Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  Impossible to grasp the nature of the terra nostra, the terra nostra of Mexico, without looking down into the well of the past. Not as a historian would do, in order to see the chronological unfolding of events, but in order to consider: what does the concentrated essence of the Mexican terra mean to a man? Fuentes grasped that essence in the form of a dream novel where various historical periods telescope into a kind of poetic and oneiric metahistory; he thus created something almost indescribable and, in any case, hitherto unknown to literature.

  Most recently, I had the same sense of secret aesthetic kinship in Philippe Sollers' La Fete a Venise, that strange novel whose story occurs in our own time but is a stage setting for Watteau, Cezanne, Monet, Titian, Picasso, Stendhal-for the display of their remarks and their art.

  And in the meantime came The Satanic Verses: the complicated identity of a Europeanized Indian; terra non nostra; terrae non nostrae; terrae perditae; to grasp that shredded identity, the novel explores it indifferent locations on the planet: in London, in Bombay, in a Pakistani village, and then in seventh-century Asia.

  The coexistence of different periods sets the novelist a technical problem: how to link them without having the novel lose its unity?

  Fuentes and Rushdie found fantastical solutions: in Fuentes, his characters move from one period to another as their own reincarnations. In Rushdie, it is the character of Gibreel Farishta who ensures that supratemporal connection by being transformed into the Archangel Gibreel, who in turn becomes a medium for Mahound (the novel's variant of Mohammed).

  In Sollers' book and in mine, the link has nothing fantastical to it. In his, the paintings and the books seen and read by the characters serve as windows into the past. In mine, the past and the present are bridged by common themes and motifs.

  Can our underground aesthetic kinship (unper-ceived and imperceivable) be explained by some influence on one another? No. By influences undergone in common? I cannot see what they might be. Or have we all breathed the same air of history? Has the history of the novel, by its own logic, set us all the same task?

  The History of the Novel as Revenge on History Itself

  History. Can we still draw on that obsolete authority? What I am about to say is a purely personal avowal: as a novelist, I have always felt myself to be within history, that is to say, partway along a road, in dialogue with those who preceded me and even perhaps (but less so) with those still to come. Of course, I am speaking of the history of the novel, not of some other history, and speaking of it such as I see it: it has nothing to do with Hegel's extrahuman reason; it is neither predetermined nor identical with the idea of progress; it is entirely human, made by men, by some men, and thus comparable to the development of an individual artist, who acts sometimes tritely and then surprisingly, sometimes with genius and then not, and who often misses opportunities.

  Here I am making a declaration of involvement in the history of the novel, when all my novels breathe a hatred of history, of that hostile, inhuman force that- uninvited, unwanted-invades our lives from the outside and destroys them. Yet there is nothing inconsistent in this double attitude, because the history of humanity and the history of the novel are two very different things. The former is not man's to determine, it takes over like an alien force he cannot control, whereas the history of the novel (or of painting, of music) is born of man's freedom, of his wholly personal creations, of his own choices. The meaning of an art's history is opposed to the meaning of history itself. Because of its personal nature, the history of an art is a revenge by man against the impersonality of the history of humanity.

  The personal nature of the history of the novel? But if it is to form a whole over the course of centuries, would not such a history need to be unified by some common and enduring-and thus by definition supra-personal-meaning? No. I believe that even this common meaning is still personal, human; for over the course of history the concept of this or that art (what is the novel?), as well as the meaning of its evolution (where has it come from and where is it going?), is constantly defined and redefined by each artist, by each new work. The meaning of the history of the novel is the very search for that meaning, its perpetual creation and re-creation, which always retroactively encompasses the whole past of the novel: Rabelais certainly never called his Gargantua-Pantagruel a novel. It wasn't a novel; it became one gradually as later novelists (Sterne, Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Vancura, Gombrowicz, Rushdie, Kis, Chamoiseau) took their inspiration from it, openly drew on it, thus integrating it into the history of the novel, or, rather, acknowledging it as the first building block in that history.

  This said, the words "the end of history" have never stirred me to anguish or displeasure. "How sweet it would be to forget the monster that saps our brief lives as cement for its vain monuments. How sweet it would be to forget History!" (Life Is Elsewhere) If history is going to end (though I cannot imagine in concrete terms that "end" the philosophers love to talk about), then let it happen fast! But applied to art, that same phrase, "the end of history," strikes me with terror; that end I can imagine only too well, for most novels produced today stand outside the history of the novel: novelized confessions, novelized journalism, novelized score-settling, novelized autobiographies, novelized indiscretions, novelized denunciations, novelized political arguments, novelized deaths of husbands, novelized deaths of fathers, novelized deaths of mothers, novelized deflowerings, novelized child-births-novels ad infinitum, to the end of time, that say nothing new, have no aesthetic ambition, bring no change to our understanding of man or to novelistic form, are each one like the next, are completely consumable in the morning and completely discardable in the afternoon.

  To my mind, great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history. It is only inside history that we can see what is new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what is imitation; in other words, only inside history can a work exist as a value capable of being discerned and judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall outside its own history, for it is a fall into the chaos where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived.

  Improvisation and Composition

  During the writing of Don Quixote, Cervantes did not mind altering his hero's character as he went. The freedom by which Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne enchant us had to do with improvisation. The art of complex and rigorous composition did not become a commanding need until the first half of the nineteenth century. The novels form as it came into being then, with its action concentrated in a narrow time span, at a crossroads where many stories of many characters intersect, demanded a minutely calculated scheme of the plot lines and scenes: before beginning to write, the novelist therefore drafted and redrafted the scheme of the novel, calculated and recalculated it, designed and redesigned as that had never been done before. One need only leaf through Dostoyevsky's notes for The Possessed: in the seven notebooks that take up 400 pages of the Pleiade edition (the novel itself takes up 750), motifs look for characters, characters look for motifs, characters vie for the status of protagonist; Stavrogin should be married, but "to whom?" wonders Dostoyevsky, and he tries to marry him successively to three women; and so on. (A paradox that only seems one: the more calculated the construction machinery, the more real and natural the characters. The prejudice against constructional thinking as a "nonartistic" element that mutilates the "living" quality of characters is just sentimental naivete from people who have never understood art.)

  The novelist in our time who is nostalgic for the art of the old masters of the novel cannot retie the thread where it was cut; he cannot leap over the enormous experience of the nineteenth century; if he wants to connect with the easygoing freedom of Rabelais or Sterne, he must reconcile it with the requirements of composition.

  I remember my first reading of Jacques le Fataliste; delighted by its boldly heterogeneous richness, where ideas mingle with anecdote, where one story frames another; delighted by a freedom of composition that utt
erly ignores the rule about unity of action, I asked myself: Is this magnificent disorder the effect of admirable construction, subtly calculated, or is it due to the euphoria of pure improvisation? Without a doubt, it is improvisation that prevails here; but the question I spontaneously asked showed me that a prodigious architectural potential exists within such intoxicated improvisation, the potential for a complex, rich structure that would also be as perfectly calculated, calibrated, and premeditated as even the most exuberant architectural fantasy of a cathedral was necessarily premeditated. Does such an architectural intention cause a novel to lose the charm of its liberty? Its quality of game? But just what is a game, actually? Every game is based on rules, and the stricter the rules, the more the game is a game. As opposed to the chess player, the artist invents his own rules for himself; so when he improvises without rules, he is no freer than when he invents his own system of rules.

  Reconciling Rabelais's and Diderot's freedom with the demands of composition, though, presents the twentieth-century novelist with problems different from those that preoccupied Balzac or Dostoyevsky. For example: the third and last of the books that constitute Hermann Broch's novel The Sleepwalkers is a "polyphonic" stream composed of five "voices," five entirely independent lines: neither a common action nor the same characters tie these lines together, and each has a completely different formal nature (A = novel, B = reportage, C = short story, D = poetry, E = essay). In the eighty-eight chapters of the book, these five lines alternate in this strange order: A-A-A-B-A-B-A-C-A-A-D-E-C-A-B-D-C-D-A-E-A-A-B-E-C-A-D-B-B-A-E-A-A-E-A-B-D-G-B-B-D-A-B-E-A-A-B-A-D-A-C-B-D-A-E-B-A-D-A-B-D-E-A-C-A-D-D-B-A-A-C-D-E-B-A-B-D-B-A-B-A-A-D-A-A-D-D-E.

  What is it that led Broch to choose precisely this order rather than another? What made him take precisely line B in the fourth chapter and not C or D? Not the logic of the characters or of the action, for there is no action common to these five lines. He was guided by other criteria: by the charm that comes from surprising juxtaposition of the different forms (verse, narration, aphorisms, philosophical meditations); by the contrast of different emotions pervading the different chapters; by the variety of the chapters' lengths; finally, by the development of the same existential questions, reflected in the five lines as in five mirrors. For lack of a better term, let us call these criteria musical and conclude: the nineteenth century elaborated the art of composition, but our own century brought musicality to that art.

  The Satanic Verses is constructed of three more or less independent lines: A: the lives of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, two present-day Indians who divide their time between Bombay and London; B: the Koranic story dealing with the origin of Islam; C: the villagers' trek toward Mecca across the sea they believe they will cross dry-footed and in which they drown.

  The three lines are taken up in sequence in the novels nine parts in the following order: A-B-A-C-A-B-A-C-A (incidentally: in music, a sequence of this kind is called a rondo: the main theme returns regularly, in alternation with several secondary themes).

  This is the rhythm of the whole (I note parenthetically the approximate number of pages): A (90), B (40), A (80), C (40), A (120), B (40), A (80), C (40), A (40). It can be seen that the B and C parts are all the same length, which gives the whole a rhythmic regularity.

  Line A takes up five sevenths of the novels page total, and lines B and C one seventh each. This quantitative ratio results in the dominance of line A: the novel's center of gravity is located in the present-day lives of Farishta and Chamcha.

  Nonetheless, even though B and C are subordinate lines, it is in them that the aesthetic wager of the novel is concentrated, for it is these B and C parts that enable Rushdie to get at the fundamental problem of all novels (that of an individual's, a characters, identity) in a new way that goes beyond the conventions of the psychological novel: Chamcha's and Farishta's personalities cannot be apprehended through a detailed description of their states of mind; their mystery lies in the cohabitation in their psyches of two civilizations, the Indian and the European; it lies in their roots, from which they have been torn but which, nevertheless, remain alive in them. Where is the rupture in these roots and how far down must one go to touch the wound? Looking into "the well of the past" is not off the point; it aims directly at the heart of the matter: the existential rift in the two protagonists.

  Just as Jacob is incomprehensible without Abraham (who, according to Mann, lived centuries before him), being merely his "imitation and continuation," Gibreel Farishta is incomprehensible without the Archangel Gibreel, without Mahound (Mohammed), incomprehensible even without the theocratic Islam of Khomeini or of that fanatical girl who leads the villagers to Mecca, or rather to death. They are all his own potentialities, which sleep within him and which he must battle for his own individuality. In this novel, there is no important question that can be examined without looking down the well of the past. What is good and what is evil? Who is the other's devil, Chamcha for Farishta or Farishta for Chamcha? Is it the devil or the angel that has inspired the pilgrimage of the villagers? Is their drowning a piteous disaster or the glorious journey to Paradise? Who can say? Who can know? And what if this unknowability of good and evil was the torment suffered by the founders of religions? Those terrible words of despair, Christ's unprecedented blasphemy, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?": do they not resound in the soul of every Christian? Mahound's doubt as he wonders who put those verses into his head, God or the devil: does it not conceal the uncertainty that is the ground of man's very existence?

  In the Shadow of Great Principles

  Starting with his Midnight's Children, which in its time (in 1980) stirred unanimous admiration, no one in the English-language literary world has denied that Rushdie is one of the most gifted novelists of our day. The Satanic Verses, appearing in English in September 1988, was greeted with the attention due a major writer. The book received these tributes with no anticipation of the storm that was to burst some months later, when the Imam Khomeini, the master of Iran, condemned Rushdie to death for blasphemy and sent killers after him on a chase whose end no one can predict.

  That happened before the text could be translated. Thus everywhere except in the English-language world, the scandal arrived before the book. In France, the press immediately printed excerpts from the still unpublished novel to show the reasons for the condemnation. Completely normal behavior, but fatal for a novel. Represented exclusively by its incriminated passages, it was, from the beginning, transformed from a work of art into a simple corpus delicti.

  We should not denigrate literary criticism. Nothing is worse for a writer than to come up against its absence. I am speaking of literary criticism as meditation, as analysis; literary criticism that involves several readings of the book it means to discuss (like great pieces of music we can listen to time and again, great novels too are made for repeated readings); literary criticism that, deaf to the implacable clock of topicality, will readily discuss works a year, thirty years, three hundred years old; literary criticism that tries to apprehend the originality of a work in order thus to inscribe it on historical memory. If such meditation did not accompany the history of the novel, we would know nothing today of Dostoyevsky, or Joyce, or Proust. For without it a work is surrendered to completely arbitrary judgments and swift oblivion. Now, the Rushdie case shows (if proof is still needed) that such meditation is no longer practiced. Imperceptibly, innocently, under the pressure of events, through changes in society and in the press, literary criticism has become a mere (often intelligent, always hasty) literary news bulletin.

  About The Satanic Verses, the literary news was the death sentence on the author. In such a life-and-death situation, it seems almost frivolous to speak of art. What is art, after all, when great principles are under attack? Thus, throughout the world, all discussion concentrated on questions of principle: freedom of expression; the need to defend it (and indeed people did defend it, people protested, people signed petitions); religion; Islam and Christianity
; but also this question: does a writer have the moral right to blaspheme and thereby wound believers? And even this problem: suppose Rushdie had attacked Islam only for publicity and to sell his unreadable book?

  With mysterious unanimity (I noticed the same reaction everywhere in the world), the men of letters, the intellectuals, the salon initiates, snubbed the novel. They decided to resist all commercial pressure for once, and they refused to read a work they considered simply a piece of sensationalism. They signed all the petitions for Rushdie, meanwhile deeming it elegant to say, with a supercilious smile: "His book? Oh no, no, no! I haven't read it." The politicians took advantage of this curious "state of disgrace" of a novelist they didn't like. I'll never forget the virtuous impartiality they paraded at the time: "We condemn Khomeini's verdict. Freedom of expression is sacred to us. But no less do we condemn this attack on religious faith. It is a shameful, contemptible attack that insults the soul of peoples."

  Of course, no one any longer doubted that Rushdie actually had attacked Islam, for only the accusation was real; the text of the book no longer mattered, it no longer existed.

  The Clash of Three Eras

  A situation unique in history: Rushdie belongs by origin to a Muslim society that, in large part, is still living in the period before the Modern Era. He wrote his book in Europe, in the Modern Era-or, more precisely, at the end of that era.

  Just as Iranian Islam was at the time moving away from religious moderation toward a combative theocracy, so, with Rushdie, the history of the novel was moving from the genteel, professorial smile of Thomas Mann to unbridled imagination drawn from the rediscovered wellspring of Rabelaisian humor. The antitheses collided, each in its extreme form.