Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

The need to resist the loss of the fleeting reality of the present arose for the novel, I think, only at a certain moment in its evolution. In Boccaccio the tale exemplifies the abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted: without concrete scenes, nearly without dialogue, a kind of summary, it is a narration that gives us the essence of an event, the causal sequence of a story. The novelists who came after Boccaccio were fine storytellers, but capturing the concreteness of the present moment was neither their issue nor their goal. They were telling a story, without necessarily imagining it in concrete scenes.

The scene becomes the basic element of the novel's composition (the locus of the novelists virtuosity) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The novels of Scott, of Balzac, of Dostoyevsky, are composed as a series of minutely described scenes with their setting, their dialogue, their action; anything not connected with this series of scenes, anything that is not scene, is considered and felt to be secondary, even superfluous. The novel is like a very rich film script.

When the scene becomes the novel's basic element, the issue of reality as it occurs in the present is potentially raised. I say 'potentially' because, in Balzac or in Dostoyevsky, what inspires the art of scene-making is more a passion for the dramatic than a passion for the concrete, more theater than reality. Actually, the novel's new aesthetic (the aesthetic born of this 'second half' of the novels history) shows in the theatrical nature of the construction: it is a construction that focuses a) on a single plot (as against 'picaresque' construction, a series of different plots); b) on the same characters (letting characters leave the novel midway, which was normal in Cervantes, is now considered a flaw); c) on a narrow time span (even if much time elapses between the beginning and the end of the novel, the action itself unfolds over a few particular days; The Possessed, for example, stretches over several months, but all of its very complex action occurs on two, then three, then two, and finally five days).

In this Balzacian or Dostoyevskian construction, it is exclusively by means of the scenes that all the complexity of plot, all the richness of thought (the great dialogues of ideas in Dostoyevsky), all the psychology of the characters, must be expressed with clarity; that is why the scene, as it does in a play, becomes artificially concentrated, dense (multiple encounters in a single scene), and develops with an unnatural logical rigor (to bring out the conflict of interests and passions); in order to express everything that is essential (essential for the intelligibility of the action and its meaning), it must forgo everything that is 'unessential,' meaning everything banal, ordinary, quotidian, everything random, or mere atmosphere.

It was Flaubert ('our most respected, honored master,' as Hemingway called him in a letter to Faulkner) who moved the novel away from theatricality. In his novels, the characters meet in an everyday setting, which (by its indifference, its indiscretion, but also by its moods and magic spells that make a situation beautiful and memorable) constantly intrudes on their intimacy. Emma is having a rendezvous with Leon in the church, but a guide latches onto them and interrupts their tete-a-tete with his long-winded, inane chatter. In his preface to Madame Bovary, Henry de Montherlant is ironic about the methodical nature of this way of bringing an antithetical motif into a scene, but the irony is misplaced; for it is not a matter of an artistic mannerism; it is a matter of a discovery that might be termed ontological: the discovery of the structure of the present moment; the discovery of the perpetual coexistence of the banal and the dramatic that underlies our lives.

Capturing the concreteness of the present has been one of the continuing trends that, since Flaubert, was to mark the evolution of the novel: it would reach its apogee, its very monument, in James Joyce's Ulysses, which in nearly eight hundred pages describes eighteen hours of life; Bloom stops in the street with McCoy: in a single second, between two successive lines of dialogue, endless numbers of things occur: Bloom's interior monologue; his gestures (hand in pocket, he touches the envelope of a love letter); everything he sees (a woman climbs into a carriage and allows a glimpse of her legs, etc.); everything he hears; everything he feels. In Joyce, a single second of the present becomes a little infinity.

5

In the epic and in the dramatic arts, the passion for the concrete has differing power; the evidence is in their dissimilar relation to prose. The epic abandoned verse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so became a new art: the novel. Dramatic literature moved from verse to prose much later and much more slowly. Opera still later, at the turn of the twentieth century, with Charpentier (Louise, 1900), with Debussy (Pelleas et Melisande, 1902, although it is written to very stylized, poetic prose), and with Janacek (Jenufa, composed between 1896 and 1903). The last is the creator of what I consider the most important opera aesthetic in the era of modern art. I say 'I consider' because I don't wish to hide my personal passion for him. Yet I don't believe I am wrong, for Janacek's feat was tremendous: he discovered a new world for opera, the world of prose. I don't mean to say he was alone in doing so (the Berg of Wozzeck, 1925, which incidentally Janacek passionately championed, and even the Poulenc of La Voix humaine, 1959, do something close), but he pursued his goal in a particularly consistent way for thirty years, creating five major works that live on: Jenufa; Katia Kabanova, 1921; The Cunning Little Vixen., 1924; The Makropulos Affair, 1926; From the House of the Dead, 1928.

I've said he discovered the world of prose, for prose is not only a form of discourse distinct from verse; it is also an aspect of reality, its daily, concrete, momentary aspect, and the opposite of myth. This goes to the deepest conviction of every novelist: there is nothing so

thoroughly disguised as the prose of life; every man seeks endlessly to transform his life into myth-seeks, so to speak, to transcribe it into verse, to shroud it in verse (bad verse). If the novel is an art and not merely a 'literary genre,' the reason is that the discovery of prose is its ontological mission, which no art but the novel can take on entirely.

On the novels path toward the mystery of prose, into the beauty of prose (for, being an art, the novel discovers prose as beauty), Flaubert made an enormous stride. In the history of opera, a half century later, Janacek accomplished that same Flaubertian revolution. But whereas we find this completely natural in a novel (as if the scene between Emma and Rodolphe against the agricultural-fair background were encoded in the genes of the novel form as an almost inevitable possibility), in opera it is far more shocking, audacious, unexpected: it contravenes the principle of unrealism and extreme stylization that seemed inseparable from the very essence of opera.

To the extent that they ventured into opera, the great modernists most often took the path of an even more radical stylization than had their nineteenth-century predecessors: Honegger turned to legendary or biblical subjects, and then gave them a form that oscillates between opera and oratorio; the subject of Bartok's only opera is a symbolist fable; Schoenberg wrote two operas: one is an allegory, the other dramatizes an extreme situation at the edge of madness. Stravinsky's operas are all written on verse texts and are extremely stylized. Janacek thus went not only against the tradition of opera but also against the prevailing trend of modern opera.

6

A famous drawing: a short, mustached man with thick white hair is walking along with an open notebook in his hand, writing down in music notes the talk he hears on the street. It was his passion: to put the living word into musical notation; he left a hundred of these 'intonations of spoken language.' In the eyes of his contemporaries, this odd activity put him at best among the eccentrics and at worst among the naive who did not understand that music is a created thing and not the naturalistic imitation of life.

But the question is not: should one imitate life or not? The question is: should a musician acknowledge the existence of the world of sound outside of music, and study it? His studies of spoken language can throw light on two basic aspects of Janacek's music: