Lit from All Sides

In this age of post-art,Milan Kundera reflects on Fuentes and Fellini,Roth and Rabelais

Philistines stay off art or buy kitsch. But the misomusist engages with art,in order to destroy it. An entry in the glossary,Sixty-three words,in Milan Kunderas The Art of the Novel (1986),says: To be without a feeling for art is no disaster. A person can live in peace without reading Proust or listening to Schubert. But the misomusist does not live in peace. He feels humiliated by the existence of something that is beyond him,and he hates it. There is a popular misomusy…. The fascist and Communist regimes made use of it…. But there is an intellectual,sophisticated misomusy as well: it takes revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthetic…. The apocalypse of art: the misomusists will themselves take on the making of art; thus will their historic vengeance be done. And,an intellectual decimation of art will be far more devastating than burning of books.

In a fresh instalment of his career-long homage to Rabelais in his new book Encounter: Essays,Kundera describes misomusy (detestation of the Muses) as an indifference to art,a rejection of art,an allergy to art. Non-serious Rabelais,in France (unlike everywhere else),was first forgotten and then reduced to a serious humanist thinker. Kundera asserts,with regret: Now that historiography and literary theory are becoming ever more misomusistic,writers are the only people who can say anything interesting about Rabelais. As only they can about all writers.

In Paris of the early 80s,Kundera hears a pleasant,intelligent young man dismiss the latest Fellini film with scorn. And he feels a sensation he did not experience even in the worst Stalinist years in Czechoslovakia: The sense that we have come to the era of post-art [my emphasis,in a world where art is dying because the need for art,the sensitivity and the love for it,is dying. Film as an agent of art has been eclipsed by film as the agent of stupidity: the triumph of technology over imagination.

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Encounter,81-year-old Kunderas fourth volume of essays,is not a collection of dirges though; the essays reflect,rescue,argue,analyse and tell tales,embodying an ambivalence as sad as they are joyous. Kundera calls the book an encounter with my reflections and my recollections,my old themes (existential and aesthetic) and my old loves. Its as much a continuation of his meditations and interventions as its a philosophical swansong. Not only is it an acceptance of the inevitable,but the pieces are usually as short as a couple of pages (barring those on Francis Bacons paintings,Anatole France,Martinican artists,Curzio Malaparte and Kunderas first love,the Czech composer Leos Janacek),and would appear to catch a thought or insight on the wing if it were not for the writings essentially anecdotal nature.

In nine parts,the book is a condensation and culmination of Kunderas lifelong existential and aesthetic concerns. Encounters between the Czech and French Kunderas; pre- and post-1989 Kunderas; big names and underestimated/forgotten artists; anti-novel and arch-novel (Hermann Broch,Carlos Fuentes,Malaparte); humourlessness and humour in its very absence (Dostoyevsky); change and using intellectualism to preserve the past (Philip Roth); total heritage of an art form (Beethoven,Stravinsky,Schoenberg) and complete rejection of that heritage (Iaanis Xenakis),etc. Explaining Bacons horror paintings and his rejection of the Bacon-Beckett equation,Kundera observes that every time an artist talks about another,hes actually talking about himself. Thats Encounter too,just as Kunderas indispensable history of the novel is a personal intellectual history.

This self-reflexivity does a necessary salvaging of Anatole France. In 1924,France was blacklisted after his death,first by a pamphlet from the young Surrealists led by Louis Aragon and then by the Parisian salons because they couldnt understand his irony and scepticism. In 1971,Aragon wrote to Kundera that his pamphlet was insolent and worthless. It had done the damage though,since nobody violates a blacklist for fear of being called a fool. And whats become of culture of late? In 1999,he says,a serious Parisian weekly published a list of eighteen 20th century geniuses that included Bill Gates,Coco Chanel,Picasso,Le Corbusier,but no novelist,no poet,no dramatist,no philosopher,preferring Stanley Kubrick to Eisenstein,Chaplin,Bergman,Fellini. The academic equivalent of this misomusy is an 800-page book on Bertolt Brecht that devotes itself to the vileness of Brechts soul,to his body ,in particular its terrible odour shunning the works for the Sin beneath the lifes surface.

Apart from the spate of such end-century monographs on T.S. Eliot,Graham Greene,Ernest Hemingway,etc,surely Kundera has in mind the 2008 controversy: it was alleged that in 1950,a young Kundera tipped off the police about a Czech pilot who worked as an American spy. The post-art world,he says,is also the age of the prosecutors,and Cervantess legacy is vanquished. Touché.

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Kundera also recalls a lecture by Vera Linhartova,the Czech novelist self-exiled in France,on exile and choice of language (her switch to French,as Kunderas own): The writer is not a prisoner of any one language. Nor does a nation own a writer.

There are a million ideas,images and anecdotes to remember Encounter by. Heres my pick. When a Czech journalist friend viciously attacks writer Bohumil Hrabal for choosing to keep publishing in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia,when other writers have been driven underground,Kundera retorts vehemently: A world where a person can read Hrabal is utterly different from a world where his voice could not be heard! One single book by Hrabal does more for people,for their freedom of mind,than all the rest of us with our actions,our gestures,our noisy protests! Well,this is Banned Books Week,and you cant do worse than not reading this essential book.