Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

grasp and yet strong and insistent, gives the two movements a unity. An inimitable unity. (The impersonal composition of a Mozart sonata could be imitated endlessly; the composition of the sonata Opus 111 is so personal that imitating it would be forgery.)

Opus 111 makes me think of Faulkner's The Wild Palms. In it a love storv alternates with the story of an escaped convict, two stories that have nothing in common, no character nor even any discernible kinship of motifs or themes. A composition that cannot serve as a model for any other novelist; that can exist only once; that is arbitrary, inadvisable, unjustifiable; unjustifiable because behind it can be heard an es muss sein that makes any justification superfluous.

15

By his refusal of systems, Nietzsche brought deep changes to the way philosophy is done: as Hannah Arendt defined it, Nietzsche's thought is experimental thought. His first impulse is to break up whatever is rigid, to undermine commonly accepted systems, to open rifts for venturing into the unknown; the philosopher of the future will be an experimenter, Nietzsche said; free to go off in various directions that could, conceivably, come into conflict.

Although I favor a strong presence of thought in the novel, this is not to say that I like the so-called philosophical novel, that subjugation of the novel to a philosophy, that 'tale-making' out of moral or political ideas. Authentically novelistic thought (as the novel has known it since Rabelais) is always unsystematic; undisciplined; it is similar to Nietzsche's; it is experimental; it forces rifts in all the idea systems that surround us; it explores (particularly through its characters) all lines of thought by trying to follow each of them to its end. And there is this too about systematic thought: a person who thinks is automatically prompted to systematize; it is his eternal temptation (mine too, even in writing this book): a temptation to describe all the implications of his ideas; to preempt any objections and refute them in advance; thus to barricade his ideas. Now, a person who thinks should not try to persuade others of his belief; that is what

puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the 'man of conviction'; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? it is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the 'man of conviction' is a man restricted; experimental thought seeks not to persuade but to inspire; to inspire another thought, to set thought moving; that is why a novelist must systematically desys-tematize his thought, kick at the barricade that he himself has erected around his ideas.

16

Nietzsche's refusal of systematic thought has another consequence: an immense broadening of theme., the barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher's thought. That too brings philosophy nearer to the novel: for the first time philosophy is pondering not epistemology, not aesthetics or ethics, the phenomenology of mind or the critique of reason, etc., but everything human.

In expounding Nietzsche's philosophy, historians or professors do not merely reduce it-that of course- but also distort it by turning it into its opposite, namely into a system. Is there still room in their systematized Nietzsche for his thoughts on women, on the Germans, on Europe, on Bizet, on Goethe, on Victor Hugo-style kitsch, on Aristophanes, on lightness of style, on boredom, on play, on translation, on the spirit

of obedience, on possession of the other and on all the psychological forms of such possession, on the savants and their mental limitations, on the Schauspieler, actors on history's stage-is there still room for a thousand psychological observations that can be found nowhere else, except perhaps in a few rare novelists?

As Nietzsche brought philosophy closer to the novel, so Musil brought the novel toward philosophy. This rapprochement doesn't mean that Musil is less a novelist than other novelists. Just as Nietzsche is no less a philosopher than other philosophers.

Musil's thinking novel too brought about an unprecedented broadening of theme; nothing that can be thought about is henceforth excluded from the art of the novel.

17

When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I used to take lessons in musical composition. Not because I was a child prodigy but because of my father's quiet tact. It was during the war, and a friend of his, a Jewish composer, was required to wear the yellow star; people had begun to avoid him. Not knowing how to declare his solidarity, my father thought of asking him just then to give me lessons. They were confiscating Jewish apartments, and the composer kept having to move on to smaller and smaller places, ending up, just before he left for Theresienstadt, in a little flat where many people were camping, crammed, in every room. All along, he had held on to the small piano on which I would play my harmony or counterpoint exercises while strangers went about their business around us.

Of all this I retain only my admiration for him, and three or four images. Especially this one: seeing me out after a lesson, he stopped by the door and suddenly said to me: 'There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It's like a lawn-if it weren't there, we couldn't enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it.'

A peculiar idea. That it has stayed in my memory is even more peculiar. Maybe I felt honored at getting to hear a confidential admission from the teacher, a secret, a great trick of the trade that only the initiated are permitted to know.

Whatever it was, that brief remark from my teacher of the time has haunted me all my life (I've defended it, I've fought it, I've never finished with it); without it, this text could very certainly not have been written.

But dearer to me than that remark in itself is the image of a man who, a while before his hideous journey, stood thinking aloud, in front of a child, about the problem of composing a work of art.

PART SEVEN. The Unloved Child of the Family

I ve referred many times to Leos Janacek's music. It is well known in England and the U.S.A., and in Germany. But in France? In the other Romance-language countries? And which of his works could be known? On February 15, 1992, I go to a large record shop in Paris to see what is available.

1

I immediately find Taras Bulba (1918) and the Sinfonietta (1926): the orchestral works of his great period: as the most popular works (the most accessible to the average music lover), they are almost always put together on the same disc.