Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  From this viewpoint, the condemnation of Rushdie can be seen not as a chance event, an aberration, but as the most profound conflict between two eras: theocracy goes to war against the Modern Era and targets its most representative creation: the novel. For Rushdie did not blaspheme. He did not attack Islam. He wrote a novel. Rut that, for the theocratic mind, is worse than an attack: if a religion is attacked (by a polemic, a blasphemy, a heresy), the guardians of the temple can easily defend it on their own ground, with their own language; but the novel is a different planet for them; a different universe based on a different ontology; an infernum where the unique truth is powerless and where satanic ambiguity turns every certainty into enigma.

  Let us emphasize this: not attack but ambiguity. The second part of The Satanic Verses (the incriminated part, which evokes Mohammed and the origin of Islam) is presented in the novel as a dream of Gibreel Farishtas, who then develops the dream into a cheap movie in which he himself will play the role of the archangel. The story is thus doubly relativized (first as a dream, then as a bad film that will flop) and presented not as a declaration but as a playful invention. A disagreeable invention? I say no: it showed me, for the first time in my life, the poetry of the Islamic religion, of the Islamic world.

  We should stress this: there is no place for hatred in the relativistic universe of the novel: the author who writes a novel in order to settle scores (personal or ideological) is headed for total and certain aesthetic ruin. Ayesha, the girl who leads the hallucinating villagers to their deaths, is of course a monster, but she is also seductive, wondrous (haloed by the butterflies that accompany her everywhere), and often touching; even in the portrait of an emigre imam (an imaginary portrait of Khomeini), there is an almost respectful understanding; Western modernity is viewed with skepticism, never presented as superior to Oriental archaism; the novel "historically and psychologically explores" sacred old texts, but it also shows how much they are degraded by TV, advertising, the entertainment industry; and the left-wing characters, who deplore the frivolity of this modern world-do they at least enjoy the author's full sympathy? No indeed, they are miserably ridiculous, and as frivolous as the frivolity around them; no one is right and no one entirely wrong in the immense carnival of relativity that is this work.

  Therefore, with The Satanic Verses, the art of the novel as such is incriminated. That is why, in this whole sad story, the saddest thing is not Khomeini's verdict (which proceeds from a logic that is atrocious but consistent); rather, it is Europe's incapacity to defend and explain (explain patiently to itself and to others) that most European of the arts, the art of the novel; in other words, to explain and defend its own culture. The "children of the novel" have abandoned the art that shaped them. Europe, the "society of the novel," has abandoned its own self.

  It does not surprise me that the Sorbonne theologians, the sixteenth-century ideological police who kindled so many stakes, should have made life so hard for Rabelais, forcing him often to flee and hide. What seems to me far more amazing and admirable is the protection provided him by the powerful men of his time, Cardinal du Bellay, for instance, and Cardinal Odet, and above all Francois I, the king of France. Were they seeking to defend principles? Freedom of expression? Human rights? They had a better motive: they loved literature and the arts.

  I see no Cardinal du Bellay, no Francois I, in today's Europe. But is Europe still Europe? Is it still "the society of the novel"? In other words, is it still living in the Modern Era? Or is it already moving into another era, as yet unnamed, for which its arts are no longer of much importance? If that is so, why be surprised that Europe was not disturbed beyond measure when, for the first time in its history, the art of the novel-Europe's art par excellence-was condemned to death? In this new age, after the Modern Era, has not the novel for some time already been living on death row?

  The European Novel

  To define precisely the art I am discussing, I call it the European novel. By that I mean not only novels created in Europe by Europeans but novels that belong to a history that began with the dawn of the Modern Era in Europe. There are of course other novels, the novel of China, of Japan, the novel of ancient Greece, but they are not bound by any continuous evolutionary

  line to the historical enterprise that began with Rabelais and Cervantes.

  I speak of the European novel not only to distinguish it from, say, the Chinese novel but also to point out that its history is transnational; that the French novel, the English novel, the Hungarian novel, are in no position to create autonomous histories of their own but are all part of a common, supranational history that provides the only context capable of revealing both the direction of the novels evolution and the value of particular works.

  At different phases of that evolution, different nations, as in a relay race, took the initiative: first Italy with Boccaccio, the great precursor; then France with Rabelais, and Spain with Cervantes and the picaresque novel; the English novel in the eighteenth century and then, toward the century's end, the German contribution, with Goethe; the nineteenth century, which belonged almost entirely to France, along with the Russian novel in the last third, and, immediately thereafter, the arrival of the Scandinavian novel. Then the twentieth century and its Central European adventure with Kafka, Musil, Broch, and Gombrowicz…

  If Europe were only a single nation, I do not believe the history of its novel could have lasted with such vitality, such power, and such diversity for four centuries. It was the ever new historical situations (with their new existential content), arising in France, then in Russia, then elsewhere, and somewhere else again, that kept the art of the novel going, brought it new inspirations, suggested new aesthetic solutions. It is as if in the course of its journey the history of the novel kept waking the different parts of Europe, one after

  the other, confirming them in their specificity and at the same time integrating them into a common European consciousness.

  In our own century, for the first time, the important initiatives in the history of the European novel are appearing outside Europe: first in North America, in the 1920s and 30s, and then, in the 60s, in Latin America. What with the pleasure provided me by the art of the French-speaking Antillean novelist Patrick Chamoiseau, and then by Rushdies, I would prefer to speak more generally of the novel from below the thirty-fifth parallel, the novel of the South: a great new novelistic culture characterized by an extraordinary sense of the real coupled with an untrammeled imagination that breaks every rule of plausibility.

  I am delighted by that imagination without understanding completely where it comes from. Kafka? Certainly. For our century, it is he who gave legitimacy to the implausible in the art of the novel. Yet the Kafkan imagination is different from Rushdies or Garcia Marquez's; that teeming imagination seems rooted in the very specific culture of the South; for example, in its still living oral literature (Chamoiseau drawing inspiration from the Creole storytellers) or, as Fuentes likes to recall, in the Latin American Baroque, more exuberant, more "crazy," than Europe's.

  Or another key to that imagination: the tropical-ization of the novel. I refer to Rushdie's fantasy: Farishta hovers above London and wishes to "tropical-ize" that hostile city. He lists the advantages of tropi-calization: "institution of a national siesta… new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards)… religious fervour, political ferment… friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family… spicier food… Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess."

  ("Culture of excess" is an excellent expression. The tendency of the novel in the last stages of its modernism: in Europe: the ordinary pursued to its utmost; sophisticated analysis of gray on gray; outside Europe: accumulation of the most extraordinary coincidences; colors on colors. The dangers: in Europe, tedium of gray; outside Europe, mo
notony of the picturesque.)

  The novels created below the thirty-fifth parallel, though a bit. foreign to European taste, are the extension of the history of the European novel, of its form and of its spirit, and are even astonishingly close to its earliest beginnings; nowhere else today does the old Rabelaisian sap run so joyfully as in the work of these non-European writers.

  The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh

  Which brings me back one last time to Panurge. In Pantagruel, he falls in love with a woman and is determined to have her at all costs. In church, during mass (isn't that a hell of a sacrilege!), he addresses her with some outrageous obscenities (in today's America, such "verbal rape" would cost him dear) and, when she refuses to listen, takes his revenge by sprinkling her gown with the minced genitals of a bitch in heat. As she leaves the church, all the dogs roundabout (six hundred thousand and fourteen, says Rabelais) run up and piss on her. I remember living in a workers' dormitory when I was twenty, my Rabelais in Czech translation under my bed. The men were curious about this fat book, and time and again I had to read them the story, which they soon knew by heart. Even though these were people of a rather conservative peasant mentality, their laughter hadn't a trace of condemnation for that rhetorical and urinary harasser; they adored Panurge, so much so that they gave his name to one of our companions; no, not a womanizer, but a youngster known for his naivete and his exaggerated chastity, who was ashamed to be seen naked in the shower. I can hear their cries as if it were yesterday: "Panurk"-our Czech pronunciation of the name- "get into the shower! Or well wash you down with dog piss!

  I can still hear that hearty laughter, making fun of a pal's modesty but at the same time showing an almost marveling affection for it. They were delighted by the obscenities Panurge addresses to the woman in church, but equally delighted by the punishment the woman's chastity inflicted on him and then, to their great pleasure, her own punishment by the dogs' urine. With what or whom did my erstwhile companions sympathize? With modesty? With immodesty? With Panurge? With the woman? Or with the dogs who had the enviable privilege of urinating on a beauty?

  Humor: the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humor: the intoxicating relativity

  of human things; the strange pleasure that conies of the certainty that there is no certainty.

  But humor, to recall Octavio Paz, is "the great invention of the modern spirit." It has not been with us forever, and it won't be with us forever either.

  With a heavy heart, I imagine the day when Panurge no longer makes people laugh.

  PART TWO. The Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta

  1

  The image of Kafka that is widely held these days comes originally from a novel. Max Brod wrote it immediately after Kafka's death and published it in 1926. Savor the title: The Enchanted Kingdom of Love (Zauberreich der Liebe). This key-novel is a roman a clef, a novel with a key. Its protagonist, a German writer in Prague named Nowy, is recognizably a flattering self-portrait of Brod (adored by women, envied by the literati). Nowy/Brod cuckolds a man who, by very elaborate wicked schemes, gets him sent to prison for four years. We are instantly plunged into a story cobbled together by the most improbable coincidences (characters meet by complete chance on a ship out at sea, on a Haifa street, on a street in Vienna), we witness the struggle between the good (Nowy and his mistress) and the evil (the cuckold, so vulgar that he fully deserves his horns, and a literary critic who systematically pans Nowy's wonderful books), we are pained by melodramatic reversals (the heroine kills herself because she cannot bear life caught between the cuckold and the cuckolder), we admire the sensitive soul of Nowy/Brod, who swoons regularly.

  This novel would have been forgotten before it was written if not for the character Carta. Because Garta, Nowy's close friend, is a portrait of Kafka. Without this key, the character would be the most uninteresting in the entire history of literature; he is described as a "saint of our time," but even about the ministry of his saintliness we don't learn much, except that from time to time, when Nowy/Brod is having love troubles, he seeks advice from his friend, which the friend, as a saint with no such experience, is incapable of giving him.

  What a marvelous paradox: the whole image of Kafka and the whole posthumous fate of his work were first conceived and laid out in this simpleminded novel, this garbage, this cartoon-novel concoction, which, aesthetically, stands at exactly the opposite pole from Kafka's art.

  2

  Some quotations from the novel: Garta "was a saint of our time, a veritable saint." "Perhaps his best quality was his remaining so independent and free, so saintly rational in the face of all mythologies, even though deep down he was akin to them and nearly a mythological figure himself." "He wanted to live in perfect

  purity-rather, he could not do otherwise…"

  The words "saint," "saintly," "mythological," "purity," are not a matter of rhetoric; they are to be taken literally: "Of all the sages and prophets who have walked the earth, he was the quietest… Perhaps he lacked one thing: self-confidence. With it, he would have become a guide to humanity. No, he was not a guide. He spoke neither to the people nor to disciples, like the Buddha, Jesus, Moses. He did not speak that way. He remained reticent. Was that because he saw more deeply into the great mystery than those three? Because what he undertook was more difficult yet than what the Buddha intended? Because if he succeeded, it would be conclusive?"

  And again: "All the founders of religions were sure of themselves. One of them, however-he may well be the most sincere of all-Lao-tze, retreated into the shadows. Carta certainly did the same."

  Carta is presented as someone who writes. Nowy "had agreed to be Garta's literary executor-Garta had asked him to do this, but with the unusual condition that everything be destroyed." Nowy "sensed the reason for that last wish. Garta was not announcing a new religion; he wanted only to live his faith. … He required the ultimate effort of himself; as he had not succeeded, his writings (mere rungs to help him climb to the heights) had no value for him."

  Still, Nowy/Brod did not want to obey his friend's wish, because in his view, Carta's writings, "even as attempts, as mere sketches, bring to wandering humanity a presentiment of something irreplaceable."

  Yes, it's all there.

  3

  Were it not for Brod, we would not even know Kafka's name today. Right after his friend's death, Brod saw to the publication of his three novels. No reaction. So he realized that, to establish Kafka's work, he would have to undertake a real and long war. Establishing a body of work means presenting it, interpreting it. Brod opened a veritable artillery attack: prefaces: for The Trial (1925), for The Castle (1926), for Amerika (1927), for "Description of a Struggle" (1936), for the diaries and letters (1937), for the stories (1946); for the Conversations by Gustav Janouch (1952); then the dramatizations: of The Castle (1953) and Amerika (1957); but above all, four important books of interpretation (take good note of the titles!): Franz Kafka: A Biography (1937), The Faith and Teachings of Franz Kafka (1946), Franz Kafka, He Who Shows the Way (1951), and Despair and Salvation in the Work of Franz Kafka (1959).

  Through all of these texts, the image outlined in The Enchanted Kingdom of Love is confirmed and developed: above all, Kafka is primarily the religious thinker, der religiose Denker. True, he "never systematically set out his philosophy and his religious world view. Nonetheless, we can deduce rather clear fundamentals from his work, from his aphorisms especially but also from his poetry, his letters, his diaries, and then also from his way of life (from that above all)…"

  Further on: Kafka's true importance cannot be understood "unless two currents in his work are distinguished: (1) the aphorisms, (2) the narrative writings (novels, stories, fragments).

  "In his aphorisms Kafka expounds the positive word [das positive Wort] that he gives to mankind, a faith, a stern call for each individual to change his own life."

  In his novels and stories, "
he describes the horrible punishments in store for those who do not wish to hear the word [das Wort] and do not follow the path of righteousness."

  Note the hierarchy: at the top: Kafka's life as an example to be followed; in the middle: the aphorisms, that is, all the meditative "philosophical" passages in his diaries; at the bottom: the narrative works.

  Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.

  Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse?

  But the man who writes bad verse turns dangerous once he starts to publish the work of his poet friend. Suppose the most influential commentator on Picasso were a painter who could not even manage to understand the impressionists. What would he say about Picasso's paintings? Probably the same thing Brod said about Kafka's novels: that they describe "the horrible punishments in store for those who… do not follow the path of righteousness."

  4

  Max Brod created the image of Kafka and that of his work; he created Kafkology at the same time. The Kafkologists may distance themselves from their founding father, but they never leave the terrain he mapped out for them. Despite the astronomical number of its texts, Kafkology goes on elaborating infinite variants on the same discussion, the same speculation, which, increasingly unconnected to Kafka's work, feeds only on itself. Through innumerable prefaces, postfaces, notes, biographies and monographs, university lectures and dissertations, Kafkology produces and sustains its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka.