Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

1

"I think." Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, "a thought comes when 'it' wants to, and not when T want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject T is necessary to the verb 'think.'" A thought comes to the philosopher "from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts heading for him." It comes in a rush. For Nietzsche loves "a bold and exuberant intellectuality that runs presto," and he makes fun of the savants for whom thought seems "a slow, halting activity, something like drudgery, often enough worth the sweat of the hero-savants, but nothing like that light, divine thing that is such close kin to dance and to high-spirited gaiety."

Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that the philosopher "must not, through some false arrangement of deduction and dialectic, falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at bv another route… We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us. The most profound and inexhaustible books will surely always have something of the aphoristic, abrupt quality of Pascals Pensees."

We should not "corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us": I find this injunction remarkable; and I notice that, beginning with The Dawn. all the chapters in all his books are written in a single paragraph: this is so that a thought should be uttered in one single breath; so that it should be caught the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing.

2

Nietzsche's determination to preserve "the actual way" his thoughts come to him is inseparable from another of his injunctions, which charms me as much as the first: to resist the temptation to turn ones ideas into a system. Philosophical systems "these days stand in a distressed and discouraged posture. If they are indeed still standing." The attack is aimed at the inevitable dogmatism of systematizing thought as much as at its form: "an act put on by the systems-makers: in their desire to fill in their system and round off the horizon that encloses it, they must try to present their weak points in the same style as their strong points."

The italics above are mine: a philosophical treatise that expounds a system is doomed to include some weak passages; not because the philosopher is untal-ented but because the treatise form requires it; for before he gets to his innovative ideas, the philosopher

must explain what others say about the problem, must refute them, propose other solutions, choose the best of them and adduce arguments for it-a surprising argument alongside an obvious one, etc.-and the reader yearns to skip pages and cut to the heart of the matter, to the philosopher's new idea. In his Aesthetics., Hegel gives us an image of art that is a superb synthesis; we are fascinated by this eagles-eye overview; but the text itself is far from fascinating, it does not make us see the thought as alluring as it looked when it was speeding toward the philosopher. In his desire to fill in his system, Hegel describes every detail, square by square, inch by inch, so that his Aesthetics comes across as a collaboration between an eagle and hundreds of heroic spiders spinning webs to cover all the crannies.

3

For Andre Breton (in his Manifesto of Surrealism)., the novel is an "inferior genre"; its style is one of "information pure and simple"; the nature of the information given is "needlessly specific" ("I am spared not a single one of the hesitations over a character: shall he be blond? what should he be called?… "); and the descriptions: "there is nothing like the vacuity of these passages; they are just piles of stock images"; as an example there follows a paragraph quoted from Crime and Punishment, a description of Raskolnikovs room, with this comment: "Some will argue that this academic drawing is appropriate here, that at this point in the novel the author has his reasons for loading me down." But Breton considers these reasons unpersua-

sive, because: "I don't register the null moments in my life." Then, psychology: the lengthy expositions that tell us everything in advance: "this hero, whose actions and reactions are admirably anticipated, must not foil-though seeming likely to foil-the calculations of which he is the object."

However partisan this critique, we cannot ignore it; it does accurately express modern art's reservations toward the novel. To recapitulate: data; description; pointless attention to the null moments of existence; a psychology that makes the characters' every move predictable; in short, to roll all the complaints into one, it is the fatal lack of poetry that makes the novel an inferior genre for Breton. I am speaking of poetry as vaunted by the surrealists and the whole of modern art-poetry not as a literary genre, versified writing, but as a certain concept of beauty, as an explosion of the marvelous, a sublime moment of life, concentrated emotion, freshness of vision, fascinating surprise. For Breton, the novel is nonpoetry par excellence.

4

The fugue: a single theme sets off a chain of melodies in counterpoint, a stream that over its long course keeps the same character, the same rhythmic pulse, a single entity. After Bach, in music's Classical period, everything changes: the melodic theme becomes self-contained and short; its brevity makes monothematic composition nearly impossible; in order to construct a large-scale work (by this I mean: the architectural organization of a big-volume ensemble), the composer

must follow one theme with another; thus is born a new art of composition which, as an example, grows into the sonata, the ruling form of the Classical and Romantic eras.

Following one theme with another called for intermediate passages, or bridges, as Cesar Franck called them. The word "bridge" makes explicit that in a composition some passages are significant in themselves (the themes) and other passages are there to serve the former and haven't the same intensity or importance. Hearing Beethoven, one has the sense that the level of intensity changes constantly: at various times something is coming, then it arrives, then it's gone and something else is on its way.

An intrinsic contradiction in the music of the "second half (the Classical and the Romantic): it considers its raison d'etre the capacity to express emotions, but at the same time it elaborates its bridges, its codas, its development sections, which are demanded by the form alone, the residue of a proficiency that is completely impersonal, that is learned, and that has difficulty refraining from routine or from commonplace musical formulas (which occur sometimes in even the greatest, Mozart or Beethoven, but which abound in their lesser contemporaries). Thus inspiration and technique are always in danger of disconnecting; a dichotomy arises between the spontaneous and the worked-over; between material that seeks to express emotion directly and a technical development of that emotion as set into music; between the themes and the filler (a pejorative term but a thoroughly objective one: for it really is necessary to "fill out," horizontally, the time between themes and, vertically, the orchestral sound).

There is a story about Mussorgsky playing a Schumann symphony on the piano and stopping just before the development section to shout: "Here's where the musical mathematics starts!" It is this aspect- contrived, pedantic, intellectual, academic, uninspired-that made Debussy say that after Beethoven, symphonies became "studied, rigid exercises" and that the music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky "are competing for the boredom monopoly."

5

That intrinsic dichotomy does not make Classical or Romantic music inferior to the music of other eras; every era's art has its structural problems; that is what lures the artist to search for original solutions and thereby sets off the evolution of form. And the music of the second half was aware of this problem. Beethoven: he breathed an unprecedented expressive intensity into music, and at the same time, more than anyone else, he crafted the compositional technique of the sonata: that dichotomy must therefore have weighed especially heavily on him; to overcome it (not that he always succeeded), he devised various strategies:

– for instance, endowing musical material other than the themes-a scale, an arpeggio, a transition, a coda-with a startling expressiveness;

– or (for instance) giving another dimension to variation form, which, before him, was usually mere technical virtuosity, and rather frivolous virtuosity at that: like having a single fashion model strut the runway in different outfits; Beethoven turned the form inside out by considering: what are the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic possibilities hidden in a theme? how far can one go in transforming the sound of a theme without violating its essence? and what, in fact, is that essence? In posing these questions musically, Beethoven needed nothing that sonata form had made available, neither bridges nor development sections nor any filler; not for a single moment did he move outside what was for him essential, outside the mystery of the theme.

It would be interesting to examine all the music of the nineteenth century as a constant effort to overcome its structural dichotomy. In this connection, what I call Chopin's strategy comes to mind. Just as Chekhov never wrote a novel, so Chopin disdained large-scale composition and almost exclusively wrote collections of short pieces (mazurkas, polonaises, nocturnes, etc.). (Some exceptions prove the rule: his piano concertos are weak.) This was operating against the spirit of his time, which considered the creation of a symphony, a concerto, a quartet, the compulsory criterion of a composers significance. But precisely in sidestepping this criterion, Chopin created a body of work that, perhaps alone of its time, has aged not at all and will remain fully alive, almost without exception. For me, Chopin's strategy explains why in Schumann, Schubert, Dvorak, Brahms the pieces of lesser size, lesser sonority, seem more alive, more beautiful (often very beautiful), than the symphonies and concertos. For (an important observation) the intrinsic dichotomy in the music of the second half is a problem only for large-scale composition.

6

In criticizing the art of the novel, is Breton attacking its weaknesses or its very essence? Let us note, first of all, that he is attacking the aesthetic of the novel that came into being early in the nineteenth century, with Balzac. The novel was in fullest flush then, for the first time establishing itself as an immense social force; armed with a nearly hypnotic power of seduction, it prefigured cinema art: so lifelike are its scenes on the screen of his imagination that a reader is prone to confuse them with scenes from his own life; to enthrall his reader, the novelist has available a whole apparatus for fabricating the illusion of reality; yet this apparatus generates for the novel a structural dichotomy like the one in Classical and Romantic music:

since it is meticulous causal logic that makes events convincing, no link of the chain can be omitted (however devoid of interest it may be in itself);

since the characters must appear to be "living," as much data about them as possible must be reported (however unremarkable);

and then there is history: its slow pace used to make it almost invisible, then it picked up speed and suddenly (here is Balzac's great experience), in the course of peoples lifetimes, everything around them is changing-the streets they walk on, the furniture in their houses, the institutions they live by; the background of human lives is no longer an immobile, predictable stage set; it turns changeable, today's look doomed to be gone tomorrow, and so it is important to seize it, to paint it (no matter how tiresome these pictures of time passing might be).

Background: painting discovered it during the Renaissance, along with perspective, which divided the picture between what is up front and what is in the rear. This produced paintings particular formal problem: the portrait, for example: the face commands more attention and interest than the body does, and still more than the drapery behind. This is quite normal, this is how we see the world around us, but nonetheless, what is normal in life does not correspond to the formal requirements of art: the imbalance, in a painting, between the privileged areas and those that are, a priori, secondary still had to be compensated for, remedied, brought back into balance. Or else radically set aside, through a new aesthetic that would cancel out that dichotomy.

7

After 1948, through the years of Communist revolution in my native country, I saw the eminent role played by lyrical blindness in a time of Terror, which for me was the period when "the poet reigned along with the executioner" (Life Is Elsewhere). I would think about Mayakovsky then; his genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky's police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.

More than the Terror, the lyricization of the Terror was a trauma for me. It immunized me for good against all lyrical temptations. The only thing I deeply, avidly, wanted was a lucid, unillusioned eye. I finally found it in the art of the novel. This is why for me being a novelist was more than just working in one "literary genre" rather than another; it was an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion. I wound up having some odd conversations: "Are you a Communist, Mr. Kundera?" "No, I'm a novelist." "Are you a dissident?" "No, I'm a novelist." "Are you on the left or the right?" "Neither. I'm a novelist." Since early youth, I have been in love with modern art-with its painting, its music, its poetry. But. modern art was marked by its "lyrical spirit," by its illusions of progress, its ideology of the double revolution, aesthetic and political, and little by little, I took a dislike to all that. Yet my skepticism about the spirit of the avant-garde never managed to affect in the slightest mv love for the works of modern art. I loved them, and I loved them all the more for being the first victims of Stalinist persecution; in The Joke., Cenek is sent to a disciplinary regiment because he loves cubist painting; that's how it was then: the Revolution had decided that modern art was its ideological Enemy Number One even though the poor modernists wanted only to sing its praises; I'll never forget Konstantin Biebl: an exquisite poet (ah, how many of his lines I knew by heart!) who, as an enthusiastic Communist, after 1948 took to writing propaganda poetry of a mediocrity as alarming as it was heartbreaking; shortly thereafter, he threw himself from a window onto a Prague pavement and died; in this subtle being, I saw modern art betrayed, cuckolded, martyred, assassinated, self-destroyed.

My allegiance to modern art was thus as much a passion as my love for the antilyricism of the novel. The poetic values dear to Breton, dear to all modern art (intensity, density, the unbound imagination, scorn for "the null moments of life"), I went seeking only in the unillusioned territory of the novel. But that made them all the more important to me. Which may explain why I was particularly allergic to the kind of boredom that irritated Debussy when he listened to the symphonies of Brahms or Tchaikovsky; allergic to the rustle of spiders hard at work. Which may explain why I long remained deaf to Balzac's art and why the novelist I particularly adored was Rabelais.

8

The dichotomy between themes and bridges, between foreground and background, is unknown to Rabelais. He moves nimbly from a grave topic to a list of the methods the little Gargantua invented for wiping his ass, and yet, aesthetically, all these elements, frivolous or grave, have equal importance in his work, give me equal pleasure. That is what delighted me about him and about other early novelists: they talk about what fascinates them and they stop when the fascination stops. Their freedom of composition set me dreaming: of writing without fabricating suspense, without constructing a plot and working up its plausibility, of

writing without describing a period, a milieu, a city; of abandoning all that and holding on to only the essential; that is to say: creating a work in which the bridges and the filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never be forced-for the sake of form and its dictates-to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him.

9

Modern art: a revolt against the imitation of reality, in the name of the autonomous laws of art. One of the first practical requirements of this autonomy: that all the moments, all the particles of a work have equal aesthetic importance.

Impressionism: landscape conceived simply as an optical phenomenon, so that a man in it has no greater value than a bush. The cubist and abstract painters went still further by eliminating the third dimension, which, inevitably, divided a painting into planes of varying importance.

In music, the same trend toward aesthetic equality of all moments of a composition: Satie, whose simplicity is simply a provocative rejection of inherited musical rhetoric. Debussy, the enchanter, the persecutor of erudite spiders. Janacek doing away with every note that is not indispensable. Stravinsky, who turns away from the Romantic and Classical heritage and seeks his models among the masters of the first half of music history. Webern, who returns to a monothematicism of his own (a twelve-tone one, that is) and achieves a spareness that no one before him could imagine.

And the novel: the questioning of Balzac's famous motto "the novel must compete with the etat civil" (the state registry of citizens); this questioning is nothing like the bravado of avant-gardists parading their mod-ernness to make it visible to fools; it simply (discreetly) renders pointless (or almost pointless, optional, unimportant) the apparatus for fabricating the illusion of reality. In this regard, a small observation:

If a character is to "compete with the etat civil" he must start by having a real name. From Balzac to Proust, a character without a name is unthinkable. But Diderot's Jacques has no patronymic and his master has neither first nor family name. Panurge-is that a first or a family name? First names without family names, family names without first names, are not names but signs. The protagonist of The Trial is not a Josef Kaufmann or Krammer or Kohl, but Josef K. The one in The Castle loses even his first name and has to make do with just a letter. Broch's The Guiltless: one of the protagonists is designated by the letter A. In The Sleepwalkers^ Esch and Huguenau have no first names. Ulrich, the protagonist of The Man Without Qualities, has no family name. Already in my early stories, by instinct, I avoided naming the characters. In Life Is Elsewhere., the hero has only a first name, his mother is known only by the term "Maman," his girlfriend as "the redhead," and her lover as "the middle-aged man." Was that mannerism? At the time, I was operating with a total spontaneity whose meaning I understood only later: I was obeying the aesthetic of the "third (or overtime) period": I did not want to make readers think my characters are real and have an official family record.

10

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain. The very long passages of data on the characters, on their pasts, their way of dressing, their way of speaking (with all the language tics), etc.; very detailed description of sanatorium life; description of the historical moment (the years just preceding the 1914 war): for example, the social customs of the time: the recently discovered passion for photography, a chocolate craze, sketching blindfolded, Esperanto, solitaire, phonograph listening, spiritualist seances (a true novelist, Mann characterizes an era by practices soon to be abandoned and that ordinary historiography misses). The very prolix dialogue reveals its informative function whenever it departs from the few principal themes, and in Mann even dreams are descriptions: after his first day in the sanatorium, the young hero, Hans Castorp, falls asleep; in his thoroughly commonplace dream, all the day's events recur in faintly distorted form. This is very far from Breton, for whom dream is the well-spring of a released imagination. Here the dream has one function only: to make the reader familiar with the milieu, to confirm his illusion of reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

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

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

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

12

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

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14

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

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

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

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

15

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

Although I favor a strong presence of thought in the novel, this is not to say that I like the so-called philosophical novel, that subjugation of the novel to a philosophy, that "tale-making" out of moral or political ideas. Authentically novelistic thought (as the novel has known it since Rabelais) is always unsystematic; undisciplined; it is similar to Nietzsche's; it is experimental; it forces rifts in all the idea systems that surround us; it explores (particularly through its characters) all lines of thought by trying to follow each of them to its end. And there is this too about systematic thought: a person who thinks is automatically prompted to systematize; it is his eternal temptation (mine too, even in writing this book): a temptation to describe all the implications of his ideas; to preempt any objections and refute them in advance; thus to barricade his ideas. Now, a person who thinks should not try to persuade others of his belief; that is what

puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the "man of conviction"; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? it is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the "man of conviction" is a man restricted; experimental thought seeks not to persuade but to inspire; to inspire another thought, to set thought moving; that is why a novelist must systematically desys-tematize his thought, kick at the barricade that he himself has erected around his ideas.

16

Nietzsche's refusal of systematic thought has another consequence: an immense broadening of theme., the barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher's thought. That too brings philosophy nearer to the novel: for the first time philosophy is pondering not epistemology, not aesthetics or ethics, the phenomenology of mind or the critique of reason, etc., but everything human.

In expounding Nietzsche's philosophy, historians or professors do not merely reduce it-that of course- but also distort it by turning it into its opposite, namely into a system. Is there still room in their systematized Nietzsche for his thoughts on women, on the Germans, on Europe, on Bizet, on Goethe, on Victor Hugo-style kitsch, on Aristophanes, on lightness of style, on boredom, on play, on translation, on the spirit

of obedience, on possession of the other and on all the psychological forms of such possession, on the savants and their mental limitations, on the Schauspieler, actors on history's stage-is there still room for a thousand psychological observations that can be found nowhere else, except perhaps in a few rare novelists?

As Nietzsche brought philosophy closer to the novel, so Musil brought the novel toward philosophy. This rapprochement doesn't mean that Musil is less a novelist than other novelists. Just as Nietzsche is no less a philosopher than other philosophers.

Musil's thinking novel too brought about an unprecedented broadening of theme; nothing that can be thought about is henceforth excluded from the art of the novel.

17

When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I used to take lessons in musical composition. Not because I was a child prodigy but because of my father's quiet tact. It was during the war, and a friend of his, a Jewish composer, was required to wear the yellow star; people had begun to avoid him. Not knowing how to declare his solidarity, my father thought of asking him just then to give me lessons. They were confiscating Jewish apartments, and the composer kept having to move on to smaller and smaller places, ending up, just before he left for Theresienstadt, in a little flat where many people were camping, crammed, in every room. All along, he had held on to the small piano on which I would play my harmony or counterpoint exercises while strangers went about their business around us.

Of all this I retain only my admiration for him, and three or four images. Especially this one: seeing me out after a lesson, he stopped by the door and suddenly said to me: "There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It's like a lawn-if it weren't there, we couldn't enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it."

A peculiar idea. That it has stayed in my memory is even more peculiar. Maybe I felt honored at getting to hear a confidential admission from the teacher, a secret, a great trick of the trade that only the initiated are permitted to know.

Whatever it was, that brief remark from my teacher of the time has haunted me all my life (I've defended it, I've fought it, I've never finished with it); without it, this text could very certainly not have been written.

But dearer to me than that remark in itself is the image of a man who, a while before his hideous journey, stood thinking aloud, in front of a child, about the problem of composing a work of art.