Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

Petrushka in spirit. The smile is not only invisibly present in the space that separates Ellington from his 'portrayal' of Grieg, it is fully visible on the faces of the old Dixieland musicians: come the moment of his solo (which is always partly improvised-that is, always brings a few surprises), the musician steps forward a little, then yields to another musician and gives himself over to the pleasure of listening (the pleasure of other surprises).

At jazz concerts people applaud. To applaud means: I have listened to you carefully and now I am declaring my appreciation. The music called 'rock' changes the situation. An important fact: at rock concerts people do not applaud. It would be almost sacrilege to applaud and thus to bring to notice the critical distance between the person playing and the person listening; we come here not to judge and evaluate but to surrender to the music, to scream along with the musicians, to merge with them; we come here to seek identification, not pleasure; effusion, not delight. We go into ecstasy here: the beat is strong and steady, the melodic motifs are short and endlessly repeated, there are no dynamic contrasts, everything is fortissimo, the song tends toward the highest range and resembles screaming. Here we re no longer in those little nightspots where the music wraps the couple in intimacy; we're in huge halls, in stadiums, pressed one against the next, and, if were dancing at a club there are no couples; each person is doing his moves by himself and together with the whole crowd at the same time. The music turns the individuals into a single collective body: talking here about individualism and hedonism is just one of the self-mystifications of our time, which (like any other time, by the way) wants to see itself as different from what it is.

Evil's Scandalous Beauty

What irritates me in Adorno is his short-circuit method that, with a fearsome facility, links works of art to political (sociological) causes, consequences, or meanings; extremely nuanced ideas (Adorno's musicological knowledge is admirable) thereby lead to extremely impoverished conclusions; in fact, given that an era's political tendencies are always reducible to just two opposing tendencies, a work of art necessarily ends up being classified as either progressive or reactionary; and since reaction is evil, the inquisition can start the trial proceedings.

Le Sacre du printemps: a ballet that ends with the sacrifice of a young girl, who must die for springtime to return. According to Adorno: Stravinsky is on the side of barbarism; his 'music does not identify with the victim, but rather with the destructive element.' (I wonder: why the verb 'identify'? how does Adorno know whether Stravinsky is 'identifying' with something or not? why not say 'paint,' or 'portray,' 'show,' 'represent'? Answer: because only identifying with evil is culpable and can justify a trial.)

I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires under-

standing its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty-there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the 'Danse sacrale' ('Sacrificial Dance'): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if it were denounced-stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness-it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of 'propaganda.' It is because it is beautiful that the girl's murder is so horrible.

Just as he made a portrayal of the mass and a portrayal of the Shrovetide fair (Petrushka), here Stravinsky made a portrayal of barbaric ecstasy. It is all the more interesting in that he had always, and explicitly, declared himself a partisan of the Apollonian principle, an adversary of the Dionysian: Le Sacre du printemps (particularly its ritual dances) is the Apollonian portrayal of Dionysian ecstasy: in this portrayal, the ecstatic elements (the aggressively beating rhythm, the few extremely short melodic motifs, many times repeated but never developed, and sounding like shrieks), are transformed into great, refined art (for instance, despite its aggressive quality, the rhythm grows so complex through the rapid alternation of measures with different time signatures that it creates an artificial, unreal, completely stylized beat); still, the Apollonian beauty of this portrayal of barbarity does not obscure its horror; it makes us see that at the very bottom point of the ecstasy there is only the harsh

rhythm, the sharp blows of percussion, an extreme numbness, death.

Emigration Arithmetic

The life of an emigre-there's a matter of arithmetic: Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (famous under the name Joseph Conrad) lived seventeen years in Poland (and in Russia, with his exiled family), the rest of his life, fifty years, in England (or on English ships). He was thus able to adopt English as his writing language, and English themes as well. Only his allergy to things Russian (ah, poor Gide, incapable of understanding Conrad's puzzling aversion to Dostoyevsky!) preserves a trace of his Polishness.

Bohuslav Martinu lived in Bohemia till he was thirty-two, then for thirty-six years in France, Switzerland, America, and Switzerland again. A nostalgia for the old country always echoed in his work, and he always called himself a Czech composer. Yet after the war, he declined all invitations from back there, and by his express wish, he was buried in Switzerland. Foiling his last will, in 1979, twenty years after his death, agents of the motherland managed to kidnap his corpse and solemnly install it beneath his native soil.

Gombrowicz lived for thirty-five years in Poland, twenty-three in Argentina, six in France. Yet he could write his books only in Polish, and the characters in his novels are Polish. In 1964, during a stay in Berlin, he is invited to Poland. He hesitates, and in the end, he refuses. His body is buried in Vence, in the south of France.

Vladimir Nabokov lived in Russia for twenty years, twenty-one in Europe (in England, Germany, and France), twenty years in America, sixteen in Switzerland. He adopted English as his writing language, but American themes a bit less thoroughly; there are many Russian characters in his novels. Yet he was unequivocal and insistent in proclaiming himself an American citizen and writer. His body lies at Montreux, in Switzerland.

Kazimierz Brandys lived in Poland for sixty-five years, moving to Paris after the Jaruzelski putsch in 1981. He writes only in Polish, on Polish themes, and yet, even though since 1989 there is no longer a political reason to stay abroad, he is not going back to live in Poland (which provides me the pleasure of seeing him from time to time).

This hasty scan reveals, for one thing, an emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits.

Emigration is hard from the purely personal standpoint as well: people generally think of the pain of nostalgia; but what is worse is the pain of estrangement:

the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign. We experience that estrangement not vis-a-vis the new country: there, the process is the inverse: what was foreign becomes, little by little, familiar and beloved. The shocking, stupefying form of strangeness occurs not with an unknown woman we are trying to pick up but with a woman who used to belong to us. Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence.