But time is passing, the women are all talking
at once, and it is nearly impossible to have a conversation,
much less to impose its subject. She
tries delicately to take up topics they raise and
lead them toward what shewants to tell them, but
: she fails: as soon as her remarks move away from
their own concerns, no one listens.
The waiter has already brought the second
round of beer; her first mug is still standing on the
table with its foam collapsed as if disgraced
alongside the exuberant foam of the fresh mug.
Irena faults herself for having lost her taste for
beer; in France she learned to savor a drink by
small mouthfuls, and is no longer used to bolting
great quantities of liquid as beer-loving requires.
Sheraises the mug to her lips and forces herself to
take two, three swigs in a row. Just then one
woman-the oldest of them all, about sixty-gently
puts her hand to Irena's lips and wipes away
the flecks of foam left there.
"Don't force yourself," she tells her. "Suppose
we have a.little wine ourselves?It would be idiotic
to pass up such a good wine," and she asks the
waiter to open one of the bottles still standing
untouched on the long table.
Milada had been a colleagueof Martin's, working
at the same institute. Irena had recognized her
when she first appeared at the door of the room,
but only now, each of them with a wine glass in
hand, is she able to talk to her. She looks at her:
Milada still has the same shape face (round),the
same dark hair, the same hairstyle (also round,
covering the ears and falling to below the chin).
She appears not to have changed; however, when
she begins to speak, her face is abruptlv transformed:
her skin creases and creases again, her
upper lip shows fine vertical lines, while wrinkles
on her cheeks and chin shift rapidly with every
expression. Irena thinks Milada certainly must
not realize this: people don't talk to themselves in
front of a mirror; she would see her own face only
when it is at rest, with the skin nearly smooth;
every mirror in the world would have her believe
that she is still beautiful.
As she savors the wine, Milada says (and
instantly, on her lovely face, the wrinkles spring
forth and start to dance): "It3 not easli,returning,
is it?'"
"They can't understand that we left without
the slightest hope of coming back. We did our
best to drop anchor where we were. Do you know
Skacel?"
"The poet?"
L'There'sa stanzawhere he talks about his sadness;
he says he wants to build a house out of it
and lock himself inside for three hundred years.
Three hundred years. We all saw a three-hundred-year-long
tunnel stretching ahead of us."
"Sure, we did too, here.''
"So then why isn't anyone willing to acknowledge
that?"
"Because people revise their feelings if the feelings
were wrong. If history has disproved them."1
"And then, too: everybody thinks we left to get
ourselves an easy life. They don't know how hard
it is to carve out a little place for yourself in a foreignworld.
Can you imagine-leaving your country
with a baby and with another one in your
belly. Losing your husband. Raising your two
daughters with no money. . .1?
She falls silent, and Milada says: "It makes no
sense
to tell them all that Even until just lately,
everybody was arguing about who had the hardest
time under the old regime. Everybody wanted
to be acknowledged as a victim. Rut those suffering-contests
are over now. These days people
brag about success. not about suffering. So if
they're prepared to respect you now, it's not for
the hard life you've had, it's because they see
you've
got yourself a rich man!"
They've been talking for a longtime in a corner
when the other women approach and collect
around them. As if to make up for not paving
enough attention to their hostess, they are garrulous
(a beer high makes people more noisy and
good-humored than a wine high) and affectionate.
The woman who earlier had demanded beer
cries: "I've really got to taste your wine!" and she
calls the waiter, who opens more bottles and fills
glasses.
Irena is gripped bv a sudden vision: beer mugs
in hand and laughing noisilv, a bunch of women
rush up to her, she makes out Czech words, and
understands, horrified, that she is not in France,
that she is in Prague and she is doomed. Oh,
yes-it's one of her old emigration-dreams, and
she quickly banishes the memory of it: in fact the
women around her aren't drinking beer now,
they're raising wineglasses, and again they're
toasting the daughter's return; then one of them,
beaming, says to her: "You remember? I wrote
you that it was high time, high time you came
back!"
Who is that woman? The whole evening sheS
been talking about her husband's sickness, lingering
excitedlv over all the morbid details.
Finally Irena recognizes her: the high-school
classmate who wrote her the very week Communism
fell: "Oh, my dear, we're old already! It's
high time you came hack!"' Again, now, she
repeats that line, and in her thickened face a
broad grin reveals dentures.
The other women assail her with questions:
"Irena, remember when . . . ?" And "You know
what happened back then with . . . ??' L'Oh,no,
really, you must remember h m !" "That guy with
the big ears, you always made fun of him!" "No,
vou can't possibly have forgotten him! You're all
he talks about!"
Until that moment they have shown no interest
in what she was trying to tell them. What is the
meaning of this sudden onslaught? bJhatis it they
want to find out, these wornen who wouldn't listen
to anything before? She soon sees that their
questions are of a particular kind: questions to
check whether she knows what they know,
whether she remembers what they remember.
This has a strange effect on her, one that will stay
m-ithher:
Earlier, by their total uninterest in her experience
abroad, they amputated twenty years from
her life.Xow, with this interrogation, they are ixying
to stitch her old past onto her present life. As
if they were amputating her forearm and attaching
the hand directly to the elbow: as if they were
amputating her calves and joining her feet to her
knees.
Transfixed by that image, she can give no
answer to their questions; anyhow7the women are
not expecting one, and, drunker and drunker,
they fall back into their chatter, which leaves
Irena out. Shewatches their mouths opening all at
the same time, mouths moving and emitting
words and constantly bursting into laughter (a
mystery: how is it that women not listening to one
arlotller can laugh at what the others are saying?).
None of them is talking to Irena anvmore, but
they're all beaming with good hulnor, the woman
who started off by ordering beer begins singing,
the others do the same, and even when the party's
over, they go on singing out in the street.
In bed Irena thinks back over her party; once
again her old emigration-dream comes back and
she sees herself surrounded by women, noisy and
hearty, raising their beer mugs. In the dream they
were working for the secret police with orders to
entrap her. But for whom were tonight's women
working? <'It'shigh time you came back," said her
old classmate with the macabre dentures. As an
emissary from the graveyards (the graveyards of
the homeland), her job was to call Irena back into
line: to warn her that time is short and that life is
supposed to finish up where it started.
Then her thoughts turn to Milada, who was so
maternally friendly; she made it clear that nobody
is interested anymore in Irena's odyssey,and Irena
realizes that, actually, neither is hhlada. But how
can she blame her? Why should Milada be interested
in something that has no connection at all
with her own life? It would be just a polite charade,
and Irena is glad that Milada was so kindly,
with no charade.
Her last thought before sleepingis about Sylvie.
It3 already so long sincc she's seen her! She
misses her! Irena would love to take her out to
their Paris bistro and tell her all about her recent
trip to Bohemia. Get her to understand how hard
it is to return home. Actually you were the first,
she imagines telling her, the first person who used
those words: the Great Return. And you knowsomething,
Sylvie-now I understand: I could go
back and live with them, but there'd be a condition:
I'd have to lay my whole life with you, with
all of you, with the French, solemnly on the altar
of the homeland and set fire to it. Twenty years of
my life spent abroad would go up in smoke, in a
sacrificial ceremony. And the women would sing
and dance with me around the fire, with beer
mugs raised high in their hands. That's the price
I'd have to pay to be ~ardoned.To be accepted.
To become one of them again.
One day at the Paris airport, she moved through
the police checkpoint and sat down to wait for the
Prague flight. On the facing bench she saw a man
and, after a few moments of uncertainty and sur-
14 TESTAMEWS BETRAYED TheDay Panurge No Longer Maker People Laugh 15
ther, in this mingling of different historical periods, in
Immortal*.
As a young writer, in Prague, I detested the word
"generation," whose smell of the herd put me off. The
first time I had the sense of being connected to others
was later, in France, reading Tern Nostm by_Carlos~ .-- ...-. Fuentes.
How was it possible that someone from.-...
another continent, so distant from me in itinerary and
background, should be possessed by the same aesthetic
ession to bring different h i s t o r i ~ a ~ ~ ~ b d s S t ~ * i s t
I-._--m a nove an obsession that till then I had na'ively
considered to be mine alone?
Impossible to grasp the nature of the terra nostra,
the tern nostm of Mexico, without looking down into
the well of the past. Not as a historian would do, in
order to see the chronological unfolding of events, but
in order to consider: what does the concentmted
essence of the Mexican term mean to a man? Fuentes
grasped that essence.in the form of a dream novel
where various historical periods telescope into a kind
of poetic and oneiric metahistory; he thus created
something almost indescribable and, in any case, hitherto
unknown to literature.
Most recently, I had the same sense of secret aesthetic
kinship in Philippe Sollers' La Fite h Venise,
that strange novel whose story occurs in our own time
but is a stage setting for Watteau, C6zanne, Mone.t,
Titian, Picasso, Stendhal-for the display of their
remarks and their an.
And in the meantime came The Satanic Verses: the
complicated identity of a Europeanized Indian; terra
non nostra; terme non nostrae; terrae peditae; to
grasp that shredded identity, the novel explores it in
different Iocations on the planet: in London, in
Bombay, in a Pakistani village, and then in seventh-
centuryAsia.
The coexistence of different periods sets the novelist
a technical problem: how to link them without having
the novel lose its unity? 3-dbi;s@found
fantastical solutions: in 1
Fuentes, his chaziers move from one period to
another as their own reincarnations. In Rushdie, it is
the character of Gibreel Farishta who ensures that
i
s~ipratemporalconnection by being transformed into
the Archangel Gibreel, who in turn becomes a medium
for Mallound (the novel$ variant of Mohammed).
Ii
In Sollera' book and in mine, the link has nothing
fantastical to it. In his, the paintings and the books
seen and read by the characters serve as windows into
the past. In mine, the past and the present are bridgSq
-by common themes and mot~fs. i
%an our underground aesthetic kinshin (unoer-. \ 1 ceived
and irnperceGable) be explained by some influence
on one another? No. By influences undergone in
common? I cannot see what they might be. Or have we
41breathed the same air of history? Has the history of
the novel, by its own logic, set us all the same task?
The History of the Nouel as R e v e n g e o n
H i s t o r y Itself
&Iistory.Can we still draw on that obsolete authority?
WhatI am about to say is a purely personal avowal: as
a novelist, I have always felt myself to be within history,
that is to say, partway along a road, in dialogue
16 TESTAMENTS BETRAYED
with those who preceded me and even perhaps (but
less so) with those still to come. Of course, 1 am speaking
of the history of the novel, not of some other history,
and speaking of it such as I see it: it has nothing
to do with Hegel's extrahuman reason; it is neither predetermined
nor identical with the idea of progress; it is
entirely human, made by men, by some men, and thus
comparable to the development of an individual artist,
who acts sometimes tritely and then surprisingly,
sometimes with genius and then not, and who often
misses opportunities.
Here I am making a declaration of u~volvementin
the history of the novel, when all my novels breathe a
hatred of history, of that hostile, inhuman force thatuninvited,
unwanted-invades our lives from the outside
and destroys them. Yet there is nothing inconsistent
in this double attitude, because the history of
humanity and the history of the novel are two very different
thiigs. The fonner is not man's to determine, it
takes over like an alien force he cannot control,
whereas the history of the novel (or of painting, of
music) is born of man's freedom. of his wholly personal
creations, of his own choices. The meaning of an
art's history is opposed to the meaning of history itself.
Because of its personal nature, the history of an art is a
revenge by man against the impersonality of the history
of humanity.
The personal nature of the history of the novel?
But if it is to form a whole over the course of centuries,
would not such a history need to be unified by some
common and enduring-and thus by definition suprapersonal-meaning?
No. I believe that even this common
meaning is still personal, human; for over the
TheDay Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh 17
courseof history the concept of this or that art (what is
the novel?), as well as the meaning of its evolution
(where has it come fmm and where is it going?), is
constantly defined and redefined by each artist, by
each new work. The meaning of the history of the
novel is the very search for that meaning, its perpetual
creation and re-creation, which always retroactively
encompasses the whole past of the novel: Rabelais certainly
never called his Gargunma-Pantagruel a novel.
It wasn't a novel; it became one gradually as later novelists
(Steme, Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Vancura,
Gombrowicz, Rushdie, Kis, Chamoiseau) took their
inspiration from it, openly drew on it, thus integrating
it into the history of the novel, or, rather, acknowledging
it as the first building block in that history.
This said, the words "the end of historyn have
never stirred me to anguish or displeasure. "How sweet
it would he to forget the monster that saps our brief
lives as cement for its vain monuments. How sweet it
would be to forget History!" (LifeIs Elsewhere) If history
is going to end (though I cannot imagine in concrete
terms that "end" the philosophers love to talk
about), then let it happen fast! But applied to art, that
Samephrase, "the end of history," strikes me with ter"r;
that end I can imagine only too well, for most novels
produced today stand outside the history of the
novel: novelized confessions, novelized journalism,
novelized score-settling, novelized autobiographies,
"~elized indiscretions, novelized denunciations, novelized
political arguments, novelized deaths of husbands,
novelized deaths of fathers, novelized deaths of
"'~thern, novelized deflowerings, novelized childbirrhs-novels
ad infinitum, to the end of time, that
18 TESTAMENTS BETRAYED
I
i say nothiig new, have no aesthetic ambition, bring no
1 change to our understanding of man or to novelistic
form, are each one like the next, are completely con-
1 sumable in the morning and completely discardable in
the afternoon.
To my mind, great works can only be born within
i ! ~i the history of their art and as participants in that hisi
l tory. It is only inside history that we can see what is
, . ,
new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what
is imitation; in other words, only inside history can a
work exist as a value capable of being discerned and
judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall
outside its own hiitory, for it is a fall into the chaos
where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived.
il#ill During the writing of Don Quizote, Cervantes did notI:' "li'i mind altering his hero's character as he went. The freedom
by which Rabelais, Cewantes, Diderot, Sterne
'1 enchant us had to do with improvisation. The art of
1 complex and rigorous composition did not become a
! commanding need until the first half of the nineteenth
century. The novel's form as it came into being then,
with its action concentrated in a narrow time s p q 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
),I(1 1 ,
,!!I1
TheDay Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh 19
1 irnprooiaation a n d Cornposition
possessed: in the seven notebooks that take up 400
pages of the PlCiade edition (the novel itself takes up
750), motifs look for characters, characters look for
motifs, characters vie for the status of protagonist;
Stawoginshould be married, but "to whom?" wonders
Dostoyevsky, and he tries to marry him successivelyto
thee 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 "livingn quality of characters
is just sentimental ndivetC from people who have
never understood art.)
The novelist in our time who is nostalgic for the a n
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
Steme, 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 magniftcent 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
"toxiccited improvisation, the potential for a complex,
'~h structure that would also be as perfectly calcu-
in the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance
and preclude any questions It follows, then, that the t ~ e
opponent of totalitariankitsch is the person who asks questions.
A question is like a knife that slim through the stage backdrop
and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that
was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her
paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath,
the unintelligible truth showing through.
But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian
regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They,
too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes
understand, to provoke collective tears.
Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organized by a
political organization in Germany. When she picked up the
catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a
drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a
biography that read like the life of a saint or martyr: she had
suffered, struggledagainst injustice, been forced to abandon her
bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. "Her
paintings are a struggle for happiness" was the final sentence.
She protested, but they did not understand her.
Do you mean that modem art isn't persecuted under Com-
munism?
"My &erny is kitsch, not Communism!" she replied, in-
furiated.
From that time on, she began to insert mystifications in her
biography, and by the time she got to America she even managed
to hide the fact that she was Czech. It was all merely a
desperate attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to
make of her life.
214
She stood in Front of her easel with a half-finished canva
the old man in the armchair behind her observing every
of her brush.
"It's time we went home," he said at last with a glr
his watch.
She laid down her palette and went into the bathn:
wash. The old man raised himself out of the amcha
reached for his cane, which was leaning against a tablt
door of the studio led directly out to the lawn. It was g~
dark. Fifty feet awaywas a white clapboard house. The gl
floor windows were lit. Sabina was moved by the two wi
shining out into the dying day.
All her life she had proclaimed kitsch her enemj
hadn't she in fact been carrying it with her7 Her kitsch a
image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and rule,
loving mother and wise father. It was an image that took
within her after the death of her parents. The less h,
resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive sf
to its magic, and more than once she shed tears whe
ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced th
glected father as the windows of the happy family's
shone out into the dying day.
She had met the old man in New York. He was ric
liked paintings. He lived alone with his wife, also aging
house in the country. Facing the house, but still on his
stood an old stable. He had had it remodeled into a stud
Sabina and would follow the movements of her brush fo
on end.
Now all three of them were having supper together.
old woman called Sabina "my daughter," but all indic;
215
would lead one to believe the opposite, namely, that Sabina was
the mother and that her two children doted on her, worshipped
her, would do anything she asked.
Had she then, herself on the threshold of old age, found the
parents who had been snatched from her as a girl? Had she at
last found the children she had never had herself?
She was well aware it was an illusion. Her days with the
aging couple were merely a brief interval. The old man was
seriously ill, and when his wife was left on her own, she would
go and live with their son in Canada. Sabina's path of betrayals
would then continue elsewhere, and fmm the depths of her
being. a silly mawkish song about two shining windows and the
happy family living behind them would occasionally make its
way ~ntothe unbearable lightness of being.
Though touched by the song, Sabina did not take her feeltiful
lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves
Iing seriously. She knew only too well that the song was a beauinto
the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarianpowIer
and becoming as touching ar any other human weakness.
For none among us is superman enough to escapekitsch completely.
No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of
the human condition. I
, Kitsch has its source in the categorical agreement with being.
But what is the basis of being? God? Mankind? Struggle?
Love? Man? Woman?
,
, .,,,
I
The Gnnd Mmh
Since opinions vary, there are various kitsches: Gathollc,
Protestant, Jewish, Communist, Fascist, democratic, feminist,
European, American. national, international.
Since the days of the French Revolution, one half of Europe
has been referred to as the left, the other half as the right.
Yet to define one or the other by means of the theoretical
principles it is all but impossible. And no wonder:
politicalmovements rest not so much on rational attitudesas on
the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together
to make up this or that politicalkitsch.
The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated
by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and
tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the
road to brotherhood, equality,justice, happiness; it goes on and
on, obstaclesnotwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the
march is to be the Grand March.
The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy7 Rejection
of the consumer society or demands for increased pmductivityf
The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside
the point. What makes a leftiit a leftist is not this or that theory
but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the
Grand March.
Franz was obviously not a devotee of kitsch. The fantasy of the
Grand March played more or less the same role in his life as
the mawkish song about the two brightly lit windows in Sa-
258 W E UNBEARABLE LIOHTNESS OF BNC The Gnnd March
bina's. What political party did Franz vote for? I am afraid he I
did not vote at all; he preferred to spend Election Day hiking in
the mountains. Which does not, of course, imply that he was
Ino longer touched by the Grand March. It is always nice to
dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through I
the centuries, and Franz never quite forgot the dream.
One day, some friends phoned him from Paris. They were
planning a march on Cambodia and invited him to join them.
Cambodia had recently been through American bombard- ,
ment, a civil war, a paroxysm of carnage by local Communists
that reduced the small nation by a fifth, and finally occupation 1
by neighboring Vietnam, which by then was a mere vassal of ~
Russia. Cambodia was racked by famine, and people were dy- '
ing for want of medical care. An international medical committee
had repeatedly requested permission to enter the country, I
but the Vietnamese had turned them down. The idea was for a
group of important Western intellectualsto march to the Cambodian
border and by means of this great spectacle performed ,
before the eyes of the world to force the occupied country to i
allow the doctors in.
The friend who spoke to Franz was one he had marched
with through the streets of Paris. At first Franz was thrilled by
the invitation, but then his eye fell on his student-mistress sit- '
ting across the room in an armchair. She was looking up at him,
her eyes magnifiedby the big round lenses in her glasses. Franz
had the feeling those eyes were begging him not to go. And so
he apologetically declined.
No sooner had he hung up than he regretted his decision.
True, he had taken care of his earthly mistress, but he had
neglected his unearthly love. Wasn't Cambodia the same as
Sabina's country? A country occupied by its neighbor's Communist
army! A country that had felt the brunt of Russia's fist!
All at once, Franz felt that his half-forgotten friend had contacted
him at Sabina's secret bidding.
Heavenly bodies know all and see all. If he went on the
march, Sabina would gaze down on him enraptured; she would
understand that he had remained faithful to her.
"Would you be terribly upset if I went on the march;
asked the girl with the glasses, who counted every day
from him a loss, yet could not deny him a thing.
Several days later he was in a large jet taking off from Paris
with twenty doctors and about fifty intellectuals (professors,
writers, diplomats, singers, actors, and mayors) as well as four
hundred reporters and photographers.
The plane landed in Bangkok. Four hundred and seventy doctors,
intellectuals, and reporters made their way to the large
ballroom of an international hotel, where more doctors, actors,
singers, and professors of linguistics had gathered with several
hundred journalists bearing notebooks, tape recorders, and
cameras, still and video. On the podium, a group of twenty or
so Americans sitting at a long table were presiding over the
proceedings.
The French intellectualswith whom Franz had entered the
ballroom felt slighted and humiliated. The march on Cambodia
had been their idea, and here the Americans, supremely unabashed
as usual, had not only taken over,but had taken over in
English without a thought that a Dane or a Frenchman might
not understand them. And because thd Danes had long since
I i . '
. , ,
- A ~