A BRILLIANT NEW CONTRIBUTION TO

KUNDERA'S ONGOING REFLECTIONS ON ART

AND ARTISTS, WRITTEN WITH UNPARALLELED

INSIGHT, AUTHORITY, AND RANGE OF

REFERENCE AND ALLUSION

/ ="� "===

ne"Yv collection of essays

�� .1 pJ�)ion.tte dden-,c of art 111 an era that, he argues,

no longer values art or beauty. With the s�une dazzling

111ix of e1notion and idea that characterizes his novels.

Kundera revisits the artists \Yho re1nain important to

hin1 and \vhose works help us better understand the

\vorld ,,.e live in and \vhat it means to be hunun. An

astute re:1dcr of fiction, Kundera brings his extraordi­

nary critical gifts to be�u on the paintings of Francis

Bacon, the n1usic of Leo� Janacek, and the fihns of

Federico Fellini, as \Vell 3S the novels of Philip l:toth,

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

among others. He also takes up the challenge of restor­

ing to its rightful place the \Vork of Anatole France

and Curzio Malaparte, 1 n aj or \vriters who have fallen

into obscurity.

Milan K undera's signature then1es of n1en1ory

:1nd forgetting, the experience of exile, and the cham­

pioning of n1odernist art arc here. along with Inore

pcrsonal reflections and stories. Dnwuntcr is a \vork of

great humanism. Art i11 what we possess in the face

of evil �1nd the darker side of human nature. Elegant,

�t,utl i ngly original, and provoc:H ive, Enrountcr follo\VS

111 the footsteps of K u nder�1 's earlier essay collccuons,

The Art (�{the i\.ot'el, 'Jcst,llncms Betrayed, and The Curr,11u.

The Fr<uH.:o-Czech novelist and u Hit

1 • ''as b or n in Brno <tnd h a� In ed 111

F1anu:. h1 etond hon1eland, since 1975. Ht· IS the

author of the n ove ls The joke, Fczr£'well H itltz, Life b

_ . The
Elsetl'hcre, The Book of Lc1llJ!llfer cwd Fot:�ettiu.�

£ ·ubearable L(S?hfllcss of Bdll,�, and ltmlwrtality, and the

� ltclble LotJcs- a ll origin.tlly

short-story c ol lec tio n Lall�

\\Tittcn in Czech. His n1ost recent novels. Sloll'llC'.'·

Identity, and lguorauce, as \\ dl as his nontiction \\'orks

Til<' Art <�{the i\'cwel, Ti.•stcllll('llts Betrcl)'£'d, T!tc Curtttill.

and Eucoullter, \ V c re originally written in Fre nc h .

Visit '" ww.AuthorTracker.com for cxdusi\"c

information on your favorite HarpcrCollins .mthors.

An Imprint ofllarp�t CullinsPubli�hcr.'

'" \\ w.harpcrCtlllms.cum
ENCOUNTE R
 BooKs BY MILAN KuNDERA

The Joke
Laughable LoveJ
Life lf E!Jetuhere
Faretuell Waltz (earlier translation: The Faretue/1 Party)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Unbearable LightneJJ of Being
ln11nortality
SlotuneJJ
Identity
Ignorance

JacqueJ and HiJ MaJter (play)

The Art of the Novel (essay)

TeJtan1entJ Betrayed (essay)
The Curtain (essay)
Encounter
MILAN KuNDERA

ENCOUNTER

Translated from the French

by Linda Asher

HARPER

An Imprint ofHarperCollinsPub/ishers
www.harpcrcollins.com
 ENCOUNTER. Copyright © 2009 by Milan Kundera. Translation copyright
© 2010 by Linda Asher. All rights reser\'ed. Printed in the United States
of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of hricf
quotations embodied in critical articles and re\'iews. For information, address
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HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

Origi nall y p u bl i shed in French as Une Rencontre

in France in 2009 by Editions Gallimard.

FIRST EDITION

DeJigned by F.ric Butler

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has hccn applied for.

ISHN: <J78-0-06-1�9441-I

1
)() II 12 13 14 OV/RRD I0 <J 8 7 (> '5 4 3
 0 0 0 an encounter with my reflections and n1y recollections,
my old thetnes (existential and aesthetic) and my old loves 0 0 0
 CONTENTS

I. THE PAINTER's BRUTAL GEsTUR E: ON FRAI\:CIS HAcor-.: I

II. N o v EL s ExiSTENTIAL SouNnir-.:cs

, Ii
The Con1ical Ab.ience of the Conzical (Do.i!oyev.ikJ': The Idiot) I9
Death and the FtHJ (LouiJ-Ferdinand Celine:

Fron1 Castle to Castle) 22

Love in Accelerating Hi.i!ory (Philip Roth:

The Professor of Desire) 25

The Secret of the Age.f of Life (Gudbe1gur BeJg.i.iOn: The S\van) 28

The Idyll, the Daughter of Horror (Afarek Bieliczyl(.' T\vorki) 32

The Debacle of l\1en1orie.i (juan Goyti.iOlo: The Curtain Falls) 35

The Novel and Procreation (Gabriel Garcia 1\fdrquez:

One Hundred Years of Solitude) 38

III. BLACKLISTs, oR DIVERTIMENTo IN Ho.l\tAGE To

ANATOLE FRANCE 41

1\'. TH E [)REAM oF ToTAL HERITAGE 61

A Dialogue on RabelaiJ and the MiJon1u.ii.it.i 63

The Drea1n ofTotal Heritage in Beethoven 68

The Arch-Novel: An Open Letter for the

Birthday of CarloJ Fuente.i 71

 Co N T E N TS

The Total Rejection of Heritage, or /annis Xenakis (a text

published in 1980, with tu;o interventions froln 2008) 74

V. BEAUTIFUL LIKE A MuLTIPLE ENcouNTER 8I

VI. ELSEWHERE 101

Exile as Liberation According to Vera Linhartova Io 3

The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (Oscar Milosz) 106

Enmity and Friendship 110
Faithful to Rabelais and to the Surrealists Who
Delved into Dreams liS
On the Two Great Springs, and on the Skvoreckjs II 7

From BeneathYou' II Breathe the Roses

(The Last Visit tvith Ernest BreleuJj I 22

VII. Mv FIRST LovE I 25

The Long Race of a One-Legged Runner I 27

The Most Nostalgic Opera I 33

VIII. FoRGETTING ScHOENBERG I43

No Celebration (a text published in 1995 in the Frankfurter

Rundschau together tuith other pieces celebrating

the hundredth anniversary of the birth of cinerna) 14S

What Will Be Left ofYou, Bertolt? 1 48
Forgetting Schoenberg Is I

IX. THE SKIN: MALAPARTE's ARcH-NovEL ISS

X
 I.

THE PAIN T E R 's B R U T A L GEsT U R E:

O N F R A N CIS BACO N
1

WHEN MI CHEL ARCHIMBAUD WAS PLAN NING A BOOK OF

Francis Bacon's portraits and self-port ra its, he asked me to

write a short essay for it. He assured me that the i nvitation
was Bacon's own wish . He rem i nded me of a short piece I had
publ ished a long wh ile back in the periodical L'Arc, a piece he
said the painter considered one of the few in wh ich he rec­
ogn ized h i mself. I will not deny my pleasure at th is message,
arriving years later, from an a rtist I have never met and whom
I so adm i red.
That piece in L'Arc discussed Bacon's triptych of portraits of
Hen rietta Moraes ; I wrote it i n the very first years a fter I emi­
grated to France, still obsessed by recollections of the country
which I had just left and wh ich stil l remained i n my memory as
a land of i nterrogations and su rveil lance. Some eighteen yea rs
later, I can only begin my new consideration of Bacon's a rt with
that older text from 1977:

"
IT WAS I9 72. I MET WITH A GIRL IN A PRAG UE SUBURB,
in a borrowed apartment. Two days earlie1� over an entire day, she
had been interrogated by the police about me. Now she wanted
 M I LA N K u N DE R A

to meet with me secretly (she feared that she was constantly fol­
lowed) to tell me what questions they had asked her and how she
had answered them. If they were to interrogate me, my answers
should match hers.
((She was a very young girl who had little experience of the
world as yet. The interrogation had disturbed he1; and three days
later the fear was still upsetting her bowels. She was very pale,
and during our conversation she kept leaving the room to go to the
toilet, so our whole encounter was accompanied by the noise of the
water refilling the tank.
(([ had known herfor a long time. She was intelligent and spir­
ited, she was very skilled at controlling her emotions, and was
always so impeccably dressed that her outfit, like her behavior, al­
lowed no hint of nakedne.fs. And now Juddenly, like a great knife,
fear had laid her open. She was gaping wide before me like the split
carcass ofa heifer hangingfrom a meat hook.
((The noise ofthe water refilling the toilet tank practically never
let up, and I suddenly had the urge to rape he1: I know what I'm
, ,
saying: 1rape he1; not 1make love to he1: I didn't want tenderness
from her. I wanted to bring my hand down brutally on herface and
in one swift in.ftant take her completely, with all her unbearably
arousing contradiction.f: with her impeccable outfit along with her
rebellious gut, her good sense along with her jea1; her pride along
with her misery. I sen.fed that all those contradictions concealed her
essence: that treasure, that gold nugget, that diamond hidden in the
depths. I wanted to possess he1; in one swift second, with her shit
and her ineffable .foul. But I saw those two eyes staring at me, filled
with torment (two tormented eyes in a sensibleface), and the more
4
 E N C OUN T E R

tormented those eyes the 1nore 1ny deJire beca1ne absurd, stupid,
scandalous, incon1prehensible, and i1npossible to carry out.
({Uncalled for and unconscionable, that desire was nonetheless
real. I cannot disavow it, and when I look at Francis Bacon'J por­
trait-triptych it's as if I recall it. The painter's gaze co1nes down on
theface like a brutal hand trying to seize hold ofher essence, ofthat
diamond hidden in the depths. Ofcourse we are not certain that the
depths really do conceal so1nething-but in any case we each have
in us that brutal gesture, that hand 1nove1nent that roughs up an­
other person'sface in hopes offinding, in it and behind it, something
that is hidden there."

THE BE S T c o M ME N TA R IE s o N BAc o N 's wo R K A RE BY B A c o N

h imsel f i n two long i nterviews : w i t h Dav id Sylvester i n 1976
a nd with Arch i n1baud i n 1992. I n both he speaks adtniringly of
P icasso, especially of the 1926-32 period, the on ly one to \\'hich
he feels truly close ; he saw an area open there "which has not
been explored : an organic fonn that relates to the hu1nan image
but is a complete distortion of it" (the en1phases are tn i ne).
Aside from that short period, one could say that every\vhere
else i n P icasso, it is the painter's light gesture that transfonned
elements of the human body into a ttuo-di1nensional form exen1pt
from any obl igation to resemble. With Bacon, playful P icassian
euphoria is replaced by amazen1ent (if not by terror) at \vhat we
are-what we are material ly, physically. I tnpel led by that terror,
 M I LA N K u N n E RA

the pai nter's hand (to use the words of my old piece) comes
down with a "brutal gestu re" on a body, on a face, "in hopes of
fi ndi ng, in it and beh i nd it, something that is hidden there."
But what is hidden there ? Its "sel f" ? Certainly every portrait
ever painted seeks to uncover the subject's "self." But Bacon lives
i n a time when the "sel f" has everywhere begun to take cover.
I ndeed, our most com monplace personal experience teaches
us (especially if the l i fe behi nd us is very long) that faces a re
lamentably al ike (the i nsane demographic avalanche fu rther
augmenting that feel i ng) , that they a re easily con fused, that
they di ffer one from the next only by something very ti ny, ba rely
perceptible, which mathematical ly often represents barely a few
n1illi meters' d i fference i n the arrangement of proportions. Add
to that our h i stor ical experience, which teaches us that men
imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable,
thei r opi n ions man ipu lable, and t hat man is therefore less an
individual (a subject) than an elen1en t i n a mass.
It is in this motnent of u ncertai nty that the rapist hand
of the painter comes down with a " brutal gestu re" on his
models' faces in order to fi nd , somewhere in the depths, thei r
bu ried sel f. I n this Bacon ian quest t he forms subjected to
"a complete distortion" never lose the cha racter of living or­
ga n isnl s, they recall thei r bod i ly existence, thei r flesh, they
always retain their three-dimensional nature. And moreover they
look like thei r models ! But how can the portrait resemble the
model of wh ich it is intentionally a d istortion ? Yet photos of
the persons port rayed a re the proof: it does resemble h i m or
 E N C OU N T E R

her; look at the triptychs-th ree j uxtaposed va riations on the

portrait of the same person; the variations differ from one a n­
other but at the same time have someth i ng cotn mon to them
a l l : "that treasure, that gold nugget, that hidden d iamond ," the
"self" of a face.

I C O ULD P U T I T D I F F E R E N TLY : B A C O N 's P O R T R A I T S A R E

a n interrogation on the limits of the sel f. Up to what degree
of distortion does an individual still remain h imsel f? To wb.t
degree of distortion does a beloved person stil l ret :P�tn a beloved
person ? For how long does a cherished fac� gro\ving remote
th rough i l l ness, th rough mad ness, th rough hatred , through
death sti l l rema i n recogni zable ? W here is th� bo rder beyond
wh ich a sel f ceases to be a sel f?

Fo R A LO N G T I M E B A c o N A N D B E c K ET T M A DE U P A couPLE
i n my i magi na ry ga l lery o f modern a rt. Then I read h is
A rch i n1baud i nterv iew : " I 've always been a mazed by this
compa rison between Beckett a nd mysel f," Bacon said. Then ,
fa rther on : " I 've always found that Shakespea re expresses rnore
poetically, more accu rately, and i n a n1uch n1ore powerful \vay

7
 l'vltLA I" K u r--= oE H A

what Beckett a nd Joyce were trying to say." A n d aga i n : "I

wonder i f Beckett's ideas about his a rt d id n't end up by k i l l­
i ng his creativity . . . . There's something too systematic and too
i ntel ligent about h i m , wh ich is perhaps what's always made
me u ncomfortable." And fi n a l ly : "Usua l ly in pai nti ng, you
always leave too much i n that is habit, you never cut enough
out, but with Beckett I often get the i mpression that because
he wa nted to hone down his text, nothing was left, and in the
end his work sou nds hol low."
When one artist tal ks about another, he is always tal king
(indi rectly, in a roundabout way) of hi msel f, and that is what's
x�luable i n his j udgment. I n tal k i ng about Beckett, what is
Baco n telliTJg 1as about himsel f?
That he doesn't want to be categorized . That he wants to
protect his work agai nst cliches.
Also : that he resists the dogmatists of modernism who have
erected a barrier between trad ition and modern art as if, in the
history of art, modern art represented an isolated period with its
own i ncomparable values, with its completely autonomous crite­
ria. Bacon, though, looks to the history of art in its enti rety ; the
twentieth centu ry does not cancel ou r debts to Shakespeare.
A nd fu rther: he is refusing to express his ideas on a rt i n
too systematic a fash ion, lest his art be turned i nto some sort of
si mplistic rnessage. He knows that the danger is all the greater
because, i n ou r time , art is e nc rusted with a noisy, opaque
logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from com i ng i nto
d i rect, media-free, not-pre-i nterpreted contact with its viewer
(its reader, its l istener).

8
 ENCOUNTER

Wherever he can Bacon therefore blu rs his tracks to th row

off the experts who want to reduce h is work to a pessimism
cliche : he brid les at using the word " horror" with regard to his
art; he stresses the role of cha nce i n his pai nting (cha nce tu rn­
ing up in the cou rse of the work-an accidental splotch of color
that abruptly changes the very subject of the pictu re) ; he insists
on the word "play" when everyone is m a k i ng much of the
ser iou sness of h i s pa i nt i ngs . People wa nt to talk about h i s
despa i r ? \lery well, but, h e specifies im med iately, i n h i s case it
is an "exhilarated despair."

I N H I S RE F LE C T I O N S O N BE C KE T T, BAC O N S AYS : " I N PA I N T­

ing, we always leave i n too much that is habit, we never el im i nate
enough." Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything i n
painti ng that is not the pa inter's own discovery, h i s fresh con­
tribution, his origi nality; everythi ng that is inherited , routi ne,
fi l ler, elaboration as tech n ical necessity. That describes, for
exa m ple, i n the sonata fonn (of even the greatest-Moza rt,
Beethoven}, all the (often very conventional} transitions fron1
one theme to another. Almost all great modern a rtists 1nea n to
do away with " fi l ler," do away with whatever comes from habit,
whatever keeps them from getti ng d i rectly a nd exclu sively at
the essential (the essential : the thing the a rtist himsel f, and only
he, is able to say}.
So it is with Bacon : the backgrounds of his pai nti ngs a re

9
 MILAN KuNDERA

su persi mple, flat color; but : in the foregrou nd , the bod ies a re
treated with a rich ness of color and form that is all the den ser.
Now, that (Shakespearea n) rich ness is what matters to him.
For without that rich ness (rich ness contrasting with the flat­
color background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if "on a diet,"
as if dimi n ished, and for Bacon the issue always and above a l l is
beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems
nowadays to be hack neyed, out of date, it is what l i nks him to
Shakespeare.
And it is why he is i rritated by the word "horror" that is
persistently applied to his pa i nti ng. Tolstoy said of Leonid A n­
dreyev a nd of his ta les of te rror: "He's trying to frighten me,
but I 'm not sca red." Nowadays too many pai nti ngs a re trying to
frighten us, and instead they bore us. Terror is not an aesthetic
sensation , a nd the horror fou nd i n Tolstoy's novels is never there
to frighten us; the harrowing scene where doctors operate with­
out anesthetic on the mortal ly wou nded And rei Bolkonsky is
not lacking in beauty; as no scene in Shakespeare lacks it; as no
pictu re by Bacon lacks it.
Butcher shops a re horri fie, but speaki ng of them , Bacon
does not neglect to rema rk that " for a pai nter, there is this great
beauty of the color of meat."

WHY IS I T TH AT, D ESP I TE ALL BA C O N ,S R ESE R VA T I O NS, I

co nti nue to see him as akin to Beckett ?

10
 ENCOU NTER

Both of them a re located at just about the same poi nt i n the

respective histories of thei r art, that is, i n the very last period of
dramatic art, i n the very last period of the history of pai nti ng.
For Bacon is one of the last painters whose la nguage is still oil
and brush . And Beckett sti l l wrote for a theater whose basis is
the author's text. After him the theater sti l l exists, true, perhaps
it is even evolving; but it is no longer the playwrights' texts that
inspire, renew, ensu re that evolution.
I n the h istory of modern a rt Bacon and Beckett are not the
ones who open the way; they close it down. When Archi mbaud
asks Bacon wh ich contemporary pai nters are important to him,
he says : "After Picasso, I don't real ly k now. There's an exh ibi­
tion of pop art at the Royal Academy at the moment . . . . [But]
when you see all those pictu res col lected together, you don't
see anything. I find there's nothi ng i n it, it's empty, completely
empty." And Warhol ? "He isn't important to me." And abstract
a rt ? Oh no, he doesn't l i ke it.
"A fter Picasso, I don't rea l ly k now." He ta lks like an orpha n .
And h e is one. H e is one even i n the very concrete sense o f the
l i fe he lived : the people who opened the way were su rrounded
by col leagues, by com mentators, by worshippers, by sympath iz­
ers, by fel low travelers, by an enti re ga ng. But Bacon is alone.
As Beckett is. I n the Sylvester i nterview: "I th ink it wou ld be
more exciting to be one of a nu mber of artists worki ng to­
gether. . . . I th i n k it wou ld be terribly n ice to have son1eone to
tal k to. Today there is absolutely nobody to ta l k to."
For thei r modernism, the modernism that closes do\vn the
way, no longer matches the modern ity around them : a 1nodernity

11
 l\t1 I LA N K v N J) E I{ A

of the jaJhionJ propel led by the ma rketi ng of art. (Sylvester: "I f

abst ract pai ntings are no n1ore than pattern-making, how do
you explain the fact that there are people like myself who have
the san1e sort of visceral response to t hem at times as they
have to figu rative work s ? " Bacon : "Fash ion ." ) Being modern
at the 1notnent when the great 1nodernism is closing down the
way is an entirely di fferent th ing from being modern in Picasso's
tin1e. Bacon is isolated ( "there is absolutely nobody to talk to" ) ;
isolated fro1n both the past and the future.

LIKE B ACO N , BECKET T H AD N O IL L U SIO N S A B O U T T HE

future of the world or of art. A nd at that moment in the last
days of illusions, both men show the sa1ne immensely i nter­
esting and sign i ficant reaction : wa rs , revolution s a nd their
setbacks, n1assacres, the democratic i 1npostu re, all these sub­
jects are absent fro1n their works. In h is R hinoceroJ, lonesco
is stil l interested in the great pol itical questions. Noth ing l ike
that in Beckett. Picasso paints Massacre in Korea. An i nconceiv­
able subject for Bacon. Living through the end of a civilization
(as Beckett and Bacon were or thought they were), the ultimate
brutal con fron tation is not with a society, with a state, with a
pol itics, but with the physiological 1nateriality of n1an. That is
why even the great subject of the Cruc i fi x ion, wh ich in past
ti1nes conce ntra ted wit h i n itself the whole ethics, the vvhole
religion, i ndeed the whole hi story of the West, becomes i n

12
 E I:'\CO U NT E R

Bacon's hands a n1ere physiological sca ndal . "I 've always been
very moved by pictu res about slaughterhouses and tneat, and to
me they belong very tnuch to the \Nhole thing of the cruci fix­
ion . There've been extraordinary photographs of anin1als just
bei ng taken up before they were slaughtered . And the stnel l of
death . . . "
To 1 i n k Jesus nailed to the cross \Vith slaughterhouses and
an a n i tn a l 's fear n1 ight seem sacri legious. But Bacon is a non­
bel iever, and the notion of sacri lege has no place in his way of
thinking; accord i ng to hin1 , "Man no\V rea li zes that he is an
accident, that he is a con1pletely futi le bei ng, that he has to play
out the ga me without reason ." Seen frotn that angle, Jesus is
that accident \\rho, \\'ithout reason , played out the game. The
cross : the fi nal point of the gatne played out to the end without
reason .
No, not sacri lege ; rather a clearsighted , sorrowi ng, thought­
fu l ga ze trying to penetrate to the essential. And what essential
thing is revealed when al . l t he social d rean1s have evaporated
and man sees "rel igious possibi lities . . . con1pletely cancelled
out for hin1" ? The body. Only ecce hon1o, visible, touching, con­
crete. For "Certa in ly we a re tneat, we a re potential carcasses.
I f I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's su rprisi ng that I
wasn't there instead of the anin1al."
This is neither pessi n1istn nor despai r, it is only obvious t1ct,
but an obviousness that is veiled by ou r n1embersh ip in a col lec­
tivity that bl inds us vvith its d rean1s, its exciten1ents, its projects,
its il lusions, its struggles, its causes, its religions, its ideologies, its
passtons. And then one day the veil fa l l s �1\vay and \Ve are

13
 wl r L A N K u N D E R A

left stranded with the body, at the mercy of the body, l i ke the
young woman in Prague who, a fter the shock of an i nterroga­
tion, went off to the toilet every th ree m i nutes. She was reduced
to her fea r, to the fu ry of her bowels, and to the sou nd of the
water she heard refi lling the toilet tan k as I hear it when I look
at Bacon's Figure at a WaJhbaJin from 1976, or the Triptych May­
June of 1973. For that young Prague woman it was no longer the
police that she had to face up to but her own belly, a nd i f some­
one was presiding i nvisibly over that l ittle horror scene, it was
no pol iceman, or appa ratch i k , or executioner, it was a God­
or an A nti-God, the cruel God of the Gnostics, a Dem iu rge, a
Creator, the one who has us trapped forever by that "accident"
of the body he cobbled together in his workshop and of which,
for a wh ile, we are forced to become the soul.
Bacon often spied on that workshop of the Creator; it can
be seen, for i nstance, in the pictures called Studies of the Human
Body, in wh ich he unmasks the body as a mere "accident," an
accident that could as easily have been put together some other
way-for i nstance, I don't k now-with th ree hands, or with
the eyes set in the knees. These are the on ly pictu res of his that
fi l l me with hor ror. But is " horror" the right word ? No. For
the sen sation these pictu res provoke, there is no right word .
W hat they provoke is not the horror we know, the one we feel
in response to the insa nities of history, to tortu re, persecution,
wa r, massacres, su fferi ng. No. In Bacon it is a whole different
horror: it comes from the accidental nature, suddenly u nveiled
by the painter, of the hu man body.
 ENC O U N T E R

W H AT IS LE F T TO US W HEN WE H AVE COME DOWN TO T H AT ?

The face ;
the face that ha rbors "that treasure, that nugget of gold, that
hidden diamond " that is the infinitely fragile sel f shiveri ng in
a body;
the face I gaze upon to seek i n it a reason for l iving the
"senseless accident" that is l i fe.
(1995)

IS
 I I.

NovE Ls,
ExiS T EN TIA L S ou N DIN Gs
The Comical Absence of the Co1nical
(Dostoyevsky: The Idiot)

TH E D I C T I O N A RY DE F I N ES LAUG HTER AS A R EACTION

"provoked by something a n1usi ng or cotn ical." But is that so ?

We could d raw up a whole anthology of di fferen t kinds of
laughter from Dostoyevsky's Idiot. A cu rious th ing: the cha r­
acters who laugh n1ost in the book a re not the ones \Vith the
greatest sense of hu mor; on the contra ry, they a re those who
have none at all. A group of young people leave a country house
to strol l in the pa rk ; three gi rls among thetn H keep laughing so
complaisantly at Evgeny Pavlovitch 's ba nter that he con1es to sus­
pect they tnay no longer even be listen ing to what he's sayi ng.''
This suspicion "n1ade h i m burst into sudden laughter." A fi ne
observation : fi rst the col lective laughter frotn the gi rls \vho, as
they laugh , lose track of thei r reason for laugh ing and go on
laughing for no reason at a l l � and then the laughter (this sort
quite ra re, quite precious) of Evgeny Pavlovitch as he rea lizes
that the girls' laughter is devoid of any cotnical rationale at all,
and, in the t1ce of this co1nical absence of the comical, he bu rsts
into laughter h i tn sel f
Walk ing in that sa1ne pa rk , Aglaia sho\vs lYiish kin a green
bench and tells hin1 that is \vhere she always cotnes to sit at about
seven in the morn ing, \vhen everyone else is still asleep. That
evening there is a bi rthday party for Mish k i n; the gatheri ng
 M I LAN K u N DERA

is d ramatic and taxing; it ends late i n the night, and instead

of goi ng off to sleep, an agitated M ishkin leaves the house to
wander in the pa rk; he comes across the green bench Aglaia
had pointed out for their morning meeting; he sits down on
it and lets out "an abrupt, noisy burst of laughter"; clea rly this
laughter is not "provoked by someth ing amusing or comical ";
i n fact the next sentence confi rms as much : "His anguish did
not lessen." He goes on sitting there and dozes off. Then " fresh
bright laughter" wakes him. "Aglaia stood before him laughi ng
hard . . . . She was laughi ng and i nd ignant at the same time."
Th is was not laughter "provoked by something amusi ng or
com ica l " either: Aglaia is i nd ignant that M ishkin should have
the bad taste to fall asleep waiti ng for her; she laughs to wake
h i m ; to let h im know he is rid iculous; to rebuke h i m by severe
laughter.
A nother laugh with no com ical cause comes to m i nd ; I
remember when I was studying at the Prague film school, stand­
ing about in a crowd of other students chatti ng and laughi ng;
among them is Alois D., a you ng fel low obsessed with poetry, a
n ice boy, a bit too sel f-conscious and oddly stilted . He opens h is
n1outh wide, em its a very loud sound , and gesticulates : that is to
say, he is laugh ing. But he's not laugh ing like the rest of them :
his laughter feels l i ke a copy among origi nals. I f I have never
forgotten this tiny episode it is because it was a brand-new ex­
perience for n1e : I was seei ng a person laugh who had no sense
of the com ica l and was laugh ing only to keep fro1n standing out
from the crowd , like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign
army to avoid recognition.

20
 ENCO U N T E R

It may be thanks to Alois D. that a passage from Lautrea­

mont's Les Chants de Maldoror a ffected me so strongly at that
same period: Maldoror is astounded one day at the sight of
people laugh ing. Not understanding the meaning of that bi­
zarre gri mace, and wanting to be l i ke everyone else, he ta kes up
a kn i fe and sl ices the corners of his mouth .
I sit before the television screen; the sho\V I 'm watch ing is
very noi sy, there a re hosts, actors, sta rs, writers, si ngers, models,
pa rl iamentarians, government ministers, ministers' wives; and
all of them react to any and every rema rk by open ing thei r
mouths wide , em itting very loud sounds, and gesticulating;
that is to say they are laugh ing. And I imagi ne Evgeny Pavlo­
vitch suddenly landing among them and seeing that laughter,
devoid of all comical cause ; at fi rst he is horri fied, then grad­
ually his terror dissipates , and fi nal ly that comical absence of
the comical "makes h i m bu rst i nto sudden laughter" himsel f.
W hereupon the laughers who a few moments earlier had been
look ing at h i m with mistrust a re reassu red, and they welcome
h i m noisi ly into thei r world of hun1orless laughter, \vhere we
a re condemned to l ive.

21
Death and the Fuss
(Louis-Ferdinand Celine: From Castle to Castle)

I N Cf L I N E 's N OV E L FRoM CASTLE To CASTLE, A s T o RY o F

a dog; she comes from the icy north of Denmark, where she
would disappear for long escapades i n the forests. W hen she
a rrives in France with Celine, her roaming days are over. Then
one day, cancer:
"I tried to lay her down on the straw . . . just after dawn . . .
she didn't l i ke me putting her there . . . she didn't want it . . . she
wanted to be in some other place . . . over by the coldest pa rt of
the house on the pebbles . . . . She stretched out n icely there . . .
she began to rattle . . . it was the end . . . they'd told me, I d idn't
believe it . . . but it was true, she was facing toward what she
remembered, the place she'd come from , the North , Denmark,
her muzzle toward the north, pointed north , . . . this very faith­
ful dog, in a way . . . faithful to the forests where she used to
run off, Kors0r, way up there . . . and fa ithfu l to her ha rsh l i fe
there, . . . these Meudon woods here meant nothing to her . . .
she died with two, three smal l rattles . . . oh, very d iscreet . . .
no complai nts . . . and i n this real ly beautifu l position , l i ke i n
mid-leap-in fl ight . . . but on her side, helpless, fi nished . . .
nose towa rd her getaway forests, up there where she came from ,
where she' d su ffered . . . God knows!
 E N COU N TER

"Oh, I 've seen plenty of death t h roes , here . . . there . . .

everywhere . . . but by far nothing so beautiful, discreet . . . faith­
ful . . . the trouble w ith men's death th roes is all the fuss . . .
somehow man is always on stage . . . even the plainest men ."
"The trouble \vith men's death th roes is all the fuss." W hat
a l i ne! And : "somehow man is always on stage." Don't we all
reca ll the ghoul ish d rama of those famous " last words" on the
deathbed ? That's how it is: even in the throes of death, tnan is
always on stage. A nd even "the plainest" of them , the least ex­
h ibition ist, because it's not ahvays the man h imself who climbs
on stage. I f he doesn't do it, someone will put him there. That
is h is fate as a man.
And that " fuss" ! Death always treated as something heroic,
as the finale of a play, the conclusion of a battle. I read in a
newspaper: in some city thousands of red bal loons a re sent up
i n homage to people suffering or dead fron1 AIDS. I ponder
that ''in homage.'' "In tnemory," fine ; " in ren1en1brance," as a
gesture of sorrow and of compassion, yes , that I \\'ould under­
sta nd . But in ho1nage? Is there anything to celebrate, to ad n1 i re,
in sickness ? Is sickness a personal vi rtue ? But that's the \vay
things are, and Cel ine kne\\' it: "The trouble with n1en's death
throes is a l l the fuss . . . "
Many great \vriters of Cel ine's generation had , l i ke h i n1 ,
known death , war, terror, torture, ban ishment. But they \Vent
th rough these terrible experiences on the other side of the \val l
fron1 h i tn ; on t h e side o f the just, o f the future victors, o r of
victims haloed with i njustices suffered-in short, on the glory

23
 M I LA N K u N DER A

side. The " fuss," that preening sel f-satisfaction, was so naturally
part of all their behavior that they could no longer see it, or judge
it. But Celine, tried for collaboration with the Nazis, l ived for
twenty years a mong the condemned and the scorned , i n h isto­
ry's trash heap, guilty among the guilty. Everyone around h i m
was reduced to silence ; h e a lone gave voice to that extraordi nary
experience: the experience ofa life utterly devoid offuss.
That experience allowed h im to see vanity not as a vice but
as a quality i nherent i n man, a quality that never leaves h im,
not even in his death throes; and against the background of that
i rremovable human fuss, the experience allowed h i m to see the
subli me beauty in a dog's death.

24
Love in Accelerating History
(Philip Roth: The Professor of Desire)

H o w LON G WA S I T S IN CE K A REN IN AN D A NN A H A D
stopped making love ? W hat about \lronsky ? Was he good at
bri nging her to climax ? A nd Anna ? Was she possibly frigid ?
Did they make love i n the dark, i n the l ight, i n bed , on the
carpet, for three m inutes, for th ree hours, with romantic tal k
or obscenities, i n silence ? We don't k now a thing about i t . I n
the n ovels o f that ti me, love stretched over the vast terrai n fron1
fi rst encounter to the bri n k of coitus ; that bri n k was a frontier
not to be crossed.
I n the twentieth century the novel d iscovered sexu a l ity,
gradual ly and i n all its di mensions. I n America the novel her­
alded and then accon1pan ied the great upheaval i n n1oral custon1
that was to proceed at dizzying speed : i n the 1 950s people \Vere
stil l sti fl i ng i n a n u nyield i ng pu rita n isn1 , and then over a si ngle
decade everythi ng changed : that long span fron1 early romance
to the act of love van ished . A person \Vas no longer shielded
from sex by the no-ma n's-land of sentiment; no\v he came i nto
direct, implacable confrontation with it.
I n D. H. Lawrence sexual freedom has the feel of a d ra­
matic or tragic revolt. A short ti n1e later, i n Hen ry Mil ler, it
is su rrounded by lyrical euphoria. Th i rty yea rs later, in Ph ilip
 M I LA N K u N oE R A

Roth, it is simply a given, taken for granted , ach ieved, col lec­
tive, commonplace, inevitable, codi fied : neither dramatic, nor
tragic, nor lyrical .
Now we are approaching the l i m it. There is n o " farther."
Now it is not laws, or parents, or conventions that oppose desi re ;
everythi ng is permitted, and the only enemy is our own body,
denuded, d isenchanted, dismasked. Philip Roth is a great histo­
rian of American eroticism . He is also the poet of that strange
solitude of man left alone to face his body.
However, over these last decades, h istory has moved so fast
that the characters in The Professor of Desire cannot help but
retain some memory of an earlier time, the time of their parents,
who l ived their loves more l i ke Tolstoy's characters than Roth 's.
The nostalgia that suffuses the atmosphere when Kepesh 's
father and mother appear on the scene is not only the parents'
own nostalgia, it is nostalgia for love as such, for the love be­
tween father and mother, for that moving, old-fash ioned love
that seems gone from the world today. (Without the memory
of how it used to be, what would remain of love, of the very
notion of love ? ) That strange nostalgia (strange in that it is not
bound up with pa rticular characters but set fa rther off, beyond
thei r own l ives, in the backgrou nd) lends this (seemingly cyni­
cal) novel a touching tenderness.
The acceleration of h istory has profoundly transformed i n­
d ividual l ives that, in centuries past, used to proceed fron1 birth
to death with in a single historical period ; today a l i fe straddles
two such periods, sometimes tnore. Whereas history used to
advance fi1r more slowly than human l i fe, nowadays it is h is-

26
 E N COU N T E R

tory that moves fast, it tears ahead , it slips from a man's grasp,
and the conti nuity, the identity, of a l i fe is in danger of crack­
i ng apart. So the novelist feels the need to keep within reach,
alongside our own way of life, the memory of the bashfu l and
half forgotten one our predecessors l ived .
This is the meaning of the i ntellectualism of Roth 's heroes,
all of them professors of l iterature or writers, constantly med­
itati ng on Chekhov or Hen ry Jatnes or Kafka. Th is is no
pointless i ntellectual display of a self-absorbed l iteratu re. It is
the yearning to keep past titnes on the novel 's horizon, and not
leave the characters i n a void where the ancestors' voices wou ld
cease to be aud ible.

27
The Secret of the Ages of Life
(Gudbergur Bergsson: The Swan)

A L I T T L E G I R L WA S S T E A L I N G S A N DW I C H E S F ROM R E Y KJ A V I K
supermarkets. For punishment her pa rents send her to spend
several months in the cou ntryside with a fa rmer she does not
k now. I n the old Icelandic sagas of the th i rteenth centu ry,
dangerous cri m i nals used to be sent l i ke this into the i nte­
rior and , given the im mensity of that frozen wilderness, this
was tantamou nt to the death penalty. Icela nd : three hu nd red
thousand in habitants spread over a hu nd red thousand square
ki lometers. To withstand the sol itude (this is an image from
the book), fa rmers train their binoculars on the far dista nce to
watch other fa rmers who a re also hold i ng binocu lars. Icela nd :
solitudes spying on each other.
The Swan, a pica resque novel about childhood , breathes the
Icelandic landscape from every l i ne. But please : do not read it as
an "Icela ndic novel," as an exotic oddity. Gudbergu r Bergsson
is a great Eu ropean novelist. H is art is pri tna rily i nspi red not by
some sociological or historica l, still less a geograph ical, cu rios­
ity, but by an existential quest, a real existential insistence, wh ich
places his book at the very center of what could (in my vie\v) be
te rmed the mode rnity of the novel .
The focus o f that quest i s the very young heroine ( "the little
girl," as the author calls her) or, more precisely, the focus is her
 E N COU N T E R

age : she is n ine yea rs old. Increasingly I think (a truth sb obvi­

ous and yet it constantly eludes us) that man exists only in h is
specific, concrete age, and everythi ng changes with age. To un­
derstand another person means to understand his current age.
The enigma of age-one of those themes only a novel can il­
lumi nate. Nine years old : the border between ch ildhood and
adolescence. I have never seen that borderland brought to light
as it is i n this book.
W hat does it mean to be n i ne years old ? It means wal king
about i n the mists of reveries. But not lyrica l reveries. No ideal­
ization of childhood in this book ! Dream i ng, fantasizing, this
is the little girl 's way of taking on a world that is unknown and
unknowable, a world far from friendly. The fi rst day on the
farm, faci ng an alien and seemi ngly hostile world, to defend
hersel f she i magi nes that " her head spurts an invisible poison
that she sprays over the whole house. That she is poisoni ng the
rooms, the people, the animals and the air."
The real world she can grasp only through fanci ful inter­
pretation. There's the fa rmer's daughter; beh ind her neurotic
behavior we make out a love story; but the l ittle gi rl-what can
she possibly make of it ? There is a peasant feast; couples scat­
ter i nto the landscape ; the little girl sees rnen covering women
with thei r bodies ; she thinks they must be trying to shelter the
women from a downpour: the sky is black with clouds.
The adults are absorbed by practical concerns that take pre­
cedence over any metaphysical questions. But the l ittle gi rl is
distant from the practical world , so there is no screen bet\veen
her and questions of life and death : she is at the metaphysica l

29
 M I L AN K u N D E R A

age. Leaning over a bog, she studies her i mage in the water's
blue su rface. "She i magi nes her body dissolving and disappear­
ing in the blue. Shall I take the plunge ? she asks hersel f. She lifts
a foot and she sees the reflection of her shoe's worn sole." Death
i ntrigues her. A calf is about to be slaughtered. All the neigh­
borhood children are eager to watch it die. Moments before the
kill the l ittle girl whispers i nto the cal f's ea r: "You k now you
don't have much time left?" The other children are amused by
her l i ne, and one by one they go whisper it to the cal f as wel l .
Then its throat is sl it a n d a few hours later everyone is cal led
to the table. The children del ight in chewing up the body they
saw put to death . A fterward they run over to the cow, the cal f's
mother. The l ittle girl wonders: does she know that at th is very
moment we're digesti ng her child in our stomachs ? A nd she
goes to breathe open-mouthed at the cow's nose.
The interval between childhood and adolescence : no longer
in need of constant parental care, the little girl suddenly discov­
ers her i ndependence ; but because she is sti ll at some distance
from the world of the practical, she feels useless ; she feels it al l
the more here alone among people who are not her kin. A nd yet,
even useless, she is captivati ng to other people. One unforget­
table little scene : the farmer's daughter, in her romantic crisis,
leaves the house every night (the wh ite Iceland nights) and goes
to sit by the river. The l ittle girl, on the watch for her, leaves the
house as well, and sits on the ground far behind her. Each is
awa re of the other's presence, but they do not speak. Then, at
a certa in moment, the fa rmer's daughter silently raises a hand
and beckons the child to come closer. And every tin1e, refusi ng

30
 E N C O U N TER

to yield, the ch ild goes back to the farmhouse. A tnodest scene,

but magical . I keep seeing that raised hand , the signal between
two beings held apart by their age, incon1prehensible to each
other, with nothing to con1 municate but the message : "I an1
fa r from you, I have nothing to say to you, but I a m here, and
I k now you are here." That raised hand is the gesture of this
book that examines a fa raway tin1e, one we can neither rel ive
nor restore, and wh ich for each of us has become a mystery that
on ly the novelist-poet's intuition can bring near to us.

31
The Idyll, the Daughter of Horror
(Marek Bienczyk: Tworki)

THE WHO L E S T O R Y T A K E S PLACE I N Po L A N D T OWA R D TH E

end of World War I I . The most fam iliar shred of h istory is

viewed from a n u n fa m i l i a r angle : from a large psychiat ric
hospital in Warsaw called Tworki . In order to be original at all
costs ? Not at all : i n those dark times it was the most natu ral
thing to seek out some corner to escape to. On the one hand
horror, on the other, refuge.
The hospital is run by the Germans (not by Nazi monsters ;
don't go looking for cliches i n this book) ; they employ a few
very young Poles as bookkeepers, among them three or fou r
Jews with fal se identity papers. What i s instantly striking: these
young people bea r no resemblance to the youth of our days ;
they a re modest, shy, awkwa rd, with a naive thirst for moral ity
and for goodness; they l ive their "virginal loves," whose jealou­
sies and disappointments never turn i nto hatred, in that strange
atmosphere of obsti nate gentleness.
Is it because of the half century between them that the
youngsters back then d iffer so from those of ou r ti me ? I see
a nother reason for that d issi mila rity: the idyll they were l iving
was the daughter of horror-of horror hidden but ever present,
always ready to pounce. This is the Luciferian paradox: i f a
 E N'C O U N T E R

society (ours, for instance) unleashes gratuitou s violence and

wickedness, it's because it has no real experience of evil, of evil 's
rule. For the crueler history is, the lovelier the \Vorld of refuge
appears ; the more ordi nary a situation , the n1ore it feels like a
buoy for "escapees" to cl ing to.
There a re pages in this novel where words recu r as refrai ns,
and where the na rration becon1es a song that l i fts us up and
away. W here does t hat tnusic, that poetry, spring from ? From
the prose of l i fe ; fron1 the n1ost ordinary, the n1ost banal of
banal ities : Ju rek is i n love with Son ia : h is nights of love a re
n1entioned on ly very briefly, but the 1noven1ent of the swi ng
Sonia sits upon is described in detail. "Why are you so fond of
the swi ng ? " Ju rek asks. "Because . . . It's hard to say. I 'tn here,
a nd then sudden ly I 'tn there, h igher up. And here again. And
there again." Ju rek hears that disa rn1 i ng con fession and , nlar­
vel ing, he looks up h igh , to \Vhere "the light brown soles of her
shoes becan1e dark . . . . Cotn i ng down , . . . her brown soles
passed under Jurek 's nose . . . . " He looks on , sti l l n1a rvel ing,
and he wi l l never forget.
Nea r the end of the book Sonia will go off. In the past she
had escaped here to Tworki , to live out, in terror, her fragile
idyl l . She is a Jew ; no one kno\VS this (not even the reader) .
However, she goes to the Gennan d i rector of the hospital and
tel ls h i tn , thus incriminating hersel f. The di rector cries, ''You're
mad ! You're mad ! " and tries to put her i nto isolation to save
her. But she persists. When we next see her she is no longer
al ive : "There, high above the juniper brushes on a th ick bough

33
 M I LA N K u N DEHA

on a thin poplar, h igh above the ground , Son ia hung, Son ia

swu ng, Sonia was hanged ."
On the one hand, the idyll of ordina ry life, the idyll recov­
ered, given new value, transformed into song; on the other, the
hanged girl .

34
The Debacle of Memories
(Juan Goytisolo: The Curtain Falls)

A M A N , A L R E A D Y E L D E R LY , W H O H A S JU S T LO S T H I S W I FE.
Not much information on his nature or on his biography. No
story. The sole subject of the book is the new stage of life he
has begu n : when his wife was at h is side, she was also in front
of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is
empty: the view has changed .
I n the fi rst chapter the man thinks about the dead wotnan
all night long, d isconcerted by the fact that memory fills his
head with old rhymes , bits of pro-Franco songs fron1 his Span­
ish adolescence, before he knew her. Why, why ? Are memories
a lways i n such poor taste ? Or a re they mock i ng h i n1 ? He
strains to call up landscapes where he'd been together with her;
he manages to see the scenes but "even fleeti ngly, she never re­
appeared i n them."
When he looks back, his life " lacked coherence : he could
only fi nd fragments, isolated elements , an i ncoherent succession
of i n1ages . . . . The desire to provide a post-facto justi fication
for the few scattered events would requ i re some falsifying that
might fool other people, but not h imsel f." (And I thi nk: Isn't
that exactly the definition of biography ? An a rti ficial logic i n1-
posed on an " i ncoherent succession of images" ? )
From his new perspective the past appears in all its u n reality�
 1\tl r L A N K u N o E R A

and what about the futu re ? Of cou rse, obviously, there's noth­
i ng real about the future (he thi nks of his father, who'd bu ilt a
house for his sons that they never l ived in). Thus, arm i n arm,
past a nd future d raw away from h i m ; he walks th rough a vil­
lage holding a ch i ld 's hand, and to his amazement " he feels light,
joyful, as free of a past as th is ch i ld lead i ng him . . . . Everything
converges towa rd the present and is completed in the present."
And suddenly, in this existence reduced to the spareness of the
present, he finds a happi ness he never k new or expected .
After these explorations of time, we can understand God 's
remark to him : "Even though you were engendered by a drop
of spenn , and I was manufactured out of spec ul ation and
doctrinal Councils, sti l l the two of us share something: non­
existence." God says that ? Yes, that being the old man i nvented
i n order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations. It is a
God who does not exist and who, because he doesn't exist, is
free to utter glorious blasphemies.
I n one of his conversations this i mpious God re m i nds the
old man of his visit to Chech nya : it was at the time, after Com­
mu nism fell, when Russia went to wa r with the Chechens. For
that reason the old man had taken along a copy of Tolstoy's
Hadji Murat, a novel about the wa r of those same Russians
aga inst those san1e Chechens son1e ISO years earl ier.
Cu riously, like Goytisolo's old man, I too reread Hadji Murat
at that time. I remetnber a circumstance that stupefied me then:
even though everyone, the salons, the media, had been worki ng
themselves up for years over the ca rnage i n Chech nya , I had
never hea rd anybody-not a journal ist, not a pol itician, not an

36
 ENCOU NTER

i ntel lectual-mention Tolstoy, refer to his book . They were all

shocked at the scandal of the massacre, but no one was shocked
that the massacre was a repetition ! And yet that repetition is
the true scandal, the queen of all scandals. On ly Goytisolo's
blasphemi ng God knows th is: "Tel l me: what has ever changed
on this Earth that legend says I created i n a week ? W hat's the
good of pointlessly prolonging this farce ? Why do people go
stubbornly on reproduci ng ? "
Because the scandal of repetition is forever charitably wiped
away by the scandal of forgetti ng (forgetti ng: that "great bot­
tomless hole where memory d rowns," the memory of a beloved
woman as well as the memory of a great novel or of a slaughter) .

37
The Novel and Procreation
(Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude)

I wA s REREADI NG ONE HuNDRED YEA R S OF S oL I T UDE W H E !\:

a strange idea occurred to me : most protagon ists of great novels

do not have chi ld ren . Scarcely 1 percent of the world 's popu­
lation a re chi ldless, but at least SO percent of the great l iterary
cha racters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither
Pantagruel, nor Panu rge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not
Val mont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the vi rtuous Presi­
dente in Dangerous Liaisons. Not Tom Jones, Fieldi ng's most
famous hero. Not Werther. All Stend hal 's protagon ists are
chi ldless, as are many of Balzac's ; and Dostoyevsky's ; and i n
the century j ust past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost
Time, and of course all of Musil 's major cha racters : Ulrich, h is
sister Agathe, Wa lter, h is wife, Cla risse, a nd Dioti ma ; and
Schweik; and Ka fka's protagon ists, except for the very young
Ka rl Rossman n, who d id impregnate a ma idservant, but that is
the very reason-to erase the infant from h is life-that he flees
to America a nd the novel can be born . Th is i n fert i l ity is not
cl ue to a conscious purpose of the novel ists ; it is the spirit of the
a rt of the novel (or its subconscious) that spu rns procreation .
The novel was born with the Mode rn Era, wh ich made
man, to quote Heidegger, the "on ly real subject," the ground
for everythi ng. It is largely th rough the novel that man as an
 ENcou NTER

i ndividual was establ ished on the Eu ropea n scene. Away frotn

the novel , i n our rea l l ives, we know very l ittle about our par­
ents as they were before our birth ; we have only fragn1entary
knowledge of the people close to us : we see them come a nd go,
a nd scarcely h ave they van ished than thei r place is taken over
by others ; they form a long l ine of replaceable beings. Only the
novel sepa rates out an i ndividual, trains a l ight on his biogra­
phy, his ideas, his feel ings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him
the center of everything.
Don Quixote d ies a nd the novel is over; that end i ng is so
perfectly defi nitive only because Don Quixote has no child ren ;
with children, his l i fe would be prolonged , imitated or con­
tested , defended or betrayed ; a father's death leaves the door
open ; i n fact so we a re told ever since our own childhood : your
l i fe will conti nue i n you r child ren, child ren a re you r immortal­
ity. But if my story can go on beyond tny own life, that n1eans
that my life is not an i ndependent entity ; it tneans it is u n fi n­
ished , unfulfilled ; it mea ns there is son1eth i ng utterly concrete
a nd earthly i nto wh ich the i ndividual blends, agrees to blend ,
consents to be lost i n : fa mi ly, posterity, tribe, nation. It tneans
that the i nd ividua l person, as "ground for everythi ng," is a n
illusion, a gamble, the dream of a few European centu ries.
With Garcia Ma rquez's One Hundred Yean of Solitude, the
a rt of the novel seems to en1erge fron1 that d rean1 ; the center of
attention is no longer an i ndividual but a procession of individ­
uals ; they a re each original, ini mitable, a nd yet each of then1 is
merely the brief flash of a sunbean1 on the S\vell of a river� each
of them carries with him h is futu re forgotten sel f, a nd each is

39
 M I LAN K u N D E R A

conscious of that, none of them rem a i ns on the novel 's stage

from begi n n i ng to end ; the mother of the whole tribe, Old
Ursula, is 120 when she dies, and that's a long time before the
book ends; and a l l the cha racters have similar names-A rcad ia
Jose Buendia , Jose Arcad ia, Jose Arcadia the Second, Aureliano
Buendia, Aureliano the Second-such that the edges between
them blur and the reader confuses them. To all appea ra nces the
era of European i nd ividualism is no longer their era. But then
what is their era ? An era that goes back to America's I ndian
past ? Or some future era when the human i nd ividual w i l l
blen d into the human a nthil l ? I sen se that this novel, which i s
an apotheosis o f the a r t of the novel, is a t the same time a fa re­
well to the age of the novel.

40
 III.

B L ACK LIS TS, O R D IV E R T IM E N TO

IN H o M A GE T o A N A TO LE F R A N CE
1

LoNG AGO A FR ENCH F R I E N D OF M I NE C A I\1 E TO VISIT

Prague with a few of his cou ntrymen, and I found n1ysel f in

a tax i with a \\'Oman whorn , to keep up the conversation, I
(inanely) asked wh ich French cornposer she liked best. Her re­
sponse was irn n1ediate, spontaneous, and vehernent, and it has
stuck in rny head : ''Absolutely not Sa i nt-Saens ! "
I failed to ask her: ''A nd what have you hea rd by h i tn ? "
She wou ld certainly have ans\vered , still n1ore ind ignantly: " By
Sa i nt-Saens ? Absolutely nothing. Not a th i ng ! " For the issue
wa s not about her aversion to son1e pa rtic u l a r rnusic, it \Va s
about son1ething n1ore seriou s : abou t having nothing to do
with a na n1e on the blacklist.

B L A C K L I STS. TH EY W E R E A L R E A D Y A G R E AT PA S S I O N O F T H E

ava nt-ga rdc before World Wa r I . W hen I \\'as about thirty-five,

I was translating Apol l i naire into Czech, a nd I happened across
his l i ttle } 9 } 3 111a n i fcst0, in \Vh ich he \VaS �1\\'a rding •'tu rds" a no
''roses." It \\'as turds for Da nte, Shakespea re, and Tolstoy, hut
also for Poe, W h i tn1a n , Baudel a i re ! The roses \Ve nt to h i rn­
scl f, Picasso, and Stravin sky. This rna ni festo \Vas ch:1 nning a nd
 M IL A N K u N DERA

fu n ny (Apollinaire awa rd i ng a rose to Apol l i naire ! ) , a nd I was

del ighted by it.

TE N YEARS L AT E R , AS A N EW EM IGRE IN FRANCE, I WA S

chatting wit h a you ng man when out of t he blue h e asked

me : "Do you like Barthes ? " At that point I was no longer naive ;
I k new I was bei ng tested. And I also knew that at j ust that
moment Roland Barthes topped every gold l ist. "Of course I
like him. And how ! You mean Karl Barth, right ? The i nventor
of negative theology ! A gen iu s ! Kafka's work is i nconceivable
without him ! " My examiner had never hea rd the name Karl
Bart h , but si nce I had l i n ked him to Kafka, u ntouchable of
untouchables, he had nothing more to say. The discussion sl id
away to other subjects. A nd I \Vas pleased with my a nswer.

A ROU N D T H AT SAM E TIME, AT A DINNER PA R T Y , I HAD

to pass another test. A music lover asked to k now my favorite

French con1poser. Ah, see how situations keep repeating ! I cou ld
have a nswered , "Absolutely not Sa i nt-Saens ! " but I chose to let
a n1en1ory seduce n1e : I n the 1 920s my father had brought home
from Pa ris the scores for Darius Mil haud 's piano works, a nd
had played thcn1 i n Czechoslova kia to the sparse (very sparse)

·H
 ENCOU NTER

aud ience for concerts of modern tnusic. Moved by the memory,

I decla red my love for Mil haud and for the whole group of
"The Six." I was all the more effusive in my pra ise because I
mea nt it to express my love for the cou ntry where I was just
begi n n i ng n1y second l i fe. My new friends heard tne out sym­
pathetical ly. A nd sympathetically they gave me to u nderstand
that those people I considered modern had not been so for a
long time, a nd that I ought to seek out other names to praise.
A nd i ndeed , that happens continually, those sh i fts from one
list to another, a nd i n nocent souls are caught i n the snare. I n
1 9 1 3 Apol l inaire had awa rded Stravinsky a rose, never k nowi ng
that i n 1 946 Theodor Adorno would give the rose to Schoen­
berg a nd to Stravinsky he would solemnly award a turd .
A nd Ciora n ! I n the titne since I came to k now him, he's
done n oth i ng but trail from one list to the other, i n the dusk
of his l i fe end i ng up on the black one. And in fact he was the
one who, not long a fter n1y arrival i n Fra nce, when I men­
tioned A natole Fra nce in his presence, leaned close to my ear
a nd wh ispered with a sa rdonic l ittle laugh, "Never tnention h is
n a me aloud here, everyone will laugh at you ! "

TH E F U N E R A L CORT E G E T H AT F O L L OW E D A NATO L E F R A N C E
to h is grave was severa l kilometers long. Then everyth i ng
cha nged . Aroused by h is death , four you ng Su rreal ist poets
wrote a pan1phlet against him. With his chair at the Acaden1 ie

45
 Ni l LA N Kv N J) E R A

Fra n�aise vacated, another poet, Paul Valery, was elected to

take his place. By tradition the successor gives a eulogy for the
depa rted . Th roughout h is whole panegyric, wh ich became leg­
endary, Valery managed to tal k about M. France without ever
saying his name, and to celebrate that anonymous figure with
conspicuous reserve.
And indeed , no sooner had France's coffin hit the floor of
the trench than his march towa rd the black l ist bega n . How
is that possible ? Could the sneers of a few poets with a l imited
fol lowi ng themselves have the power to i n fluence a public a
hund red times more numerous ? W here d id it d isappea r to,
what happened to the adm i ration of those thousands of people
who had wal ked behi nd his coffi n ? W here do the blacklists
d raw thei r power from ? What is the source of the secret com­
mandments they obey ?
The fashionable d rawi ng rooms . Nowhere i n the world
have salons played so great a role as in France. Thanks to the
centuries-old aristocratic tradition, a nd then thanks to Pa ris,
where, in a smal l a rea, the whole i ntellectua l el ite of the nation
piles together and manufactures opi n ions; it propagates them
not t h rough critical stud ies or expert discussion but th rough
da zzl i ng ph rasetnaking, wordplay, gl ittering nastiness (that's
the way it is: decentralized countries d ilute mean ness, central­
ized ones concent rate it) . Agai n about Ciora n : at the time when
I was convi nced that his name must glea m on every gold list, I
ra n into a renowned i ntel lectua l : "Ciora n ? " he sa id, look ing
me long in the eyes. Then, with a lengthy, suppressed chuckle :
"A dandy of nothingness."

46
 ENCOU NTEH

WH E N I WA S N I N E T E E N , A F R I E N D S O M E F I V E Y E A R S O L D E R

tha n I , a convi nced Con1munist (l i ke me), a member o f the

Resista nce duri ng the war (a rea l resistant who had put his l i fe
on the l i ne, a nd whom I adn1i red for that), con fided a project
to me : he plan ned to produce a new ca rd game in \vhich the
k i ngs, queens, and jacks would be replaced by Sta kha novites,
partisa ns, or Len i ns ; and why not, why not combine people's
a ncient love for cards with a pol itical education ?
Then one d ay I read a Czech translation of Anatole Fra nce's
novel The Gods Are Thirsty, set i n the t i me of the French
Revolution. The protagon ist, Gamelin, a young pai nter and a
supporter of the Jacobi n faction, has invented a ne\\' ca rd ga me
that replaces the ki ng, queen, and jack in each suit with Lib­
erty, Equal ity, Fraternity. . . I was stu nned . So then is history
.

noth i ng but a long stri ng of va riations ? For I \Vas sure that

n1y friend had never read a si ngle line of Anatole France. (No,
never; I asked him expl icitly.)

WH E N I WA S A Y0U NG M AN, T RY I N G T0 FI N D l\.1 Y \V A Y

in a world sl iding towa rd the abyss of a d ictatorship \Vhose
real ity no one had foreseen , desi red , i tn agi ned, especially not
the people who had desi red a nd celebrated its a rrival , the on ly

4i
 M I L A N K u N DERA

book that ma naged to tel l me a nyth i ng lucid about that un­

k nown world was The Gods Are Thirsty.
Gamel i n, the painter with the new playing cards, may be the
fi rst l iterary portrait of a "pol itically engaged a rtist." I n the ea rly
days of Communism, what a lot of such people I saw around me !
Sti l l , what captivated me i n France's novel was not its condem­
nation of Gamelin but the mystery of Gamel in. I say "mystery"
because that man who ended up send i ng dozens of people to
the guillotine would probably i n some other time have been a
kindly neighbor, a good colleague, a gifted ar tist. How can a n
unarguably decent man harbor a monster inside him ? Would the
monster be lurking in him in peaceful political times as wel l ? un­
detectable ? or perhaps actually discernible ? Those of us who have
known terrifying Gameli ns-are we capable of spotti ng the mon­
sters sleeping inside the kindly Gamel i ns that surround us today ?
In my native country, as people were shedding thei r ideologi­
cal i llusions, the "Gamel i n mystery" ceased to interest them . A
basta rd is a basta rd, what's the mystery ? The existential enigma
has disappea red behi nd political certitude, a nd certitudes don't
give a damn about enigmas. This is why, despite the wealth of
their l ived experiences, people emerge from a h istoric ordeal
stil l just as stupid as they were when they went i nto it.

I N T HE G A R RE T J U S T A B O V E G A M E L I N 's A PA R T ME N T ,
there is a shabby little room i nhabited by Brotteaux, a onetime

48
 ENCOU NTER

banker recently expropriated ; Gamelin and Brotteaux: the novel 's

two poles. I n thei r strange antagon isn1 it's not virtue opposed
to crime nor counterrevolution versus revolution : Brotteaux is
not fighti ng any battle at all ; he has no an1 bition to impose his
own th i n k i ng on the dominant mind-set, he is on ly cla in1 i ng
his right to think u nacceptable thoughts and to doubt not only
the revolution but tnan as God has created hin1 . At a time when
my own ideas were taki ng shape, this Brotteaux fasci nated tne ;
not for th is o r that pa rticular idea o f h is, but for h is attitude :
of a man who refuses to believe.
Th i n k i ng back later on Brotteaux, I realized that i n the
Communist period there were two basic fonns of disagreen1ent
with the regime: one based on a belief and the other on skepti­
cism ; one moral istic and the other imtnoral ist; one pu rita nical
and the other l ibertine; the one reproach ing Co1nn1un isn1 for
not believi ng i n Jesus, the other accusi ng it of turning into a

new Chu rch ; the one angry that it pern1 itted abortion , the
other accusi ng it of tnaking abortion d i fficult. (Obsessed \Vith
their cotnmon enemy, these two positions sca rcely perceived
their divergence, and it rose up all the n1ore po\verfully \Vhen
Cotn 1nunisn1 collapsed .)

AND W H AT A BO U T M Y FRIEND AND HIS CARDS ? HE t\' E V E R

ma naged to sell his idea, any tnore than Gan1elin d id . But I

don't bel ieve that depressed h i n1 . Because he had a sense of

49
 lVI J L A N K u N D E R A

hun1or. When he fi rst told me about his project, I remember, he

was laugh i ng. He recogn ized that his idea was fu nny, but in his
view, why shouldn't a fu n ny idea also be useful to a good cause ?
Con1paring h i m with Gamel i n , I thi n k it was a sense of humor
that d isti ngu ished one man from the other, and that certai nly,
because of his hun1or, my friend could never have become a n
executioner.
I n the novels of A natole France humor is constantly present
(though always subtle) ; i n a nother book , La rotisserie de Ia reine
Pedauque, one can't help enjoy i ng it, but what's hun1or doing
on the bloody terra i n of one of the worst traged ies in history ?
Yet that is exactly what is un ique, fresh, ad tn i rable : the sk ill to
resist the nearly obl igatory pathos of so somber a subject. For
only a sense of humor can discern the humorlessness i n others.
And d iscern it tuith horror! Only the lucid ity of humor could
see in Garnel in's deepest soul his dark secret: the desert ofseriouJ­
ness, the humorless desert.

10

C H A PT E R I o o F T1 1 1:· C o os A N t: TH I R S T Y : HERE 1 s w H ERE

the light, merry, happy atn1osphere is concentrated ; from here

a glow spreads over the whole of the novel , without this chap­
ter the hook wou ld grow son1her a nd lose all its cha nn . I n the
da rkest d ays of the Terror, a few you ng painters-Ga mel i n
with his friend I)esn1 a h is ( a likable scamp and sk i rt chaser),
a t1 n1ous act ress (toget her with some other young women), a n

'50
 ENCOU NTER

,.

a rt dealer (with his daughter Elodie, Gatnelin's fiancee), and

even Brotteaux (incidental ly an amateur pai nter as well)­
set out from Pa ris to spend a couple of pleasant days together.
Their adventures over this brief i nterlude only amount to some
ord inary l ittle events, but it is this very ordinariness that exudes
happiness. The only erotic episode (Desmahis couples with a
servant girl who's wider than she is tall because of her freak­
ish double-boned skeleton) is grotesque but insign i ficant, and
happy anyhow. Gamelin, recently appointed to the Revolution­
ary Tribunal, is com fortable with the group, as is Brotteaux,
his future guilloti ne victim. The bunch is bound together by
a mutual affection, an affection made easy enough by the i ndif­
ference most Frenchmen already feel for the Revolution and its
rhetoric-an indifference that of course they prudently keep
masked , so that Gameli n is unaware of it; he is content with the
other people though at the same time quite alone among them
(alone but not yet awa re of it) .

11

TH E PEOPLE wHo M A NAGED To K E E P A N A T O L E F R A N c E 's

name on the blacklist for a century were not novelists but poets :
mai n ly the Surrealists : A ragon (his great conversion to the novel
,

still lay ahead of h im), Breton, Elua rd, Soupault (each of them
wrote his own text for the joi nt pamphlet) .
As avid you ng ava nt-ga rdists, they were a l l i r r itated by
France's too-officia l celebrity ; as authentic lyric poets, they fo-

51
 M I LA N K u N DERA

cused thei r aversion on the same key words : A ragon reproached

,

the dead man for " irony"; Elua rd for "skepticism and i rony";
Breton for "skepticism, rea l ism, heartlessness." So their vehe­
mence had a certa i n consistency, a logic, although actually I
must say I find that " hea rtlessness" a l ittle disconcerting comi ng
from Breton : could this great nonconformist mean to span k the
cadaver with the strap of such a ti red kitsch word ?
I n The Gods Are Thirsty, France h imsel f tal ks about heart.
Gameli n sits among his new colleagues, the Revolutionary judges,
who were required to speedily sentence the accused to death or
acquit them; France describes them this way: "On the one hand
the indifferent, the lukewarm, the hair-splitters, unmoved by any
passion, and on the other, those who gave over to feeling, cared
l ittle for rational argument and judged with their hearts. That
second group always convicted. " (The emphases a re mine.)
Breton was right : Anatole Fra nce did not have enormous
respect for the hea rt.

12

THE S PEE C H I N W H I C H PA U L VA L E RY E LE G A N T LY RE P R I ­
ma nded Anatole France was noteworthy for another reason
as well : it was the fi rst oration del ivered from the dais of the
Academie Franc;aise that was about a novel ist-that is, about a
writer whose i mportance rested almost enti rely on his novels. I n
fact, th rough the whole nineteenth century, the greatest period

52
 E N c o u N T E H.

of the French novel , novel ists vvere fa i rly wel l ignored by the
Academie. Is that not absurd ?
Not completely absu rd . For the figu re of the novelist d id
not fit the notion of a person who by his ideas, his attitudes,
h is moral example, could represent a nation. The status of "great
ma n ," which the Academ ie quite natu ra l ly requ i red of its
members, is not what a novel ist a ims for; by the nature of his
art, he is secretive, atnbiguous, i ronical (yes, i ron ical , the Sur­
real ist poets in their pamphlet h it it on the head); and above all :
concealed as he i s beh ind h is characters, it i s difficult to reduce
him to some particular conviction or attitude.
So although a few novelists have entered the collective
memory as "great tnen," this is only th rough the play of historical
coincidence, and for thei r books it is a lways a calamity.
I think of Thomas Mann laboring to get across the humor
1 n h is novels; an effort both touch i ng and futile, for i n the
period when his country's name was stai ned by Nazistn , he was
the on ly writer who could speak to the world as an hei r to the
Germany of old, the land of culture ; the gravity of his situation
hopelessly obscured the seductive s1nile of his books.
I think of Maxim Gorky; hoping to do son1ething useful
to aid the poor and their failed revolution (the one in 1 905), he
wrote his dul lest book , Mothe1; \Vhich n1uch later becatne (by
decree of the appa ratch iks) the sacred tnodel of so-ca l led so­
cial ist l iterature ; beh ind his person elevated into a statue, his
novels (wh ich a re fa r freer a nd finer than anyone ca res to be­
l ieve) have disappea red .

53
 l\.tl r L A � K u N D E R A

And I think of Sol zhenitzyn. Was that great man a great

novel ist ? How would I know ? I have never opened one of his
books. His resounding decla rations of pol itical position (whose
courage I applauded) made me feel I knew in advance whatever
he had to say.

13

TH E IL IA D ENDS LONG BE FORE THE FA L L o F TR o Y , AT T H E

moment when the war is stil l u ndecided a nd before the famous

wooden horse exists even i n U lysses' head . For such was the
aesthetic commandment set out by the fi rst great epic poet :
thou shalt never let the timing of a character's personal destiny
coincide with the tim i ng of h istorical events. The first great
epic poem was set to the tim i ng of personal destinies.
In The Gods Are Thirsty, Gameli n is decapitated with i n days
of Robespierre, he perishes at the same moment as the Jacobins'
power; the timing of his l i fe d i rectly parallels the rhythm of his­
tory. I n my secret soul, d id I blame Anatole France for violating
Homer's comma nd ment ? Yes . But later on I thought better of
it. For the horror of Gamel in's fate is exactly that: history swal­
lowed up not only h is thoughts, his senti ments, h is actions, but
even the tim i ng of his l i fe ; he is a man eaten whole by history;
he is just a hutnan fi l ler for h istory; and the novel ist had the
audacity to grasp that horror.
So I will not say that the coincidence of history's timing \Vith
the ti m i ng of the protagonist's life is a flaw in the book; but I

54
 ENcou NTER

\Von't deny that it is its handicap ; because the coi ncidence of

these two time frames invites the reader to see The Gods Are
Thirsty as a H historical novel ," an il lustration of history. A sna re
that is unavoidable for a French reader, si nce, i n his country, the
Revolution has become a sacred event, transformed i nto end­
less national debate, that divides people, sets them agai nst one
another, such that a ny novel that proposes to describe the Revo­
lution is i nstantly che\ved up by this i nsatiable debate.
This explains \vhy The Gods Are Thirsty has a lways been
better understood outside France than within it. For such is the
fate of any novel whose action is too tightly bound to a na rrow
historical period : fellow citizens automatically look for a doc­
ument of what they themselves experienced or passionately
debated ; they look to see i f the novel 's image of history matches
thei r own ; they try to work out the author's political sta nces,
impatient to judge thetn . The su rest way to spoil a novel .
For in a novel ist the passion to know is not ai med at pol i­
tics or history. W hat new thing can a novel ist possibly uncover
about events described and discussed i n thousands of lea rned
books of all sorts ? There's no doubt that in Anatole Fra nce the
Terror looks d read ful, but take a good look at the last chapter,
which u n folds as fu l l-blown counterrevolutiona ry euphoria !
The handsome dragoon Henri, the fellow who used to denounce
people to the Revolutionary Tribunal, sh ines again a n1ong the
victors ! The stupid fanatical young royalists bu rn a mannequin
of Robespierre and hang a Ma rat effigy fron1 a lan1ppost ! No,
the novel ist wrote his book not to condetn n the Revolution but
to exam i ne the mystery of the actors in it, and other n1ysteries

55
 M r LA N K u N n E H A

as wel l : the mystery of the comical i n filtrating the horrors, the

mystery of the boredom that accompanies d ramas, the mystery
of the heart that finds del ight in the sight of heads rol ling, the
mystery of humor as the last refuge of the human . . . .

14

'
PA U L VA L E R Y , AS E V E R YO N E K N OW S , DIDN T THINK MUCH

of the art of the novel ; this is apparent i n that oration to the

Academie; he is i nterested on ly in Anatole France's i ntellectual
views, not his novels. In this he has never lacked for zealous
disciples. I open my copy of The Gods Are Thirsty : at the back
a bibliography recommends five books about the author: Ana­
tole France, Polemicist; Anatole France, a Passionate Skeptic; The
Adventures of Skepticism (an Essay on the Intellectual Evolution
of Anatole France); Anatole France, in His Own Words; Anatole
France, the Formative Yean·. The titles provide a good indica­
tion of where the attraction lies : ( 1 ) in France's biography, and
(2) in his views on the i ntel lectual con fl icts of his time. But
why is no one ever interested in the essential ? In h is work did
Anatole France say something about human l i fe that had never
been said before ? Did he bring someth i ng new to the a rt of
the novel ? And if so, how would we describe, and define, his
poetics of the novel ?
I n a si ngle quick sentence Va lery compa res Fra nce's books
with those of Tolstoy, Ibsen , Zola, and rates them " light works."
Someti mes, unconsciously, mea nness can become pra ise ! For

56
 E N C O U !\' T E R

the admirable element i n France's work is, actually, that very

l ightness of style with which he dealt with the weight of the
Terror ! A l ightness unequaled in any other of the great novels of
h is century. I n a vague way it sometimes rem inds me of works
from the preceding century, of Jacques le Fataliste or Candide.
But i n D iderot or Voltaire, the l ightness of the narration floats
above a world whose everyday reality remains unseen and un­
expressed ; by contrast, in The Gods the banality of the everyday,
that great d iscovery of the n ineteenth-century novel, is always
present, not i n long descriptions but in details, remarks, brief
su rprisi ng observations. This novel is a cohabitation of un ­
bearably dramatic history with unbearably banal dailiness, a
cohabitation that spa rkles with irony, given that these two op­
posite aspects of l i fe consta ntly clash, contrad ict, and mock
each other. Th is cohabitation ma kes for the book 's style and is
a lso one of its major themes (ordinary life during the massacres) .
But enough ; I don't want to do an aesthetic analysis mysel f of
Anatole France's novels . . . .

15

'
I DoN T WA N T To BECAUSE I 'M NOT R E A DY. I Do H AV E

strong memories of The Gods Are Thirsty and La reine Pedauque

(those books were part of my l ife), but other novels by France
have left only vague memories and some I never read at all.
W hich is, actually, the \vay we k now novel ists , even those \Ve
l ike a lot. I say "I love Joseph Conrad ." And my friend says,

57
 M I LAN K u N DERA

"Me, not so much ." But are we tal k i ng about the same writer ?
I 've read two Con rad novels, he just one, and it's one I don't
know. And yet each of us, i n all i nnocence (in all i n nocent i m­
pertinence), is su re he has an accurate idea of Conrad .
Is that the situation i n all the arts ? Not entirely. I f I told you
that Matisse was a second-rate pai nter, it would take you no
more than fifteen mi nutes in a museum to see that I 'm a fool .
But how could one reread all of Conrad ? It would take weeks !
The d i fferent arts reach our brains i n different ways; they lodge
there with d i ffering ease, at d i fferent speed s, with different
degrees of i nevitable simpli fication ; and for different du rations.
We all tal k about the history of l iteratu re, we claim con nection
to it, convinced we know it, but what, concretely, is the history of
literatu re in the com mon memory ? A patchwork of fragmen­
tary images that, by pu re chance, each of thousands of readers
has stitched together for h i msel f Beneath the hole-ridden sky
of such a vaporous, i llusory memory, we are all at the mercy of
blackl ists, of thei r a rbitra ry, u ntestable verd icts, and always
ready to ape thei r stupid elega nce.

16

J C O M E A C RO S S A N O L D L ET T E R , DAT E D AuGUST 20, 1 97 1 ,

a nd signed "Louis." The rather long letter is Aragon's response
to what I had written him (a nd of wh ich I reta in no memory) .
He tel ls me what he has been doing over the previous tnonth ,
about books h e i s prepa ring for publ ication ( " The MatiJJe is

58
 ENcou NTEH

con1 i ng out around September 1 0" ) , a nd i n that context I read :

"But that pa n1ph let on Anatole France is worthless, I don't
think I even have a copy of the thing, it just had so1ne i nsolent
piece of m i ne i n it, that's all."
I very n1uch liked the novel s Aragon vvrote a fter the wa r­
Holy Week, The Kill . . When later on he \V rote a preface for
. .

the French edition of my book The Joke, I was delighted by the

cha nce to know hi1n a nd I tried to stretch out 1ny con nection
with h i n1 . I behaved like that \VOinan i n the ta xi whon1 I ' d
asked , for the sa ke of conversation, who her favorite French
composer was. To show off 1ny fa 1n il iarity with the Su rrea lists'
pa 1nph let agai nst A natole Fra nce, I 1nust have asked Aragon
some question about it in 1ny letter. These days I ca n i tnagine
his vague d isappoint1nent: "That insolent little piece, is that the
only thing that interests th is Kundera fel low, out of everything
I ever wrote ? " A nd fu rther (fa r 1nore sorro\vfully) : "Will there
be nothing left of us but \Vorthless stuff? "

17

I ' M C O M I J:\: G T O T H E END HERE t\ 1:\: D , AS A FA R E W E L L , J

aga i n reca ll chapter 1 0 of The Gods, that lan1p l ighted i n the
fi rst third of the novel \Vhose gentle glo'A' goes on brighten i ng
it to the last page : a stnall ba nd of bohe1n ia n friends sl ip out of
Pa ris for a couple of days and set up i n a cou ntry i n n ; they're
all look i ng for an adventu re, but only one tn ateria ] i zes: n ight
fa lls and Destnahis, the l i kable sca n1p and sk i rt chaser, goes up

59
 M I LA N KuNDERA

to the attic looki ng for one of the girls of their group ; she's not
there, but he finds someone else : a servant for the inn, a frea k ish
girl who, because of a double skeleton, is wider than she is ta l l ;
she i s asleep there, her chemise rumpled a t her waist and her
legs spread wide. W ithout a second thought Desmah is ma kes
love to her. This quick coupling, this genial rape, is soberly de­
scribed i n a brief pa ragraph. And so that nothi ng ponderous, or
ugly, or natural istic should l inger from the episode, the next day
as the band prepares to leave, the double-boned girl is up on a
ladder i n fine spir its, cheerfu l , bidding everyone good-bye and
tossing flowers down on them . And two hundred pages fa rther
on, at the very end of the novel, Desmahis, the gen ia l fucker of
the double-boned girl , is lying in the bed of E Jodie, the fiancee
of his friend Gamelin, who has a l ready been gui llotined . And
all that without a touch of pathos, or accusation, or snicker­
w ith just a l ight, l ight, l ight vei l of sadness.

60
 IV.

TH E D R E A M OF To T A L H E R I T A G E
A Dialogue on Rabelais and the Misom usists

GUY S C A R P E T TA : I RECALL YOU R WOR DS : "I AM A LW A Y S

surprised by how l ittle influence Rabelais has had on French l it­

erature. On Diderot, of course. On Celine. But apart from that ? "
And you recal led that Gide, in response to a survey in 1 91 3 , left
Rabelais out of his pantheon of the novel but did include Fro­
mentin. And what about you ? What does Rabelais mean to you ?
MILAN K U N DE R A : Gargantua-Pantagruel is a novel from
before novels existed . A miraculous moment, never to return, in
which an art had not yet come into being as such and therefore
was not yet bound by any norms. As soon as the novel begins
to assert itsel f as a special gen re or (better) an autonomous a rt,
its original freedom sh rinks; aesthetic censors arrive thin king
they can decree what does or does not correspond to the de­
scription of that a rt (what is or isn't a novel), and an aud ience
forn1s and takes on its own habits and detnands. Because of
that initial freedom of the novel, Rabelais' work conta ins enor­
mous aesthetic possibil ities, some of wh ich have been realized
in the novel 's later evolution and others never have been. Wel l , a
novel ist inherits not only everything that has been done but also
everything that \Vas possible. Rabelais retn i nds us of that.
Gs : So then , Celine is one of the few French \\1riters, perhaps
the only one, to d raw explicitly on Rabelais. What do you think
of his text ?
 M I LAN KuNoERA

MK: "Rabelais missed his shot," Cel ine says. "What he hoped
to do was develop a language for everybody, a real one. He
wanted to democratize the language . . . bring the spoken lan­
guage into the written language." Celi ne felt that the academ ic
style has won out: " No, France can no longer understand Ra­
belai s : the country has gone precious." A k ind of preciosity, yes,
it's a curse of French literature, of the French mind, I agree. On
the other hand, I do have reservations when I read in that same
Cel i ne piece : "Here's my essential point: a l l the rest (imagi­
nation, creative power, the com ical, and so on), none of that
interests me. La nguage, nothing but language." At the time he
wrote that, in 1 957, Celine couldn't have known that this reduc­
tion of the aesthetic to the linguistic was goi ng to become one of
the axioms of the future academ ic foolish ness (wh ich he would
certai n ly have detested) . In fact, the novel is also : cha racters ;
plot; composition ; style (a range of styles) ; the nature of imagi­
nation. Consider, for instance, that pyrotech n ic play of styles
in Rabelais : prose, verse, joke l ists, pa rody science discou rse,
meditations, a llegories, letters, rea l istic descriptions, dialogues,
monologues, pantomimes . . . . Tal king about some " democra­
tizing of the language" doesn't begin to explain that profusion
of form s : v i rtuosic, exubera nt, playfu l , euphoric, and h igh ly
artificial (a rtificial doesn't mean precious). The formal rich­
ness of Rabelais' novel is without equal . This is one of those
possibi l ities forgotten i n the later evolution of the novel . It was
rediscovered on ly three centu ries later, i n James Joyce.
c s : I n contrast to that " forgetti ng" by French novelists, Ra­
belais is an essentia l reference for many foreign writers : you've

64
 ENCOU NTER

mentioned Joyce, of course ; and we m ight look at Gadda, but

a l so at some contempora ry w riters : i n my own experience,
I 've a lways hea rd the most fervent tal k about Rabelais from
Dan i lo K is, Ca rlos Fuentes, Goytisolo, or you yourself. . . .
So t h i ngs go on as i f that source of the novel gen re was un­
recogn ized in its own land, a nd cla i med abroad. How do you
expl a i n that pa radox ?
MK: I ' d only dare spea k to the most superfici a l aspect of
the paradox. The Rabelais that entranced me when I was about
eighteen i s a Rabelais written i n an ad m i rable modern Czech
l anguage . Because h is antique French is hard to u nderstand
these days, for a Frenchman Rabelais will always be more old­
fashioned , more a rcha ic, more i nteresti ng for a scholar than
for a reader who comes to know him through a translation (a
good one) .
c s : W hen was Rabelais translated into Czech ? By whom ?
How come ? And how has the translation fa red ?
MK: He was translated by a sma l l collective of excellent
roma nce-la nguage specialists who called themselves "the Bo­
hemian Theleme." The Gargantua translation appea red in 1 91 1 .
The whole set, the five volumes, was published i n 1 93 1 . On this
point: after the Thi rty Years' War, Czech as a literary language
nearly d isappea red . W hen the nation began to be reborn (like
other Central Europea n nation s) i n the n i neteenth centu ry,
the cha l lenge was : make Czech a European la nguage equal
to the others. Bringing off a translation of Rabelais-what a
dazzling proof of a language come to maturity ! And i n fact,
Gargantua-Pantagruel is one of the finest books ever written i n

65
 Nl l LA N K u N J) E R A

Czech. For n1odern Czech literatu re Rabelais has been a very

i n1porta nt i nspi ration . The greatest Czech modernist of the
novel , Vladislav Va ncu ra (who died in 1 942 , shot by the Ger­
ma ns), was a passionate Rabelaisian .
c s : A nd a s to Rabelais elsewhere in Central Eu rope ?
MK: His h istory in Poland was al most the same as in Czecho­
slovakia: the translation by Tadeusz Boy-Zeleriski (a lso shot by
the Germa ns, i n 1 94 1 ) was magn i ficent, one of the greatest
written texts i n Pol ish. And it was that Poloni zed Rabelais that
enchanted Gombrowicz . When he speaks of his "masters" he
cites three in the sa me breath : Baudelaire, Rin1baud , a nd Rabe­
lais. Baudela i re and R imbaud were the usual reference poi nts
for a l l the modern ists, but claiming Rabelais as a n1odel, that
was rarer. The French Surreal ists did n't much care for h i m .
To the west of Central Eu rope, ava nt-ga rde modernistn was
child ishly a ntitrad itional, a nd it was expressed al most exclu­
sively in lyric poetry. Gon1browicz's modern istn is different. It's
mai nly a modern ism of the novel . A nd besides, G ombrowicz
was not i nterested in a naive chal lenge to the va lues of trad ition ;
rather he wa nted to "re-va lue" then1 , "trans-value'' them (i n the
Nietzschean sense : Umtuertung aller Werte} . Rabelais-Ri mbaud
as a pai r, as a program : now, here was such "transvaluation of
values," a new perspective, one \Vith sign ifica nce for the great
figu res of modern ism as I myself conceive it.
c s : I n Fra nce's education tradition (the one expressed, for
insta nce, in the literature textbooks), there is a tendency to put
Rabelais back i nto the "spi rit of the serious," to make h i m out
si rn ply a hu man ist thi nker, to the detrin1ent of the qual ities of
 ENCOUNTER

play, exuberance, fantasy, obscen ity, laughter that suffuse his

work , of that "ca rniva l " element that Bak hti n made much
of. What's you r feeli ng about this diminution, or mutilation ?
Should we see it as a rejection of that element of i rony towa rd
all orthodoxies, toward all "positive thinking," that you've sa id
cha racterizes the very essence of the novel gen re ?
MK: It's even worse than a rejection of irony, of fantasy, etc.
It's a n indifference to art, a rejection of art, a n allergy to art,
what I 've ea rlier cal led "misomusy" (detestation of the Muses) :
they're removing Rabelais' work from a ny aesthetic consider­
ation. Now that historiography a nd litera ry theory are becoming
ever more "m isomusistic," writers a re the only people who ca n
say a nyth i ng i nteresting about Rabelais. One l ittle recol lection :
a n i nterviewer asked Sal ma n Rushd ie what he loved best i n
French l iterature ; he repl ied, "Rabelais a nd Bouvard et Pecu­
chet." That a nswer says more than any nun1ber of long textbook
discussions. Why Bouvard et Pecuchet ? Because it's a different
,

Flaubert from the one who wrote [;Education sentimentale and

Mada1ne Bovary. Because it's the Flaubert of the non-serious.
A nd why Rabelais ? Because he's the pioneer, the fou nd i ng
father, the gen ius of the non-serious i n the art of the novel . With
those two references Rushd ie u nderscores the pri nciple of the
non-serious that is precisely one of those possibil ities for the a rt
of the novel that lay neglected th roughout its history.
(1994)

67
The Dream of Total Heritage in Beethoven

I K N o w , H A Y D N H AD A LR E AD Y, M o z A RT H AD A LR E AD Y
occasionally revived polyphony in thei r classical works. Holvv­
ever, in Beethoven that resurrection seems to me far more
persistent and deliberate : I 'm thinking of his late piano sonatas;
op. 1 06, the Hammerklavier, in which the last movement is a
fugue with all the old polyphonic richness but driven by the
spirit of the new era : longer, more complex, more sonorous,
more d ramatic, more expressive.
The op. 1 10 sonata amazes me even more : the fugue is part
of the third (final) movement; it is introduced by a short passage
of a few ba rs ma rked recitative (the melody loses its songl ike
quality here and becomes speech ; intensified, with an i rregular
rhyth m , consisti ng ma i nly of the repetition of the same notes
in sixteenth and th i rty-second notes) ; then comes a composi­
tion in fou r pa rts. The fi rst: an arioso (entirely homophonic :
a melody una co1-da, accompanied by chords in the left hand ;
mood classically serene) ; the second : a fugue ; the third : a varia­
tion on that arioso (the same melody turns expressive, plaintive ;
the mood romantically torn apart) ; the fou rth : a conti nuation
of that fugue, with the theme inverted (it moves from piano to
forte and i n the fou r last bars becotnes entirely homophonic,
without a trace of polyphony) .
 ENcou NTER

So within its brief ten-mi nute span, this third movement

(includ ing its short recitative prologue) is notable for its extraor­
d inary heterogeneity of etnotion and form ; yet the listener does
not rea lize this, because the complexity seems so natu ral and
si mple. (Let that be a lesson : the formal innovations of the great
masters always have a certain d iscreetness about them ; such is
true perfection ; only an1ong the smal l masters does novelty seek
to call attention to itsel f.)
Bringing the fugue (the model form of polyphony) into the
sonata (the model form of classical music), Beethoven seems to
have laid his hand on the sca r left by the passage between t\VO
great period s : the one stretch ing from the earl iest polyphony
in the twel fth century up to Bach, and the next one grounded in
\Vhat we have come to term " hon1ophony." As i f he had won­
dered : is the legacy of polyphony sti l l mine ? and i f it is, how
could polyphony, which requi res each voice to be thoroughly
aud ible, accon1 n1odate the recent developn1ent of the orches­
tra (like the transformation of the modest ea rly piano into the
Hamn1erklavier) , where rich sonority no longer allo\VS us to d is­
tinguish i ndividual voices ? and how could the serene spi rit of
polyphony resist the emotional subjectivity of the n1usic born
of classicisn1 ? can two such opposite conceptions of music co­
exist ? and coexist in the san1e work (the op. 1 06 sonata) ? And
even tnore narrO\\'ly, \\'ithin the san1e n1oven1ent (the last n1ove­
n1ent of op. 1 1 0) ?
I itnagine that Beethove n wrote his sonatas d reatn i ng he
was hei r to the whole of Eu ropea n n1usic si nce its beginnings.

(/)
 M I LA N K u N D E R A

This dream I impute to him, the d ream of the great synthesi s

(a synthesis of two seemingly irreconcilable period s), reached
its co1n plete fu l fi llment on ly a hund red years later, with the
greatest composers of modern ism, particularly Schoenberg and
Stravi nsky, who themselves were a lso, despite thei r totally op­
posite pathways (or which Adorno saw as total ly opposite·), not
(merely) the perpetuators of their immediate precu rsors but­
and in an entirely conscious way-total heirs (and probably the
last of them) to the whole history of music.

"" I d i sc u ss t h e r e l a t i o n between S t ra v i n sk y a n d S c hoen berg i n det a i l i n pa r t 3 of

Testaments Betrayed, " I m prov i sa t ion i n Hom age to S t rav i n s ky": S t rav i n sk y 's en t i re
oeu v re i s a great s u m m a t ion of E u rope a n m u sic i n t h e for m of a long jou rney
fro m the t we l ft h c e n t u r y to the t we n t i e t h . Sc hoen berg's m u sic , roo, e m braces t h e
e x p e r i ence o f t h e whole h i stor y o f m u s i c , n o t i n S t r a v i n s k y 's ''horizon t a l ," "epic,"
r a m b l i ng fa s h i o n , b u t i n the very synt hesis of h i s " t welve-tone syste m ." Adorno
p resents t he<>e t wo aest hetics as e nt i rely co n t rad i c to r y ; he does n ot sec w h a t , from a
d i sta nce, m a ke<> t h e m s i m i l a r.

70
The A rch -Novel:
A n Open Letter for the Birthday of Carlos Fuentes

Mv DEA R C A R Los :
An ann iversa ry for you , and for me too : seventy years
si nce your bi rth, and thi rty si nce I met you for the fi rst ti me,
in Prague. You came there a few months after the Russian in­
vasion with Julio Cortazar, with Gabriel Ga rcia Marquez, to
show you r concern for us Czech writers. A few years later I
catne to l ive in France when you were the Mexican ambassa­
dor there. We tnet often and ta lked . A little about pol itics, a lot
about the novel . Especially on that second subject, \Ve were very
close to each other.
We tal ked about the astonishing ki nship between your vast
Latin Atnerica and my l ittle Central Eu rope , the t\VO pa rts
of the \Vorld similarly ma rked by the h i storical memory of
the Ba roque , which makes a \\'riter hypersensitive to the se­
ductions of the fantastical , magical , onei ric imagi nation. And
anothe r poi nt in com mon : both our two pa rts of the world
played a decisive role in the evolution of the twentieth-century
novel , of the modern-let's say post-Proustia n-novel : fi rst,
during the 1 9 1 0s, 1 920s, 1 930s, thanks to the constel lation of
great \\'riters fron1 my pa rt of Eu rope : Kafka, Musi l , Broch,
G on1browicz . . . {we were surprised to fi nd we had the san1e
 M I LA N K u N n i� H A

ad mi ration for Broch , greater, I bel ieve, tha n what his compa­
triots felt, and different: i n our view, he opened new aesthetic
possibil ities for the novel; he was thus above all the author of
The Sleepwalkers) ; then, th rough the n i neteen-fi fties, -sixties,
a nd -seventies, tha n ks to a nother great constel lation of writ­
ers i n you r part of the world who conti nued transform i ng the
aesthetic of the novel: Juan Ru l fo, Ca rpentier, Sabato, then you
a nd you r friends . . . .
Two fidel ities shaped us : fidelity to the revolution of modern
art in the twentieth centu ry a nd fidel ity to the novel . Two fi­
delities not at all convergent. For the avant-ga rde (the ideolo­
gized version of modern art) has always relegated the novel to
a position outside modernism, conside ring the form to be old
hat, i rrevocably conventional. When, later on , in the 1 950s a nd
1 960s, the latter-day ava nt-ga rdes bega n to create a nd proclaim
thei r own modernism for the novel, they did it i n a pu rely
negative way : a novel with no cha racters, no plot, no story, i f
possible n o punctuation : a novel that came to be cal led the
anti-novel.
A cu rious thi ng: the people vvho created n1odern poetry
did not claim to be ma k i ng anti-poetry. On the contra ry, from
Baudelaire on , poetic modern ism was seeking a radical way to
get at the essence of poetry, its 1nost profound specificity. I n this
sa n1e way I imagi ned the n1odern novel not as an anti-novel
but a n arch-novel. The arch -novel would, primo, focus on what
only the novel can say; a nd secu nda, it wou ld revive all the ne­
glected a nd forgotten possibi lities the a rt had accumulated over

�
;_,
 ENCOUNTER

the four centuries of its history. Twenty-five years ago I read

your Terra Nostra ; what I was reading there was an arch-novel .
It was proof that such a thing existed, could exist. The great
modernity of the novel. Its fascinating and difficult newness.
I embrace you, Carlos !
MILAN

73
 The Total Rejection of Heritage, or lannis Xenakis
(a text published in 1980, with two interventions
from 2008)

IT WA S T WO OR THREE Y EA R S A FTER THE Ru s S I A N I N VA -

sion of Czechoslovakia. I fel l in love with the music of Edgard

Va rese and lannis Xenakis.
I wonder why. Out of avant-ga rde snobbery ? In the sol i­
tary l i fe I was l iving at the time, snobbery would have made
no sense. Out of an expert's interest ? I might, with some effort,
understand a piece by Bach, but faced with Xenakis's music I
was completely unprepared, unschooled, unin itiated , an utterly
naive l istener. And yet I felt genuine pleasu re at hea ring h is
works, and I would listen avidly. I needed them : they brought
me some strange consolation.
Yes, the word sl ipped out: I found consolation in Xenak is's
music. I learned to love it du ring the darkest ti me of my life,
and that of tny homeland.
But why d id I seek consolation in Xenakis rather than in
the patriotic music of S1neta na, whe re I cou ld have found the
il lusion of pe ren nial l i fe for my country, which had just gotten
a death sentence ?
The disencha ntn1ent brought on by the catastrophe that had
 ENCOU NTER

struck my country (a catastrophe whose con sequences will be

felt for centu ries) was not on ly about pol itical events : the dis­
enchantment was about tnan as man, n1an with his cruelty but
a lso with the a l ibi he uses to disgu ise that cruelty, n1an always
quick to justify h is barba rity by his feeli ngs . I was seeing that
senti mental agitation (in private life as \vei l as publ ic) is not
antithetical to brutal ity, but rather, n1erges with it, is pa rt and
pa rcel of it . . . .
(1980)

IN 2008 I ADD:

Read i ng my old text, seei ng the ph rases "tny nation had just
gotten a death sentence" and ••the catastrophe that had st ruck
tny country . . . and \-vhose con sequences will be felt for centu­
ries," I felt a spontaneous urge to obliterate thetn , si nce these
days they can on ly seem absurd . Then I got a grip on n1yself.
And I even found it rather distu rbi ng that tny n1en1ory should
thi n k to censor itsel f. Such a re the Splendors and Miseries of
tnemory: it is proud of its abil ity to keep truth ful track of the
logical sequence of past events ; but when it con1es to ho\v \-Ve
experienced then1 at the ti tne, memory feels no obl igation to
truth. Thi n k i ng to suppress those fe\v li nes, n1en1ory d id not
feel gui lty of any lie. It may have considered lyi ng, but \Vasn't it
in the nan1e of truth ? Because after a l l , isn't it clea r no\v that
in the n1ea ntime history has made the Russia n occupation of
 M ILAN KuNDERA

Czechoslovakia i nto just a n episode that the world has a l ready

forgotten ?
Of course. Still, I and my friends did experience that episode
as a hopeless catastrophe. And i f we forget our state of m i nd
back then, there is no way to u nderstand a nything, neither the
feel of that time nor its consequences. Our despair was not about
the Com munist regime. Regimes come and go. But the borders
of civ i lizations endure. And we saw ourselves being swa llowed
up by a very different civ i lization . I nside the Russian empire
so many other nations were i n the process of losing even thei r
l a nguage, thei r identity. And I real ized the obvious fact (the
astoundingly obviousfoct) : that the Czech nation is not immortal ;
that i t too could cease to exist. Without that obsessing thought,
my strange attach ment to Xenakis would be i ncomprehensible.
His music reconciled me to the i nevitabil ity of endings.

1980 TEXT RESUMED :

,.

A propos of senti ment as a j ustification for human cru-

elty, I recal l a rema rk from Ca rl Gustav Jung. I n his analysis
of Ulysses he cal ls James Joyce "the prophet of unfeelingness":
We have, he writes, "a good deal of evidence to show that we
actu a l ly a re i nvolved i n a senti mental ity hoax of gigantic pro­
portions. Think of the l amentable role of popular senti ment i n
wa rti me ! . . . Sentimental ity is the superstructure erected upon
brutality. . . . I am deeply convinced that we . . . are caught in our

76
 ENCOUNTER

own sentimental ity. . . . It is therefore qu ite comprehensible

that a prophet should arise to teach ou r cultu re a compensatory
lack of feel ing."
Although a "prophet of unfeelingness," James Joyce could
go on bei ng a novel ist. I even thi n k that he could have fou nd
the forerunners of his "prophecy" i n the history of the novel .
The novel as a n aesthetic category is not necessa rily bound to
a sentimental conception of man . Music, however, cannot avoid
such a conception.
Despite Strav i nsky's denial that musiC expresses feel i ng,
the naive l istener can not see it a ny other way. That is music's
cu rse, its m i ndless aspect. All it takes is a viol i n ist playi ng the
th ree long opening notes of a largo, a nd a sensitive listener will
sigh, "A h , how beauti ful ! " In those th ree notes that set off the
emotional response, there is nothing, no i nvention , no creation,
noth i ng at a l l : it's the most rid iculous "sentin1ental ity hoax."
But no one is proof against that perception of music, or against
the fool ish sigh it sti rs.
Eu ropean 1nusic is founded on the artificial sou nd of a note
a nd of a scale ; i n this it is the opposite of the objective sou nd
of the world. Since its begi n ni ngs, Western n1usic is bou nd, by
a n i nsu rmountable convention, to the need to express Jubjec­
tivity. It sta nds aga in st the ha rsh sou nd of the outside world
just as the sensitive soul sta nds agai nst the insensibi l ity of the
u niverse.
But the moment cou ld come (in the l i fe of a tna n or of a
civi lization) when sentiment (previously considered a force that
makes man more hun1an and that rel ieves the cold ness of h is

77
 M I LA N K u N D E R A

reason) is abruptly revealed as the "superstructu re of brutal ity,"

ever present in hatred , in vengeance, in the fervor of bloody vic­
tories. At that time I came to see music as the deafening noise of
the emotions, whereas the world of noises i n Xenakis's works
beca me beauty ; beauty washed clean of affective fi lth, stripped
of sentimental barba rity.

IN 2008 I ADD:

By pu re coi ncidence, t n these days when I 'm t h i n k ing

about Xenakis, I happen to read the book of a you ng Aus­
trian writer, Thomas Glavinic's Night Work. A thi rty-year-old
man, Jonas, a"''a kes one morni ng to fi nd the world a round him
empty, without huma ns ; his apa rtment, the streets, the stores,
the cafes-everything is there, unchanged , just as before, with
all the traces of the people who just yesterday inhabited it but
a re there no longer. The book describes Jonas's wa nderings
th rough t h is aba ndoned world , on foot and then aboa rd vari­
ous veh icles that he keeps changing, si nce they're all sta nd i ng
d riverless, available. For a few months, until he kills h imsel f, he
moves th rough the world looki ng desperately for traces of his
l i fe, his own memories, even other people's memories. He looks
at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless gen­
erations who used to see those things a nd who a re gone now;
and he understands that everyth i ng he is seeing is oblivion, pure
obl ivion , the obl ivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved,

78
 ENCOU NTER

the n1oment he himself is gone. And again I th ink the obvious

idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists
(nation, thought, music) can also not exist.

1980 T EXT RESUM ED:

Even being a "prophet of unfeel i ngness," Joyce was able

to ren1ain a novel ist; Xenak is, on the other hand, had to leave
music. H i s i n novation \Vas d i fferent in natu re fron1 that of
Debussy or of Schoenberg. Those t\VO never lost their ties to the
h istory of music, they could always "go back " (and they often
did). For Xena kis, the bridges had been bu rned. Ol ivier Mes­
siaen said as n1uch : Xena kis's n1usic is "not radica lly ne\v but
radical ly other." Xenakis does not stand aga inst son1e earlier
phase of 1nusic; he tu rns away fron1 all of Eu ropean n1usic, fro1n
the whole of its legacy. He locates his starting poi nt son1e\vhere
else : not in the a rtificial sou nd of a note sepa rated fro1n natu re
in order to express a huma n subjectivity, but i n the noise of
the world, in a "mass of sound'' that does not rise fron1 inside the
heart but instead cotnes to us fron1 the outside, like the t1l l of
the ra in, the racket of a factory, or the shouts of a n1ob.
H is experin1ents on sou nds and noises that lie beyond notes
and scales-can they becon1e the basis of a ne\v period i n n1usic
h istory ? Will h is music live for long in n1usic lovers' n1en1ory ?
Not very l ikely. What \vi l l remain is the act of cnorn1ous re­
jection : for the fi rst titne sotneone has da red to tel l Eu ropean

79
 M I LA N KuNDERA

music that it ca n be abandoned . Forgotten. (Is it only cha nce

that i n his youth, Xenakis saw human nature as no other com­
poser ever did ? Living through the massacres of a civi l wa r,
bei ng sentenced to death , having his ha ndsome face forever
scarred by a wound . . . ) And I think of the necessity, of the
deep meaning of this necessity, that led Xenakis to side with
the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul 's
subjectivity.

80
 v.

B E AU T I F U L L I K E A
M u LT I P L E E N c o u N T E R
A Legendary Encounter

I N 1 9 4 1 , A S H E WA S E M I G R A T I N G TO T H E U N I T E D S TA T E S ,
Andre Breton stopped off i n Martin ique ; the French \Tichyite
ad ministration there interned hin1 for a few days ; upon his re­
lease he was stroll i ng th rough Fort-de-Prance when in a small
variety shop he came upon a local l iterary journal , Tropiques; he
was dazzled by it; at that balefu l mon1ent in his life it shone l i ke
the l ight of poetry and cou rage. He quickly came to know the
editorial tean1 , a few young people in thei r twenties organized
a round the poet Aime Cesai re, and he spent all h is time with
then1 . Pleasu re and encouragen1ent for Breton , aesthetic inspi­
ration and unforgettable fasci nation for those Martinicans.
Several years later, on his way hotne to Fra nce in 1 9 4 5,
Breton stopped briefly in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he gave a
lecture. All the island 's i ntel lectuals attended , a rnong then1 the
very you ng writers Jacques Stephen Alexis and Rene Depestre.
They listened to h i tn, as fascinated as the Marti n icans had been
a few years ea rlier. Thei r journal, La Ruche (again a journal !
yes, that was the great era of litera ry jou rna ls, an era that exists
no longer), devoted a special issue to Breton ; the issue \Vas con­
fiscated and the journal outlawed .
For the Haitians the encounter was as unforgettable as it \vas
brief. I 've said "encou nter": not a social relation , not a friendsh ip,
 M ILAN KuNDERA

not even an all iance : an encounter, which is to say a spa rk; a

l ight n i ng flash ; random cha nce. Alexis was twenty-th ree at
the time, Depestre n ineteen ; they had only a very superficial
acquaintance with Surrealism, k nowi ng nothing, for i nsta nce,
about its pol itics (the schisms i nside the movement) ; i ntel lec­
tually both avid a nd i nexperienced, they were captivated by
Breton, by his rebel l ious stance, by the freedom of i magination
that his aesthetic ca lled for.
I n 1 946 Alexis a nd Depestre established the Haitian Com­
munist Party, a nd their writing was revolutionary i n orientation ;
at the time that sort of l iterature was common the world over,
u nder the obligatory i nfluence of Russia and its "socialist real­
ism." For the Haitians, though, the master was not Gorky but
Breton. They were not tal ki ng about socialist rea l ism ; thei r
watchword was the literature "of the marvelous," or "magical
realism." Soon Alexis and Depestre were forced to leave the
country. Then in 1961 Alexis returned to Haiti i ntendi ng to take
up the struggle aga i n . He was a r rested, tortured , a nd k i l led.
He was thi rty-ni ne yea rs old.

Beautiful Like a Multiple Encounter

A I M E C ES A I R E : HE IS THE G R E AT FOU NDI NG FIGURE: THE

fou nder of M a rti nican politics, which had not existed before
h i m . But he is a lso the fou nder of M a rti nican literature: h is
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (a n utterly original
poem I can compa re to nothing else, a nd accordi ng to Breton

84
 E J\C c o u 1\' T E H.

"the greatest lyrical tnonument of its ti me" ) is as foundationa l

for Ma rti n ique (and i ndeed for all the Antil les) as the works of
Mickiewicz ( 1 798-1 8 55 ) are for Poland, or the poetry of Petofi
( 1 823-49) for Hunga ry. In other words, Cesa i rc is doubly a
found i ng figu re : t\vo in novations (the pol itical and the litera ry)
meet in his one person . But, unlike Mick ie\vicz or Petofi, he is
not only a founding poet, he is also a 1nodern poet, heir to R i n1-
baud and Breton . Two sepa rate epochs (the begi nning and the
apogee) come together ma rvelously in his \Vork .
The jou rnal TropiqueJ, whose n i ne issues were publi shed
between 1 94 1 and 1 945, deals systematica lly with th ree main
subjects that, set side by side, thetnselves constitute an extraor­
dina ry encounter, one that has never occurred i n any other
avant-ga rde journal in the world:
1 . Martinican e1nancipation, both cultural and political: consid­
eration of Africa n culture, pa rticu larly that of black Africa ;
investigation into the history of slavery ; the ea rly stages of
thinking on "negritude" (it was Cesai re who coined the tern1 ,
defiantly, spu r red by the disda i n fu l con notation of the
word "negro" ); the pa noran1a of Martin ique's cultu ral and
political situation ; anticlerical and anti-\Tichy poletnics ;
2 . pedagogy on 1nodern poetry and 1noder11 art: a celebration of
the heroes of n1odern poetry: Ritnbaud , Lautrea mont, Mal­
l a nne, Breton ; sta rting with the th i rd issue , a fu l l-blo\vn
Su rreal ist orientation (\vc shou ld poi nt out that, although
strongly politici zed , these you ngsters do not sacrifice poetry
to pol itics : for thcn1 Su rrea li sm is pri marily an art n1ovc­
ment) ; thei r identification \Vith Su rrea l i s1n is boyishly

8 '5
 M I L A N K u N D E H. A

passionate : "the ma rvelous is always beauti fu l , a nyth i ng

ma rvelous is beautifu l , i n fact on ly the ma rvelous is beau­
ti fu l ," B reton said , a nd the word "tna rvelous" became a
catchword for them ; the syntactical model of Breton's sen­
tences ( " beauty will be convu lsive or will not be at a l l " ) is
often im itated, as is that of Lautreamont's ph rase ( " beau­
tifu l l i ke the chance encou nter on a d issection table of a
sewing machine with an umbrella . . . ', ) ; says Cesai re : "Lau­
treamont's poet ry, beauti fu l l i ke an expropriation decree"
(and Breton himsel f: "the voice of Aime Cesa i re beautifu l
l i ke newborn oxygen" ) ; and s o on.
3. thefoundation ofMartinican patriotism: the desire to embrace
the island as home, as a fatherland that one should know in
depth : a long article on the fauna of Ma rtinique, another on
its plant l i fe, but especia l ly fol k a rt: publication of and com­
menta ry on Creole fol ktales.
On the subject of fol k a rt: i n Eu rope it was taken up by the
romantics : Brentano, Arnim, the brothers Grimm, and Liszt,
Chopin , Brahms, Dvorak; there is a view that folk music lost its
appeal for the modernists, but that is an error: not on ly Bartok
and Ja nacek but a lso Ravel , M i l haud , de Fa lla, Stravi nsky; a l l
o f them loved this music, i n wh ich they discovered forgotten to­
nalities, unfamiliar rhythms, a ha rsh ness and immediacy that
conce rt-hall n1usic had long si nce lost; u nl ike the roma ntics,
fol k art con fi rmed the modernists in their aesthetic nonconfor­
n1ity. The position of the Marti n ique artists is similar: for them
the fantastica l aspect of fol ktales blended \Nith the freedotn of
imagi nation propou nded by the Su rrealists.

86
 ENCOUNTER

Encounter of an Umbrella in Perpetual Erection

with a Sewing Machine for Uniforms

D E PEST R E : I READ HIS rg8r S T O RY C O L L E C T I O N W I T H I TS

symptomatic title, Hallelujah for a Woman-Garden. Depestre's

eroticism : a l l women overfl ow w ith so much sexual ity that
even the traffic l ights are aroused and twist around to watch
them pass. And the men are so randy that they're ready to make
love during a scienti fic con ference, during a surgical operation,
i nside a spacesh ip, on a trapeze. All for pure pleasure ; there
are no problems psychological , moral , or existential ; we're i n
a u niverse where v ice a n d i n nocence are one a n d the same.
Usual ly this sort of lyrical i ntoxication bores me ; if anyone had
described Depestre's books before I read them, I would never
have opened them.
Fortunately I read them without k nowi ng what I was in for,
and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened
to me : I loved somethi ng that, by conviction (or by my nature) ,
I should not have loved . I f someone j ust slightly less talented
than he had tried to express that sa me t h i ng, he would only
have come up with a cartoon ; but Depestre is a rea l poet or,
to say it the Antillean way, a true master of the ma rvelous: he
has managed to put onto man k i nd 's existential map something
that was not there before : the nea rly inaccessible borderlands of
happy, naive eroticism, of u nbridled and paradisal sexuality.
Then I go on to read other stories by h im, from the collection
titled Eros in a Chinese Train , and I l inger over a few set in the

87
 M I LA N Ku NDERA

Commun ist countries t hat had opened their arms to this revolu­
tionary figure banished from his own land. With astonish ment
and tenderness, I ponder this Haitian poet, his head stuffed
with crazy erotic fantasies, wandering the Sta l i n ian desert i n
its worst years, when a n unbelievable puritanism reigned and
when the least erotic liberty could cost dearly.
Depestre and t he Com mun ist world : the encounter of an
u mbrella i n perpetua l erection with a sew i ng mac h i ne for
making unifor ms and shroud s. He recounts his amorous ad­
ventures: with a Ch inese woman who because of one n ight
of love is ban ished for nine years to a Turkestan leper colony ;
with a Yugoslav girl who j ust escaped having her head shaved ,
l ike all Yugoslav women at the time who were found guilty of
sleeping wit h a foreigner. I read these few stories today and,
abruptly, ou r whole century strikes me as unreal , improbable,
as if it were j ust the black fantasy of a black poet.

The Night World

"
IN THE S L AV E P L A N TAT I O N S OF THE CA R I BBEAN A FRI-
cans existed in two worlds. There was the world of the day; that
was the white world . There was the world of the night; that was
the African world, of spirits and magic and the true gods. And i n
that world ragged men, humiliated by day, were transformed­
i n thei r own eyes, and the eyes of t hei r fel lows-i nto k i ngs,
sorcerers, herba l ists, men in touch with the true forces of t he

88
 ENCOUNTER

earth and possessed of complete power. . . . To the outsider, to

the slave owner, the African night world might appear a mimic
world , a chi l d 's world, a carn ival. But to the African . . . it was
the true world : it turned white men to phantoms and plantation
life to an i llusion ."
After readi ng these words of V. S. Naipaul, who also came
from the Antilles, I suddenly reali zed that Ernest B releur's
paintings are a l l n ight pictures . Night is thei r sole setting, the
only one that could show "the real world " on the other side of
the deceptive daytime. And I understood that these paintings
could only be born here, i n the Antilles, where the slave past is
sti l l etched in pain on what used to be called "the col lective un-
. "
COnSCIOUS .
And yet, while the very earliest period of his work is pur­
posely anchored i n the culture of Africa, while I d iscern i n it
certai n motifs taken from African fol k a rt, the later periods are
more and more personal, free of any program. And this is the
paradox : it is precisely i n this extremely personal pai nting that
the black identity of a man of Martinique is present i n a l l its
dazzling d isplay: this work is, fi rst, the world of the night king­
dom ; second , it is the world where everything is transformed
i nto myth (everything, each tiny ordinary object, i nclud i ng Er­
nest's little dog, which appears i n so many pictures, changed i nto
a mythological animal); and third , it is the world of cruelty, as
if the i neradicable past of slavery ret u rns as an obsession with
the body: the body in pain, the body tortu red and torturable,
woundable and wounded.

89
 M I LA N K u N oERA

Cruelty and Beauty

WE A R E D I S C U S S I N G C R U E LT Y , A N D I HEAR BRELEUR S A Y,

in his calm voice : "No matter what, i n pai nting the ma i n thi ng
n1ust be beauty." Wh ich, to my mind, means : art must always
guard against sti rring emotions that l ie outside the aesthetic :
sexual arousal , terror, disgust, shock. A photograph of a naked
woman pissing could give a man an erection, but I don't bel ieve
he could get the same charge from Picasso's La pisseuse, though
it's a m ightily erotic pai nting. We turn ou r eyes away from a
fil m about a massacre, whereas the eye del ights i n the sight of
Guernica, the pai nting that depicts the san1e atrocity.
Headless bodies, suspended i n space-these are Breleu r's
latest pictures. Then I look at thei r dates : as his work on this
cycle proceeds, the theme of the body left hanging i n the void
loses its original traumatic effect, the mutilated body tossed into
the void suffers less and less ; from one i mage to the next it
comes to resemble an a ngel lost amid the sta rs, or a magical i n­
vitation a rriving from afa r, or a ca rnal temptation, or a playful
acrobatics. Over the cou rse of countless va ria nts, the original
theme sh i fts from the rea l m of c ruelty to the realm (to reuse
this catchword) of the ma rvelous.
With us in the studio a re my wife, Vera , and Alexa nd re
Ala ric, a Martin ica n ph ilosopher. As always before the n1ea l ,
we a re d rink i ng a punch. Then Ernest prepa res the lunch. On
the table six places a re set. Why six ? At the last mornent i n

90
 ENcou NTER

comes l smael Munda ray, a Venezuelan painter; we begin to

eat. But strangely the sixth setting l ies intact right to the end of
the meal. Much later Ernest's wife comes hon1e from work, a
beautiful and-it's instantly clear-beloved woman. We leave
i n Alexander's car; Ernest and his wife sta nd in front of their
house gazing after us. I get the sense of a couple i n anxious
union, surrounded by an inexplicable au ra of lonel iness. "You
understand the 1nystery of that sixth setti ng," says Alexandre
when we are out of thei r sight: "It gave Ernest the i l lusion that
his wife was with us."

Home and the World

"I S AY W E A R E S M O T H E R I N G . TH E P R I N C I P L E O F A H E A LT H Y

Antil lean politics : Open the windows. Air. Air," Cesaire wrote
in 1 9 44 , in the journal TropiqueJ.
Open the windows toward which direction ?
Fi rst of all towa rd Fra nce, says Cesaire; for France is the
Revolution , it's the great abol ition ist Schoelcher, and it's also
Ri mbaud, Lautreatnont, Breton ; it is a literature and a culture
worthy of the greatest love. Next, open then1 toward the Afri­
can past, a past amputated, con fiscated, that holds the bu ried
essence of the Marti nican personal ity.
Later generations \Vould often dispute Cesa i re's Fra nco­
African orientation, i nsisting on the A 1nericanness of Ma rti­
n ique ; on its "creolite" (connoti ng the whole array of sk i n colors

91
 M I LA N K u N n E RA

and a language of its own) ; on its bonds with the Antil les and
with all of Latin America.
Because every people in search of itsel f thinks about where
to locate the margin between its own home and the rest of
the world, the location of what I call the median context, the
rea l m between nationa l and global contexts . For a C h i lea n
that med ian context woul d be Latin America; for a Swede,
it is Scand i n avia. Obviously. But what about Austria ? Where
was that marg i n located ? I n the Germanic world ? O r i n the
world of multinational Centra l Europe ? The whole mea n i ng
of Austria's existence depended on the response to that question.
W hen, after 1 9 18 and then sti l l more radical ly after 1 945, it had
left the context of Central Europe, it turned back i nto itself
or i nto its German ness, it ceased to be that shining Austria of
Freud or Mahler, it was a different Austria, and with far more
l i mited cultura l i n fl uence. The same d ilem ma faced Greece,
wh ich i n h abits both the world of Eastern Eu rope (Byzant i ne
trad ition , Orthodox Church , Russoph ile orientation) and the
world of Western Europe (Greek-Latin tradition, strong bond
to the Renaissance, and modernity) . I n i mpassioned polemics
the Austrians or the Greeks can argue for one orientation over
another, but with a l ittle detach ment we would say: there are
some nations whose identity is characterized by dual ity, by the
complexity of their media n context, a nd that's precisely what
gives them their pa rticularity.
As to Martinique, I would say the same th ing: the coexis­
tence of various d i fferent median contexts there is what makes
for the particularity of its culture. Martinique : a multiple i nter-

92
 ENCOUNTER

section ; a crossroads among the continents ; a tiny sl ip of land

where France, Africa, the Americas meet.
Yes, that's beautifu l . Very beautiful, except that Fra nce,
Africa, America don't much ca re. In today's world the voice of
smal l entities is barely heard .
Martin ique: the encounter of a great cultural complexity
with a great sol itude.

The Language

M A RT I N I QUE I S B ILI N G UAL. THE RE I S C RE OLE , T HE E VE RY­

day language born in the time of slavery, and (as in Guadeloupe,
Guya na, Haiti) there is the French language taught in school ,
and mastered by the intelligentsia to a nea rly vind ictive perfec­
tion. (Cesaire " hand les the French language as no wh ite man
today handles it," Breton declared .)
When Cesaire was asked , i n 1 978, why the jou rnal TropiqueJ
was not written in Creole, he answered : "The question makes
no sense, becau se this k i nd of j ourna l is not conceivable in
Creole . . . . What we have to say, I don't even know whether it
cou ld be ar ticu lated i n Creole . . . . Creole is incapable of ex­
pressing abst ract ideas; . . . it is solely an oral language."
Nonetheless it is a delicate task to write a Martin ican novel
in a tongue that does not embrace the \vhole reality of daily life.
Possible solutions : a novel in Creole ; a novel in French � a novel
in French en riched by Creole words explai ned in footnotes � and
then, the solution of Patrick Chatnoiseau :

93
 M I LAN K u N OERA

He has taken liberties with French that no writer i n Fra nce

could even imagi ne daring to take. It is l i ke a Brazil ian writ­
er's l iberty with Portuguese, a Spanish American writer with
Spanish . Or, yes, the l iberty of a bil i ngual writer who refuses
to grant absolute authority to one or the other of his languages,
and has the courage to d isobey. Chamoiseau did not reach some
comprom ise between French and Creole by m i x i ng them to­
gether. H is language is French, but French transformed ; it is
not creolized (no Martinican tal ks l i ke that), it is Chamoisized :
he gives it the delightfu l i nsouciance of the spoken language,
its cadence, its melody; he brings i n many Creole expressions,
not for t he sake of "natura l ism" (to i nt roduce bits of " loca l
color" ) , but for aesthetic reasons (for t heir fun n i ness, t hei r
charm, or thei r semantic irreplaceabil ity) . But mainly he has
given his French the freedom of unaccustomed, casual, " impos­
sible" turns of phrase, the freedom of neologisms (a freedom
the highly normative French language enjoys much less than
other languages) : he casually transforms adjectives i nto nouns
(maximalite, aveuglage), verbs into adjectives (eviteux), adjec­
tives i nto adverbs (malement, inattendument) ( "lnattendument ?
Cesaire al ready made that word legitimate in his Notebook on
a Return to my Native Land," Chamoiseau protests), verbs i nto
nouns (egorgette, raterie, emerveille, dijparaisseur), nouns i nto verbs
(horloger, rivierer), and so on. And he does this without all these
transgressions d i m i n ishing t he lexical or grammatical richness
of the French (there is no shortage of either bookish or archaic
words, a nd plenty of imperfect subjunctive) .

94
 ENCOUNTER

The Encounter Across Centuries

AT F I R S T GLA N CE SoL IRO MA GNIFICENT c o uL D L O O K L I KE

a n exotic, local novel, focused on a cha racter u n i maginable
elsewhere : a fol k story tel ler. Wrong: Cha moiseau's novel dea ls
with one of the greatest events i n the h istory of cultu re : the
encounter between oral l iteratu re in its last hours and written
l iterature as it is being born . I n Europe this encounter occurred
in Boccaccio's Decameron. Without the practice (sti l l a live at the
ti me) of storytellers entertai n ing an aud ience, this fi rst great
work of Eu ropean prose could not exist. Later, unti l the end
of the eighteenth centu ry, fron1 Rabelais to Lau rence Sterne,
the echo of the storyteller's voice continued to sound in novels;
\\'riti ng, the writer was speaking to the reader, addressing h i m,
insulting h i m , flattering h i m ; i n turn, readi ng, the reader was
also hearing the novel 's author. It a l l changed at t he sta rt of
the nineteenth century; that is the begin ning of what I call the
"second period " * of the novel 's history : the writer's Jpoken word
disappea rs beh i nd the writing.
"Hector Bianciotti, this word is for you," says the dedica­
tion of Soliho Magnificent. Chamoiseau etnphasizes : the spoken

* " Fi rst" a nd "second " period s : I d i sc u ss t h i s (ent i rely person a l ) idea of period i za ­
t i o n in t he h i sto ry of t he novel ( a n d i n t h e h i story of m u sic a s wel l ) i n Te.ilament.i
Betrayed, pa r t i c u l a rly i n pa r t 3, " I m prov i s a t i on i n H om age to S t ra v i n sky." Ve ry
schem a t i ca l ly : t h e fi rst per iod of t he novel 's h i story e nds . in m y v iew. at roughly
t h e end of t he eightee n t h centu ry. The n i netee n t h cent u r y i naugu rates a d i fferent
aesthetic fo r the no\'e l , one fa r more obed ie nt to the r u les of plausibi l i t y. The mod­
e r n ism of the novel , a s i t b rea k s free of t he dog m a s of t h a t "seco nd " per i o d . cou l d .
i f one ag rees to that idea (st r i c t l y m y ow n ) , be c a l led t h e "t h i rd " period.

95
 M I LA N K u N D E R A

word, not the writi ng. He sees h imsel f as the d i rect hei r of the
storytellers, he cal ls himself not a writer but "a word scratcher, a
person who sets down talk." On the map of the supranational
h istory of cultu re, he means to locate himsel f at the juncture
where the word pronounced aloud passes the baton to written
l iteratu re. In his novel the imaginary storyteller named Solibo
tells him that: "I talked, but you, you write and declare that you
come from the spoken word." Chamoiseau is the writer coming
from the spoken word.
But j ust as Cesai re is not M ickiewicz, Chamoiseau is not
Boccaccio. He is a writer with all the refinement of the modern
novel, and it is as such (as a grandson of Joyce or of Broch) that he
reaches out a hand to Solibo, to that oral prehistory of l iterature.
Solibo Magnificent is thus an encounter across centur ies. "You
give me your hand over a distance," Solibo tells Chamoiseau .
The story of Solibo Magnificent : on an open space cal led
Savanna in the town of Fort-de-France, Sol ibo is tal king before
a small audience ( Chamoiseau is among them) gathered there at
random . I n the m idst of h is discou rse he d ies. The old Negro,
Congo, knows what happened : Solibo has d ied from the word
slitting his throat. This explanation is not very convi ncing to
the pol ice, who i nstantly latch on to the i ncident and break
thei r backs to uncover the murderer. There ensue some n ight­
nla rish ly cruel i nterrogations during \vh ich the cha racter of
the dead storytel ler takes form before us and two suspects d ie
under tortu re. At the end the autopsy rules out murde r: Sol ibo
died i n some unexpla i ned fashion : maybe, actual ly, from the
word sl itting his th roat.

96
 E N C O U !': T E R

I n the last pages of the book , the author publishes Sal iba's
discourse, the one during which he fel l down dead . This imagi­
nary discourse, true poetry, is an i nitiation i nto the aesthetic
of the oral tradition. W hat Solibo tells is not a story, it is tal k :
words, speech, fantasy, wordplay. It is improvisation, i t is auto­
matic talking (like the Surrealists' "automatic writing" ) . And
since it is tal k , that is, " language before there was writi ng," the
rules of writing do not apply: therefore, no punctuation : Saliba's
d iscourse is a surge with no periods, no commas, no paragraphs,
l i ke Molly's long monologue at the end of Ulysses. (Another ex­
ample demonstrati ng that fol k art and modern art, at a certai n
moment of h istory, c a n reach out a hand to each other.)

The Improbable in Rabelais, Kafka, Chamoiseau

WH AT I E S P E C I A L LY LIKE ABOUT CH A MOI SEAU I S H I S

imagination, oscil lating between the probable and the i mprob­

able, and I wonder where it comes from, what are its roots ?
Surreal ism ? The Surreal ists' i magination developed main ly
i n poet ry and pa inting. W hereas Chamoiseau is a novel ist, a
novel ist and nothing but.
Kafka ? Yes, he d id make the improbable legitimate for the
art of the novel . But the nature of the imagination in Chamoi­
seau is not very Kafkaesque.
"Lad ies and gentlemen here present": this is how Cham­
oiseau sta rts his first novel, Chronicle of the Seven Sorrotus. He
add resses the readers of Solibo several tin1es with "0 friends."

97
 M r r.AN K u N D E R A

T h i s reca l l s Rabel a i s , who begins his Gargantua with the

apost rophe : " Very i l lustrious d r i n kers, and you , precious pox­
ridden . . . " Someone who speaks to h is reader aloud this way,
who i nvests every phrase with his wit, his humor, h is displays,
ca n easily exaggerate, mysti fy, slip from the real to the impos­
sible, for such was the cont ract between novelist and reader i n
that " fi rst period " o f the novel 's history, when the storyteller's
voice was not yet completely obscured behind printed characters.
With Kafka we a re in a d i fferent piece of the novel 's h is­
tory; i n his work the i n1probable is supported by description ;
it i s utterly i mpersonal and so very evocative that the reader
is d rawn into an i maginary world as if it were a fil m : even
though noth i ng about it resembles our own experiences, the
power of the description makes it all believable. In this kind of
aesthetic the voice of a raconteu r tal k i ng, joking, commenti ng,
showing off would break the spel l . It is impossible to i magine
Kafka sta rti ng The Castle by cheeri ly add ressing h is readers :
"Ladies and gentlemen here present."
In Rabelais, on the other hand, the improbable comes from
nothing but the raconteur's offhand style. Pa nu rge chases after
a lady, but she rebuffs hin1 . To get even he smea rs her clothes
with tissue from the sex organs of a bitch in heat. All the dogs
in town storm the lady, they run after her, piss on her gown, on
her legs, on her back; and when they reach her house they piss
so thorough ly on her door that thei r uri ne runs down the street
like a brook and ducks come to swim on it.
Solibo's corpse is ]aid upon the grou nd ; the pol ice try to move
it to the morgue. But no one can manage to l i ft it; " Solibo had

98
 ENCOUNTER

begun to weigh a ton, l i ke the corpses of those Negroes who go

on yea rn i ng for life." They call for help; Solibo now weighs two
tons, five tons. A crane is cal led. W hen it arrives Solibo sta rts
losi ng weight. A nd the chief sergeant raises the body up with
"the tip of his little fi nger. Fi nally he starts some slow macabre
man ipulations that fasci nate everyone. With a few slight twists
of the wrist he twi rls the cadaver, passing it from h is little fi nger
to his thumb, frotn the thun1b to the i ndex fi nger, from the
index to the tn iddle fi nger. . . . "
0 ladies a nd gentletnen here assen1bled , most va l i ant and
il lust rious dru n ks, precious pox-ridden cotn rades , with Cham­
oiseau you are n1uch nea rer to Rabelais than to Kafka.

Alone Like the Moon

I N A L L B R E L E U R's PA I N T I N G S T H E MOON, C R ES C EN T­
shaped , lies hori zonta l ly with the two tips poi nted up, l i ke a
gondola floati ng on the swells of the n ight. This is not the
pa inter's fantasy, it's how the moon actua l ly is in Martin ique.
I n Eu rope the crescent tnoon stands upright: con1bative, l i ke a
fierce little a n i n1al set on its hau nches ready to spri ng or, if you
prefer, like a perfectly sha rpened scythe; the n1oon in Eu rope is
t he n1oon of \\'a r. In Martin ique it i s peaceable. That tnay be
\\'hy Ernest gives it a warn1 golden color; i n his n1ythic pictures
it represents an u natta inable happi ness.
Biza rre : I tnention this to some M a rti nica ns, a nd I notice
that they don't k now \\rhat the moon actually looks l i ke up

99
 M I LA N K u N DE R A

i n the sky. I ask Eu ropeans : do you remember the moon i n

Eu rope ? What is its shape when i t i s risi ng, when it is setting?
They don't know. Man no longer looks at the sky.
Neglected, the moon has come to rest i n Breleur's paintings.
But the people who no longer see it i n the sky will not see it
i n the paintings either. You are a lone, Ernest. Alone l i ke Mar­
tinique amid the seas. A lone l i ke Depestre's concupiscence i n
the monastery of Commun ism. A lone l i ke a van Gogh paint­
i ng before the i mbecile stares of tourists. A lone l i ke the moon
nobody sees.
(1991)

1 00
 VI.

ELSEWH ERE
Exile as Liberation According to Vera Linhartova

I N T H E r 9 6 o s V E R A L I N H A RT O VA wA s O N E O F T H E M o s T
admired writers i n Czechoslovakia, the poetess of a prose that
was med itative, hermetic, beyond category. Having left the
country for Paris after 1 968, she began to write and publ ish
in French. Known for her sol ita ry nature, she astonished all
her friends when, in the early 1 990s, she accepted the inv ita­
tion of the French Institute of Prague and, on the occasion of
a colloquium on the issue of exile, she delivered a paper. I have
never read anything on the subject more nonconformist and
more clearsighted.
The second half of the past centu ry has made everyone ex­
tremely sensitive to the fate of people forced out of their own
homelands. This compassionate sensitivity has befogged the
problem of exile with a tear-sta ined moral ism, and obscured the
actual nature of life for the exile, who accordi ng to Linha rtova
has often managed to transform h is banish ment into a liberat­
ing lau nch "towa rd another place, an elsewhere, by definition
unknown and open to all sorts of possibil ities." Of course she is
right a thousand times over! Otherwise how are we to under­
stand the fact that after the end of Communism, al most none of
the great em igre artists hurried back to their home countries ?
Why was that? D id the end of Communism not spur them to
celebrate the "Great Return" in their native lands ? And even
 l'vl J L A N K u N D E H. A

if, despite the disappoi ntn1ent of thei r aud ience, that return
was not what they wa nted , wasn't it thei r mora l obl igation ?
Sa id Linha rtova : "The writer is above all a free person , and the
obligation to preserve his i ndependence against all con strai nts
comes before any other consideration . And I mea n not on ly the
i n sane constra i nts imposed by an abusive political power, but
the restrictions-all the harder to evade because they are well­
i ntentioned-that cite a sense of duty to one's country." In fact
people chew over cl iches about human rights, and at the same
ti me persist in con sidering the ind ividua l to be the property of
his nation .
She goes fu rther sti l l : "So I chose the place where I wa nted
to l ive, but I have also chosen the la nguage I wanted to speak."
People wi ll protest: sure, a writer is a free person , but is he not
the custod ian of his language ? I sn't that the very mea n i ng of a
writer's n1 ission ? Lin hartova : " It is often asserted that a writer
has less freedom of movement than anyone else, for he ren1ains
bou nd to his la nguage by an i nd issoluble tie. I bel ieve this is
another of those n1yths that serve as excuse for t i m id folks."
For: "The writer is not a prisoner of any one la nguage." A great
liberating sentence. On ly the brev ity of l i fe keeps a writer fro1n
d rawi ng all the conclusions from this i nvitation to freedotn .
Li n ha rtova : "My sympath ies l ie with the no1nads, I haven't
the soul of a sedenta ry n1ysel f. So I a n1 now entitled to say that
my own exi le has ful fil led what was always my dea rest wish :
to l ive elsewhere." When Li nha rtova writes in French , is she
sti ll a Czech writer? No. l)oes she becon1e a French writer?
No, not that either. She is elsevv here. Else\vhere as Chopi n \vas

1 04
 ENCOUNTER

i n h is time, elsewhere as, later, each i n his own fashion, were

Nabokov, Beckett, Stravi nsky, Gombrowicz. Of course each of
them l ived his exile i n his own inimitable way, and Linhartova's
experience is an extreme case. Yet after her radical , luminous
declaration, we can no longer speak of exile as we have done
up till no\v.

1 05
The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (OJcar MiloJz)

TH E F I RST T I M E I S AW T H E N A M E O s c A R M I L osz , I T WA S
over the tit1e of his November Symphony, tra nslated into Czech
and publ ished a few mon ths after Wor1d Wa r I I in a n ava nt­
ga rde journal I used to read assiduously at the age of seventeen .
How thoroughly that poetry had entranced me I u nderstood
sotne th i rty yea rs later i n Fra nce, where for the fi rst time I was
able to open the volume of Milosz's poetry i n its origi nal French .
I quickly looked up November Symphony, and as I read it I hea rd
in tnemory the whole (superb) Czech translation of th is poem,
not one word of wh ich have I forgotten. In that Czech version
M ilosz's poem ma rked me perhaps more profoundly tha n other
poetry I was devou ring at that same period , that of Apo1 1 i naire
or R i n1baud or Desnos or Vitezslav Nezval . Beyond a doubt
these poets had a n1azed tne not only with the beauty of thei r
verses but also by the myth su rrou nd i ng thei r sacred names,
wh ich served as passwords to get tnysel f recognized atnong tny
own people, the moderns, the in itiated . But there was no myth
a rou nd Milosz : his totally unk nown na tne said nothing to me,
and noth ing to anyone a rou nd me. In his case I \vas entra nced
not by a n1yth but by a beauty acti ng on its ow n, alone, naked ,
with no outside support. Let's be honest: that ra rely happens .
 ENCOU NTER

BuT W H Y T H I S P O E M I N PA RT I C U L A R ? TH E ESSENTI A L REASON,

I think, lay in the discovery of something I had never encoun­

tered anyvvhere else : I discovered the a rchetype of a form of
nostalgia that is expressed, grammatically, not by the past but
by the futu re : the grammatical future of nostalgia. The gram­
matical form that projects a lamented past into a distant future,
that transforms the mela ncholy evocation of a th ing that no
longer exists into the heartbreaking sorrow of a promise that
can never be realized.

You will be all in pale violet, beautiful grief

And the flowers on your hat will be sad and small

I R E M E M BER A PER FOR MA NCE oF R Aci N E AT T H E Co l\1 E D I E ­

Fran�aise. To ma ke the lines sound natu ral, the actors recited
them as if they were prose, systematically suppressing the pause
at the end of the lines ; impossible to recognize the alexa ndrine
rhythm or hear the rhymes. Perhaps they thought they were be­
having according to the spi rit of rnodern poetry, \vhich has long
since abandoned meter and rhyme. But free verse, at its bi rth,
was not trying to make poetry into prose ! It was trying to rid
poetry of the a rmorplate of meter and d iscover a d i ffe re nt

1 07
 M I LA N Ku N DERA

musical ity, a richer and more natural one. My ears will always
retain the singing voices of the great Su rreal ist poets (Czech as
wel l as French) reciting thei r own verses ! Like an alexandrine,
a free-verse l i ne was also an uninterrupted musical unit, endi ng
i n a pause. The pause must be made audible, i n free verse as
wel l as in an alexand rine l i ne, even if that seems to contrad ict
the grammatical logic of the sentence. That pause break i ng the
syntax is the heart of the melodic refi nement (the melodic prov­
ocation) of the enjambment. The doleful melody of M ilosz's
Symphonies is grounded i n the sequence of enjambments. An
enjambment i n Milosz is a brief sta rtled silence before the word
that will come at the start of the next l i ne:

And the murky path will be there} all damp

With an echo of cascades. And I shall speak to you
Of the city on the water and of the Bacharach Rabbi
And of Florentine Nights. There will be as well . . .

I N 1 9 4 9 A N D R E G I DE E D I T E D A N A N T H OLO GY O F F R E N C H
poetry for Gallimard Publishers. I n the preface he wrote, "X
compla i ns that I put i n nothing by Milosz. Was that by over­
sight ? Not at all. It is because I found nothing that seemed to
me especial ly worth includ i ng. I repeat: my selection was not
intended to be h istorical ; I select by quality alone." There was

1 08
 ENCOU NTER

an elen1ent of good sense i n Gide's arrogance : Oscar Mi losz had

no business in that anthology ; his poetry is not French ; reta i n­
i ng all his Polish Lithuanian roots, he took refuge in the lan­
guage of the French people as if i n a Carthusian monastery. So
we may consider Gide's rejection a noble way of protecti ng the
untouchable sol itude of a foreigner; of a Stranger.

IO<J
Enmity and Friendship

ON E D A Y E A R LY I N T H E 1 970s, DU R I NG T H E Russ i A N o c c u ­
pation of our country, both of us fi red from our jobs, both of us
in poor health, my wife and I went to a hospital in the Prague
suburbs to see a great doctor, friend to all the dissidents, an old
Jewish wise man as we called him, Professor Sma hel. There
we ran into E . , a journalist who had also been run out of ev­
erywhere, who was also in poor hea lth, and the four of us sat
and talked for a long time, happy in the atmosphere of fel low
feeling.
E . gave us a lift back into town and began to tal k about
Bohumil H raba l , who was at the tin1e the greatest living Czech
writer: a man of boundless fantasy, passionately interested in
plebeian experience (his novels a re fi l led with the most ordinary
people), he was 1nuch read and much loved (the whole wave of
young Czech fi l n1 makers worshipped him as its patron saint) .
H e was profou nd ly apolitica l . In a regime for which "every­
thing was pol itical ," this was not innocent: his apol itical stance
mocked the world where ideologies ra n riot. For that reason he
lived for a long while in relative disgrace (unusable as he was
for any official assignment) , but a lso for the very reason of that
apolitical sta nce (neither did he spea k out agai nst the regitne),
he was left a lone during the Russian occupation and he man­
aged , one way and another, to publish a few books.
 ENCOUNTER

E . raged aga inst h i m : How could he allow his books to be

printed \vhi le his colleagues were forbidden to publ ish ? How
could he validate the regi me that way ? Without a word of pro­
test ? His behavior is detestable, H rabal is a col laborator.
I reacted with the same rage : What absurdity to spea k of
collaboration when the spi rit of H rabal 's books, thei r humor,
thei r imagi nation , are the absolute opposite of the mental ity
ruling over us, tryi ng to strangle us with thei r straitjacket ! A
world where a person ca n read H rabal is utterly different from
a world where his voice could not be heard ! One single book by
Hrabal does more for people, for their freedom of mind, than all
the rest of us with our actions, our gestures, our noisy protests !
The d iscussion in the car turned quickly into a bitter quarrel .
Think ing about it later, astounded by that hatred (authen­
tic, and completely reciprocal), I said to mysel f: ou r harn1ony in
the doctor's office was transitory, con nected to a particular set
of historical ci rcumstances that made us a l l victin1 s of persecu­
tion ; ou r d isagreement, though, was fundan1ental , i ndependent
of ci rcumstances ; it was the d isagreement between people for
whom the political struggle is tnore i mportant than real l i fe,
than art, than thought, and people for whon1 the whole n1ean­
i ng of pol itics is to serve real l i fe, a rt, thought. These two
attitudes may each of them be legitimate, but they are irrecon­
cilable.
I n the autumn of 1 9 68 I spent two weeks i n Pa ris, and \Vas
fortunate to have two or th ree long conversations \Vith Louis
A ragon i n his apartment on the rue de \'a ren nes. No, I d id not
tel l him much ; I l istened. I have never kept a jou rnal, so n1y

111
 MI L A N K u N D E R A

recol lections a re vague : of his remarks I reca ll on ly two recur­

ring themes : he tal ked a good deal about Andre Breton, who,
towa rd the end of his l i fe, was apparently in contact again, and
he tal ked about the art of the novel . Even in his preface to my
book The Joke (wh ich he wrote a month before ou r meeti ngs),
he had praised the art of the novel as such : "The novel is i nd is­
pensable to man, l i ke bread "; in the course of my visits he kept
u rging me always to defend "that art" (that " depreciated " art,
as he wrote in his preface ; I later took up that expression for the
title of a chapter in my Art of the Novel) .
O u r meetings left me with the sense that the most signi fi­
cant reason for his brea k with the Surrealists was not pol itica l
(his obedience to the Communist Pa rty) but aesthetic (his loy­
alty to the novel , that art "depreciated " by the Surrealists), and I
felt I had gli mpsed the double drama of h is life : his passion for
the art of the novel (perhaps the most important area of his own
genius) and his friendship for Breton (today I know this: when
it comes time to ta ke stock, the most painful wound is that of
broken friendsh ips ; and there is nothing more fool ish tha n to
sacrifice a friendship to pol itics. I am proud never to have done
that. I ad m i red Mitterrand for his loya lty to old friends. That
loyalty was the reason he was so violently attacked towa rd the
end of his life. That loyalty was his nobil ity.)
Some seven years after my encounter with Aragon, I made
the acquaintance of Aime Cesaire, whose poetry I had discovered
just after the wa r in Czech translation in an ava nt-ga rde journa l
(the same journal that had introduced me to Milosz) . This was in
Paris, in the atel ier of the pai nter Wilfredo Lam. Ain1e Cesaire,

1 12
 E NCOU NTER

young, vivacious, charming, barraged me with questions. The

very fi rst one: "Kundera, did you know Nezval ? " "Yes, of course.
But you-how do you know hi m ? " No, he had not k nown
Nezval , but And re Breton had talked a lot about him. Accord­
i ng to my own preconceived notions, I would have thought that
Breton, with his reputation as an i ntransigent man, could only
have spoken ill of Vitezslav Nez val, who some years earlier had
broken with the Czech Surrealists, choosing instead like Aragon
to fol low the d ictates of the Party. And yet Cesai re said again
that when Breton was i n Martin ique in 1 94 0, he spoke lovingly
of Nezval . And I found that movi ng. All the more because, I
remember well, Nezval too always spoke lovi ngly of Breton.
What shocked me most in the great Stalin trials was the cold
approval with which the Com mun ist statesmen accepted the
execution of the i r friend s. For they were a l l friends, by wh ich
I mean that they had k nown one another i ntimately, had l ived
together th rough rough ti mes, em igration, persecution, a long
pol itical struggle. How is it that they were able to sacrifice their
friendship, and i n such a macabrely defi nitive way ?
But was it friendship ? There is a human relationship called
soudruzstvi in Czech-from soudruh, comrade-mean i ng "the
friendship of com rades or companions," the fellow-feel i ng that
binds those who engage in the same political struggle. W hen
the common devotion for the cause disappea rs, the reason for
that fel low-feel i ng d isappears as well. But friendship subordi­
nated to an interest considered superior to friendship has noth­
ing to do with friendsh ip.
I n our time people have learned to subord i nate friendship

1 13
 M I LA N KuNDERA

to what's cal led "convictions." And even w ith a pridefu l tone

of moral correctness. It does take great maturity to understand
that the opin ion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis
we favor, necessarily i mperfect, probably transitory, which only
very l i mited m inds can declare to be a certainty or a trut h .
Unl i ke the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is
a v irtue-perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
I look at a photograph of the poet Rene Char alongside
Heidegge r. The one celebrated as a French resistant to the
German occupation, the other denigrated for sympath izing
with early Nazism at one poi nt i n h is l i fe. The photo dates
from the postwar years. The two are pictured from the rear ;
with caps on their heads, one figure tall, the other short, they are
tak ing a wal k i n the outdoors. I am very fond of that photo.

1 14
Faithful to Rabelais and to the Surrealists
Who Delved into Dreams

LE A F I N G T H R O U G H DA N I L O K 1 s 's o L D B o o K o F RE F LE C ­
tions , I feel I 'tn back i n a bistro nea r the Trocadero, with hin1
across the table ta l k ing in h is loud harsh voice as i f he were
bawl i ng n1e out. Of a l l the great \v riters of his generation ,
French or foreign , who l ived in Pa ris in the 1 980s, he was the
most invisible. The Goddess of Ne\vs had no reason to train her
kl ieg l ights on h i n1 . " l 'n1 not a d issident," he wrote. He \Vasn't
even a n em igre. He traveled freely bet\veen Belgrade a nd Pa ris.
He was only a ''basta rd writer out of the s\va l lowed-up \vorld
of Central Europe." Swa l lowed up, yes, but over the cou rse of
D a n i lo's l i fe (he d ied i n 1 989) that \:vorld had been the con­
densat ion of the Europea n sto ry. Yugoslav i a : a long bloody
(and victorious) wa r against the Nazis ; the Holocaust that n1u r­
dered tna i n ly the Jews of Centra l Europe (an1ong them Da­
nilo's father) ; the Con1n1un ist revolution, i n1 1ned iately fol lo\ved
by Tito's dran1atic (also victor ious) spl it fron1 Sta l i n and Sta l i n­
istn . As a ffected as he \Vas by this historic dra n1a, Da nilo never
sacri ficed h is novels to pol itics. Thus he \Vas able to grasp the
n1ost harro\ving aspects : individual fates no sooner born tha n
aba ndoned ; traged ies \vith no vocal cord s . H e agreed \vith
Or\vel l 's ideas, but how could he have loved 198"-, the novel i n
\vh ich that scou rge o f tota litarianisn1 reduced hutnan life to its
 M I LA N K u N DE R A

political dimension alone, exactly as the Maos of the world were

doing ? Aga inst that flatteni ng of existence, Dan ilo called Ra­
belais to the rescue, w ith his d rolleries, and the Surrealists, who
" delved i nto the unconscious, i nto d reams." I leaf through h is
old book and I hear his loud harsh voice : "Unfortunately, the
major-key tone of French l iteratu re that began with Villon-it's
d isappeared." Once he understood that, he became sti l l more
faithfu l to Rabelais, to the Surrealists " delvi ng i nto d reams,"
and to a Yugoslavia that, blindfolded, was already on its way to
disappearing as well .

1 16
On the Two Great Springs, and on the Skvoreckys

I N SEP T E M B E R 1 9 6 8 , T R A U M AT I Z E D BY T H E Rus s i A N
invasion of Czechoslova kia, I was able to spend a fe\v days i n
Paris; Josef a nd Zdena S kvorecky \Vere there a s wel l . I recal l the
itnage of son1e young man \\'ho said to us, in an aggressive tone :
"Just what did you Czechs \Vant, any\vay ? You were al ready sick
of social ism ? "
In those weeks we had long discussions \\'ith a ci rcle of French
friends who saw the two Spri ngs of 1 968-the French and the
Czech-as related events, emanating the san1e rebell ious spi rit.
That \vas a lot nicer to hear, but the misunderstand ing persisted :
Pa ri s's May '68 \\1as an unexpected explosion . The Prague
Spring \\1as the cu l n1 i nation of a long process rooted i n the
shock of the Stali nist Terror in the early yea rs after 1 948.
Pa ris's May, brought about prin1a rily by the i nitiative of the
young, was n1arked by revolutionary lyricisn1 . The Prague Spri ng
was i nspi red by the postrevolutiona ry skepticisn1 of adults.
Pa ri s's May was a h igh-spi rited chal lenge to a Europea n
cultu re viewed as dead eni ng, ted ious, officia l , sclerotic. The
Prague Spring \\1as a n hotnage to that sa n1e Eu ropea n cultu re,
so long sn1othered beneath ideological idiocy; it \Vas a defense of
Ch ristian bel ief as \\'ell as of l iberti ne u nbel ief, a nd of cou rse
of modern art (I stress "tnodern," not "postnlodcrn'' ) .
 M I LA N Ku NDERA

The Paris May trumpeted its i nternational character. The

Prague Spring sought to give a smal l nation back its particular­
ity and its i ndependence.
By "marvelous chance" those two Springs-out of synch ,
the two com ing from d i fferent h i storical experiences-met
on the "dissection table" of the same year.

TH E STA RT O F THE ROAD T O WA R D THE PRAGU E SP R I NG IS

marked i n my own memory by S kvorecky 's first novel, The

Cowards, published i n 1 956 and greeted by the glorious fi re­
works of official hatred . This novel, a great l iterary turn ing
point, describes a great historical turn i ng point: a week i n May
1 945 during which , after six years of German occupation , the
Czech Republic was reborn. But why did the book arouse such
hatred ? Was it so aggressively anti-Commun ist ? Not at a l l .
I n it S kvorecky tells the story of a man o f twenty, mad about
jazz (like Skvorecky), carried away by the whi rlwind of the last
few days of war when the German army was on its k nees, the
Czech resistance was, awkwardly, seeking its way, and the Rus­
sians were moving i n . No a nti-Communism, but a profoundly
unpolitical attitude : free ; l ight; impolitely nonideological.
A nd a lso the omn ipresence of humor, of i nconven ient
humor. Wh ich makes me th i n k that people laugh at d i fferent
th ings i n every part of the world . How wou ld anyone dispute
Bertolt Brecht's sense of humor ? Wel l , h is theater adaptation

1 18
 ENCOU NTER

of The Good Soldier Schweik shows that he did n't understand

a th ing about Hasek 's comical sense. S kvorecky 's humor (l ike
Hasek 's or H rabal 's) is the humor of people who are fa r from
power, make no clai m to power, and see history as a bli nd old
witch whose moral verd icts make them laugh. And I find it
sign i ficant that it was precisely in that nonserious, anti moral­
ist, anti-ideological spi rit that, at the dawn of the 1 960s, there
bega n a great decade of Czech cultu re ( i n fact the last that
could be cal led "great" ) .

AH, T H O S E B E L OV E D S I X T I E S - AT T H E T I M E I L I K E D TO S AY

cynically: the ideal pol itical regime is a crumbling dictatorship ;

the machi nery of oppression functions ever more incompe­
tently, but it is sti l l in place to stimulate a critical, n1ocking turn
of m i nd. In the summer of 1 96 7, i rritated by the bold congress
of the Writers' Union, and feeli ng that the effrontery had gone
quite far enough, the bosses of the State tried to ha rden their
pol icies. But the critical spi rit had al ready contam inated even
the Party's Central Comn1 ittee, which i n Janua ry of 1 968 de­
cided to i nstall an unknown fel low, one Alexander Dubcek, as
their chief. The Prague Spring bega n : gleeful, the country re­
jected the lifestyle i mposed by Russia; the State borders opened
up, and all the social orga nizations (the syndicates, unions, as­
sociations), i n itia lly meant to transmit to the people the Pa rty's
will, went independent and tu rned then1selves i nto unexpected

1 19
 M I LA N K u N DERA

i nstru ments of an unexpected democracy. A system was born

(with no advance plann ing, al most by chance) that was truly
unprecedented : the economy 1 00 percent national ized , agricul­
ture in the hands of cooperatives, nobody too rich , nobody too
poor, schools and medici ne for free, but also: the end of the
secret police's power, the end of political persecutions, the free­
dom to write without censorsh ip, and consequently the bloom­
i ng of l iterature, art, thought, journals. I cannot tel l what the
prospects m ight have been for the future of th is system ; i n the
geopol itical situation of the time, certainly not great; but in a
different geopol itical situation ? Who could k now . . . Anyhow,
for the second the system existed, the second was magnificent.
"

I n his Miracle in Bohemia (completed i n 1 970), Skvorecky

tells the story of that whole period between 1 948 and 1 968. The
surprisi ng thing is that he sets h is skeptical gaze not only on
the stupidity of the rul ing power but also on the protesters,
on the preeni ng theatrics moving onto the Spring's scene. That
was the reason the book was ban ned after the catastrophe of the
Russian i nvasion-not only banned by the government, like all
S kvorecky 's books, but also d isl iked by the opposition, wh ich ,
infected by the vi rus of mora l ism , could not bea r the i nconve­
nient freedom of its gaze, the i nconvenient freedom of its i rony.

WH E N , I N S E P T E M B E R I g 6 8 I N PA R I S , T H E S K VO R E C K Y S
and I d iscussed our two sepa rate Springs w ith ou r French

1 20
 ENCOU NTER

friends, we were not without worries : I was th inking about my

d i fficult retu rn to Prague, a nd they about their d i fficult emi­
gration to Toronto. Josef's passion for A n1erican literatu re and
for jazz had made their choice easy. (As i f, since ea rly child hood ,
we had each ha rbored an idea of the place for possible exi le-
1, France; they, North America.) But however great their cosmo­
pol itan ism, the S kvoreckys were patriots. Oh, I k now-these
days, when the da nce is being led by the Europe homogeniz­
ers, the word "patriot" ca rries some disdain. But excuse us : in
those sinister times, how could \\'e not be patriotic ? I n Toronto
the S kvoreckys l ived i n a little house with one room set aside
for publ ish i ng the Czech writers banned in their own coun­
try. Nothing was more important than that. The Czech nation
was born (several different times born) not because of its mil i­
ta ry conquests but because of its l iterature. And I don't n1ean
l iterature as a pol itical weapon . I mean l iterature as l iterature.
In fact no pol itical orga n i zation subsidi zed the S kvoreck)rs ;
as publishers they could rely only on thei r own capacities and
their own sacrifices. I will never forget it: I was l iving in Pa ris,
and for me the hea rt of my native lan� was i n Toronto. W hen
the Russian occupation ended, there was no longer any reason
to publ ish Czech books abroad . Since then, Zdena and Josef
visit Prague from time to time, but they always return to their
homeland to l ive.
To the homeland of their exile.

121
From Beneath You} II Breathe the Roses
(The Last Visit with Ernest Breleur)

WE WERE DR I N K I NG W HITE RU M W ITH B ROW N SUGAR,

as we always did; the canvases were on the floor, many canvases

from the past several yea rs. But that day I was concentrating on
a few very recent paintings, leaning against the wal l , which I
was seeing for the first ti me and which d i ffered from the previ­
ous works in the predom i nance of the color wh ite. I asked, "Is
that always death everywhere ? " "Yes," he said .
I n previous periods naked headless bodies soared , wh ile
down below small dogs wept in an endless night. Those noc­
turnal pictures I had thought were inspi red by the past of slaves
for whom night was the only time l i fe was free. "So with you r
wh ite pai ntings, has the n ight finally left ? " "No. It's still n ight,"
he said. Then I understood : night had merely turned its shi rt
inside out. It was a n ight eternally set ablaze by the beyond .
H e explained that i n the ea rly phase o f the work, the ca nvas
is highly colored, then gradually, white drippings l ike a curtain
of fine threads, like ra i n fall, came to cover the painting. I said,
"Angels visit you r studio at night and piss white u ri ne over you r
patnttngs. "
. .

One pictu re I sta red at agai n and aga i n : at the left an open
door, in the m iddle a horizontal body floated as if it were
com ing out of a house. Below, at the right, a hat set down. I
 ENcou NTER

understood : it was not the door of a house but the entra nce to
a tomb, the sort you see in Ma rtin ique cemeteries : little houses
of wh ite tile.
I looked at that hat at the bottom, so surprising at the edge of
the tomb. Was it the incongruous presence of an object, in the
Su rrealist ma nner ? The n ight before, I had gone to visit Hubert,
another Ma rtin ican friend. He showed me a hat, the big beau­
tiful hat of his long-dead father: "The hat, the memento that
eldest boys here in herit from their fathers," he had explained .
And the roses. They floated around the gl id ing corpse or
grew out of it. Sudden ly some lines sprang i nto my head , verses
I had n1a rveled at when I was very you ng, the Czech verses of
Frantisek Halas:

From below you'll breathe the roses

When you live your death
And in the night you'll throw off
Love your shield.

And I saw my native land, that land of Baroque chu rches,

of Ba roque cemeteries, of Ba roque statues, with its obsession
with death , its obsession with the departing body that no longer
belongs to the l iving but that, even decon1posed , goes on bei ng
a body, thus an object of love, of tenderness, of desi re. And I
saw before me the Afr ica of yesteryea r a nd the Rohen1 ia of
yesteryea r, a l ittle vil lage of Negroes and Pascal 's infin ite space,
Surrea l ism a nd the Ba roque, Halas a nd Cesa i re, u r i nating
angels a nd weeping dogs, tny own hon1e and n1y el se\vhere.

1 23
 VII.

Mv F I R S T L ov E
The Long Race of a One-Legged Runner

IF I W E R E A S K E D W H A T F E A T U R E H A S I N D E L I B LY W R I T T E N

my native land i nto my aesthetic genes, I would not hesitate to

answer: the music of Leos Janacek. Biograph ical coincidences
have son1e role i n this: Ja nacek lived his whole l i fe i n Brno,
l i ke my father who, as a you ng pian ist, was a n1ember of the
enchanted (and isolated ) c i rcle of the composer's con noisseurs
and defenders ; I came i nto the world a year after Janacek had
left it and, from my ea rl iest ch i ldhood , I would hea r his music
played daily on the piano by my father or by his students ; at
my father's fu nera l i n 1 9 7 1 , during that somber period of the
Russian occupation, I forbade a ny orations; only at the crema­
toriu m , fou r musician friends played Janacek 's Second Str i ng
Qua rtet.
Fou r yea rs later I em igrated to France and, sha ken by the
fate of my cou nt ry, I tal ked about its greatest composer on
the rad io, several ti mes a nd at length . A nd later I happily ac­
cepted an i nvitation frotn a music journal to review recordings
of his tnusic made during those years (the ea rly nineties). It \vas
a pleasure, yes, but somewhat spoiled by the incred ibly uneven
(a nd someti mes disgraceful) level of the perfonnances . Of all
those recordi ngs only two delighted n1e : the piano works played
by Alai n Planes and the qua rtets played by the Berg Qua rtet of
Vienna. To pay them homage (and thereby to inveigh agai nst
 M I LA N K u N DERA

the others) I tried to define Janace k 's style : " d izzyingly tight
j uxtaposition of highly contrasti ng themes that follow rapidly
one upon another, without transitions and, often, resonating
simultaneously; a tension between brutal ity and tenderness
within an extremely short time span . And yet further: a ten­
sion between beauty and ugli ness, for Janacek may be one of
the rare composers who could pose in their music the problem
familiar to great painters : ugli ness as the subject of an artwork.
(In his quartets, for instance, the passages played sui ponticello
scrape and grate, and turn a musical sound i nto noise.) " But
even this wonderful Berg Quartet record ing came packaged
with a text presenting Janacek i n a stupidly nationalist l ight,
c a l l i ng him a "spiritual d isciple of Smetana" (he was the op­
posite of that ! ) and reducing his expressivity to the romantic
sentimental ism of a bygone time.
That different performances of the same music should have
d i fferent qual ities is quite natural . But with these Janacek d isks
it was a matter not of flawed rendition but of deafness to his
aesthetic ! Of a failure to comprehend his particularity ! I fi nd
that i ncomprehension reveal i ng, and significant, for it points
to a curse that has weighed on the fate of his music. Thus this
essay on "the long race of a one-legged run ner":

Born in 1 854 i nto a poor milieu, son of a village schoolteacher (in

a small village), from age eleven on he lived i n Brno, a provincial
town on the margins of Czech i ntellectual l ife whose center was
in Prague (which under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was
itsel f merely a provincial town) . I n such circumstances his artis-

1 28
 ENCOU NTER

tic development was unbelievably slow: he wrote music from a

young age but d id not d iscover his own style until he was nearly
forty-five, as he composed fenufa, the opera he completed i n
1 902 and whose fi rst performance took place i n a modest
Brno theater in 1 904 ; he \Vas fi fty years old , a nd his h a i r was
completely wh ite. Constantly u ndervalued , nea rly u n k nown ,
he was to wait through fourteen years of rejection until i n 1 916
fenufa was finally presented i n Prague with unexpected suc­
cess and, to general surprise, brought h i m immediate renown
beyond the borders of his country. He was sixty-two, and the
course of his l i fe sped up at a dizzying rate ; he had twelve years
left to l ive and he wrote the major part of h is work as if i n
an uni nterrupted fever. I nvited to a l l the festivals organized by
the International Society for Contemporary Music, he appeared
alongside Ba rtok, Schoenberg, Stravinsky as thei r brother (a
much older brother, but nonetheless a brother) .
So who was he ? Some provincial character under the spel l
of folk music, as he was persistently described by the arroga nt
musicologists of Prague ? Or one of the great figures of n1odern
music ? And i n that case, of which modern music ? He belonged
to no recognized trend, no group, no school ! He was different,
and alone.
In 1 9 1 9 the tnusicologist Vladimir Helfert became a professor
at the Brno University and, fascinated by Janacek, i mmediately
set about writing a huge monograph on him, planned for four
volumes. Janacek d ied i n 1 928, and ten years later, after long
labors, Hel fert fi nished the first volume. It was 1 938 : Mu nich,
the German occupation, the war. Deported to a concentration

1 29
 M I LA N K u N D E R A

camp, Hel fert died in the fi rst d ays a fter the war. O f his study
we have only the fi rst volume , end i ng with Janacek at just
thirty-five yea rs old, with no important work to his name yet.
A n a necdote : I n 1 924 Ma x Brod had publ ished a n enthu­
siastic little monograph (i n German) on Janacek, the fi rst book
about him to appear. Hel fert promptly attacked it: Brod lacked
a ny schola rly substance ! The proof: there were some youth­
ful Janacek compositions the fellow didn't even know existed !
Janacek defended B rod : what was the poi nt of consideri ng
unimportant work ? W hy judge a composer on music he him­
self does not value, and much of which he had even bu rned ?
This is the a rchetypal con fl ict: a new style, a new aesthetic­
how to grasp them ? By running backwards to the artist's youth,
his fi rst coitus, his baby d iapers, as historians l i ke to do ? Or, as
the practitioners of an art do, by looking at the work itself, at
its structu re, analyzi ng and dissecting it, compari ng and con­
trasting ?
I think of the famous fi rst performance of Victor Hugo's
Hernani: the writer was twenty-eight yea rs old , his supporters
you nger still, and they were all a fire not only about the play but
especially about its new aesthetic, which they k new wel l , which
they advocated, which they did battle for. I thi n k of Schoenberg:
d isl i ked as he was by a broad audience, still he was su rrounded
by young musicians, by his students and by con noisseurs, among
them Adorno, who was to write a famous book about him, a
major analysis of his music. I think of the Su rrealists, forced to
present thei r art accompanied by a theoretical man i festo so as

1 30
 ENcou NTER

to head off any m isinterpretation . I n other words, all n1odern

currents have had to fight both for thei r art and for thei r aes­
thetic program .
Back i n h is provincial home Janacek had no band of friends
a round h i m . No Adorno, not even a tenth, not a hu nd redth of
an Adorno, was on hand to explain the novelty of his music,
wh ich therefore had to move ahead on its own , with no theo­
retical support, l i ke a one-legged run ner. In the last decade of
his life, in Brno, a circle of you ng musicians adored h i m and
understood h i m , but thei r voices were scarcely audible. A few
months before his death, the Prague National Opera (the body
that had rebuffed fenufa for fourteen years) produced A lban
Berg's Wozzeck; the Prague audience, i rr itated by that too­
modern music, wh istled down the show, and the theater
management, doci lely and speed i ly, pu l led Wozzeck from the
repertory. The elderly Janacek took up Berg's defense, publ icly
and violently, as if he mea nt to make clear, wh ile there was still
tin1e, whom he belonged with, who were his kin, the ki nsmen
whose presence he had been m issi ng over a whole lifetin1e.
Today, eighty years after his death , I open up the La rousse
dictiona ry and I read his portrait: "He undertook a systen1atic
col lection of folk music, whose juices fed all his work and all his
political thinking" (just try to imagine the unlikely idiot such a
line describes ! ) . H is work is "deeply national and ethn ic" (vvh ich
is to say, outside the international context of n1odern n1usic ! ) .
H is operas are "steeped i n social ist ideology" (utter nonsense) ;
h is forms are described as "trad itional " and his noncon fonn isn1

131
 M I LA N K u N DERA

unrema rked ; of his operas the dictiona ry mentions Sarka (an

i m matu re work , j ustly forgotten) but offers not a word about
From the House of the Dead, one of the greatest operas of the
centu ry.
So how can we be surpr ised that for decades , pianists
and orchestra conductors , mi sled by all those wrongheaded
signposts, should have erred in thei r search for h is style ? My
ad m i ration is all the greater for those who did understa nd it
with i m mediate certai nty: Cha rles Mackerras, Alain Planes,
the Berg Quartet . . . . Seventy-five years after his death, i n Pa ris
in 2003, I attended a great concert, played twice over before
an enthusiastic aud ience : Pierre Boulez conducti ng Capriccio,
Sinfonietta, and The Glagolitic Mass. I never hea rd a Ja nacek
that was more Janacekian, with his bold cla rity, his antiromantic
expressivity, h is brutal modernity. I said to mysel f then : Maybe,
after a whole century of r u n n i ng, Ja nacek with h i s one leg is
fi nally com ing to j oi n his own tea m , the team of his ki nsmen,
once and for all.

1 32
The Most Nostalgic Opera

A M O N G J A N A C E K 's O PE R A S ARE F I V E M A ST E RWO R K S : THE

l ibrettos of th ree of them Uenufa-1 902 , Katya Kabanovd-

1 923, a nd The Makropoulos Affair- 1 924) a re theater work s
adapted and shortened . The two others (The Cunning Little
Vixen-1923, and From the House ofthe Dead-1 927) are differ­
ent: the one was based on a serial novel by a contemporary
Czech author (a charming work but without great artistic ambi­
tion), the other inspi red by Dostoyevsky's prison reminiscences.
In these it was no longer enough to trim and arrange ; it would
be necessa ry to create autonomous theat rica l works and con­
struct a new architecture. A task that Janacek could not delegate,
one that he took on hitnsel f.
A compl icated task , fu rther compl icated by the fact that
these two literary models lack dramatic composition and tension,
Vixen bei ng merely a suite of tableaux or scenes in a wood land
idyll, and House of the Dead being a reportage on convicts' l ives.
And what's noteworthy : not on ly did Janacek do nothing i n
his adaptation to al leviate this absence of intrigue and suspense,
he even en1phasized it: he transformed this d isadvantage into
an asset.
The danger inherent in the art of opera is that the n1usic ca n
 M I LAN K u N D E RA

easily become mere illustration ; that the spectator concent rates

so fu l ly on the action of the story that he can cease to be a
listener. From this standpoint Janacek 's renunciation of story
mak i ng, of d ramatic action, seems the ulti mate st rategy of
a master musician seeking to reverse the " ba lance of power"
with i n the opera and place the music rad ically at the forefront.
This very suppression of plot is what a l lows Janacek, in
these two works more than i n the other th ree, to draw out the
specific nature of opera text, wh ich may be demonst rated by
a negative proof: presented without the music, the l ibrettos
would look rather sl ight, sl ight because from the very sta rt,
Janacek assigned the domi nant role to the music; it is the music
that narrates, that reveals the cha racters' psychology, that ex­
cites feeling, that surprises, med itates, ent h ral ls, and that even
organizes the whole and determines its (actually very carefully
wrought and pol ished) a rchitectu re.

TH E PE RSON I F I E D A N I M A LS COU L D L E A D O N E TO S E E THE

Cunning Little Vixen as a fa i ry tale, a fable, or a n allegory; such
an error would obscure the essential originality of this work ,
wh ich is its ground i ng in the prose of human life, its ordina ry
d a i l i ness . The setti ng: a wood land cottage, an i n n , the forest;
the cha racters : a \Voodsn1 a n with his two comrades, a vil­
lage schoolteacher and a priest, then an inn keeper, his wife; a
poacher; and the anima ls. Thei r person i fication does not tea r

1 34
 ENCOUNTER

them out of the prose of daily l i fe : the vixen is trapped by the

woodsman , locked up in the yard, then she escapes, l ives a life i n
the forest, bea rs her l ittle foxes, is shot by a poacher a nd wi nds
up as a muff for her k i l ler's sweethea rt. A playfully offband
sm ile i n the a n imal scenes is all that's added to the routi ne of
l i fe as it i s : a revolt by hens demand i ng social rights, some
moral istic chatter among envious birds, and so on.
What l in ks the a n i m a l world to the world of men is a
common theme : the passage of time, old age as the end of every
road. Old age : in his famous poem Michelangelo speaks of it
as a painter would: amassing concrete, awful details of physical
decline; Janacek speaks of it as a musicia n would : the "musical
essence" of old age ( "musical " i n the sense of a state that music
c a n get at, that music a lone c a n express) is that bottom less
nostalgia for time that is gone.

N o s TA L G I A . I T DET E R M I N ES N O T O N LY T H E C L I M AT E O F T H E

work, but even its architecture, which is based on the parallelism

of two kinds of time continually contrasted : the time of humans
who age slowly, a nd the time of a n imals, whose l ives speed
along at a rapid pace; i n the mirror of the fox's swi ft time the old
woodsman senses the melancholy transience of his own life.
I n the opera's first scene he wearily makes his way th rough
the forest. " I feel exhausted ," he sighs , " l i ke after a \\'edd i ng
n ight"; he sits down a nd fal ls asleep. I n the last scene, he aga i n

1 35
 M I L A N K u r-. o E R A

recalls his wedding, and again he falls asleep beneath a tree.

Thanks to that human framing, the vixen's own nuptial moment,
with its joyous celebration in the middle of the opera, glows with
the dappled l ight of end i ngs.
The final passage of the opera begins with a scene that seems
insign i ficant but that always grips my hea rt. The woodsman
and the schoolteacher are alone at the inn. The third friend, the
priest, has been transferred to a d i fferent village and is no longer
with them . The inn keeper's wife is very busy and doesn't feel
l i ke tal k i ng. The teacher h imself is taciturn : the woman he
loves is to be married today. So the conversation is very sparse :
where is the i n n keeper ? off to town ; and how is the priest get­
ting on ? who knows ; and the woodsman's dog, why isn't he
here ? he doesn't 1 ike to walk any longer, his paws hurt, he is old ;
" li ke us," the woodsman adds. I know no other opera scene so
utterly banal i n its d ialogue ; or any scene of sadness more poi­
gna nt, more real.
Janacek has managed to say what only an opera can say : the
unbea rable nostalgia of i nsigni fica nt ta l k at an i n n can not be
expressed any other way than by an opera : the music becomes
the fou rth d i mension of a situation which without it would
remain anodyne, un noticed, 1nute.

A FTER A GOOD DEA L O F D R I N K TH E T EAC H E R , A LO N E O U T

in the field s, sees a sun flower. Insane with love for a woman,

1 36
 ENCOU NTER

he bel ieves it is she. He fa lls to his knees and declares his love
to the su n flower : "Anywhere in the world , I ' l l go with you . I
will hold you in my arms." On ly seven measures of music, but
great intensity of feeling. I quote them here with thei r ha rmo­
nies, to show that there is not a si ngle note which, th rough some
unexpected dissonance (as wou ld be the case with Stravinsky),
would make a listener hea r this decla ration as grotesque :

This i s the wisdom of Janacek the old ma n : he knows

that the ludicrous element i n ou r feeli ngs does not rnake then1
any less authentic. The more profound and sincere the teacher's
passion , the more com ical it is, and the sadder. (To this poi nt,
i magine the su n flower scene without the mu sic : it wou ld be
nothing but comical. Flatly com ical. It is on ly the music that
allows us to see the hidden pain.)
But let's look a bit longer at this love song to a sun flo\ve r.
It lasts only seven measures, it doesn't repeat or retu rn, it is

1 37
 M I LA N K u N DERA

not protracted . T h is is the opposite of Wagneria n emotion­

alism, with its long melodies that deepen, broaden, and to the
point of intoxication keep amplifying a single state of feel i ng.
I n Janacek the emotions are no less intense, but they a re h igh ly
concentrated and thus brief. The world is l i ke a carousel where
feelings spin past, revolve, give way to others, clash, and despite
their incompatibility, may often sound at once, which makes for
an inim itable tension i n all Janacekian music; witness the very
first measures of The Cunning Little Vixen : a languidly nostal­
gic legato motif coll ides with a disturbing staccato motif, which
ends in th ree quick notes repeated several times and gradually
more and more aggressive :

c __..... ____. - I ,......._ f I ,.-4 I r� I

\ X

1 38
 ENCOU NTER

These two emotionally contradictory motifs, set out at the

same time, intermingled, superi mposed, the one agai nst the other,
take up the first forty-one bars with thei r disquieti ng simultane­
ity and im mediately plunge us i nto the tense emotional cl i n1ate
of the heartbreak ing idyll that is The Cunning Little Vixen.

LAST ACT: TH E WOODSMAN B I DS THE TEAC H E R GOOD-BYE

and leaves the i n n ; i n the forest he lets nosta lgia overtake h i m :

h e recalls the day of his marriage, when h e strol led with h i s
wife beneath these same trees : an enth ralling melody, the exal­
tation of a long-gone springti me. So then , does this turn i nto
a conventional senti mental fi nale after a l l ? Not con1pletely
"conventiona l ," for the prosaic keeps interrupti ng, invad i ng the
exaltation ; fi rst with an u npleasant buzz of flies (viol ins played
sui ponticello ) ; the woodsman swats them away frotn his face :
"If it weren't for these flies, I'd t'lll asleep right a\\'ay." For, don't
forget, he is old, old as his dog with the pa inful feet; yet over
a nother several tneasu res he conti nues his song before actually
dozi ng off. I n his d ream he sees all the woodland creatu res,
a n1ong then1 a baby fox, the daughter of the cunning vixen.
He tells her: " I 'm goi ng to trap you like you r mama, but this
time I ' l l ta ke better care of you , so they don't write about you
and me i n the newspapers." This is an allusion to the serial
story out of wh ich Ja nacek had bu i lt his opera ; a joke that
wa kes us (but only for a few seconds) fron1 the very intensely

1 3<)
 M I LA N KuNDERA

lyrical atmosphere. Then a frog comes by : "You l ittle monster,

what are you doing here ? " asks the woodsman. The frog stam­
mers a reply: "The fuh-frog you think you-you-you're s-s-seeing
isn't me, it's my-my grandfather. He t-told me a lot ab-about
you ." And these are the last words of the opera. The woodsman
sleeps deeply beneath a tree (perhaps he snores a bit) as the music
(briefly, only a few measures) swells in a drunken ecstasy.

A H , T H AT LITTLE F R O G ! M A x B Ro D D I D NOT LIKE HIM

at a l l . Max Brod-yes, Fra n z Ka fka's closest friend-he
supported Janacek wherever and however he cou ld : he trans­
lated h is operas into German and opened German theaters to
them . The sincerity of h is friendship authori zed him to let the
composer know all his criticisms. The frog must go, he wrote
Janacek i n a letter, and in place of h is stammering, the woods­
man should solemn ly pronounce the words that will close the
opera ! And he even suggests what they should be : "So kehrt
alles zuriicfv alles in ewiger ]ugendpracht! (Thus do all things
repeat, all with a timeless youthfu l power.) "
Janacek refused . Brod 's proposal went against all h is aes­
thetic intentions, agai nst the polem ic he had waged h is whole
l i fe long. A polemic that set h i m in opposition to opera tra­
d ition . I n opposition to Wagner. I n opposition to Smetana.
I n opposition to the official musicology of h is countrymen. In

140
 ENCOU NTER

other words, i n opposition (to quote Rene Girard) to "the ro­

mantic l ie." The little d isagreement about the frog shows Brad 's
i ncurable romanticism : imagine that weary old woodsman , h is
a rms widespread, head thrown back, singing the glory of eter­
nal youth ! This is the romantic lie par excellence, or, to use
another term : this is kitsch.
The greatest l iterary figu res of Central Europe in the twen­
tieth century (Kafka, Musil, Brach, Gombrowicz, but Freud
as wel l) rebel led (they were very much alone i n that rebellion)
aga i nst the legacy of the preced ing century, wh ich i n the i r
pa rt of Europe bowed u nder the particularly heavy weight of
Romanticism . They felt that i n its vulga r paroxysm, Romanti­
cism i nev itably ends in k itsch. And kitsch was, for them (and
for their d isciples and heirs), the greatest aesthetic evil.
Central Europe, i n the n ineteenth century, gave the world
no Balzac, no Stendhal, but it did worship opera, which played
a social, political, a nd national role there as it d id nowhere else.
And so it is opera as such, its spirit, its proverbial grandiloquence,
that stirred the i ronica l irritation of those great modernists ; to
Herma n n Brach , for instance, Wagner's opera, with its pomp
a nd senti menta l ity, its u n real ism, represented the very para­
d igm of k itsch.
I n the aesthetic of his work Janacek was pa rt of that constel­
lation of great (and solita ry) anti-Romantics of Central Europe.
Although he had devoted h is whole life to opera, his position
on its tradition , its conventions, its gesticulation, was as critical as
Hermann B rach 's.

141
 M I LA N K u N DERA

}A NAC E K WA S ONE OF THE FIRST TO COM POS E AN OPERA

(he bega n fenufa before the end of the n i neteenth century) on

a prose text. I t was as i f this great gesture, by which he rejected
versi fied language once and for a l l (and with it, a poeticized
v ision of real ity), as i f this great gestu re had suddenly led h i m
to d iscover his enti re style. And h is great wager, too : seek i ng
musical beauty i n prose : i n the prose of ordinary situations ; i n
the prose of the spoken language that would inspire the original­
ity of his melodic art.
Elegiac nostalgia: the subli me, eternal subject of music and
of poetry. But the nostalgia that Janacek unveils in The Cunning
Little Vixen is a fa r cry from theatrica l gestures bemoa n i ng
times gone by. This nostalgia is terribly real , it is to be found
where no one looks for it: i n the quiet talk of two old men at an
inn; i n the death of a poor animal; i n the love of a schoolteacher
on his k nees before a sunflower.

142
 V I I I.

Fo RGET T I N G S c H o E N B E RG
No Celebration
(a text published in 1995 in the Frank furter Rundschau
together with other pieces celebrating the hundredth
anniversary of the birth of cinema)

W H AT THE B RO T H E R S LU M I ER E INVENTED I N 1 895 WA S

not an art but a technology that made it possible to capture, to

display, to keep, and to archive the visual image of a real ity, not
in a fraction of a second but in its movement and its duration.
Without that discovery of the "moving photo," the world today
would not be what it is: the new technology has become, primo,
the principal agent of stupidity (i ncomparably more powerfu l
than the bad l iterature of old : advertisements, television series) ;
and secunda, the agent of worldwide indiscretion (ca n1eras se­
cretly film ing political adversaries in compromising situations,
immortalizing the pain of a half-naked woman laid out on a
stretcher after a street bombi ng) .
It is true that fibn as art does also exist, but its significa nce
is fa r more li mited than that of film as technology, and its his­
tory is certainly shorter than that of any other a rt. I remember
a dinner in Pa ris more than twenty yea rs ago : a pleasant, in­
tel ligent young man is talking about Fel lini with an atnused ,
mock ing scorn. He fi nds the latest fil tn fran k ly d read fu l . I
watch him as if hypnotized . Knowing the cost of imagination ,
I feel above all a humble adm i ration for Fel l i ni 's fi ln1s. I n the
 M I LA N K u N DERA

presence of this clever you ng fel low, in the Fra nce of the early
1 980s, I experienced for the fi rst time a sensation I never felt
i n Czechoslovakia, even i n the worst Stalinist yea rs : the sense
that we have come to the era of post-a rt, i n a world where art
is dyi ng because the need for a rt, the sensitivity a nd the love
for it, is dyi ng.
Since then I have more and more often seen that Fellini was
no longer beloved ; even though the man's work had created a
whole great epoch in the history of modern art (like Stravinsky,
l i ke Picasso) ; even though with h is i ncompa rable i magi na­
tion he had achieved the fusion of d ream a nd real ity, that old
project-wish of the Surrealists; even though in his late period
(pa rticu larly underrated), he had managed to bring to h is own
d reamy gaze a clear-eyed lucid ity that cruelly u n masks ou r
contempora ry world (remember Orchestra Rehearsal, City of
Women , And the Ship Sails On , Ginger and Fred, Interview, The
Voice of the Moon) .
During that late period Fel lini violently attacked the media
magnate Silvio Berluscon i , protesting aga inst his practice of
al lowing televised films to be interrupted by advertising. I found
that con frontation deeply significant: since the advertisi ng spot
is a lso a gen re of cinematography, this was a con frontation
between two d i fferent legacies from the brothers Lumiere : be­
tween fi lm as a r t and fi lm as agent of stupid ity. We k now the
outcome : film as a rt has lost.
That confrontation had its epilogue in 1 993 when Berlusconi 's
television screens showed Fel l in i 's body, naked, defenseless,

1 46
 ENCOU NTER

i n the th roes of death (a stra nge coi ncidence : i n a n u n forget­

table, a nd prophetic, scene i n Fell i n i 's 1 960 fi lm La Dolce Vita,
the camera's necroph i l iac frenzy was captu red and d isplayed
for the fi rst ti me) . The h i storical tur n i ng poi n t was complete :
as hei rs of the brothers Lum iere, Fel l i n i 's orphans no longer
coun ted for n1uch . Fel l i n i 's Europe was set aside by a wholly
other Europe. A hund red yea rs of ci nema ? Yes. But I 'tn not
celebrati ng.

1 47
What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt ?

I N A PR I L 1 9 9 9 A PA R I S W E E K LY (oNE oF T H E MORE S ER ious

ones) publ ished a specia l section on Geniuses of the Century.

There were eighteen on the l ist of honoree s : Coco Chanel ,
Maria Callas, Sigmund Fre'u d, Marie Curie, Yves Saint Laurent,
Le Corbusier, Alexander Fleming, Robert Oppenheimer, Rock­
efeller, Stanley Kubrick, Bill Gates, Pablo Picasso, Hen ry Ford,
Albert Einstein, Robert Noyes, Edward Tel ler, Thomas Edison,
J. P. Morgan. So, then : no novelist, no poet, no dramatist; no phi­
losopher; a single architect; a single painter, but two coutu riers;
no composer, one singer; a single moviemaker (over Eisenstein,
Chaplin, Bergman, Fellini, the Paris journalists chose Kubrick).
This honor rol l was not someth i ng put together by ignorant
people. With great lucidity it declared a real change : the new
relationsh ip of Europe to l iteratu re, to philosophy, to art.
Have the great cultu ral figures been forgotten ? "Forgotten" is
not the right word. I remember that at that same period, toward
the end of the century, we were i nu ndated by a tida l wave
of monographs : on G raham Greene, on Ernest Hem ingway,
on T. S. El iot, on Phi l ip Larkin, on Bertolt B recht, on Martin
Heidegger, on Pablo Picasso, on Eugene lonesco, on Cioran,
and endless others.
These venomous works (my gratitude to Craig Raine for de­
fend ing Eliot, to Marti n Amis who took up for Larki n) made
 ENCOU NTER

clear the meaning of that honors list: the geniuses of cultu re have
been set aside without regret; it is com forting to prefer Coco
Chand and the in nocence of her d resses over those great cultural
figures, all of them tainted \vith the century's ills, its perversity,
its cri mes. Eu rope was moving i nto the age of the prosecutors:
Europe was no longer loved , Eu rope no longer loved itself.
Does that mean that all those monographs were especially
harsh towa rd the works of the writers portrayed ? Oh no; at that
time art had al ready lost its appeal , and the professors and con­
noisseurs were no longer interested i n either pai nti ngs or books,
only in the people who had made them ; in thei r lives.
In the age of the prosecutors what does a l i fe tnea n ?
A long succession of events whose deceptive surface is meant
to h ide Si n.
To ferret out Si n beneath its d isgu ise, the tnonographer
n1ust have a detective's talent a nd a network of i n formers. And
so as not to sacrifice his lofty stature as expert, he n1ust cite the
nan1es of his i n forn1ers in footnotes, for in the eyes of scholar­
ship this turns gossip i nto truth .
I open a huge eight-hu ndred-page book on Bertolt Brecht.
The author, a professor of compa rative l iteratu re, after den1on­
strati ng in detail the vi leness of Brecht's Joul (secret hotnosexu­
al ity, erotomania, exploitation of girl friend s \Vho were the true
authors of his plays , pro-Stal i n sy n1pathies, tendency to l ies,
greed , a cold hea rt), fi nally in chapter 4 5 con1es to h is body, i n
pa rticular to its terrible odor, wh ich the professor takes a \Vhole
pa ragraph to describe. As gua rantee of the schola rly natu re of
th is ol factory revelation, i n a note to the chapte r the \v riter says
 M I LA N Ku N DERA

he collected "this detai led description from the woman who was
at the time the head of the photo lab of the Berliner Ensemble,
Vera Tenschert," whom he interviewed "on June 5, 1 985" (that
is, thirty yea rs after the smelly fel low was laid in his coffin).
Ah, Bertolt, what will be left of you ?
Your body odor, preserved for thirty years by your faithfu l
colleague a n d then revived by a scholar who, after intensify­
i ng it by the modern methods of u n iversity laboratories, has
now sent it forth i nto the future of our millenn ium.

I SO
Forgetting Schoenberg

A Y E A R O R T W O A F T E R T H E WA R , A S A N A D O L E S C E N T, I M ET

a you ng Jewish couple some five yea rs older than I . They had
spent their youth in the Terezin concentration camp and later in
another ca mp. I felt intim idated by their fate; it was beyond me.
My awe i rritated them : " Stop that ! Just stop it ! " and they i n­
sisted I see that l i fe there had retained its ful l ra nge, with jokes
as well as tears, tenderness as well as horror. For love of thei r
own lives, they refused to be transformed into legends, into stat­
ues of m isfortune, into a fi le i n the black book of Nazism . I've
completely lost track of them si nce, but I have never forgotten
what they urged me to understand.
Terezin , in Czech; Theresienstadt, i n G erman. A city
tu rned i nto a ghetto that the Nazis used as a sho\vcase, \vhere
they allowed their prisoners to l ive a relatively civil ized l i fe i n
order to show thetn off to the pushovers fro1n the International
Red Cross. The place col lected Jews from Central Eu rope,
mostly from its Austro-Czech regions; atnong then1 were n1any
i ntel lectuals, composers, writers, of the great generation who
had l ived in the glow of Freud, Mah ler, Ja nacek, Schoenberg's
Vien nese school , the Prague structural ists.
They were under no il lusions : they were living in death 's
antecha mber; their cultural l i fe \vas on exh ibit by Nazi propa­
ganda as an al ibi ; but should that be a reason to refuse freedon1,
 M I LA N K u N D E H A

however precarious and fraudulent ? Thei r response was utterly

clea r: thei r creations, thei r art shows, their concerts, their loves,
the whole array of thei r lives were i ncomparably more impor­
tant than their jailers' macabre theatrics. That was thei r wager.
Thei r i ntellectual and artistic activity leaves us dumbst ruck:
not only at the work they managed to produce (I th i n k of the
composers ! Pavel Haas, Janacek 's pupil , who taught me compo­
sition when I was a child ! And Hans Krasa ! And Gideon Klein !
And Karel Ancerl, who after the war became one of the great­
est conductors i n Europe ! ) but perhaps even more, at the thirst
for culture that, i n those dread ful cond itions, gripped the whole
Terezfn com munity.
What did art mea n to them ? It was the way to keep fully
deployed the whole range of feeli ng and thought so that l i fe
should not be reduced to the single d imension of horror. And
for the a rti sts held there ? They saw thei r personal dest i n ies
fused with the fate of modern art, the art cal led "degenerate,"
the art that was hunted down, mocked , condemned to death.
I have before me the poster for a concert in the Terezfn of the
time : Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Haba. Under the execu­
tioners' watch the condemned played condem ned music.
I th i n k of the last yea rs of this past centu ry. Memory, the
duty of memory, the work of memory, were the ba n ner words
of that ti me. It was considered an act of honor to hunt out past
pol itical crimes, right down to thei r very shadows, down to thei r
last vile stains. And yet that very particular sort of memory, i n­
cri mi nati ng memory, the dil igent hand maiden of pun ishment,
had not h i ng in com mon with the sort of 1nemory so passion-

1 52
 ENCOUNTER

ately important to the Jews at Terezln, who cared not a dam n

about i m morta l i zi ng their torturers a nd i nstead d id all they
could to preserve the memory of Mahler a nd Schoenberg.
Once, as I was discussing this topic with a friend , I asked
him : "Do you k now 'A Warsaw Survivor' ? " "A survivor ? Who ?
W hat survivor ? " He did n't k now what I was ta l k i ng about.
A nd yet A Warsaw Survivor (Ein Oberlebender aus Warschau),
an oratorio by Arnold Schoenberg, is the greatest monument
music ever ded icated to the Holocaust. The whole existential
essence of the d rama of the Jews i n the twentieth century is
kept al ive i n it. In all its fearsome grandeur. In all its fearsome
beauty. People fight to ensure that the murderers should not be
forgotten. But Schoenberg they forget.

1 53
 IX.

TH E S K I N :
M A L A PA R T E 's A R c H - N o v E L
1. Seeking a Form

TH E R E ARE WR ITERS, G R E AT WRITERS , WHO DA Z Z L E US

with the power of thei r m i nds, but who are ma rked with a kind
of curse : for what they have to say they never found an original
form that is l i n ked to thei r person a l ity as i nsepa rably as are
thei r ideas. I th ink for i nstance of the great French writers born
around the sta rt of the twentieth century; in my youth I adored
them a l l ; Sartre perhaps most. A cu rious thing: i n his essays
(his "ma n i festos" ) on l iterature he surprised me with his mis­
trust for the notion of the novel ; he d isl ikes the terms "novel ,"
"novel ist"; this word that is the prime i nd icator of a form, he
avoid s usi ng; he only spea ks of "prose," the "prose writer,"
someti mes the "prosateu r." He explains: he' ll acknowledge an
"aesthetic autonomy" for poetry, but not for prose: " Prose is in
essence utilitarian . . . the writer is a Jpeaker: he designates, dem­
onstrates, orders, rejects, questions, entreats, insults, persuades ,
insinuates." But in that case, how does the form tnatter ? He
repl ies : "It is a question of intent, of knowing \vhat you mean
to write about: about butterfl ies or about the Jewish cond ition.
A nd once you kno\v that, you decide how to \Vrite about it."
And, in fact, all Sartre's novels, important as they may be, a re
cha racteri zed by the eclecticism of thei r form.
Hearing the name Tolstoy, I instantly think of his two great
novels, which are like nothing else. When I say Sa rtre, Can1us,
 M I L A r-: K u r-: n E R A

Malrau x, it is not their novels that come fi rst to my mind but

thei r biographies, thei r polem ics a nd battles, thei r positions.

2. The Forerunner of ((the Engaged Writer}}

THE ITALI A N C u R z i o M ALA PA RTE , To w H o M I DE V O TE T HE

last pa rt of this book , belonged to Sart re's generation . I n the
Sartrian sense, but some twenty years ea rl ier, he was al ready
an "engaged ," or comm itted, writer. Rather, we should say, an
ea rly example of the phenomenon, for that famous Sartre term
was not yet in use, and Malapa rte had not yet written anything.
At fi fteen he was secreta ry of the local youth section of the
Ital ian republica n (leftist) pa rty ; when he was si xteen the 1 914
wa r broke out; h e left his home, crossed the French border, and
enl i sted i n a legion of volunteers to fight the Germans.
I don't mean to impute any greater i mporta nce to a n adoles­
cent's decisions than they a re due ; but stil l , Malaparte's behavior
was remarkable. And si ncere : carried out, need we note, fa r
from the media hoopla wh ich these days would i nevitably
attend any pol itica l act. Towa rd the end of the wa r, du ring a
fierce battle, he was gravely wounded by German flameth row­
ers. H is lu ngs would remai n forever damaged from the attack,
a nd his soul traumatized .
But why did I say that this student-soldier was a n adva nce
rnodel of the engaged writer? Later he would recount a men1ory:
the young Italian volunteers soon split into two rival groups : one

1 18
 ENCOU NTER

side cla i n1ed i n spi ration fron1 the great sold ier Ga ribald i , the
other from Pet ra rch, the great poet (who six hund red yea rs
ea rlier had lived in th is part of southern France "''here the vol­
unteers were musteri ng before leavi ng for the front) . In that
di spute a mong adolescents, Malapa rte l i ned up under the Pe­
t ra rch flag against the Ga riba ld ians. H is cotn tn itment, from
the start, was not that of a synd ical ist, a pol itical activist, but
rather that of a Shel ley, a Hugo, or a Mal raux.
After the war, as a young (very you ng) man, he joins Musso­
l i n i 's pa rty; sti l l a ffected by the 1nen1ory of the tn assacres, he
sees in Fascism the prom ise of a revolution that would sweep
away the world as he has known and detested it. He is a jour­
na list, awa re of everyth i ng goi ng on i n the world of pol itics;
he is \vorld ly, sci nti l lating, a nd seductive, but he is n1a i n ly a
lover of a rt and poetry. He sti l l prefers Pet ra rch to Ga riba ld i ,
and the people h e cherishes above all a re a rtists and writers.
And because Petra rch means more to hitn tha n Ga ribaldi,
his pol itical engagement is personal, extravaga nt, independent,
und iscipli ned , so that he soon fi nds hitnsel f in con flict with the
ruling powers (i n Russia, at that sa tne mon1ent, the Con1 n1u­
nist intel lectuals were in a si n1 ilar situation); he is even arrested
" for anti-Fascist activities," expel led fron1 the Pa rty, i n1prisoned
for a whi le, then sentenced to a long house a rrest. Eventual ly
relea sed , he retu rns to jou rna l i sn1 . Mobi li zed i n 1 940, a nd at­
tached to the Axis a rm ies, he sends hotne a rticles fron1 the
Russi an front that are soon (correctly) seen as anti-G ern1an a nd
anti-Fascist, and he spends another severa l tnonths i n prison .
 M I LA N K u N oERA

3. Finding a Form

TH R O U G H O U T HIS L I F E , M A L A PA RT E W ROT E A GOOD

many books-essays, polem ics, observations, memoi rs-al l

i ntell igent, bril liant, but all of which wou ld certai n ly be already
forgotten i f Kaputt a nd The Skin d id not exist. With Kaputt he
not only wrote a n important book, but he i nvented a form that
is a total ly new thing and that belongs to him alone.
W hat is this book ? At first glance it looks to be reportage
by a war correspondent. A n exceptional , even sensational, re­
portage, because as a journalist for Carriere della Sera and an
officer of the Ita l ian army, he moves through Nazi-occupied
Europe w ith the freedom of an u ndetectable spy. The politi­
cal world opens up to him, this bri l liant habitue of the salons :
i n Kaputt, he describes his conversations w ith Ita l ian statesmen
(in particular with Ciano, the foreign minister and Mussoli­
n i 's son-in-law), with German politicians (with Fran k , the
governor-general of Poland , who is orga ni zi ng massacres of
Jews, but a lso with H i m mler, whom he runs across naked i n a
Fin nish sauna), with the d ictators of the satell ite countries (for
instance, Ante Pavel ic, the boss of Croatia) , his u rbane social re­
lations accompan ied by observations on the rea l l i fe of ord inary
fol k (in Germany, Ukra i ne, Serbia, C roatia, Poland, Roman ia,
Finland).
Given the u nique nature of Malaparte's accounts, it is aston­
ish i ng that no historian of World Wa r I I has c;ited his experi­
ences or quoted the remarks of the pol iticians whom he let tal k

1 60
 ENCOU NTER

at length i n his book . It is strange, yes, but understand able :

for this reportage is something other than reportage; it is a liter­
ary work_ whose aesthetic intention is so strong, so apparent, that
the sensitive reader auto1natically excludes it from the context
of accounts brought to bea r by historians, journal ists, pol itical
analysts, memoirists.
The aesthetic i ntention of the book shows most st r i k ingly
i n its origina l ity of forn1 . To try to describe its architectu re : it is
triply d ivided : into parts, chapters, and sections. There are six
parts (each titled) ; each pa rt has several chapters (also titled);
and each chapter is d iv ided i nto sections (which are without
titles, sepa rated each from the next by only a blank line) .
These are the titles of the six pa rts : "Horses," "Rats,"
"Dogs," "Birds," "Reindeer," "Fl ies." These animals are pres­
ent both as material creatu res (the unforgettable scene from the
fi rst part: a hu ndred horses trapped in a frozen lake, with only
their dead heads jutting above the ice) but also (and especially)
as metaphors (in the second part the rats symbol izing Jews as
the Germans called them; or, in the sixth pa rt, the fl ies actually
proli ferati ng from the heat and the corpses but also symbol iz­
i ng the atmosphere of the war that will not end) .
The unfold ing of events is not organized as a chronological
succession of the reporter's experiences ; intentionally hetero­
geneous, the events of each part are set i n several h istorical
moments, in va rious places ; for i n sta nce, the fi rst part (Mala­
pa rte is i n Stock holm at an old friend 's house) comprises three
chapters : i n the first the two men reca l l thei r past l i fe i n Pa ris;
i n the second Malaparte (st i l l i n Stock hol m with his friend)

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 M I LA N K u N DE R A

describes h is experiences in the Ukraine blood-drenched by the

war; in the third a nd last chapter he describes his time in Fin­
land (wh ich is where he saw the h ideous spectacle of the horses'
heads jutting through the surface of a frozen lake) . Thus the
events of each part occur neither at the same date nor at the
same place ; but the part is u n i fied by a common atmosphere, a
common group fate (for example, i n the second pa rt, the fate of
the Jews), and above all a common aspect of human existence
(indicated by the animal metaphor of the part's title) .

4. The Disengaged Writer

TH E M A N US C R I PT O F KA PUTT, W RITTEN I N E X T R A O R D I N A RY

circumstances (much of it in the home of a peasant i n Ukraine

u nder Wehrmacht occupation) , was publ ished i n 1 944, even
before the end of the war, in an Italy just barely l iberated . The
Skin, written i m mediately afterward, during the first postwar
years, was published i n 1 949. The two books a re alike : the form
Malaparte i nvented in Kaputt also underl ies The Skin ; but how­
ever clear the k inship between the two books, more i mportant
is their d i fference :
On Kaputt's stage there very often appear actual historical
figures, which makes for some ambiguity: how are these pas­
sages to be understood ? as the account of a jou rnalist proud of
the precision and the honesty of h is testimony ? or as the fantasy
of an author concerned to put across h is own v ision of these his­
torical figu res, with the ful l freedom of a poet ?

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 ENCOU NTER

I n The Skin the ambiguity is gone : here no h istorical fig­

ures appear. There are stil l the great fashionable gatherings,
where the Italian aristocrats of Naples hobnob with American
army officers, but whether the names they bear are real or i n­
vented is unimportant. The American colonel Jack Hami lton
who accompan ies Malaparte throughout the whole book : d id
he actually exist ? I f he d id, was his name Jack Hamilton ? And
d id he say what Malaparte has him saying ? These questions are
of absolutely no i nterest whatever. For we have entirely quit the
territory of journal ists or memoirists.
Another big difference : the man who wrote Kaputt was an
"engaged writer," that is to say, confident that he knew where
to assign good and evil. He detested the German i nvaders as he
had detested them when he was eighteen years old, with flame­
th rowers i n their hands. How could he have felt neutral after
seeing the pogroms ? (About Jews : who else has written so shat­
tering an account of their daily persecution i n all the occupied
countries ? And in 1 944 at that, when no one was yet tal k ing
much about the subject a nd people sca rcely even knew any­
th i ng about it ! )
I n The Skin the wa r is not yet over, but its conclusion is al­
ready decided. The bombs are sti l l falling, but fal l i ng now on
a different Europe. Yesterday no one had to ask who was the
executioner a nd who the victim. Now, suddenly, good and evil
have veiled their faces ; the new world is stil l barely known ; u n­
k nown ; enigmatic; the person telling the tale is su re of only one
thi ng: he is certai n he can be certain of nothi ng. His ignorance
becomes wisdom . I n Kaputt during those drawing-room chats

1 63
 M I LAN K u N DERA

with Fascists or collaborators, Malaparte deployed a constant

chill i rony to mask his own thoughts, wh ich were thus all the
clearer to his readers. In The Skin his speech is neither ch ill nor
clea r. It is stil l i ron ica l , but the irony is desperate, often over­
wrought; he exaggerates, he contradicts himself; with his words
he does himself harm and he harms others ; it is a doleful ma n
speak ing. Not an "engaged " writer. A poet.

5. Composing The Skin

As DIFFERENT F ROM THE TR IPL E DIVISION OF KA P U T T

( into pa rts, chapters, sections), the d ivision of The Skin i s only
a double one : there are no parts, only the sequence of twelve
chapters, each with its own title and made up of several unti­
tled sections sepa rated from one another by a bla n k line. Thus
the composition is simpler, the narration swifter, and the whole
book a quarter shorter than the preceding one. As i f the slightly
plump body of Kaputt had undergone a slenderizing regimen.
And a beautifying one. I ' l l try to illustrate this beauty with
chapter 6 ( "The Black Wind "), an especially fascinating one,
wh ich contains five sections:
The first, superbly short, consists of a si ngle pa ragraph of
four sentences and develops a si ngle onei ric image of the " black
wind " that, " li ke a bli nd person tentatively feeling his way,"
moves th rough the world, a messenger of m isfortune.
The second section describes a recol lection : in wa r-torn

1 64
 ENCOU NTER

Ukraine, two yea rs before the book 's present time, Mala parte is
rid i ng his horse along a road lined on either side with a row of
trees, where Jews are nailed up and hang cruci fied, waiting to
die. Malaparte hears their voices asking hin1 to kill them, to cut
short thei r suffering.
The third section also recounts a recol lection ; this one goes
back yet further i nto the past, to Lipari, the island where before
the war Malaparte had been deported : it is the story of his dog
Febo. "Never have I loved a woman, a brother, a friend as I
loved Febo." The dog vvas with him over the two last years
of his island detention, and it went with him to the ma inland
upon his release.
The fourth section conti nues the story of Febo, who disap­
pea rs one day. After arduous sea rchi ng, Malaparte learns that
the animal was snatched by a hoodlum and sold to a hospital
for medical research. He finds him there, "stretched out on his
back , his bel ly open , a probe bu ried in his liver." No n1oans
come from his n1outh because, before operati ng, the doctors
routinely cut the vocal cords in all the dogs. Out of syn1pathy
for Malaparte, the doctor gives Febo a fatal i njection .
The fifth section retu rns to the present ti1ne of the book:
Malaparte's accompanyi ng the An1erican anny as it advances
on Rome. A sold ier is hideously wounded , his bel ly torn open,
his i ntesti nes coi l i ng out onto his thighs. H is sergeant i nsists
that the boy be transported to a hospita l. Ma lapa rte protests
violently : the hospital is very far off, the jeep journey wou ld be
long and would cause the sold ier terrible su ffering; he should

1 65
 M I LAN Ku NDERA

be kept where he is and allowed to die without knowing he is

dying. In the end the sold ier does die, and the sergeant pun ches
Malaparte fu l l in the face : "It's you r fau lt he d ied , died like a
dog ! " The doctor who comes to register the death shakes Mala­
parte's hand : " I thank you i n his mother's name."
Even though each of these five sections is set in a different
time, a d i fferent place, they are all perfectly l inked together.
The first section develops the metaphor of a black wind, a n
atmosphere that w i l l cover the whole chapter. I n the second
section that wind moves through the Ukrainian landscape. I n
the third, on the island of Lipa ri, the wind i s always present, as
an obsession \Vith death "always pro\v l i ng around men i nvis­
ibly, tacitu rn and suspicious." For death is everywhere i n this
chapter. Death, and man's attitude toward it, an attitude at once
cowa rdly, hypocritical , ignorant, powerless, awkward, helpless.
The Jews cruci fied to the trees moan. Febo l ies mute on the d is­
section table because his vocal cords have been cut. Malaparte
teeters at the brink of madness, incapable of killing the Jews to
end their su ffering. He does fi nd the cou rage to give Febo his
death. The theme of euthanasia reappea rs i n the last section of
the chapter, where Mala pa rte refuses to prolong the misery of a
morta lly wounded sold ier, a nd the sergeant pu nishes him with
a punch.
This whole chapter, so heterogeneous, is marvelously uni­
fied by the consistent atmosphere, the same themes (death, the
animal, eutha nasia), the repetition of the sa me metaphors and
the same words (out of which comes a melody that transports
us with its inexhaustible breath) .

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6. The Skin and Modernity in the Novel

IN HIS P R E FA C E TO THE FR ENCH EDITION OF A VO LU M E

of Malaparte essays, the author cal ls Kaputt and The Skin

"major novels by this enfant terrible." Novels ? A re they, actu­
ally ? Yes, I do agree. Even though I know that the form of The
Skin is unlike what most readers consider to be a novel. Such a
case is actually far from u nusual: there a re many great novels
that, at their bi rth, a re unl i ke the com mon ly held idea of the
novel . And so ? Isn't a great novel great precisely because it does
not repeat what a lready existed ? The great novelists themselves
have often been surprised by the odd form of the th ing they've
w ritten, and they would rather avoid useless a rguments over
the gen re of thei r book . Sti l l , i n the case of The Skin the d i f­
ference is radical, depending on whether the reader approaches
it as a piece of jou rnalism that wi l l broaden his knowledge
of history, or as a literary work that will en rich him with its
beauty and its understanding of mankind.
And then this : it is d i fficult to grasp the value (the orig­
i na l ity, the newness, the cha rm) of a work of a r t without
seei ng it i n the context of that particula r a rt's history. And I
fi nd it sign i ficant that everyth i ng about The Skin's fonn that
seems to contrad ict the very idea of the novel should a lso re­
flect the new climate i n the aesthetic of the novel as it took
shape i n the twentieth centu r y, i n contrast to its norn1 s i n the
century before. For i nstance : a l l the great modern novel ists
had a somewhat distant relation to story in a novel, no longer

1 67
 M I LA N KuNDERA

consideri ng it to be the i nd ispensable basis for ensur i ng u nity

in a work.
So the strik i ng feature of The Skin s form is that the compo­
'

sition does not rely on a story, on a ny causal sequence of actions.

The present time of the novel is shaped by its "starting point" (in
October 1 943 the American army enters Naples) a nd its "end
point" (in the sum mer of 1 944 Jimmy bids Malaparte farewell
before h is final departure for the States) . Between those two d i­
viders the All ied army marches from Naples to the Apenn i ne
mountains. Everything that occurs withi n that span of time is
marked by an extraordinary heterogeneity (of places, of times, of
situations, of memories, of characters); and I emphasize this: that
heterogeneity, new i n the h istory of the novel , i n no way wea k­
ens the unity of the composition; the same breath blows through
each of the twelve chapters, forming them into a single u niverse
with the same atmosphere, the same themes, the sa me cha rac­
ters, the same i mages, the same metaphors, the same refrains.
The same decor: Naples: the place where the book starts and
where it ends and the place whose memory remains omn ipres­
ent; the moon : it shi nes above all the landscapes of the book:
i n Ukra i ne it illuminates the crucified Jews nailed to the trees ;
hanging over settlements of wandering tramps, "as a rose does,
it perfu mes the sky l ike a garden"; "ecstatic a nd wond rously
d istant," it l ights the mountains of Tivoli ; "enormous, dripping
blood ," it gazes upon a battlefield covered with bodies. Words
made i nto refrai n s : the plague: it appears in Naples on the same
day as the American army, as if the l iberators had brought it
along as a gift to the l iberated ; later on it becomes a metaphor for

1 68
 ENCOUNTER

the massive denunciations spreadi ng l ike the worst pandemic;

or, at the very sta rt, the flag: on orders from their k ing, the
Italians flu ng it " heroical ly" i nto the mud, then raised it up as
their new flag, and then again threw it down and again raised
it up, with huge blasphemous laughter, and towa rd the end of
the book, as if i n answer to that early scene, a human body is
crushed by a tank, flattened and brandished " li ke a flag."
I could go on quoting ad infinitum the words, the metaphors,
the themes that return as repetitions, variations, responses, and
thereby create the novel's unity, but I pause over a further charm
of this composition, which purposely abstains from story : Jack
Hamilton d ies, and Malaparte k nows that from now on, in the
m idst of h is own people, in his own country, he will forever
feel a lone. And yet Jack's death is i ndicated (no more than in­
d icated, we never even learn how or where he d ies) by a single
phrase in a long paragraph that talks about other things as well .
I n any novel built on a story l ine, the death of such an i mportant
character would be described at length, and would probably
constitute the conclusion of the book . But, c u r iously, because
of that very brevity, that reticence, that delicacy, because of
the absence of any descript ion at all, Jack 's death becomes un­
bearably movi ng.

7. The Retreat of Psychology

WH E N A F A I R LY S TA B L E SOCI ETY M OV E S A LONG AT A

fai rly slow pace, a man may seek to d istinguish h imself from

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his fel lows (who so sadly seem all a l i ke), by payi ng great at­
tention to his own small psychological pa rticula rities, the only
thing that affords him the pleasu re of rel ish ing his singula rity,
wh ich he hopes is ini mitable. But the 1 914 war, that gigantic
absu rd massacre, set Eu rope off on a new epoch in wh ich his­
tory, i mperative and avid, rea rs up before a man and seizes hold
of him. Henceforth men wi l l be shaped pri mari ly from the out­
side. And I emphasize : these jolts from the exterior will be no
less su rprising, no less puzzli ng, no less difficult to understa nd,
with all their consequences for men's ways of acting and react­
i ng, than the secret wounds h idden deep i n the unconscious;
a nd no less fasci nati ng for a novelist. In fact, only a novelist will
be capable of graspi ng, l i ke no one else, this shi ft that the ti mes
have brought to hu ma n existence. A nd for that reason it is sel f­
evident that the novelist will have to ring some changes i n the
current form of the novel.
The cha racters in The Skin are perfectly real, a nd yet never
i ndividual i zed by biograph ical accounts. W hat do we know
about Jack Hami lton, Mala pa rte's best friend ? That he taught
in an A merican university, he has a loving fa m i l iarity w ith
Europea n culture, a nd at present feels disconcerted by a Eu rope
he cannot recognize. That's all. No information about his family,
his private l i fe. None of what a n i neteenth-centu ry novel ist
wou ld consider i nd ispensable for making a cha racter real and
"a live." One could say the same about all the cha racters i n The
Skin (i nclud ing Malaparte as a cha racter-there is not a si ngle
word about his persona l, private past) .
The withd rawa l from psychology : Kafka proclai med this

1 70
 ENCOUNTER

in his notebooks. I n fact, what do we learn of K .'s psychological

roots, about his childhood , h is parents, his loves ? As l ittle as we
do about Jack Hamilton's intimate h istory.

8. Raving Beauty

IN T H E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U R Y, I T WA S TA K E N F O R G R A N T E D :

whatever happened in a novel had to be plausible. I n the twen­

tieth century, this rule lost its force ; from Kafka to Carpentier
or Ga rcfa Marquez, novel ists grew increasingly sensitive to the
poetry of the improbable. Mala parte (who was not an ad mirer of
Kafka and d id not know either Carpentier or Ga rcfa Ma rquez)
succun1bed to that same temptation.
Once again I recall the scene where, early one night, Mala­
parte is mov i ng on horseback beneath a double fi le of trees;
he hears voices above his head and as the moon rises he realizes
that these are crucified Jews . . . . Is this true ? Is it fantasy ? Fan­
tasy or not, it is unforgettable. And I think of Alejo Ca rpentier
who, in Pa ris in the 1 920s, sha red the Surrealists' passion for
delirious imagination, joined their conquest of the "marvelous,"
but who twenty years later in Caracas was seized with doubts :
what used to enchant him he now saw as n1ere "poetic routine,"
like a "conjuror's trick "; he d istanced hin1sel f from Parisian Sur­
real ism not to return to the old real ism but because he thought
he had found a different "marvelous," a truer one, grou nded i n
reality, the real ity of Latin America where everything looked
improbable. I imagine that Malapa rte experienced son1eth i ng

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 M I LA N Ku N DERA

s i m i la r; he too had loved the Sur real ists (in the journal he
,

fou nded i n 1 937 he publ ished h is translations of Elu a rd and

Aragon), which d id not cause him to follow them but may have
made him more sensitive to the somber beauty of real ity gone
ravi ng mad, fu l l of strange encounters " between an umbrel la
and a sewing machine."
I n fact such an encounter opens The Skin : "The plague
broke out in Naples on the first of October 1 943, the very day
when the Allied armies entered that unhappy city as l ibera­
tors." And toward the end of the book, i n the ninth chapter,
"The Firestorm ," a similar sur real encounter takes on the pro­
portions of a w idespread del i rium : all through Holy Week the
Germans bombard Naples, a young girl is killed and laid out on
a table i n a castle, and at the same time, with a d readful racket,
Vesuvius starts to spit out lava as it had "never done since the day
when Herculaneum and Pompei were shrouded a live i n their
tomb of ashes." The volcanic eruption sets off madness i n men
and nature both : clouds of small birds take refuge in the tab­
ernacles around the statuettes of saints, women force open the
bordel lo doors and d rag out the naked whores by thei r hai r,
the roads are strewn with dead bodies, their faces encased i n a
shell of white ash , "as i f they had an egg instead of a head," and
nature never stops rampagtng. . . .
I n another passage of the book, the i mprobable i s more
grotesque than it is horrible : the sea a round Naples i s riddled
with mines that make fishing impossible. To provide for a ban­
quet the American generals must go gather the d inner fish from
the fumous aquarium. But when General Cork plans a dinner in

1 72
 ENCOU NTER

honor of Mrs. Flat, an i n1portant political envoy from America,

there is only one fish left in the Naples aquarium: the Siren , "a
very ra re exa mple of the species of 'si renoid s' wh ich , because
of their nea rly hu tnan form, gave rise to the ancient legend of
the Sirens ." W hen the fish platter is set out on the table, there
is consternation . "I hope you won't force me to eat that . . . that
poor girl ! " cries M rs . Flat, aghast. Embarrassed , the general
orders "that horrible th i ng" ta ken away, but that does not sat­
isfy Colonel Brown, the army chaplai n : he orders the servants
to ta ke the fish away i n a si lver coffi n carried on a stretcher,
and he goes along with them to guarantee a Christian bu rial .
In U k raine, i n 1 94 1 , a Jew was crushed by the tracks of a
tan k; he became "a carpet made of human skin"; some Jews
start to peel it out of the dust; then "one of them stuck the tip
of a shovel i nto the side of the head and set out marching along
the road waving this flag." That scene is described in chapter 1 0
(which i s i n fact titled "The Flag" ) and i s im med iately fol lowed
by a variation, this one set in Rotne, near the Capitol : a n1an is
shouting for joy at the arrival of the American tanks; he sl ips ;
he fal ls ; a tank rolls over h i tn ; he is laid on a bed ; all that's left
of him is "a sk in in the shape of a tnan"; "the only flag worthy
to fly from the tower of the Capitol ."

9. A New Europe In Statu Nascend i

THE �E w E u R o PE As IT E M E RGE D F RO M Wo R L D WA R I I
is caught by The Skin i n con1plete authenticity, that is to say

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 M I L A N K u N D E RA

caught by a gaze that has not yet been revised (or censored) by
later considerations a nd that therefore shows it gleam i ng with
the newness of its bi rth i nstant. I 'm rem i nded of Nietzsche's
idea : the essence of a phenomenon is revealed i n the instant of
tts genests.
. .

The new Europe is born of an enormous defeat unparalleled

in its h istory; for the fi rst time, Eu rope has been vanquished,
Europe as Europe, the whole of Europe. Fi rst vanquished by
the madness of its own evi l inca rnated i n Nazi Germany,
then l iberated by America on the one hand, by Russia on the
other. Liberated and occupied. I say this without i rony. These
words-both of them-are accurate. And in their juncture l ies
the un ique nature of the situation . That resisters (pa rtisans) had
fought the Germans eve rywhere made no difference to the es­
sential fact: no country i n Eu rope ( Eu rope from the Atlantic
to the Baltic) was liberated by its own doing. (No country at all ?
Wel l , Yugoslavia. By its own a rmy of partisans. Which is why
Serb cities had to be botnba rded for many long weeks in 1 999 :
in order to impose, a posteriori, the "vanquished " status on even
that pa rt of Europe. )
The liberators occupied Europe, and the change \Vas im­
med iately clear: the Europe that on ly the day before sti l l (quite
natu rally, qu ite in nocently) considered its own history, its cul­
ture, to be a model for the enti re world now felt ho\v sn1all it
was . Here was Ame rica, sh i n i ng, om n iprese nt ; now reth i n k­
ing and reshapi ng relations with it becan1e the pri n1e task for
Eu rope. Malapa rte saw that and described it without clai ming
to pred ict Eu rope's pol itical future. What fasci nated him \Vas

1 74
 ENCOU NTER

the new way of being Eu ropean, the new way offeeling Eu ro­
pean, wh ich from then on would be determined by America's
ever more intense presence. I n The Skin that new way of being
emerges from the ga l lery of portraits-brief, succi nct, often
d roll-of the Americans i n Italy at the ti n1e.
No position is ta ken, either positive or negative, i n these
sketches, wh ich are often wicked , often fu l l of sympathy : M rs.
Flat's arrogant id iocy; Chaplain Brown's sweet dumbness ; the
l ikeable simpl icity of General Cork who, for the opening dance
of a grand bal l , i nstead of honoring one of the great ladies of
Naples, ta kes as his pa r tner the coat clerk 's pretty daughter;
J i m my's friend l y, appeal i ng v u lga rity; and, of cou rse, Jack
Hamilton , a true friend , a beloved friend .
Because at the time America had never lost a \va r, and be­
cause it was a country of believers, its citizens saw its victories
as divine will confirn1 ing their own pol itica l and mora l certai n­
ties. A Eu ropean, weary and skeptical, defeated a nd ashamed ,
could easily be dazzled by the wh iteness of those teeth, that vir­
tuous wh iteness "that every America n , as he steps stn i l i ng into
his grave, projects l i ke a final salute to the world of the living."

10. Memory Turned into a Battlefield

0N T H E G R E A T S TA I R C A S E O F A N E W LY L I B E R AT E D FL O R E N -
tine chu rch, a group of Com tnu nist pa rtisans is executing sorne
you ng (even very you ng) Fascists, one by one. A scene that a n­
nounces a rad ical tu rn in the history of Eu ropea n l i fe : the victor

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having d rawn defin itive and untouchable frontiers, there will

be no more slaughters between European nations; "wa r was
dying now, and massacres a mong Ita l ians were begi n n i ng";
hatreds withd raw to the i nterior of nations ; but even there the
struggle cha nges its nature : the goal of the fight is no longer
the future, the next political system (the victor has already de­
cided what the future would look l i ke), but the past; the new
European war will play out on ly on the battlefield of memory.
I n The Skin, when the A merican a rmy is already occupy­
i ng nor thern I taly, partisans execute a loca l i n former i n total
secu rity. They bury him i n a meadow and, as a monument,
they leave his foot, still in its shoe, sticking up from the ea rth.
Malaparte sees this and he protests, but in vain ; the partisans are
delighted at leaving the collaborator as a ridiculous laughingstock
in a wa rn ing for the futu re. And today we know: the further
Eu rope moved away from the end of the war, the more it pro­
claimed it a moral duty to keep past crimes unforgotten . And as
ti me went on the cou rts were pun ishing older and older people,
whole regi ments of denouncers were beating the bushes of the
forgotten, and the battlefield stretched i nto the cemeteries.
I n The Skin, Mala parte describes Hamburg a fter the Ameri­
ca ns dropped phosphorus bombs. To quench the fi re devouring
them , the in habita nts were fl i nging themselves into the canals
that crisscross the city. But the fi res drowned by the water im­
med iately fla red up aga i n in the a i r, so people had to keep
plu ngi ng thei r heads u nder aga in and again ; this situation went
on for days, during which "thousa nds of heads would emerge
from the water, bl ink their eyes, open thei r mouths, speak."

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Another scene where the reality of wa r surpassed the plau­

sible. And I ask myself why the managers of men1ory have not
made that horror (that dark poetry of horror) i nto a sacred
metnory ? The memory war rages on only an1ong the defeated.

11. As Background, Eternity, Animals, Time, the Dead

"I N EV E R LOVED A WOMAN, A B ROT H E R , A FRIEND AS I

loved Febo." A m id so much human suffering, the story of this
dog is fa r from being a mere episode, an i nterlude in the m idst
of a d rama. The A merican army's entry i nto Naples is only
a brief second in history, whereas animals have accompan ied
human life since time i mmemorial. Faci ng his neighbor, man is
never free to be hitnself; the power of the one lin1its the freedon1
of the other. Facing an a n i mal, man is who he is. H is cruelty is
free. The relation between man and anin1al constitutes an eter­
nal background to human l i fe, a m i rror (a d readful m i rror) that
wil l never leave it.
The ti me span of the action in The Skin is short, but ma n's
infi nitely long history is always present i n it. It is th rough the
antique city of Naples that the A merica n army, the n1ost 1nodern
army of all, enters Europe. The cruelty of a supern1odern wa r
plays out before the background of the most ancient, archaic
cruelties. The world that has changed so rad ical ly makes clea r,
at the same time, what remains sadly uncha ngeable, uncha nge­
ably huma n .
And the dead . In peacefu l times they only n1odestly i nterrupt

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our tranquil l ives. But in the period described i n The Skin, they
a re not modest; they are active ; they a re everywhere; undertak­
ers haven't enough vehicles to car ry them away, the dead stay on
in the apartments, on the beds, they decompose, stink, they a re
in the way; they i nvade conversations, memory, sleep : "I hated
these corpses. They were the foreigners, the only, the real for­
eigners i n the common homeland of all the l iving."
The war's closing moments bring out a truth that is both
fundamental and ban a l , both eternal and disregarded : com­
pared with the living, the dead have an overwhelming numerical
superior ity, not j ust t he dead of this wa r's end but a l l the dead
of a l l times, t he dead of the past, t he dead of the futu re ; con­
fident i n their superiority, they mock us, they mock this l ittle
island of time we l ive in, this tiny time of the new Europe, they
force us to grasp all its insigni ficance, all its transience . . . .

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