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Paz to
elaborate on this: "There is no humour in Homer or
Virgil; Ariosto seems to foreshadow it, but not until
Cervantes does humour take shape . . .
Humour is the
great invention of the modern spirit." Take for instance
Rabelais’
"Fourth Book" in which Pantagruel’s boat meets a
merchant ship carrying sheep. The merchants make fun of
Panurge who cleverly buys a sheep and then chucks it into the
sea. This moves the other sheep to follow suit.
The merchants
frantically cling on to their fleece, but are themselves
dragged into the sea. As they drown, Panurge holds forth on
the miseries of this world and the fortunes of the next. And
when admonished by Frere Jean as to why he had paid first
before taking possession of the sheep, he gleefully retorts:
"By God, I got a good fifty thousand franc’s worth of
fun for it."
One can here
ask what the purpose of the scene could be? Does it have a
moral? Is it an attack on the merchant class? Or is the writer
annoyed by such heartlessness? What is obvious is the
ambiguity of the purpose of the novel with a deep-seated
obsession with the underlying element of humour, which can
never be denied; whosoever denies it has not understood
Rabelais’ art of the novel.
Kundera is of
the opinion that joy lies in responding to the humour rather
than in passing any moral judgement: "From the view-point
of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the
most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil."
Judgement has no place in the novel and it least of all
concerns the writer. This is Kundera’s chief thrust at the
outset.
Kundera
examines the experience of banishment - his own as well as
that of Stravinsky, Conrad, Nabokov and Gombrowicz — and a
moving assault on the changing moral judgements and
persecutions of art and artists from Celine to Mayakovsky to
Rushdie. He is a fervent guardian of the ethical privileges of
the artist and the reverence due to a work of art and its
creator’s desires. The betrayal of both is one of the
central arguments of the book.
For example,
Kundera has a second look at Kafka and reprimands the
disfiguring lens forced on his writings by his comrade and
literary executor, Max Brod. The title of this book,
"Testaments Betrayed" has allusions to Max Brod’s
betrayal of Kafka’s presumed appeal that his writing be
destroyed after his death. In Kundera’s view, Brod betrayed
Kafka by creating the parable of the tormented saint whose
novels express the nasty retribution in store for those who do
not pursue the course of uprightness and rectitude.
Translators
and literary critics resort to irrelevant judgements always
looking "for a position (political, philosophical,
religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it
for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that
aspect of reality." Kundera shows how one of Stravinsky’s
friends, the conductor Ernest Ansermet, attempted to distort
his music; and how a biographer befuddled Hemingway’s work
with his life. This comes as an unswerving clash with the
autonomy of art.
Milan Kundera
unwaveringly stands up against the building of a system,
especially that which springs from one’s ideas. He doggedly
resorts to Nietzsche’s command that we should never
"corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us".
Like music, we must go on playing with our ideas, an exercise
quite familiar to Kundera, the virtuoso pianist who believes
in the autonomy of art. The case is argued through the works
of modern artists like Stravinsky, Kafka, Robert Musil,
Hermann Broch, Witold Gombrowicz and the Czech composer Leos
in his earlier work, "The Art of the Novel".
The chapter
on Stravinsky is rather fascinating, especially for its
far-fetched analogy of two halves of a soccer game to the
rhythmic development of music and the novel in Europe. He
explains: "The caesuras, or halftime breaks . . . do not
coincide. In the history of music, the break stretches over a
big part of the 18th century (the symbolic apogee of the first
half occurring in Bach’s ‘The Art of the Fugue’, and the
start of the second half in the works of the earliest
Classical composers); the break in the history of the novel
comes a little later: between the 18th and the 19th centuries
— that is, between Laclos andd Sterne, on the one side, and,
on the other, Scott and Balzac."
Kundera is
here emphatically arguing that modernism has been a
"third (or overtime) period" in which the supreme
works of fiction have tried to re-establish the first half by
rebuffing "any obligation to give the reader the illusion
of reality: an obligation that reigned supreme throughout the
novel’s second half." This is achieved through the
"playful transcription" of Dickens by Kafka or the
rewriting of Diderot by Kundera, in his play "Jacques and
His Master", and Stravinsky’s transformation of the
entire history of music and settling down in it as if it were
his abode.
Modern-day
fundamentalism might get provoked by Kundera’s thesis that
religion and the novel are incompatible and, therefore, the
novel concerns itself with humour or, in other words,
"profanation" literally meaning (in Latin)
"outside the temple". Thomas Mann has done it in
"Joseph and His Brothers" by revealing how God is
the invention of Abraham. Profanity is not an offence but an
element of customary behaviour; is it not apparent that
Rushdie wants to show that "the Holy Scriptures make us
laugh"?
Fiction thus
comes to our defence in countering any notion of shame which
"is one of the key notions of the Modern Era",
Kundera argues, "the individualisti period that is
imperceptibly receding from us these days; shame: an epidermal
instinct to defend one’s personal life; to require a curtain
over the window; to insist that a letter addressed to A not be
read by B."
"Like a
dog!," Kundera quotes Kafka’s K. as saying when he is
dying of his stab wound; "it was as if the shame of it
must outlive him." Kundera comments: "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 (which is the)
transformation of a man from subject to object experienced as
shame).
The meaning
attributed to words can never have a one-hundred-percent
guarantee, being always contaminated by their opposite.
Structuring and categorising reality is not all that simple.
Can we really attain a more realisable view of things in this
world of mere representations underpinned by nothing but the
non-transparency of language? Thus we distrust the very notion
of reason, and the idea of the human being as an independent
entity.
This deep-seated scepticism
and the world of fiction burns away the intellectual ground on
which objectification stands. It is the subjective that
presents the rallying point against any
"body-snatching" ideology.
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Like Rabelais,
Milan Kundera’s "Testaments Betrayed" has an
astounding richness; it has every thing: the plausible and the
implausible, allegory and satire, ordinary men and anecdotes,
meditations and scholarly disputes, voyages real and fantastic
and, on top of all, digressions of pure verbal virtuosity.
Such digressions of Kundera, though disquieting, are full of
informative connections and rather original re-readings of
Rabelais, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, Musil,
Kafka and Salman
