Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  It's often said: if Kafka really wishecl to destroy what he had written, he would have destroyed it himself. But how? His letters were in the hands of the recipients. (He himself kept none of the letters he received.) It's true that he could have burned his diaries. But they were working diaries (more notebooks than diaries), they were useful to him for as long as he was writing, and he wrote until his very last days. The same can be said of his unfinished works. Only in the event of death would they be irremediably unfinished; while he was still alive he could always get back to them. Not even a story he considers a failure is useless to a writer, as it can become material for

  another story. As long as he is not dying, a writer has no reason to destroy something he has written. But when Kafka was dying he was no longer in his home, he was in a sanatorium and unable to destroy anything, he could only count on a friend's help. And not having many friends, having finally but one, he counted on him.

  People also say that wanting to destroy one's own work is a pathological act. In that case, disobeying Kafka's destructive wish becomes loyalty to the other Kafka, the creator. This touches on the greatest lie of the legend surrounding his testament: Kafka did not want to destroy his work. He expressed himself with utter precision in the second of those letters: "Of all my writings, only the books are worthwhile [gelten]: Judgment, Stoker, Metamorphosis., Penal Colony, Country Doctor, and a story: 'Hunger Artist.' (The few copies of Meditations can stay, I don't want to put anyone to the trouble of pulping them, but nothing from that book is to be reprinted.)" Thus, not only did Kafka not repudiate his work, but he actually assessed it and tried to separate what should survive (what could be reprinted) from what fell short of his standards; there is sadness, severity, but no insanity, no blindness of despair, in his judgment: he finds all his published books worthwhile except the first, Meditations, probably considering it immature (that would be hard to contradict). His rejection does not automatically concern everything unpublished, for he includes among the "worthwhile" works the story "A Hunger Artist," which at the time he wrote the letter existed only in manuscript. Later on, he added to that piece three more stories ("First Sorrow," "A Little

  Woman," and "Josefine the Singer") to make a book; he was correcting the proofs of this book in the sanatorium on his deathbed-nearly poignant evidence that Kafka had nothing to do with the legend of the author wanting to destroy his work.

  His wish to destroy thus concerns only two clearly defined categories of writing:

  – in the first place, most emphatically: the personal writings: letters, diaries;

  – in the second place: the stories and the novels he had not, in his judgment, succeeded in bringing off.

  8

  I am looking at a window across the way. Toward evening the light goes on. A man enters the room. Head lowered, he paces back and forth; from time to time he runs his hand through his hair. Then, suddenly, he realizes that the lights are on and he can be seen. Abruptly, he pulls the curtain. Yet he wasn't counterfeiting money in there; he had nothing to hide but himself, the way he walked around the room, the sloppy way he was dressed, the way he stroked his hair. His well-being depended on his freedom from being seen.

  Shame is one of the key notions of the Modern Era, the individualistic period that is imperceptibly receding from us these days; shame: an epidermal instinct to defend one's personal life; to require a curtain over the window; to insist that a letter addressed to A not be read by B. One of the elementary situations in the passage to adulthood, one of the prime conflicts with par-

  ents, is the claim to a drawer for letters and notebooks, the claim to a drawer with a key; we enter adulthood through the rebellion of shame.

  An old revolutionary Utopia, whether fascist or communist: life without secrets, where public life and private life are one and the same. The surrealist dream Andre Breton loved: the glass house, a house without curtains where man lives in full view of the world. Ah, the beauty of transparency! The only successful realization of this dream: a society totally monitored by the police.

  I wrote about this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Jan Prochazka, an important figure of the Prague Spring, came under heavy surveillance after the Russian invasion of 1968. At the time, he saw a good deal of another great opposition figure, Professor Vaclav Cerny, with whom he liked to drink and talk. All their conversations were secretly recorded, and I suspect the two friends knew it and didn't give a damn. But one day in 1970 or 1971, with the intent to discredit Prochazka, the police began to broadcast these conversations as a radio serial. For the police it was an audacious, unprecedented act. And, surprisingly: it nearly succeeded; instantly Prochazka was discredited: because in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we bad-mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public

  is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Thus only gradually did people realize (though their rage was all the greater) that the real scandal was not Prochazkas daring talk but the rape of his life; they realized (as if by electric shock) that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain-rippers are criminals. And because the curtain-rippers were serving a hated regime, they were unanimously held to be particularly contemptible criminals.

  When I arrived in France from that Czechoslovakia bristling with microphones, I saw on a magazine cover a large photo of Jacques Brel hiding his face from the photographers who had tracked him down in front of the hospital where he was being treated for his already advanced cancer. And suddenly I felt I was encountering the very same evil that had made me flee my country; broadcasting Prochazkas conversations and photographing a dying singer hiding his face seemed to belong to the same world; I said to myself that when it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person's private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual.

  9

  There are almost no trees in Iceland, and the few that exist are all in the cemeteries; as if there were no dead without trees, as if there were no trees without the dead. They are not planted alongside the grave, as in idyllic Central Europe, but right in the center of it, to force a passerby to imagine the roots down below piercing the body. I am walking with Elvar D. in the Reykjavik cemetery; he stops at a grave whose tree is still quite small; barely a year ago his friend was buried; he starts reminiscing aloud about him: his private life was marked by some secret, probably a sexual one. "Because secrets excite such irritated curiosity, my wife, my daughters, the people around me, all insisted I tell them about it. To such an extent that my relations with my wife have been bad ever since. I couldn't forgive her aggressive curiosity, and she couldn't forgive my silence, which to her was evidence of how little I trusted her." He smiled, and then: "I divulged nothing," he said. "Because I had nothing to divulge. I had forbidden myself to want to know my friends secrets, and I didn't know them." I listened to him with fascination: since childhood I had heard it said that a friend is the person with whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is something else: it is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.

  10

  I think of the endi
ng of The Trial: the two men bend over K. and one of them thrusts a knife deep into his heart: "With failing eyes K. could still see, right near his face, the two men cheek by jowl watching the outcome: 'Like a dog!' he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him."

  The last noun in The Trial: "shame." Its last image: the faces of two strangers, close by his own face, almost touching it, watching K.'s most intimate state, his death throes. In that last noun, in that last image, is concentrated the entire novel's fundamental situation: being accessible at any time in his bedroom; having his breakfast eaten by other people; being available, day and night, to go where he's summoned; seeing his window curtains confiscated; being unable to see whom he wants; no longer being his own man; losing his status as an individual. This transformation of a man from subject to object is experienced as shame.

  I don't believe that Kafka asked Brod to destroy his letters because he feared their publication. Such an idea could scarcely have entered his mind. The publishers were not interested in his novels, why would they have cared about his letters? What made him want to destroy them was shame, simple shame, not that of a writer but that of an ordinary individual, the shame of leaving private things lying about for the eyes of others-of the family, of strangers-the shame of being turned into an object, the shame that could "outlive him."

  And yet Brod made these letters public; earlier, in his own will and testament, he had asked Kafka "to destroy certain things"; and here he himself published everything, indiscriminately; even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letter that Kafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod, anyone but its addressee could eventually read. To me, Brods indiscretion is inexcusable. He betrayed his friend. He acted against his friends wishes, against the meaning and the spirit of his wishes, against the sense of shame he knew in the man.

  11

  There is an essential difference between the novel on the one hand and memoirs, biography, autobiography, on the other. A biography's value lies in the newness and accuracy of the real facts it reveals. A novel's value is in the revelation of previously unseen possibilities of existence as such; in other words, the novel uncovers what is hidden in each of us. A common form of praise for a novel is to say: I see myself in that character; I have the sense that the author knows me and is writing about me; or as a grievance: I feel attacked, laid bare, humiliated by this novel. We should never mock such apparently naive judgments: thev prove that the novel is being read as a novel.

  That is why the roman a clef (which deals with real people with the intention of making them recognizable beneath fictional names) is a false novel, an aesthetically equivocal thing, morally unclean. Kafka disguised under the name Garta! You object to the

  author: "That's not accurate!" The author: "These aren't memoirs I've written; Carta is an imaginary character!" You: "As an imaginary character, he's implausible, badly made, written with no talent!" The author: "But this isn't the usual sort of character; he lets me make new revelations about my friend Kafka!" You: "Inaccurate revelations!" The author: "These aren't memoirs I've written; Carta is an imaginary character!… " And so on.

  Of course, every novelist, intentionally or not, draws on his own life; there are entirely invented characters, created out of pure reverie; there are those inspired by a model, sometimes directly, more often indirectly; there are those created from a single detail observed in some person; and all of them owe much to the author's introspection, to his self-knowledge. The work of the imagination transforms these inspirations and observations so thoroughly that the novelist forgets about them. Yet before publishing his book, he must think to hide the keys that might make them detectable; first, out of the minimum of consideration due persons who, to their surprise, will find fragments of their lives in the novel, and second, because keys (true or false) one puts into the reader's hands can only mislead him: instead of unknown aspects of existence, he will be searching a novel for unknown aspects of the author's existence; the entire meaning of the art of the novel will thus be annihilated, as it was annihilated, for instance, by that American professor who, wielding his huge bunch of skeleton keys, wrote the big biography of Hemingway:

  Through the force of his interpretation, he turned Hemingway's whole oeuvre into a single roman a clef;

  as if it had been turned inside out like a jacket: suddenly, the books are invisible inside, and on the lining outside, a reader avidly observes the (real or alleged) events of the life-trivial, painful, ridiculous, pedestrian, stupid, petty events; thus the work is undone, the imaginary characters are transformed into people from the authors life, and the biographer begins the moral trial of the writer: in one short story there is a wicked mother character: Hemingway is maligning his own mother here; in another story there is a cruel father: it is Hemingway's revenge on his father for allowing his childhood tonsils to be removed without anesthesia; in "Cat in the Rain," the unnamed female character "is dissatisfied with her… self-absorbed, unresponsive husband": this is Hemingways wife Hadley, complaining; the female character of "Summer People" is to be seen as the wife of Dos Passos: Hemingway tried in vain to seduce her and, in the story, he abuses her disgracefully by making love to her in the guise of a character; in Across the River and Into the Trees, an unnamed, very ugly man appears in a bar: Hemingway is describing the ugliness of Sinclair Lewis, who, "bitterly hurt and angered by Hemingway's cruelest passage, died three months after the novel was published." And so on and on, one denunciation after another.

  Novelists have always resisted that biographical furor whose representative prototype, according to Proust, is Sainte-Beuve with his motto: "I do not look on literature as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man…" Understanding a work therefore requires knowing the man first-that is, Sainte-Beuve specifies, knowing the answers to a cer-

  tain number of questions even though they "might seem at the furthest remove from the nature of his writings: What were his religious views? How did he react to the sight of nature? How did he conduct himself in regard to women, in regard to money? Was he rich, was he poor? What governed his actions, what was his daily way of life? What was his vice, or his weakness?" This quasi-police method, Proust comments, requires a critic "to surround himself with every possible piece of information about a writer, to check his letters, to interrogate people who knew him…"

  Yet, surrounded as he was "with every possible piece of information," Sainte-Beuve managed not to recognize any of the great writers of his time-not Balzac, nor Stendhal, nor Baudelaire; by studying their lives he inevitably missed their work, because, said Proust, "a book is the product of a self other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices'; "the writers true self is manifested in his books alone."

  Proust's polemic against Sainte-Beuve is of fundamental importance. Let us make clear: Proust is not criticizing Sainte-Beuve for exaggerating; he is not decrying the limitations of Sainte-Beuve's method; his verdict is absolute: that method is blind to the author's other self; blind to his aesthetic wishes; incompatible with art; directed against art; inspired by hatred of art.

  12

  In France, Kafka's work is published in four volumes. The second volume: stories and narrative fragments;

  that is: everything Kafka published in his lifetime, plus everything found in his desk drawers: unpublished and incomplete stories, drafts, false starts, rejected or abandoned versions. What order should it all have? The editor applied two principles: (1) with no distinction as to their nature, genre, or degree of completion, all the narrative writings are set on an equal plane and (2) arranged in chronological order, that is, in the order of their birth.

  This is why none of the three collections of stories Kafka himself put together for publication (Meditations, A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist) is presented here in France in the form Kafka gave them; these collections have simply disappeared; the individual stories constituting them are scattered among other things (am
ong drafts, fragments, and such) by chronology; thus eight hundred pages of Kafka's writings become a flood where everything dissolves into everything else, a flood formless as only water can be, water that flows and carries along with it both good and bad, finished and unfinished, strong and weak, draft and work.

  Brod had already proclaimed the "fanatical veneration" with which he surrounded each of Kafka's words. The editors of Kafka's work show the same absolute veneration for everything their author touched. But understand the mystery of absolute veneration: it is also, and inevitably, the absolute denial of the author's aesthetic wishes. For aesthetic wishes show not only by what an author has written but also by what he has deleted. Deleting a paragraph calls for even more talent, cultivation, and creative power than writing it does. Therefore, publishing what the author deleted is

  the same act of rape as censoring what he decided to retain.

  What obtains for deletions within the microcosm of a particular work also obtains for deletions within the macrocosm of a complete body of work. There too, as he assesses his work, and guided by his aesthetic requirements, the author often excludes what doesn't satisfy him. Claude Simon, for instance, no longer allows his earliest books to be reprinted. Faulkner explicitly stated his wish to leave no trace "but the printed books," in other words, none of what the garbage-can scavengers would find after his death. He thus made the same request as Kafka, and he was obeyed the same way: they published everything they could dig up. I purchase Seiji Ozawa's recording of Mahler's First Symphony. This four-movement symphony originally had five movements, but after the premiere Mahler definitively removed the second, which is not to be found in any printed score. Ozawa put it back into the symphony; so now absolutely everyone can see that Mahler was right to delete it. Need I go on? The list is endless.