Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

10

I open the biography of Hemingway published in 1985 by Jeffrey Meyers, a professor of literature in an American university, and I read the passage on "Hills Like White Elephants." The first thing I learn: the story "may… portray Hemingway's response to Hadley's [his first wife's] second pregnancy." There follows this commentary, which I accompany with my own italicized remarks in brackets:

"The comparison of hills with white elephants- imaginary animals that represent useless items, like the unwanted baby-is crucial to the meaning [the comparison, a bit forced, of elephants with unwanted babies is not Hemingway's but the professor's; it is needed to set up the sentimental interpretation of the story]. The simile becomes a focus of contention and establishes an opposition between the imaginative woman, who is moved by the landscape, and the literal-minded man, who refuses to sympathize with her point of view… The theme of the story evolves from a series of polarities: natural v. unnatural, instinctive v. rational, reflective v. talkative, vital v. morbid [the professor's intention becomes clear: to make the woman the morally positive pole, the man the morally negative pole]. The egoistic man [there is no reason to call the man egoistic, unaware of the woman's feelings [there is no reason to say this], tries to bully her into having an abortion… so they can be exactly as they were before… The woman, who finds it horribly unnatural, is frightened of killing the baby [she cannot kill the baby, given that it is unborn] and hurting herself. Everything the man says is false [no: everything the man says is ordinary words of consolation, the only kind possible in such a situation]; everything the woman says is ironic [there are many other explanations for the girl's remarks]. He forces her to consent to this operation ["I wouldn 't have you do it if you didn 't want to," he says twice, and there is nothing to show that he is insincere] in order to regain his love [there is nothing to show either that she had the man's love or that she had lost it], but the very fact that he can ask her to do such a thing means that she can never love him again [there is no way to know what will happen after the scene in the railroad station]. She agrees to this form of self-destruction [the destruction of a fetus and the destruction of a woman are not the same thing] after reaching the kind of dissociation of self that was portrayed in Dostoyevskys Underground Man and in Kafka's Joseph K., and that reflects his attitude toward her: 'Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.' [Reflecting someone else's attitude is not a dissociation, otherwise all children who obey their parents would be dissociated and would be like Josef K.] She then walks away from him and… finds comfort in nature: in the fields of grain, the trees, the river and the hills beyond. Her peaceful contemplation [we

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