Behind the curtain

As I get older, I try not to read more than one or two books by a particular author because I want to spread my reading more widely. But there are a few authors I cannot help but peek into their latest offerings, and be inevitably drawn into them. Milan Kundera in one of them. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee and, lately, Orhan Pamuk being others. Yes, Sharon, none of them are women. That was not a conscious decision. None of them are Anglo-Saxon either. Again, not a conscious omission.)

Milan Kundrea's The Curtain is a small book of seven essays on the art of the novel (though the blurb on the cover says the book is an essay in seven parts). Having read his previous book on the topic, Testaments Betrayed, I more or less knew what to expect. But, still, Kundera does not fail to excite, though I can imagine the comment that this book is meant for his 'fans', which, I admit, I am one. (This, by the way, is not a review of the book.)

Kundera says on page 16, "Each aesthetic judgement is a personal wager, but a wager that does not close off its own subjectivity; that faces up to other judgements, seeks to be acknowledged, aspires to objectivity ..." (italics mine). Wow! How I wish I wrote that.

Yes, when someone says a book, or anything, is 'good', is he (or she) saying that it possesses some universal absolute indisputable 'good', or is the person merely saying that he liked it? Even the word 'like' then comes up for dispute. Another person could (and would) say the he 'didn’t like' it. So is it merely a matter of taste then? Of prejudice? Of subjectivity? In which case, of course, quality would not exist.

Fortunately, Kundera points the way out of that one when he quotes Jan Mukarovsky: "Only the presumption of objective aesthetic value gives meaning to the historical evolution of art." And says, in other words; (in the) absence of aesthetic value, the history of art is just an enormous warehouse of works whose chronological sequence carries no meaning. That is, the aesthetic value of art can only be seen from its historic value. And this is his main point in the first essay in The Curtain called The Consciousness of Continuity, in which he discusses, amongst many other things, the difference between the many types of history. 'History as such’ is the history of events, of victories (and defeats). It is the history of mankind, of things that no longer exist, and which have no direct connection to our present lives. The history of science (and technology) depends little on man and has nothing to do with his freedom ... it is nonhuman: "If Edison had not invented the light bulb, someone else would have." The history of art (including literature) is a history of (aesthetic) values ... (which is) always present, always with us."

In the second essay called Die Weltliteratur (World Literature -- a term coined by Goethe), Kundera provocatively says about Kafka (who, he emphasises, wrote in German and considered himself a German writer): "No, believe me, nobody would know Kafka today -- nobody -- if he had been a Czech", that is if he had written his works in the language of a "faraway country which we know little (about)".

This reminds me of a little incident that happened at Silverfish Books a few years ago. The, then, Austrian Ambassador, came in one day looking for books by Austrian writers (for an exhibition or something, in conjunction with something or other at the Embassy). I told him that I did have a few European writers but I was not sure if any of them were Austrian. (I often don't care about the nationality of a writer when I buy or read a book.) He asked me if he could look around, and came back from the shelves in a short while with a bunch of books. In his hands were Hermann Broch, Max Brod, Sigmund Freud, Peter Handke, and there was Kafka! (I didn't have Elfride Jelinek then.) And he subsequently proceeded to educate me on why Kafka was Austrian ­-- one of the things being that he wrote in German. I told him that I always though he was Czech. He said I was mistaken. It was sometime after that I ran into the wife of the Czech Ambassador (who was an active member in a book club I was helping) and related this story to her. I thought she would laugh about it, but I was wrong. She was livid. She must have told my little story to her husband because the next time we chanced to meet (at another one of those functions) I was witness to some very diplomatic but decidedly barbed exchanges between the Ambassadors of two central European countries! I quickly found an excuse to run off elsewhere. I guess, when one comes from a country whose fate has, for centuries, been decided entirely by the 'major' powers, one could get quite sensitive. (BTW, Wikipedia has Kafka as an Austrian writer. Now is Rasa Sayang and satay Malaysian, Singaporean or Indonesian?)

One point I am not altogether sure I agree with Kundera, is his assertion that size and population does not matter in determining 'major' and 'minor' nations. He mentions how, though Spain and Poland have roughly the same population, the former is considered a world power but not the latter. But wouldn't that be ignoring the rest of the Spanish-speaking people in the world? In the Americas? I take the point of Iceland and how its massive collection of thirteenth and fourteenth century literature has been relegated to the 'archaeology of letters' and does not in any way 'influence world literature' (as they would have, if they had been written in English).

"The word 'kitsch' was born in Munich in the mid nineteenth century; it describes the syrupy leftover of the great Romantic period." He says that the concept of kitsch only arrived in France (and presumably the rest of the world) in the 1960s, that is, a hundred years later where the ultimate 'aesthetic reprobation' was (and still is) vulgarity -- from Latin vulgus, of the people. (There is an interesting, and sad, story involving Sartre and Camus after the latter won the Nobel prize in 1957 due to Camus' apparent 'vulgar' origins in Algeria.) From the evidence of giant fibreglass pitcher plants, lamp-posts with electric hibiscus light-bulbs, gold-plated palatial gates and Corinthian columns at residences, giant stores selling Emperors' furniture, and Kenny G, kitsch has met an entirely different form of vulgar, fallen in love and they are now happily married, and live in Malaysia.

In Getting into the Soul of Things, Kundera quotes Hermann Broch: "... the novel’s soul morality is knowledge; a novel that fails to reveal some hitherto unknown bit of existence is immoral ..." and adds his own comment further on, "... the novelist, unlike the poet or the musician, must learn how to silence the cries of his own soul ... the writing of a novel takes up a whole era in a writer's life, and when the labour is done he is no longer the person he was at the start."

What is a Novelist? A novelist is the person who lifts the curtain just a little bit, just momentarily, to let the reader have a peek at what is behind, the obvious cliche that is life,. Kundera says. A novelist is 'born from the ruins of his lyrical years.' "I have long seen youth as the lyrical age, that is, the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him." This he uses to differentiate between the poet and the novelist. He quotes from Proust: "Every reader as he reads is actually a reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen himself without this book."

If I have to pick a favourite essay, it would have to be Aesthetics and Existence. When Kundera says: "I often think: tragedy has deserted us; and that may be our true punishment ...", I feel like I know what he feels. (I have not dismissed entirely the possible play of cognitive dissonance in taking this view.) When the entire world is seen in terms of black and white, in right and wrong, between the forces of good and those of evil, when we are constantly told of the 'grandeur in massacres' of innocents and of martyrdom, of indignant self-righteousness, the only real tragedy is the death of tragedy.

Kundera's essays do suggest and emphasise the Western, that is Greek, origins of the tragedy, and the resultant birth of the novel. If that were true in his definition, the Asian novel can only be an orphan at best, existing in a vacuum, but a bastard more likely. I can only speak of what I know. Didn't The Ramayana start as a tragedy, of a king's foolish (forgotten) promise to his favourite (third) wife, a lady of impeccable piety and virtue, who is cast as a villain and a monster only for trying to safeguard the interest of her only son, whose love for Rama is only exceeded by that for her own Bharath (who refuses the throne for himself but, instead, places the Sri Paduka on it as he awaits the return of the rightful king). It was a tragedy from the beginning, and one that leads to one after another, despite attempts by petty 'moralists' to conjure up 'divine' interpretations and tie themselves up in knots in the process. It is the tragedy that has breathed life into the tale through the millenniums, sparked numerous debates ,and kept the story alive till today.

Arguably, the greatest Indian tragedy is the Mahabaratha. Kunti upon giving birth to a child out of wedlock, Karna (later day 'morally correct' versions suggest some divine intervention by the gods and involvement of a form of parthenogenesis -- in fact, later day moralists, who rewrote whole chunks of the Mahabaratha, would imply that all her other five children were also conceived asexually given that Pandu, her husband, was impotent), and gives him away, drifts him down a river in a reed boat, ala Moses, without anyone's knowledge. Later Kunti's other son Arjuna and Karna meet and become sworn enemies. The battle between the two warriors (neither Arjuna nor Karna know that the enemy is his brother) is one of the highlights of the epic. It is a tragic tale that is alive and well even today and affects the very Indian psyche. (All this inspite of moralists who like to take sides, and the 'Conversation with God' bit, which most people don't even understand, inserted in-between by person or persons unknown centuries after the original was written -- not unlike political versions of Antigone, Kundera talks about, during WW2 in which Creon was cast as a wicked fascist against a 'young heroine of liberty' and thus completely ruining the tragedy). How many tales, and tragic Bollywood movies, have been written involving battles between long lost brothers, and a mother who couldn't speak the truth? (A bit of trivia: did you know Sukarno was named after Karna?)

History doesn't like tragedies. It prefers clear winners, it prefers the 'grandeur of massacres', even if it kills the very thing that makes us human, even if it kills us. Good and bad, we (like to) define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow. But I was so much older then, I am younger than that now. (Apologies Robert Zimmerman).