Comparative Cultural Studies

Liisa Steinby

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612492483
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While a large amount of scholarship about Milan Kundera's work exists, in Liisa Steinby's opinion his work has not been studied within the context of (European) modernity as a sociohistorical and a cultural concept. Of course, he is considered to be a modernist writer (some call him even a postmodernist), but what the broader concept of modernity intellectually, historically, socially, and culturally means for him and how this is expressed in his texts has not been thoroughly examined. Steinby's book fills this vacuum by analyzing Kundera's novels from the viewpoint of his understanding of the existential problems in the culture of modernity. In addition, his relation to those modernist novelists from the first half of the twentieth century who are most important for him is scrutinized in detail. Steinby's Kundera and Modernity is intended for students of modernism in literary and (comparative) cultural studies, as well as those interested in European and Central European studies.

Chapter One

Kundera, a European Novelist

Milan Kundera (born in 1929) is one of the most prominent and widely read authors in contemporary France and is also acknowledged by an international reading public. This apparently simple statement is not, however, free of paradox: paradoxes are apparently not only a distinctive feature of Kundera’s fiction, but also characterize his image as an author and the reception of his works. It is arguable whether Kundera, who in 1975 emigrated from Czechoslovakia to France and who until the early 1990s wrote his novels—which are mostly set in Czechoslovakia or in the circles of Czechoslovak émigré(e)s—in Czech, should be called a French author at all. Calling him a Czech author, however, is no less problematic. From the very beginning, he refused the label of Czech emigrant dissident, which until 1989 was attached to him frequently (see, e.g., Petras 69–70). His irritation stems from the purely political content of the concept of “dissident.” Kundera does not position himself as a political thinker, but as a novelist, one whose existence implies independent thought—not, however, primarily in the sense of a critique of a particular political system, but more generally (see, e.g., Finkielkraut 37; McEwan 24; Petro 82). He compared Western journalism—which views an “East European” emigrant author in an exclusively political light—with the falsifications of Stalinism (see, e.g., O’Brien, “Meaning” 7).

There is, however, more to it than that. Kundera does not want to be regarded as a Czech author, since in his opinion the habit of classifying authors according to their nationality is misguided and he argues that in European literature national boundaries are not essential. He claims to represent European culture as a whole; more specifically, he suggests a cultural division of Europe that he considers more valid than that defined by the borders of nation-states and thinks of himself as representing Central Europe. Prague and “Bohemia,” as he calls his country of origin, are parts of Central Europe, that is, of the Habsburg Empire—particularly its nineteenth- to the twentieth-century formation, the Austro-Hungarian empire—which Kundera considers one of the most culturally creative parts of Europe (see, e.g., Kundera, The Art 124–25; “The Tragedy”; The Curtain 45–47; “The Czech Wager”; see also Pichova, “Milan Kundera”). His former home country is important for Kundera insofar as it represents the culture of Europe but at the same time he views his act of moving from Prague to Paris as an escape from the situation in his Europe of culture, that is, a Europe that undergoes dramatic and negative changes. He moved to France because he was convinced that the “Russian night” which had fallen upon Czechoslovakia in 1968 would last forever and that hence his Europe of culture was forfeited in his home country (“An Introduction” 476; Finkielkraut 35–36).

One might presume that Kundera’s commitment to a European identity rather than to any particular national one makes it impossible for him to identify even with French culture, although from his youth he had admired French literature, especially surrealism and avant-garde poetry (see Bauer 111; Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 149–51; du Plessix Gray 49); subsequently he often expressed his admiration for and indebtedness to the eighteenth-century French novel, especially Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (see, e.g., An Introduction; Testaments 77; see also Pierce; Raynard). Kundera’s self-identification as a European author rather than as a representative of any particular national literature may explain his decision not to return to his native country even after the political shift whereby Czechoslovakia was released from Soviet domination and later divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Yet Kundera says that the reasons to not return were partly “existential and incommunicable”; incommunicable because “too intimate” but also because “too wounding for the others,” for “what is worse [than the emigrant’s pain of nostalgia] is the pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign” (Testaments 93). To the disappointment of many of his former compatriots, he declared himself to be satisfied with his life and work in France.

An author living in translations

Another paradox in Kundera’s identity is that regardless of his emphasis on a shared European culture and on the need to overcome national boundaries, the fact is that an author’s very instrument, his or her language, represents a fundamental restriction on such unity. During most of his career as a novelist, Kundera has been deprived of his native reading public, and as a consequence of the political changes he was bereft of his audience already before his emigration. During the 1950s and early 1960s Kundera had established himself in his home country as a poet and the author of two successful plays; and the publication of his first novel Žert (The Joke) in 1967 was an event that provoked considerable discussion. After 1968, when Soviet tanks crushed the “sister nation’s” efforts to build a “human-faced socialism,” Kundera lost his teaching position at the film academy and the possibility of pursuing his career as a writer. In 1970 all his works were blacklisted and removed from public view (see Kundera, An Introduction 469; see also Misurella xiii) and he became persona non grata. He wrote his next two novels, La Vie est ailleurs (Life Is Elsewhere; Život je jinde) and La Valse aux audieux (Farewell Waltz [also published in English as The Farewell Party]; Valčík na rozloučenou) not knowing whether they would ever be published (Elgrably 66). Yet, as his first novel had brought him fame—it was received favorably in France and was translated into several languages—Kundera was able to have his next two novels published in France in 1973, where La Vie est ailleurs was awarded the publisher Gallimard’s Medicis Prize for best foreign novel of the year; other translations in several languages followed. Život je jinde (Life Is Elsewhere) and Valčík na rozloučenou (Farewell Waltz) were first published in Czech in 1979 by an emigrant publishing house in Toronto (Sixty-Eight Publishers) run by Joseph Škvorecký and thus it reached only a negligible fraction of the Czech reading public.

Well before Kundera moved to France in 1975, he was an author who established contact with his readers almost exclusively through translations. In France he continued writing his novels in Czech and publishing them in translation, until 1993, with the publication of L’Immortalité (1993) (Nesmrtlnost; Immortality; it has emerged since that Kundera himself, simultaneously with the Czech version, created the French “translation” of the novel allegedly prepared by an “Eva Bloch,” see Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 154). The essay collection, L’Art du roman, published in 1986 (The Art of the Novel, 1988), was Kundera’s first book written directly in French. Subsequently Kundera published La Lanteur (1994) (Slowness [1996]), L’Identité (1997) (Identity [1998]), and L’Ignorance (2003) (Ignorance [2002]), but these novels in French do not change the fact that the major, and weightier, part of his fiction was originally written in Czech, and hence accessible to most of the reading public only in translation.

Thus, Kundera is literally an author living in translation. He himself acknowledges that for him, translations mean everything (e.g., The Art of the Novel 121). His books are read, criticized, judged, accepted, or rejected as translations; consequently, he cannot possibly afford not to be scrupulous about the translations of his texts (see Woods, Translating 25). Between 1985 and 1987 Kundera dedicated a great deal of time to the editing of the French translations of his novels written in Czech (see The Art 13, 41) and he recognized these as equally authentic with regard to the Czech versions. He also intervened in the translation of his novels into other languages, especially English, and rumors of his fierce disputes with the translators have reached the public (see Crain; Woods, Translating; “Traduction”). From Kundera’s point of view, the conflict has arisen from his insistence that the translations be absolutely faithful to the original. He considers his own language to be clear and explicit and thus his insistence that the translator find exact equivalents; he also insists that nothing in the repetition of words or in the punctuation is allowed to be altered (see Crain 44; Elgrably 63–64; Woods, “Traduction” 200; see also the chapter on translating Kafka in Testaments). His demands are often difficult to meet and conflict frequently with the translator’s efforts to produce a translation that is as natural and easy to understand as possible.

The problem with the translations, however, goes deeper than Kundera’s interest in accuracy. Michelle Woods, who has studied the Czech originals and the various translations of Kundera’s works, argues that the difficulty—in addition to what I discuss above—is caused by the fact that Kundera takes the opportunity of close cooperation with his translators to rewrite parts of his texts with the result that the “translations” actually are new, authorized versions of the original. The changes may be—as in the case of The Joke—abridgements Kundera considered necessary, since the omitted passages required background knowledge available only to Czech readers (see Crain; Stanger). Woods also finds differences in wording, sentence structure, as well as other aspects of the text. For example, this process of rewriting is repeated in different versions of the English text and the “original” Czech text is revised for reprinting as well. In the case of The Joke, Woods counts four different versions in Czech, three in French, and no fewer than five in English, leading her to speak of Kundera’s “pathology of rewriting” (Translating 66). According to Woods, “Kundera has rewritten almost all his Czech ‘originals’ so that the translations have no original text to be faithful to” (42–43). She concludes that in Kundera’s oeuvre, the “definitive” (or the “authentic”) text “is not necessarily a final one. It represents two things: firstly, Kundera’s belief that it is the best version in the language at the given time, and, secondly, the degree of Kundera’s own involvement in the translation process” (83).

This textual plurality causes confusion not only among readers but especially among scholars, who are faced with the question of where to find the “real” Kundera. Against his critics, Kundera has defended his right to do whatever he likes with his texts: “Because what an author creates doesn’t belong to his papa, his mama, his nation or to mankind; it belongs to no one but himself; he can publish it when he wants and if he wants; he can change is, revise it, lengthen it, shorten it” (The Curtain 98). Yet, however important he considers the author’s freedom to change his texts, Kundera certainly does not aim at encouraging critics and scholars to focus on comparing the different versions of his texts.

Kundera’s alterations demonstrate that he does not conceive of his readership as “an entity so abstract, so vague that I couldn’t even try to predict its reaction or taste,” as he once stated (qtd. in du Plessix Gray 51; see also Elgrably 67). On the contrary: ever since he began to write “for [his] translators only” (“Comedy” 4), he has sought to ensure that his texts have reached his readers exactly as he has meant them. Since his first book written in France, Le Livre du rire et d’oubli (1985) (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [1979]; Kniha smíchu a zapomnění [1981]) he has striven to write as clearly and simply as possible and to choose expressions which are semantically accurate and unambiguous (see Biron 3; Chvatik, Die Fallen 114; Garfinkle 55; Gautier 53; Richterová 51–52) so as “to minimize the translator’s potential interference” (Baranczak 249). He also elaborates upon certain concepts with the help of several other European languages. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for instance, Kundera elucidates the Czech word “lítost” by means of several examples, and in L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (1984) (The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]; Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí [1985]) he discusses the concept of “compassion” in the light of the etymology of the word in different European languages.

The fact that Kundera can reach his readers only through translation may, however, not be the only reason for his struggle to control readers’ encounters with his texts. In his work on the development of the Czech literary scene during 1967–68, written shortly after the Soviet invasion, Dušan Hamšik tells us that Kundera was already then well-known for his habit of constantly reformulating and rewriting his texts as well as for his reluctance to give way to the dictates of censorship, often at the cost of being unable to publish his writings at all (83–86, 91). Kundera also introduced considerable changes in new editions of his works, for instance, his early collections of poems. Not merely a personal trait of the author, this process probably also indicates the author’s vigilance concerning changes in the political atmosphere. What was allowed to be said, and how, changed considerably over a relatively short period of time, with the general atmosphere becoming more permissive in the 1960s. Kundera’s great concern for transmitting the author’s meaning to readers as authentically as possible is probably to some extent a legacy of being able to publish his texts for twenty years only under more or less severe censorship (see Hamšík 83; Hybler 79).

Kundera’s career as a novelist is characterized by yet other paradoxes. What brought him general public recognition was the 1988 film adaptation of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Philip Kaufman. The paradox here is Kundera’s objection to the film versions of novels in general. He values the novel, along with music, more highly than any other art form and relegates the adaptation of a novel to another medium, the screen, as a banal oversimplification of the original work. In Immortality the author’s alter ego says: “The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential” (266; see also Testaments 165). The film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being also fueled the misconception that Kundera’s work deals above all with “sex and politics” (see Petro, “Authenticity”). It is true that the topics of sex and politics could easily account for Kundera’s popularity; however, he denies that his novels deal with politics. Indeed, in his work human behavior is analyzed in the context of specific historical-political conditions, but his attention is always focused on human beings, on their “anthropological possibilities”; the political system or ideology merely constitutes the framework for the manifestation of particular human possibilities (see, e.g., The Art 143; see also O’Brien, “Falling” 95). Moreover, although sexual intercourse is abundantly depicted in Kundera’s novels, this is not an end in itself either. The reason for the presentation of the sexual act again and again derives from Kundera’s conviction that it is precisely in this act that the individual’s deepest concerns and the true nature of the relation between two human beings are acutely revealed (see McEwan 30; Raddatz 100).

All in all, Kundera can be regarded as a paradoxical “product” of the historical tumults of twentieth-century Europe. He is a novelist for whom the novel represents the art of the word and the very essence of European culture, but whose texts are conveyed to his readers in translation only and who is an expatriate representative of Central Europe who for a long time, during which he created his most important works, considered that this Europe no longer existed. Nevertheless, Kundera would disapprove of regarding a novelist as the product of any particular historical circumstances. To the contrary, for him being a novelist means breaking away from the grip of history and residing in the realm of freedom (Testaments 15–16). The novel as a genre has a history of its own in which the individual author occupies his place; but this is a history in which, unlike world history, freedom is realized (Testaments 15). If the relationship between these two kinds of history seems contradictory or paradoxical, this should come as no surprise from an author according to whom all of Europe, that is, the world to which he himself and the entire tradition of the novel belong, are living in, as he calls it, “the period of terminal paradoxes” (The Art 13).

Brno, Prague, Paris

Ann Jefferson has made the interesting remark that Kundera’s leaving Prague for Paris was in fact already his second “exile” because he had earlier chosen to leave his home town, the Moravian city of Brno, to move to Prague. The fact that his father was an influential figure on the Moravian cultural scene—he was a teacher at the Brno Conservatory, a pianist and a scholar of Moravian folk music and of Leos Janáček—suggests that Kundera’s leaving the regional center for the capital of the country is to be understood as a conscious choice of his future circle of influence (see Jefferson 120–21). In arguing that Janáček’s remaining in the province definitely obstructed recognition of his true status as a great innovative composer on a European scale (see Testaments 132–39, 179–95; Encounter 127–42), Kundera is commenting obliquely on his own decision not to remain in the province, which he later extended to the demand that not only he himself but also authors, composers, and artists in general should ignore national borders and take their place on the European scene. Nevertheless, Kundera acknowledges his debt to his native town not only by expressing his great admiration for Janáček but also by regarding himself, as a composer of novels, a follower of Janáček’s “aesthetic rule,” according to which “only absolutely necessary (semantically necessary) notes have a right to exist” (Testaments 187–88). Kundera says that his own “art of ellipsis” is a result of following this “Janáčekian” imperative: “to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense” (The Art 73). Furthermore, in his first novel, The Joke, when the protagonist returns to his Moravian hometown after several years of absence, he is once again smitten by the spell of Moravian folk music, whose different historical layers are reflected upon in a digression with score samples. In the novel, this re-encounter has of course other than merely autobiographical relevance: identification with folk culture is presented as an alternative in art and life.

Kundera started out as a student of music, but later chose literature as his main field of art. That musical structures serve as patterns for the construction of his novels suggests how closely related these two fields are in his conception of art. However, on the literary scene of the early 1950s Kundera appeared neither as a novelist nor as a distanced observer, but as an author who was well adapted to the prevailing cultural climate. Of his first three published works, two—Člověk zahrada širá (1953) (Man, the Vast Garden) and Monology (1957) (Monologues)—are collections of poems, while the third, Poslední máj (1955) (The Last May) is a long poem on a single topic. These works secured him a significant place on the Czech literary scene.

Since the nineteenth century, lyrical poetry had been dominant in Czech literature. During the First Republic of 1918–1938, the traditional national romantic current in lyrical poetry competed with that of the the modernists, who found their ideals in Apollinaire and other French surrealist and avant-garde poets (see, e.g., Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 149–51). After the communist coup in February 1948, only the former mode of writing was permitted. The young Kundera was a devoted admirer of surrealist and avant-garde poetry and translated a number of Apollinaire’s poems into Czech (Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 151). He joined the communist party at the age of eighteen, just before the February coup; but only a couple of years later, in 1950, he was expelled from the party because he had written a parody of a poem by the celebrated communist poet Vítězslav Nezval (see Steiner, The Desert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Kundera, a European Novelist
• Chapter Two: The Legacy of Cervantes
• Chapter Three: Falling Out of History
• Chapter Four: Unmasking, Thought, and Analysis in the Post-Proustian Novel
• Chapter Five: The Thematic Structure of Kundera’s Novels
• Chapter Six: The Sentimental and the Authentic Self
• Chapter Seven: The Dangers of Forgetting and Laughter
• Chapter Eight: Hedonism, Aestheticism, and Love as Modes of Authentic Sense Giving
• Chapter Nine: Lightness and Death
• Chapter Ten: The End of Modernity, the End of the Novel?
• Works Cited
• Index