Download mmodel - University of Washington

Leroy F. Searle
Department of English GN-30
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
The Musical Model:
Beethoven and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I. The Beast in the Basement
In Robert Musil's Der Manne ohne Eigenshaften, Ulrich, the man without
qualities, is especially haunted by two things: his friend Walter, afflicted by music
(especially Wagner) and devoted to mad piano duets with his wife Clarise; and
Mossbruger, a huge blond homocidal maniac, a carpenter like Jesus, determined to prove
to the court (and the world) that his violent sexual murders are not the result of insanity.
Ulrich senses a connection; and Musil portrays it in the image of a force of immense
power, from a “cavern of disaster,” a kind of beast in the basement, tearing away at the
chains that bind it, which it “might someday rend away.” (Musil, 68). Instead of the
benificent image of music as having the power to tame the savage beast, it seems to have
the power of one. One might think, fleetingly, of Aristotle's odd remark in the Politics,
that while it is proper for a man to be musical-- that is, to be on some kind of terms with
the muses--flute music is unseemly, for it is altogether too exciting.(Aristotle, 1341a)
For the most part, we seem content with noise, tending to cliches about music.
Pater's familiar remark that “all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music”
[Pater, 135] hardly means anything, or if it does, attempts to render it confirm that it is the
kind of remark that seems destined to become a cliche. It is not that Pater is wrong--nor
Searle /
2
even the fastidious Aristotle, for that matter--but the terms for discussion elude us, just as
music does, when we try to speak of its meaning.
I take this to be a general problem in criticism, where theoretical terms that are
intelligible persistently fail to be perspicuous. We settle for such cliches as Horace's ut
pictura poesis, thereby obscuring the fact that we don't really know what pictures are like
either, or reach up toward the lintel of the sublime for the expressions of great souls, or
devote ourselves to mirrors, lamps, and always, texts, as if the muses were really just
weavers, a little down on their luck and therefore underemployed. For at least two
hundred years, we have been collectively engaged in the project of undoing traditional
metaphysics, first looking for foundations and then, finding only the sockets where old
chains were anchored, trying to eradicate even them.
Why is it so hard to cash in the analogy between literature and music? Or is it an
analogy? Aristotle's concern with being Musical--despite our habits, I can see no reason
to suppose that Aristotle really liked poetry or any art-- was that he knew, with some
anxiety, that beyond misanthropy, beyond the misology or distrust of argument against
which his master, Plato warned in the Phaedo [89d] lay the devastation of being or
becoming a misomusist, to use Kundera's term: "one who feels humiliated by the
existence of something that is beyond him." [Kundera 1988, 140] Hence Aristotle’s
obsessive need to be right all the time: a beast in the basement, tearing away at its chains.
Searle /
3
2. The Way of Discourse
Parmenides, one of the tutelary spirits of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of
Being, was, for all the lightness Kundera wishes to attribute to him, very heavy on one
subject: following the way of discourse, by which the affirmation that the One IS can be
maintained. It is the way of Being, to which Heidegger was disastrously seduced,
thinking of language as the House of Being. He never went downstairs. Plato picks up
on it in the dialogue named for that old Eleatic Stranger, Parmenides: the way of
discourse is the road that leads to the theory of Forms, which can themselves only
be”apprehended by discourse.”[cf. Plato’s Parmenides 135e ] Plato, fearing he might
blind his soul should he rely on images [Phaedo, 99e] is nevertheless their captive: if the
ultimate reality is the Forms, they are apprehended by a spiritual not a corporeal eye, and
the entire cognitive grammar of "to see" is mapped onto the intricacies of "to know." The
allegory of the cave, the relegation of poetry as an imitation of an imitation, both bespeak
the tyranny of the image, its appeal, and its immemorial complicity with words.
Picture instead that scene from Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, in which
Alex, monstrously guilty of assaults upon women, friends, and everybody's sensibility, is
to be rehabilitated. The doctors do it by propping his eyes open, forcing him to observe
scenes of torture, of the Third Reich and the holocaust, as all the while, everyone is
flooded by the sounds of Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy from the Ninth
Symphony. What is Kubrick doing? What does he see in those sounds, so different and
evidently deliberately so from what Burgess does in his less interesting novel? [Burgess,
102 ff.]
3. Narrative as Explanation
Searle /
4
Among other reasons, we are more comfortable with theoretical models that link
words and images (leaving music out of it) because they allow us to construct readable
narratives, in the simplest form of chronicles, graphable as a line of uniform slope,
mimicing time by having statements follow its arrow, marked and mapped by pictures.
These narrative relations lie at that heart of most of our successful scientific theories, to
say nothing of our models of art or our sense of social reality. Narrative is genetic,
causal: this happened and then this happened, while we supply a connecting "because."
In some cases we are right, but the privilege we accord to those cases, in transferring to
the mode of explanation, does great mischief. We get this narrative virus from Aristotle,
incorporate it and pass it on, with antibodies in the form of one or another species of
scepticism, be it Ockham, Hume, or Derrida. In all these cases, the way of discourse is a
way of turning everything into rhetoric, such that all of reality we acknowledge is what
we can get into words--or rather, what we can get into parsable sentences and phrases, the
stuff of causal explanations. Lyotard's concern for the differend, for the unpresentable,
for that for which we have no words, is, as he puts it, a concern to preserve the “honor of
thinking” in a time when theory, having become less an activity of mind than a library
classification, increasingly seems a way to avoid thought by working an algorithm or
running a routine.[Lyotard, xii] It is also a way to recognize that our habits in regarding
stories may systematically deflect us from even recognizing stories with a very different
formal deployment than the commonplace beginning, middle, and end of Aristotle's
Poetics.
But the power of narrative is the power of its explanations, not its apparent form.
For this reason, the divigations of narrative, particularly when it seems bent on undoing
Searle /
5
itself, are crucial: the monotonic mode of the chronicle, where episodes are linear and
assume a directly readable sense of cause, has been in the process of undoing itself
throughout the post-medieval epoch. What I mean to suggest is that we have, in thinking
of narrative, tended to normalize all cases by reference to the chronicle, sophisticated only
to the level of emplotment, taking that as the paradigm and model of what will count as
narrative, instead of the simpler sense of articulating, or the root etymological sense of
gnosis, or knowing.
4. The Sign of Seven
My theoretical interest in the novels of Milan Kundera is, initially, in his
distinctive mode of articulation, of narrating as an art of knowing. It is not a mere
coincidence that he is, in all his works, obsessed by music. A musician and composer
himself, he never lets his readers forget that he is thinking of music--despite his
observation in The Art of the Novel that his translators and foreign publishers seem to
have been terminally obtuse, eliminating all the musicological chapters in the English
translation of The Joke, and repeatedly missing the point of his scrupulously careful
phrasing in other works. [Kundera 1988, 121]
There is a musical model in these novels, a very specific one: Beethoven's Quartet
# 14 in C# minor, opus 131; but more generally, a profound recognition that narrative as
knowing is not a chronicle, not a plot in which beginning, middle, and end have a
meaning with reference to what we accept as natural time, with conclusions or
"messages" compatible in some functional way with the purgation of Aristotle's catharsis.
In this latter sense, the musical model is a model for making artistic arguments, a way of
Searle /
6
thinking and understanding that is inherently non-linear, even as it occurs sequentially in
time. Like the Mandelbrot set, it is iterable, self-similar but infinitely various.
In a well known interview with Christian Salmon, Kundera attempted to describe
this sense of musical thinking by appropriating the term "polyphony," provoking Salmon
to ask if the application of this metaphor "to literature [doesn't] set up demands a novel
could never meet." [Kundera 1988, 73] Kundera's response, not entirely satisfactory, is
nevertheless instructive. He associates the term with attempts, since Cervantes, to open
up "rifts" in "unilinear composition," breaking up continuous narration (what I have here
called chronicle), recognizing that writing cannot manage the simultaneous presence of
multiple voices in the way that an orchestra or a string quartet can. [74] His further
account of polyphony in fiction cites examples of multiplicity of subjects and styles, but
does not really return to Salmon's question which is, in a sense, unanswerable because it
is framed from within a model of the novel as discourse, as rhetoric. But Kundera's
fiction is far better than his quasi-critical commentary on it for showing that polyphony is
not a metaphor, and that far from setting up demands that a novel could never meet, it
reveals a demand in novels to which few readers, evidently, are willing to rise. The
contingent advantage of Kundera as an example is that he is obsessed with calling what
we may call the musical demand to the reader's notice.
Not only does he include, in every novel, a running commentary, sometimes a
subplot, pertaining to music, as in his use of the Es muss sein motif of Beethoven's last
quartet, Opus 135 in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he articulates his stories to
provide polyphony not as sound but as cognitive presence. In a musical score, polyphony
is graphically present as those notes, in these voices, under the joint signatures of key and
Searle /
7
tempo; but what we hear is rarely the score but the ensemble: one thing, composite,
unfolding in time. If we hear the score through the ensemble, it is only by virtue of
knowing how to read music and effect the transformation from sign to sound that the
score mediates. Kundera shows, however, that reading a novel is a precise complement,
masked perhaps only by the greater portion of our neural anatomy that administers
speech--and the relatively larger share of our economy that is dedicated to teaching
people to read words as opposed to music. The verbal score, the text, is graphically
present only as a linear sequence, but what we read is composite: these words, in those
voices. The medium of sound in the first case affects us as feeling; the medium of words
in the second case affects us as the ensemble of a history--both our own, as we read, and
those voices mediated to us by the text. To take advantage of a pun, the ensemble must
be assembled, and it takes work.
In the same interview to which I have already alluded, Salmon remarks to
Kundera that all but one of his books have seven parts (the exception is Laughable Loves,
with five parts), including the collection of interviews and essays collected under the title
The Art of the Novel. Kundera says of this that it seems to be a "deep, unconscious,
incomprehensive drive, an archetype of form that I cannot escape." [Kundera 1988, 86]
He later remarks that he once thought that "the form that obsessed me was some sort of
algebraic definition of my own personality," [91] but says that he had to give up "that
narcissistic and subjective conception of the form" upon studying Beethoven's Quartet #
14, Opus 131. He simply lists the seven movements of that marvelous work, remarking
Beethoven's transformation of the sonata allegro form in the sonatas and quartets by
"bringing a maximum of formal diversity into [the] unity" of the composition.[92]
Searle /
8
In calling Opus 131 "the pinnacle of architectonic perfection," Kundera does not
detail why he thinks so (he is surely not alone in this opinion). Thus he does not note, as
he might have, the degree to which Beethoven seems to have been obsessed by the sign of
seven in this quartet. Not only does the quartet have seven movements, the fourth (at the
geometrical and temporal center) of the quartet takes about a third of the time, and has
itself seven sections, the fourth of which occupies about a third of the movement. (The
sign of seven appears to be four.)
If awareness of such patterning is, as Kundera intimates, a late discovery on his
part (something I am a little inclined to doubt), it is an important indication that this
"archetype of form" bears a revealing resemblance to the patterning we are now learning
to spot as fractal, possessing the formal characteristic of infinite expressibility by merely
changing the scale. [Gleich, 98 ] That is, the pattern is composed, not necessarily by
explicit prior design, but by the unfolding of representative functions, each of which has
the property of iterability: each repetition of the function has an outcome that can be
entered back into the function and repeated, to whatever depth of recursion we are
competent to comprehend. There is a fairly simple reason, in this light, for the sign or
shadow of seven to mark Kundera's work (or, for that matter, Beethoven's): it is the level
of recursion most aptly suited to human memory.
5. The Second Infinity
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as the reader reads, supposing no unusual
impairment of memory, the reassembly of feeling into ensemble is mediated by virtually
eternal returns to the same places, the same events, the same feelings and dreams. The
irony of the opening chapter, in which Kundera querulously considers Nietszche's "mad
Searle /
9
doctrine" of eternal return, is thus palpable: being does not return, as one's life is always
without precedent: one never knows in any occasion of choosing what would be the best
choice, since the occasion is forever new. But the novel returns, to Prague, and to the six
fortuities by which Tomas meets Tereza, precipitating the seventh, the "difficult
resolution" or Der schwer gefasste Entschluss that announces the finale of Beethoven's
last quartet, Opus 135, and its Er muss sein motif, in Tomas's decision to marry Tereza.
He says, repeatedly, that she was sent to him, like Moses to the Pharoah's daughter, down
the river among the bullrushes to the "bank of his bed," showing how the fortuitous, the
coincidental, gathers into a voice like the first violin saying "Es muss sein, It Must Be" to
be answered, shall we say, by a viola saying, "Es konnte auch anders sein (it could just as
well have been otherwise)." Thus the first fortuity becomes fatality: it creates its own
occasion for ensemble, for music. As Kundera says, coincidence and fortuity, chance, are
the very conditions of composition, and if we say, when symmetries are made articulate,
that it is too "novelistic," or "untrue to life" we miss the knowing, the narrative, in the fact
that "human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion." He goes on to say, "They
are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a
fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then
assume a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life." [Kundera 1984, 52]
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera uses the technique that reaches
its pinnacle in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where the end of the story is revealed
almost exactly in the middle of the book, to take up this issue of music in a wonderful and
profound meditation on his father, as in his latter years, he gradually lost words. When
they failed him, he would struggle, then say, "That's strange," while "his eyes would
Searle / 10
express infinite astonishment at knowing everything and being unable to say
anything."[160] This too is part of what Lyotard means by the "differend" as it partakes
of the very honor of thought we are always and everywhere in danger of losing. What his
dying father knows is what Kundera's novels narrate, pertaining to a second infinity, an
infinity of variations on a theme wherein we encounter the "infinity of internal variety
concealed in all things."[Kundera 1981, 164) And the particularity of this narration is one
that has gone to the basement, to find that "The most complex music is still a
language."[178] The beast that is there is not Lacan's unconscious, and surely not
Freud's, but perhaps it is Sophocles's: it is, in the extreme ellipsis of lost words, "the
idiocy of music," a primordial state, prior to its history, as "music minus thought"
reflecting the "inherent idiocy of human life." It is not insane; neither is it repressed; and
the unconscious is a metaphor one applies only if one is. Kundera says, rather, "It took
monumental effort of heart and mind for music to rise up over this inherent idiocy..."
[180] The beast is only the affective ground, the occasion for thought, not carried out as a
Cartesian project of dominance (as Kundera, in Unbearable Lightness recalls the story of
Nietszche breaking into tears as he tried to “apologize to the horse for Descartes”
[Kundera 1984, 290]). The beast is just an animal (like Karenin, Tereza and Tomas's dog
in The Unbearable Lightness) that wants only to knows its own time.
6. Artistic Reasoning
Albeit elliptically, I have been arguing that there is a privilege in artistic work,
and, as Kundera notes, "any privileged position is dangerous."[1981, 181] By the
economic artifice of our institutions, we have tamed the arts, by embracing theories that
give the titilation of risk and the absolute safety of requiring no work. Kundera points to
Searle / 11
the lapse of music as the primordial condition of thoughtlessness; in The Unbearable
Lightness, whose 145 sections in seven parts, like the 145 historians silenced during the
years of communist administration,[cf. 1981, 159] testify to the genuine desire for
goodness and justice that impose such silence, he articulates a model of fortuity,
coincidence, and difficult resolution among four characters, misunderstanding everything
except the particular occasions for thought, for feeling, for the elaboration of a little
music.
But the narrative carries out an argument, enacts a form of reasoning, that in a
world of rhetoric may seem to be either deluded, circular, exclusionary, totalizing, or all
of the above, and therefore in need of being corrected, unmasked, made to confess, or
otherwise shown to be an enemy of virtue and right. More directly, I would like to argue
that if we do not privilege imaginative work as something that does not happen every day,
not as the House of Being made out of words, but the very opposite of that: a house of
words made out of being, then we give over our habitations to the beast in the basement,
whether wearing a hair shirt, or a brown shirt, or no shirt at all. [cf. Heidegger, 239;
Wollin, 1-19 ] Artistic reasoning, and particularly literary reasoning, is not about
messages, not even about meanings or interpretations. It is, rather, about poetics in the
most rudimentary sense: it is about making things, about constructing something, within
which the second infinity of self-similarity, looking to the lazy like merest chaos, takes
shape as opportunities to act without being rendered unconscious first.
7. The Musical Model
Kundera's novels, obsessed as they are with an archetype of form, offer a musical
model, deserving a much fuller elaboration of the picture of imaginative work that
Searle / 12
emerges. It is the paradoxical, or perhaps we should say antiphonal disclosure that the
unbearable lightness of being, in which each life is unique, unrepeatable, and always an
experiment in grave risk of failing, starts as feeling, congeals to fact, and concludes when
conditions are felicitous, in the eminently bearable heaviness of narrative. When it is to
music that we turn, to analogize our understanding, the salutary ambiguity is precisely
that form cannot be a simple collapse into shape, as if what formed the narrative, and
what forms our response to it, were merely the collocation of empirical details, open to
description or to sight. Parmenides, as Plato memorialized him, followed the way of
discourse because it followed the sense of hearing. As artists take this up, it is not (as
philosophers from Plato to Derrida have been disposed to take it) a question of
metaphysical presence or absense, but a logic of feeling, whether we hear the performer
or make the music in our own minds and bodies. Following the musical model, the mad
doctrine of the eternal return can only happen in a story, where it is the rarest sanity.
_________________________________________________
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle.
The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House,
1941.
Burgess, Anthony. The Clockwork Orange. New York: Ballantine Books, 1965.
Gleich, James.
Choas: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987.
Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David
Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel, translated by Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, 1988.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York:
Penguin Books, 1981.
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York:
Harper Perennial Editions, 1984.
Searle / 13
Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Different: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser.
New York: Capricorn Books, 1965.
Plato.
Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1961.
Wollin, Richard. The Heidegger Controversy, edited by Richard Wollin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993.