MILAN KUNDERA
727
stitutes an opportunity to achieve a
supreme intellectual synthesis.
Before
The Sleepwalkers
(and before
The Man without Qualities)
the novel had
never had such an ambition and had not appropriated for itself a
comparable place in the structure of human culture.
Joyce's
Ulysses
ends with Molly Bloom's famous "soliloquy," the
stream of her consciousness as her husband gets into the conjugal
bed. When Frau Hentjen makes love with Esch, Broch does not bother
to record her thoughts on some hidden tape recorder. Why should he
bother? Does that poor creature actually know what she is thinking?
A secret recording of her stream of consciousness would certainly not
reveal it to us. Conversely, the long, concentrated gaze the author
casts on her does tell us- not about his character's secret thoughts
but about the secret
meaning
of what is happening: the couple makes
love in "a profound silence that she would in no way allow to be
broken, even though he might take that silence, which was so out of
place, for stupidity or fatuity. In that silence shame' disappears
because shame is the child of language. The woman does not feel
pleasure: she feels liberated from shame ..."
This might remind us of
Nausea
or
Being and Nothingness,
writ–
ten, respectively, five and ten years later. Sartre's admirable phe–
nomenological descriptions would be comparable to a Broch from
whom we had squeezed the poetry. Broch stands at a great distance
from Sartre's esthetic asceticism. Nevertheless, few writers have had
such serious doubts about beauty and its dangerously facile nature
as Broch. And he talked about it in these terms quite often. But we
have to understand the meaning of this prejudice: what Broch de–
spises in art is beauty
alien to the act of cognition.
On the other hand,
when his piercing gaze captures "the essence of what is," it captures
that essence as beauty: the unsought beauty of the unknown, the
beauty of the "never spoken." Here is another of the sentences that
describe Frau Hentjen making love: "Suddenly she presses her mouth
to his, like an animal's snout against a window, and Esch trembles
with anger when he sees that in order not to give herself to him, she
holds her soul back behind her clenched teeth." The beauty of this
metaphor is in the light it radiates, when we suddenly see it as the
essence of a situation. Broch is the greatest phenomenologist of the
novel and the greatest poet of phenomenology.
Now I would like to express a very personal opinion. The last
volume of
The Sleepwalkers,
the most ambitious, the one that most ob–
viously reflects an aspiration toward intellectual synthesis, has never
seemed to me a total success. It would seem that Broch is less a musi-
