Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

people around me, all insisted I tell them about it. To such an extent that my relations with my wife have been bad ever since. I couldn't forgive her aggressive curiosity, and she couldn't forgive my silence, which to her was evidence of how little I trusted her.' He smiled, and then: 'I divulged nothing,' he said. 'Because I had nothing to divulge. I had forbidden myself to want to know my friends secrets, and I didn't know them.' I listened to him with fascination: since childhood I had heard it said that a friend is the person with whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is something else: it is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.

10

I think of the ending of The Trial: the two men bend over K. and one of them thrusts a knife deep into his heart: 'With failing eyes K. could still see, right near his face, the two men cheek by jowl watching the outcome: 'Like a dog!' he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.'

The last noun in The Trial: 'shame.' Its last image: the faces of two strangers, close by his own face, almost touching it, watching K.'s most intimate state, his death throes. In that last noun, in that last image, is concentrated the entire novel's fundamental situation: being accessible at any time in his bedroom; having his breakfast eaten by other people; being available, day and night, to go where he's summoned; seeing his window curtains confiscated; being unable to see whom he wants; no longer being his own man; losing his status as an individual. This transformation of a man from subject to object is experienced as shame.

I don't believe that Kafka asked Brod to destroy his letters because he feared their publication. Such an idea could scarcely have entered his mind. The publishers were not interested in his novels, why would they have cared about his letters? What made him want to destroy them was shame, simple shame, not that of a writer but that of an ordinary individual, the shame of leaving private things lying about for the eyes of others-of the family, of strangers-the shame of being turned into an object, the shame that could 'outlive him.'

And yet Brod made these letters public; earlier, in his own will and testament, he had asked Kafka 'to destroy certain things'; and here he himself published everything, indiscriminately; even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letter that Kafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod, anyone but its addressee could eventually read. To me, Brods indiscretion is inexcusable. He betrayed his friend. He acted against his friends wishes, against the meaning and the spirit of his wishes, against the sense of shame he knew in the man.

11

There is an essential difference between the novel on the one hand and memoirs, biography, autobiography, on the other. A biography's value lies in the newness and accuracy of the real facts it reveals. A novel's value is in the revelation of previously unseen possibilities of existence as such; in other words, the novel uncovers what is hidden in each of us. A common form of praise for a novel is to say: I see myself in that character; I have the sense that the author knows me and is writing about me; or as a grievance: I feel attacked, laid bare, humiliated by this novel. We should never mock such apparently naive judgments: thev prove that the novel is being read as a novel.

That is why the roman a clef (which deals with real people with the intention of making them recognizable beneath fictional names) is a false novel, an aesthetically equivocal thing, morally unclean. Kafka disguised under the name Garta! You object to the

author: 'That's not accurate!' The author: 'These aren't memoirs I've written; Carta is an imaginary character!' You: 'As an imaginary character, he's implausible, badly made, written with no talent!' The author: 'But this isn't the usual sort of character; he lets me make new revelations about my friend Kafka!' You: 'Inaccurate revelations!' The author: 'These aren't memoirs I've written; Carta is an imaginary character!… ' And so on.

Of course, every novelist, intentionally or not, draws on his own life; there are entirely invented characters, created out of pure reverie; there are those inspired by a model, sometimes directly, more often indirectly; there are those created from a single detail observed in some person; and all of them owe much to the author's introspection, to his self-knowledge. The work of the imagination transforms these inspirations and observations so thoroughly that the novelist forgets about them. Yet before publishing his book, he must think to hide the keys that might make them detectable; first, out of the minimum of consideration due persons who, to their surprise, will find fragments of their lives in the novel, and second, because keys (true or false) one puts into the reader's hands can only mislead him: instead of unknown aspects of existence, he will be searching a novel for unknown aspects of the author's existence; the entire meaning of the art of the novel will thus be annihilated, as it was annihilated, for instance, by that American professor who, wielding his huge bunch of skeleton keys, wrote the big biography of Hemingway:

Through the force of his interpretation, he turned Hemingway's whole oeuvre into a single roman a clef;

as if it had been turned inside out like a jacket: suddenly, the books are invisible inside, and on the lining outside, a reader avidly observes the (real or alleged) events of the life-trivial, painful, ridiculous, pedestrian, stupid, petty events; thus the work is undone, the imaginary characters are transformed into people from the authors life, and the biographer begins the moral trial of the writer: in one short story there is a wicked mother character: Hemingway is maligning his own mother here; in another story there is a cruel father: it is Hemingway's revenge on his father for allowing his childhood tonsils to be removed without anesthesia; in 'Cat in the Rain,' the unnamed female character 'is dissatisfied with her… self-absorbed, unresponsive husband': this is Hemingways wife Hadley, complaining; the female character of 'Summer People' is to be seen as the wife of Dos Passos: Hemingway tried in vain to seduce her and, in the story, he abuses her disgracefully by making love to her in the guise of a character; in Across the River and Into the Trees, an unnamed, very ugly man appears in a bar: Hemingway is describing the ugliness of Sinclair Lewis, who, 'bitterly hurt and angered by Hemingway's cruelest passage, died three months after the novel was published.' And so on and on, one denunciation after another.

Novelists have always resisted that biographical furor whose representative prototype, according to Proust, is Sainte-Beuve with his motto: 'I do not look on literature as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man…' Understanding a work therefore requires knowing the man first-that is, Sainte-Beuve specifies, knowing the answers to a cer-

tain number of questions even though they 'might seem at the furthest remove from the nature of his writings: What were his religious views? How did he react to the sight of nature? How did he conduct himself in regard to women, in regard to money? Was he rich, was he poor? What governed his actions, what was his daily way of life? What was his vice, or his weakness?' This quasi-police method, Proust comments, requires a critic 'to surround himself with every possible piece of information about a writer, to check his letters, to interrogate people who knew him…'

Yet, surrounded as he was 'with every possible piece of information,' Sainte-Beuve managed not to recognize any of the great writers of his time-not Balzac, nor Stendhal, nor Baudelaire; by studying their lives he inevitably missed their work, because, said Proust, 'a book is the product of a self other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices'; 'the writers true self is manifested in his books alone.'

Proust's polemic against Sainte-Beuve is of fundamental importance. Let us make clear: Proust is not criticizing Sainte-Beuve for exaggerating; he is not decrying the limitations of Sainte-Beuve's method; his verdict is absolute: that method is blind to the author's other self; blind to his aesthetic wishes; incompatible with art; directed against art; inspired by hatred of art.