"Knowledge is the novel’s only morality."

Very slight thoughts on Kundera + outrageous banger quotes.

No one has influenced me more deeply than Milan Kundera, although as I often recall with amusement I happened to come across his work utterly accidentally¹. For years I’ve told unfortunates trapped in conversation with me to read

1. Immortality, an ideal contemporary novel in my opinion, a complete expression of a certain mode of literature, a formally inventive and delightful read, and probably the zenith of whatever remains of modernism; to me, Kundera is like Bernini and Immortality is like the Cornaro Chapel: it’s after the fact, from the point of view of some historians who over-index on specific eras, but it’s the final and maximal expression of an entire world. And

2. Testaments Betrayed, a series of essays about the history of the novel, related cultural and political and historical themes, and the nature of attention, criticism, integrity in the arts, and more. Kundera’s non-fiction is almost polemical at times, plainly animated by a sense of opposition to various kinds of error (for example: in how novels are interpreted), which makes this a more-fun read than you might imagine. It’s also one of those books that instantly leads to as many other books, artists, thinkers, historical eras, etc. as one likes, potentially yielding years of discoveries that all interrelate.

That said, when Milan Kundera died this week, I wasn’t especially upset. Kundera himself is probably why. From him, I learned to be suspicious of my tendency towards sentimental self-expansion, a crucial lesson for someone with my personality. When I “love” something, I am often projecting myself onto it, associating myself with its qualities, deluding myself about who I am and why I think what I think. When I “identify” with something, I am often fleeing from the reality of my identity-less-ness, like every generation before me that disappeared into its mass movements or affiliations or scenes —the names of which are now not only forgotten but, when remembered, ridiculous— and the othering they usually engender. When I “reason,” I am often merely rationalizing feelings, or perhaps something deeper than feelings: patterns of inertia, archetypes and other forms from the past, animal instincts. When I “believe,” I do not choose to do so: so to be proud of my beliefs is as to be proud of my eye color; and indeed, often I seem to “believe” things that permit the behavior I prefer to engage in or the feelings I want: what happy chance!

All this is to say: Kundera introduced me to the skeptical psychological view of humanity, and he did so as much through stylistic and formal elements as through, say, plot or character. Indeed: I never found his characters especially persuasive; in this, he reminds me of his own remarks about Dostoevsky, for whom characters were often mannequins on whom to hang ideas; I don’t accuse of Kundera of that, but I don’t live with his characters in-mind the way I do with Flannery O’Connor’s. Sabina is no Hulga! But what I took from Hulga and Good Country People was akin to what I took from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, through different means: the essayistic reflections, for example.

So: to try and reflect what I took from him, I won’t sentimentalize or self-aggrandize any further. He wrote several wonderful novels and non-fiction books and was my guide into the entirety of Western intellectual history. I think he rescued me from some very bad possible selves by exposing the mechanics of the contemporary mind in new forms and with new metaphors and expressions, making it possible to see it more clearly and understand how we delude ourselves, especially through the misuse of culture. I don’t have any idea what sort of person he was, but to the extent that he had a guilty conscience, I think it helped him as an artist anyway. I'm glad I came across his writing.

Banger Avalanche

I’ve quoted and cited Kundera a lot over the years, so I went back to my old Tumblr and read some of the almost countless posts, as usual an exercise in mortification. But his words, at least, are still worth sharing. He was so bracing and provocative, and these all still knock me back. I hope you enjoy them!

On what the novel teaches us about morality:

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice; accuse Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac–that’s your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it.

Creating the imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop–that is, individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws. Western society habitually presents itself as the society of the rights of man, but before a man could have rights, he had to constitute himself as an individual, to consider himself such and to be considered such; that could not happen without the long experience of the European arts and particularly of the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own. In this sense E. M. Cioran is right to call European society “the society of the novel” and to speak of Europeans as “the children of the novel.”

On friendship:

What shocked me most in the great Stalin trails was the cold approval with which these Communist statesmen accepted the execution of their friends. For they were all friends, by which I mean that they had known each other intimately, had lived together through rough times, emigration, persecution, a long political struggle. How is it that they were able to sacrifice their friendship, and in such a macabrely definitive way?

But was it friendship? There is a human relationship called soudruzstvi in Czech —from soudruh, comrade— meaning "the friendship of comrades or companions,” the fellow-feeling that binds those who engage in the same political struggle. When the common devotion to the cause disappears, the reason for the fellow-feeling disappears as well. But friendship subordinated to an interest considered superior to friendship has nothing to do with friendship.

In our time people have learned to subordinate friendship to what’s called “convictions.” And even with a prideful tone of moral correctness. It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue—perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

On the forms our thoughts take and the way we write:

“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 'I’ want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject 'I’ 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 by 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 Pascal’s Pensées.”

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.

On the purpose of the novel:

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

On memory:

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one, I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two, but the acoustisovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.

And not only is it lost but we do not even wonder at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are so dazzled by their potency that we don’t realize how schematic and meager their content is.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it’s happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

On historical judgment:

Tolstoy argues against the idea that history is made by the will and reason of great individuals. History makes itself, he says, obeying laws of its own, which remain obscure to man. Great individuals “all were the involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work that was concealed from them.” Later on: “Providence compelled all these men, each striving to attain personal aims, to combine in the accomplishment of a single stupendous result not one of them (neither Napoleon nor Alexander and still less anyone who did the actual fighting) in the least expected.” And again: “Man lives consciously for himself, but is unconsciously a tool in the attainment of the historic, general aims of mankind.” From which comes this tremendous conclusion: “History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind…”

With this conception of history, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move. Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they “involuntarily” participate in events whose meaning is “concealed from them”), they proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react.

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them —Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound, Gorky, Gottfried Benn, St.-John Perse, Giono— all were walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?

Mayakovsky’s blindness is part of the eternal human condition. But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are.

On the poetry of Kafka and the everyday world:

[Kafka] created the extremely poetic image of an extremely nonpoetic world. By “extremely nonpoetic world” I mean: a world where there is no longer a place for individual freedom, for the uniqueness of the individual, where man is only the instrument of inhuman forces: of bureaucracy, technology, history. By “extremely poetic image” I mean: without changing its essence and its nonpoetic nature, Kafka has transformed, reshaped that world by his immense poetic imagination.

K. is completely absorbed by the predicament of this trial that has been imposed upon him; he hasn’t a moment to think about anything else. And yet, even in this no-way-out predicament, there are windows that open suddenly, for a brief instant. He cannot escape through these windows; they edge open and then shut instantly; but for a flash at least, he can see the poetry of the world outside, the poetry that, despite everything, exists as an ever-present possibility and sends a small silvery glint into his life as a hunted man.

Some such brief openings are K.’s glances, for instance: he reaches the suburban street where he has been called for his first interrogation. A moment before, he was still running to get there on time. Now he stops. Standing in the street, he forgets the trial for a few seconds and looks around: “Most of the windows were occupied, men in shirtsleeves were leaning there smoking or holding children carefully and tenderly on the windowsills. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman would appear for a moment.” Then he enters the courtyard: “Near him, a barefooted man was sitting on a crate reading a newspaper. Two boys were see-sawing on a handcart. A frail young girl was standing at a pump in her nightdress and gazing at K. while she filled her jug with water.”

These sentences remind me of Flaubert’s descriptions: concice; visually rich; a sense of detail, none of which is clichéd. That power of description makes clear how thirsty K. is for reality, how avidly he drinks up the world that, just a moment earlier, was eclipsed by the trial. Alas, the pause is short; the next instant, K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl…

On music and sentiment:

Despite Stravinsky’s denial that music expresses feeling, the naive listener cannot see it any other way. That is music’s curse, its mindless aspect. All it takes is a violinist playing the three long opening notes of a largo, and a sensitive listener will sigh, “Ah, how beautiful!” In those three notes that set off the emotional response, there is nothing, no invention, no creation, nothing at all: it’s the most ridiculous ‘sentimentality hoax.’ But no one is proof against that perception of music, or against the foolish sigh it stirs.

From Immortality, characters on culture:

We started to talk about all sorts of things. Avenarius referred a few more times to my novels, which he had not read, and so provoked Paul to make a remark whose rudeness astonished me: “I don’t read novels. Memoirs are much more amusing and instructive for me. Or biographies. Recently I’ve been reading books about Salinger, Rodin, and the loves of Franz Kafka. And a marvelous biography of Hemingway. What a fraud. What a liar. What a megalomaniac.” Paul laughed happily. “What an impotent. What a sadist. What a macho. What an erotomaniac. What a misogynist.”

“If you’re ready, as a lawyer, to defend even murderers, why don’t you come to the defense of writers who have committed no wrong except for writing books?” I asked.

“Because they get on my nerves,” Paul retorted cheerfully, and poured some wine into the glass the waiter had just placed before him.

“My wife adores Mahler,” he continued. “She told me that two weeks before the premiere of his Seventh Symphony he locked himself up in a noisy hotel room and spent the whole night rewriting the orchestration.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “it was in Prague, in 1906. The name of the hotel was the Blue Star.”

“I visualize him sitting in the hotel room, surrounded by manuscript paper,” Paul continued, refusing to let himself be interrupted. “He was convinced that his whole work would be ruined if the melody were played by a clarinet instead of an oboe during the second movement.”

“That’s precisely so,” I said, thinking of my novel.

Paul continued, “I wish that someday this symphony could be played before an audience consisting of the best musical experts, first with the corrections made in those last two weeks, and then without the corrections. I guarantee that nobody would be able to tell one version from the other. Don’t get me wrong: it is certainly remarkable that the motif played in the second movement by the violin is picked up in the last movement by the flute. Everything is worked through, thought through, felt through, nothing has been left to chance, but that enormous perfection overwhelms us, it surpasses the capacity of our memory, our ability to concentrate, so that even the most fanatically attentive listener will grasp no more than one-hundredth of the symphony, and certainly it will be this one-hundredth that Mahler cared about the least.”

His idea, so obviously correct, cheered him up, whereas I was becoming sadder and sadder: if a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won’t be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages?

“I don’t deny those symphonies their perfection,” continued Paul. “I only deny the importance of that perfection. Those super-sublime symphonies are nothing but cathedrals of the useless. They are inaccessible to man. They are inhuman. We exaggerated their significance. They made us feel inferior. Europe reduced Europe to fifty works of genius that it never understood. Just think of this outrageous inequality: millions of Europeans signifying nothing, against fifty names signifying everything! Class inequality is but an insignificant shortcoming compared to this insulting metaphysical inequality, which turns some into grains of sand while endowing others with the meaning of being!”

The bottle was empty. I called the waiter to bring us another. This caused Paul to lose the thread.

“You spoke about biographies,” I prompted him.

“Ah… yes,” he recalled.

“You were happy that you can at last read the intimate correspondence of the dead.”

“I know, I know,” said Paul, as if he wanted to counter in advance any objections from the other side. “I assure you that rifling through someone’s intimate correspondence, interrogating his former mistresses, talking doctors into betraying professional confidences, that’s rotten. Authors of biographies are riffraff, and I would never sit at the same table with them as I do with you. Robespierre, too, would never have sat down with the riffraff that had collective orgasms at the spectacle of public executions. But he knew that he couldn’t do without them. The riffraff is an instrument of just revolutionary hatred.”

“What is revolutionary about hatred for Hemingway?” I asked.

“I’m not talking about hatred for Hemingway! I’m talking about his work! I’m talking about their work! It was necessary to say out loud at last that reading about Hemingway is a thousand times more amusing and instructive than reading Hemingway. It was necessary to show that Hemingway’s work is but a coded form of Hemingway’s life and that this life was just as poor and meaningless as all our lives. It was necessary to cut Mahler’s symphony into little pieces and use it as background music for toilet-paper ads. It was necessary at last to end the terror of the immortals. To overthrow the arrogant power of the Ninth Symphonies and the Fausts!”

Drunk on his own words, he got up and raised his glass high: “I drink to the end of the old days!”

On inattentive reading and living (discussing War and Peace):

The usual reading of this scene: Wounded, Andrei sees his rival with his leg amputated; the sight fills him with immense pity for the man and for man in general. But Tolstoy knew that these sudden revelations are not due to causes so obvious and so logical. It was a curious fleeting image (the early-childhood memory of being undressed in the same way as the doctor’s assistant was doing it) that touched everything off -his new metamorphosis, his new vision of things. A few seconds later, this miraculous detail has certainly been forgotten by Andrei himself, just as it has probably been immediately forgotten by the majority of readers, who read novels as inattentively and badly as they “read” their own lives.

On the performance of desire, from Immortality (these are the words of a character, to be clear):

Imagine that you are given the choice of two possibilities: to spend a night of love with a world-famous beauty, let’s say Brigitte Bardot or Greta Garbo, but on condition that nobody must know about it. Or to stroll down the main avenue of the city with your arm wrapped intimately around her shoulder, but on condition that you must never sleep with her… everyone, including the worst wretches, would maintain that they would rather sleep with her. Because all of them would want to appear to themselves, to their wives, and even to the bald official conducting the poll as hedonists. This, however, is a self-delusion. Their comedy act. Nowadays hedonists no longer exist… Except for me. No matter what they say, if they had a real choice to make, all of them, I repeat, all of them would prefer to stroll with her down the avenue. Because all of them are eager for admiration and not for pleasure. For appearance and not for reality. Reality no longer means anything to anyone. To anyone.

On highways and paths:

A highway differs from a path not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A path is a tribute to space. Every stretch of path has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A high is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.

Before paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and enjoy it. What’s more, he no longer saw his own life as a path, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.

On speed:

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

On secrets:

I am walking with Elvar D. in the Reykjavik cemetery; he stops at a grave [where] barely a year ago his friend was buried; he starts reminiscing aloud about him: his private life was marked by some secret, probably a sexual one. ‘Because secrets excite such irritated curiosity, my wife, my daughters, the people around me, all insisted I tell them about it. To such an extent that my relations with my wife have been bad ever since. I couldn’t forgive her aggressive curiosity, and she couldn’t forgive my silence, which to her was evidence of how little I trusted her.’ He smiled, and then: 'I divulged nothing,’ he said. 'Because I had nothing to divulge. I had forbidden myself to want to know my friend’s secrets, and I didn’t know them.’ I listened to him with fascination: since childhood I had heard it said that a friend is the person with whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is something else: it is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.

It’s hard not to feel that his last title, Festival of Insignificance, is a bit of a self-written eulogy.

1. Kundera is one of several extremely influential figures whom I came to via interest in the cover of their book, with no other information. In his case, I saw the paperback of Immortality on my dad’s table; it had Charles Paul Landon’s painting of Icarus and Daedalus on the cover, and I picked it up thinking “that sky looks nice.” I then read it in a day or two and went completely berserk about it.