Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

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!

"So I cannot let you make cuts in Jeu de cartes: I think it is better not to play it at all than to do so with reservations.

"I have nothing to add, period."

On October 15, Ansermet's reply:

"I ask only if you would forgive me the small cut in the March from the second measure after 45 to the second measure after 58."

Stravinsky reacted on October 19:

"… I am sorry, but I cannot allow you any cuts in Jeu de cartes.

"The absurd one that you propose cripples my little March, which has its form and its structural meaning in the totality of the composition (a structural meaning that you claim to be protecting). You cut my March only because you like the middle section and the development less than the rest. In my view, this is not sufficient reason, and I would like to say: 'But you're not in your own house, my dear fellow'; I never told you: "Here, take my score and do whatever you please with it.'

"I repeat: either you play Jeu de cartes as it is or you do not play it at all.

"You do not seem to have understood that my letter of October 14 was quite categorical on this point."

Thereafter they exchanged only a few letters, chilly, laconic. In 1961 Ansermet published in Switzerland a voluminous book of musicology, including a lengthy chapter that is an attack on the insensitivity of Stravinsky's music (and his incompetence as a conductor). Only in 1966 (twenty-nine years after their dispute) was there this brief response from Stravinsky to a conciliatory letter from Ansermet:

"My dear Ansermet,

"Your letter touched me. We are both too old not to think about the end of our days; and I would not want to end these days with the painful burden of an enmity."

An archetypal phrase for an archetypal situation:

often toward the end of their lives, friends who have failed one another will call off their hostility this way, coldly, without quite becoming friends again.

It's clear what was at stake in the dispute that wrecked the friendship: Stravinsky s authors rights, his moral rights; the anger of an author who will not stand for anyone tampering with his work; and, on the other side, the annoyance of a performer who cannot tolerate the authors proud behavior and tries to limit his power.

2

As I listen to Leonard Bernstein's recording of he Sacre du printemps, something seems odd about the famous lyrical passage for E-flat clarinet in the "Rondes print-anieres"; I turn to the score:

In Bernstein's performance, this becomes:

The novel charm of the passage above lies in the tension between the melodic lyricism and the rhythm, which is both mechanical and weirdly irregular; if this rhythm is not executed exactly, with clockwork precision, if it is rubatoed, if the last note of each phrase is stretched out (which Bernstein does), the tension disappears and the passage becomes commonplace.

I think of Ansermet's sarcasms. I prefer Stravinsky's performance, a hundred times over, even if he does push "his music stand up against the podium rail… and counts time."

3

In his book on Janacek, Jaroslav Vogel, himself a conductor, discusses Kovarovic's alterations to the score of Jenufa. He approves them and defends them. An astonishing attitude, for even if Kovarovics alterations were useful, good, or sensible, they are unacceptable in principle, and the very idea of arbitrating between a creators version and one by his corrector (censor, adapter) is perverse. Without a doubt, this or that sentence of A la recherche du temps perdu could be better written. But where could you find the lunatic who would want to read an improved Proust?

Besides, Kovarovics alterations are anything but good or sensible. As proof of their soundness, Vogel cites the last scene of the opera, where, after the discovery of her murdered child and the arrest of her stepmother, Jenufa is alone with Laca. Jealous of her love for Steva, his half-brother Laca had earlier slashed Jenufa's face; now Jenufa forgives him: it was

out of love that he had injured her, just as she herself had sinned out of love:

The allusion to her love for Steva, "as I once did," is delivered very rapidly, like a short cry, in high notes that rise and break off; as if Jenufa is evoking something she wants to forget immediately. Kovarovic broadens the melody of this passage (he "makes it bloom," as Vogel says) by transforming it like this:

Doesn't Jenufa's song, asks Vogel, become more beautiful under Kovarovic's pen? And isn't it still completely Janacekian? Yes, if you wanted to fake Janacek, you couldn't do better. Nonetheless, the added melody is absurd. Whereas in Janacek, Jenufa recalls her "sin" rapidly, with suppressed horror, in Kovarovic she grows tender at the recollection, she lingers over it, she is moved by it (her song stretches out the words "love," "I," and "once did"). So there to Laca's face she sings of her yearning for Steva, Laca's rival-she sings of her love for Steva, the cause of all her misery!

How could Vogel, a passionate supporter of Janacek's, defend such psychological nonsense? How could he sanction it, when he knew that Janacek's aesthetic rebellion is rooted precisely in his rejection of the psychological unrealism current in opera practice? How is it possible to love someone and at the same time misunderstand him so completely?

4

Still-and here Vogel is right-by making the opera a little more conventional, Kovarovic's alterations did contribute to its success. "Let us distort you a bit, Maestro, and they'll love you." But there comes a time when the maestro refuses to be loved at such cost and would rather be detested and understood.

What means does an author have at his disposal to make himself understood for what he is? Hermann Broch hadn't many in the 1930s and in an Austria cut off from Germany turned fascist, nor later on in the loneliness of emigration: a few lectures explaining his aesthetic of the novel; then letters to friends, to his readers, to his publishers, to his translators; he left nothing undone, taking great care, for instance, over the copy on his book jackets. In a letter to his publisher, he protests a proposal for a promotional line on the back cover of his novel The Sleepwalkers that would compare him to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Italo Svevo. His counterproposal: that he be compared to Joyce and Gide.

Let's look at this proposal: what is actually the difference between the Broch-Svevo-Hofmannsthal context and the Broch-Joyce-Gide context? The first con-

text is literary in the broad, diffuse sense of the word; the second is specifically novelistic (the Gide of The Counterfeiters is the one Broch is claiming connection to). The first context is a small context-that is, local, Central European. The second is a large context-that is, international, global. By setting himself alongside Joyce and Gide, Broch is demanding that his novel be seen in the context of the European novel; he is aware that The Sleepwalkers, like Ulysses or The Counterfeiters., is a work that revolutionizes the novel form, that creates a new aesthetic of the novel, and that can be understood only against the backdrop of the history of the novel as such.

This demand of Broch's is valid for every important work. I can't repeat it too often: the value and the meaning of a work can be appreciated only in the greater international context. That truth becomes particularly pressing for any artist who is relatively isolated. A French surrealist, a "nouveau roman" author, a naturalistic nineteenth-century writer-all were borne along by a generation, by a movement, known throughout the world; their aesthetic program preceded their work, so to speak. But what about Gombrowicz-where does he fit in? How are people to understand his aesthetic?

He left his country in 1939, at the age of thirty-five. For his credential as an artist, he brought with him only one book, his novel Ferdydurke, an ingenious work barely known in Poland, totally unknown elsewhere. He landed far from Europe, in Argentina. He was unimaginably alone. The great Argentine writers never came near him. Later, the Polish anti-Communist emigres had little curiosity about his art. For fourteen

years, nothing happened to him, and then in 1953 he began to write and publish his Diary. It doesn't tell us much about his life, it is primarily a statement of his position, a continuing aesthetic and philosophic self-interpretation, a handbook on his "strategy"-or better yet, it is his testament; not that he was thinking, at the time, of his death: but as a last, definitive wish he wanted to establish his own understanding of himself and his work.

He demarcated his position by three key refusals: a refusal to submit to engagement in Polish emigre politics (not that he had pro-Communist sympathies but because the principle of politically engaged art was repugnant to him); a refusal of Polish tradition (one can make something worthwhile for Poland, he said, only by opposing "Polishness," by shaking off its heavy Romantic legacy); lastly, a refusal of the Western modernism of the 1950s and '60s-a modernism he saw as sterile, "unfaithful to reality," ineffectual in the art of the novel, academic, snobbish, absorbed in its self-theorizing (not that Gombrowicz was less modern, but his modernism was different in nature). That third "clause of the testament" is most important and decisive-and is also doggedly misunderstood.

Ferdydurke was published in 1937, a year before Nausea., but as Gombrowicz was unknown and Sartre famous, Nausea, so to speak, usurped Gombrowicz's rightful place in the history of the novel. Whereas Nausea is existential philosophy in a novels clothing (as if a professor had decided to entertain his drowsy students by teaching the lesson in the form of a novel), Gombrowicz wrote a real novel that ties into the old

comic-novel tradition (as in Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding), and so existential issues, about which he was no less passionate than Sartre, come across in his book as unserious and funny.

Ferdydurke is one of those major works (along with The Sleepwalkers and The Man Without Qualities) that I see as inaugurating the "third (or overtime) period" of the novel's history, by reviving the forgotten experience of the pre-Balzac novel and by taking over domains previously reserved for philosophy. That Nausea, not Ferdydurke, became the exemplar of that new orientation has had unfortunate consequences: the wedding night of philosophy and the novel was spent in mutual boredom. Discovered some twenty or thirty years after their creation, Gombrowicz's works, and Broch's and Musil's (and certainly Kafka's), no longer had the potency required to seduce a generation and create a movement; interpreted by a different aesthetic school, which in many regards stood opposed to them, they were respected-even admired-but ill understood, such that the greatest shift in the history of the twentieth-century novel went unnoticed.

5

As I've said before, this was also the case with Janacek. Max Brod put himself at Janacek's service as he had at Kafka's: with selfless ardor. He deserves praise: he gave himself over to the two greatest artists ever to live in my native land. Kafka and Janacek: both underrated; both with an aesthetic difficult to apprehend; both victims of the pettiness of their milieu. Prague

represented an enormous handicap for Kafka. He was isolated there from the German literary and publishing world, and that was fatal for him. His publishers concerned themselves very little with this author whom they barely knew personally. In a book on this problem, Joachim Unseld, the son of a leading German publisher, shows that the most likely reason (I consider the idea very realistic) why Kafka left his novels unfinished is that no one was asking him for them. Because if an author has no definite prospect of publishing his manuscript, nothing forces him to put the finishing touches on it, nothing keeps him from moving it off his desk for the time being and going on to something else.

To the Germans, Prague was just a provincial town, like Brno to the Czechs. Both Kafka and Janacek were therefore provincials. Kafka was nearly unknown in this country whose population was alien to him, while Janacek, in the same country, was trivialized by his own people.

Anyone who wants to understand the aesthetic incompetence of the founder of Kafkology should read Brod's monograph on Janacek. An enthusiastic work, it was certainly a great help to the underrated master. But how weak it is, how naive! with its lofty words-"cosmos," "love," "compassion," "humiliated and insulted," "divine music," "hypersensitive soul," "tender soul," "soul of a dreamer"-and without the slightest structural analysis, the slightest attempt to get at the particular aesthetic of Janacek's music. Knowing musical Prague's hatred for the composer from the provinces, Brod wanted to prove that Janacek belonged to the national tradition and that he was every bit as good as the great Smetana, idol of the Czech national ideology.

He became so obsessed by this provincial, narrow-minded, Czech-focused polemic that the rest of world music slipped out of his book, and of all composers of all periods, the only one mentioned is Smetana.

Ah, Max, Max! It's no good rushing into the other team's territory! All you'll find there are a hostile mob and bribed referees! Brod failed to utilize his position as a non-Czech to place Janacek in the large context, the cosmopolitan context of European music, the only one where he could be defended and understood; he locked him back within his national horizon, cut him off from modern music, and sealed his isolation. Such first interpretations stick to a work, it never shakes them off. Just as Brod's ideas would forever color all the literature on Kafka, so Janacek would forever suffer from the provincialization inflicted on him by his compatriots and confirmed by Brod.

Brod the enigma. He loved Janacek; he was guided by no ulterior motive, only by the spirit of justice; he loved him for the essential, for his art. But he did not understand that art.

I will never get to the bottom of the Brod mystery. And Kafka?-what did he think? In his 1911 diary, he tells this story: one day the two of them went to see a cubist painter, Willi Nowak, who had just finished a series of lithograph portraits of Brod; in the Picasso pattern as we know it, the first drawing was realistic, whereas the others, says Kafka, moved further and further off from their subject and wound up extremely abstract. Brod was uncomfortable; he didn't like any of the drawings except for the realistic first one, which, by contrast, pleased him greatly because, Kafka notes with tender irony, "beyond its looking

like him, it had noble and serene lines around the mouth and eyes…"

Brod understood cubism as little as he understood Kafka and Janacek. Doing his best to free them from their social isolation, he confirmed their aesthetic aloneness. The real meaning of his devotion to them was: even a person who loved them, and thus was most disposed to understand them, was alien to their art.

6

I am always surprised by peoples amazement over Kafka's (alleged) decision to destroy all his work. As if such a decision were a priori absurd. As if an author could not have reasons enough to take his work along with him on his last voyage.

It could in fact happen that on final assessment the author realizes that he dislikes his books. And that he does not want to leave behind him this dismal monument of his failure. I know, I know, you'll object he is mistaken, that he is giving in to an unhealthy depression, but your exhortations are meaningless. He's in his own house with that work, not you, my dear fellow!

Another plausible reason: the author still loves his work but not the world. He can't bear the idea of leaving the work here to the mercy of a future he considers hateful.

And yet another possibility: the author still loves his work and doesn't even think about the future of the world, but having had his own experiences with the public, he understands the vanitas vanitatum of art, the inevitable incomprehension that is his lot, the

incomprehension (not underestimation, I'm not talking about personal vanity) he has suffered during his lifetime and that he doesn't want to go on suffering post mortem. (It may incidentally be only the brevity of life that keeps artists from understanding fully the futility of their labor and making arrangements in time for the obliteration of both their work and themselves.)

Aren't these all valid reasons? Of course. Yet they weren't Kafka's reasons: he was aware of the value of what he was writing, he had no declared repugnance for the world, and-too young and nearly unknown- he had had no bad experiences with the public, having had almost none at all.

7

Kafka's testament: not a testament in the precise legal sense; actually two private letters; and not even true letters, in that they were never posted. Brod, who was Kafka's legal executor, found them after his friend's death, in 1924, in a drawer among a mass of other papers: one in ink, folded and addressed to Brod, the other more detailed and written in pencil. In his "Postscript to the First Edition" of The Trial, Brod explains: "In 1921… I told my friend that I had made a will in which I asked him to destroy certain things [dieses unci jenes vernichten], to look through some others, and so forth. Kafka thereupon showed me the outside of the note written in ink which was later found in his desk, and said: 'My last testament will be very simple: a request that you burn everything.' I can still remember the exact wording of the answer I gave

him: '… I'm telling you right now that I won't carry out your wishes." Brod evokes this recollection to justify disobeying his friend's testamentary wish; Kafka, he continues, "knew what fanatical veneration I had for his every word"; so he was well aware that he would not be obeyed and he "should have chosen another executor if his own instructions were unconditionally and finally in earnest." But is that so certain? In his own testament, Brod was asking Kafka "to destroy certain things "; why then wouldn't Kafka have considered it normal to request the same service of Brod? And if Kafka really knew that he would not be obeyed, why, after their conversation in 1921, did he write that second, penciled letter, in which he elaborates his instructions and makes them specific? But let's drop it: we'll never know what these two young friends said to each other on a subject that was, by the way, not their most urgent concern, since neither one of them, and Kafka especially, could at the time consider himself in serious danger of immortality.

It's often said: if Kafka really wishecl to destroy what he had written, he would have destroyed it himself. But how? His letters were in the hands of the recipients. (He himself kept none of the letters he received.) It's true that he could have burned his diaries. But they were working diaries (more notebooks than diaries), they were useful to him for as long as he was writing, and he wrote until his very last days. The same can be said of his unfinished works. Only in the event of death would they be irremediably unfinished; while he was still alive he could always get back to them. Not even a story he considers a failure is useless to a writer, as it can become material for

another story. As long as he is not dying, a writer has no reason to destroy something he has written. But when Kafka was dying he was no longer in his home, he was in a sanatorium and unable to destroy anything, he could only count on a friend's help. And not having many friends, having finally but one, he counted on him.

People also say that wanting to destroy one's own work is a pathological act. In that case, disobeying Kafka's destructive wish becomes loyalty to the other Kafka, the creator. This touches on the greatest lie of the legend surrounding his testament: Kafka did not want to destroy his work. He expressed himself with utter precision in the second of those letters: "Of all my writings, only the books are worthwhile [gelten]: Judgment, Stoker, Metamorphosis., Penal Colony, Country Doctor, and a story: 'Hunger Artist.' (The few copies of Meditations can stay, I don't want to put anyone to the trouble of pulping them, but nothing from that book is to be reprinted.)" Thus, not only did Kafka not repudiate his work, but he actually assessed it and tried to separate what should survive (what could be reprinted) from what fell short of his standards; there is sadness, severity, but no insanity, no blindness of despair, in his judgment: he finds all his published books worthwhile except the first, Meditations, probably considering it immature (that would be hard to contradict). His rejection does not automatically concern everything unpublished, for he includes among the "worthwhile" works the story "A Hunger Artist," which at the time he wrote the letter existed only in manuscript. Later on, he added to that piece three more stories ("First Sorrow," "A Little

Woman," and "Josefine the Singer") to make a book; he was correcting the proofs of this book in the sanatorium on his deathbed-nearly poignant evidence that Kafka had nothing to do with the legend of the author wanting to destroy his work.

His wish to destroy thus concerns only two clearly defined categories of writing:

– in the first place, most emphatically: the personal writings: letters, diaries;

– in the second place: the stories and the novels he had not, in his judgment, succeeded in bringing off.

8

I am looking at a window across the way. Toward evening the light goes on. A man enters the room. Head lowered, he paces back and forth; from time to time he runs his hand through his hair. Then, suddenly, he realizes that the lights are on and he can be seen. Abruptly, he pulls the curtain. Yet he wasn't counterfeiting money in there; he had nothing to hide but himself, the way he walked around the room, the sloppy way he was dressed, the way he stroked his hair. His well-being depended on his freedom from being seen.

Shame is one of the key notions of the Modern Era, the individualistic period that is imperceptibly receding from us these days; shame: an epidermal instinct to defend one's personal life; to require a curtain over the window; to insist that a letter addressed to A not be read by B. One of the elementary situations in the passage to adulthood, one of the prime conflicts with par-

ents, is the claim to a drawer for letters and notebooks, the claim to a drawer with a key; we enter adulthood through the rebellion of shame.

An old revolutionary Utopia, whether fascist or communist: life without secrets, where public life and private life are one and the same. The surrealist dream Andre Breton loved: the glass house, a house without curtains where man lives in full view of the world. Ah, the beauty of transparency! The only successful realization of this dream: a society totally monitored by the police.

I wrote about this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Jan Prochazka, an important figure of the Prague Spring, came under heavy surveillance after the Russian invasion of 1968. At the time, he saw a good deal of another great opposition figure, Professor Vaclav Cerny, with whom he liked to drink and talk. All their conversations were secretly recorded, and I suspect the two friends knew it and didn't give a damn. But one day in 1970 or 1971, with the intent to discredit Prochazka, the police began to broadcast these conversations as a radio serial. For the police it was an audacious, unprecedented act. And, surprisingly: it nearly succeeded; instantly Prochazka was discredited: because in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we bad-mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public

is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Thus only gradually did people realize (though their rage was all the greater) that the real scandal was not Prochazkas daring talk but the rape of his life; they realized (as if by electric shock) that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain-rippers are criminals. And because the curtain-rippers were serving a hated regime, they were unanimously held to be particularly contemptible criminals.

When I arrived in France from that Czechoslovakia bristling with microphones, I saw on a magazine cover a large photo of Jacques Brel hiding his face from the photographers who had tracked him down in front of the hospital where he was being treated for his already advanced cancer. And suddenly I felt I was encountering the very same evil that had made me flee my country; broadcasting Prochazkas conversations and photographing a dying singer hiding his face seemed to belong to the same world; I said to myself that when it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person's private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual.

9

There are almost no trees in Iceland, and the few that exist are all in the cemeteries; as if there were no dead without trees, as if there were no trees without the dead. They are not planted alongside the grave, as in idyllic Central Europe, but right in the center of it, to force a passerby to imagine the roots down below piercing the body. I am walking with Elvar D. in the Reykjavik cemetery; he stops at a grave whose tree is still quite small; barely a year ago his friend was buried; he starts reminiscing aloud about him: his private life was marked by some secret, probably a sexual one. "Because secrets excite such irritated curiosity, my wife, my daughters, the people around me, all insisted I tell them about it. To such an extent that my relations with my wife have been bad ever since. I couldn't forgive her aggressive curiosity, and she couldn't forgive my silence, which to her was evidence of how little I trusted her." He smiled, and then: "I divulged nothing," he said. "Because I had nothing to divulge. I had forbidden myself to want to know my friends secrets, and I didn't know them." I listened to him with fascination: since childhood I had heard it said that a friend is the person with whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is something else: it is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.

10

I think of the ending of The Trial: the two men bend over K. and one of them thrusts a knife deep into his heart: "With failing eyes K. could still see, right near his face, the two men cheek by jowl watching the outcome: 'Like a dog!' he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him."

The last noun in The Trial: "shame." Its last image: the faces of two strangers, close by his own face, almost touching it, watching K.'s most intimate state, his death throes. In that last noun, in that last image, is concentrated the entire novel's fundamental situation: being accessible at any time in his bedroom; having his breakfast eaten by other people; being available, day and night, to go where he's summoned; seeing his window curtains confiscated; being unable to see whom he wants; no longer being his own man; losing his status as an individual. This transformation of a man from subject to object is experienced as shame.

I don't believe that Kafka asked Brod to destroy his letters because he feared their publication. Such an idea could scarcely have entered his mind. The publishers were not interested in his novels, why would they have cared about his letters? What made him want to destroy them was shame, simple shame, not that of a writer but that of an ordinary individual, the shame of leaving private things lying about for the eyes of others-of the family, of strangers-the shame of being turned into an object, the shame that could "outlive him."

And yet Brod made these letters public; earlier, in his own will and testament, he had asked Kafka "to destroy certain things"; and here he himself published everything, indiscriminately; even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letter that Kafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod, anyone but its addressee could eventually read. To me, Brods indiscretion is inexcusable. He betrayed his friend. He acted against his friends wishes, against the meaning and the spirit of his wishes, against the sense of shame he knew in the man.

11

There is an essential difference between the novel on the one hand and memoirs, biography, autobiography, on the other. A biography's value lies in the newness and accuracy of the real facts it reveals. A novel's value is in the revelation of previously unseen possibilities of existence as such; in other words, the novel uncovers what is hidden in each of us. A common form of praise for a novel is to say: I see myself in that character; I have the sense that the author knows me and is writing about me; or as a grievance: I feel attacked, laid bare, humiliated by this novel. We should never mock such apparently naive judgments: thev prove that the novel is being read as a novel.

That is why the roman a clef (which deals with real people with the intention of making them recognizable beneath fictional names) is a false novel, an aesthetically equivocal thing, morally unclean. Kafka disguised under the name Garta! You object to the

author: "That's not accurate!" The author: "These aren't memoirs I've written; Carta is an imaginary character!" You: "As an imaginary character, he's implausible, badly made, written with no talent!" The author: "But this isn't the usual sort of character; he lets me make new revelations about my friend Kafka!" You: "Inaccurate revelations!" The author: "These aren't memoirs I've written; Carta is an imaginary character!… " And so on.

Of course, every novelist, intentionally or not, draws on his own life; there are entirely invented characters, created out of pure reverie; there are those inspired by a model, sometimes directly, more often indirectly; there are those created from a single detail observed in some person; and all of them owe much to the author's introspection, to his self-knowledge. The work of the imagination transforms these inspirations and observations so thoroughly that the novelist forgets about them. Yet before publishing his book, he must think to hide the keys that might make them detectable; first, out of the minimum of consideration due persons who, to their surprise, will find fragments of their lives in the novel, and second, because keys (true or false) one puts into the reader's hands can only mislead him: instead of unknown aspects of existence, he will be searching a novel for unknown aspects of the author's existence; the entire meaning of the art of the novel will thus be annihilated, as it was annihilated, for instance, by that American professor who, wielding his huge bunch of skeleton keys, wrote the big biography of Hemingway:

Through the force of his interpretation, he turned Hemingway's whole oeuvre into a single roman a clef;

as if it had been turned inside out like a jacket: suddenly, the books are invisible inside, and on the lining outside, a reader avidly observes the (real or alleged) events of the life-trivial, painful, ridiculous, pedestrian, stupid, petty events; thus the work is undone, the imaginary characters are transformed into people from the authors life, and the biographer begins the moral trial of the writer: in one short story there is a wicked mother character: Hemingway is maligning his own mother here; in another story there is a cruel father: it is Hemingway's revenge on his father for allowing his childhood tonsils to be removed without anesthesia; in "Cat in the Rain," the unnamed female character "is dissatisfied with her… self-absorbed, unresponsive husband": this is Hemingways wife Hadley, complaining; the female character of "Summer People" is to be seen as the wife of Dos Passos: Hemingway tried in vain to seduce her and, in the story, he abuses her disgracefully by making love to her in the guise of a character; in Across the River and Into the Trees, an unnamed, very ugly man appears in a bar: Hemingway is describing the ugliness of Sinclair Lewis, who, "bitterly hurt and angered by Hemingway's cruelest passage, died three months after the novel was published." And so on and on, one denunciation after another.

Novelists have always resisted that biographical furor whose representative prototype, according to Proust, is Sainte-Beuve with his motto: "I do not look on literature as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man…" Understanding a work therefore requires knowing the man first-that is, Sainte-Beuve specifies, knowing the answers to a cer-

tain number of questions even though they "might seem at the furthest remove from the nature of his writings: What were his religious views? How did he react to the sight of nature? How did he conduct himself in regard to women, in regard to money? Was he rich, was he poor? What governed his actions, what was his daily way of life? What was his vice, or his weakness?" This quasi-police method, Proust comments, requires a critic "to surround himself with every possible piece of information about a writer, to check his letters, to interrogate people who knew him…"

Yet, surrounded as he was "with every possible piece of information," Sainte-Beuve managed not to recognize any of the great writers of his time-not Balzac, nor Stendhal, nor Baudelaire; by studying their lives he inevitably missed their work, because, said Proust, "a book is the product of a self other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices'; "the writers true self is manifested in his books alone."

Proust's polemic against Sainte-Beuve is of fundamental importance. Let us make clear: Proust is not criticizing Sainte-Beuve for exaggerating; he is not decrying the limitations of Sainte-Beuve's method; his verdict is absolute: that method is blind to the author's other self; blind to his aesthetic wishes; incompatible with art; directed against art; inspired by hatred of art.

12

In France, Kafka's work is published in four volumes. The second volume: stories and narrative fragments;

that is: everything Kafka published in his lifetime, plus everything found in his desk drawers: unpublished and incomplete stories, drafts, false starts, rejected or abandoned versions. What order should it all have? The editor applied two principles: (1) with no distinction as to their nature, genre, or degree of completion, all the narrative writings are set on an equal plane and (2) arranged in chronological order, that is, in the order of their birth.

This is why none of the three collections of stories Kafka himself put together for publication (Meditations, A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist) is presented here in France in the form Kafka gave them; these collections have simply disappeared; the individual stories constituting them are scattered among other things (among drafts, fragments, and such) by chronology; thus eight hundred pages of Kafka's writings become a flood where everything dissolves into everything else, a flood formless as only water can be, water that flows and carries along with it both good and bad, finished and unfinished, strong and weak, draft and work.

Brod had already proclaimed the "fanatical veneration" with which he surrounded each of Kafka's words. The editors of Kafka's work show the same absolute veneration for everything their author touched. But understand the mystery of absolute veneration: it is also, and inevitably, the absolute denial of the author's aesthetic wishes. For aesthetic wishes show not only by what an author has written but also by what he has deleted. Deleting a paragraph calls for even more talent, cultivation, and creative power than writing it does. Therefore, publishing what the author deleted is

the same act of rape as censoring what he decided to retain.

What obtains for deletions within the microcosm of a particular work also obtains for deletions within the macrocosm of a complete body of work. There too, as he assesses his work, and guided by his aesthetic requirements, the author often excludes what doesn't satisfy him. Claude Simon, for instance, no longer allows his earliest books to be reprinted. Faulkner explicitly stated his wish to leave no trace "but the printed books," in other words, none of what the garbage-can scavengers would find after his death. He thus made the same request as Kafka, and he was obeyed the same way: they published everything they could dig up. I purchase Seiji Ozawa's recording of Mahler's First Symphony. This four-movement symphony originally had five movements, but after the premiere Mahler definitively removed the second, which is not to be found in any printed score. Ozawa put it back into the symphony; so now absolutely everyone can see that Mahler was right to delete it. Need I go on? The list is endless.

The way Kafka's collected works were published in France shocks no one; it corresponds to the spirit of the time: "Kafka is to be read as a whole," the editor explains; "among his various modes of expression, none can claim greater worth than the others. Such is the decision of the posterity we are; it is an acknowledged judgment and one that must be accepted. Sometimes we go further: not only do we reject any hierarchy among genres but we deny the very existence of genres, we assert that Kafka speaks the same lan-

guage throughout his work. In Kafka is finally achieved the situation everywhere sought or always hoped for-a perfect correspondence between lived experience and literary expression."

"Perfect correspondence between lived experience and literary expression." This is a variant of Sainte-Beuve's slogan: "Literature inseparable from its author." A slogan that recalls: "The unity of life and work." Which evokes the famous line wrongly attributed to Goethe: "Life like a work of art." These magical catchphrases are simultaneously statements of the obvious (of course what a man does is inseparable from him), countertruths (inseparable or not, the creation surpasses the life), and lyrical cliches (the unity of life and work "everywhere sought or always hoped for" is presented as an ideal state, a Utopia, a lost paradise at last regained), but most important, they reveal the wish to refuse art its autonomous status, to force it back into its source, into the authors life, to dilute it there and thus deny its raison d'etre (if a life can be a work of art, what use are works of art?). The sequence Kafka chose for the stories in his collections is disregarded because the only sequence considered valid is that dictated by life itself. No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women. Hermann Broch protested when his work was put into a small context with Svevo and Hofmannsthal. Poor Kafka, he wasn't granted even that small context. When people speak of him, they don't mention Hofmannsthal, or Mann, or Musil, or

Broch; they leave him only one context: Felice, the father, Milena, Dora; he is flung back into the mini-mini-mini-context of his biography, far from the history of the novel, very far from art.

13

The Modern Era made man-the individual, a thinking ego-into the basis of everything. From that new conception of the world came a new conception of the work of art as well. It became the original expression of a unique individual. It is in art that the individualism of the Modern Era was realized and confirmed, found its expression, its consecration, its glory, its monument.

If a work of art emanates from an individual and his uniqueness, it is logical that this unique being, the author, should possess all rights over the thing that emanates exclusively from him. After a centuries-long process, these rights attained their definitive form during the French Revolution, which recognized literary property as "the most sacred, the most personal of all property."

I remember the days when I was enchanted by Moravian folk music: the beauty of its melodic phrases; the originality of its metaphors. How are such songs born? Collectively? No; that art had its individual creators, its village poets and composers, but once their invention was released into the world, they had no way of following after it and protecting it against changes, distortions, endless metamorphoses. At the time, I was much like those who looked upon such a

world with no artistic-property claims as a kind of paradise; a paradise where poetry was made by all and for all.

I evoke this memory to point out that the great figure of the Modern Era, the author, emerged only gradually over these recent centuries and that in the history of humanity, the era of authors' rights is a fleeting moment, brief as a photoflash. And yet, without the prestige of the author and his rights, the great blossoming of European art in recent centuries would be inconceivable, and so would Europe's greatest glory. Its greatest or perhaps its only glory, because, if reminder is needed, it's not for its generals or its statesmen that Europe was admired even by those it caused to suffer.

For authors' rights to become law, it required a certain frame of mind that was inclined to respect the author. That frame of mind, which took shape slowly over the centuries, seems to be coming undone lately. If not, thev couldn't accompany a toilet paper commercial with a passage from a Brahms symphony. Or be praised for publishing abridged versions of Stendhal novels. If there were still a frame of mind that respects the author, people would wonder: Would Brahms agree to this? Wouldn't Stendhal be angry?

I examine the new version of the French law on authors' rights: the problems of writers, composers, painters, poets, novelists take up a minute part of it, most of the text being devoted to the great industry called "audiovisual." There's no question this immense industry requires entirely new rules of the game. Because the situation has changed: what we persist in calling "art" is less and less the "original expression of a unique individual." How can the screenwriter for a

film that costs millions prevail with his own moral rights (say, the right to prevent tampering with what he wrote) when involved in its creation is a battalion of other persons, who also consider themselves authors and whose moral rights are reciprocally limited by his; and how claim anything at all against the will of the producer, who though not an author is certainly the film's only real boss?

Even without their rights being restricted, authors in the old-style arts are suddenly thrust into another world where authors' rights are starting to lose their old aura. When a conflict arises in this new climate, those who violate authors' moral rights (adapters of novels; garbage-can scavengers who plunder great writers with their so-called critical editions; advertising that dissolves a thousand-year-old legacy in its bloody saliva; periodicals that reprint whatever they want without permission; producers who interfere with filmmakers' work; stage directors who treat texts so freely that only a madman could still write for the theater; and so on) have general opinion on their side, whereas an author claiming his moral rights risks winding up without public sympathy and with judicial support that is rather grudging, for even the guardians of the laws are sensitive to the mood of the time.

I think of Stravinsky. Of his tremendous effort to preserve all his work in his own performances as an unimpeachable standard. Samuel Beckett behaved similarly: he took to attaching more and more detailed stage directions to his plays, and insisted (contrary to the usual tolerance) that they be strictly observed; he often attended rehearsals in order to evaluate the direction, and sometimes did it himself; he even pub-

lished as a book the notes for his own production of Endgame in Germany so as to establish it for good. His publisher and friend, Jerome Lindon, stands watch-if need be, to the point of lawsuit-to insure that his authorial wishes are respected even after his death.

Such major effort to give a work a definitive form, thoroughly worked out and supervised by the author, is unparalleled in history. It is as if Stravinsky and Beckett wanted to protect their work not only against the current practice of distortion but also against a future less and less likely to respect a text or a score; it is as if they hoped to provide an example, the ultimate example of the supreme concept of author: one who demands the complete realization of his aesthetic wishes.

14

Kafka sent the manuscript of "The Metamorphosis" to a magazine whose editor, Robert Musil, was prepared to publish it on the condition that the author shorten it. (Ah, sorry encounters between great writers!) Kafka's reaction was as glacial and as categoric as Stravinsky's to Ansermet. He could bear the idea of not being published at all, but the idea of being published and mutilated he found unbearable. His concept of authorship was as absolute as Stravinsky's or Beckett's, but whereas they more or less succeeded in imposing theirs, he failed to do so. This failure is a turning point in the history of authors' rights.

In 1925, when Brod published the two letters known as Kafka's testament in his "Postscript to the First Edition" of The Trial, he explained that Kafka

knew full well that his wishes would not be fulfilled. Let us assume that Brod was telling the truth, that those two letters were indeed only expressing a bad mood, and that on the subject of any eventual (very improbable) posthumous publication of Kafka's writings, everything had been fully understood between the two friends; in that case, Brod, the executor, could take full responsibility upon himself and publish whatever he thought best; in that case, he had no moral obligation to inform us of Kafka's wishes, which, according to Brod, were not valid or were so no longer.

Yet he hastened to publish these "testamentary" letters and to give them as much impact as possible; actually, he had already begun to create the greatest work of his life, his myth of Kafka, one of whose crucial components is precisely that wish, unique in all of history-the wish of an author who would annihilate all his work. And thus is Kafka engraved on the public's memory. In accordance with what Brod gives us to believe in his mythographic novel, where, with no nuance whatever, Garta/Kafka would destroy everything he has written; because he is dissatisfied with it artistically? ah no, Brod's Kafka is a religious thinker; remember: wanting not to proclaim but "to live his faith," Garta granted no great importance to his writings, "mere rungs to help him climb to the heights." His friend, Nowy/Brod, refuses to obey him because even though what Garta wrote was "mere sketches," they could help "wandering humanity" in its quest for the path of righteousness to "something irreplaceable."

With Kafka's "testament," the great legend of Saint Kafka/Garta is born, and along with it a littler legend-of Brod his prophet, who with touching earnest-

ness makes public his friends last wish even as he confesses why, in the name of very lofty principles, he decided not to obey him. The great mythographer won his bet. His act was elevated to the rank of a great gesture worthy of emulation. For who could doubt Brod's loyalty to his friend? And who would dare doubt the value of every sentence, every word, every single syllable Kafka left to humanity?

And thus did Brod create the model for disobedience to dead friends; a judicial precedent for those who would circumvent an authors last wish or divulge his most intimate secrets.

15

With regard to the unfinished stories and novels, I readily concede that they would put any executor in a very uncomfortable situation. For among these writings of varying significance are the three novels; and Kafka wrote nothing greater than these. Yet it is not at all abnormal that because they were unfinished he ranked them among his failures; an author has trouble believing that the value of a work he has not seen through to the end might already be almost fully discernible, before it is done. But what an author is incapable of seeing may be clear to the eyes of an outsider. Yes, because of these three novels I admire boundlessly, I would not have found the strength to carry out fully Kafka's "testament."

Who could have confirmed me in that position?

Our greatest Master. Let's open Don Quixote, Part One, Chapters Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen: Don Quixote

and Sancho are in the mountains, where they learn the story of Grisostomo, a young poet in love with a shepherdess. To be near her, he himself becomes a shepherd; but she doesn't love him, and Grisostomo ends his life. Don Quixote decides to attend the burial. Ambrosio, a friend of the poet, conducts the modest ceremony. Beside the flower-covered body there are notebooks and sheets of poems. Ambrosio tells the gathering that Grisostomo requested that they be burned.

At that moment a gentleman who has joined the mourners out of curiosity, Senor Vivaldo, intervenes: he disputes the idea that burning the poetry truly answers to the dead man's wish, for a wish must make sense and this one does not. It would therefore be better to give his poetry to other people, that it might bring them pleasure, wisdom, experience. And without waiting for Ambrosios response, he bends down and takes a few of the pages nearest to him. Ambrosio says to him: "Out of courtesy, sir, I will permit you to keep those that you have taken; but it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest."

"Out of courtesy, I will permit you"; meaning that even though a dead friends wish has for me the force of law, I am not a lackey to the laws, I respect them as a free being who is not blind to other values, values that may stand opposed to the law, such as, for instance, courtesy or the love of art. That is why "I will permit you to keep those that you have taken," while hoping that my friend will forgive me. Still, in making this exception I have violated his wish, which for me is law; I have done so on my own responsibility, at my own risk, and I've done so as a violation of a law, not

as a denial and nullification of it; that is why "it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest.

16

A television broadcast: three famous and admired women collectively propose that women too should have the right to be buried in the Pantheon. It's important, they say, to consider the symbolic significance of this act. And they immediately suggest the names of some great dead women who, in their opinion, could be moved there.

A fair demand, certainly; yet something about it troubles me: these dead women who could be moved right over to the Pantheon, aren't they now lying beside their husbands? Certainly; and they wanted it so. What then are we to do with the husbands? Move them too? That would be hard; not being important enough, they must stay where they are, and the wives that have been moved out will spend their eternity in widows' solitude.

Then I say to myself: and what about the men already in the Pantheon? Yes, the men! Are they perchance in the Pantheon of their own will? It was after they died, without asking their opinion, and certainly contrary to their last wishes, that it was decided to turn them into symbols and separate them from their wives.

After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.

A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.

17

Ah, it's so easy to disobey a dead person. If, nonetheless, we sometimes submit to his wishes, it is not out of fear, out of duress, but because we love him and refuse to believe him dead. If an old peasant on his deathbed begs his son not to cut down the old pear tree outside the window, the pear tree will not be cut down for as long as the son remembers his father with love.

This has little to do with any religious belief in the eternal life of the soul. It's simply that a dead person I love will never be dead for me. I can't even say: "I loved him"; no, its: "I love him." And my refusing to speak of my love for him in the past tense means that the dead person is. That may be the seat of man's religious dimension. Indeed, obedience to a last wish is mysterious: it goes bevond all practical and rational thought: the old peasant will never know, in his grave, if the pear tree has been cut down or not; yet for the son who loves him, it is impossible to not obey him.

Long ago I was moved (I still am) by the end of Faulkner's novel The Wild Palms. The woman dies of a botched abortion, the man is in prison under a ten-year sentence; a white tablet, poison, is brought to him in his cell; but he quickly dismisses the idea of suicide, because his only way of prolonging the life of the beloved woman is to preserve her in his memory.

"… so when she became not then half of memory

became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.-Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief."

Later on, writing The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I immersed myself in the character Tamina, who has lost her husband and is trying desperately to recover, to gather, scattered memories so as to reconstruct a person who has disappeared, a bygone past; it was then that I began to understand that a memory doesn't give us back the dead person's presence; memories are only confirmation of his absence; in memories the dead person is only a past that is fading, receding, inaccessible.

Yet if it is impossible for me ever to regard as dead the being I love, how will his presence be manifested?

In his wishes, which I know and with which I will keep faith. I think of the old pear tree that will stand outside the window for as long as the peasant's son shall live.