Terra Nostra

ESCH IS LUTHER To Carlos Fuentes by Milan Kundera

When, during January 1969, in Prague, in Wenceslas Square, a Czech student took his own life by fire to protest the Russian occupation of his country, I had the feeling that this horror did not belong to Czech history. There was no precedent for this act; it came from a terrible elsewhere.

Not the world war, not the concentration camps, not the Stalinist terror, but the burning corpse of Jan Palach filled me with a sense of the apocalypse.

A scholarly definition occurred to me: an act is moral if it can serve as an example for everyone; but how can one imitate a boy who immolated himself? Did not that act project us beyond Europe and the moral experience of Europe?

For weeks after his death, the streets of Czech cities were filled with excited demonstrators. One slogan inspired them: “Jan Palach is the Jan Hus of today.”

In fact, Jan Palach, an adolescent, bore no resemblance to Jan Hus, one of the great intellectuals of the fifteenth century. Hus did not want to die. Rather, this was the only course open to him if he wanted to remain faithful to himself and his beliefs. The example of Hus, burned as a heretic, is difficult but not impossible to follow. To imitate the other Jan is inconceivable.

Nevertheless, there is incontestably something in common between these two deaths: fire. The Czech people, petrified in the terrible moment of January 1969, saw the history of their country as if in fast motion: like the passage between two flames, the one that burned the body of Jan Hus and the one that burned the body of Palach. With the first, their country appeared on the scene of Europe; with the second, it disappeared from it.

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The Second World War — the Hitlerite delirium — must have provoked an apocalyptic feeling in certain Germans. Thomas Mann transformed that moment into a watchtower from which he could take in all of German history in a glance.

Doctor Faustus (1947) is not only a novel about a composer called Adrian Leverkühn, but equally a reflection of four centuries of German music. Adrian is not only a composer, but the composer who terminates the history of music (indeed, his greatest composition is called Apocalypse). Moreover, he is not only the final composer (author of the Apocalypse); he is also Faust.

Just as a Czech, overwhelmed by the death of Palach, couldn’t but think of the death of Jan Hus, a German, confronted by this apocalyptic moment, eyes fixed on the diabolism of his country, thought of the contract the devil made with that mythic character who incarnated the German spirit. The entire history of his country surged before his eyes as the adventure of one sole character; of one sole Faust.

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The year when the flame passed from the body of Jan Hus to the body of Jan Palach, a few hundred meters from Wenceslas Square, in my studio in Prague I was writing Life Is Elsewhere. Suddenly, through the character of Jaromil (an authentic poet, and a police informer), I thought I saw the entire history of poetry, to the degree that — in certain pages of the novel — the face of my hero disappeared behind those of Rimbaud and of Mayakovsky, and his death is confused with those of Lermontov and of Shelley.

I experienced the Stalinism of the 1950s as a time when “the poet reigned alongside the executioner” (Life Is Elsewhere). And when poetry identifies itself with terror, then one is taking part in the apocalypse of poetry. Lit by this apocalyptic explosion, the past (of a nation, a civilization, an art, a region) appears suddenly telescoped: Jaromil is confused with Rimbaud; Jan Palach with Hus.

Several years after Palach’s death, I came to France, and everyone asked me what I thought of communism, of Marxism, of the revolution. Nothing interested me less than this sort of question. I had before my eyes that flame which traversed five centuries, and I thought of Thomas Mann. I thought of the art of the novel, which, alone of all the arts, is capable of becoming that privileged place where humanity’s distant past can converse with its present. To arrange this rendezvous seemed to me one of the three or four great tasks, one of the three or four great possibilities available to the future of the novel.

And today I think of Carlos Fuentes: in his Terra Nostra (1975), this new possibility of the novel has been realized in a far more radical fashion than anyone could have imagined.

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Serenus Zietblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus, set himself the task of writing his souvenirs of his friend Adrian Leverkühn at the end of the Second World War. From time to time, he interrupts his narrative to comment on contemporary events. It is precisely these passages which rang flat and falsely to my ears when, recently, I reread Mann’s novel. We know, alas, that the last war, presented by Mann as the final apocalypse, which also held the promise of the resurrection of the West, was nothing more than an episode. It was one phase of a much longer process and was followed by no resurrection.

I deduced that, from the watchtower of the novel, one can see the past but not the future and that it is very difficult to find the right spot to set up a watchtower.

If Fuentes has known how to find that spot — that incontestable locus of the apocalypse — it is thanks to great artistic ruse (or wisdom): he did not search in real history but in myth. The watchtower from which he views history is called the year 1999, the end of the millennium. His description of the apocalypse will thus not be contradicted by the reality of the real year 1999, because Fuentes is talking about a mythic date, not a real one.

It is not the political predictions of the author which are at the root of Terra Nostra but something more profound. “Historic time is stretched so taut that it is hard to see how it will not snap,” Cioran writes. This “tension of historic time” (of that time which today hurtles on, accumulating events, approaching a paroxysm), and the personal experience Fuentes has of this tension, is, it seems to me, the hidden source, the subterranean force, of the unbelievable, apocalyptic dream which is Terra Nostra.

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Carlos Fuentes has several times compared the contemporary Latin American novel to that of Central Europe.

Latin America and Central Europe are in effect two border areas of the West: two parts of the world where the West (Westernness) has become problematic; two parts of the world where the survival of the West is not a theoretical question but forms part of the most concrete reality.

Beginning in 1914, Central Europe lives obsessed with the end of things: Karl Kraus writes The Last Days of Mankind; Robert Musil composes The Man without Qualities, where a society constructs its future at a time when it has none; Hermann Broch, in The Sleepwalkers, studies the gradual decline of Western values; Jaroslav Hašek describes a world where liberty survives only under the mask of idiocy; Franz Kafka imagines a world where history is already forgotten and where life takes place in a present bereft of memory.

The causes of this “obsession of the end” are not hard to understand. The collapse of an empire, traditionally understood as a model of Europe (“little Europe”), appeared as foreshadowing a more general collapse, which, of course, took place quickly enough: Hitler, Stalin, and, finally, the real start of the end of Central Europe, most of which was included for an unforeseeably long time in Russia’s civilization. Too bad if, at the same time, the discordant noise of progress assaults our ears: “Every advance brings the end closer and such happy catchwords as ‘farther’ and ‘forward’ make us hear the lascivious voice of death encouraging us to hurry” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting).

In a different but no less radical (because it is so ancient) way, the West is at issue in Latin America. The West took the continent by conquest, and its legitimacy has never been sure. Even if Latin America’s culture is Western, it belongs to the Third World as well and shares all its anti-Western reflexes. Latin America, as Fuentes says, is a façade and one always wonders what is hidden behind it.

Western historical time interrupted Indian time in Latin America. Gabriel García Márquez’s village of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude keeps its pathetic solitude — the solitude of a world outside history.

But the world deserted by history can avenge itself and one day could banish history to its own exile. History, abandoned, alone, will be forgotten in a world which would have got rid of the Western mirage of “historic time.” Fuentes sees history in that solitude; he sees it as if it were already finished; he dreams of it as one dreams of the dead.

Be that as it may, in Central Europe and in Latin America, the novel puts history in question in a way not seen until now.

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The novel speaks of a world without a future, but the world prefers to debate the future of the novel.

In a long interview on American TV, Fuentes said: “Outside of scientific knowledge, logic, and politics, there is the knowledge of the imagination. There are many things which neither historiography nor logic nor science can discern. There are things which only a Dostoevsky sees.”

Still, in the last few decades, one has the impression that the romanesque procedures of literature have exhausted themselves and that “a Dostoevsky” has nothing to see or to say.

This impression sometimes engenders a radical reaction. One sees only one way of avoiding the shame of eclecticism: the total renunciation of the conventions of the novel. One begins to distinguish on one side the traditional novel (whose time is past) and on the other the modern novel (which is not conceived as a new phase of literature’s evolution but as confrontation, rupture, and negation).

This renunciation also concerns that which was the basis of the romanesque — the character (an imaginary being not identical to the author), about whom everything has now been said. All of a sudden, the notion of the character is itself exhausted, used up. In the 1920s, Proust and Joyce explored the whole universe of the human soul; they touched its limit. Following this logic, it is easy to think that Kafka, during the same period, in depriving K. of his visible face, of his past, even of his name, effected a kind of definitive decapitation of the romanesque character as such.

Still, it seems to me that the development of the novel is not over yet and that what appears to be an end is nothing but a change of direction. The camera of romanesque knowledge turns slowly toward other horizons. I don’t think Kafka decapitated the character: he was only interested in other aspects of man and he had another idea of what was essential for human life.

K. does not enchant us by the universe of his soul; if his soul is a universe, then it is besieged, dried out, absorbed by another universe — the world that surrounds it and toward which its possibilities of action are tragically limited. By virtue of this new human condition (as Kafka conceived of it), the physical face, the character’s past, his name, etc., lose all interest.

But one must never forget: what is basic (with Kafka as with all great novelists) is discovery (of the unknown aspects of human life and of the new possibilities of the novel). Renunciation (of old conventions) is nothing more than a consequence — inevitable, perhaps, but secondary.

Paradox: renunciation is immediately visible; it is thus an easily perceived sign of modernity. In contrast, what is new, what constitutes a discovery, is much harder to discern.

The reader’s eye is accustomed to conventions: the renunciation of convention is thus picked out instantly. In contrast, the discovery of the new holds itself outside all conventions. The conventional spirit cannot register it. For a conventional person, Doctor Faustus is just a conventional novel.

That is why minor works which noisily assert their rejection of conventions without bringing us anything new are often preferred to works which, without proclaiming their renunciation, discover and reveal.

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Among these, The Sleepwalkers of Hermann Broch is the book I admire ceaselessly. It contains the germ of all the possibilities of the post-Proustian novel.

Broch’s greatest performance in The Sleepwalkers is probably the character of Esch (this portrait says more about the man of our century and about the irrational forces that guide his conduct than any other book). Esch appears in the novel at the age of thirty; we do not know and never will what he was up to until then. His past remains absent, just like K.’s in The Trial.

And if the past is absent, so is “psychology,” at least in the sense that writers before Broch (and his generation) understood it: the search for psychological causality, the quest for hidden motivations in the depths of biography. Despite this “renunciation” (that is, the renouncing of those novelistic procedures dubbed psychological), Esch is completely “alive” for us. Broch explains his character’s attitudes by minute descriptions (which are, however, phenomenological, not psychological).

During one of his descriptions, Broch develops the comparison between the criminal and the rebel. He writes: “Esch was a rebel. He was a rebel the way Luther was.”

Instead of informing us about Esch’s childhood and youth, Broch tells us Esch was like Luther. His character’s individual past is unimportant. Esch’s attitude can be traced beyond his life. Esch’s past is Luther.

The novelty of Broch’s conception of character is discrete (although it is consistent: Passenow, another character in The Sleepwalkers, is linked to St. Augustine, to Seneca, to Zeno, and to Pythagoras). It is nonetheless clear: a character is no longer conceived as an inimitable uniqueness but rather as a locus of continuity, as a window which gives out on man’s distant past.

That which we call psychological analysis in the art of the novel has not been the exclusive property of a Richardson or a Stendhal. It was one of the secular tasks of the novel in an era fascinated by the discovery of the individual, of his irreplaceable non-interchangeable nature.

The principle Esch is like Luther is not Broch’s property. It is the general orientation of the novel in a century in which “the tension of historic time” seems close to its paroxysm and in which man looks backward to summarize the history of his civilization.

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The principle Esch is like Luther is transformed in the aesthetic of Terra Nostra as the principle Esch is Luther.

If the principle Esch is like Luther is not Broch’s exclusive property, the principle Esch is Luther belongs only to Fuentes. It cannot be imitated except at the risk of turning into pastiche.

Toward the end of Terra Nostra, Fuentes shows us the key to his method: “A life is not sufficient. Several existences are needed to make up a person.” And he follows with a Cabalistic allusion: “Each child born at each instant reincarnates each person who dies at each instant.” And: “It is not possible for us to know who we are reincarnating, because there exists no witness capable of recognizing in me the person I was.”

The ancient mythology of reincarnation is materialized in a romanesque technique. Terra Nostra is an immense dream in which history is performed by endlessly reincarnated characters who say to us: it is always us, we are the same who go on playing the game of history. Historical continuity resides not only in the causal linkage of events but also in the identities of the actors.

“Several existences are needed to make a sole person.” That’s why Philip I is confused with his grandson Philip II (who, in the novel, becomes his son); why Celestina traverses the centuries, and the wife of Philip II goes to England to become Queen Elizabeth. Characters from books — Don Juan and Don Quixote — join real characters, and at certain times the silhouettes get confused: Don Quixote becomes Don Juan and Don Juan becomes Don Quixote.

If Esch is Luther, the history which leads from Luther to Esch is simply a private story of Luther-Esch. The structural consequences are overwhelming. The novel has always been built on the notion of temporal space which couldn’t go beyond the dimensions of one life. To imagine a romanesque story lasting a thousand years or even a hundred would have seemed nonsensical.

And if Ludovico discovers in Mexico a new undiscovered continent, if he then finds himself in Palestine in Roman times, and if he appears during the last summer of our century, in Paris, with Celestina — she who was the mistress of Philip I and Philip II — the time of the novel becomes limitless. The private story of all these characters (reincarnated, immortal) is nothing more than the story of history itself.

If Esch is Luther, the novel enters the realm of the “fantastic.” The fantastic of Terra Nostra is not far from madness, but that folly (baroque folly) does not oppose the novel as an aesthetic category. On the contrary, Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist (“a Dostoevsky,” as Fuentes says) can see and say.

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For Cervantes, history was the barely visible background of adventure.

For Balzac, it became a “natural” dimension without which man is unthinkable.

Today, at last, history appears like a monster, ready to assault each of us and to destroy the world. Or else (another aspect of its monstrousness), it represents the immeasurable, incomprehensible mass of the past — a past which is unbearable as forgetfulness (because man will lose himself), but also as memory (because its mass will crush us).

Let us read the last pages of Terra Nostra. Philip II lies in his coffin in the Escorial. As often happens in poetry marked by the baroque tradition (a tradition which is as strong in my country as in Carlos’s — another parallel between Central Europe and Latin America!), the corpse is aware of being dead. Philip of Terra Nostra lives his death. One day, he rises and leaves his coffin. He encounters a tour guide who panics and runs away. But Philip is also afraid of the guide and flees to the mountains. There he finds some peasants around a small fire. We are in the distant future. An old mountain man strokes his head and Philip is suddenly full of “a sense of comfort and gratitude.”

The encounter between Philip and the guide and the villagers is not only “beautiful like the encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine.” It makes us hear the uninterrupted dialogue between our present and humanity’s immemorial past — that dialogue which only the novel of our late epoch (of the West’s late epoch) knows how to hear and say.

Translated by David Rieff