Indeed, that general compliance with the sonatas or the symphony's prescribed scheme is somewhat ridiculous. Imagine all the great symphonists, including Haydn and Mozart, Schumann and Brahms, weeping in their adagios and then turning into little children when the last movement starts, darting into the schoolyard to dance, hop, and holler that alls well that ends well. This is what we might call "the stupidity of music." Beethoven saw that the only way to get around it is to make composition radically individual.
This idea is the first item in his artistic testament addressed to all the arts, to all artists, and which I shall state thus: the composition (the architectural organization of a work) should not be seen as some preexistent matrix, loaned to an author for him to fill out with his invention; the composition should itself be an invention, an invention that engages all the author's originality.
I cannot say how thoroughly this message was heard and understood. But Beethoven did draw all of its implications-magnificently-in his last sonatas, each of them composed in a manner unique and unprecedented.
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The sonata Opus 111; it has only two movements: the first, which is dramatic, is worked out more or less classically in sonata form; the second, meditative in character, is written in variation form (a form rather unusual in sonatas before Beethoven): there is no play of contrasts and differences among the individual variations, only an intensification that keeps adding fresh nuance to the previous variation and gives this long movement an exceptional unity of tone.
The more thoroughly unified each of the movements, the greater its difference from the other. Disproportionate in length: the first movement (in Schnabel's recording): 8:14; the second: 17:42. The second half of the sonata is thus more than twice as long as the first (a case without precedent in the history of the sonata)! Furthermore: the first movement is dramatic, the second calm, reflective. Now, to begin dramatically and end with so lengthy a meditation would seem to contradict every architectural principle and condemn the sonata to the loss of all the dramatic tension previously so dear to Beethoven.
But it is just that unexpected juxtaposition of these two movements that is eloquent, that speaks, that becomes the semantic gesture of the sonata, its metaphorical sense evoking the image of a hard, short life and the endless yearning song that follows it. That metaphorical sense, beyond the power of words to grasp and yet strong and insistent, gives the two movements a unity. An inimitable unity. (The impersonal composition of a Mozart sonata could be imitated endlessly; the composition of the sonata Opus 111 is so personal that imitating it would be forgery.)
Opus 111 makes me think of Faulkner's The Wild Palms. In it a love storv alternates with the story of an escaped convict, two stories that have nothing in common, no character nor even any discernible kinship of motifs or themes. A composition that cannot serve as a model for any other novelist; that can exist only once; that is arbitrary, inadvisable, unjustifiable; unjustifiable because behind it can be heard an es muss sein that makes any justification superfluous.
15
By his refusal of systems, Nietzsche brought deep changes to the way philosophy is done: as Hannah Arendt defined it, Nietzsche's thought is experimental thought. His first impulse is to break up whatever is rigid, to undermine commonly accepted systems, to open rifts for venturing into the unknown; the philosopher of the future will be an experimenter, Nietzsche said; free to go off in various directions that could, conceivably, come into conflict.
Although I favor a strong presence of thought in the novel, this is not to say that I like the so-called philosophical novel, that subjugation of the novel to a philosophy, that "tale-making" out of moral or political ideas. Authentically novelistic thought (as the novel has known it since Rabelais) is always unsystematic; undisciplined; it is similar to Nietzsche's; it is experimental; it forces rifts in all the idea systems that surround us; it explores (particularly through its characters) all lines of thought by trying to follow each of them to its end. And there is this too about systematic thought: a person who thinks is automatically prompted to systematize; it is his eternal temptation (mine too, even in writing this book): a temptation to describe all the implications of his ideas; to preempt any objections and refute them in advance; thus to barricade his ideas. Now, a person who thinks should not try to persuade others of his belief; that is what
puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the "man of conviction"; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? it is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the "man of conviction" is a man restricted; experimental thought seeks not to persuade but to inspire; to inspire another thought, to set thought moving; that is why a novelist must systematically desys-tematize his thought, kick at the barricade that he himself has erected around his ideas.
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Nietzsche's refusal of systematic thought has another consequence: an immense broadening of theme., the barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher's thought. That too brings philosophy nearer to the noveclass="underline" for the first time philosophy is pondering not epistemology, not aesthetics or ethics, the phenomenology of mind or the critique of reason, etc., but everything human.
In expounding Nietzsche's philosophy, historians or professors do not merely reduce it-that of course- but also distort it by turning it into its opposite, namely into a system. Is there still room in their systematized Nietzsche for his thoughts on women, on the Germans, on Europe, on Bizet, on Goethe, on Victor Hugo-style kitsch, on Aristophanes, on lightness of style, on boredom, on play, on translation, on the spirit
of obedience, on possession of the other and on all the psychological forms of such possession, on the savants and their mental limitations, on the Schauspieler, actors on history's stage-is there still room for a thousand psychological observations that can be found nowhere else, except perhaps in a few rare novelists?
As Nietzsche brought philosophy closer to the novel, so Musil brought the novel toward philosophy. This rapprochement doesn't mean that Musil is less a novelist than other novelists. Just as Nietzsche is no less a philosopher than other philosophers.
Musil's thinking novel too brought about an unprecedented broadening of theme; nothing that can be thought about is henceforth excluded from the art of the novel.
17
When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I used to take lessons in musical composition. Not because I was a child prodigy but because of my father's quiet tact. It was during the war, and a friend of his, a Jewish composer, was required to wear the yellow star; people had begun to avoid him. Not knowing how to declare his solidarity, my father thought of asking him just then to give me lessons. They were confiscating Jewish apartments, and the composer kept having to move on to smaller and smaller places, ending up, just before he left for Theresienstadt, in a little flat where many people were camping, crammed, in every room. All along, he had held on to the small piano on which I would play my harmony or counterpoint exercises while strangers went about their business around us.