A Single Straight Line that is Invisible and Endless: "Amadeus"
Our topic today is labyrinths. Our guides are Jorge Luis Borges, a Twentieth Century Argentinian writer and perhaps the greatest spelunker of the narrative labyrinthine in literary history, and Antonio Salieri, an Eighteenth Century composer, contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and one of the two lead characters in Milos Forman's 1986 film Amadeus.
For our purposes, let's consider a labyrinth to be something over and above a simple maze. Let us conceive of it, instead, as a structure – rooms with multiple doorways that each lead to another room with multiple doorways, unlit staircases beckoning here and there, bricked-in windows, hallways that branch many times and hallways that lead nowhere – designed to confuse, to frustrate, to confine, to intimate that one may wander for eternity without ever escaping, for in a labyrinth the wandering and confusion and danger is the very point. The most famous labyrinth in history is, of course, that occupied by the Minotaur on the island of Crete; it was a place inescapable and with a fearsome terror at its center, and to enter it meant you would, sooner or later, come face to face with that terror.
One would expect Borges to have written a story about that particular labyrinth, and he did: "The House of Asterion." But it's his story "Death and the Compass" that concerns us here. In it, a detective named Lönnrot finds himself caught up in a mystery which turns into a labyrinth; much as, in Amadeus, Salieri finds himself caught up in an unwinnable competition with the greatest composer of his age, which also turns into a labyrinth.
The plot of "Death and the Compass" goes as follows. Erik Lönnrot is a formidable detective whom a criminal named Red Scharlach (like many of the criminals in their city) has "sworn upon his honor" to kill. In the course of the story, Lönnrot encounters a series of three murders, each of which seems to be related to ancient Jewish superstition regarding the true name of God. By puzzling through the details of these unsolvable crimes, Lönnrot realizes that there will be a fourth murder, completing a circuit of the points of the compass – South, East, West, and now finally North – creating a perfect rhombus on a map. This confirms his suspicions as to the metaphysical nature of the crimes, as the secret name of God, YHVH, also has four letters.
On the night the fourth murder is to be committed, Lönnrot journeys to the place where he believes it will occur. He finds a decaying old mansion; upon entering, he discovers that it is constructed like a mirroring labyrinth, containing two of everything and full of "pointless symmetries and obsessive repetitions." At its center, Lönnrot is captured by Red Scharlach, who has designed the events of the story as a labyrinth of his own in order to trap Lönnrot, knowing that the detective's inability to resist a mystery is his only weakness.
Lönnrot understands that he is vanquished. But he makes a strange suggestion: that the next time Scharlach hunts him down, "in another avatar of our lives," he should create a more perfect labyrinth, one that consists of only a straight line. Lönnrot's idea is that the first murder should be committed at Point A, and the second at Point B, then the third at Point C, halfway between the first two. The final crime can then be planned for point D, halfway between A and C. The reference here is to one of Zeno's paradoxes, in which you keep cutting a line in half only to realize that this is a process that can never be finished, taking you down into infinity.
Scharlach agrees, promising Lönnrot "the labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless." Then he kills Lönnrot.
"The labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless." It's a beautifully turned phrase, and one that suggests that the truest mysteries, like labyrinths, have no end but instead take you continually forward into darkness, the walls narrowing in around you but never quite coming together to meet. But the mysteries Borges has in mind here are not those of who hefted the dagger or swung the lead pipe. They are instead the mysteries of the heart and soul, of the implacable opposition of the detective and the criminal, of the lure of the mysterious itself, of the search for the eternal hidden name of God.
The plot of Amadeus goes as follows. Antonio Salieri, onetime court composer to Emperor Joseph II in Vienna, cries out for forgiveness from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who has been dead for 33 years, and then tries to commit suicide. He is rushed to an insane asylum. A priest arrives to grant him absolution, and Salieri tells the priest his story.
Intensely religious, Salieri wanted nothing more in his life than for God to use him as an instrument through which to produce His music. This wish, he believed, had been granted when The Emperor made him court composer. But then he met the young Mozart. Inane, foppish, childish, scatological, unserious, irreligious and irreverent, Mozart was everything that Salieri (and the rest of the Emperor's Court) abhorred. And yet the music that came out of him was divine, immeasurably better than anything Salieri had ever written or would ever be able to write.
This broke Salieri's faith. How could a loving God give so much to such a worthless person in Mozart, and so little to his devoted servant in Salieri? The answer was that He could not and still be reverenced. So Salieri did what any jilted devotee – half-mad with jealousy and the knowledge that he would never be allowed to fully fulfill his life's ambition – would do: he came up with a plan to kill Mozart, calling it "a terrible way I could finally triumph over God."
This plan involved turning the court and the wealthy people of Vienna against the young composer so that he could not make a living, driving him into drink and despair. When this had decimated Mozart enough, Salieri laid down his final card. He bought a black costume reminiscent of one that Mozart’s own recently deceased, overbearing father had once appeared in. Knowing that it would trigger a terrible guilt and superstitious fear, he wore this costume to Mozart's door to request that he compose a requiem mass.
The plan worked. Overwhelmed by alcohol, grief, poverty, stress and his reaction to the appearance of this black-clothed figure, Mozart gave out. The film ends back where it began, with Salieri concluding his story to the priest and then being wheeled off to breakfast in the insane asylum.
In addition to being one of the high points of 20th Century cinema, and perhaps the greatest film about music ever made, Amadeus explores, in a way strikingly similar to "Death and the Compass," the unending series of dark chambers that can lie within the labyrinths of our hearts.
As Scharlach plays on Lönnrot's vanity, Salieri plays on Mozart's desperation, by giving him a challenge he cannot refuse: to write the greatest of requiem masses. But, as with the architecture of the house Lönnrot enters, which suggests that he and Scharlach are connected, twinned, "pointless symmetries and obsessive repetitions" of one another, Salieri cannot escape Mozart so easily, precisely because he loves Mozart's music with all his soul. He worships Mozart's monumental gift, but he can never have what Mozart does.
And so Salieri, who idolizes music above all else (perhaps, in the final analysis, even above God) destroys what is greatest and most beautiful in his world, and then goes on to live for another three decades with his sin. He is wracked with guilt and grief, and yet also with a neverending fury, for after Mozart's death his music continues to grow in popularity and acclaim while Salieri's continues to fade from the world.
On one level, Amadeus is about the creation of music and the absurd nature of genius, which is granted here and there for absolutely no reason at all. Salieri's mix of wonderment at the beauty of art and rage at his own lack of talent is familiar to artists everywhere, the vast majority of who, unlike the Mozart of the film, sound false notes and struggle with aesthetic choices more frequently than they will ever admit.
But part of the triumph of the movie is that it never relents in demonstrating – thanks in part to a soundtrack under the supervision of conductor Sir Neville Mariner – why our obsession with art is so strong, and why, despite the agony of the pursuit, artists continue to create. Art quickens us and enraptures us; it gives us glimpses of the sublime, as Salieri is never able to deny even in his most rage-filled moments, in ways that nothing else is capable of matching.
The idea of music as an an expression of the Divine is here not an exaggeration but an attempt to understand its force, just as in "Death and the Compass" the comparison of the lure of a mystery to the hidden name of God serves to illuminate the inescapable drive we have for stepping continually into the unknown after that thing – call it a solution, an answer, an understanding – that we sense ahead of us in the darkness but cannot see.
And it is this feeling that directs us, I think, toward the quieter, deeper and more personal mystery at the center of Amadeus.
"The labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless," is, in the end, an interior one. It is the battle with ourselves, the exploration of ourselves, that we endure in the process of living up to the externalities around us. Lönnrot in his obsession with mysteries, his metaphysical hankerings, finds himself weakened by the very thing he cannot let go of. Borges notes early in the story that the detective "did not succeed in preventing the last crime, but he did, indisputably, foresee it." He solved the mystery – the location of the final murder – but was blinded by himself and so could not understand that it was he who was to be murdered.
Salieri, who names Mozart's attempt to wrestle with the legacy of his dead father as "the madness of a man splitting in half," is in that line also describing himself. There is in him a touch of divinity that exalts music over all else; there is also in him a petulant, vengeful, human spirit that would destroy that music rather than let someone not named Salieri create it. Thus he finds himself in a labyrinth, the walls closing in but never touching, never giving him a solution. He is doomed to wander endlessly in his own psyche, among the stern frowning monuments of what he has done and what he has not been able to do.
And so in the end they wheel him off to breakfast in a house constructed for the insane, which is, needless to say, a tidy closing metaphor for the way his internal labyrinth – as so many of ours do – has been made manifest in the world.
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