Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant; as Brod said: he who does not love anyone, who only dallies, must die; thus K. is stabbed in the heart; Bukharin is hanged. Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.

  The Trial Against the Century

  For nearly seventy years Europe lived under a trial-regime. From among the great artists of the century, how many defendants… I shall mention only those who had some significance for me. Starting in the twenties, there were those hounded by the tribunal of revolutionary morality: Bunin, Andreyev, Meyerhold, Pilnyak, Veprik (a Jewish-Russian musician, a forgotten martyr of modern art; he dared to defend Shostakovich's opera against Stalin's condemnation; they stuck him in a camp; I remember his piano compositions, which my father liked to play), Mandelstam, Halas (the poet who was adored by Ludvik in The Joke., hounded after his death for gloominess seen as counterrevolutionary). Then there were the quarry of the Nazi tribunal: Broch (he gazes at me, pipe in mouth, from a photo on my worktable), Schoenberg, Werfel, Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Musil, Vancura (the Czech writer I love most), Bruno Schulz. The totalitarian empires and their bloody trials have disappeared, but the spirit of the trial lingers as a legacy, and that is what is now settling scores. Thus the trial strikes at: those accused of pro-Nazi sympathies: Hamsun, Heidegger (all Czech dissident thought, Patocka most notably, is indebted to him), Richard Strauss, Gottfried Benn, von Doderer, Drieu la Rochelle, Celine (in 1992, a half century after the war, an indignant official refused to designate his house a historical monument); supporters of Mussolini: Malaparte, Marinetti, Ezra Pound (the American military kept him, like an animal, in a cage for months under the blazing Italian sun; in his Reykjavik studio, the painter

  Kristjan Davidsson showed me a large photo of him: "For fifty years it has gone with me everywhere I go"); the Munich appeasers: Giono, Alain, Morand, Montherlant, St.-John Perse (a member of the French delegation to the Munich conference, he was closely involved in the humiliation of my native country); then, the Communists and their sympathizers: Maya-kovsky (who today remembers his love poetry and his amazing metaphors?), Gorky, Shaw, Brecht (who is thereby undergoing his second trial), Eluard (that exterminating angel who used to decorate his signature with a drawing of crossed swords), Picasso, Leger, Aragon (how can I forget that he offered me his hand at a difficult time in my life?), Nezval (his self-portrait in oils is on the wall by my bookshelves), Sartre. Some of these people are undergoing a double trial, first accused of betraying the revolution, then accused for services they had rendered it earlier: Gide (in the old Communist countries, the symbol of all evil), Shostakovich (to atone for his difficult music, he manufactured rubbish for the regime's needs; he maintained that for the history of art a worthless thing is null and void; he didn't know that for the tribunal it is the worthlessness itself that counts), Breton, Malraux (accused yesterday of having betrayed revolutionary ideals, accusable tomorrow of having held them), Tibor Dery (some works of this Communist writer, who was imprisoned after the Budapest massacre, were for me the first great literary, nonpropagandistic reply to Stalinism). The most exquisite flower of the century, the modern art of the twenties and thirties, was even triply accused: first by the Nazi tribunal as Entartete Kunst, "degenerate art"; then by the Communist tribunal as "elitist formalism alien to the people"; and finally by the triumphant capitalist tribunal as art steeped in revolutionary illusions.

  How is it possible that the Soviet Russian chauvinist, the maker of versified propaganda, he whom Stalin himself called "the greatest poet of our epoch"-how is it possible that Mayakovsky is nevertheless a tremendous poet, one of the greatest? Given her capacity for enthusiasm, her emotional tears that blur her view of the outside world, wasn't lyric poetry-that untouchable goddess-doomed one fateful day to become the beautifier of atrocities, their "warmhearted maidservant" (Baudelaire)? These are the questions that fascinated me when, some twenty-five years ago, I wrote Life Is Elsewhere, the novel in which Jaromil, a poet under twenty years old, becomes the elated servant of the Stalinist regime. I was aghast when critics, although praising my book, saw my hero as a fake poet, a bastard even. In my view, Jaromil is an authentic poet, an innocent soul; otherwise, I would not have seen any interest to my novel. Am 1 the one to blame for the misunderstanding? Did I express myself badly? I don't think so. To be a true poet and at the same time to support (like Jaromil or Mayakovsky) an incontestable horror is a scandal-in the sense of an unjustifiable, unacceptable event, one that contradicts logic and yet is real. We are all unconsciously tempted to dodge scandals, to behave as though they don't exist. That is why we prefer to say that the great cultural figures tainted with the horrors of our century were bastards., but it isn't so; if only out of vanity, aware that they are seen, looked at, judged, artists and philosophers are anxious to be decent and courageous, to be

  on the right side, to be right. That makes the scandal still more intolerable, more inexplicable. If we don't want to leave this century just as stupid as we entered it, we must abandon the facile moralism of the trial and think about this scandal, think it through to the bottom, even if this should lead us to question anew all our certainties about man as such.

  But the conformism of public opinion is a force that sets itself up as a tribunal, and the tribunal is not there to waste time over ideas, it is there to conduct the investigations for trials. And as the abyss of time widens between judges and defendants, it is always a lesser experience that is judging a greater. The immature sit in judgment on Celine's erring ways without realizing that because of these erring ways, Celine's novels contain existential knowledge that, if they were to understand it, could make them more adult. Because therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.

  Those with No Sense of Guilt Are Dancing

  The music (commonly and vaguely) called "rock " has been inundating the sonic environment of daily life for twenty years; it seized possession of the world at the very moment when the twentieth century was disgustedly vomiting up its history; a question haunts me: was

  this coincidence mere chance? Or is there some hidden meaning to the conjunction of the century's final trials and the ecstasy of rock? Is the century hoping to forget itself in this ecstatic howling? To forget its Utopias foundering in horror? To forget its art? An art whose subtlety, whose needless complexity, irritates the populace, offends against democracy?

  The word "rock" is vague; therefore, I would rather describe the music I mean: human voices prevail over instruments, high-pitched voices over low ones; there is no contrast to the dynamics, which keep to a perpetual fortissimo that turns the singing into howling; as in jazz, the rhythm accentuates the second beat of the measure, but in a more stereotyped and noisier manner; the harmony and the melody are simplistic and thus they bring out the tone color, the only inventive element of this music; while the popular songs of the first half of the century had melodies that made poor folk cry (and delighted Mahler's and Stravinsky's musical irony), this so-called rock music is exempt from the sin of sentimentality; it is not sentimental, it is ecstatic, it is the prolongation of a single moment of ecstasy; and since ecstasy is a moment wrenched out of time-a brief moment without memory, a moment surrounded by forgetting-the melodic motif has no room to develop, it only repeats, without evolving or concluding (rock is the only "light" music in which melody is not predominant; people don't hum rock melodies).

  A curious thing: thanks to the technology of sound reproduction, this ecstatic music resounds incessantly and everywhere, and thus outside ecstatic situations. The acoustic image of ecstasy has become the everyday decor of our lassitu
de. It is inviting us to no orgy, to no mystical experience, so what does this trivialized ecstasy mean to tell us? That we should accept it. That we should get used to it. That we should respect its privileged position. That we should observe the ethic it decrees.

  The ethic of ecstasy is the opposite of the trial's ethic; under its protection everybody does whatever he wants: now anyone can suck his thumb as he likes, from infancy to graduation, and it is a freedom no one will be willing to give up; look around you on the Metro; seated or standing, every single person has a finger in some orifice of his face-in the ear, in the mouth, in the nose; no one feels he's being observed, and everyone dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self, which is picking its nose; no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others. In this situation of uniform egocentricity, the sense of guilt does not play the role it once did; the tribunals still operate, but they are fascinated exclusively by the past; they see only the core of the century; they see only the generations that are old or dead. Kafka's characters were made to feel guilty by the authority of the father; it is because his father disgraces him that the hero of "The Judgment" drowns himself in a river; that time is past: in the world of rock, the father has been charged with such a load of guilt that, for a long time now, he allows everything. Those with no guilt feelings are dancing.

  Recently, two adolescents murdered a priest: on television I heard another priest talking, his voice trembling with understanding: "We must pray for the priest who was a victim of his mission: he was especially concerned with young people. But we must also pray for the two unfortunate adolescents; they too were victims: of their drives."

  While freedom of thought-freedom of words, of attitudes, of jokes, of reflection, of dangerous ideas, of intellectual provocations-shrinks, under surveillance as it is by the vigilance of the tribunal of general con-formism, the freedom of drives grows ever greater. They are preaching severity against sins of thought; they are preaching forgiveness for crimes committed in emotional ecstasy.

  Paths in the Fog

  Robert Musil's contemporaries admired his intelligence much more than his books; they said he should have written essays, not novels. A negative proof suffices to refute this opinion: read Musil's essays: how heavy they are, boring and charmless! For Musil is a great thinker only in his novels. His thought needs to feed on concrete situations and concrete characters; in short, it is novelistic thought, not philosophic.

  Each first chapter of the eighteen books of Fielding's Tom Jones is a brief essay. Its first French translator, in the eighteenth century, purely and simply eliminated all of them, claiming that they were not to the French taste. Turgenev reproached Tolstoy for the essayistic passages in War and Peace dealing with the philosophy of history. Tolstoy began to doubt himself and, under pressure of advisers, eliminated those passages in the third edition of the novel. Fortunately, he later restored them.

  Just as there are novelistic dialogue and action, there is also novelistic reflection. The lengthy reflections of War and Peace are inconceivable outside of the novel-for instance, in a scholarly journal. Because of their language, certainly, which is filled with intentionally naive similes and metaphors. But above all because Tolstoy talking about history is not interested, as a historian would be, in the exact account of events and of their consequences for social, political, and cultural life, in the evaluation of this or that persons role, and so on; he is interested in history as a new dimension of human existence.

  History became a concrete experience for everyone toward the start of the nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic Wars that figure in War and Peace; with a shock, these wars made clear to every European that the world around him was subject to perpetual change that interferes with his life, transforming it and keeping it in motion. Before the nineteenth century, wars and rebellions were felt to be natural catastrophes, like the plague or an earthquake. People saw neither unity nor continuity in historical events, and did not believe it possible to influence their course. Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist joins a regiment and then is seriously wounded in battle; marked for life, he will limp for the rest of his days. But what battle was it? The novel doesn't say. And why should it say? All wars were the same. In eighteenth-century novels the historical moment is specified only very approximately. Only after the start of the nineteenth century, from Scott and Balzac on, do all wars no longer seem the same and characters in novels live in precisely dated times.

  Tolstoy looks back on the Napoleonic Wars from a distance of fifty years. In his case, the new perception of history not only affects the structure of the novel, which has become more and more capable of capturing (in dialogue, in description) the historical nature of narrated events; but what interests him primarily is man's relation to history (his ability to dominate it or to escape it, to be free or not in regard to it), and he takes up the problem directly, as the very theme of his novel, a theme he explores by every means, including novelistic reflection.

  Tolstoy argues against the idea that history is made by the will and reason of great individuals. History makes itself, he says, obeying laws of its own, which remain obscure to man. Great individuals "all were the involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work that was concealed from them." Later on: "Providence compelled all these men, each striving to attain personal aims, to combine in the accomplishment of a single stupendous result not one of them (neither Napoleon nor Alexander and still less anyone who did the actual fighting) in the least expected." And again: "Man lives consciously for himself, but is unconsciously a tool in the attainment of the historic, general aims of mankind." From which comes this tremendous conclusion: "History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind …" (I emphasize the key phrases.)

  With this conception of history, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move. Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they "involuntarily" participate in events whose meaning is "concealed from them"), thev proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close bv and react.

  Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them-Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound, Gorky, Gottfried Benn, St.-John Perse, Giono-all were walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?

  Mayakovsky's blindness is part of the eternal human condition.

  But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky's path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are.

  PART NINE. You're Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow

  1

  Toward the end of his life, Stravinsky decided to bring his whole oeuvre together in a great recorded edition of his own performances, as pianist or conductor, so as to establish an authorized sonic version of all his music. This wish to take on the role of performer himself often provoked an irritated response: how fiercely Ernest Ansermet mocked him in his 1961 book: when Stravinsky conducts an orchestra, he is seized "by such panic that, for fear of falling, he pushes his music stand up against the podium rail, cannot take his eyes off a score he knows by heart, and counts time!";
he interprets his own music "literally and slavishly"; "when he performs all joy deserts him."

  Why such sarcasm?

  I open the Stravinsky letters: the correspondence with Ansermet starts in 1914; 146 letters by Stravinsky: My dear Ansermet, My dear fellow, My dear friend, Very dear, My dear Ernest; not a hint of tension; then, like a thunderclap:

  "Paris, October 14, 1937:

  "In great haste, my dear fellow.

  "There is absolutely no reason to make cuts in Jeu de cartes in concert performances… Compositions of this type are dance suites whose form is rigorously symphonic and require no audience explanation, because there are no descriptive elements illustrating theatrical action, which would interfere with the symphonic evolution of the pieces as they are played in sequence.

  "If this strange idea occurred to you, of asking me to make cuts, it must be that you personally find the sequence of movements in Jeu de cartes a little boring. I cannot do anything about that. But what amazes me most is that you try to convince me to make cuts in it-me, who just conducted it in Venice and who reported to you the enthusiastic response of the audience. Either you forgot what I told you, or else you do not attach much importance to my observations or to my critical sense. Furthermore, I really do not believe that your audience would be less intelligent than the one in Venice.

  "And to think that it is you who proposed to cut my composition, with every likelihood of distorting it, in order that it might be better understood by the public-you, who were not afraid to play a work as risky from the standpoint of success and listener comprehension as the Symphonies of Wind Instruments!