Encounter is the fourth collection of Milan Kundera’s essays in English and perhaps his last. These latest pieces, published between the mid-90’s and 2008, return to his favorite topics, such as the defense of the modern novel, and the nature of the self in a world capable of totalitarianism. But Encounter sounds a bitter, fearful, final message, “the sense that that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and love for it, is dying.” The celebrations in Encounter are countermeasures.
A single sentence by Kundera in “Somewhere Behind,” an essay in The Art of the Novel (1988), changed everything for me as a writer: “I understood all at once that the psychological mechanisms that function in great (apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as those that regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations.” This idea is anathema to those writers who emphasize the implicit political impetus in any piece of writing and regard their work as a contravention of power. They live on a higher moral plane. But Kundera will have none of it. “The existential enigma has disappeared behind political certitude,” he writes now in “Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France.”
In Anatole France, Kundera finds a novelist who was smeared by the avant-garde for his ambiguities and the difficulty of reducing him to “some particular conviction or attitude”:
“The people who managed to keep Anatole France’s name on the blacklist for a century were not novelists but poets, mainly the Surrealists … As avid young avant-gardists, they were all irritated by France’s too-official celebrity; as authentic lyric poets, they focused their aversion on the same key words: Aragon reproached the dead man for ‘irony’; Éluard for ‘skepticism and irony’; Breton for ‘skepticism, realism, heartlessness’ … I find that ‘heartlessness’ a little disconcerting coming from Breton: could this great nonconformist mean to spank the cadaver with the strap of such a tired kitsch word?”
The Czech avant-gardists never forgave Kundera for what he called their “preening theatrics.” In 2008, a holier-than-thou academic named Hradilek at the Prague-based Institute for Study of Totalitarian Regimes uncovered a 1950 police report suggesting that Kundera had informed on a young Czech pilot who had been slipping information to American intelligence. Kundera joined the Communist party in 1948 and supported the Czech regime until 1954 when he visited Moscow.
Former dissidents wanted Kundera to acknowledge his “mistake.” Those on the other side, such as art historian Sonja Zemanekova, insisted that even if he snitched on another “it does not make him a morally flawed person.” But Kundera rejected both points of view by integrating them: we are all morally flawed. He continues to mark the difference between “people for whom the political struggle is more important than real life, than art, than thought, and the people for whom the whole meaning of politics is to serve real life, art, thought.” Some of Kundera’s zingers seemed aimed at certain of my poet friends: “Céline couldn’t have known that this reduction of the aesthetic to the linguistic was going to become one of the axioms of the future academic foolishness.”
The best parts of Encounter may be Kundera’s portraits of artists who were “different and alone” – novelists Bohumil Hrabel, Josef Skvorecky, Curzio Malaparte and René Depestre, painter Francis Bacon, and composer Leos Janácek – all undervalued, unrecognized for years during which they worked on. Different and alone. But many other figures appear among the anecdotes: Dostoevsky, Fellini, Roth, Kafka, Céline, Márquez, Fuentes, Barthes, Valéry, Kis, Brecht. It angers him that educated people don’t know that the oratorio A Warsaw Survivor (Ein Überlebender aus Warschau), “is the greatest monument ever dedicated to the Holocaust … [yet] people fight to ensure that the murderers should not be forgotten. But Schoenberg they forget.”
There are segments of Encounter that repeat previous observations about the shrinkage of the modern self and the novel’s ability to express the sensation so profoundly. But these reiterated ideas, as in “An Open Letter for the Birthday of Carlos Fuentes,” are worth hearing again. The opening essay on Bacon lets Kundera rephrase some of his most searing questions: “Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person?” Speaking of Bacon and Beckett, he tersely explains the demise of modernism: “For their modernism, the modernism that closes down the way, no longer matches the modernity around the: a modernity of the fashions propelled by the marketing of art.”
Another earlier line from Kundera that I’ve relied on for years: “The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols.” Such as those in marketing.
[Published by Harper Collins on August 17, 2010. 180 pages, $24.00 hardcover.]
thanks
Ron, thanks for the post. When I first read Kundera, I fell into a fever that has lasted twenty years. I’ll share this with my facebook friends.
Kundera review
“Both enjoyable and scant” sounds good to me. I’m often
glad of ideas that slip beyond the words which think to
track them– glad, too, especially late at night, of a book
that weighs less than 500 pages. Thanks for another good
review, and for reminding me of Kundera, an occasional
eminence in my occasionally striving mind for decades.
Encounter
encounter…I bought the work some weeks ago in Amsterdam,
in a Dutch translation.
Your mention has made me aware of my purchase, waiting for me to be read.
Which I will do…now and in the coming days.
Thank you, Ron.
Encounter by Kundera
Quite interesting to hear your take on the book, Ron. I was disappointed that he left so many of the essays undeveloped: an idea or an opinion without thinking all the way through it. Still, it’s refreshing to read essays that at least present ideas and opinions. I don’t trust Kundera on music, though. Schoenberg is lovely–and not yet forgotten, at least not in this country. Janacek is good, but not great. And Beethoven deserves a much fuller piece than he got from Kundera. I found the book both enjoyable and scant.
Where It’s Thin …
Yes, there’s some fatigue setting in, as if sometimes he is writing between naps, gathering up the old energy when he can. Chamber pieces strung together instead of concertos now. The repetition I mentioned. I’ll let him debate with you about Janacek. A long allegiance to Kundera underlies my stubborn praise.
On The Human Situation
“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
This comes of course from “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” – and reading it again still makes me pretty dizzy. That the famed abyss is our defense against ourselves, positioned close past the edge, say, about a meter or two to the right or the left of the lip. But I don’t want to discount the “something higher” at the expense of the some better self. How we, the human animal, can be flawed and still be loved. That needs work. And I think I understand that it’s not only art (or political struggle) that will do that. The claims of Totalitarianism that always beat strongly against our selves; the very strange distortions of power that make the higher into the lower, where it seems we will find we have very little useful power of our own. Yes. It all needs much work.
Careful
Kundera’s essays have guided me, but so have those of John Berger who very often appeals for a linkage of political and aesthetic values. So my comments on Kundera aren’t intended to disparage political awareness or aspirations for the improvement of our lot. And Kundera knows not to go too far in his own indictments. For instance, although he jabs at Andre Breton for blacklisting writers like Anatole France in Europe, he praises Breton for his stimulating effect on the literary awakenings and political activism in Martinique.