Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
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What is a conversation in real life, in the concreteness of the present moment? We don't know. All we know is that conversations on the stage, in a novel, or even on
the radio are not like a real conversation. This was certainly one of Hemingway's artistic obsessions: to catch the structure of real conversation. Let us try to define this structure by comparing it with that of theatrical dialogue:
a) in the theater: the story is told in and through the dialogue; this is therefore focused entirely on the action, on its meaning, on its content; in real life: dialogue is surrounded by dailiness, which interrupts it, slows it down, affects its development, changes its course, makes it unsystematic and illogical;
b) in the theater: dialogue must provide the audience with the most intelligible, the clearest, idea of the dramatic conflict and of the characters; in real life: the individuals conversing know each other and know the subject of their conversation; thus their dialogue is never wholly comprehensible to a third person; it remains enigmatic, a thin veneer of the said over the immensity of the unsaid;
c) in the theater: the limited time span of the performance demands a maximal economy of words in the dialogue; in real life: the characters return to a subject already discussed, repeat themselves, correct what they just said, etc.; these repetitions and awkwardnesses reveal the characters' obsessions and imbue the conversation with a particular melody.
Hemingway knew not only how to catch the structure of real dialogue but also how to use it to create a form-a simple, transparent, limpid, beautiful form, as appears in "Hills Like White Elephants": the conversation between the American man and the girl begins piano, with insignificant remarks; the repetitions of the same words, the same turns of phrase, throughout the
story give it a melodic unity (this melodization of dialogue is what is so striking in Hemingway, so entrancing); the intervention of the woman bringing drinks curbs the tension, which nonetheless goes on rising, reaches its crisis toward the end ("please please"), then calms to pianissimo with the final words.
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"February 15 toward evening. Twilight at 6, near the railroad station. Two young women are waiting for someone.
"On the sidewalk, the bigger one, her cheeks rosy, in a red winter coat, shivers.
"She starts speaking brusquely:
show up.'
"Her companion, cheeks pale, in a flimsy skirt, interrupts the last note with a somber, sad, soulful echo:
"'I don't care.' "And she stayed put, half rebellious, half waiting."
So begins one of the texts Janacek regularly published, together with his musical notations, in a Czech periodical.
Imagine that the sentence "We're going to wait here and I know he won't show up" is a line in a story an actor is reading aloud to an audience. We would probably sense a certain falseness in his tone. He speaks the sentence as one might imagine it in memory; or, simply, in a way meant to move his listeners. But how is this sentence spoken in a real situation? What is the melodic truth of this sentence? What is the melodic truth of a vanished moment?
The search for the vanished present; the search for the melodic truth of a moment; the wish to surprise and capture this fleeting truth; the wish to plumb by that means the mystery of the immediate reality constantly deserting our lives, which thereby becomes the thing we know least about. This, I think, is the onto-logical import of Janacek's studies of spoken language and, perhaps, the ontological import of all his music.
Act Two of Jenufa: after lying ill for some days with puerperal fever, Jenufa leaves her bed and learns that her newborn son is dead. Her reaction is unexpected: "So, he is dead. So, he has become a little angel." And she sings these phrases calmly, with a strange astonishment, as if paralyzed, without cries, without gestures. The melodic curve rises several times, only to fall back immediately, as if it too were stricken with paralysis; it is beautiful, it is moving, yet without losing its accuracy.
Novak, the most influential Czech composer of the time, ridiculed this scene: "It's as if Jenufa were mourning the death of her parrot." It's all there, in this
idiotic sarcasm. To be sure, this is not how we imagine a woman who is just learning of her child's death! But an event as we imagine it hasn't much to do with the same event as it is when it happens.
Janacek based his first operas on "realist" plays; in his time, doing that in itself shattered conventions; but because of his thirst for the concrete, even the prose drama form soon came to seem artificial to him: and so he wrote his own libretti for his two most audacious operas, the one, for The Cunning Little Vixen, based on a newspaper serial, the other on Dostoyevsky-not on one of the writer's novels (ensnarement by the unnatural and the theatrical is a greater threat in Dostoyevsky's novels than anywhere else!), but on his "reportage" of the Siberian prison camp: From the House of the Dead.
Like Flaubert, Janacek was fascinated by the coexistence of various emotional charges in a single scene (he felt the Flaubertian fascination for "antithetical motifs"); thus his orchestra does not emphasize but instead often contradicts the emotional content of the words. There is one scene of The Cunning Little Vixen that I have always found particularly moving: in a forest inn, a gamekeeper, a village schoolmaster, and the innkeeper's wife are gossiping: they recall their absent friends and talk about the innkeeper, who is away that day in town, about the parish priest, who has moved house, about the woman the schoolmaster loved, who has just married someone else. The conversation is completely banal (never before Janacek had a situation so undramatic and so ordinary been seen on the opera stage), but the orchestra is full of a nearly unbearable yearning, so that the scene becomes one of the most beautiful elegies ever written on the transience of time.
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For fourteen years, a certain Kovarovic, a conductor and submediocre composer who was director of the Prague Opera, rejected Jenufa. Although he finally gave in (in 1916 it was he who conducted the Prague premiere), he nonetheless held to his view of Janacek as a dilettante and made many changes in the score, revisions of the orchestration, and even a great number of deletions.
Didn't Janacek rebel? Certainly, but as we know, everything depends on the balance of power. And he was the weaker one. He was sixty-two years old and nearly unknown. If he fought too much, he could have had to wait another ten years for the premiere of his opera. Besides, even his supporters, euphoric over their masters unexpected success, all agreed: Kovarovic had done a magnificent job! For example, the final scene!
The final scene: After the body of Jenufas illegitimate child is discovered drowned, after the stepmother has confessed her crime and the police have taken her away, Jenufa and Laca are left alone. Laca, the man over whom Jenufa preferred another but who loves her still, decides to stay with her. All that lies before this couple are misery, shame, and exile. An extraordinary mood: resigned, sorrowful, and yet glowing with immense compassion. Harp and strings, the soft sonority of the orchestra; the great drama closes, unexpectedly, with tranquil song, touching and intimate.
But can an opera end like that? Kovarovic transformed it into a real apotheosis of love. Who would dare object to an apotheosis? Besides, an apotheosis is so simple: you add brasses to extend the melody by
contrapuntal imitation. An effective procedure, tried and proven a thousand times over. Kovarovic knew his business.
Snubbed and humiliated by his Czech compatriots, Janacek found firm and faithful support from Max Brod. But when Brod studied the score of The Cunning Little Vixen, he was not satisfied with the ending. The last words of the opera: a joke by a little frog stammering to the gamekeeper: "What y-y-you think you're seeing is n-n-not me, it's m-m-my grandpa." "Ending with the frog is impossible," Brod protested in a letter ("Mit dem Frosch zu schliessen, ist unmoglich"), and he proposed as a new last line a solemn proclamation to be sung by the gamekeeper: about nature's renewal, about the eternal power of youth. Another apotheosis.
But this time Janacek didn't obey. Now recogn
ized outside his own country, he was no longer weak. By the time of the premiere of From the House of the Dead, he had become so again; he was dead. The ending of the opera is masterly: the hero is released from the camp. "Freedom! Freedom!" the convicts cry. Then the commandant shouts: "Back to work!" and these are the last words of the opera, which closes with the brutal rhythm of forced labor punctuated by the syncopated rattle of chains. The posthumous premiere was conducted by a pupil of Janacek's (who also prepared the barely finished manuscript of the score for publication). He fiddled a bit with the final pages: thus the cry "Freedom! Freedom!" returns at the end, and broadened into a tacked-on long coda, a joyous coda, an apotheosis (still another one). It is not an addition that, by repetition, extends the author's intent; it is the denial of that intent; the final lie that annuls the truth of the opera.
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I open the biography of Hemingway published in 1985 by Jeffrey Meyers, a professor of literature in an American university, and I read the passage on "Hills Like White Elephants." The first thing I learn: the story "may… portray Hemingway's response to Hadley's [his first wife's] second pregnancy." There follows this commentary, which I accompany with my own italicized remarks in brackets:
"The comparison of hills with white elephants- imaginary animals that represent useless items, like the unwanted baby-is crucial to the meaning [the comparison, a bit forced, of elephants with unwanted babies is not Hemingway's but the professor's; it is needed to set up the sentimental interpretation of the story]. The simile becomes a focus of contention and establishes an opposition between the imaginative woman, who is moved by the landscape, and the literal-minded man, who refuses to sympathize with her point of view… The theme of the story evolves from a series of polarities: natural v. unnatural, instinctive v. rational, reflective v. talkative, vital v. morbid [the professor's intention becomes clear: to make the woman the morally positive pole, the man the morally negative pole]. The egoistic man [there is no reason to call the man egoistic, unaware of the woman's feelings [there is no reason to say this], tries to bully her into having an abortion… so they can be exactly as they were before… The woman, who finds it horribly unnatural, is frightened of killing the baby [she cannot kill the baby, given that it is unborn] and hurting herself. Everything the man says is false [no: everything the man says is ordinary words of consolation, the only kind possible in such a situation]; everything the woman says is ironic [there are many other explanations for the girl's remarks]. He forces her to consent to this operation ["I wouldn 't have you do it if you didn 't want to," he says twice, and there is nothing to show that he is insincere] in order to regain his love [there is nothing to show either that she had the man's love or that she had lost it], but the very fact that he can ask her to do such a thing means that she can never love him again [there is no way to know what will happen after the scene in the railroad station]. She agrees to this form of self-destruction [the destruction of a fetus and the destruction of a woman are not the same thing] after reaching the kind of dissociation of self that was portrayed in Dostoyevskys Underground Man and in Kafka's Joseph K., and that reflects his attitude toward her: 'Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.' [Reflecting someone else's attitude is not a dissociation, otherwise all children who obey their parents would be dissociated and would be like Josef K.] She then walks away from him and… finds comfort in nature: in the fields of grain, the trees, the river and the hills beyond. Her peaceful contemplation [we know nothing about the feelings that the sight of nature stirs in the girl; but in any case they are not peaceful feelings, for the words she speaks immediately afterward are bitter] recalls Psalm 121 as she lifts up her eyes to the hills for help [the plainer Hemingway's style, the more pretentious his commentator's]. But her mood is shattered by the mans persistent argument [let's read the story carefully: it is not the American man, it is the girl who, after her brief withdrawal, is the first to speak and continues the argument; the man is not looking for an argument, he only wants to calm the girl down], which drives her to the edge of a breakdown. Echoing King Lear's 'Never, never, never, never, never,' she frantically begs: 'Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?' [the evocation of Shakespeare is as meaningless as were those of Dostoyevsky and Kafka]." Let us summarize the summary:
1) In the American professor's interpretation, the short story is transformed into a moral lesson: the characters are judged according to their attitude toward abortion, which is a priori considered an evil: thus the woman ("imaginative," "moved by the landscape") represents the natural, the living, the instinctive, the reflective; the man ("egoistic," "literal-minded") represents the artificial, the rational, the chatty, the unhealthy (note incidentally that in modern moral discourse, the rational represents evil and the instinctive represents good);
2) the connection to the author's biography suggests that the negative, immoral hero is Hemingway himself, who is making a kind of confession through the intermediary of the story; in that case the dialogue loses all its enigmatic quality, the characters are without mystery and, for anyone who has read Hemingway's biography, thoroughly determined and clear;
3) the original aesthetic nature of the story (its lack of psychologizing, its intentional veiling of the characters' pasts, its undramatic nature, etc.) is not considered; worse, that aesthetic nature is undone;
4) starting with the basic givens of the story (a man and a girl are on their way to an abortion), the professor goes on to invent his own story: an egoistic man is engaged in forcing his wife to have an abortion; the wife despises her husband, whom she will never again be able to love;
5) this other story is absolutely flat and all cliches; nevertheless, because it is compared successively with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, the Bible, and Shakespeare (the professor has managed to assemble in one paragraph the greatest authorities of all time), it retains its status as a great work and therefore, despite its authors moral poverty, justifies the professor's interest in it.
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This is how kitsch-making interpretation kills off works of art. Some forty years before the American professor imposed this moralizing meaning on the story, "Hills Like White Elephants" was published in France under the title '"Paradis perdu," a title that has no relation to Hemingway (in no other language does the story bear this title) and that suggests the same meaning (paradise lost: preabortion innocence, happiness of impending motherhood, etc., etc.).
Kitsch-making interpretation is actually not the personal defect of some American professor or some early-twentieth-century Prague conductor (many conductors after him have ratified his alterations of Jenufa); it is a seduction that comes out of the collective unconscious; a command from the metaphysical prompter; a perennial social imperative; a force. That force is aimed not at art alone but primarily at reality
itself. It does the opposite of what Flaubert, Janacek, Joyce, and Hemingway did. It throws a veil of commonplaces over the present moment, in order that the face of the real will disappear.
So that you shall never know what you have lived.
PART SIX. Works and Spiders
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"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 ide
as 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.
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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."