An Old Milan Kundera Interview

 The Literary Review released Interview: Milan Kundera (1985) by Olga Carlisle, and, being a fan, I had to read it. Yes, Kundera's reputation for his female characters has led to a decline in his readership. Too bad, and not a criticism I care about. These kinds of criticisms where we impose our moral judgments on the past reek of the self-righteous, with their ignoring of how the past got us where we are and denial of humanity's mixing of good and bad. 

What I cannot turn my mind away from is Kundera's ideas about the novel. In them, I think we should seriously think on them - something I do not see in current writers. 

In addition to your roots in Prague, what other literary loves have shaped you?

First, the French novelists Rabelais and Diderot. For me the real founder, the king of French literature is Rabelais. And Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste carried the spirit of Rabelais into the eighteenth century. Don’t be misled by the fact that Diderot was a philosopher. This novel cannot be reduced to a philosophical discourse. It is a play of irony. The freest novel ever written. Freedom turned into a novel. I have recently done a theatrical adaptation of it. It was staged by Susan Sontag in Cambridge, Mass. as Jacques and His Master.

Your other roots?

The Central European novel of our century: Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Witold Gombrovicz. These novelists are marvellously distrustful of what André Malraux called the ‘lyric illusions’. Distrustful of the illusions concerning progress, distrustful of the Kitsch of hope. I share their sorrow about the Western twilight. Not a sentimental sorrow. An ironic one. And my third root: modern Czech poetry. For me, it was a great schooling of the imagination.

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What about Russian literature? Does it still touch you, or have the political events of 1968 made it distasteful to you?

I like Tolstoy very much. He is much more modern than Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy was the first, perhaps, to grasp the role of the irrational in human behaviour. The role played by stupidity – but mostly by the unaccountability of human actions guided by a subconscious that is both uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

Re-read the passages preceding Anna Karenina’s death. Why did she kill herself without really wanting to? How was her decision born? To capture these reasons, which are irrational and elusive, Tolstoy photographs Anna’s stream of consciousness. She is in a carriage; the images of the street mix in her head with her illogical, fragmented thoughts. The first creator of the interior monologue was not Joyce but Tolstoy, in these few pages of Anna Karenina. But Tolstoy is badly translated. I once read a French translation of this passage. I was amazed. What in the original text is illogical and fragmented becomes logical and rational in the French translation. As if the last chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses were rewritten – Molly Bloom’s long monologue given logical, conventional punctuation.

Alas, our translators betray us. They do not dare translate the unusual in our texts – the uncommon, the original. They fear that the critics will accuse them of translating badly. To protect themselves, they trivialise us. You have no idea how much time and energy I have lost correcting the translations of my books.

I also find his views on oppressive political regimes have something to say in these days of looming American fascism:

It is sometimes said that, paradoxically, oppression gives more seriousness and vitality to art and literature.

Let us not be romantic. When oppression is lasting, it may destroy a culture completely. Culture needs a public life, the free exchange of ideas; it needs publications, exhibits, debates and open borders. Yet, for a time culture can survive in very difficult circumstances.

After the Russian invasion in 1968, almost all Czech literature was banned and circulated only in manuscript. Open public cultural life was destroyed. Nonetheless, the Czech literature of the 1970s was magnificent. The prose of Hrabal, Grusa, Skvorecky. It was then, at the most perilous time of its existence, that Czech literature gained its international reputation. But how long can it survive in the underground? No one knows. Europe has never experienced such situations before.

When it comes to the misfortune of nations, we must not forget the dimension of time. In a fascist, dictatorial state, everyone knows that it will end one day. Everyone looks to the end of the tunnel. In the empire of the East, the tunnel is without end. Without end, at least, from the point of view of a human life. This is why I don’t like it when people compare Poland with, say, Chile. Yes, the torture, the suffering are the same. But the tunnels are of very different lengths. And this changes everything.

Political oppression presents yet another danger, which – especially for the novel – is even worse than censorship and the police. I mean moralism. Oppression creates an all-too-clear boundary between good and evil, and the writer easily gives in to the temptation of preaching. From a human point of view, this may be quite appealing but for literature it is deadly.

Hermann Broch, the Australian novelist whom I love above all, has said, ‘The only morality for a writer is knowledge.’ Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being. To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

But isn’t it possible that societies experiencing oppression offer more occasions for the writer to discover an unknown fragment of existence than those that lead peaceful lives?

Perhaps. If you think about Central Europe, what a prodigious laboratory of history! In a period of 60 years, we have lived through the fall of an empire, the rebirth of small nations, democracy, Fascism, the German occupation with its massacres, Russian occupations with its deportations, the hope of Socialism. Stalinist terror, emigration … I have always been astounded by how people around me comported themselves in this situation.

Man has become enigmatic. He stands as a question. And it is out of that astonishment that the passion to write a novel is born. My scepticism in relation to certain values that are almost totally unassailable is rooted in my Central European experience.

For instance, youth is usually referred to not as a phase but as a value in itself. When they utter this word, politicians always have a silly grin on their faces. But I, when I was young, lived in a period of terror. And it was the young who supported terror, in great numbers, through inexperience, immaturity, their all-or-nothing morality, their lyric sense. The most sceptical of all my novels is Life is Elsewhere. Its subject is youth and poetry. The adventure of poetry during the Stalinist terror. Poetry’s smile, the bloody smile of innocence.

Poetry is another of those values unassailable in our society. I was shocked when, in 1950, the great French Communist poet Paul Eluard publicly approved the hanging of his friend, the Prague writer Zavis Kalandra. When Brezhnev sends tanks to massacre the Afghans, it is terrible, but it is, so to say, normal it is to be expected. When a great poet praises an execution, it is a blow that shatters our whole image of the world.

 

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