Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera [Kundera, Milan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-22T18:30:00+00:00

This is how kitsch-making interpretation kills off works of art. Some forty years before the American professor imposed this moralizing meaning on the story, "Hills Like White Elephants" was published in France under the title '"Paradis perdu, " a title that has no relation to Hemingway (in no other language does the story bear this title) and that suggests the same meaning (paradise lost: preabortion innocence, happiness of impending motherhood, etc., etc.).

Kitsch-making interpretation is actually not the personal defect of some American professor or some early-twentieth-century Prague conductor (many conductors after him have ratified his alterations of Jenufa); it is a seduction that comes out of the collective unconscious; a command from the metaphysical prompter; a perennial social imperative; a force. That force is aimed not at art alone but primarily at reality itself. It does the opposite of what Flaubert, Janacek, Joyce, and Hemingway did. It throws a veil of commonplaces over the present moment, in order that the face of the real will disappear.

So that you shall never know what you have lived.

PART SIX Works and Spiders

1

"I think." Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, "a thought comes when 'it' wants to, and not when T want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject T is necessary to the verb 'think.'" A thought comes to the philosopher "from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts heading for him." It comes in a rush. For Nietzsche loves "a bold and exuberant intellectuality that runs presto," and he makes fun of the savants for whom thought seems "a slow, halting activity, something like drudgery, often enough worth the sweat of the hero-savants, but nothing like that light, divine thing that is such close kin to dance and to high-spirited gaiety."

Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that the philosopher "must not, through some false arrangement of deduction and dialectic, falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at bv another route. . . . We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us. The most profound and inexhaustible books will surely always have something of the aphoristic, abrupt quality of Pascals Pensees. "

We should not "corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us": I find this injunction remarkable; and I notice that, beginning with The Dawn. all the chapters in all his books are written in a single paragraph: this is so that a thought should be uttered in one single breath; so that it should be caught the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing.

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