Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  Tolstoy's meticulousness in describing all the spelling changes Pierre works on his own name so as to get to the number 666 is irresistibly comic: l'Russe is a marvelous orthographic gag. Can grave and courageous decisions of an unquestionably intelligent and likable man be rooted in some foolish idea?

  And what are your thoughts on man? What are your thoughts on yourself?

  Change of Opinion as Adjustment to the Spirit of the Time

  One day, with a radiant face, a woman declares to me: "So, there's no more Leningrad! We're back to good old Saint Petersburg!" It never did thrill me, cities and streets being rechristened. I am about to tell her this, but at the last moment I control myself: in her gaze,

  bedazzled by the fascinating march of history, I foresee disagreement, and I have no desire to argue, especially because just then I recall an episode she has certainly forgotten. This same woman came from abroad to visit my wife and me in Prague after the Russian invasion, in 1970 or 1971, when we were in the painful situation of being under ban. She was showing her solidarity with us, and we wanted to pay her back by trying to entertain her. My wife told her the funny story (it was oddly prophetic besides) of an American moneybags staying in a Moscow hotel. Someone asks him: "Have you been to see Lenin in the mausoleum?" And he replies: "For ten dollars I had him brought over to the hotel." Our visitors face tensed. A leftist (she still is), she saw the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as a betrayal of ideals she cherished, and felt it unacceptable that victims with whom she meant to sympathize should mock those same betrayed ideals. "I don't find that funny," she said coldly, and only our status as persecuted people saved us from a break with her.

  I can tell lots of stories of this kind. Such changes of opinion involve not only politics but also attitudes generally-feminism first on the rise and then in decline, admiration followed by scorn for the "nouveau roman," revolutionary puritanism supplanted by libertarian pornography, the idea of Europe denigrated as reactionary and neocolonialist by people who later unfurled it as a banner of Progress, and so on. And I wonder: do they or do they not recall their earlier attitudes? Do they retain any memory of the history of their changes? Not that it angers me to see people change their opinions. Bezukhov, formerly an admirer of Napoleon, becomes his potential assassin, and I like

  him just as much in the one role as in the other. Doesn't a woman who worshiped Lenin in 1971 have the right to rejoice in 1991 that Leningrad is no longer Leningrad? She certainly does. Her change, however, is different from Bezukhov's.

  It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself.

  By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindi-viduality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged.

  Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow. I remember my youth in Czechoslovakia.

  Having emerged from our initial enchantment with Communism, we felt each small step against official doctrine to be a courageous act. We protested the persecution of religious believers, stood up for banned modern art, argued against the stupidity of propaganda, criticized the country's dependence on Russia, and so on. In doing so, we were taking some risk-not much, but still some-and that (little) danger gave us a pleasant moral satisfaction. One day a hideous thought came to me: what if our rebellions were dictated not by internal freedom, by courage, but by the desire to please the other tribunal that was already preparing, in the shadows, to sit in judgment?

  Windows

  No one can go further than Kafka in The Trial; he created the extremely poetic image of an extremely non-poetic world. By "extremely nonpoetic world" 1 mean: a world where there is no longer a place for individual freedom, for the uniqueness of the individual, where man is only the instrument of extrahuman forces: of bureaucracy, technology, History. By "extremely poetic image" I mean: without changing its essence and its nonpoetic nature, Kafka has transformed, reshaped that world by his immense poetic imagination.

  K. is completely absorbed by the predicament of this trial that has been imposed upon him; he hasn't a moment to think about anything else. And yet, even in this no-way-out predicament, there are windows that open suddenly, for a brief instant. He cannot escape through these windows; they edge open and then shut

  instantly; but for a flash at least, he can see the poetry of the world outside, the poetry that, despite everything, exists as an ever present possibility and sends a small silvery glint into his life as a hunted man.

  Some such brief openings are K.s glances, for instance: he reaches the suburban street where he has been called for his first interrogation. A moment before, he was still running to get there on time. Now he stops. Standing in the street, he forgets the trial for a few seconds and looks around: "Most of the windows were occupied, men in shirtsleeves were leaning there smoking or holding little children carefully and tenderly on the windowsills. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman would appear for a moment." Then he enters the courtyard: "Near him a barefooted man was sitting on a crate reading a newspaper. Two boys were seesawing on a handcart. A frail young girl was standing at a pump in her nightdress and gazing at K. while she filled her jug with water."

  These sentences remind me of Flaubert's descriptions: concise; visually rich; a sense of detail, none of which is cliched. That power of description makes clear how thirsty K. is for reality, how avidly he drinks up the world that, just a moment earlier, was eclipsed by worries about the trial. Alas, the pause is short; the next instant K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl in her nightdress filling her jug with water: the torrent of the trial takes him up again.

  The few erotic situations in the novel are also like windows briefly ajar-very briefly: K. meets only women who are connected in one way or another to his trial: for instance, his neighbor Fraulein Biirstner, in whose room he had been arrested; troubled, K. tells her what happened and finally, at her door, he manages to kiss her: "He seized her and kissed her on the mouth, and then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a long-sought spring." I emphasize the word "thirsty," which gives the sense of a man who has lost his normal life and can contact it only furtively, through a window.

  During the first interrogation, K. is making a speech but is thrown off track by a curious event: the bailiffs wife is in the room, and a scrawny, ugly student gets her down on the floor and is making love to her in the midst of the audience. With this amazing interplay of incompatible events (that sublime Kafkan poetry, grotesque and implausible!), a new window opens onto the landscape far from the trial, onto exuberant vulgarity, the exuberant vulgar freedom that has been confiscated from K.

  That Kafkan poetry reminds me, by contrast, of another novel that is also about an arrest and a trial: Orwell's 1984. the book that for decades served as a constant reference for antitotalitarianism professionals. In this novel, which means to be the horrifying portrayal of an imaginary totalitarian
society, there are no windows; in it no one glimpses a frail young girl filling a jug with water; Orwell's novel is firmly closed to poetry; did I say novel? it is political thought disguised as a novel; the thinking is certainly lucid and correct, but it is distorted by its guise as a novel, which renders it imprecise and vague. So if the novel form obscures Orwell's thought, does it give something in return? Does it throw light on the mystery of human situations that sociology or political science cannot get at? No:

  the situations and the characters are as flat as a poster. Then is it justified at least as a popularization of good ideas? Not that either. For ideas made into a novel function no longer as ideas but as a novel instead- and in the case of 1984, as a bad novel, with all the pernicious influence a bad novel can exert.

  The pernicious influence of Orwell's novel resides in its implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone, and in its reduction of that dimension to what is exemplarily negative about it. I refuse to forgive this reduction on the grounds that it was useful as propaganda in the struggle against totalitarian evil. For that evil is, precisely, the reduction of life to politics and of politics to propaganda. So despite its intentions, Orwell's novel itself joins in the totalitarian spirit, the spirit of propaganda. It reduces (and teaches others to reduce) the life of a hated society to the simple listing of its crimes.

  In talking with Czechs a year or two after the end of Communism, I would hear from every one of them that now-ritual turn of speech, that obligatory preamble to all their recollections, all their remarks: "after those forty years of Communist horror" or: "those horrible forty years" or especially: "the forty lost years." I looked at my interlocutors: they had been neither forced to emigrate, nor imprisoned, nor deprived of their jobs, nor even looked down on; all of them had lived their lives in their own country, in their apartments, had done their work and had their vacations, their friendships and their loves; with the expression "forty horrible years" they were reducing their lives to the political aspect alone. But even the political history of those forty years-did they really experience that only as an undifferentiated block of horrors? Have they forgotten the years when they were seeing Milos Forman's films, reading Bohuslav Hrabal's books, going to the little nonconformist theaters, and telling hundreds of jokes and cheerfully making fun of the regime? In their talk of forty horrible years, they were all Orwellizing the recollection of their own lives, which, a posteriori, in their memories and in their heads, were thereby devalued or even completely obliterated (forty lost years).

  Even in his situation of extreme deprivation of freedom, K. is able to look at a frail young girl slowly filling her jug with water. I've said that such moments are windows that briefly open onto a landscape far away from K.'s trial. What landscape? To make the metaphor more precise: the windows in Kafka's novel open onto Tolstoys landscape: onto a world where, even at the harshest moments, characters retain a freedom of decision which gives life the happy incalcula-bility that is the source of poetry. The extremely poetic world of Tolstoy is the opposite of Kafka's world. But even so, because of the half-open window, it enters K.'s story like a breath of yearning, like a barely felt breeze, and stays there.

  Tribunal and Trial

  The philosophers of existence like to breathe philosophical significance into the words of everyday language. It is difficult for me to say the words anguish or talk without thinking of the meaning Heidegger gave them. On this score, the novelists preceded the philoso-

  phers. In examining their characters' situations, they worked out their own vocabulary, often with key words that stand as concepts and go beyond the dictionary definitions. Thus Crebillon the younger used the word moment as a concept word for the libertine game (the moment of opportunity when a woman can be seduced) and bequeathed it to his time and to other writers. In the same way, Dostoyevsky spoke of humiliation and Stendhal of vanity. Thanks to The Trial, Kafka bequeathed to us at least two concept words that have become indispensable for understanding the modern world: tribunal and trial. He bequeathed them to us: meaning that he put them at our disposal, for us to use, consider, and reconsider in terms of our own experiences.

  Tribunal: this does not signify the juridical institution intended for punishing people who have violated the laws of a state; the tribunal (or court) in Kafka's sense is a power that judges, that judges because it is a power; its power and nothing but its power is what confers legitimacy on the tribunal; when the two intruders enter his room, K. immediately recognizes that power, and he submits.

  The trial brought by the tribunal is always absolute; meaning that it does not concern an isolated act, a specific crime (theft, fraud, rape), but rather concerns the character of the accused in its entirety: K. searches for his offense in "the most minute events" of his whole life; in our century, by this standard, Bezukhov would have been indicted for both his love and his hatred of Napoleon. And also for his drunk-ennness, since, being absolute, the trial concerns private life as well as public; Brod condemned K. to death for seeing in women only the "lowest sexuality"; I recall the 1951 political trials in Prague; biographies of the accused were distributed in enormous printings; that was the first time I read a piece of pornography: the account of an orgy during which the naked body of a female defendant was coated with chocolate (at that peak of shortages!) and licked by the tongues of other defendants, soon to be hanged; at the start of the gradual collapse of the Communist ideology, the trial of Karl Marx (a trial that has lately culminated in the razing of his statues in Russia and elsewhere) opened with an attack on his private life (the first anti-Marx book I ever read: the account of his sexual relations with his housemaid); in The Joke, three other students are trying Ludvik over a sentence he has written his girlfriend; defending himself, he says he dashed it off in haste, without thinking; they answer: "you could only have written what was inside you"; because everything the defendant says, murmurs, thinks, everything he has hidden inside him is to be put at the tribunal's disposal.

  The trial is absolute as well in that it does not keep within the limits of the defendant's life; thus K.s uncle says: "Do you want to lose this trial?… It means that you will be absolutely ruined. And all your relatives along with you." The guilt of one Jew contains within it that of the Jews of all times; the Communist doctrine on the influence of class origin includes within the offense of the accused the offense of his parents and grandparents; in the trial of Europe for the crime of colonialism, Sartre accused not the colonists but Europe, all of Europe, the Europe of all times; because "there is a colonist in each of us," because "being a man here means being an accomplice since we have all profited from colonial exploitation." The spirit of the trial recognizes no statute of limitations; the distant past is as alive as today's event; and even in death you will not escape: there are informers in the cemetery.

  The trial's memory is colossal, but it is a very specific memory, which could be defined as the forgetting of everything not a crime. The trial thus reduces the defendant's biography to criminography; Victor Farias (whose Heidegger and Nazism is a classic example of criminography) locates the roots of the philosopher's Nazism in his early youth, without the least concern for locating the roots of his genius; to punish someone accused of ideological deviations, Communist tribunals would put all his work on the index (thus, for instance, the ban on Lukacs and Sartre in Communist countries covered even their pro-Communist writings). "Why are our streets still named for Picasso, Aragon, Eluard, Sartre?" a Paris paper asked in a 1991 post-Communist intoxication; it's tempting to answer: because of the value of their works! But in his trial against Europe, Sartre said exactly what values mean now: "our cherished values are losing their wings; looked at closely, every one of them is blood-stained"; values stained are values no longer; the spirit of the trial is the reduction of everything to morality; it is absolute nihilism in regard to craft, art, works.

  Even before the intruders come in to arrest him, K. sees the old woman in the house across the way
gazing at him "with totally unusual curiosity"; thus, from the beginning, the ancient chorus of concierges enters the game; in The Castle, Amalia is neither accused nor convicted, but it is widely known that the invisible tribunal dislikes her, and that is enough to keep all the villagers away from her; because if the tribunal imposes a trial-regime on a country, the entire population is dragooned into the grand machinations of the trial, increasing its efficacy a hundredfold; every single person knows that he could be accused at any moment, and he ponders his self-criticism in advance; self-criticism: the subjection of the accused to the accuser; the renunciation of his self; a way of nullifying himself as an individual; after the Communist revolution of 1948, the daughter of a wealthy Czech family felt guilty about her undeserved privileges as a child of affluence; to show her repentance, she became so fervent a Communist that she publicly repudiated her father; now, after the disappearance of Communism, she is again undergoing judgment and again feeling guilty; ground between the millstones of two trials, of two self-criticisms, all she has behind her is the desert of a repudiated life; even though in the meantime all the houses once confiscated from her (repudiated) father have been returned to her, today she is merely a nullified creature; doubly nullified; self-nullified.