The Story of the University Seminar When Milan Kundera first learned that among those showing interest in hearing him speak on his book tour for the definitive new translation of his international best-selling novel Slowness was that university student we call Zachary L. Hammerman, he demanded the invitation be refused. Fortunately, his agent was able to convince the author to think otherwise: "But the universities are far more hospitable than they used to be. Education has adapted to the spirit of the time: these days, it is at war with its students but completely at peace with the free world." A short time later the author found himself in a small classroom on the second floor of the Jewish Studies or Public Policy department (he wasn’t sure which: two doors allowed one to enter the building, but each bore a different sign). The center of the classroom was demarcated by two rectangular tables placed end to end, leaving just enough space for a cramped walkway around its edges. Three windows lined the outer wall of the classroom, each cracked open slightly to let in the autumn breeze. The author, who had arrived fifteen minutes early, took a seat at the head of the table. Two seats down on his left sat a lone student, busily reading over a highlighted text. Kundera introduced himself and asked the student if he knew by chance exactly what university organization had invited the author to speak. The student replied that, to the best of his knowledge, no university organization had extended an invitation; the event had been sponsored and paid for in its entirety by a handful of interested students. Seeing the anxious author show slight signs of relief, the student continued: "Yes, it was we students who desired to hear you speak, Mr. Kundera. For the past few months we’ve spent a great deal of time studying your novels. The reading was part of a university seminar, actually. A seminar called Being and Time in the Novels of Milan Kundera." Kundera’s face posited the expression of a man whose feet have been uprooted from the depths of the earth and miss the pull of gravity at its core. At this point Lotaria, an acquaintance also taking the seminar, entered and took a seat to the author’s right. She introduced herself to the author and told him how grateful she was that he had been able to attend. Apparently, both Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous had been invited to speak for a seminar she had taken the year before, a seminar entitled Love Well Missed in the Short Stories of Clarice Lispector. Both authors had accepted the invitation to attend. On the day of the scheduled lecture, two mature women indeed were in attendance, but these ladies uttered not a word of love, missing, or Clarice Lispector. Instead, they spoke of high art (discourse) and low art (Philip Roth), angels and sphinxes, and all the usual generalizations one could expect of intellectuals with forced accents. As it turns out, the whole event had been a sham: Julia Kristeva had indeed attended the seminar, but in the guise of Hélène Cixous. Hélène Cixous had also attended the seminar, but in the guise of Julia Kristeva. Each had come in disguise hoping to ruin the other’s reputation. Gradually the conversation turned away from Love Well Missed to more general things: how Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator was running a fever and how his Italian translator had caught a slight cold; how the Iranian government had retracted its fatwa and how Salman Rushdie had appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in a bold attempt to prove to the world that he refused to live his life as a prisoner of Islamic fundamentalists. Caught up in the spirit of the conversation, Milan Kundera found himself joining in. He told us that several years back he had sent a personal letter to Mr. Rushdie to let him know he had found great tenderness towards the Muslim people in The Satanic Verses. Lotaria asked the author what sort of novelist he considered Mr. Rushdie to be. Kundera told the young woman he believed Mr. Rushdie was Indian by descent, though he lived in England. "No, you misunderstood," Lotaria tried to correct him. "I want to know the author’s position with regard to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems That Demand a Solution." To make Kundera’s task easier, Lotaria furnished him with a list of names of Great Masters among whom he should situate Mr. Rushdie. "The novelist is neither historian nor prophet," Kundera tried to explain. "He is an explorer of existence." Seeing Lotaria shift in her seat as if about to commence on a painfully particular and particularly painful exploration of what the 'novelist' truly 'is', I asked her if she had read some books by Salman Rushdie that I'd lent her. She said no, she did not have a computer at her disposal. She explained to us that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. "That way I can have an already completed reading at hand, with an incalculable saving of time." Kundera was quick to object: "The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’ That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off." "What is the reading of the text except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings?" Lotaria rebutted. An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book." Kundera replied that on behalf of himself, Mr. Rushdie and all the novelists of the world, he was greatly offended. He told the university student that it was a terrible insult to become a corpse. "One moment, you are a human being protected by modesty... and then the instant of death is enough to put your body suddenly at anyone’s disposal – to undress it, to rip it open, to scrutinize its entrails, to hold one’s nose against its stench, to shove it into the freezer or into the fire." Lotaria missed the last string of these metaphors rummaging through her book bag on the floor. When she surfaced again from beneath the table she held a book proudly in her hands. It was a paperback copy of The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera. "Mr. Kundera, you tell me that my reading practices are offensive in the foulest manner. I would like to quote, with your permission, of course, a passage from The Art of the Novel." She opened the collection to page twenty-nine and began: "‘As I was writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ you state, ‘I realized that the code of this or that character is made up of certain key words. For Tereza: body, soul, vertigo, weakness, idyll, Paradise. For Tomas: lightness, weight.’ "I must inform you that I have read your Unbearable Lightness of Being. Or to put it better, I have performed an electronic reading. Furthermore, my analysis indeed found ‘body, soul, vertigo, weakness, idyll, and Paradise’ to be the key words for Tereza, just as I have found ‘lightness and weight’ to be the key words for Tomas. I ask you, Mr. Kundera: what do you have to say to that?" Kundera told Lotaria he had a simple response concerning her electronic reading of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He told her if she had turned to the next page of his Art of the Novel, she would have discovered a passage where he explained that the existential code is not examined in abstracto, but reveals itself progressively in the action, in the situations. Thus, while she had unquestionably located the themes of his novel, she most certainly could not be considered as having read it. By now the classroom had filled up (which is to say there were ten or twelve of us) with university students of all ages and backgrounds. A general spokesperson for the class introduced Milan Kundera to the group and the group to Milan Kundera. It was then suggested by the spokesperson that the seminar commence with a selection from the author’s impressive collection of stories, Laughable Loves. The assignments were handed out: during the reading there were to be some students who underlined the reflections of production methods, others the processes of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgressions of roles, in politics and private life. While all this was taking place, Milan Kundera thought to himself about how European culture seemed under threat today, a threat from within and without that hung over what is most precious about it – its respect for the individual, for his original thought, and for his right to an inviolable private life. He thought about how that precious essence of the European spirit was being held safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel. He thought about how he had intended to honor that spirit of the novel in a speech of thanks that afternoon, but God had laughed upon seeing him thinking. At this point we threw open the discussion. Events, characters, settings, impressions were thrust aside, to make room for the general concepts. "The polymorphic-perverse sexuality..." "The laws of a market economy..." " The homologies of signifying structures..." "Deviation and institutions..." "Castration..." Milan Kundera explained to the students that his works were meant for reading, not for rewriting. He told them that he saw that his work served them perfectly well to demonstrate their theories, and that this was certainly a positive fact – for the novels or for the theories, he did not know which. He told the students that from their detailed talk, he got the idea of a piece of work being seriously perused, but that his books, seen through their eyes, proved unrecognizable to him. He said he was sure that they had read them conscientiously, but that he believed they had read them only to find in them what they were already convinced of before reading them. "Why? Would you want us to read in your books only what you’re convinced of?" Milan Kundera answered that that wasn’t at all his point. He said he expected readers to read in his books something he didn’t know, but that he could expect it only from those who expected to read something they didn’t know. And with that, Milan Kundera stood up from his seat at the head of the table and, with a slight nod in the direction of the three windows as if he hoped we might all jump out, departed.
Another Conversation with Silas Flannery Milan Kundera once wrote that somewhere out in space there is a planet where all people will be born again. An optimist is someone who thinks that on this planet the history of the novel will be less banal. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise. Silas Flannery was telling me something similar just the other day. "Reading is going toward something that it is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be." "Does that make reading anything less than it ever was?" "Surely not! That privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader, the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive to which there is nothing to be added and from which there is nothing to be removed, remains intact." "Reading seems to have lost that privileged relationship," I told the author. "It has become a stockpile of interviews, adaptations, transcriptions for the theater, for film, for television. It’s turned into newsgroups and voice mail and web sites. Rewriting is the spirit of the times. Someday all past novels will be rewritten and completely forgotten behind their rewrites." "Then it is the writer who will have lost his privileged relationship, not the reader! You have turned up here at a time when those hanging around publishing houses are no longer aspiring poets or novelists, as in the past, would-be-poetesses or lady writers; this is the moment in the history of Western culture when self-realization on paper is sought not so much by isolated individuals as by collectives: study seminars, working parties, research teams, as if intellectual labor were too dismaying to be faced alone. The figure of the author has become plural and moves always in a group because nobody can be delegated to represent anybody." I told Silas Flannery about the recent commotion at my university seminar, Being and Time in the Novels of Milan Kundera: about how we had invited Milan Kundera to speak on his new novel Slowness; about how we had hoped to begin with a reading from Laughable Loves, and how the author had hoped otherwise; about how Kundera had left the seminar without uttering a single word worthy of citing in my final thesis. "The problem with Kundera is that for him shit is absolute metaphysical negativity," the author replied, apparently misunderstanding what I’d said. "I would object that for pantheists and for the constipated – I belong to one of these two categories, though I will not specify which – shit is one of the greatest proofs of the generosity of the universe! That shit is to be considered of value and not worthless is a matter of principle." "So much shit today manifests itself in the written word. If an author isn’t publishing his whole life story, he’s publishing the whole life story of someone else. And if he isn’t a biographer, which is highly unlikely, then he’s usually either dead or just plain awful. The talent of Milan Kundera is that he’s able to explore shit without becoming it." "In order not to fall either into vague sentiments of a universal redemption that ends up by producing monstrous police states or into generalized and temperamental pseudo-rebellions that are resolved in sheepish obedience," Flannery disagreed, "it is necessary to recognize how things are, whether we like them or not. I believe a certain amount of shit is necessary precisely because it is incompatible with the kitsch that Kundera justly detests." The author paused to think things through. And then: "I’d imagine Kundera isn’t capable of saying anything worth citing in my final feces either."
The Art of the Novel You were expecting something new, perhaps? Something other than a story about Milan Kundera, Silas Flannery and feces, at the very least. Maybe you’d like to read something that brings you immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. Did you know that in Silas Flannery’s newest thriller the brands of liquor to be drunk by the characters, the tourist spots to be visited, the haute-couture creations, furnishing and gadgets have already been determined by contract through specialized advertising agencies? Of course, perhaps the novel you would most like to read at this moment should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves. Very well then: Silas Flannery produces books as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins. Then again, maybe the novels you prefer are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page. The novels of Silas Flannery are something so well characterized it seems they were already there before, before he wrote them, in all their details; it’s as if they passed through him, using him because he knew how to write, since, after all, there had to be somebody to write them. Or perhaps the book you’re looking for is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world. In that case, you’d best pick up the new novel Slowness by Milan Kundera. Kundera suffers from what he calls a graphomania epidemic. He fears becoming "one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow." I call this graphomania epidemic Silas Flannery anxiety: "Will I ever be able to say, ‘Today it writes,’ just like ‘Today it rains,’ ‘Today it is windy’? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb ‘write’ in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual." If it were possible for Milan Kundera to accept the unnatural effort to which he subjects himself... writing... as the respiration of the reader – as the operation of reading turned into a natural process, as the current that brings the sentence to graze the filter of the reader’s attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable – perhaps he would not be so tense. Of course, the author might enter into this lecture in his own defense to point out that he has never explicitly stated that the novel will disappear, or that nothing will be left but the endless babble of graphomaniacs, nothing but novels that come after the history of the novel. He has merely written that he knows that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on ‘progressing’ as a novel, it will do so only against the progress of the world. Kundera might go on to posit his conviction that the reader is in equal danger of being swallowed by the age of universal deafness and incomprehension. Can the nature of the reader truly resist becoming unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and wishing all other readers dead? Will we one day say, ‘Today it reads’ as we say ‘Today it rains’? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through her mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes."
The Next Millennium Pre-Millennium Tension is the title of this fiction. Perhaps you will come up with a more perfect title. I have come up with more perfect titles, too. However, I have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in the next millennium. Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature have a function.For my part, I know that if I think I must write one lecture, all the problems of how this lecture should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write. My hope is that my stories have over the course of this lecture become your stories, just as the stories of Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino have become my stories. By no means should you feel that you need to ask permission to borrow these stories for future use. On the contrary, steal them; include them in your next research paper; use them in public and in private; as slander or libel; for fodder or fornication. Of course, be sure to work on the transitions; make it more clear where the lecture is going; delete much of the italics, too (they’re overused anyway); don’t take quotes from Kundera’s novels as his actual words; consider your audience a bit more; clarify when you’re referring to characters from If on a winter’s night a traveler and when you’re only making them up; let the reader hear more from you, your voice and thoughts and judgments; maybe your voice doesn’t have anything to say, but it would be better than just your perspective through narrative. Couldn’t you, forgive me for asking, include the footnotes in the body of the text, and perhaps condense the text a bit, and even – the decision is yours – turn it into a footnote? Reader: this story was yours from the beginning. Centography Milan Kundera Italo Calvino Copyright 1997, Zachary L Hammerman Back to Italo Calvino | to Zachary's Index.
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