Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

1

In the middle of Spain, somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid, two people sit in the bar of a small railroad station: an American man and a girl. We know nothing about them except that they are waiting for the train to Madrid, where the girl is going to have an operation, certainly (though the word is never spoken) an abortion. We don't know who they are, how old they are, whether or not they are in love; we don't know the reasons that brought them to their decision. Their conversation, even though it is reproduced with extraordinary precision, gives us no understanding either of their motivations or of their past.

The girl is tense and the man is trying to calm her: "It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig. It's not really an operation at all." And then: "I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time…" And then:

"Well be fine afterward. Just like we were before."

When he senses the slightest agitation on the girl's part, he says: "Well, if you don't want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to." And eventually, again: "You've got to realize that I don't want you to do it if you don't want to. I'm perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you."

Behind the girl's replies, one can sense her moral scruples. Looking at the landscape, she says: "And we could have all this. And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible."

The man tries to calm her: "We can have everything…"

"No… And once they take it away, you never get it back."

And when the man again assures her that the operation is safe, she says: "Would you do something for me now?"

"I'd do anything for you."

"Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"

The man says: "But I don't want you to. I don't care anything about it."

"I'll scream," says the girl.

At this point the tension reaches its peak. The man gets up to take their bags to the other side of the station, and when he returns: "Do you feel better?"

"I feel fine. There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine." And these are the last lines of the famous story "Hills Like White Elephants," by Ernest Hemingway.

2

What is odd about this five-page story is that from the dialogue we can imagine any number of stories: the man is married and is forcing his mistress to have an abortion to spare his wife; he is a bachelor and wants the abortion because he is worried about complicating his life; but it is also possible that he is unselfishly looking ahead to the problems a child would cause the girl; maybe-anything is imaginable-he is seriously ill and is concerned about leaving the girl on her own with a child; we can even imagine that the child's father is some other man whom the girl left to go off with this one, who is advising her to have the abortion but stands ready, should she refuse, to take on the father role himself. And the girl? She might have agreed to the abortion to satisfy her lover; or maybe she took the initiative herself but, as the day approaches, is losing her nerve, feels guilty, and is engaging in some last verbal resistance, directed more at her own conscience than at her partner. Indeed, one could go on forever inventing the situations that might lie behind the dialogue.

As for the nature of the characters, the choice is just as great: the man could be sensitive, loving, tender; he could be selfish, wily, hypocritical. The girl could be hypersensitive, subtle, deeply moral; she could also be capricious, affected, fond of making hysterical scenes.

The real motives behind their behavior are the more unclear as the dialogue carries no indication of how the lines are spoken: fast? slow? ironically, ten-

derly, mechanically, harshly, wearily? The man says: "You know I love you." The girl answers: "I know." But what does that "I know" mean? Does she reallv feel sure of the man's love? Or is she speaking ironically? And what does that irony mean? That the girl doesn't believe in his love? Or that this man's love no longer matters to her?

Apart from the dialogue, the story consists of only a few necessary descriptions; they are as scant as stage directions. Only one motif escapes this rule of maximum economy: the one of the white hills that stretch to the horizon: it returns several times, accompanied by a metaphor (more exactly: simile), the onlv one in the story. Hemingway was no lover of metaphors. Also, this one is not the narrator's, but the girl's; it is she who says, as she gazes at the hills: "They look like white elephants."

Swallowing his beer, the man answers: "I've never seen one."

"No, you wouldn't have."

"I might have," says the man. "Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything."

In these four lines of dialogue, the characters reveal the difference, indeed the opposition, between them: the man shows some reserve toward the girl's poetic invention ("I've never seen one"), she snaps right back, seeming to reproach him for a lack of poetic sensitivity ("you wouldn't have"), and the man (as if already familiar with this reproach and allergic to it) defends himself ("I might have").

Later, when the man assures the girl of his love, she says: "But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?"

"I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it."

So does this different attitude about metaphor at least distinguish between their characters? The girl subtle and poetic, the man literal-minded?

Well, all right, we could see the girl as more poetic than the man. But it's also possible to see her metaphor-find as mannerism, preciosity, affectation: wanting to be admired as original and imaginative, she shows off her little poetical flourishes. If that is the case, the ethical and emotional content of her remarks about the world that will no longer be theirs after the abortion can be attributed to her taste for lyrical exhibitionism rather than to the authentic despair of a woman giving up her motherhood.

No, there is nothing clear about whatever lies behind that simple and banal dialogue. Any man could say the same lines as this man, any woman the same as the girl. Whether a man loves a woman or not, whether he is lying or sincere, he would say the same thing. As though this dialogue were waiting here since the creation of the world to be delivered by countless couples, with no regard to their individual psychology.

Since they have nothing more to work out, it is impossible to make any moral judgment of these characters; as they sit in the train station, everything has already been definitively decided; they have already made their points a thousand times before; a thousand times already they have debated the arguments; now the old dispute (old discussion, old drama) shows only faintly through a conversation where nothing is at stake anymore, and words are just words.

3

Even though the story is extremely abstract, describing a quasi-archetypal situation, it is also extremely concrete, attempting to capture the visual and aural surface of a situation, of the dialogue in particular.

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one, I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two, but the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.

And not only is it lost but we do not even wonder at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are so dazzled by their potency that we don't realize how schematic and meager their content is.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that

they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present-the concreteness of the present-as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure., is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without knowing what we have lived.

4

The need to resist the loss of the fleeting reality of the present arose for the novel, I think, only at a certain moment in its evolution. In Boccaccio the tale exemplifies the abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted: without concrete scenes, nearly without dialogue, a kind of summary, it is a narration that gives us the essence of an event, the causal sequence of a story. The novelists who came after Boccaccio were fine storytellers, but capturing the concreteness of the present moment was neither their issue nor their goal. They were telling a story, without necessarily imagining it in concrete scenes.

The scene becomes the basic element of the novel's composition (the locus of the novelists virtuosity) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The novels of Scott, of Balzac, of Dostoyevsky, are composed as a series of minutely described scenes with their setting, their dialogue, their action; anything not connected with this series of scenes, anything that is not scene, is considered and felt to be secondary, even superfluous. The novel is like a very rich film script.

When the scene becomes the novel's basic element, the issue of reality as it occurs in the present is potentially raised. I say "potentially" because, in Balzac or in Dostoyevsky, what inspires the art of scene-making is more a passion for the dramatic than a passion for the concrete, more theater than reality. Actually, the novel's new aesthetic (the aesthetic born of this "second half" of the novels history) shows in the theatrical nature of the construction: it is a construction that focuses a) on a single plot (as against "picaresque" construction, a series of different plots); b) on the same characters (letting characters leave the novel midway, which was normal in Cervantes, is now considered a flaw); c) on a narrow time span (even if much time elapses between the beginning and the end of the novel, the action itself unfolds over a few particular days; The Possessed, for example, stretches over several months, but all of its very complex action occurs on two, then three, then two, and finally five days).

In this Balzacian or Dostoyevskian construction, it is exclusively by means of the scenes that all the complexity of plot, all the richness of thought (the great dialogues of ideas in Dostoyevsky), all the psychology of the characters, must be expressed with clarity; that is why the scene, as it does in a play, becomes artificially concentrated, dense (multiple encounters in a single scene), and develops with an unnatural logical rigor (to bring out the conflict of interests and passions); in order to express everything that is essential (essential for the intelligibility of the action and its meaning), it must forgo everything that is "unessential," meaning everything banal, ordinary, quotidian, everything random, or mere atmosphere.

It was Flaubert ("our most respected, honored master," as Hemingway called him in a letter to Faulkner) who moved the novel away from theatricality. In his novels, the characters meet in an everyday setting, which (by its indifference, its indiscretion, but also by its moods and magic spells that make a situation beautiful and memorable) constantly intrudes on their intimacy. Emma is having a rendezvous with Leon in the church, but a guide latches onto them and interrupts their tete-a-tete with his long-winded, inane chatter. In his preface to Madame Bovary, Henry de Montherlant is ironic about the methodical nature of this way of bringing an antithetical motif into a scene, but the irony is misplaced; for it is not a matter of an artistic mannerism; it is a matter of a discovery that might be termed ontological: the discovery of the structure of the present moment; the discovery of the perpetual coexistence of the banal and the dramatic that underlies our lives.

Capturing the concreteness of the present has been one of the continuing trends that, since Flaubert, was to mark the evolution of the novel: it would reach its apogee, its very monument, in James Joyce's Ulysses, which in nearly eight hundred pages describes eighteen hours of life; Bloom stops in the street with McCoy: in a single second, between two successive lines of dialogue, endless numbers of things occur: Bloom's interior monologue; his gestures (hand in pocket, he touches the envelope of a love letter); everything he sees (a woman climbs into a carriage and allows a glimpse of her legs, etc.); everything he hears; everything he feels. In Joyce, a single second of the present becomes a little infinity.

5

In the epic and in the dramatic arts, the passion for the concrete has differing power; the evidence is in their dissimilar relation to prose. The epic abandoned verse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so became a new art: the novel. Dramatic literature moved from verse to prose much later and much more slowly. Opera still later, at the turn of the twentieth century, with Charpentier (Louise, 1900), with Debussy (Pelleas et Melisande, 1902, although it is written to very stylized, poetic prose), and with Janacek (Jenufa, composed between 1896 and 1903). The last is the creator of what I consider the most important opera aesthetic in the era of modern art. I say "I consider" because I don't wish to hide my personal passion for him. Yet I don't believe I am wrong, for Janacek's feat was tremendous: he discovered a new world for opera, the world of prose. I don't mean to say he was alone in doing so (the Berg of Wozzeck, 1925, which incidentally Janacek passionately championed, and even the Poulenc of La Voix humaine, 1959, do something close), but he pursued his goal in a particularly consistent way for thirty years, creating five major works that live on: Jenufa; Katia Kabanova, 1921; The Cunning Little Vixen., 1924; The Makropulos Affair, 1926; From the House of the Dead, 1928.

I've said he discovered the world of prose, for prose is not only a form of discourse distinct from verse; it is also an aspect of reality, its daily, concrete, momentary aspect, and the opposite of myth. This goes to the deepest conviction of every novelist: there is nothing so

thoroughly disguised as the prose of life; every man seeks endlessly to transform his life into myth-seeks, so to speak, to transcribe it into verse, to shroud it in verse (bad verse). If the novel is an art and not merely a "literary genre," the reason is that the discovery of prose is its ontological mission, which no art but the novel can take on entirely.

On the novels path toward the mystery of prose, into the beauty of prose (for, being an art, the novel discovers prose as beauty), Flaubert made an enormous stride. In the history of opera, a half century later, Janacek accomplished that same Flaubertian revolution. But whereas we find this completely natural in a novel (as if the scene between Emma and Rodolphe against the agricultural-fair background were encoded in the genes of the novel form as an almost inevitable possibility), in opera it is far more shocking, audacious, unexpected: it contravenes the principle of unrealism and extreme stylization that seemed inseparable from the very essence of opera.

To the extent that they ventured into opera, the great modernists most often took the path of an even more radical stylization than had their nineteenth-century predecessors: Honegger turned to legendary or biblical subjects, and then gave them a form that oscillates between opera and oratorio; the subject of Bartok's only opera is a symbolist fable; Schoenberg wrote two operas: one is an allegory, the other dramatizes an extreme situation at the edge of madness. Stravinsky's operas are all written on verse texts and are extremely stylized. Janacek thus went not only against the tradition of opera but also against the prevailing trend of modern opera.

6

A famous drawing: a short, mustached man with thick white hair is walking along with an open notebook in his hand, writing down in music notes the talk he hears on the street. It was his passion: to put the living word into musical notation; he left a hundred of these "intonations of spoken language." In the eyes of his contemporaries, this odd activity put him at best among the eccentrics and at worst among the naive who did not understand that music is a created thing and not the naturalistic imitation of life.

But the question is not: should one imitate life or not? The question is: should a musician acknowledge the existence of the world of sound outside of music, and study it? His studies of spoken language can throw light on two basic aspects of Janacek's music:

1) his melodic originality: toward the end of the Romantic movement, the melodic wealth of European music seemed to be running out (there is indeed an arithmetical limit to the permutations of seven or twelve tones); close knowledge of the intonations that come not from music but from the objective world of words allowed Janacek access to a different inspiration, a different source of melodic imagination; in consequence, his melodies (he may be the last great melodist in the history of music) have a very specific character and are immediately recognizable:

a) contrary to Stravinsky's maxim ("Be frugal with your intervals, treat them like dollars'), they contain many unusually large intervals, till then unthinkable in a "beautiful" melody;

b) they are very succinct, compressed, and nearly

impossible to develop, prolong, elaborate by techniques common till then, which would immediately make them false, artificial, "deceitful"; that is: his melodies are developed in their own particular way: either repeated (persistently repeated) or else treated like a word: for example, progressively intensified (on the model of someone insisting or imploring), etc.;

2) his psychological orientation: what most interested Janacek in his research on spoken language was not the specific rhythm of the language (the Czech language) or its prosody (there is no recitative in Janacek's operas), but the influence on spoken intonation of a speaker's shifting psychological state; he sought to comprehend the semantics of melodies (he thus appears to be the antipode of Stravinsky, who conceded music no expressive capacity; for Janacek, only the note that is expression, that is emotion, has the right to exist); examining the connection between an intonation and an emotion, Janacek the musician acquired a thoroughly unique psychological lucidity; a veritable psychological furor (remember Adorno speaking of Stravinsky's "antipsychological furor") marked all of his work; because of it he turned especially to opera, for in opera the ability to "define emotions musically" could be realized and tested better than anywhere else.

7

What is a conversation in real life, in the concreteness of the present moment? We don't know. All we know is that conversations on the stage, in a novel, or even on

the radio are not like a real conversation. This was certainly one of Hemingway's artistic obsessions: to catch the structure of real conversation. Let us try to define this structure by comparing it with that of theatrical dialogue:

a) in the theater: the story is told in and through the dialogue; this is therefore focused entirely on the action, on its meaning, on its content; in real life: dialogue is surrounded by dailiness, which interrupts it, slows it down, affects its development, changes its course, makes it unsystematic and illogical;

b) in the theater: dialogue must provide the audience with the most intelligible, the clearest, idea of the dramatic conflict and of the characters; in real life: the individuals conversing know each other and know the subject of their conversation; thus their dialogue is never wholly comprehensible to a third person; it remains enigmatic, a thin veneer of the said over the immensity of the unsaid;

c) in the theater: the limited time span of the performance demands a maximal economy of words in the dialogue; in real life: the characters return to a subject already discussed, repeat themselves, correct what they just said, etc.; these repetitions and awkwardnesses reveal the characters' obsessions and imbue the conversation with a particular melody.

Hemingway knew not only how to catch the structure of real dialogue but also how to use it to create a form-a simple, transparent, limpid, beautiful form, as appears in "Hills Like White Elephants": the conversation between the American man and the girl begins piano, with insignificant remarks; the repetitions of the same words, the same turns of phrase, throughout the

story give it a melodic unity (this melodization of dialogue is what is so striking in Hemingway, so entrancing); the intervention of the woman bringing drinks curbs the tension, which nonetheless goes on rising, reaches its crisis toward the end ("please please"), then calms to pianissimo with the final words.

8

"February 15 toward evening. Twilight at 6, near the railroad station. Two young women are waiting for someone.

"On the sidewalk, the bigger one, her cheeks rosy, in a red winter coat, shivers.

"She starts speaking brusquely:

show up.'

"Her companion, cheeks pale, in a flimsy skirt, interrupts the last note with a somber, sad, soulful echo:

"'I don't care.' "And she stayed put, half rebellious, half waiting."

So begins one of the texts Janacek regularly published, together with his musical notations, in a Czech periodical.

Imagine that the sentence "We're going to wait here and I know he won't show up" is a line in a story an actor is reading aloud to an audience. We would probably sense a certain falseness in his tone. He speaks the sentence as one might imagine it in memory; or, simply, in a way meant to move his listeners. But how is this sentence spoken in a real situation? What is the melodic truth of this sentence? What is the melodic truth of a vanished moment?

The search for the vanished present; the search for the melodic truth of a moment; the wish to surprise and capture this fleeting truth; the wish to plumb by that means the mystery of the immediate reality constantly deserting our lives, which thereby becomes the thing we know least about. This, I think, is the onto-logical import of Janacek's studies of spoken language and, perhaps, the ontological import of all his music.

Act Two of Jenufa: after lying ill for some days with puerperal fever, Jenufa leaves her bed and learns that her newborn son is dead. Her reaction is unexpected: "So, he is dead. So, he has become a little angel." And she sings these phrases calmly, with a strange astonishment, as if paralyzed, without cries, without gestures. The melodic curve rises several times, only to fall back immediately, as if it too were stricken with paralysis; it is beautiful, it is moving, yet without losing its accuracy.

Novak, the most influential Czech composer of the time, ridiculed this scene: "It's as if Jenufa were mourning the death of her parrot." It's all there, in this

idiotic sarcasm. To be sure, this is not how we imagine a woman who is just learning of her child's death! But an event as we imagine it hasn't much to do with the same event as it is when it happens.

Janacek based his first operas on "realist" plays; in his time, doing that in itself shattered conventions; but because of his thirst for the concrete, even the prose drama form soon came to seem artificial to him: and so he wrote his own libretti for his two most audacious operas, the one, for The Cunning Little Vixen, based on a newspaper serial, the other on Dostoyevsky-not on one of the writer's novels (ensnarement by the unnatural and the theatrical is a greater threat in Dostoyevsky's novels than anywhere else!), but on his "reportage" of the Siberian prison camp: From the House of the Dead.

Like Flaubert, Janacek was fascinated by the coexistence of various emotional charges in a single scene (he felt the Flaubertian fascination for "antithetical motifs"); thus his orchestra does not emphasize but instead often contradicts the emotional content of the words. There is one scene of The Cunning Little Vixen that I have always found particularly moving: in a forest inn, a gamekeeper, a village schoolmaster, and the innkeeper's wife are gossiping: they recall their absent friends and talk about the innkeeper, who is away that day in town, about the parish priest, who has moved house, about the woman the schoolmaster loved, who has just married someone else. The conversation is completely banal (never before Janacek had a situation so undramatic and so ordinary been seen on the opera stage), but the orchestra is full of a nearly unbearable yearning, so that the scene becomes one of the most beautiful elegies ever written on the transience of time.

9

For fourteen years, a certain Kovarovic, a conductor and submediocre composer who was director of the Prague Opera, rejected Jenufa. Although he finally gave in (in 1916 it was he who conducted the Prague premiere), he nonetheless held to his view of Janacek as a dilettante and made many changes in the score, revisions of the orchestration, and even a great number of deletions.

Didn't Janacek rebel? Certainly, but as we know, everything depends on the balance of power. And he was the weaker one. He was sixty-two years old and nearly unknown. If he fought too much, he could have had to wait another ten years for the premiere of his opera. Besides, even his supporters, euphoric over their masters unexpected success, all agreed: Kovarovic had done a magnificent job! For example, the final scene!

The final scene: After the body of Jenufas illegitimate child is discovered drowned, after the stepmother has confessed her crime and the police have taken her away, Jenufa and Laca are left alone. Laca, the man over whom Jenufa preferred another but who loves her still, decides to stay with her. All that lies before this couple are misery, shame, and exile. An extraordinary mood: resigned, sorrowful, and yet glowing with immense compassion. Harp and strings, the soft sonority of the orchestra; the great drama closes, unexpectedly, with tranquil song, touching and intimate.

But can an opera end like that? Kovarovic transformed it into a real apotheosis of love. Who would dare object to an apotheosis? Besides, an apotheosis is so simple: you add brasses to extend the melody by

contrapuntal imitation. An effective procedure, tried and proven a thousand times over. Kovarovic knew his business.

Snubbed and humiliated by his Czech compatriots, Janacek found firm and faithful support from Max Brod. But when Brod studied the score of The Cunning Little Vixen, he was not satisfied with the ending. The last words of the opera: a joke by a little frog stammering to the gamekeeper: "What y-y-you think you're seeing is n-n-not me, it's m-m-my grandpa." "Ending with the frog is impossible," Brod protested in a letter ("Mit dem Frosch zu schliessen, ist unmoglich"), and he proposed as a new last line a solemn proclamation to be sung by the gamekeeper: about nature's renewal, about the eternal power of youth. Another apotheosis.

But this time Janacek didn't obey. Now recognized outside his own country, he was no longer weak. By the time of the premiere of From the House of the Dead, he had become so again; he was dead. The ending of the opera is masterly: the hero is released from the camp. "Freedom! Freedom!" the convicts cry. Then the commandant shouts: "Back to work!" and these are the last words of the opera, which closes with the brutal rhythm of forced labor punctuated by the syncopated rattle of chains. The posthumous premiere was conducted by a pupil of Janacek's (who also prepared the barely finished manuscript of the score for publication). He fiddled a bit with the final pages: thus the cry "Freedom! Freedom!" returns at the end, and broadened into a tacked-on long coda, a joyous coda, an apotheosis (still another one). It is not an addition that, by repetition, extends the author's intent; it is the denial of that intent; the final lie that annuls the truth of the opera.

10

I open the biography of Hemingway published in 1985 by Jeffrey Meyers, a professor of literature in an American university, and I read the passage on "Hills Like White Elephants." The first thing I learn: the story "may… portray Hemingway's response to Hadley's [his first wife's] second pregnancy." There follows this commentary, which I accompany with my own italicized remarks in brackets:

"The comparison of hills with white elephants- imaginary animals that represent useless items, like the unwanted baby-is crucial to the meaning [the comparison, a bit forced, of elephants with unwanted babies is not Hemingway's but the professor's; it is needed to set up the sentimental interpretation of the story]. The simile becomes a focus of contention and establishes an opposition between the imaginative woman, who is moved by the landscape, and the literal-minded man, who refuses to sympathize with her point of view… The theme of the story evolves from a series of polarities: natural v. unnatural, instinctive v. rational, reflective v. talkative, vital v. morbid [the professor's intention becomes clear: to make the woman the morally positive pole, the man the morally negative pole]. The egoistic man [there is no reason to call the man egoistic, unaware of the woman's feelings [there is no reason to say this], tries to bully her into having an abortion… so they can be exactly as they were before… The woman, who finds it horribly unnatural, is frightened of killing the baby [she cannot kill the baby, given that it is unborn] and hurting herself. Everything the man says is false [no: everything the man says is ordinary words of consolation, the only kind possible in such a situation]; everything the woman says is ironic [there are many other explanations for the girl's remarks]. He forces her to consent to this operation ["I wouldn 't have you do it if you didn 't want to," he says twice, and there is nothing to show that he is insincere] in order to regain his love [there is nothing to show either that she had the man's love or that she had lost it], but the very fact that he can ask her to do such a thing means that she can never love him again [there is no way to know what will happen after the scene in the railroad station]. She agrees to this form of self-destruction [the destruction of a fetus and the destruction of a woman are not the same thing] after reaching the kind of dissociation of self that was portrayed in Dostoyevskys Underground Man and in Kafka's Joseph K., and that reflects his attitude toward her: 'Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.' [Reflecting someone else's attitude is not a dissociation, otherwise all children who obey their parents would be dissociated and would be like Josef K.] She then walks away from him and… finds comfort in nature: in the fields of grain, the trees, the river and the hills beyond. Her peaceful contemplation [we know nothing about the feelings that the sight of nature stirs in the girl; but in any case they are not peaceful feelings, for the words she speaks immediately afterward are bitter] recalls Psalm 121 as she lifts up her eyes to the hills for help [the plainer Hemingway's style, the more pretentious his commentator's]. But her mood is shattered by the mans persistent argument [let's read the story carefully: it is not the American man, it is the girl who, after her brief withdrawal, is the first to speak and continues the argument; the man is not looking for an argument, he only wants to calm the girl down], which drives her to the edge of a breakdown. Echoing King Lear's 'Never, never, never, never, never,' she frantically begs: 'Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?' [the evocation of Shakespeare is as meaningless as were those of Dostoyevsky and Kafka]." Let us summarize the summary:

1) In the American professor's interpretation, the short story is transformed into a moral lesson: the characters are judged according to their attitude toward abortion, which is a priori considered an evil: thus the woman ("imaginative," "moved by the landscape") represents the natural, the living, the instinctive, the reflective; the man ("egoistic," "literal-minded") represents the artificial, the rational, the chatty, the unhealthy (note incidentally that in modern moral discourse, the rational represents evil and the instinctive represents good);

2) the connection to the author's biography suggests that the negative, immoral hero is Hemingway himself, who is making a kind of confession through the intermediary of the story; in that case the dialogue loses all its enigmatic quality, the characters are without mystery and, for anyone who has read Hemingway's biography, thoroughly determined and clear;

3) the original aesthetic nature of the story (its lack of psychologizing, its intentional veiling of the characters' pasts, its undramatic nature, etc.) is not considered; worse, that aesthetic nature is undone;

4) starting with the basic givens of the story (a man and a girl are on their way to an abortion), the professor goes on to invent his own story: an egoistic man is engaged in forcing his wife to have an abortion; the wife despises her husband, whom she will never again be able to love;

5) this other story is absolutely flat and all cliches; nevertheless, because it is compared successively with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, the Bible, and Shakespeare (the professor has managed to assemble in one paragraph the greatest authorities of all time), it retains its status as a great work and therefore, despite its authors moral poverty, justifies the professor's interest in it.

11

This is how kitsch-making interpretation kills off works of art. Some forty years before the American professor imposed this moralizing meaning on the story, "Hills Like White Elephants" was published in France under the title '"Paradis perdu," a title that has no relation to Hemingway (in no other language does the story bear this title) and that suggests the same meaning (paradise lost: preabortion innocence, happiness of impending motherhood, etc., etc.).

Kitsch-making interpretation is actually not the personal defect of some American professor or some early-twentieth-century Prague conductor (many conductors after him have ratified his alterations of Jenufa); it is a seduction that comes out of the collective unconscious; a command from the metaphysical prompter; a perennial social imperative; a force. That force is aimed not at art alone but primarily at reality

itself. It does the opposite of what Flaubert, Janacek, Joyce, and Hemingway did. It throws a veil of commonplaces over the present moment, in order that the face of the real will disappear.

So that you shall never know what you have lived.