Once more, with feeling: Updike on Kundera
[NOTE: This is a repeat (slightly edited) of a previous post. It seems timely, as I think you’ll see as you read it.
Maybe it’s always timely.]
I’ve quoted the following excerpt before, because it’s one of my very favorites. It’s from the Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
I first came across The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in an excerpt published in The New Yorker around the time of the book’s English publication, 1980. The first paragraph of the book in its New Yorker version hit me with great force as soon as I read it, which is unusual for me. I understood immediately that I was in the presence of brilliance of a particular and unusual sort, a writer who said things in a way that resonated deeply with me. The work managed to mix political and philosophical observations with a fanciful fictional narrative (not exactly a novel but rather a series of linked and unconventional stories) all told in the idiosyncratic and blunt voice of an exceedingly perceptive and reflective author.
I’ll leave it to another perceptive and reflective author—John Updike, in his original review of the book—to describe it:
This book…is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out…
…[T]he mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history. Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among that moiety of Czechs–“the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half”–who cheered the accession of the Communists to power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new regime: “And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intelligent radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down.”
Kundera’s prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communists idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself—the most interesting political question of the century–why a plausible and necessarily redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom? Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare?
The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements; and we it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy cost to his life, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us 35 years ago.
That probably tells you more about Updike’s politics and quality of mind (see much more here) than about Kundera. However, I actually think that, although Kundera doesn’t directly spell out the answer to that “most interesting political question of the century,” the answer is inherent in everything he writes. In fact, come think of it, the answer is even subtly implied in that paragraph I quoted at the outset of this post, and it resides in that single word “forced.” In the inevitably vain effort to realize a dream that goes against human nature and reality, one must force compliance or abandon the dream. That necessity for force appeals to the worst in human nature and ultimately attracts the worst human beings rather than the best.
What it really says about Updike is that, like most book reviewers, he hasn’t actually read the book (see Tolkien’s sarcastic remark about that habit). He doesn’t know squat about the situation, the dilemma, or much else. Typical of a class of American intellectual. stands to Updike’s work like sheep to humans.
Time for me to read the book. As I haven’t read the book, no point in my commenting on either Updike of Kundera.
jdrax:
It might be more persuasive if you didn’t just baldly state your opinion, but defended it with reasons.
I have some quibbles with what Updike wrote – and stated one of them. But I see no evidence that he didn’t read the book.
Also, if you followed the link in the post on the phase “see much more here,” you would see a great deal of evidence that Updike was certainly not typical of “a certain class of American intellectuals.”
“In the inevitably vain effort to realize a dream that goes against human nature and reality, one must force compliance or abandon the dream. That necessity for force appeals to the worst in human nature and ultimately attracts the worst human beings rather than the best.” – Neo
In the steps of F. Hayek, C.S. Lewis, and other sane observers of the insanity of humanity.
And see what Artflgr quoted from Spiked Online about British dystopia here:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/04/06/boris-johnson-is-in-intensive-care/#comment-2488549
“In the inevitably vain effort to realize a dream that goes against human nature and reality, one must force compliance or abandon the dream. That necessity for force appeals to the worst in human nature and ultimately attracts the worst human beings rather than the best.” – Neo
Could be why it used to be called the dream that would not die..
and the book you wont read is the dream we lost…
Force exerted in the service of hysteria — what’s wrong with this picture?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/woman-fined-200-going-drive-amid-pandemic/
How is she gonna infect anyone with no one else in the car?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/colorado-man-handcuffed-front-6-year-old-daughter-park-violating-social-distancing-order-video/
Park sign said no gatherings above 4 people – it was the man, his wife, and daughter (who all happen to live with each other when not playing tee-ball in the park). Police did not use masks or gloves, and made him sit in their car – when was it last disinfected?
And yet —
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/burglaries-75-new-york-city-seattle-houston-san-francisco-deal-rising-crime-amid-lockdown-orders/
SOOO – it’s better to break into a store than to play with your kids.
Got it.
How is it that we can more or less agree that the sun rises somewhere in the east and sets somewhere in the west, but about anything the slightest bit less concrete, it’s as if we have entirely separate lexicons, entirely different sets of facts?
A YouTube short my husband put on today in an effort to think about anything besides The Plague – it was a “history in a couple of minutes” piece in which the presenter completely unironically held up Marx as a visionary whose vision just hadn’t been successfully achieved yet. It was the usual thing – “it hasn’t ever really been tried.” And I wanted to crash through the screen and shriek like a banshee at the young tousle-headed fellow: “How many people are you willing to starve, neglect, freeze, or directly murder in order to get it right, you little cretin?!!”
Wanting to be fair is so powerful that it easily transforms into wanting equal outcomes==>forcing, communism, et al.
Egalitarian theory is the idea that all humans are equal and worthy in status. And what is wrong with that notion?
I believe this comes from our animal roots. Can you imagine how the tribe had to follow the youngish strong man in our life in the forest and savanna and ice age? No dissension or nonconformity allowed or the tribe expires. Thousands of years of orthodoxy to the tribe, and those genes that were heterodox did not survive. Socialism is seductive because it is in our old genes. It does work but only with a dictator.
“I searched through rebellion, drugs, diet, mysticism, religion, intellectualism and much more, only to begin to find that truth is basically simple and feels good, clear and right.” Chick Corea
“Truth is simple… But seldom ever seen…” Linda Ronstadt – Simple Man, Simple Dream
Any ‘dream’ in fundamental conflict with human nature and reality is at base, in opposition to God and his creation. Which is why the left is forced to declare that God does not exist, for then… “everything is permitted”.
Not to be too technical, but the earth rotates east to west. That lazy ole Sun turns not at all.
Dear Neo, I wasn’t trying to be persuasive. I was registering a reaction. As politely as I could, without trying to give offense. Sorry if I offended you, I won’t post again.
parker,
The sun also rotates on its axis. About 27 of our days at its equator. 31 of our days at its poles.
Regarding dreams and human nature; I have become a firm believer that we all create a narrative to fit what we see, how we behave and react and fit it to what happens to us and around us. The closer we fit that narrative to actual truth, to actual reality, the more at peace we will be. Maybe “at peace” isn’t the exact right term. “Comfortable?”
I see so many people whose narrative is vastly different from reality and they spend their days in a rage, trying to make the world conform to the narrative.
In my corner of the world abortion centers are open, essential activity. Churches are closed, non essential. Protesters are not allowed to congregate outside the abortion centers.
The churches “closed” part is a bit tacit. I know of no churches holding public services (many have gone on-line), but many are leaving their doors open for folks to come to pray if they choose, assuming that will be sporadic, and in small numbers. No worshipping communally.
I happen to belong to a faith whose leader garnered infamy for refusing government health orders to worship among lepers.
I think we may see some tests of the current system Easter Sunday.
“The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” sounds right up my alley. I would like to read it one day, but I’m not optimistic that will happen.
When young (4 – 12) I was a voracious reader. Almost all books I intentionally read were fiction, mostly the classics. I read anything I could get my hands on, so I also read a lot of “fact;” newspapers, Reader’s Digests, biographies, histories (especially U.S. history)…
Around age 13 I developed an intense interest in science and through roughly age 45 (or so) my reading has skewed about 95% fact, 5% fiction.
But now I find I sit and read books less and less. I’ve greatly enjoyed the handful of fiction works I have read the past, several years, but the idea of sitting and reading a book was almost always appealing to me, and now it rarely is.
I hope this is a phase, I miss reading books for pleasure, however, I feel it is not. Something seems to have changed in me, but I don’t know what it is, nor how to “fix” it.
“east to west”
**That’s a bit vague spatial frame-wise**, said Ernst Mach. Suppose we view the [daily] rotation from high above the north pole? Then earth turns counterclockwise (as we conventionally call that motion). From above the south pole? Then earth turns clockwise.
Ol’ Sol? Hurtles through his own orbit along the galactic local space with his own rotational motion as he trips the [other. . . photonic] light fantastic. We’re along for that ride, as well as the more general galactic motion toward merger with Andromeda, among others. Wheeeeeee!
a song too:
The Dream That Would Not Die
Shirley Murdock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_slOINkY2vI
Trouble often comes, to destroy the dream within
It’s hard to find a friend that wants to see you win
Trouble often comes, to destroy what we believe
But the dreams lives on inside of me
Growing Strong in spite of me
Through it all my dream will survive
God gave me
A dream that would not die
God cannot lie
God showed me
A dream that would not die
The dream cannot die
Joseph dream a dream
(Joseph dream a dream)
That set him apart from men
A dream that gave him courage
(Courage)
To overcome his every sin
(Joseph dreamed a dream that he had honor and power)
And when they laughed at what he said, he found the strength to raise his head
And through it all, the dream it still survived
God gave me
A dream that would not die
God cannot lie
God showed me
A dream that would…
The Dems flirt with an old fantasy
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/pruden062918.php3
[end of a long article]
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t trying to slip into office as a socialist in disguise. She’s serving up the real socialist dish: She wants to abolish immigration enforcement at once, have the government offer single-payer Medicare-for-all, declare housing a “right,” and invoke a radical criminal-justice “reform” to empty the prisons. She cites the campaign slogan of the British Labor Party with approval, “In the wealthiest nation in the world, working families shouldn’t have to struggle.” It’s the dream that will not die, but can never become more than a dream.
utopos the place that can not be…
MAD MEN Utopos, the place that cannot be 1 06
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9CM9Ffxzk
Neo, this is one of the really important issues. The “unity” of the circle dance. Many folk do get similar feelings at rock concerts and sports events, but far more limited.
“together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.”
This can barely be done in marriage, the joining of two into one, into a single dance, into a combined soul. But in many teams, with the single purpose of perfect performance, there is an attempt to achieve it, and even comes close.
Because of total agreement on the team’s purpose.
Life is not like that. Tho some voluntary monasteries/ communes can work (perhaps only for celibates?). Even voluntary socialism, when children are added, becomes unstable — the kids did NOT volunteer. And some want out. All non-voluntary socialisms start out as failures, even if it’s not so clear at first — since they all start out in violating some individual human rights.
How can so many still believe it, still “imagine” it could be true. (Great songs help! sadly)
Dnaxy: Wanting to be fair is so powerful that it easily transforms into wanting equal outcomes==>forcing, communism, et al.
Wanting life to be fair.
Life is not fair. Life is unfair. But unfair does not mean unjust. After an injustice, there might be some justice possible. But there is no justice for mere unfairness.
Health.
Citizenship.
Parents.
Handicaps.
IQ.
Looks – beauty. (one of the biggest unfair issues in many lives, often leading to unjust actions.)
Money from family.
People are different, NOT “equal”, but they should be “treated equal under the law”. Meaning, same bad behavior gets same punishment — which reduces the amount of bad behavior.
Unfair is not an injustice that any justice system can rectify.
Rufus T. Firefly:
I seldom read books these days, at least not complete ones, although I used to. I think it’s a combination of age, the internet, and the fact that a lot of books these days just aren’t that good – and are way too long.
But now and then one catches my fancy, and I read the whole thing like in the olden days.
My suggestion is to try the book and see whether it engages you. That book is easier than most to read, because it’s more like a series of stories. And it’s not especially long. You might find it quite engaging. Or, if you don’t, just don’t finish it.
jdrax:
You didn’t offend me, you just wrote something I thought was quite extreme and unsupported.
Why would you think you need to go away? People are going to disagree with you and challenge you (or anyone else) at times.
neo,
Thanks for the advice, but my issue regards desire. Used to be, on the rare times I would come home and find no wife and children I would instantly throw on some work out clothes and run or bike ride, or practice piano or grab a book.
I have more opportunity now that my kids are sort-of grown, but the impetus is rarely there.
Maybe a little in line with your suggestion, when I do read I have become a skimmer. For most of my life I made it a point to read every single word of anything I started. “Sister Carrie” is the only book I recall ever not finishing until about a decade ago. If reading a cartoon in the newspaper I even made it a point to read every, “Pow! Sock-O!” or parenthetical. I think the Internet taught me to skim and even when I read books I enjoy I do that now.
In February I read Crichton’s, “State of Fear*” and finished it quickly. “O.K., this paragraph is setting up a love interest between these two characters, got it, on to the next.” “O.K., this paragraph’s purpose is to tip us off that this character will be tested later, and prove resourceful. Got it, on to the next.” I do that often when I read now (even some of the comments here 🙂 ), but I just read books much less often. And I genuinely miss it. Books used to be one of the greatest joys in my life.
*Boy, until typing that I hadn’t even realized how apt it is that I chose to read that book while Wuhan was in lockdown and the U.S. was a few weeks from descending into the same. Dr. Michael Crichton would be fascinated by current events.
Tom Grey,
I guess dancing emplies music, but I find music itself can instigate the effect you define. I think most of us can relate to being in a small club, listening to a band, and sensing instances when a musician plays a solo that is in complete congruence with the “vibe” of the room and his or her backing musicians.
I find it more common with free form music, like jazz, blues or rock, but it can happen with written and rehearsed music also. There are accounts of patrons fainting to Liszt, Beethoven and Mozart, just as teens did when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan!
Rufus T. Firefly:
I’ve always been somewhat of a skimmer, and it’s only gotten more so with age. So, I hear you.
But – and of course you don’t have to do this – I suggest you give the book a try. It is very unusual, written in an unusual style. It certainly held my interest. To whet your interest (or kill it, perhaps), please see these quotes from the book.
A friend turned me on to Kundera, who I had not previously read…she was particularly fond on this passage:
“We all need someone to look at us. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers.”
“That necessity for force appeals to the worst in human nature and ultimately attracts the worst human beings rather than the best.”
I just wrote that down in my treasured book of collected quotations I’ve been compiling for 30 years. Thanks.
I first read Laughter & Forgetting in my mid 20s while living/working in London in the early ’90s, having read The Unbearable Lightness of Being earlier. Laughter & Forgetting was so bracing, particularly a year later when I spent the summer backpacking through parts of Europe I’d not yet seen, places such as Eastern Germany, Hungary, Czech’ia and Poland. The Wall had fallen only five years earlier and the shock of social dislocation was still brutally evident, the lacerations deep and septic. The amalgam of distrust, if not paranoia, and utter confusion was palpable in the cities and the smallest towns I visited.
The passage regarding The Circle is a favorite of mine from the book. It made clear to me how collectivism seduced the naive, and the useful idiots. Those three years before I returned to the U.S., and the couple afterward at the University of Chicago, opened the entire world to me and caused me completely to replace my inherited politics with my own. What a gift in all respects.
I so enjoy your writing and thinking. Thank you.
David Foster: thank you for that quote, which I recall dimly now, though from which of his books I can’t recall. I need to reread Laughter & Forgetting. It has been far too long.
Rufus T. Firefly on April 8, 2020 at 3:16 pm said:
…
In February I read Crichton’s, “State of Fear*” and finished it quickly. “O.K., this paragraph is setting up a love interest between these two characters, got it, on to the next.” “O.K., this paragraph’s purpose is to tip us off that this character will be tested later, and prove resourceful. Got it, on to the next.” I do that often when I read now (even some of the comments here ? ), but I just read books much less often. And I genuinely miss it. Books used to be one of the greatest joys in my life.
* * *
I totally relate to this progression from “read anything that’s in print” (including cereal boxes) to “meh – maybe later.”
We have over 10,000 books (can’t even count how many we don’t have any longer), and if I read a book a week until I’m 100 (knock on synthetic wood-substitute), I won’t get through all of them. I’ve stopped buying news ones (only got used ones from the library sale anyway) in 2010.
The decline I attribute to two main things.
First, as Rufus said, after this many years, there is not much in fiction that isn’t a “been there, read that” experience. Which doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a well-crafted story, but there aren’t a lot of surprises.
However, when we were young, fiction was a way of experiencing the lives and thoughts of people we were never likely to meet in reality, certainly not in the numbers stacked up after years of reading; ditto with places we had never been to and might never see, and “events” that might or might not ever happen.
Books were a source of speed-dating on the Grand Tour, as it were, and building relationships outside of your own pretty limited personal contact circle. Fifty years later, we already know so many different personality constructs, and maybe have visited some of those locales, so fiction just isn’t needed anymore.
Second, the internet has taken over much (nearly all, in fact) of the time I used to spend reading, and that has two sub-heads.
(a) so much nonfiction is available at the touch of a “search” button, why be limited to what’s printed and costs time, effort, and money to obtain?
(b) reality has taken the place of fiction — no further comment needed.
Addedum to First point:
As a beginning reader (and through middle age, actually), one could believe that all of the authors were allowing you to get into the minds of people very different from yourself and your friends and your family, and thus open up a new world of psychological and behavioral insight.
Later, one realized that all of those “different people” were only constructs of what the author knew about psychology & behavior, filtered through their own biases.
2(b) has shown us how to examine people as they present themselves, and is closer to reality — if not always identical to it.
On the internet, no one knows that you’re a dog.