Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

trained men to something that was soon methodically inflicted on them at the political level.'

Let us recapitulate: a dissonance is justified if it expresses 'subjective suffering,' but in Stravinsky (who is morally guilty, as we know, of never discussing his sufferings) that very dissonance is the sign of brutality; a parallel is drawn (by a brilliant short circuit of Adorno thought) with political brutality: thus the dissonant chords added to Pergolesis music prefigure (and thereby prepare) the coming political oppression (which in this particular historical context can mean only one thing: fascism).

I had my own experience with the free transcription of a work from the past when, early in the 1970s, while I was still in Prague, I set about writing a variation for the theater on Jacques le Fataliste. Diderot being for me the embodiment of a free, rational, critical mind, I experienced my affection for him at the time as a kind of yearning for the West (to my eyes, the Russian occupation of my country represented a forced de-Westernization). But the meaning of things keeps changing: today I would say that Diderot embodied for me the first half of the art of the novel and that my play celebrated various principles well known to the novelists of old, and dear to me as well: (1) the euphoric freedom of composition; (2) the constant association of libertine stories and philosophical reflections; (3) the nonserious, ironical, parodic, shocking nature of those reflections. The rules of the game were clear: what I did was not an adaptation of Diderot, it was my own play, my variation on Diderot, my homage to Diderot: I completely rewrote his novel; the love stories are taken from him, but the ideas in the dialogue are largely mine; anyone can instantly see lines in it that are unthinkable from Diderot's pen; the eighteenth century was optimistic, my time is not, I myself still less so, and in my play the Master and Jacques characters indulge in dark excesses barely imaginable in the age of Enlightenment.

After that little experience of my own I can only call stupid those remarks on Stravinsky's brutality and violence. He loved his old master as I loved mine. In adding twentieth-century dissonances to melodies of the eighteenth, perhaps he imagined he might intrigue his master out in the beyond, that he might tell him something important about our time, that he might even amuse him. He needed to address him, to talk to him. The playful transcription of an old work was for him like a way of establishing communication between centuries.

Playful Transcription According to Kafka

A curious novel, Kafka's Amerika: indeed, why should this young twenty-nine-year- old writer have laid his first novel in a continent where he had never set foot? This choice shows a clear intent: to not do realism; better yet: to not do a serious work. He did not even try to palliate his ignorance by research; he invented his idea of America from second-rate readings, from

popular prints, and indeed, the novel's image of America is (intentionally) made up of cliches; the main inspiration for the characters and plot (as he acknowledged in his diary) is Dickens, especially David Copperfield (Kafka describes the first chapter of Amerika as 'a sheer imitation of Dickens'): he picks up particular motifs from it (and lists them: 'the story of the trunk, the boy who delights and charms everyone, the menial labor, the sweetheart in the country house, the filthy living quarters'), and he draws on its characters (Karl is an affectionate parody of David Copperfield) and especially on the atmosphere that all Dickens's novels bathe in: the sentimentality, the naive distinction between good and evil figures. Adorno speaks of Stravinsky's music as a 'music about music'; Kafka's Amerika is a 'literature about literature,' and within the genre it is even a classic work, perhaps a seminal one.

The first page of the novel: in the port of New York, Karl is about to leave the ship when he realizes that he has forgotten his umbrella below. In order to go back for it, with a gullibility that is barely believable he entrusts his steamer trunk (a heavy trunk holding everything he owns) to a stranger: of course, he loses the trunk and the umbrella both. From the first lines, the spirit of playful parody generates an imaginary world where nothing is completely plausible and everything is a little comical.

Kafka's castle, which exists on no map anywhere, is no more unreal than that America conceived as a cliche picture of the new civilization of gigantism and the machine. In the house of his uncle the senator, Karl comes across a desk that is an extraordinarily complicated machine, with a hundred compartments keyed to a hundred push buttons, an object at once practical and utterly useless, at once technical wonder and nonsense. I counted ten such devices in the novel, all marvelous, entertaining, and implausible, from the uncles desk, the mazelike country house, the Hotel Occidental (monstrously complex architecture, diabolically bureaucratic organization), to the Oklahoma Theater, itself another enormous, incomprehensible administration. So it is through parodic playing (playing with cliches) that Kafka first set out his greatest theme, that of the labyrinthine social organization where man loses his way and proceeds to his ruin. (Genetically speaking: the comical mechanism of the uncles desk is the ancestor of the terrifying castle administration.) Kafka managed to capture this theme, grave as it is, not by means of a realistic novel, grounded in some Zolaesque examination of society, but by just that seemingly frivolous means of 'literature about literature' which allowed his imagination all the freedom it required (freedom for exaggerations, for enormities, for improbabilities, freedom for playful inventions).

Heartlessness Masked by a Style Overflowing with Feeling

In Amerika, there are many unaccountably excessive sentimental gestures. The end of the first chapter: Karl is already set to go off with his uncle, the stoker is staying behind, abandoned in the captains cabin.

Then Karl (I stress the key phrases) 'went over to the stoker, pulled the man's right hand out of his belt and held it lightly in his… Karl drew his fingers back and forth between the stoker's, while the stoker looked around with shining eyes, as if blessed by a great happiness, but one that nobody could grudge him.

''Now you must get ready to defend yourself, answer yes and no, or else these people wont have any idea of the truth. You must promise me to do what I tell you, for I'm afraid, and I've good reason for it, that I won't be able to help you anymore.' And then Karl burst out crying and kissed the stoker's hand, taking that seamed, almost nerveless hand and pressing it to his cheek like a treasure that he would soon have to give up. But now his uncle the senator was at his side and with only the slightest compulsion led him away.'

Another example: At the end of the evening at Pollunder's country house, Karl explains at length why he wants to go back to his uncle's. 'During this long speech of Karl's, Mr. Pollunder had listened attentively, often, particularly when Uncle Jacob was mentioned… pressing Karl to himself. …'

The sentimental gestures of the characters are not only exaggerated, they are inappropriate. Karl has known the stoker for barely an hour and has no reason to be so passionately attached to him. And if we decide that the voung man is naively touched by the prospect of a manly friendship, we are all the more amazed when, a moment later, he so readily lets himself be carried off from his new friend, without any resistance.

In that evening scene, Pollunder knows full well that the uncle has already thrown Karl out of his house; that is why he takes Karl in an affectionate embrace.

Yet when, in Pollunder's presence, Karl reads the uncle's letter and learns of his own sad fate, Pollunder shows him no further affection and offers him no help.

In Kafka's Amerika, we find ourselves in a universe of feelings that are inappropriate, misplaced, exaggerated, unfathomable, or-the reverse-bizarrely missing. In his diary, Kafka characterized Dickens's novels by the words: 'Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling.' Such is the real meaning of that theater of showily displayed and instantly forgotten feelings that is Kafka's novel. This 'critique of sentimentality' (an implicit, parodic, droll, never aggressive critique) is aimed not at Dickens alone but at romanticism generally, at its heirs, Kafka's contemporaries, particularly the expressionists, with their cult of hysteria and madness; it is aimed at the entire Holy Church of the Heart; and once more, it brings together those