In its French edition, published by Gallimard, Slowness — La lenteur — comes scarfed with a red paper bandanna on which the word KUNDERA appears, a huge one-word promise. Gallimard’s habit of singularizing its A-ream of authors is not uncommon in France. However, to be elected to the band of the bandannaed still implies that the Czech emigre novelist Milan Kundera has crossed some high-stepped threshold of notoriety. The reader is being assured of something at once familiar and-buy! buy! — -crispy new.
In any culture, once an author has an offcially registered territory, a brave departure is seen in the light of what he has done before: John Updike, having perfected his elaborately rabbity style, was able to compose stunningly — the best talents get the best adverbs — versatile variations on it. Updike’s impersonations of the novelist Henry Bech, a Jew alreadwere sweetly typical in their salable daring. If you star in the right circus, the safety net and the high wire can be one and the same thing.
Reputations for versatility depend on the possession of persistent underlying features; a master of disguise cannot be applauded unless we can recognize just how unrecognizable he is being: Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams have proved the point again and again, which may be once or six times too often. So, let’s hear it for KUNDERA, who has not only done it again but done it in a different language and in a different culture.
Menacing and cheerful, philosophical and sexy, Kundera both cares about life and talks dirty. Think Solzhenitsyn with bubbles and without the bearded metaphysics. Who better matches a modern publisher’s ideal image of an accessibly important (foreign) author than a champagne-style intellectual?
As any competent blurbist will tell you, Kundera began as a poet and was an early postwar member of the Czech Communist party before being dropped, picked up again, and then again, definitively, dropped in 1970, after the 1968 Prague spring turned into a prolonged winter to whose discontents writers could allude only at the risk of being drafted to ignominious jobs of the kind usually reserved for the salt of the earth. Kundera first became infamously famous in pre-Dubek Czechoslovakia with a “political” novel entitled The Joke, a portrait of how, in totalitarian regimes, fun is not fun if it is not socialist realist fun: Its hero mocks his reluctant mistress’s political rectitude by sending her a postcard in only-joking praise of Trotsky, upon which — having been sent literally underground to work in the mines — he discovers that no joke is only a joke when the Party is its butt.
The rest of Kundera’s oeuvre, until he left “the East” (not a division of Europe he cares to recognize), played variations on the theme of the absurdity of trying to be “serious” about anything in an absurd society. The interplay of the erotic and the “political” gave Kundera’s early stories a lugubrious zest congenial to the taste of his early champion in the West, Philip Roth, whose own The Prague Orgy turned out to be a tune played o on much the same set of pipes.
Like other principled Eastern authors, whose courage was defined by challenges to a regime that parodied Marxist-Leninist morality while remaining subject to Russian diktat, Kundera doubtless applauded the collapse and ejection of the occupying power. But in the case of Czechoslovakia, the restitution of liberty and the opportunity for pluralistic give-and-take were followed by the country tearing itself in half. And the loss of the Communist behemoth left an anti-Communist writer like Kundera bereft of the witless Goliath at whom he had launched his ironic sling-shots. The crassness of the Communist authorities had lent glamour to a good-soldierly slyness which now had no campaign to fight. Communism’s collapse has led Kundera — who literally drove his way out of Czechoslovakia in 1974 and ended up in France — to become a specifically French author. Slowness (now available in English from Harper-Collins, 156 pages, $ 21, translated by Linda Asher) was written in French, which makes Kundera part of a distinguished exile tradition to which Slowness either deliberately or inadvertently pays homage.
I do not know whether Madame Kundera is really called Vra, as she is in Slowness, but I do know that Vladimir Nabokov’s inspiring wife bore that name and that Nabokov, like the Polish-born Joseph Conrad, is another of the few great writers who became master of languages not originally their own. Conrad brought a moral maturity to his adopted country and Nabokov a grammarian’s playfulness, which added a dimension to the prosaic weaponry of English. Since part of the action, such as it is, of Slowness takes place at an entomology conference, there is further internal evidence of slip- streaming — for Nabokov had a butterfly named after him.
On the strength of Slowness, however, no one can yet accuse Kundera of having taught the frogs a new way to hop. On the contrary, he jumps to their modish tune. He has contracted his talent to embrace the anti-narrative narrative style that disdains realistic fictions and freshens speculative fancies with interstitial erotic sorbets. In the gastronomic tradition of cooks whose skill lies in transforming yesterday’s scraps into how- does-he- do-it? novelties, Kundera’s “story” of himself and his wife and their night in a chateau-style hotel is double-decked with what purports to be an obscure 18th-century nouvelle in which a chevalier enjoys an erotic night to remember in the company of a noble lady. Come the dawn, he discovers Madame de T. is only using him to hide the identity of her real lover from her jealous husband.
The author of this tale-within-a-tale is said to be “Vivant Denon,” whom I cannot find in any reference book and whose name, which translates as “Living From [Saying] No,” certainly smells pseudonymous. The chevalier and his lying partner’s protraction of pleasure — to which fraud adds its regular zest — is emblematic of that sweetness which Talleyrand later said no one who had not known the ancien regime would ever be able to imagine. Kundera contrasts the dawdling extensions of antique hedonism with the hectic urgency of modern life. The modern cult of speed is evidence of our desire to accelerate conquests and forget the past.
Kundera’s quick book honors his bservation by being both brief and forgettable. Fast food is destroying French cuisine; the fast book does the same for French literature. Kundera supplies a text which we can say we have read without having to read anything. You have finished Slowness before you have been given enough information to remember who the characters are, or why they are doing what they are doing, if they are really doing anything.
Since this is Kundera’s first fictional attempt to be French, he pays smart homage to local gods. The Marquis de Sade and Choderlos de Laclos (author of Les liaisons dangereuses) receive deferential nods. When Vincent, the protagonist of the novel’s present-day section, has a mandatory skinny dip, it is with the juicy Julie, a waitress whose earlier self used to hang out with the divine Marquis. Despite her other tabulated charms, Vincent hankers after the waitress’s “asshole.” Linda Asher, the quite competent translator, cannot make this target as appetizing as the original’s “trou de cul,” perhaps because “asshole” is what Sylvester Stallone and Bobby De Niro call everybody, not having access to connasse and similar French terms of endearment.
Kundera’s desire to innovate by mentioning the unmentionable is weakened by the fact that English poet Craig Raine has written a rather good poem about the beauty of what we are told Guillaume Apollinaire — in the trenches at the time — called “the ninth portal” of the human body. However, Kundera clearly believes that sodomy still scandalizes the bourgeoisie and so he talks a lot about it without ever getting to the short strokes (spiel, not speleology, is his real thing). Mrs. Asher translates “sodomiser” as ” bugger,” which is a little too colloquially unclinical. She also renders ” sans couilles” as “no-balls,” a turn of phrase which has a meaning, so far as I know, only in very English English: a foul ball in cricket is known as a “no-ball.” She might better have rendered the phrase as “gutless.” Mrs. Asher’s problem overall is that one cannot find happy equivalents in any language for the terms of a “novel” whose pattern is merely whimsical and whose dialogue is merely patter. Among what purport to be conversations between paperthin characters, we are treated to a chat between Vincent and his member (shades of Alberto Moravia here, as there are echoes of Umberto Eco everywhere).
The unquenchable vitality of The Modern Novel suggests that fiction is never more alive than when declared dead. It may be that modern writers are right to disdain the old “realistic” narrative line, but personally, I prefer to hear where the marquis is off to when he goes out at five o’clock rather than be treated to show-off sophisms. However, the death of fiction is a function of what near-artists — often academics — would like to be the case: Critics dream of the ceding of literature’s whole estate to — let us say — no-balled professors who cannot believe that making lists of The Canon is not an art form. Fiction is one of our only remaining ways of subverting the offcial histories of politicians and the officious curricula of pundits. It is a symptom of freedom, not least from second-guessing meta-McLuhanites.
Fiction has to be imagined, not managed, which is why the supposedly great editor Maxwell Perkins probably did more to warrant the destruction of American writerly integrity than anyone else. It has also to be based on observation, even of what is being imagined. This is what Nabokov meant by ” caressing the details.” Let me give one example of where Kundera fails in just such observation: Very early on, he describes a child in a French restaurant, standing on his chair and singing. I have spent some time eating out in France during the last thirty years and I have never seen or heard a French child, of whatever age, so much as misbehave at table. So: Either Kundera’s child was not French — which we should have been told — – or he never existed, not literally but in the author’s imagination; he was simply pasted in there. The phony singing child alerts the reader to the fact that this whole “story” is a got-up confection disguised as fiction by an author who can do the French language all right but now has no abiding, well, raison d’etre.
Claudio Magris, whose Danube is probably his best-known translated work, has written a marvelously detailed and lucidly instructive scholarly work entitled, not too handily perhaps, The Hapsburg Myth in Modem Austrian Literature, in which he analyzes the influence of the vanished supremacy of the emperor Franz Josef on a whole range of writers, from Grillparzer to Joseph Roth by way of Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Karl Kraus. Few of these very different writers escaped the shadows cast by a Hapsburg sun that had long ceased to shine; they may have been subservient, subversive, or satirical, but we can never understand their attitudes without some knowledge of the myth of the Hapsburgs, an awareness of the real illusion of an empire kept together, after a fashion, by a determination to preserve a Zeitgeist which even its most damning critics adored and whose demise killed their muse.
It is not diffcult to see how the Hapsburg myth had a sort of second coming in the spuriously homogenizing ethos of Eastern European communism. Whether or not it was ever a valid system, the “morality” of the phony monolith not only supplied something against which Kundera could react with wit, it was also an irreplaceable source of an ironic vigilance and an accurate satire which sharpened its critics’ now blunted darts. Whether that is an argument for lamenting its passing is quite another matter.
Slowness is no good because its author’s once bold voice is now raised not against the grotesqueries of a gimcrack regime but in order to flesh out his list of works with signs of recent life. He has been reduced to concocting a cooked-up scrapbook — half-essay, half- (unfilmable) film treatment — whose recipes, images, and naughtinesses have mostly been either rescripted from his own work or inspired by other people’s.
By Frederic Raphael; Frederic Raphael is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work includes The Glittering Prizes, Darling, and the forthcoming Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wde Shut
