Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

violate authors' moral rights (adapters of novels; garbage-can scavengers who plunder great writers with their so-called critical editions; advertising that dissolves a thousand-year-old legacy in its bloody saliva; periodicals that reprint whatever they want without permission; producers who interfere with filmmakers' work; stage directors who treat texts so freely that only a madman could still write for the theater; and so on) have general opinion on their side, whereas an author claiming his moral rights risks winding up without public sympathy and with judicial support that is rather grudging, for even the guardians of the laws are sensitive to the mood of the time.

I think of Stravinsky. Of his tremendous effort to preserve all his work in his own performances as an unimpeachable standard. Samuel Beckett behaved similarly: he took to attaching more and more detailed stage directions to his plays, and insisted (contrary to the usual tolerance) that they be strictly observed; he often attended rehearsals in order to evaluate the direction, and sometimes did it himself; he even pub-

lished as a book the notes for his own production of Endgame in Germany so as to establish it for good. His publisher and friend, Jerome Lindon, stands watch-if need be, to the point of lawsuit-to insure that his authorial wishes are respected even after his death.

Such major effort to give a work a definitive form, thoroughly worked out and supervised by the author, is unparalleled in history. It is as if Stravinsky and Beckett wanted to protect their work not only against the current practice of distortion but also against a future less and less likely to respect a text or a score; it is as if they hoped to provide an example, the ultimate example of the supreme concept of author: one who demands the complete realization of his aesthetic wishes.

14

Kafka sent the manuscript of 'The Metamorphosis' to a magazine whose editor, Robert Musil, was prepared to publish it on the condition that the author shorten it. (Ah, sorry encounters between great writers!) Kafka's reaction was as glacial and as categoric as Stravinsky's to Ansermet. He could bear the idea of not being published at all, but the idea of being published and mutilated he found unbearable. His concept of authorship was as absolute as Stravinsky's or Beckett's, but whereas they more or less succeeded in imposing theirs, he failed to do so. This failure is a turning point in the history of authors' rights.

In 1925, when Brod published the two letters known as Kafka's testament in his 'Postscript to the First Edition' of The Trial, he explained that Kafka

knew full well that his wishes would not be fulfilled. Let us assume that Brod was telling the truth, that those two letters were indeed only expressing a bad mood, and that on the subject of any eventual (very improbable) posthumous publication of Kafka's writings, everything had been fully understood between the two friends; in that case, Brod, the executor, could take full responsibility upon himself and publish whatever he thought best; in that case, he had no moral obligation to inform us of Kafka's wishes, which, according to Brod, were not valid or were so no longer.

Yet he hastened to publish these 'testamentary' letters and to give them as much impact as possible; actually, he had already begun to create the greatest work of his life, his myth of Kafka, one of whose crucial components is precisely that wish, unique in all of history-the wish of an author who would annihilate all his work. And thus is Kafka engraved on the public's memory. In accordance with what Brod gives us to believe in his mythographic novel, where, with no nuance whatever, Garta/Kafka would destroy everything he has written; because he is dissatisfied with it artistically? ah no, Brod's Kafka is a religious thinker; remember: wanting not to proclaim but 'to live his faith,' Garta granted no great importance to his writings, 'mere rungs to help him climb to the heights.' His friend, Nowy/Brod, refuses to obey him because even though what Garta wrote was 'mere sketches,' they could help 'wandering humanity' in its quest for the path of righteousness to 'something irreplaceable.'

With Kafka's 'testament,' the great legend of Saint Kafka/Garta is born, and along with it a littler legend-of Brod his prophet, who with touching earnest-

ness makes public his friends last wish even as he confesses why, in the name of very lofty principles, he decided not to obey him. The great mythographer won his bet. His act was elevated to the rank of a great gesture worthy of emulation. For who could doubt Brod's loyalty to his friend? And who would dare doubt the value of every sentence, every word, every single syllable Kafka left to humanity?

And thus did Brod create the model for disobedience to dead friends; a judicial precedent for those who would circumvent an authors last wish or divulge his most intimate secrets.

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With regard to the unfinished stories and novels, I readily concede that they would put any executor in a very uncomfortable situation. For among these writings of varying significance are the three novels; and Kafka wrote nothing greater than these. Yet it is not at all abnormal that because they were unfinished he ranked them among his failures; an author has trouble believing that the value of a work he has not seen through to the end might already be almost fully discernible, before it is done. But what an author is incapable of seeing may be clear to the eyes of an outsider. Yes, because of these three novels I admire boundlessly, I would not have found the strength to carry out fully Kafka's 'testament.'

Who could have confirmed me in that position?

Our greatest Master. Let's open Don Quixote, Part One, Chapters Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen: Don Quixote

and Sancho are in the mountains, where they learn the story of Grisostomo, a young poet in love with a shepherdess. To be near her, he himself becomes a shepherd; but she doesn't love him, and Grisostomo ends his life. Don Quixote decides to attend the burial. Ambrosio, a friend of the poet, conducts the modest ceremony. Beside the flower-covered body there are notebooks and sheets of poems. Ambrosio tells the gathering that Grisostomo requested that they be burned.

At that moment a gentleman who has joined the mourners out of curiosity, Senor Vivaldo, intervenes: he disputes the idea that burning the poetry truly answers to the dead man's wish, for a wish must make sense and this one does not. It would therefore be better to give his poetry to other people, that it might bring them pleasure, wisdom, experience. And without waiting for Ambrosios response, he bends down and takes a few of the pages nearest to him. Ambrosio says to him: 'Out of courtesy, sir, I will permit you to keep those that you have taken; but it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest.'

'Out of courtesy, I will permit you'; meaning that even though a dead friends wish has for me the force of law, I am not a lackey to the laws, I respect them as a free being who is not blind to other values, values that may stand opposed to the law, such as, for instance, courtesy or the love of art. That is why 'I will permit you to keep those that you have taken,' while hoping that my friend will forgive me. Still, in making this exception I have violated his wish, which for me is law; I have done so on my own responsibility, at my own risk, and I've done so as a violation of a law, not

as a denial and nullification of it; that is why 'it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest.

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A television broadcast: three famous and admired women collectively propose that women too should have the right to be buried in the Pantheon. It's important, they say, to consider the symbolic significance of this act. And they immediately suggest the names of some great dead women who, in their opinion, could be moved there.

A fair demand, certainly; yet something about it troubles me: these dead women who could be moved right