1142
PARTISAN REVIEW
understanding of it one becomes no longer a plaything but a member of
the bureaucracy. One's bondage
to
the Law increases with this mastery
(Knecht
means servant, slave), but the entrance to the Law affords a
two-way passage; Hesse, taking literally Kafka's fable in
The Trial
about
the door to the Law which stands open the whole of a man's life, an–
swers it with the charmingly simple-minded observation that one can
also walk out. Joseph Knecht leaves Castalia with no more trouble
than he entered.
Magist er Ludi
is a translation of Kafka into the tradi–
tion of philosophical naturalism. And while this is done ironically–
the scholars and bureaucrats of this well-lighted Castle are after all con–
cerned only with a game- Hesse's irony, it seems to me, is not meant
to detract from his optimistic recommendation in the spirit of enlighten–
ment: enter the Castle, make yourselves at home.
Moravia's novel starts at the other end of the scale, taking its met–
aphor from the body. The Woman of Rome is Adriana, who finds her
vocation in being a whore. She has a great natural capacity for it,
and is the only character in this novel, as well as any other recent one
I can think of, who is able to love. The drama of her life is not, as in
Knecht's, unachieved by the author; but it is unnecessary, as are also
the self-conscious intellectual insights Moravia never rests from trying
to add to it: an existentialist sense of being alive, which as it is a tenuous
sense, is ludicrously out of place in a full-bodied woman. Moravia lacks
the courage of his sensuality, he does not let it stand as such, a poem,
its own being, self-augmenting. He worries Adriana, constantly interven–
ing, in his own voice spoken through her mouth, to school her sen–
sibility. Yet if she has love's capacity, if in the sexual embrace she holds
all of life, what need has she to sound like Sartre?
Adriana is sheer overflow, the novel cannot hold her. Moravia, hur–
riedly throwing up action to keep her in the story, only makes her nature
seem so much the more tide-like, "undramatic." He leads her into an
entanglement with a schizoid student, Mino, whom she loves and a
brutal murderer, Sonzogno, who, of all hel' lovers, is the only man to
possess her completely. Left to herself Adriana, I have the feeling, would
not have stood these men; she would have rejected the humiliation
Mino imposed on her, and as for Sonzogno, far from being fascinated
by his horrible depravity and by the thought of being owned by it, she
would have laughed in his face, for he is a pretentious idiot. Overevalua–
tion of the murderer is a mistake, not of the lover, but of the serious
novelist who raises the scent of the dramatic moment: meanings must
spill out like blood. But love can afford to be lighthearted, it can do with-
