11
When I finished The Farewell Party, at the very start of the 1970s, I considered my career as a writer over. It was under the Russian occupation and my wife and I had other worries. It wasn't until we had been in France a year (and thanks to France) that, after six years of a total interruption, I began without passion to write again. Feeling intimidated, and to regain my footing, I decided to tie into something I had already done: to write a kind of second volume of Laughable Loves. What a regression! Those short stories had started me on my way as a writer twenty years before. Fortunately, after drafting two or three of these "Laughable Loves II," I saw that I was writing an entirely different thing: not a story collection but a novel (later entitled The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), a novel in seven parts that were independent yet so closely bound that any one of them read by itself would lose much of its meaning.
At once, whatever mistrust I still harbored toward the art of the novel disappeared: by giving each part the nature of a short story, I made unnecessary the whole seemingly unavoidable technique of large-scale novel composition. In my project I happened upon the old Chopin strategy, the strategy of small-scale com-position that has no need of nonthematic passages. (Does that mean that the story is the small form of the novel? Yes. There is no ontological difference between story and novel, as there is between the novel and poetry or the novel and theater.) How are these seven small, independent compositions related if they have no action in common? All that holds them together, that makes them a novel, is that they treat the same themes. As I worked I thus came across another old strategy: Beethoven's variation strategy, this allowed me to stay in direct, uninterrupted contact with some existential questions that fascinate me and that this novel in variation form explores from multiple angles in sequence.
This sequential exploration of themes has a logic, and it determines the linkage of the parts. For example: Part One ("Lost Letters') introduces the theme of man and history in its basic version: man collides with history and it crushes him. In Part Two ("Mama") this theme is turned around: for Mama, the arrival of the Russian tanks is a small matter compared to the pears in her garden ("tanks are perishable, pears are eternal"). Part Six ("The Angels"), in which the heroine, Tamina, drowns, would seem to be the tragic conclusion of the novel; yet the novel doesn't end there but ends in the next part, which is neither poignant nor dramatic nor tragic; it recounts the erotic life of a new character, Jan. The history theme appears here briefly and for the last time: "Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about"; this touches on that metaphysical border (border: another theme worked out in the course of the novel) beyond which everything loses its meaning. The island where Tamina's tragic life ends is dominated by the laughter (another theme) of the angels, while Part Seven echoes with the "laughter of the devil," which turns everything (everything: history, sex, tragedies) into smoke. Only then does the trail of themes draw toward an end, and the book can close.
12
In the six books of his maturity (The Dawn; Human, All Too Human; The Gay Science; Beyond Good and Evil; Toward a Genealogy of Morals; The Twilight of the Idols), Nietzsche is always pursuing, developing, elaborating, affirming, refining the same compositional archetype. Its principles: the basic unit of the book is the chapter; its length ranges from a single sentence to many pages; without exception the chapters consist of a single paragraph; they are always numbered; in Human, All Too Human and in The Gay Science, they are numbered and given titles besides. A certain number of chapters make up a part, and a certain number of parts, a book. The book is built on a principal theme, which is specified by the title (beyond good and evil, the gay science, a genealogy of morals, etc.); the various parts treat themes derived from the principal theme (such parts being either titled, as in Human, All Too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, The Twilight of the Idols., or else merely numbered). Certain of these derived themes are arranged vertically (in which each part discusses mainly the theme set out by the part's title), whereas others run horizontally through the entire book. This makes for a composition that is at once maximally articulated (divided into many fairly autonomous units) and maximally unified (the same themes constantly recur). It also makes for a composition imbued with an extraordinary sense of rhythm based on the alternation of short and long chapters: for instance, the fourth part of Beyond Good and Evil consists exclusively of very short aphorisms (like a kind of divertissement or scherzo). But above alclass="underline" this is a composition where there is no need for filler, for transitions, for weak passages, and where the tension never slackens because all we get is thoughts speeding toward us "from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts."
13
If a philosopher's thought is so thoroughly bound up with the formal organization of his text, can it exist outside that text? Can Nietzsche's thought be extracted from Nietzsche's prose? Certainly not. Thought, expression, composition are inseparable. Is what is valid for Nietzsche valid in general? That is: can we say that the thought (the meaning) of a work is always, and by principle, inseparable from its composition?
Oddly, no, we cannot say that. In music, for a long time a composer's originality consisted exclusively in his melodic-harmonic inventiveness, which he set out, so to speak, in compositional schemes that were not determined by him but were more or less preestab-lished: masses, Baroque suites, Baroque concertos, etc. Their various sections were arranged according to an order determined by tradition, so that, for instance, with clocklike regularity, suites always ended with a last dance, and so on.
Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas, which cover nearly his whole creative life, from the age of twenty-five to fifty-two, represent an immense evolution during which sonata composition is completely transformed. The earliest sonatas still do not go beyond Haydn and Mozart's compositional thinking: four movements; allegro in sonata form; lied in a slow tempo; minuet or scherzo in a faster tempo; rondo in a rapid tempo.
The disadvantages of such composition are immediately apparent: the most important, most dramatic, longest movement is the first; the sequence of movements is thus a devolution: from the gravest to the lightest; moreover, until Beethoven, the sonata was still midway between a collection of pieces (at the time, separate movements were often played at concerts) and an indivisible, unitary composition. As his thirty-two sonatas evolved, Beethoven gradually replaced the old composition scheme with one that was more concentrated (often reduced to three or even two movements), more dramatic (the center of gravity shifts to the final movement), more unified (mainly by a consistent emotional mood). But the real meaning of this evolution (which made it actually a revolution) lay not in replacing an unsatisfactory scheme with another, better one but in shattering the very principle of the preestablished composition scheme.