Milan Kundera, One More Time

Reading Significant Obsessions: Milan Kundera and the weight of influence by Alisha Dietzman reminded me of one particular way that Milan Kundra influences what I am trying to do with writing fiction.

If he writes heroes, they are difficult to identify: Tomáš and Sabina may be the rational actors, but they’ve surrendered to the tragedy of the human condition, while Tereza resists that tragedy, despite the harm this resistance arguably causes her. This tension creates a novel that never answers its own question, which is not about the uncertain state of agency and action, but what to do with that uncertainty, how to respond, how to live. My own writing engages in a similar refusal. I am never sure who is right, least of all myself, and who should get the last word, if anyone, or if there should be a last word at all. In an interview included at the end of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—probably my favorite of his novels besides Immortality—Kundera describes the novelist as teaching the reader to “comprehend the world as a question.” The text asks a question it can’t answer because if the text could answer its own question, it wouldn’t be worth writing, much less reading.  

I question my own understanding of my own life. I do not think of myself as being able to give anyone a definite meaning to life, other than to approach it with more creativity than I did. Kundrea freed me of feeling any need to explain. Besides, as a former trial lawyer, I can tell you the questions are often more interesting than the answers.

I suggest you go read the original essay. Ms. Dietzman has written a most interesting essay on Kundra; quite unlike any of the others I have seen since his death.

sch 7/13