Kafka's castle, which exists on no map anywhere, is no more unreal than that America conceived as a cliche picture of the new civilization of gigantism and the machine. In the house of his uncle the senator, Karl comes across a desk that is an extraordinarily complicated machine, with a hundred compartments keyed to a hundred push buttons, an object at once practical and utterly useless, at once technical wonder and nonsense. I counted ten such devices in the novel, all marvelous, entertaining, and implausible, from the uncles desk, the mazelike country house, the Hotel Occidental (monstrously complex architecture, diabolically bureaucratic organization), to the Oklahoma Theater, itself another enormous, incomprehensible administration. So it is through parodic playing (playing with cliches) that Kafka first set out his greatest theme, that of the labyrinthine social organization where man loses his way and proceeds to his ruin. (Genetically speaking: the comical mechanism of the uncles desk is the ancestor of the terrifying castle administration.) Kafka managed to capture this theme, grave as it is, not by means of a realistic novel, grounded in some Zolaesque examination of society, but by just that seemingly frivolous means of "literature about literature" which allowed his imagination all the freedom it required (freedom for exaggerations, for enormities, for improbabilities, freedom for playful inventions).
Heartlessness Masked by a Style Overflowing with Feeling
In Amerika, there are many unaccountably excessive sentimental gestures. The end of the first chapter: Karl is already set to go off with his uncle, the stoker is staying behind, abandoned in the captains cabin.
Then Karl (I stress the key phrases) "went over to the stoker, pulled the man's right hand out of his belt and held it lightly in his… Karl drew his fingers back and forth between the stoker's, while the stoker looked around with shining eyes, as if blessed by a great happiness, but one that nobody could grudge him.
"'Now you must get ready to defend yourself, answer yes and no, or else these people wont have any idea of the truth. You must promise me to do what I tell you, for I'm afraid, and I've good reason for it, that I won't be able to help you anymore.' And then Karl burst out crying and kissed the stoker's hand, taking that seamed, almost nerveless hand and pressing it to his cheek like a treasure that he would soon have to give up. But now his uncle the senator was at his side and with only the slightest compulsion led him away."
Another example: At the end of the evening at Pollunder's country house, Karl explains at length why he wants to go back to his uncle's. "During this long speech of Karl's, Mr. Pollunder had listened attentively, often, particularly when Uncle Jacob was mentioned… pressing Karl to himself. …"
The sentimental gestures of the characters are not only exaggerated, they are inappropriate. Karl has known the stoker for barely an hour and has no reason to be so passionately attached to him. And if we decide that the voung man is naively touched by the prospect of a manly friendship, we are all the more amazed when, a moment later, he so readily lets himself be carried off from his new friend, without any resistance.
In that evening scene, Pollunder knows full well that the uncle has already thrown Karl out of his house; that is why he takes Karl in an affectionate embrace.
Yet when, in Pollunder's presence, Karl reads the uncle's letter and learns of his own sad fate, Pollunder shows him no further affection and offers him no help.
In Kafka's Amerika, we find ourselves in a universe of feelings that are inappropriate, misplaced, exaggerated, unfathomable, or-the reverse-bizarrely missing. In his diary, Kafka characterized Dickens's novels by the words: "Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling." Such is the real meaning of that theater of showily displayed and instantly forgotten feelings that is Kafka's novel. This "critique of sentimentality" (an implicit, parodic, droll, never aggressive critique) is aimed not at Dickens alone but at romanticism generally, at its heirs, Kafka's contemporaries, particularly the expressionists, with their cult of hysteria and madness; it is aimed at the entire Holy Church of the Heart; and once more, it brings together those two apparently very different artists, Kafka and Stravinsky.
A Little Boy in Ecstasy
Of course, one cannot say that music (all music) is incapable of expressing feelings; the music of the Romantic era is authentically and legitimately expressive; but even about that music it can be said: its worth has nothing to do with the intensity of the feelings it provokes. For music can powerfully stir feelings with no musical art at all. I recall my childhood: sitting at the piano, I would throw myself into passionate improvisations for which I needed nothing but a G-minor chord and the subdominant F minor, played fortissimo over and over again. The two chords and the endlessly repeated primitive melodic motif made me experience an emotion more intense than any Chopin, any Beethoven, has ever given me. (One time my musician father, completely furious-I never saw him so furious before or after-rushed into the room, lifted me off the piano stool, and with a disgust he could barely control, carried me into the dining room and set me down under the table.)
What I was experiencing during those improvisations was an ecstasy. What is ecstasy? The boy banging on the keyboard feels an enthusiasm (or a sorrow, or a delight), and the emotion rises to such a pitch of intensity that it becomes unbearable: the boy flees into a state of blindness and deafness where everything is forgotten, even oneself. Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation (its oblivion).
Ecstasy means being "outside oneself," as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one's position (stasis). To be "outside oneself" does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too is the negation of time).
We can see the acoustical image of emotion in the Romantic melody of a lied: its length seems intended for sustaining emotion, building it, causing its slow enjoyment. Ecstasy, on the other hand, cannot be mirrored in a melody, because memory strangled by ecstasy is incapable of retaining the sequence of notes in a melodic phrase, however short; the acoustical image of ecstasy is the cry (or: a very brief melodic motif that imitates a cry).
The classic example of ecstasy is the moment of orgasm. Think back to the time before women had the benefit of the pill. It often happened that at the moment of climax a lover forgot to slide out of his mistress's body and made her a mother, even though, a few moments earlier, he had firmly intended to be extremely careful. That second of ecstasy made him forget both his determination (his immediate past) and his interest (his future).
The instant of ecstasy thus weighed more heavily on the scales than the unwanted child; and since the unwanted child will probably fill the lovers whole life span with his unwanted presence, it may be said that one instant of ecstasy weighed more than a whole lifetime. The lovers lifetime faced the instant of ecstasy from roughly the same inferior status as the finite has facing eternity. Man desires eternity, but all he can get is its imitation: the instant of ecstasy.
I recall a day in my youth: I was with a friend in his car; people were crossing the street in front of us. I saw a person I disliked and pointed him out to my friend: "Run him over!" It was of course only a verbal joke, but my friend was in a state of great euphoria, and he hit the accelerator. The man took fright, slipped, fell. My friend stopped the car just in time. The man was not hurt, but people crowded around and threatened (understandably) to lynch us. Yet my
friend was not a murderer by nature. My words had sent him into a momentary ecstasy (actually, one of the oddest: the ecstasy of a joke).
We are used to connecting the notion of ecstasy to great mystical moments. But there is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy: the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at th
e wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium. Living is a perpetual heavy effort not to lose sight of ourselves, to stay solidly present in ourselves, in our stasis. Step outside ourselves for a mere instant, and we verge on death's dominion.
Delight and Ecstasy
I wonder if Adorno ever found the slightest pleasure in listening to Stravinsky's music. Pleasure? By his lights, Stravinsky's music offers only one such: "the perverse pleasure of deprivation"; for all it does is "deprive" itself of everything: of expressivity; of orchestral sonority; of developmental technique; casting a "spiteful look" on the old forms, it deforms them; "grimacing," it is incapable of invention, it only "ironizes," "caricatures," "parodies"; it is just "negation," not merely of nineteenth-century music but of music altogether ("Stravinsky's music is a music from which music is banished," says Adorno).
Curious, curious. And what about the delight that beams from that music?
I remember the Picasso exhibition in Prague in the mid-sixties. One painting has stayed with me. A woman and a man are eating watermelon: the woman
is seated, the man is lying on the ground, his legs lifted up to the sky in a gesture of unspeakable joy. And the whole thing painted with a delectable offhandedness that made me think the painter, as he painted the picture, must have been feeling the same joy as the man with his legs lifted up.
The delight of the painter painting the man with his legs lifted up is a double delight; it is the delight of contemplating delight (with a smile). It is the smile that interests me. In the delight of the man lifting his legs up to the sky the painter glimpses a wonderful tinge of the comical, and he rejoices in it. His own smile spurs him to a merry, heedless invention, just as heedless as the gesture of the man lifting his legs to the sky. So the delight I'm talking about bears the mark of humor; this is what sets it apart from the delight of other ages in art, from the Romantic delight of Wagners Tristan, for instance, or from the idyllic delight of a Philemon and Baucis. (Is it a fatal lack of humor that makes Adorno so unreceptive to Stravinsky's music?)
Beethoven wrote the "Ode to Joy," but that Beethovenian joy is a ceremony that requires us to stand at respectful attention. The rondos and minuets of the Classical symphonies are, so to speak, an invitation to the dance, but the delight I'm talking about and that I love would not proclaim itself as delight through the collective act of a dance. This is why no polka makes me happy except Stravinsky's "Circus Polka," which is written not for us to dance to but for us to listen to, with our legs lifted up to the sky.
There are works in modern art that have discovered an inimitable delight in being, the delight that shows in a euphoric recklessness of imagination, in the pleasure of inventing, of surprising-even of shocking-by an invention. One might draw up a whole list of works of art that are suffused with this delight: along with Stravinsky {Petrushka, Les Noces, Renard, the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, etc., etc.), everything by Miro; Klee's paintings; Dufy's; Dubuffet's; certain Apollinaire writings; late Janacek (Nursery Rhymes, Sextet for Wind Instruments, his opera The Cunning Little Vixen); some of Milhauds works; and some of Poulencs: Les Mamelles de Tiresias, his comic opera on a text by Apollinaire, written in the last days of the war, was denounced by people who thought it scandalous to celebrate the Liberation with a piece of fun; and indeed, the age of delight (of that rare delight which humor sets aglow) was over; after the Second World War, only the very old masters Matisse and Picasso still managed, against the spirit of the times, to keep it going in their work.
In this listing of the great works of delight, I cannot overlook jazz music. The whole jazz repertory consists of variations on a relatively small number of melodies. So it is that all throughout jazz we keep catching sight of a smile that has slipped in between the original melody and its elaboration. Like Stravinsky, the great jazz masters enjoyed the art of playful transcription, and they composed their own versions not only of old Negro songs but also of Bach, of Mozart, of Chopin; Ellington does transcriptions of Tchaikovsky and Grieg, and for his Uwis Suite, he composes a variant of a village polka that recalls Petrushka in spirit. The smile is not only invisibly present in the space that separates Ellington from his "portrayal" of Grieg, it is fully visible on the faces of the old Dixieland musicians: come the moment of his solo (which is always partly improvised-that is, always brings a few surprises), the musician steps forward a little, then yields to another musician and gives himself over to the pleasure of listening (the pleasure of other surprises).
At jazz concerts people applaud. To applaud means: I have listened to you carefully and now I am declaring my appreciation. The music called "rock" changes the situation. An important fact: at rock concerts people do not applaud. It would be almost sacrilege to applaud and thus to bring to notice the critical distance between the person playing and the person listening; we come here not to judge and evaluate but to surrender to the music, to scream along with the musicians, to merge with them; we come here to seek identification, not pleasure; effusion, not delight. We go into ecstasy here: the beat is strong and steady, the melodic motifs are short and endlessly repeated, there are no dynamic contrasts, everything is fortissimo, the song tends toward the highest range and resembles screaming. Here we re no longer in those little nightspots where the music wraps the couple in intimacy; we're in huge halls, in stadiums, pressed one against the next, and, if were dancing at a club there are no couples; each person is doing his moves by himself and together with the whole crowd at the same time. The music turns the individuals into a single collective body: talking here about individualism and hedonism is just one of the self-mystifications of our time, which (like any other time, by the way) wants to see itself as different from what it is.
Evil's Scandalous Beauty
What irritates me in Adorno is his short-circuit method that, with a fearsome facility, links works of art to political (sociological) causes, consequences, or meanings; extremely nuanced ideas (Adorno's musicological knowledge is admirable) thereby lead to extremely impoverished conclusions; in fact, given that an era's political tendencies are always reducible to just two opposing tendencies, a work of art necessarily ends up being classified as either progressive or reactionary; and since reaction is evil, the inquisition can start the trial proceedings.
Le Sacre du printemps: a ballet that ends with the sacrifice of a young girl, who must die for springtime to return. According to Adorno: Stravinsky is on the side of barbarism; his "music does not identify with the victim, but rather with the destructive element." (I wonder: why the verb "identify"? how does Adorno know whether Stravinsky is "identifying" with something or not? why not say "paint," or "portray," "show," "represent"? Answer: because only identifying with evil is culpable and can justify a trial.)
I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires under-
standing its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty-there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if it were denounced-stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness-it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of "propaganda." It is because it is beautiful that the girl's murder is so horrible.
Just as he made a portrayal of the m
ass and a portrayal of the Shrovetide fair (Petrushka), here Stravinsky made a portrayal of barbaric ecstasy. It is all the more interesting in that he had always, and explicitly, declared himself a partisan of the Apollonian principle, an adversary of the Dionysian: Le Sacre du printemps (particularly its ritual dances) is the Apollonian portrayal of Dionysian ecstasy: in this portrayal, the ecstatic elements (the aggressively beating rhythm, the few extremely short melodic motifs, many times repeated but never developed, and sounding like shrieks), are transformed into great, refined art (for instance, despite its aggressive quality, the rhythm grows so complex through the rapid alternation of measures with different time signatures that it creates an artificial, unreal, completely stylized beat); still, the Apollonian beauty of this portrayal of barbarity does not obscure its horror; it makes us see that at the very bottom point of the ecstasy there is only the harsh
rhythm, the sharp blows of percussion, an extreme numbness, death.
Emigration Arithmetic
The life of an emigre-there's a matter of arithmetic: Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (famous under the name Joseph Conrad) lived seventeen years in Poland (and in Russia, with his exiled family), the rest of his life, fifty years, in England (or on English ships). He was thus able to adopt English as his writing language, and English themes as well. Only his allergy to things Russian (ah, poor Gide, incapable of understanding Conrad's puzzling aversion to Dostoyevsky!) preserves a trace of his Polishness.
Bohuslav Martinu lived in Bohemia till he was thirty-two, then for thirty-six years in France, Switzerland, America, and Switzerland again. A nostalgia for the old country always echoed in his work, and he always called himself a Czech composer. Yet after the war, he declined all invitations from back there, and by his express wish, he was buried in Switzerland. Foiling his last will, in 1979, twenty years after his death, agents of the motherland managed to kidnap his corpse and solemnly install it beneath his native soil.
Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts Page 7
