Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  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.