Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  10

  The balance sheet, then, is not entirely bad, but it is not good either. With Janacek this was so from the beginning. Jenufa reached the world's stages twenty years after it was written. Too late. For after twenty years the polemical character of an aesthetic disappears, and then its novelty is no longer discernible. That is why Janacek's music is so often badly understood, and so badly performed; its historic meaning is blurred; it seems unclassifiable; like a beautiful garden laid out just next door to History; the question of its place in the evolution (better: in the genesis) of modern music doesn't even arise.

  If in the case of Broch, of Musil, of Gombrowicz, and in a certain sense of Bartok, delay in recognition is due to historic catastrophes (Nazism, war), but in Janacek's case it was his small nation that completely took over the role of the catastrophes.

  11

  Small nations. The concept is not quantitative; it describes a situation; a destiny: small nations haven't the comfortable sense of being there always, past and future; they have all, at some point or another in their history, passed through the antechamber of death; always faced with the arrogant ignorance of the large nations, they see their existence perpetually threatened or called into question; for their very existence is a question.

  Most of the small European nations became free and independent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus they have their own evolutionary rhythm. For the arts, this historical asynchrony has often been a fruitful thing, as it made for the curious telescoping of different eras: for instance, Janacek and Bartok were both ardent participants in the national struggle of their peoples; that is their nineteenth-century side: an extraordinary sense of reality, an attachment to the working classes and to popular arts, a more spontaneous rapport with the audience; these qualities, already gone from the arts in the large countries, here merged with the aesthetic of modernism in a surprising, inimitable, felicitous marriage.

  The small nations form "another Europe," whose evolution runs in counterpoint with that of the large nations. An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life. This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a "human scale'; everyone can encompass that wealth, can participate in the totality of cultural life; this is why, in its best moments, a small nation can bring to mind life in an ancient Greek city.

  That potential for everyone's participation in everything can also bring to mind something else: the family; a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for "family" is fjolskylda; the etymology is eloquent: skylda means "obligation"; fjol means "multiple." Family is thus "a multiple obligation." Icelanders have a single word for "family ties": fjolskyldubond: "the cords (bond) of multiple obligations." Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in multiple ways, by multiple cords. When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his homeland, no German or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor.

  Secluded behind their inaccessible languages, the small European nations (their life, their history, their culture) are very ill known; people think, naturally enough, that this is the principal handicap to international recognition of their art. But it is the reverse: what handicaps their art is that everything and everyone (critics, historians, compatriots as well as foreigners) hooks the art onto the great national family portrait photo and will not let it get away. Gombrowicz: to no purpose (and with no competence either), foreign commentators struggle to explain his work by discoursing on the Polish nobility, on the Polish Baroque, etc., etc. As Lakis Proguidis writes, [2] they "Polonize" him, "re-Polonize" him, push him back into the small context of the national. However, it is not familiarity with the Polish nobility but familiarity with the international modern novel (that is, with the large context) that will bring us to understand the originality and, hence, the value of Gombrowiczs novels.

  12

  Ah, small nations. Within that warm intimacy, each envies each, everyone watches everyone. "Families, I hate you!" And still another line from Gide: "There is nothing more dangerous for you than your own family, your own room, your own past… You must leave them." Ibsen, Strindberg, Joyce, Seferis knew this. They spent a large part of their lives abroad, away from the family's power. For Janacek, that ingenuous patriot, this was inconceivable. And he paid the price.

  Of course, all modern artists have had experience with hatred and incomprehension from the public; but they were also surrounded by disciples, by theoreticians, by performers who from the beginning were defending them and promulgating the authentic idea of their art. In Brno, in a province where he spent his whole life, Janacek too had his faithful followers, some performers who were often admirable (the Janacek Quartet was among the last heirs to this tradition) but whose influence was weak. From the early years of the century, official Czech musicology disdained him. Knowing no other musical gods but Smetana, nor other laws than the Smetanesque, the national ideologues were irritated by his otherness. The pope of Prague musicology, Professor Nejedly, who late in his life, in 1948, became minister and omnipotent ruler of culture in Stalinized Czechoslovakia, took with him into his bellicose senility only two great passions: Smetana worship and Janacek vilification. The most useful support of Janacek's lifetime came from Max Brod; between 1918 and 1928 Brod translated all Janacek's operas into German, thereby opening frontiers to them and delivering them from the exclusive power of the jealous family. In 1924 he wrote the first monograph on Janacek; but Brod was not Czech, and thus the first Janacek monograph was in German. The second was in French, published in Paris in 1930. The first complete monograph in Czech only appeared thirty-nine years after Brod's. [3] Franz Kafka compared Brod's campaign for Janacek to the one for Dreyfus earlier-a startling comparison that indicates the degree of hostility leveled at Janacek in his own country. From 1903 to 1916, the National Theater of Prague persistently turned away his first opera, Jenufa. In Dublin at the same time, from 1905 to 1914, Joyces countrymen refused publication of his first book of prose, Dubliners, in 1912 even burning the proofs. Janacek's story differs from Joyce's in the perversity of its outcome: he was forced to see the premiere of Jenufa directed by the conductor who for fourteen years had dismissed him, who for fourteen years had had only contempt for his music. He was obliged to be grateful. After that humiliating victory (the score was reddened with corrections, deletions, additions), he eventually came to be tolerated in Bohemia. I say "tolerated." If a family doesn't succeed in annihilating its unloved son, it humiliates him with maternal indulgence. The common view in Bohemia, meant as favorable, tears him out of the context of modern music and immures him in local concerns: passion for folklore, Moravian patriotism, admiration for Woman, for Nature, for Russia, for Slavitude, and other nonsense. Family, I hate you. Not a single important musicological study analyzing the aesthetic newness of his work has to this day been written by any of his compatriots. There is no significant school of Janacek interpretation, which might have made his strange aesthetic intelligible to the world. No strategy for making his music known. No complete recorded edition of his works. No complete edition of his theoretical and critical writings.

  And yet that little nation has never had any artist greater than he.

  13

  Let us go on. I consider the last decade of his life: his country independent, his music at last applauded, himself loved by a young woman; his works become more and more bold, free, merry. A Picasso-like old age. In the summer of 1928, his beloved and her two

  children come to see him in his little country house. The children wander off into the forest, he goes looking for them, runs every which way, catches cold and develops pneumonia, is taken to the hospital, and, a few days later, dies. She is there with him. From the time I was fourteen, I have heard the gossi
p that he died making love on his hospital bed. Not very plausible but, as Hemingway liked to say, truer than the truth. What better coronation for the wild euphoria that was his late age?

  And it is also proof that within his national family there were, after all, people who loved him. For that legend is a bouquet set upon his grave.

  PART EIGHT. Paths in the Fog

  What Is Irony?

  In Part Four of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tamina, the heroine, needs some help from her friend Bibi, a young graphomaniac; to win her goodwill, she arranges for her to meet a local writer named Banaka. He explains to the graphomaniac that todays real writers have renounced the obsolete art of the novel: "You know, the novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?… All anyone can do is give a report on oneself… Anything else is a lie." And Banakas friend, a philosophy professor, says: "Since James Joyce we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure… Homers odyssey has been taken inside. It has been interiorized." Some time after the book appeared, I found these words as the epigraph to a French novel. I was very flattered but embarrassed too, because, in my view, what Banaka and his friend said were just sophisticated stupidities. At the time, in the seventies, I was hearing them all around me: university chatter cobbled together from scraps of structuralism and psychoanalysis.

  This Part Four of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in Czechoslovakia as a small, separate volume (the first publication of any work of mine after a twenty-year ban), and a press clipping was sent to me in Paris: the reviewer was pleased with me, and as proof of my intelligence he quoted a line he considered brilliant: "Since James Joyce we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure," and so on. I took a strangely wicked pleasure at seeing myself ride back into my native land on a donkey of misunderstanding.

  The misapprehension is understandable: I hadn't set out to ridicule Banaka and his professor friend. I had not made obvious my reservation about them. On the contrary, I did all I could to conceal it, to give their opinions the elegance of the intellectual discourse that everyone, back then, respected and fervently imitated. If I had made their talk ridiculous, by exaggerating its excesses, I would have produced what is called satire. Satire is a thesis art; sure of its own truth, it ridicules what it determines to combat. The novelists relation to his characters is never satirical; it is ironic. But how does irony, which is by definition discreet, make itself apparent? By the context: Banaka's and his friends remarks are set within an environment of gestures, actions, and words that relativize them. The little provincial world that surrounds Tamina is characterized by an innocent egocentrism: everyone has sincere liking for her, and yet no one tries to understand her, not even knowing what "understanding" would mean. When Banaka says that the art of the novel is obsolete because the notion of understanding others is an illusion, he is expressing not only a fashionable aesthetic attitude but, unknowingly, his own misery and that of his milieu: a lack of desire to understand another; an egocentric blindness toward the real world.

  Irony means: none of the assertions found in a novel can be taken by itself, each of them stands in a complex and contradictory juxtaposition with other assertions, other situations, other gestures, other ideas, other events. Only a slow reading, twice and many times over, can bring out all the ironic connections inside a novel, without which the novel remains uncomprehended.

  K.'s Curious Behavior During His Arrest

  K. wakes up one morning and, still in bed, rings for his breakfast to be brought. Instead of the maid, two strangers arrive, ordinary men, in ordinary dress, who nevertheless immediately behave with such authority that K. cannot help but feel their force, their power. So although he is exasperated, he is incapable of throwing them out and instead he politely asks them: "Who are you?"

  From the beginning, K.'s behavior oscillates between his weakness, prepared to bow to the intruders' unbelievable effrontery (they have come to notify him that he is under arrest), and his fear of appearing ridiculous. For instance, he says firmly: "I shall neither stay here nor let you address me until you have introduced yourselves." It would suffice to pull these words out of their ironic setting, to take them literally (as my reader took Banakas words), and K. would be for us (as he was for Orson Welles in his film version of The Trial) a man-in-revolt-against-violence. Yet it suffices to read the text carefully to see that this man said to be in revolt continues to obey the intruders, who not only never deign to introduce themselves but also eat his breakfast and keep him standing the whole time in his nightshirt.

  At the end of this scene of odd humiliation (he offers them his hand and they refuse to take it), one of the men says to K.: "You'll be going to the bank now, I suppose?" "To the bank?" asks K. "I thought I was under arrest."

  There he is again, the man-in-revolt-against-violence! He is being sarcastic! He is being provocative! As, by the way, Kafka's commentary makes explicit: "K. asked the question with a certain defiance, for though his offer to shake hands had been ignored, he felt, especially now that the inspector had risen to his feet, more and more independent of all these people. He was playing with them. If they should leave, he planned to chase after them to the front door and offer himself up for arrest."

  Here is a very subtle irony: K. is capitulating but wants to see himself as someone strong who "plays with them," who mocks them by derisively pretending to take his arrest seriously; he is capitulating but immediately also interprets his capitulation in a way that lets him maintain his dignity in his own eyes.

  People first read Kafka with a tragic expression on their faces. Then they heard that when Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, he made them all laugh. Thereupon readers started forcing themselves to laugh too, but without knowing exactly why. What actually is so funny in this chapter? K.'s behavior. But what is comic about this behavior?

  The question reminds me of the years I spent at the cinema school in Prague. During the teachers' meetings, a friend and I would always watch with a malicious affection one of our colleagues, a writer of about fifty, a man who was subtle and correct but whom we suspected of tremendous, incurable cowardice. We dreamed up the following scenario, which (alas!) we never carried out:

  In the middle of the meeting, one of us would suddenly tell him: "On your knees!"

  At first he wouldn't understand what we wanted; or more exactly, in his clear-eyed cravenness, he would understand instantly but would think to gain a little time by pretending not to understand.

  We would have to say it louder: "On your knees!"

  Now he could no longer pretend not to understand. He would be all set to obey, with just one problem: how to do it? How would he get down on his knees here, in front of all of his colleagues, without humiliating himself? He would look desperately for some funny remark to make as he got down: "Will you permit me, my dear colleagues," he would finally say, "to put a cushion under my knees? "

  "On your knees and be quiet!"

  He'd do it, putting his hands together and slightly tilting his head to the left: "My dear colleagues, if you have really studied Renaissance painting, this is exactly the way Raphael painted Saint Francis of Assisi."

  Every day we imagined new variations on this delectable scene, inventing more and more witty remarks for our colleagues efforts to preserve his dignity.

  The Second Trial of Josef K.

  As opposed to Orson Welles, Kafka's earliest interpreters were far from considering K. an innocent man in revolt against the arbitrary. Max Brod never doubted that Josef K. is guilty. What has he done? According to Brod (Despair and Salvation in the Work of Tranz Kafka [Verzweiflung und Erlosung im Werk Franz Kafkas], 1959), he is guilty of Lieblosigkeit, the inability to love. "Josef K. liebt niemanden, er liebelt nur, deshalb muss er sterben." Josef K. loves no one, he only dallies, and therefore he must die. (Let us never forget the sublime st
upidity of this sentence!) Brod is quick to adduce two proofs of Lieblosigkeit: according to a chapter left unfinished and excluded from The Trial (usually published as an appendix), Josef K. has not been to see his mother for three years; he has merely sent her money, getting information about her health from a cousin (a curious resemblance: Meursault, in The Stranger, is also accused of not loving his mother). The second piece of evidence is K.s relationship with Fraulein Biirstner, a relationship that Brod describes as of the "lowest sexuality" (niedrigster Sexualitat). "Fraulein Biirstner, to whom he is drawn by a kind of desire, remains shadowy to him as a human being, interests him only as a sexual creature."

  In his preface to the 1964 Prague edition of The Trials the Czech Kafkologist Eduard Goldstiicker criticized K. with equal severity, even though his vocabulary is marked not by theology, like Brod's, but by Marxist-style sociology: "Josef K. is guilty because he has allowed his life to be mechanized, automatized, alienated, to be fitted to the stereotyped rhythm of the social machine, let it be deprived of every human quality; thus K. has broken the law that, according to Kafka, rules all humankind: 'Be human.'" In the fifties Goldstiicker underwent a dreadful Stalinist trial where he was accused of imaginary crimes, and he spent four years in prison. I ask myself: how could this man, the victim of a trial himself, some ten years later set up a trial against another defendant, no guiltier than he?