Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  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.

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  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.

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  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."

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  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.

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  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 imagina
tion 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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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 fir
st 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.

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  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.