Another Milan Kundera Post

 Why be scared of reading a foreign writer? Seems from what I read, Americans do not read foreigners. Could be my recommending Milan Kundera will do him no good, but then you should read McFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Milan Kundera. The writer makes a spot evaluation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and of Kundera:

In this absurdist tradition, one can easily find Kundera’s influences to be his predecessors Kafka and Nietzsche, and even his contemporaries, Sartre and Beauvoir. While modernists may have influenced him, Kundera seems to be actively responding to postmodern literature and philosophy as well. He had a similar approach to Vonnegut in asking why we’re so willing to give up our free will during wartime and accept war as a fact of life. He even makes fun of modernist writers in doing so. Like Hemmingway, Kundera uses war as a backdrop of his novel, and does so to point out a selfish absurdity present in all wartime literature, why would anyone write during times like these? Kundera doesn’t pose such questions to doubt the validity of art as much as he does to relate his own struggles of being a poet and a novelist during times of unrest. He makes his answer from Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 16” in which Beethoven wrote in his manuscript “Muss es sein?” “Es muss sein!” This question and answer roughly translate to “Must it be?” “It must be!” By implementing this phrase into Tomas’s thought process, Kundera clues readers into his struggle of creating art. Kundera’s point of view seems to be that if we didn’t make art during times of unrest, there would be nothing left after war besides death. Yes, it is absurd to write comedies, tragedies, romances, etc. while people are needlessly suffering and dying, but if humans approached this absurdity in an air of self-doubt and resignation, we simply would never improve upon literature, music, philosophy, or anything else revolving around the humanities. Why do we do this? Because we must! If the only thing we focus on during war is the war itself, we are left with nothing but the ghosts of brutality, and Kundera argues in this novel that human nature simply does not allow for this. Humans have in them an innate capacity for moral sentimentality- this argument was made by Adam Smith, and Kundera builds upon this in his literature.

I think in our current times, Kundera is more relevant than he has been for decades. Ugliness pervades our culture with its tribalism, with one side's hatred of the other, with wars fought and anticipated, we are not in a good shape. We are susceptible to the predations of demagogues. I read Kundera as standing against all of that.

sch 10/24/22