Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  Thus a vast background is meticulously depicted, before which are played out Hans Castorp's fate and the ideological duel between two consumptives: Settembrini and Naphta; the one a Freemason and democrat, the other a Jesuit and autocrat, both of them incurably ill. Manns tranquil irony relativizes these two learned mens truths; their dispute has no winner. But the novel's irony goes further and reaches its pinnacle in the scene where, each surrounded by his little audience and intoxicated by his own implacable logic, they both push their arguments to the extreme so that no one can any longer tell who stands for progress and who for tradition, who for reason and who for the irrational, who for the spirit and who for the body. Over several pages we witness an enormous confusion where words lose their meaning, and the debate is all the more violent because the positions are interchangeable. Some two hundred pages later, at the end of the novel (the war is soon to break out), all the patients in the sanatorium fall into a state of irrational irritability, inexplicable hatreds; then Settembrini insults Naphta and the two invalids go off to fight a duel that will end in the suicide of one of them; and suddenly we understand that what sets men against one another is not irreconcilable ideological antagonism but an aggressiv-ity beyond the rational, an obscure, unexplained force for which ideas are merely a screen, a mask, a pretext. Thus this magnificent "novel of ideas" is at the same time (especially for a reader at the end of our century) a dreadful requestioning of ideas as such, a great farewell to the era that believed in ideas and in their power to run the world.

  Mann and Musil. Despite the closeness of their birth dates, their aesthetics belong to two different eras in the novels history. Both are novelists of immense intellectuality. In the Mann novel, the intellectuality shows mainly in the dialogues about ideas carried on before the backdrop of a descriptive novel. In The Man Without Qualities, the intellectuality is manifest at every instant, thoroughgoing; as against Mann's descriptive novel, Musil's is a thinking novel. Here too the events are set in a concrete milieu (Vienna) and in a concrete moment (the same one as in The Magic Mountain: just before the 1914 war), but whereas in Mann Davos is described in detail, in Musil Vienna is barely named, the author not even deigning to evoke the look of its streets, its squares, its parks (it simply disregards that "apparatus for fabricating the illusion of reality"). We are in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it is systematically called by a derisive sobriquet: Kakania. Kakania: the Empire deconcretized, generalized, reduced to a few basic situations, the Empire transformed into an ironical replica of the Empire. This Kakania is not a background to the novel as Davos is in Thomas Mann, it is one of the novels very themes:, it is not described, it is analyzed and thought through.

  Mann explained that the structure of The Magic Mountain is musical, built out of themes that are developed as in a symphony, that return, that intersect, that accompany the novel throughout. This is true, but it should be noted that a theme does not signify quite the same thing in Mann and in Musil. To start with, in Mann the themes (time, the body, illness, death, etc.) are developed in front of a vast nonthematic background (descriptions of place, time, customs, people) more or less as the themes of a sonata are enveloped in music that is other than the theme-the bridges and the transitions. Then also, his themes are strongly "polyhistorical" (i.e., multidisciplinary) in nature, that is to say: Mann makes use of every means offered by the various branches of knowledge-sociology, political science, medicine, botany, physics, chemistry-to illuminate this or that theme; as though he hoped by this popularization of knowledge to create a solid didactic base for analyzing themes; to my mind, too often and for overlong stretches, this diverts his novel from the essential-for let us remember, the essential for a novel is what only a novel can say.

  In Musil, theme analysis is another matter: first, it has nothing multidisciplinary to it; the novelist doesn't set up as a scholar, a doctor, a sociologist, a historian, he analyzes human situations that are not part of some scientific field but are simply part of life. This is how Broch and Musil saw the historical task for the novel after the era of psychological realism: if European philosophy could not think out man's life, think out his "concrete metaphysics," then it is the novel that is fated finally to take over this vacant terrain where nothing could ever replace it (existential philosophy has confirmed this by a negative proof; for the analysis of existence cannot become a system; existence cannot be systematized, and Heidegger, a poetry lover, was wrong to disregard the history of the novel, for it contains the greatest treasury of existential wisdom).

  Second, as opposed to Mann, in Musil everything becomes theme (existential questioning). If everything becomes theme, the background disappears and, as in a cubist painting, there is nothing but foreground. It is this abolition of the background that I consider to be the structural revolution Musil brought about. Great changes often have an unobtrusive appearance. Indeed, its lengthy reflections, the slow tempo of its sentences, give The Man Without Qualities the feel of "traditional" writing. No overturning of chronology. No interior monologues a la Joyce. No abolishing of punctuation. No annihilating of character or action. For some two thousand pages, we follow the modest

  story of a young intellectual, Ulrich, who visits several mistresses, meets with some friends, and works for an organization as sober as it is grotesque (this is where the novel, almost imperceptibly, moves away from the plausible and turns into play), whose purpose is to arrange the emperors anniversary celebration, a great "festival of peace" planned (and this is a comic bomb slipped under the book's foundation) for the year 1918. Each little situation is as if frozen in its tracks (this oddly slowed tempo is where Musil occasionally recalls Joyce), to be pierced by a long gaze that considers what it means, how to understand it and think it through.

  In The Magic Mountain, Mann transformed the several years before the 1914 war into a magnificent farewell party for the nineteenth century, gone forever. The Man Without Qualities, set in the same years, examines the human situations of the time to come: of that terminal period of the Modern Era that began in 1914 and, it seems, is in the process of ending today before our eyes. Actually, everything is there already in the Musil Kakania: the reign of a runaway technology that turns people into statistics (the novel opens on a street where an accident has occurred; a man is lying on the ground and a couple of passersby comment on the event by citing the annual number of traffic accidents); speed as the supreme value of a world intoxicated by technology; opaque and pervasive bureaucracy (Musil's offices are a great match to Kafka's); the comical sterility of ideologies that understand nothing, that provide no guidance (the glorious age of Settembrini and Naphta is finished); journalism, the heir to what used to be called culture; modernity's collaborationists; solidarity with criminals as the mystical expression of the human rights religion (the characters Clarisse and Moosbrugger); infantophilia and infantoc-racy (Hans Sepp, a fascist before the term was born, whose ideology is based on adoration of the child in us).

  11

  When I finished The Farewell Party, at the very start of the 1970s, I considered my career as a writer over. It was under the Russian occupation and my wife and I had other worries. It wasn't until we had been in France a year (and thanks to France) that, after six years of a total interruption, I began without passion to write again. Feeling intimidated, and to regain my footing, I decided to tie into something I had already done: to write a kind of second volume of Laughable Loves. What a regression! Those short stories had started me on my way as a writer twenty years before. Fortunately, after drafting two or three of these "Laughable Loves II," I saw that I was writing an entirely different thing: not a story collection but a novel (later entitled The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), a novel in seven parts that were independent yet so closely bound that any one of them read by itself would lose much of its meaning.

  At once, whatever mistrust I still harbored toward the art of the novel disappeared: by giving each part the nature of a short story, I made unnecessary the whole see
mingly unavoidable technique of large-scale novel composition. In my project I happened upon the old Chopin strategy, the strategy of small-scale com-position that has no need of nonthematic passages. (Does that mean that the story is the small form of the novel? Yes. There is no ontological difference between story and novel, as there is between the novel and poetry or the novel and theater.) How are these seven small, independent compositions related if they have no action in common? All that holds them together, that makes them a novel, is that they treat the same themes. As I worked I thus came across another old strategy: Beethoven's variation strategy, this allowed me to stay in direct, uninterrupted contact with some existential questions that fascinate me and that this novel in variation form explores from multiple angles in sequence.

  This sequential exploration of themes has a logic, and it determines the linkage of the parts. For example: Part One ("Lost Letters') introduces the theme of man and history in its basic version: man collides with history and it crushes him. In Part Two ("Mama") this theme is turned around: for Mama, the arrival of the Russian tanks is a small matter compared to the pears in her garden ("tanks are perishable, pears are eternal"). Part Six ("The Angels"), in which the heroine, Tamina, drowns, would seem to be the tragic conclusion of the novel; yet the novel doesn't end there but ends in the next part, which is neither poignant nor dramatic nor tragic; it recounts the erotic life of a new character, Jan. The history theme appears here briefly and for the last time: "Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about"; this touches on that metaphysical border (border: another theme worked out in the course of the novel) beyond which everything loses its meaning. The island where Tamina's tragic life ends is dominated by the laughter (another theme) of the angels, while Part Seven echoes with the "laughter of the devil," which turns everything (everything: history, sex, tragedies) into smoke. Only then does the trail of themes draw toward an end, and the book can close.

  12

  In the six books of his maturity (The Dawn; Human, All Too Human; The Gay Science; Beyond Good and Evil; Toward a Genealogy of Morals; The Twilight of the Idols), Nietzsche is always pursuing, developing, elaborating, affirming, refining the same compositional archetype. Its principles: the basic unit of the book is the chapter; its length ranges from a single sentence to many pages; without exception the chapters consist of a single paragraph; they are always numbered; in Human, All Too Human and in The Gay Science, they are numbered and given titles besides. A certain number of chapters make up a part, and a certain number of parts, a book. The book is built on a principal theme, which is specified by the title (beyond good and evil, the gay science, a genealogy of morals, etc.); the various parts treat themes derived from the principal theme (such parts being either titled, as in Human, All Too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, The Twilight of the Idols., or else merely numbered). Certain of these derived themes are arranged vertically (in which each part discusses mainly the theme set out by the part's title), whereas others run horizontally through the entire book. This makes for a composition that is at once maximally articulated (divided into many fairly autonomous units) and maximally unified (the same themes constantly recur). It also makes for a composition imbued with an extraordinary sense of rhythm based on the alternation of short and long chapters: for instance, the fourth part of Beyond Good and Evil consists exclusively of very short aphorisms (like a kind of divertissement or scherzo). But above all: this is a composition where there is no need for filler, for transitions, for weak passages, and where the tension never slackens because all we get is thoughts speeding toward us "from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts."

  13

  If a philosopher's thought is so thoroughly bound up with the formal organization of his text, can it exist outside that text? Can Nietzsche's thought be extracted from Nietzsche's prose? Certainly not. Thought, expression, composition are inseparable. Is what is valid for Nietzsche valid in general? That is: can we say that the thought (the meaning) of a work is always, and by principle, inseparable from its composition?

  Oddly, no, we cannot say that. In music, for a long time a composer's originality consisted exclusively in his melodic-harmonic inventiveness, which he set out, so to speak, in compositional schemes that were not determined by him but were more or less preestab-lished: masses, Baroque suites, Baroque concertos, etc. Their various sections were arranged according to an order determined by tradition, so that, for instance, with clocklike regularity, suites always ended with a last dance, and so on.

  Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas, which cover nearly his whole creative life, from the age of twenty-five to fifty-two, represent an immense evolution during which sonata composition is completely transformed. The earliest sonatas still do not go beyond Haydn and Mozart's compositional thinking: four movements; allegro in sonata form; lied in a slow tempo; minuet or scherzo in a faster tempo; rondo in a rapid tempo.

  The disadvantages of such composition are immediately apparent: the most important, most dramatic, longest movement is the first; the sequence of movements is thus a devolution: from the gravest to the lightest; moreover, until Beethoven, the sonata was still midway between a collection of pieces (at the time, separate movements were often played at concerts) and an indivisible, unitary composition. As his thirty-two sonatas evolved, Beethoven gradually replaced the old composition scheme with one that was more concentrated (often reduced to three or even two movements), more dramatic (the center of gravity shifts to the final movement), more unified (mainly by a consistent emotional mood). But the real meaning of this evolution (which made it actually a revolution) lay not in replacing an unsatisfactory scheme with another, better one but in shattering the very principle of the preestablished composition scheme.

  Indeed, that general compliance with the sonatas or the symphony's prescribed scheme is somewhat ridiculous. Imagine all the great symphonists, including Haydn and Mozart, Schumann and Brahms, weeping in their adagios and then turning into little children when the last movement starts, darting into the schoolyard to dance, hop, and holler that alls well that ends well. This is what we might call "the stupidity of music." Beethoven saw that the only way to get around it is to make composition radically individual.

  This idea is the first item in his artistic testament addressed to all the arts, to all artists, and which I shall state thus: the composition (the architectural organization of a work) should not be seen as some preexistent matrix, loaned to an author for him to fill out with his invention; the composition should itself be an invention, an invention that engages all the author's originality.

  I cannot say how thoroughly this message was heard and understood. But Beethoven did draw all of its implications-magnificently-in his last sonatas, each of them composed in a manner unique and unprecedented.

  14

  The sonata Opus 111; it has only two movements: the first, which is dramatic, is worked out more or less classically in sonata form; the second, meditative in character, is written in variation form (a form rather unusual in sonatas before Beethoven): there is no play of contrasts and differences among the individual variations, only an intensification that keeps adding fresh nuance to the previous variation and gives this long movement an exceptional unity of tone.

  The more thoroughly unified each of the movements, the greater its difference from the other. Disproportionate in length: the first movement (in Schnabel's recording): 8:14; the second: 17:42. The second half of the sonata is thus more than twice as long as the first (a case without precedent in the history of the sonata)! Furthermore: the first movement is dramatic, the second calm, reflective. Now, to begin dramatically and end with so lengthy a meditation would seem to contradict every architectural principle and condemn the sonata to the loss of all
the dramatic tension previously so dear to Beethoven.

  But it is just that unexpected juxtaposition of these two movements that is eloquent, that speaks, that becomes the semantic gesture of the sonata, its metaphorical sense evoking the image of a hard, short life and the endless yearning song that follows it. That metaphorical sense, beyond the power of words to grasp and yet strong and insistent, gives the two movements a unity. An inimitable unity. (The impersonal composition of a Mozart sonata could be imitated endlessly; the composition of the sonata Opus 111 is so personal that imitating it would be forgery.)

  Opus 111 makes me think of Faulkner's The Wild Palms. In it a love storv alternates with the story of an escaped convict, two stories that have nothing in common, no character nor even any discernible kinship of motifs or themes. A composition that cannot serve as a model for any other novelist; that can exist only once; that is arbitrary, inadvisable, unjustifiable; unjustifiable because behind it can be heard an es muss sein that makes any justification superfluous.

  15

  By his refusal of systems, Nietzsche brought deep changes to the way philosophy is done: as Hannah Arendt defined it, Nietzsche's thought is experimental thought. His first impulse is to break up whatever is rigid, to undermine commonly accepted systems, to open rifts for venturing into the unknown; the philosopher of the future will be an experimenter, Nietzsche said; free to go off in various directions that could, conceivably, come into conflict.