Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

character as he went. The freedom by which Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne enchant us had to do with improvisation. The art of complex and rigorous composition did not become a commanding need until the first half of the nineteenth century. The novels form as it came into being then, with its action concentrated in a narrow time span, at a crossroads where many stories of many characters intersect, demanded a minutely calculated scheme of the plot lines and scenes: before beginning to write, the novelist therefore drafted and redrafted the scheme of the novel, calculated and recalculated it, designed and redesigned as that had never been done before. One need only leaf through Dostoyevsky's notes for The Possessed: in the seven notebooks that take up 400 pages of the Pleiade edition (the novel itself takes up 750), motifs look for characters, characters look for motifs, characters vie for the status of protagonist; Stavrogin should be married, but 'to whom?' wonders Dostoyevsky, and he tries to marry him successively to three women; and so on. (A paradox that only seems one: the more calculated the construction machinery, the more real and natural the characters. The prejudice against constructional thinking as a 'nonartistic' element that mutilates the 'living' quality of characters is just sentimental naivete from people who have never understood art.)

The novelist in our time who is nostalgic for the art of the old masters of the novel cannot retie the thread where it was cut; he cannot leap over the enormous experience of the nineteenth century; if he wants to connect with the easygoing freedom of Rabelais or Sterne, he must reconcile it with the requirements of composition.

I remember my first reading of Jacques le Fataliste; delighted by its boldly heterogeneous richness, where ideas mingle with anecdote, where one story frames another; delighted by a freedom of composition that utterly ignores the rule about unity of action, I asked myself: Is this magnificent disorder the effect of admirable construction, subtly calculated, or is it due to the euphoria of pure improvisation? Without a doubt, it is improvisation that prevails here; but the question I spontaneously asked showed me that a prodigious architectural potential exists within such intoxicated improvisation, the potential for a complex, rich structure that would also be as perfectly calculated, calibrated, and premeditated as even the most exuberant architectural fantasy of a cathedral was necessarily premeditated. Does such an architectural intention cause a novel to lose the charm of its liberty? Its quality of game? But just what is a game, actually? Every game is based on rules, and the stricter the rules, the more the game is a game. As opposed to the chess player, the artist invents his own rules for himself; so when he improvises without rules, he is no freer than when he invents his own system of rules.

Reconciling Rabelais's and Diderot's freedom with the demands of composition, though, presents the twentieth-century novelist with problems different from those that preoccupied Balzac or Dostoyevsky. For example: the third and last of the books that constitute Hermann Broch's novel The Sleepwalkers is a 'polyphonic' stream composed of five 'voices,' five entirely independent lines: neither a common action nor the same characters tie these lines together, and each has a completely different formal nature (A = novel, B = reportage, C = short story, D = poetry, E = essay). In the eighty-eight chapters of the book, these five lines alternate in this strange order: A-A-A-B-A-B-A-C-A-A-D-E-C-A-B-D-C-D-A-E-A-A-B-E-C-A-D-B-B-A-E-A-A-E- A-B-D-G-B-B-D-A-B-E-A-A-B-A-D-A-C-B-D-A-E-B-A-D-A-B-D-E-A-C-A-D-D-B-A-A-C-D-E-B-A-B-D-B-A-B-A-A-D-A-A- D-D-E.

What is it that led Broch to choose precisely this order rather than another? What made him take precisely line B in the fourth chapter and not C or D? Not the logic of the characters or of the action, for there is no action common to these five lines. He was guided by other criteria: by the charm that comes from surprising juxtaposition of the different forms (verse, narration, aphorisms, philosophical meditations); by the contrast of different emotions pervading the different chapters; by the variety of the chapters' lengths; finally, by the development of the same existential questions, reflected in the five lines as in five mirrors. For lack of a better term, let us call these criteria musical and conclude: the nineteenth century elaborated the art of composition, but our own century brought musicality to that art.

The Satanic Verses is constructed of three more or less independent lines: A: the lives of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, two present-day Indians who divide their time between Bombay and London; B: the Koranic story dealing with the origin of Islam; C: the villagers' trek toward Mecca across the sea they believe they will cross dry-footed and in which they drown.

The three lines are taken up in sequence in the novels nine parts in the following order: A-B-A-C-A-B-A-C-A (incidentally: in music, a sequence of this kind is called a rondo: the main theme returns regularly, in alternation with several secondary themes).

This is the rhythm of the whole (I note parenthetically the approximate number of pages): A (90), B (40), A (80), C (40), A (120), B (40), A (80), C (40), A (40). It can be seen that the B and C parts are all the same length, which gives the whole a rhythmic regularity.

Line A takes up five sevenths of the novels page total, and lines B and C one seventh each. This quantitative ratio results in the dominance of line A: the novel's center of gravity is located in the present-day lives of Farishta and Chamcha.

Nonetheless, even though B and C are subordinate lines, it is in them that the aesthetic wager of the novel is concentrated, for it is these B and C parts that enable Rushdie to get at the fundamental problem of all novels (that of an individual's, a characters, identity) in a new way that goes beyond the conventions of the psychological novel: Chamcha's and Farishta's personalities cannot be apprehended through a detailed description of their states of mind; their mystery lies in the cohabitation in their psyches of two civilizations, the Indian and the European; it lies in their roots, from which they have been torn but which, nevertheless, remain alive in them. Where is the rupture in these roots and how far down must one go to touch the wound? Looking into 'the well of the past' is not off the point; it aims directly at the heart of the matter: the existential rift in the two protagonists.

Just as Jacob is incomprehensible without Abraham (who, according to Mann, lived centuries before him), being merely his 'imitation and continuation,' Gibreel Farishta is incomprehensible without the Archangel Gibreel, without Mahound (Mohammed), incomprehensible even without the theocratic Islam of Khomeini or of that fanatical girl who leads the villagers to Mecca, or rather to death. They are all his own potentialities, which sleep within him and which he must battle for his own individuality. In this novel, there is no important question that can be examined without looking down the well of the past. What is good and what is evil? Who is the other's devil, Chamcha for Farishta or Farishta for Chamcha? Is it the devil or the angel that has inspired the pilgrimage of the villagers? Is their drowning a piteous disaster or the glorious

journey to Paradise? Who can say? Who can know? And what if this unknowability of good and evil was the torment suffered by the founders of religions? Those terrible words of despair, Christ's unprecedented blasphemy, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?': do they not resound in the soul of every Christian? Mahound's doubt as he wonders who put those verses into his head, God or the devil: does it not conceal the uncertainty that is the ground of man's very existence?

In the Shadow of Great Principles

Starting with his Midnight's Children, which in its time (in 1980) stirred unanimous admiration, no one in the English-language literary world has denied that Rushdie is one of the most gifted novelists of our day. The Satanic Verses, appearing in English in September 1988, was greeted with the attention due a major writer. The book received these tributes with no anticipation of the storm that was to burst some months later, when the Imam Khomeini, the master of Iran, condemned Rushdie to death for blasphemy and sent killers after him on a chase whose end no one can predict.

That happened before the text could be translated. Thus everywhere except in the English-language world, the scandal arrived before the book. In France, the press immediately printed excerpts from the still unpublished novel to show the reasons for the condemnation. Completely normal behavior, but fatal for a novel. Represented exclusively by its incriminated passages, it was, from the beginning, transformed from a work of art into a simple corpus delicti.

We should not denigrate literary criticism. Nothing is worse for a writer than to come up against its absence. I am speaking of literary criticism as meditation, as analysis; literary criticism that involves several readings of the book it means to discuss (like great pieces of music we can listen to time and again, great novels too are made for