Living in Hope and History by Nadine Gordimer

the Emperor—that other image which haunts his life. Roth reconceives this small scene in full scale when, at a bacchanalian ball that might have been staged by Fellini on a plan by Musil’s Diotima for her ‘Collateral Campaign’ to celebrate Emperor Franz Josef’s seventy-year reign, the news comes of the assassination of the Emperor’s son at Sarajevo. Some Hungarians raucously celebrate: ‘We all agree we ought to be glad the swine’s done for.’ Trotta, drunk, takes ‘heroic’ exception—’My grandfather saved the Emperor’s life . . . I will not stand by and allow the dynasty to be insulted!’ He is forced to leave ignominiously.
    As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvellous subtlety what was withheld, longing for release in the father. The aged District Commissioner’s unrealized bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set-pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is first merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.
    The second set-piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequencesthat have richly overlaid it. The levelling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The D.C. not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is against Carl Joseph’s demission in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph, ‘ “That’s the young fellow I saw at the last manoeuvres.” Since this confused him a little, he added, “You know, he saved my life. Or was that you?” A stranger catching sight of them at this moment might have taken them for brothers . . . the one felt he had changed into a District Commissioner, the other, that he had changed into the Emperor.’ The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin speaks of as ‘an extensiveness of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes.’
    Carl Joseph, firing on striking workers, hears them sing a song he has never heard before. It is the
Internationale
. At the same time, he has a yearning to escape to the peasant origins of the Trotta family. Unable to retreat to the ‘innocent’ past, superfluous between the power of the doomed empire and the power of the revolution to come, he is given by Roth a solution that is both intensely ironic and at the same time a strangely moving assertion of the persistence of a kind of naked humanity, flagellated by all sides. Leading his men in 1914, he walks into enemy fire to find something for them to drink. ‘Lieutenant Trotta died, not with sword in hand but with two buckets of water.’
    Carl Joseph’s cousin, of
The Emperor’s Tomb
, has never met him, although Roth knows how to give the reader a
frisson
by casually dropping the fact that they were both in the battle atwhich Carl Joseph was killed. But this Trotta does link with the peasant branch of the family, through his taking up, first as a form of radical chic, another cousin, Joseph Branco, an itinerant chestnut-roaster from Roth’s familiar frontier town. Emotionally frozen between a mother who, like the D.C., cannot express her love, and a young wife who turns lesbian after he leaves her alone on their wedding night while he sits with a dying servant (the vigil of the D.C. with Jacques composed in a new key), this Trotta forms his