Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

undone;

4) starting with the basic givens of the story (a man and a girl are on their way to an abortion), the professor goes on to invent his own story: an egoistic man is engaged in forcing his wife to have an abortion; the wife despises her husband, whom she will never again be able to love;

5) this other story is absolutely flat and all cliches; nevertheless, because it is compared successively with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, the Bible, and Shakespeare (the professor has managed to assemble in one paragraph the greatest authorities of all time), it retains its status as a great work and therefore, despite its authors moral poverty, justifies the professor's interest in it.

11

This is how kitsch-making interpretation kills off works of art. Some forty years before the American professor imposed this moralizing meaning on the story, 'Hills Like White Elephants' was published in France under the title ''Paradis perdu,' a title that has no relation to Hemingway (in no other language does the story bear this title) and that suggests the same meaning (paradise lost: preabortion innocence, happiness of impending motherhood, etc., etc.).

Kitsch-making interpretation is actually not the personal defect of some American professor or some early- twentieth-century Prague conductor (many conductors after him have ratified his alterations of Jenufa); it is a seduction that comes out of the collective unconscious; a command from the metaphysical prompter; a perennial social imperative; a force. That force is aimed not at art alone but primarily at reality

itself. It does the opposite of what Flaubert, Janacek, Joyce, and Hemingway did. It throws a veil of commonplaces over the present moment, in order that the face of the real will disappear.

So that you shall never know what you have lived.

PART SIX. Works and Spiders

1

'I think.' Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, 'a thought comes when 'it' wants to, and not when T want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject T is necessary to the verb 'think.'' A thought comes to the philosopher 'from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts heading for him.' It comes in a rush. For Nietzsche loves 'a bold and exuberant intellectuality that runs presto,' and he makes fun of the savants for whom thought seems 'a slow, halting activity, something like drudgery, often enough worth the sweat of the hero-savants, but nothing like that light, divine thing that is such close kin to dance and to high-spirited gaiety.'

Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that the philosopher 'must not, through some false arrangement of deduction and dialectic, falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at bv another route… We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us. The most profound and inexhaustible books will surely always have something of the aphoristic, abrupt quality of Pascals Pensees.'

We should not 'corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us': I find this injunction remarkable; and I notice that, beginning with The Dawn. all the chapters in all his books are written in a single paragraph: this is so that a thought should be uttered in one single breath; so that it should be caught the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing.

2

Nietzsche's determination to preserve 'the actual way' his thoughts come to him is inseparable from another of his injunctions, which charms me as much as the first: to resist the temptation to turn ones ideas into a system. Philosophical systems 'these days stand in a distressed and discouraged posture. If they are indeed still standing.' The attack is aimed at the inevitable dogmatism of systematizing thought as much as at its form: 'an act put on by the systems-makers: in their desire to fill in their system and round off the horizon that encloses it, they must try to present their weak points in the same style as their strong points.'

The italics above are mine: a philosophical treatise that expounds a system is doomed to include some weak passages; not because the philosopher is untal-ented but because the treatise form requires it; for before he gets to his innovative ideas, the philosopher

must explain what others say about the problem, must refute them, propose other solutions, choose the best of them and adduce arguments for it-a surprising argument alongside an obvious one, etc.-and the reader yearns to skip pages and cut to the heart of the matter, to the philosopher's new idea. In his Aesthetics., Hegel gives us an image of art that is a superb synthesis; we are fascinated by this eagles-eye overview; but the text itself is far from fascinating, it does not make us see the thought as alluring as it looked when it was speeding toward the philosopher. In his desire to fill in his system, Hegel describes every detail, square by square, inch by inch, so that his Aesthetics comes across as a collaboration between an eagle and hundreds of heroic spiders spinning webs to cover all the crannies.

3

For Andre Breton (in his Manifesto of Surrealism)., the novel is an 'inferior genre'; its style is one of 'information pure and simple'; the nature of the information given is 'needlessly specific' ('I am spared not a single one of the hesitations over a character: shall he be blond? what should he be called?… '); and the descriptions: 'there is nothing like the vacuity of these passages; they are just piles of stock images'; as an example there follows a paragraph quoted from Crime and Punishment, a description of Raskolnikovs room, with this comment: 'Some will argue that this academic drawing is appropriate here, that at this point in the novel the author has his reasons for loading me down.' But Breton considers these reasons unpersua-

sive, because: 'I don't register the null moments in my life.' Then, psychology: the lengthy expositions that tell us everything in advance: 'this hero, whose actions and reactions are admirably anticipated, must not foil-though seeming likely to foil-the calculations of which he is the object.'

However partisan this critique, we cannot ignore it; it does accurately express modern art's reservations toward the novel. To recapitulate: data; description; pointless attention to the null moments of existence; a psychology that makes the characters' every move predictable; in short, to roll all the complaints into one, it is the fatal lack of poetry that makes the novel an inferior genre for Breton. I am speaking of poetry as vaunted by the surrealists and the whole of modern art-poetry not as a literary genre, versified writing, but as a certain concept of beauty, as an explosion of the marvelous, a sublime moment of life, concentrated emotion, freshness of vision, fascinating surprise. For Breton, the novel is nonpoetry par excellence.