, an unmourned death seems best. But it is a fate, of course, that he has the chance to dodge.
No such option awaits Bertha Rochester, who is sent plummeting from the battlements she haunted, so that her husband can marry the governess. To an age when mental illness represented the shadow of demonic possession, the first Mrs Rochester's grim determination to bring hellfire to Thornfield Hall means that she must perish. Even as she does, however, Edward must be seen vainly trying to save her from the inferno.
Other than when the blameless are released from suffering, we are not at the top of our moral game perhaps when welcoming the death of another. The sigh of relief seems only a little less culpable than the outburst of rejoicing. If the death has been preceded, as in the cases of Milosevic, Pinochet and - presumably - Saddam, by an extended legal process, the ethical complexities thicken to a knot. Theodor Adorno famously remarked that to have put a captured Hitler on trial would have insulted his victims. The better recourse would have been to have shot him on sight.
Pinochet's death recalls us to García Márquez's dictator in Autumn of the Patriarch, a nameless general crippled with unimaginable age, paranoia and a deformed, whistling testicle. The greatest of all such literary portraits, the general is an über-Ubu, afloat on the tide of his own boundless evil, bullying the church to have his mother canonised, taking delivery of sacks filled with the severed heads of his opponents. And what we are left with is not the monster's death but a memento of his squalid, illegitimate birth, where the coming to light of a grotesquely misshapen infant gives the lie to the liberal myth that we all start out with an equal chance of grace.
