Des textes un peu disparates, parfois très éclairants. ( )

Czech-born author Milan Kundera (born 1926) who went into exile in France in 1975.

In this collection of short essays, Milan Kundera shares reflections on a number of topics and writers, artists and composers from Francis Bacon, Philip Roth and Juan Goytisolo to Beethoven, Carlos Fuentes, Oscar Milosz and Curzio Malaparte, to name several. However, a reader need not be familiar with these artists and writers to benefit from the many wisdom nuggets sprinkled throughout the book’s 180 pages. As a way of sharing some of Kundera’s wisdom and insights, here are a number of quotes from the text along with my modest comments:


Francis Bacon - Triptych of portraits of Henrietta Moraes

“The painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to seize hold of her essence, of that diamond hidden in the depths. Of course we are not certain that the depths really do conceal something – but in any case we each have in us that brutal gesture, that hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there.” ---------- Kundera goes on to question to what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person. Actually, I myself take a different approach: I attempt to seize the hidden true essence of a person not by any brutal gesture but by remaining completely still and listening. Usually quite a unique experience for people – to be permitted the space to be heard. Much different than someone taking their words as a means to insert their own opinions and views.

“The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more. Whereas history used to advance far more slowly that human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man’s grasp, and the continuity, the identity of a life is in danger of cracking apart.” ---------- I myself have lived through a few phases of history. Turns out, I love our current international community where we can speak to one another across the globe instantly. As for the pre-internet, pre-Goodreads world where people were cut off from one another and had to filter their reflections and experiences through conventional publishers – good riddance! There is one aspect of life I have absolute no use for – nostalgia. My sense is people who rely on nostalgia are asleep to the present, deserving of good whack on the back to wake up to their current life.

“Scarcely 1% of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50% of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. . . . All Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of “In Search of Last Time,” and of course all of Musil’s major characters.” ---------- I suspect the various authors wanted their novel’s characters set free to reflect and act in interesting and unusual ways so as to further propel their story. None of those mundane tasks of changing dippers, attending their kid’s organized sports and dealing with their kid’s desires and wants – how conventional, unexceptional and boring!


French novelist Anatole France (1844-1924)

“The funeral cortege that followed Anatole France to his grave was several kilometers long. Then everything changed. Aroused by his death, four young Surrealist poets wrote a pamphlet against him.” ---------- As Kundera explains, the surrealists desired a world of pure imagination and poetry, a world of painting of dreams and improbable visions; none of that irony, skepticism and seasoned wisdom at the very core of a novel. Matter of fact, they dismissed the novel as a prime form of artistic expression.

“When I was a young man, trying to find my way in a world sliding toward the abyss of a dictatorship whose reality no one had foreseen, desired, imagined, especially not the people who had desired and celebrated its arrival, the only book that managed to tell me anything lucid about the unknown world was Anatole France’s “The Gods Are Thirsty.” ---------- I love how Kundera found refuge in a novel during his own personal time of crisis, during a bleak episode in his country’s history. A novel can be a second world for us during our own times of crisis, a time when the outer, material, day-to-day world appears hostile, even sinister.

“In the novels of Anatole France humor is constantly present (though always subtle); in another book, La Rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque, one can’t help enjoying it, but what’s humor doing on the bloody terrain of one of the worst tragedies in history? Yet that is exactly what is unique, fresh, admirable: the skill to resist the nearly obligatory pathos of so somber a subject. For only a sense of humor can discern the humorlessness in others.” ---------- I recall how Kierkegaard said that people who lack a sense of humor become an object of humor themselves. Actually, the longer I live, the less seriously I take all those very serious people I encounter - people who are entirely serious strike me as complete dullards.

“This explains why “The Gods Are Thirsty” has always been better understood outside France than within it. For such is the fate of any novel whose action is too tightly bound to a narrow historical period: fellow citizens automatically look for a document of what they themselves experienced or passionately debated; they look to see if the novel’s image of history matches their own; they try to work out the author’s political stances, impatient to judge them. The surest way to spoil a novel.” ---------- Isn’t it curious how many authors find their true audience on the other side of the globe? As an American, I am always pleasantly surprised when I read praise and perceptive observations about American authors (authors I have no particular love for myself) such as John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway from readers in such places as India and Japan.

“I say “I love Joseph Conrad.” And my friend says, “Me, not so much.” But are we talking about the same writer? I’ve read two Conrad novels, he just one, and it’s one I don’t know. And yet each of us, in all innocence (in all innocent impertinence), is sure he has an accurate idea of Conrad.” ---------- I enjoy Kundera admitting how he takes his own reading of a famous author as accurate, yet on deeper reflection, acknowledging how his reading and understanding is limited and relatively superficial.


Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001) - Greek-French composer

Xenakis does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of its legacy. He locates his starting point somewhere else: not in the artificial sound of a note separated from nature in order to express a human subjectivity, but in the noise of the world, in a “mass of sound” that does not rise from inside the heart but instead comes to us from the outside, like the fall of the rain, the racket of a factory, or the shouts of a mob.” ---------- Kundera notes how Xenakis’s face and body were deformed as the consequence of the horrors of war, a deformation that left a permanent record of the insanity of much of world culture on his body, propelling the composer to look elsewhere than tradition for musical inspiration.


Vera Linhartova (born 1938) - Czech writer and art historian

In the 1960s Vera Linhartova was one of the most admired writers in Czechoslovakia, the poetess of a prose that was meditative, hermetic, beyond category. . . . Linhartova: “My sympathies lie with the nomads, I haven’t the soul of a sedentary myself. So I am now entitled to say that my own exile has fulfilled what was always my dearest wish: to live elsewhere.” When Linhartova writes in French is she still a Czech writer? No. Does she become a French writer? No, not that either. She is elsewhere.” ---------- Thus is exile in our post-modern world. I suspect many who are reading these words consider themselves exiles. I myself do not watch TV or read newspapers or listen to pop music, do not go to movies or support a sports team, do not drink or smoke, do not drive a car or seek out gossip, thus, in a very real sense, I am an exile to the country and society I have lived in all of my life. Ah, the postmodern world! ( )

Czech-born author Milan Kundera (born 1926) who went into exile in France in 1975.

In this collection of short essays, Milan Kundera shares reflections on a number of topics and writers, artists and composers from Francis Bacon, Philip Roth and Juan Goytisolo to Beethoven, Carlos Fuentes, Oscar Milosz and Curzio Malaparte, to name several. However, a reader need not be familiar with these artists and writers to benefit from the many wisdom nuggets sprinkled throughout the book’s 180 pages. As a way of sharing some of Kundera’s wisdom and insights, here are a number of quotes from the text along with my modest comments:


Francis Bacon - Triptych of portraits of Henrietta Moraes

“The painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to seize hold of her essence, of that diamond hidden in the depths. Of course we are not certain that the depths really do conceal something – but in any case we each have in us that brutal gesture, that hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there.” ---------- Kundera goes on to question to what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person. Actually, I myself take a different approach: I attempt to seize the hidden true essence of a person not by any brutal gesture but by remaining completely still and listening. Usually quite a unique experience for people – to be permitted the space to be heard. Much different than someone taking their words as a means to insert their own opinions and views.

“The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more. Whereas history used to advance far more slowly that human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man’s grasp, and the continuity, the identity of a life is in danger of cracking apart.” ---------- I myself have lived through a few phases of history. Turns out, I love our current international community where we can speak to one another across the globe instantly. As for the pre-internet, pre-Goodreads world where people were cut off from one another and had to filter their reflections and experiences through conventional publishers – good riddance! There is one aspect of life I have absolute no use for – nostalgia. My sense is people who rely on nostalgia are asleep to the present, deserving of good whack on the back to wake up to their current life.

“Scarcely 1% of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50% of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. . . . All Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of “In Search of Last Time,” and of course all of Musil’s major characters.” ---------- I suspect the various authors wanted their novel’s characters set free to reflect and act in interesting and unusual ways so as to further propel their story. None of those mundane tasks of changing dippers, attending their kid’s organized sports and dealing with their kid’s desires and wants – how conventional, unexceptional and boring!


French novelist Anatole France (1844-1924)

“The funeral cortege that followed Anatole France to his grave was several kilometers long. Then everything changed. Aroused by his death, four young Surrealist poets wrote a pamphlet against him.” ---------- As Kundera explains, the surrealists desired a world of pure imagination and poetry, a world of painting of dreams and improbable visions; none of that irony, skepticism and seasoned wisdom at the very core of a novel. Matter of fact, they dismissed the novel as a prime form of artistic expression.

“When I was a young man, trying to find my way in a world sliding toward the abyss of a dictatorship whose reality no one had foreseen, desired, imagined, especially not the people who had desired and celebrated its arrival, the only book that managed to tell me anything lucid about the unknown world was Anatole France’s “The Gods Are Thirsty.” ---------- I love how Kundera found refuge in a novel during his own personal time of crisis, during a bleak episode in his country’s history. A novel can be a second world for us during our own times of crisis, a time when the outer, material, day-to-day world appears hostile, even sinister.

“In the novels of Anatole France humor is constantly present (though always subtle); in another book, La Rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque, one can’t help enjoying it, but what’s humor doing on the bloody terrain of one of the worst tragedies in history? Yet that is exactly what is unique, fresh, admirable: the skill to resist the nearly obligatory pathos of so somber a subject. For only a sense of humor can discern the humorlessness in others.” ---------- I recall how Kierkegaard said that people who lack a sense of humor become an object of humor themselves. Actually, the longer I live, the less seriously I take all those very serious people I encounter - people who are entirely serious strike me as complete dullards.

“This explains why “The Gods Are Thirsty” has always been better understood outside France than within it. For such is the fate of any novel whose action is too tightly bound to a narrow historical period: fellow citizens automatically look for a document of what they themselves experienced or passionately debated; they look to see if the novel’s image of history matches their own; they try to work out the author’s political stances, impatient to judge them. The surest way to spoil a novel.” ---------- Isn’t it curious how many authors find their true audience on the other side of the globe? As an American, I am always pleasantly surprised when I read praise and perceptive observations about American authors (authors I have no particular love for myself) such as John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway from readers in such places as India and Japan.

“I say “I love Joseph Conrad.” And my friend says, “Me, not so much.” But are we talking about the same writer? I’ve read two Conrad novels, he just one, and it’s one I don’t know. And yet each of us, in all innocence (in all innocent impertinence), is sure he has an accurate idea of Conrad.” ---------- I enjoy Kundera admitting how he takes his own reading of a famous author as accurate, yet on deeper reflection, acknowledging how his reading and understanding is limited and relatively superficial.


Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001) - Greek-French composer

Xenakis does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of its legacy. He locates his starting point somewhere else: not in the artificial sound of a note separated from nature in order to express a human subjectivity, but in the noise of the world, in a “mass of sound” that does not rise from inside the heart but instead comes to us from the outside, like the fall of the rain, the racket of a factory, or the shouts of a mob.” ---------- Kundera notes how Xenakis’s face and body were deformed as the consequence of the horrors of war, a deformation that left a permanent record of the insanity of much of world culture on his body, propelling the composer to look elsewhere than tradition for musical inspiration.


Vera Linhartova (born 1938) - Czech writer and art historian

In the 1960s Vera Linhartova was one of the most admired writers in Czechoslovakia, the poetess of a prose that was meditative, hermetic, beyond category. . . . Linhartova: “My sympathies lie with the nomads, I haven’t the soul of a sedentary myself. So I am now entitled to say that my own exile has fulfilled what was always my dearest wish: to live elsewhere.” When Linhartova writes in French is she still a Czech writer? No. Does she become a French writer? No, not that either. She is elsewhere.” ---------- Thus is exile in our post-modern world. I suspect many who are reading these words consider themselves exiles. I myself do not watch TV or read newspapers or listen to pop music, do not go to movies or support a sports team, do not drink or smoke, do not drive a car or seek out gossip, thus, in a very real sense, I am an exile to the country and society I have lived in all of my life. Ah, the postmodern world! ( )

Buku ini adalah himpunan esai Milan Kundera tentang seni di Eropah. Perbicaraannya yang mencakupi seni lukis, muzik dan (terutamanya) sastera ini adalah imbangan perbicaraan tentang idea, cerita dan tokoh seni itu sendiri. Terdapat beberapa esei yang panjang seperti perbicaraan tentang Francis Bacon,Anatole France, tentang sastera Martinique dan novel Malaparte, yang lainnya adalah esei-esei pendek sekitar 2-5 mukasurat termasuk tentang novel Philip Roth, Goytisolo, Rabelies, Carlos Fuentes, Oscar Milosz, muzika Bergsson, Schoenberg dan ramai lagi pemuka-pemuka seni samada yang terkenal mahupun kurang dikenali.

Walaupun ada sesetengah tokoh dalam buku ini yang tidak pernah saya dengar atau membaca karya mereka, membaca refleksi Kundera ini adalah sesuatu yang sangat menyenangkan terutama bila kita memahami bahawa perbicaraan seseorang manusia walaubagaimana berbezapun budayanya adalah perbicaraan tentang kemanusiaan bersama kedua-dua sisi indah dan sisi gelapnya. ( )

Milan Kundera's newest foray into the essay, "Encounter," continues his critical engagement with the history and aesthetic of the European novel and the place and importance of art today. It contains four longer essays (fifteen to twenty pages each) on, respectively, the art of Francis Bacon, an "homage" to Anatole France, the artistic sensibilities of particular Martinican poets (Aime Cesair among them), and Curzio Malaparte's novel "The Skin." Most of these essays, however, are occasional pieces which rarely exceed four or five pages in length. Because of their length, they are almost necessarily underdeveloped. Many of these shorter pieces should have been made more substantial and elaborated upon. Kundera's insight and coolly analytical approach would have greatly benefitted the ideas they were lavished upon, as in the longer essays. If anything, that would be the one thing that I would change about this collection.

That having been said, there are a great many things of particular interest in this book. In his first substantial essay - the one on Bacon - he states a distinct paradox that all artists confront in the pursuit of their craft (see below for the extent to which one of the main concerns of this text is paradox): how does one capture the essence of a human (in this case, the work in question is Bacon's triptych of Henrietta Moraes) whose very essence is accidental? Kundera's answer is that Bacon distorts and contorts the images of people to see to what someone can have this done to them, but still maintain their identity; Kundera calls this Bacon's "brutal gesture."

One of the most fascinating pieces is "The Comical Absence of the Comical" in which he discusses how our mundane understanding of the word "comic" as "provoked by something amusing or comical" is sadly incomplete. He examines several instances in the novels of Dostoyevsky in which characters laugh in the most awkward and tragic of circumstances, as when Prince Mishkin is castigated by Aglaia by a "severe laughter" for having the bad taste to fall asleep while waiting for her. This is not a laughter whose provenance is in the human sense of the comic, but rather one that punishes, de-situates and reorganizes our response to this scene.

The extended essay on the work of Anatole France, while thematically disorganized and rather discursive, is largely an account of certain aspects of France's novel "The Gods Are Thirsty." The essay also incorporates a Surrealist critique of France, spearheaded by Paul Valery, who would later fill France's chair at the Academie Francaise upon the novelist's death. Andre Breton's critique impugned France for his "skepticism, realism, and heartlessness," though Kundera makes an intelligent argument for France's "cohabitation of unbearably dramatic history with unbearable, banal dailiness, a cohabitation that sparkles with irony." These interesting juxtapositions, as mentioned above, perennially interest Kundera throughout the collection as when, in a highly thoughtful essay on the work of Leos Janacek, Kundera concludes that "Janacek has managed to say what only an opera can say: the unbearable nostalgia of insignificant talk at an inn [he is referencing a scene from Janacek's "Cunning Little Vixen"] cannot be expressed any other way than by opera: the music becomes the fourth dimension of a situation which without it would remain anodyne, unnoticed, mute."

In the last paragraph of the entire book, Kundera ties together two of the themes that have informed not just this collection of his essays, but his entire body of work: the history of Europe and the perceived profound ordinariness of truth. "The war's closing moments bring out a truth that is both fundamental and banal, both eternal and disregarded: compared with the living, the dead have an overwhelming numerical superiority, not just the dead of this war's end but all the dead of all times, the dead of the past, the dead of the future; confident in their superiority, they mock us, they mock this little island of time we live on, this tiny time of the new Europe, they force us to grasp all its insignificance, all its transience." ( )