and the innkeeper's wife are gossiping: they recall their absent friends and talk about the innkeeper, who is away that day in town, about the parish priest, who has moved house, about the woman the schoolmaster loved, who has just married someone else. The conversation is completely banal (never before Janacek had a situation so undramatic and so ordinary been seen on the opera stage), but the orchestra is full of a nearly unbearable yearning, so that the scene becomes one of the most beautiful elegies ever written on the transience of time.
For fourteen years, a certain Kovarovic, a conductor and submediocre composer who was director of the Prague Opera, rejected Jenufa. Although he finally gave in (in 1916 it was he who conducted the Prague premiere), he nonetheless held to his view of Janacek as a dilettante and made many changes in the score, revisions of the orchestration, and even a great number of deletions.
Didn't Janacek rebel? Certainly, but as we know, everything depends on the balance of power. And he was the weaker one. He was sixty-two years old and nearly unknown. If he fought too much, he could have had to wait another ten years for the premiere of his opera. Besides, even his supporters, euphoric over their masters unexpected success, all agreed: Kovarovic had done a magnificent job! For example, the final scene!
The final scene: After the body of Jenufas illegitimate child is discovered drowned, after the stepmother has confessed her crime and the police have taken her away, Jenufa and Laca are left alone. Laca, the man over whom Jenufa preferred another but who loves her still, decides to stay with her. All that lies before this couple are misery, shame, and exile. An extraordinary mood: resigned, sorrowful, and yet glowing with immense compassion. Harp and strings, the soft sonority of the orchestra; the great drama closes, unexpectedly, with tranquil song, touching and intimate.
But can an opera end like that? Kovarovic transformed it into a real apotheosis of love. Who would dare object to an apotheosis? Besides, an apotheosis is so simple: you add brasses to extend the melody by
contrapuntal imitation. An effective procedure, tried and proven a thousand times over. Kovarovic knew his business.
Snubbed and humiliated by his Czech compatriots, Janacek found firm and faithful support from Max Brod. But when Brod studied the score of The Cunning Little Vixen, he was not satisfied with the ending. The last words of the opera: a joke by a little frog stammering to the gamekeeper: 'What y-y-you think you're seeing is n-n-not me, it's m-m-my grandpa.' 'Ending with the frog is impossible,' Brod protested in a letter ('Mit dem Frosch zu schliessen, ist unmoglich'), and he proposed as a new last line a solemn proclamation to be sung by the gamekeeper: about nature's renewal, about the eternal power of youth. Another apotheosis.
But this time Janacek didn't obey. Now recognized outside his own country, he was no longer weak. By the time of the premiere of From the House of the Dead, he had become so again; he was dead. The ending of the opera is masterly: the hero is released from the camp. 'Freedom! Freedom!' the convicts cry. Then the commandant shouts: 'Back to work!' and these are the last words of the opera, which closes with the brutal rhythm of forced labor punctuated by the syncopated rattle of chains. The posthumous premiere was conducted by a pupil of Janacek's (who also prepared the barely finished manuscript of the score for publication). He fiddled a bit with the final pages: thus the cry 'Freedom! Freedom!' returns at the end, and broadened into a tacked-on long coda, a joyous coda, an apotheosis (still another one). It is not an addition that, by repetition, extends the author's intent; it is the denial of that intent; the final lie that annuls the truth of the opera.
I open the biography of Hemingway published in 1985 by Jeffrey Meyers, a professor of literature in an American university, and I read the passage on 'Hills Like White Elephants.' The first thing I learn: the story 'may… portray Hemingway's response to Hadley's [his first wife's] second pregnancy.' There follows this commentary, which I accompany with my own italicized remarks in brackets:
'The comparison of hills with white elephants- imaginary animals that represent useless items, like the unwanted baby-is crucial to the meaning [the comparison, a bit forced, of elephants with unwanted babies is not Hemingway's but the professor's; it is needed to set up the sentimental interpretation of the story]. The simile becomes a focus of contention and establishes an opposition between the imaginative woman, who is moved by the landscape, and the literal-minded man, who refuses to sympathize with her point of view… The theme of the story evolves from a series of polarities: natural v. unnatural, instinctive v. rational, reflective v. talkative, vital v. morbid [the professor's intention becomes clear: to make the woman the morally positive pole, the man the morally negative pole]. The egoistic man [there is no reason to call the man egoistic, unaware of the woman's feelings [there is no reason to say this], tries to bully her into having an abortion… so they can be exactly as they were before… The woman, who finds it horribly unnatural, is frightened of killing the baby [she cannot kill the baby, given that it is unborn] and hurting herself. Everything the man says is false [no: everything the man says is ordinary words of consolation, the only kind possible in such a situation]; everything the woman says is ironic [there are many other explanations for the girl's remarks]. He forces her to consent to this operation ['I wouldn 't have you do it if you didn 't want to,' he says twice, and there is nothing to show that he is insincere] in order to regain his love [there is nothing to show either that she had the man's love or that she had lost it], but the very fact that he can ask her to do such a thing means that she can never love him again [there is no way to know what will happen after the scene in the railroad station]. She agrees to this form of self-destruction [the destruction of a fetus and the destruction of a woman are not the same thing] after reaching the kind of dissociation of self that was portrayed in Dostoyevskys Underground Man and in Kafka's Joseph K., and that reflects his attitude toward her: 'Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.' [Reflecting someone else's attitude is not a dissociation, otherwise all children who obey their parents would be dissociated and would be like Josef K.] She then walks away from him and… finds comfort in nature: in the fields of grain, the trees, the river and the hills beyond. Her peaceful contemplation [we know nothing about the feelings that the sight of nature stirs in the girl; but in any case they are not peaceful feelings, for the words she speaks immediately afterward are bitter] recalls Psalm 121 as she lifts up her eyes to the hills for help [the plainer Hemingway's style, the more pretentious his commentator's]. But her mood is shattered by the mans persistent argument [let's read the story carefully: it is not the American man, it is the girl who, after her brief withdrawal, is the first to speak and continues the argument; the man is not looking for an argument, he only wants to calm the girl down], which drives her to the edge of a breakdown. Echoing King Lear's 'Never, never, never, never, never,' she frantically begs: 'Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?' [the evocation of Shakespeare is as meaningless as were those of Dostoyevsky and Kafka].' Let us summarize the summary:
1) In the American professor's interpretation, the short story is transformed into a moral lesson: the characters are judged according to their attitude toward abortion, which is a priori considered an evil: thus the woman ('imaginative,' 'moved by the landscape') represents the natural, the living, the instinctive, the reflective; the man ('egoistic,' 'literal-minded') represents the artificial, the rational, the chatty, the unhealthy (note incidentally that in modern moral discourse, the rational represents evil and the instinctive represents good);
2) the connection to the author's biography suggests that the negative, immoral hero is Hemingway himself, who is making a kind of confession through the intermediary of the story; in that case the dialogue loses all its enigmatic quality, the characters are without mystery and, for anyone who has read Hemingway's biography, thoroughly determined and clear;
3) the original aesthetic nature of the story (its lack of psychologizing, its intentional veiling of the characters' pasts, its undramatic nature, etc.) is not considered; worse, that aesthetic nature is
