Commiserating with devastated things: Milan Kundera and the entitlements of thinking 9780823268207, 9780823268214

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Commiserating with Devastated Things

Series Board James Bernauer

Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn

Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal

Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL

PHILOSOPHY

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JASON M. WIRTH

Commiserating with Devastated Things Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York au 2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wirth, Jason M., 1963—

Commiserating with devastated things : Milan Kundera and the entitlements of thinking / Jason M. Wirth. — First edition. pages cm. — (Perspectives in Continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6820-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Kundera, Milan—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Kundera, Milan— Knowledge—Literature. 3. Literature—Philosophy. I. Title. PG5039.21.U6Z94 2016 891.8'635—dc23 2015006027 Printed in the United States of America

18 17 16 54321 First edition

For Elizabeth Myoen Sikes, garden of marvelous delight

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Contents

Preface xt Acknowledgments xtit List of Abbreviations xv

1 Tamina at the Border 1

3 Laughter 48 4 Dogs and History 73

2 Caught Looking: The Universe of the Novel 30

5 Kitsch 101

6 Idiocy on the Verge of the Novel 131

Notes 187 Bibliography 21 Index 223

7 Novel Idiocy 163

1x

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Preface

In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sabina and Franz understood different things by the words /ight and darkness. For Sabina, the enemy of kitsch, light and darkness were the two poles within which seeing was possible. Too much light and one is blinded. Total darkness was the opposite extreme, but some darkness also made seeing possible. This may explain why Sabina was averse to extremism: “extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and politics, is a veiled longing for death” (ULB, 94). Her lover Franz, however, associated the light with its source. Like Plato’s sun outside the cave, it illuminated the true and the good. Beyond the light, however, was not death, but infinity. Darkness was without borders, free of limits. When having sex with Sabina, he left the light on, but closed his eyes and lost himself in the infinite. “That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders” (ULB, 95). Sabina found Franz’s transport to the infinite distasteful, and so she too shut her eyes, but “for her, darkness did not mean infinity; for her it meant disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see” (ULB, 95). This is a book by a philosopher about Kundera’s universe of the novel, including his remarkable critical reflections on that universe. It is aware that such an enterprise risks debacle, being like Plato attempting to seduce Sabina. Kundera shuts his eyes in distaste for philosophy’s clumsy and aggressive relationship to truth, to its devotion to the light of certainty and its need for transcendence (an infinite darkness that negates the here and xt

now). Its often importunate mood is impatient with the novel’s cultivation of ambiguity, polyvalence, humility, irreverent humor, irony, complexity, broadness of theme (all things human), and its insistence on understanding rather than judgment, patience rather than conclusions, polyphony rather than fixed systems, and solidarity with humans in their folly rather than blanket condemnation. Philosophy, however, has not exhausted its historical possibilities and it belongs to its dignity to renew its sense of wonder about its vocation and powers. Philosophy’s ongoing self-interrogation is often neglected and philosophers sometimes act as if the art of philosophy

is something that we can take for granted. I do not do so and the present study strives to bring the plastic powers of philosophy to the border beyond which one finds the universe of Kundera’s novel, with its history (Broch, Musil, Kafka, and Gombrowicz, but also Cervantes, Rabelais, and Diderot), its discoveries, and its challenges and joyful opportunities for thinking.

This is a book written at this border, and it knows that this border, as Sabina discovered, makes possible seeing. It respects the autonomy of both universes (what only the novel can do and what only philosophy can do), leaving in the end these complex and internally contested arts to themselves. It wagers, however, that these two universes can and do communicate with each other as well as mutually provoke and benefit each other. It seeks to read Kundera on his own terms, but also with an eye to his unexpected and perhaps unintended gift to the friends of wisdom.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my good friend Rustam Singh (Bhopal, India), a beautiful writer in his own right, for his careful reading of an earlier draft of this text and for his supportive and helpful remarks. I would also like to thank my outside readers, Leah Kalmanson and Martin Matustik, whose comments were very helpful and appreciated. A special thanks and deep appreciation are due to the late Helen Tartar (1951-2014), who first acquired this text. Her contribution to philosophy and to letters more generally is incalculable. Her loss is enormous and she will be missed. Finally, I would like to thank my current editor, Thomas Lay as well as my copy editor, Michael Koch.

XU

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Abbreviations

AN The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1988).

BLF The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

C The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

E Encounter, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

EW Farewell Waltz, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

I Ignorance, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

ID Identity, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

IM Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove Press, 1991).

J The Joke, trans. Michael Henry Heim and fully revised by the author and Aaron Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

JM Jacques and His Master, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: HarperCollins, 1985).

LL Laughable Loves, trans. Suzanne Rappaport, revised by the author and Aaron Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). XV

LE Life Is Elsewhere, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

S Slowness, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

TB Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

ULB The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).

xvi um Abbreviations

.. . and because we did not know how to commiserate with the devastated things, we turned away from them and so injured them, and ourselves as well.

—Milan Kundera, The Joke

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Tamina at the Border The moment scatters. Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause.

—Octavio Paz!

Giving the Spiders a Rest In Kundera’s first novel, Zhe Joke, Helena, underway to an affair with Ludvik, convinced herself that she was doing so to avoid crossing a border, a

border beyond which her habits of being, her life commitments, would become meaningless. Having an affair with someone you love, despite being a nuptial infidelity, at least remains faithful to the idea of love, an idea that made Helena recognizable to herself. On the other side of the border, a border already operating within her own body, the Sirens called: there is no meaning to bodies coming together; it is just a sick joke, the unbearable lightness of being. Unlike Ivan Karamazov, Helena did not need to collect stories of our cruelty to innocent children and animals to experience the vacuum of a godless universe. Without love to endow the sexual body with

meaning, she would “cross the border into the realm of that monstrous freedom where shame, inhibitions, and morals have ceased to exist, that vile, monstrous freedom where everything is permitted, where deep inside all you need to understand is the throb of sex, that beast” (/, 21—22).? That beast, so unbearably light that it makes all human affairs suddenly float like feathers (everything is permitted, nothing has gravity), haunts

the border of meaning itself, but it does so in such a way that it ceases to be merely an academic problem. Ludvik, his revenge absurdly foiled, suddenly “felt the oppressive lightness of the void that lay over my life”

I

(J, 250). Helena stood before the border beyond which the gravity of her identity lost its weight. In the early short story (from Laughable Loves), “The Hitchhiking Game,” a young couple (a young man who adores the soul, the heavenly purity, of his girlfriend, and a shy girl who worries about her boyfriend’s less pure past) embarked on a long anticipated vacation. Underway, they stopped at a gas station, and after the girl returned from bashfully peeing in the woods, the boyfriend swung by and picked her

up and they found themselves pretending that he had just picked up a licentious hitchhiker. Under the presumed cover of these masks it became less and less obvious that they were only playing, allowing their identities to go on holiday, and the girl, not without pleasure, “crossed the forbidden boundary” (ZZ, 105). Suddenly the weight of shyness and prudishness lifted, and as “a hitchhiker,” she “could do anything: Everything was permitted her; she could say, do, and feel whatever she liked” (ZL, 96). The boy, who had taken refuge in the gravity of her soul (he believed that she would never cross the boundary into being a mere body), was suddenly gripped with a great hatred, realizing “that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity” (LZ, 100). In a consuming rage, he succumbed to something that Friedrich Nietzsche once observed, apropos of the sappy romantic men who idealize women: “one closes one’s ears to all physiology and declares secretly to oneself, ‘I want to hear nothing about the human as other than soul and form!’”’ Soon he was humiliating her (he, too, stood before his own amorphousness as his seeming nobility crossed the border into sadism, and his “love” revealed itself to be laughable). As they subsequently reclined in bed, the girl cried and then bawled, “endlessly repeating this pitiful tautology: ‘I’m me, I’m

me, ’m me...” (ZL, 106). This pitiful tautology stood at the border, a border so unsettling that the “hitchhikers” were pushed to seek refuge from the great unknown by settling once again into “the same unknown” (ZZ, 106). But as Nietzsche already observed: “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers.”* On the other side of the border: not only the enigma of our selves, but also the enigma of all things in a world that has lost its faith in the gravity of divinely guaranteed meaning. “But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being” (AN, 41). Such a void drove Eduard (in “Eduard and God”), without renouncing his atheism, to nonetheless yearn for God, “for God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be” (LL, 287). At the border of the longing for pure being, however, was the realization 2 su Tamina at the Border

of the lightness of his affairs—“a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously” (LZ, 287). At the twilight of the collapse of Platonism’s obdurate insistence on a remote intelligibility as the meaning of the sensible, we find ourselves in the endgame of its inversion: mute sensibility, the mere shimmering of surfaces in their stupidity, the sudden upsurge of the sublimated unbearable lightness of being, without recourse to a stabilizing intelligibility beyond itself. The problem of the void is not first and foremost a detached academic topic, kept at a safe, scholarly distance. Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate philosophy major, I happened upon Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and was quickly captivated. I was immediately taken by the philosophical sounding title and the opening discussion of Nietzsche’s eternal return as the existential DNA of Tomas°—that things do not return again and again makes them appear light and trifling and thereby “in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted” (ULB, 4). Without the gravity that enables us to take at least something seriously, we sink into absurdity and irresponsibility; without some levity, however, such meaning becomes deadly serious. “The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all” (ULB, 6). The pervading sense everywhere that the novel, precisely as a novel, was opening a whole new world of thought was invigorating. Kundera’s novels had a freshness and directness that I had not found in my philoso-

phy courses, but I could not say that what had originally drawn me to philosophy, whatever that was, was somehow absent in Kundera’s writing. To the contrary: the sense of wonder, the therapeutic discontent with the official and received account of things, the thrill (and sometimes terror) of the investigation of the great questions and problems, was everywhere here, but it was not that I was finding nifty novelistic applications of the

big guns that I had studied in philosophy. Kundera is not in the business of producing knock-down philosophical arguments, nor does he repackage classical arguments in the sweeter guise of fiction. In Kundera’s practice of the novel, thinking was simultaneously more dangerous, complex, and exciting. “The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters” (AN, 83), and the coherence of its meditations is maintained by its themes (questions and problems), which vary according to characters and their situations “like a thing reflected

in three mirrors” (AN, 82-83). Although I went on to devote my professional energies to philosophy, my discovery of Kundera, his influences (what he calls “Pleiades”), and the universe within which they were created shadowed me. Tamina at the Border m= 3

Listening to very serious academic conference pronouncements in which we would decolonize this or utterly rethink that or expose so and sos immense hidden debt to some other very important but misappreciated philosopher, I sometimes took solace in Kundera’s devilish sense of humor (he was born on April Fool’s Day), a sense of humor that I found rarely in either philosophy’s historical canon or its contemporary practices. It reminded me of Nietzsche and Montaigne and the great Zen Masters, but then again, it is the philosopher’s perennial prejudice that anything that the novel does of intellectual merit must owe its existence to philosophy’s conceptually purer and more original version of it. This was not, however, my experience of Kundera’s novelistic thinking. When philosophers appeared in Kundera’s novels, they appeared on the novel’s terms, not on their terms. It was as if the novel were resuscitating philosophy not by engaging it on philosophy’s own terms, but by replanting it in new, more nourishing soil or by transposing it into another universe where it had more air to breathe. When Nietzsche exclaims that if you want fresh air, you should stay out of a church, this sounds scandalously flippant to the serious mood of philosophy, as if Nietzsche were also challenging us that we have paradoxically not taken the opening of philosophy seriously enough precisely because we have confused the hard work of philosophical thinking with taking ourselves seriously.’ This is a problem for philosophy and for philosophers, but it is not a problem for the universe of the novel, which Kundera tells us is born of a very different mode of attunement. “The novel’s wisdom is different from that of philosophy. The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor’ (AN, 160). This does not mean that novels have to be funny to partake in this birthright, but it does mean that philosophy’s obsession with the gravity of the apodictic, the knock-down argument, metalanguages, and systems, and with being at all costs right, produces a climate of investigation and exploration incompatible with that of the novel. “There is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think” (AN, 78). When Nietzsche took Spinoza’s recourse to the system to task, arguing that this determinate article is a dishonest way of packaging in the language of the universal what is really just “my” system, his approach had broad implications for philosophy. Zarathustra counsels his auditors to leave him, fearing that he may have deceived them, and implores: “This is my way. What is your way?” This humbling of the distributive range of philosophy (no immutable and universal truths, no transcendent realities) is at the same time an unprecedented expansion of the thematic range of philosophy (what counts as philosophy is again up for negotiation). 4 wu Tamina at the Border

What makes Nietzsche exceptional in philosophy is not exceptional in the universe of the novel. Indeed, it is the spirit out of which it is born, as if Nietzsche allowed the spirit of the novel to sneak back into the polis, millennia after Plato (or at least Platonism) expelled the tragic poets and elevated the concept over the image and universal abstractions over both characters and the situations that shape and reveal them. In the universe of the novel, there are no identities as such. “At what moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border” (JD, 167)? This book attempts to accompany Kundera, the novelist and critic, as well as his influences—especially Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz, the four “Pleiades of Central Europe’s great novelists,” after the hot blue cluster of stars, “each of them . . . surrounded by space, each of them distant from the others,” each of them “solitaries” (C, 50—51).8 But what does it mean to keep such company’? It does not mean that the task of this book is to explain Kundera because he is already one of the great expositors of his work. It certainly does not

mean that I hope to issue him new identity papers and return him to the philosophers and academic bureaucrats from whom he has so assiduously escaped. Kundera’ work neither begins nor ends in philosophy. It does mean, however, that I will attempt to be very explicit about what it means, for both philosophy and the novel, for a philosopher to approach his work. This is a book that, in thinking with Kundera, in appreciating his remarkable novelistic accomplishments, also wants to think explicitly where I stand when I discuss Kundera and his influences. To put it more succinctly: what entitles the novel to do what only the novel can do, and what entitles the philosopher to do whatever sorts of things that philosophers imagine themselves to be doing, and what entitles a mode of thinking that inhabits the borderlands between these two sorts of universes to do what it does? What manner of thinking occupies the pause, the gap, and the barbarian moment between these two universes? Philosophers have often accorded themselves the privilege of beginning these sorts of investigations, but this usually means that philosophers thereby control the terms and the values of the discourse, allowing philosophy to conduct a monologue about its competitors. Since philosophy assumes that it is coextensive with all serious thinking, it assumes that all other serious forms of thinking are just philosophy by other means. I think that this is not the case and this book is an attempt to overcome this “ineradicable error” (C, 63), to take on the daunting task of approaching Kundera’s work in a manner that allows it to speak on its own terms, that grants the universe of the novel its own space—a space that asks philosophy, as did Nietzsche in his Tamina at the Border m= 5

own way, to reconsider its own entitlements and birthrights. In disallowing philosophy either the first or the last word while at the same time not conflating its possible universes with the universe of the novel, what other forms of thinking emerge? Since I am not writing a novel about Kundera’s novels, on what terms am I engaging them? This book does not want to participate in the triumph of the theoretical spirit over the devil’s laughter. This is not the angels’ revenge. We could engage this question by following Deleuze when he argues that we must also ask again: what is philosophy? Deleuze was speaking of the remarkable provocation of cinema, itself “a new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice.”? Certain works of cinema challenge us not to draw routinely from the stockpile of philosophical materials, but also to be productive and creative so that we can meet the philosophical demands of cinema. In such a practice, however, we are not once again subjugating the image to the priority of the concept, but rather using philosophy creatively to allow cinema to speak on its own terms and to develop a different kind of sensibility for the singularities of particular works. Cinema is a child compared to the novel, which came on the scene as European conceptual practice was beginning its disengagement with theology and the political muscle of the Church. Although philosophy, after almost utterly ignoring the new modes of disclosure that cinema discovered, has recently begun to engage with it,’° it has not been that much better with the novel, generally preferring to regard it as either the illustration of philosophical positions and arguments or as fodder that can be repurposed in order to exemplify philosophical positions. The novel went the way of Rabelais and Cervantes, while concept production went the way of the rationalists and the empiricists. Descartes’s evil genius god, hopelessly tricking us at every turn, seemingly bequeathing us no reliable ideas except for the solipsistic nightmare of ourselves, was an opportunity to unleash a variation of the ontological argument for God’s existence. Because the idea of God is the idea of an utterly perfect being (nonexistence is a defect and imperfection), it turns out that God is incapable of such trickery. God, being good, would not trick us, and therefore we are the source of our mistakes, not anything external to us. We can overcome our mistakes and build the house of knowledge on unimpeachable foundations. Don Quixote, in contrast, is ceaselessly bewitched and when windmills turn out not to be giant marauders, it is not Don Quixote who is responsible for his errors. Who could have concocted such an extraordinary deception, an error so grand that it could not be attributable to an intellectual failing? In a kind of argument from intelligent design gone 6 sm Tamina at the Border

mad, it is clear that the worthy are dignified by attracting the torment of evil genius gods; in this case it is Freston the Wise who conspired to turn the giants into windmills expressly to deprive Don Quixote of the glory of vanquishing them. Descartes, writing in an era that knew the horror of the Thirty Years’ War and the unsettling of theological foundations and Church authority, made it safe to know. Cervantes made it safe to laugh, but dangerous to know.

Although I have no intention of reconciling the spirits of philosophy and the novel, this book, as an exercise in the practice of concept creation, will attempt to revisit the looming gap in which the evil genius god fights for its life. The present work therefore is not a systematic work, not an exhaustive historical accounting or analysis, not a work that fully participates in the philosophical universe nor accords it automatic privilege. The evil genius god haunts the liminal space between the universe of the novel and philosophy’s unwise securitization of its practices. Kundera applauds Nietzsche for recognizing that systems “must try to present their weak points in the same style as their strong points’ (TB, 150). Although Kundera speaks of his own practice of the novel as being within

a “universe of the novel,” that is, within a sense of what practices and what kinds of content belong by right to the creation and appreciation of novels, this sense of the whole, as a universe, is not a system and it does not fill in all of the gaps with such asphyxiating thoroughness that thinking has nowhere else to go, nothing left to do. This is the contemporary terminal paradox of our age-old hope for a harmonious oneness among the members of our species: our dream of unity has not produced the further dispersion of our kind, a new tower of Babel, but rather the nightmare of globalization and the totally administered world. “Today, the history of the planet has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war, ambulant and everlasting war, that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere” (AN, 10-11).

One might, following Deleuze, think of the whole as a kind of plane of immanence, of a slice of the chaos of infinity that allows characters and situations to appear, including those of the reader, but in the half-light and limited visual range of a plane in fog, without panoptic clarity. “T say fog, not darkness. In the darkness we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in the fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react” (7B, 240). Kundera admired Nietzsche and his elliptical style Tamina at the Border = 7

for capturing a thought “the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing” (7B, 150). Thoughts depend on the fog-shrouded planes upon which they appear, but this does not mean: These thoughts can be turned into a system, buttressed so as to exclude all competing thoughts and hunkering down to ward off the play of chance.

This is dishonest. Writing is more faithful to the advent of the not-yetthought and the in itself unprethinkable (das Unvordenkliche, to use F. W. J. Schelling’s felicitous term). Vigilance must be kept against the siren call of the system, a temptation for all writing, including the present book. This is the “temptation to describe all of the implications of his ideas; to preempt

any objections and refute them in advance; thus to barricade his ideas” (TB, 174). The painful irony of barricading this book about the dangers of barricades is not lost on me. The fluid borders of the present work are not barricades and they do not seek to deliver Kundera back to the arachnid curators of thought. Experiments in knowing, the novel’s only ethical imperative, disclose fragile truths as well as the fragility of knowing, what Francois Ricard in his beautiful study calls “puzzled knowledge, riddled

with things unknown, with contradictions, with fog; knowledge of the very unknowability of the world and of existence.” The nonsystemic range of thinking condemns thinking and creation to per-

sonal production. Nothing could be farther from the case. The creation of characters reveals the enigma of both creativity and the created by revealing the lack of a fixed, identifiable subject operating with authorial agency. “T think.’ Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, ‘a thought comes when “it” wants to, and not when “I” want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject “I” is necessary to the verb “think.”’” (TB, 149). The closed system conceals the fact that it is my system (what has come to me in my solitude). The dishonesty of closed systems does not own up to either: (a) the systematic immobilization of thinking and (b) the lack of a fixed person (author) constructing the system. The enigma of thinking includes the enigma of thinking about oneself. Thinking may strive to fix the self, but the thinking that does so is not itself fixed or fixable. Philosophically, this was the great discovery of Fichte and Schelling, respectively. They radically engaged the Kantian critical project and overcame the illusion of a Cartesian fixed subject. This, however, is a chapter in the history of modern philosophy. Cervantes’s good Don loses his mind right from the get go. “All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self” (AN, 23).

8 a Tamina at the Border

Although this may be a modern discovery within the traditions inspired by Europe (which were responding first to the problem of an eternal soul

and then the fixed subject discerning itself and its world as objects of thought), it is an ancient problem in other parts of the world. The great Kamakura Zen Master Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), for example, in his celebrated fascicle Genjo Koan, proclaims that to study the way is to study the self, but to study the self is to forget the self. He likens the illusion of the fixed-point subject to the illusion that the shore is actually moving when you see it from a boat:

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and essence are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing has unchanging self.”

The novel did not wait for thinkers like Nietzsche (or Hume, or Fichte, or Schelling, or Freud, or Heidegger) in order to overcome the illusion that we are obvious to ourselves and, as such, self-possessed vantage points

on the world. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s refusal of both the fixed subject of thinking and the systemic sclerosis of thought has for Kundera other consequences. Nietzsche's writing and the novel are “unsystematic,” “undisciplined,” and “experimental,” forcing “rifts in all the idea systems that surround us” (7B, 174). The experimental turn also makes possible an “immense broadening of theme; the barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full

range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher’s thought” (7B, 175). This expansion of what can count as philosophy, the range of problems to which a philosopher can claim by right, “brings philosophy closer to the novel” (7B, 175), as evidenced, for example, by the present book. Two

writers, Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, both trained in philosophy (Broch studied with the Vienna Positivists while Musil wrote a dissertation on Ernst Mach), reciprocated this generosity. In this respect, Musil provides the novel with a revolutionary structural opening and thereby “brought the novel toward philosophy” (7B, 176). In Musil’s Zhe Man without Qualities, the vast array of discussions in which the characters meet in countless committees, trysts, and parlor rooms, oblivious to the forces

about to dissolve Kakania into the chaos of the World War I, there is no

Tamina at the Border = 9

human theme that can be excluded from the universe of the novel. “In Musil everything becomes themes (existential questioning). If everything becomes theme, the background disappears and, as in a cubist painting, there is nothing but foreground. It is this abolition of the background that I consider to be the structural revolution Musil brought about” (7B, 165). In this coming into mutual proximity, the enlarged range of the novel, both stylistically and thematically, challenges the range of philosophy. The latter is expanding, but not with the vigor found in Nietzsche's thinking,

and it is often all-too willing to cede the questions of composition and style to the so-called best practices—herd protocols—of professional academic philosophy. The novel remains a challenge for philosophy, but not in the sense of another frontier to conquer (e.g., Hegel’s insistence that the rise of the self-aware Idea marks the end of art, the end of merely sensuous or aesthetic absolutes). It is not an opportunity to finish Platonism’s work and expel the novelists from the polis and preserve the rigid opposition between image and concept, the aesthetic and the conceptual. It is also not the challenge that philosophy renounce its own autonomy: Nietzsche and Musil move philosophy and the novel closer to each other

to their mutual benefit, but they do not conflate them. The novel does what only the novel can do and philosophy does what only philosophy can do. The novel challenges philosophy to continue to reassess its own powers and abilities and to stop apologizing for its wealth of resources and possibilities. The present study proceeds not only from a sense of philosophy reinvigorated by thinkers like Nietzsche, but also from philosophy’s selfexamination after its encounter with Kundera and his Pleiades. (Science spurred philosophy beyond its demotion to the handmaiden of theology,

but it is still absorbing its encounter with art. Some of the triumphs in art—the novel, cinema, and contemporary poetry and music—have been far more thoughtful than philosophy’s assessment of such works.) In encountering Kundera and the writers who influenced him on their own terms (and there are many other novelists that I could have discussed that, while not part of Kundera’s universe, make a profound case for the intellectual achievements of the novel), philosophy, this present work included, must reconsider its own terms and devise other modes of disclosure that are more sensitive to the novel’s unique modes of disclosure. Although the theme of this book is a consideration of Kundera’s extraordinary accomplishments as seen from the Janus-faced border between the universes of the novel and philosophy, it is neither a work of literary criticism nor a work of philosophy considered in terms of its canonical problems and compositional forms. It is an essay that strives to be a little more philosophical about philosophy and in so doing find ways to be more attentive 10 « Tamina at the Border

and sensitive to both sides of this border; it strives to provide what Kundera called “a meditative background which is indispensable to art.” In this spirit, the present text is neither systemic nor exhaustive and it is wary of the busy spiders of thought, connecting every single thing to every other thing. In his Aesthetics, Hegel gives us an image of art that is a superb synthesis; we are fascinated by this eagle’s-eye view; but the text itself is far from fascinating, it does not make us see the thought as alluring

as it looked when it was speeding toward the philosopher. In his desire to fill in his system, Hegel describes every detail, square by square, inch by inch, so that his Aesthetics comes across as a collaboration between an eagle and hundreds of heroic spiders spinning webs to cover all the crannies. (7B, 151)

This is also a book without eagles and spiders. It is full of ellipses'* and from the backcountries of thinking, born of the pause that holds these two autonomous practices together. Tamina’s Situation In the sixth chapter or variation of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera’ persona announced that the novel is “about Tamina, and whenever Tamina goes offstage, it is a novel for Tamina. She is its principle character and its principal audience” (BLF, 227). All of the other stories are variations of her story, variations of the problem of laughing and forgetting. There is no original problem or phenomenon of laughter or forgetting, no laughter or forgetting in themselves. Laughter and forgetting are seen in various ways through various characters and situations, all of which attempt to remember Tamina. Laughter cuts through the historical forces that erase and consign to oblivion all of the Taminas, but, from another perspective, laughter refuses to make this a universal procedure and to accept the settled accounts. Kundera’s laughter knows that the devil cannot suppress its laughter when in the presence of the extremely serious and holy, but at the same time, it is very nervous in a theater where everyone is laughing as if on cue, as if humor were part of the received nonthought about how we collectively react to the world. Laughter refuses but it protects; forgetting gets over things, but it is also the enemy of what we automatically deem worth remembering. Tamina, who wanted to forget her present world, did not want to forget her deceased husband and was unsettled that, contrary to her intentions, she sometimes did. “No, no, her husband was still alive in that sadness, he Tamina atthe Border m= 11

was merely lost and she must go search for him” (BLF, 229). In a nightmarish variation on Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (1937) where the narrator is pulled by T. Pimko, “a doctor of philosophy and a professor, in reality just a school teacher,” back into the nightmarish world of “immaturity,” Tamina found herself surrounded everywhere by children, little “angelic” children. Why did Kundera’s persona imagine Tamina at such a fragile time on the children’s island? He was not sure, perhaps because on the day that his father was dying, “the air was filled with joyful songs sung by children’s voices” (BLF, 238), these angels—“Children, never look back” (BLF, 239)—did not have the last word. Kundera’s father could still laugh at them, a laughter that pierced the curtain of the kitsch of infantocracy, “the ideal of childhood imposed on all humanity” (AN, 133). That our deaths would not be noble and beautiful, but that the oblivion of death is absolutely indifferent to such values, is to be “here, among children (in the world of things without weight)” (BLF, 240). Leos Janacek does not dignify the soundtrack to death. It is more like being forced once again to listen to the live version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird”—the history of music, its difficult emergence from our deep-seated stupidity, “is perishable, but the idiocy of guitars is eternal” (BLF, 248). The forgetting that is death is also life’s own laughter at our efforts to rise above our stupidity. Tamina found herself on the other side of the border that defines the children’s world. Humans do not revolt against the killing of calves in slaughterhouses. Calves are outside human law, just as Tamina is outside the children’s law. And the image of this child’s world is the image of a future (“Children, never look back!”) without a past, an absolute interruption with the fragile traditions that mark our ongoing struggle against stupidity. And Tamina began to feel the horrible “weight of lightness” (BLF, 259), the unbearable lightness of being, the lack of gravity to all things, their unmooring and ungrounding. No weight of the past, just the absolute lightness of a pure future against which we are powerless to resist, as if all of our efforts to build the sandcastles of art, science, and philosophy were swallowed up by the indifference of an immense surging of the ocean of stupidity. Tamina drowned at sea, her body growing heavier, until she “vanished beneath the surface,” while the children just stared at her from their boat (BLF, 262). This border is not so much a metaphor as an image of thought, an intuition that thinking stands in relationship to its own impossibility, “that metaphysical border . . . beyond which everything loses its meaning” (7B, 169). The present book is written from and for this border, this border where we commiserate with the devastated things and we struggle against oblivion to remember our fragile efforts to stem its tides. This border: the 12 « Tamina at the Border

motionless pause between coming and going, always subject to the sudden shift that, even when miniscule, changes everything. “It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life—and herein lies its secret-—takes place in immediate proximity of that border, even

in direct contact with it; its not miles away, but a fraction of an inch” (AN, 124; BLF, 281). This border infiltrates everything that we are and do. The furious gravity of the hip, countercultural orgy suddenly gives way to

the perception that the conjunction of sex with meaning is laughable.’ “It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense” (BLF, 297).

The Supreme Intellectual Synthesis

How do we decide what belongs to philosophy and what belongs to a novel? What guides our judgments about what is relevant and, when relevant, especially apt? I take up these questions by concentrating first and foremost on Kundera’s works, an oeuvre that Kundera has carefully tidied up and upon which he has thoughtfully commented. I will, however, scrupulously avoid every possible speculation about Kundera the person; there

will be no attempt to ferret out the identity of the author, as if it were somehow lurking behind his works. He has already told us: “If I had to define myself, I would say I am a hedonist trapped in a world politicized in the extreme. Such is the situation I depict in Laughable Loves, the book of mine I am fondest of because it reflects the happiest period of my life” (JM, 4). Such comments are not to be read as confessional and they do not have any standing outside of the essayistic dimension of the novel. Kundera is not attempting to express his true self or advertise his personal

history in the hopes that we might find him hiding behind his novels, waiting for us. Kundera’s novels are not confessional and they eschew the autobiographical. Even the author’s voice, which is a prominent feature of his fictional works starting with 7he Book of Laughter and Forgetting, does not have an authority external to the work itself. Even the self-definition of Kundera’s persona should be read in the situation that renders it intelligible, namely, the author as he imagined himself writing a theatrical variation on Diderot in the period after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Kundera’s voice never comes from elsewhere; it is always a character within the situations that a particular work is exploring. “From time to time, I like to intervene directly as author, as myself. In that case, tone is crucial. From the very first Tamina at the Border = 13

word, my thoughts have a tone that is playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or inquiring” (AN, 80). For example, Kundera’s essay on the problem of kitsch (see chapter 5) “is unthinkable outside the novel” (AN, 80). Moreover, Kundera is not writing political novels, that is, novels opposed to the Soviet occupation of his home country or novels that originate in the agony of exile. (In /gnorance, Irena has nightmares that she had not successfully escaped, that her abandoned Prague life had come back and snatched her away from her French life and brought her back “home.”) Politics is the increasingly ubiquitous realm of the speech, the treatise, the demonstration, and the pamphlet. As important as these things are, they are not the provenance of the novel, which writes against a world “politicized in the extreme.” Kundera, “an explorer of existence” (AN, 44), writes, at least in part, as a response to the ideological claustrophobia of a globalized existence and its binding regulations—Heidegger’s rule of das Man on a planetary scale. The novel is not propaganda in the fight even against the forces that threaten it because its allegiance is always with the nonobvious, the unexplored, the not yet thought. In a world in which we imagine that we all know what we are doing (even though we never agree on what that is), Kundera pits the novel against the trap of any self-assured alignment with being. The novel for Kundera was not a “literary genre,” but rather

a “wisdom” and a “position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion” (7B, 158).'” The novel’s insistent nonidentification is also its allegiance to experiments in locating new lines of escape, a kind of palpating for a way out, which it does through its conquest of undiscovered regions of human existence.'® The novel, Kundera’s persona tells us in 7he Unbearable Lightness of Being, “is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become” (ULB, 221; AN, 26—27).” This trap has at least two dimensions:

Traps essential to the human condition that we inherit as part of our humanity: “we are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die” (AN, 26-27). We have long known about this. The trap that we have made for ourselves, the trap that Adorno and Marcuse have called “the totally administered society” and what Kundera called “a veritable whirlpool of reduction where Husserl’s ‘world of life’ is fatally obscured and being is forgotten” (AN, 17).

14 « Tamina at the Border

The grand march of history requires that we all be participants, not spectators. It is the nightmare of world harmony in which the obviousness of ourselves to ourselves is a source of celebration, not weeping and worry.

World War I concerned only a portion of the world, Kundera tells us, but it foreshadowed the increasingly global reach of normalizing practices. “Henceforward, nothing that occurs on the planet will be a merely local matter . . . we are more and more determined by external conditions, by

situations that no one can escape and that more and more make us resemble one another” (AW, 27). In philosophy we can see this resistance to a totally administered world

in Michel Foucault’s defiant insistence that “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”*? One can include Kundera in Foucault’s faceless company: “I dream of a world where writers will be required by law to keep their identities secret and use pseudonyms. Three advantages: a drastic reduction of graphomania; decreased aggressiveness in literary life; the disappearance of biographical interpretation of works” (AN, 148).”! In Jmmortality, this was the elderly Goethe’s final escape from himself, when “a person ceases to minister to his immortality and no longer considers it a serious matter” (IM, 76). In a sense, this is a liberating aspect of the approaching oblivion of death, which lurks on the other side of the border where the attachments that seemed essential to one’s life can suddenly shed their solemnity.

This lightness can be unbearable but, at the terminal paradox of the border, it can also lighten the insufferable gravity of one’s life. This terminal paradox is hard-won. In /mmortality Bettina engaged in a tug of war with Goethe over a share of his posterity. She plotted to write a book about him that would insert her into his biographical legacy. When

future generations thought of Goethe, they would also think of Bettina. Goethe “recognized at once that behind the expressions of love lurked the menacing aggressiveness of the pen” (JM, 63), “not a battle for love; a battle for immortality” (JM, 67). Sometimes we write about others in order to co-opt a part of what we perceive to be their place in the sun. It is my express hope that my own pen is not complicit with such aggression. I do not want to dance on Kundera’s oeuvre, and exact “moral judo” upon it (S, 19). I find myself very much a friend of these works, provoked and challenged by them, and as such I am happy to think with and through them, but I do not want to hijack them or to trap its author in my devices. What follows, therefore, will be an engagement with the works of Milan Kundera,

Tamina at the Border m= 15

not some musing about Milan Kundera the person.*? In the spirit in which Francois Ricard in the Bibliothéque de la Pléiade editions of Kundera’s works scrupulously avoided a biography of Kundera, but rather provided “a biography of the works,” I would like to keep my fingers on the pulsing life of these works. And if I speak of myself, I would confess that, although I really do not understand myself at all, I am a philosopher who finds himself drawn to the works of Kundera, so much so that I ventured to engage in a dialogue with them enacted at the border of the novel and philosophy. I want to give both philosophy and Kundera’s works their due, but in so doing, I also want to prevent my own discipline (philosophy) from having either the first or the last word. Kundera does not need philosophy or philosophers, but I am convinced that philosophy will profit from Kundera’s work in the very terms that he poses them, flirting with philosophy, while avoiding philosophy’s ambush. This is a book written at the porous borders between philosophy and the novel, borders that open fluid lines of transit between the two practices. This encounter seeks to avoid the universalizing impulse of much of the philosophical enterprise, respecting the solitude of the novel. It embraces novelistic solitude in philosophical solitude. It is also not my intention here to tell Kundera what he thinks, to help

him out, to decide what he really meant to say. He does not need any help with this. Kundera’s four “confessions” (The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter) already speak with great eloquence and precision about the stakes and strategies of his works. All that would remain from such a task is a clever paraphrasing of what has already

been lucidly articulated by the author himself. Instead I would like, at the Janus-faced border that is, in all of its hybridity and ambiguity, the shared heritage of philosophy and the novel, to address the conjunction that holds together philosophy and the universe of the novel as practiced by Kundera. More bluntly: this is not a secret coup where philosophy, constantly protesting the contrary, finds a way, as Hegel did, to reconcile this tension in favor of philosophy.’? Philosophy will not have the last word or the favored word. That being said, Kundera’s own works (a combination of novels and essays) complicate the distinction between the novel and the essay (his essays have novelistic elements and his novels often have essayistic elements). The present work therefore seeks neither to explicate the alleged philosophy of Milan Kundera nor to convince either him or his readers that he, despite his constant protestations to the contrary, really is a closet philosopher. My own essays here are a hybrid variation of the form of what Kundera, attempting to carry the work of Hermann Broch forward, called

a “new art of the specifically novelistic essay (which does not claim to 16 « Tamina at the Border

bear an apodictic message but remains hypothetical, playful, or ironic)” (AN, 65). The present work is a series of essays, experiments and attempts, wary of spiders, rife with ellipses, born on the ambiguous but fecund border between the respective planes of philosophy and the novel. The border from which the present work was conceived attempts to think within the ambiguity of the novel and the essayistic that Kundera’s own critical essays make manifest.

In other words, I will not do for Kundera what Arthur Danto once attempted to do for Nietzsche: recuperate him by giving him the philosophical discipline that he allegedly lacked. A youthful Danto once shamelessly proposed, “because we know a good deal more philosophy today, I believe it is exceedingly useful to see his analyses in terms of logical features which

he was unable to make explicit, but toward which he was unmistakably groping. His language would have been less colorful had he known what he was trying to say.”** Poor Nietzsche! He “never had the discipline to write for a true public!””? Nietzsche should have delivered himself over to the very herd that he sought to contest. Perhaps Nietzsche's incompatibility with the philosophical public, however, says something worrisome about the reading skills of a “true public.” At the end of the preface to the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche lamented that he had no readers—a strange challenge, because if one accepted this challenge, it meant that one had presumably read it. Reading is not mere literacy and recapitulation. The necessary ingredient for reading is today lacking: rumination, Wiederkduen.*© As the German makes even clearer than the Latinate rumination, this is a bovine metaphor. The book that one would read is the grass that the cow would eat. But if the cow does not transform the grass into cud and chew it again, the grass will kill the cow. To be clear: the grass is poison. Simply to consume it is to make oneself sick or even to destroy oneself. Reading turns poison into food as the solitude of the reader encounters the solitude of the writer. The present text does not seek to explain Kundera, but rather to ruminate with him on the shared border that divides two universes.

In this respect, I take quite seriously both the autonomy of Kundera’s universe of the novel as well as the arrogance of the philosophical disposition that unquestioningly assumes that its own traditions have a monopoly on what it means to think and that, as such, regard themselves as the supreme arbiter of serious thinking. As a philosopher, I am very protective of and grateful for many of the traditions—ancient and contemporary, from all over the world, and from all walks of life—that have enriched thinking. But I am also quite suspicious of a tendency in many philosophers to apologize for the diversity of wisdom’s modes of disclosure. Philosophy, Tamina at the Border m= 17

too, should not fail to investigate human life (in the broadest sense possible, beyond anthropocentric privilege) in the trap the world has become and it should do so with the realization that its own unduly narrow selfdetermination makes it complicit in its own entrapment. In this sense, philosophy needs nonphilosophy (that which is not yet philosophy, but which, under the right conditions, could one day be rendered audible by philosophy) in order not only to address the trap that the world has become, but also the trap that too readily becomes philosophy. Such an ongoing rejuvenation of philosophy with its wings no longer clipped is fraught with its own dangers. Philosophy flies over everything and everyone, claiming it all for itself. The glory of philosophy is its creativity and rigor and audacity with concepts. An intuition of what it means to think, an “image of thought” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase, is articulated and populated by the concepts that belong to “the image of thought” by right.’” An intuition into what counts as philosophy enables one to repurpose old concepts and create new ones. The universe of the novel, in contrast, can absorb ideas and even philosophical treatises in toto, without being determined or fundamentally characterized by them. As Broch saw, “the novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry nor philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing thereby anything of its identity, which is characterized (we need only recall Rabelais and Cervantes) precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge” (AN, 64). The novel uses all means at its disposal, unembarrassed by the wealth of its resources, “marshaling all intellectual means and all poetic forms to illuminate ‘what only the novel can discover’: man’s being” (ibid.). This power of incorporation is not transitive: a novel can wholly absorb a work of philosophy (Kundera’s example is Broch’s essay on the “Degeneration of Values” in the third part of The Sleepwalkers trilogy), but a work of philosophy cannot absorb a novel. When the novel incorporates a philosophical treatise, the philosophical voice is reconfigured and relativized,

and it no longer directly means what it says. The practice of philosophy yields to the practice of the novel, with its pervasive sense of irony and its accommodation of polyphony (what Bakhtin called heteroglossia”®’) of fully valid perspectives, a polyphonic “equality of voices: no one voice should dominate, none should serve as mere accompaniment” (AN, 75).” Unlike Dostoevsky, however, Kundera’s polyphony of voices is not only distributed among his characters, but also through an equally enigmatic and paradoxically nonauthoritative authorial voice, which eventually goes by the persona “Kundera.”*° 18 uu Tamina at the Border

Compared to the polyphonic focus of this lineage of the novel, which can sustain the dissonance of several equally valid perspectives (its characters and their situations), judging none of them, a work of philosophy, whose power comes from its capacity not only to be abstract, but also to do so in order to exercise its immense power of focus, can rarely sustain the novel’s complexity. There are important exceptions including Plato's dialogues, especially when freed from obsessively interpreting Socrates as the mouthpiece of Plato and otherwise robbing the dialogues of their literary features; the cosmological exuberance of Giordano Bruno's dialogues; Montaigne’s essays; Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings; Nietzsche’s aphoristic, postarachnid essays; Thoreau’s illuminating embrace of the universe of solitude; Spinoza’s astonishing scholia, bursting with life amidst the geometric machinery of The Ethics; Hélderlin’s hymns and translations, endeavoring to speak in a poetic word that intensifies the range and power of philosophical thought; and the experiments with new forms (dialogues, aphorisms) of the Jena Circle (Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, etc.).*! One could say that the present work occupies the kind of porous border

that defined Goethe’s relationship to Schelling. The latter—through and through a philosopher, albeit a radically creative and original one—argued that philosophy’s various completed tasks should all “flow back like many individual streams into the general ocean of poesy, from which they started out.”*? Goethe, who had a strong hand in getting the young Schelling his early academic post in Jena, and who shared Schelling’s engagement in the renegotiation of the procedures and aims of natural science, wrote novels as well as the incomparable second part of Faust. Schelling’s literary ambi-

tions were modest, amounting to a handful of underwhelming poems. Nonetheless, Schelling belongs to the rare philosophical attempts to take art, including the novel, seriously without absorbing it into philosophy’s own practices. The arts do the sorts of things that only the arts can do (the muses are always plural, governing multiple universes), but as such, philosophy is dependent on the arts because they have a more direct relationship to the creative source (“the general ocean of poesy”) out of which thinking emerges. Goethe had a healthy suspicion of the professionalization of philosophy, but so in his own way did Schelling. While the present work does not necessarily align itself with the results of this particular encounter, it does attempt to reflect on the site of such encounters. In general, however, the relative brevity of this list of philosophical exceptions proves the rule and the rise of philosophy as a university profession has generally had a profoundly taming effect.*? Furthermore, philosophical success, beyond the echo chamber of the philosophical bureaucrats (the Tamina at the Border m= 19

closed conversation in which philosophy is always what we already do), is measured by the univocal focus of the freestanding treatise, whose power is found in successful demonstrations or descriptions. That being said, philosophers inhabit their own universes and their capacity to populate them with strikingly original concepts is remarkable in its own right. The philosophers mentioned above, however, venture further and verge on the universe of the novel, although they do not breach its borders.** Such thinkers are hybrid figures, not wholly at home in the philosophical universe. This is not to say that all philosophers need to be novelists, only that the novel is an example of a kind of artwork that occasions a constructive selfexamination of what it is that we do when we do philosophy. Kundera’s complication of the border between the novelistic and the essayistic also recalls Ulrich’s discovery of the essay in The Man without Qualities, which “explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it—for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept.” This present work is in this sense an essay on and about the border between philosophy and the novel. In contrast with the relatively small list of hybrid philosophers, there

is an almost half millennium legacy of novels of immense intellectual ambition and complexity. Although they comprise a minute fraction of published novels, these works lean toward philosophy from the other side

of the border.*° Their powers of thinking do not reduce philosophy to a philosophical consideration of particular themes and ideas but rather transform it in accordance with the lens of the novel. Hermann Broch, for example, had an acute sense of the philosophical crisis of his age. After selling his father’s textile factory, he studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna. This was the height of the Vienna Circle (includ-

ing Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap) and they devoted themselves to tidying up philosophy’s traditional metaphysical indiscretions. But there is something very strange about this. After the incomprehensible devastation of World War I, professional philosophers worried about protocol sentences! It was as if the denizens of Musil’s Kakania remained as oblivious after the war as they were before the war.

The Vienna Circle may not have been a particularly robust and expansive chapter in the history of philosophy, but its impotence had an inadvertently salutary effect on Broch. “If one judges by the ethical content then positivistic ‘scientific’ philosophy is philosophy no longer.”°’ Philosophy had collapsed, unable to speak to the ethical crises of the day, and so Broch abandoned his philosophy studies “for what only the novel can do.” Perhaps another kind of philosophy could have contributed to our understanding of this crisis (the death of God and the degradation 20 w Tamina at the Border

of values in the trenches of the “war to end all wars’), but in Broch’s Vienna, philosophy had exhausted itself. But Broch’s discovery has implications far broader than the philosophical helplessness of the Vienna Circle, which was as useful in addressing the degeneration of values as the formula for water is to a sailor drowning at sea. The novel was the possibility of a renewal of thought during a nihilistic crisis so severe that one of its symptoms was that it did not appear as a crisis. Business is business, war is war, philosophy is philosophy—everything is merely sachlich. For the Vienna Circle this was the charge to clear philosophy of all metaphysics, which meant anything that is not a proposition of the logical and scientific kind. The novel for Broch was therefore not a venue for philosophy. It was the possibility of thinking at all during the crisis of values after the death of God. The novel is therefore not philosophy by other means. Kundera himself explicitly disavowed that his novels are works of applied philosophy. Resisting Christian Salmon’s suggestion that his novels are “phenomenological,” Kundera responded: “The adjective isn't bad, but I make it a rule not to use it. I’m too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists. What superb ‘phenomenological descriptions’ in Proust, who never even knew a phenomenologist” (AN, 32). Innovative and thoughtful novelists like Broch and Musil “brought a sovereign and radiant intelligence to bear on the novel” but this do not mean that their goal was “to transform the novel into philosophy, but to marshal around the story all the means—rational and irrational, narrative and contemplative—that could illuminate man’s being; could make of the novel the supreme intellectual synthesis’ (AN, 16; emphasis mine). The novel could bring a polyphonic complexity, rife with irony and ambiguity, to bear on the problems of human existence, a practice that could swallow works of philosophy whole, but which did not need philosophy to supply it with its questions, compositional techniques, and insights. Philosophy has its own modes of disclosure and “the arts are not all alike; each of them accedes to the world by a different doorway” and of all the possible modes of disclosure, “one is exclusively reserved to the novel,” which is “an art sui generis, an autonomous art (C, 61). The novel might choose to make use of philosophy, but it is not in any way dependent on it. That we automatically assume that novelistic thinking must derive from discoveries that only philosophers could have made is for Kundera a persistent, “ineradicable error” (C, 63). Kundera takes Tamina at the Border m= 2/

the case of the so-called existential theater and novel: “Sartre’s powerful personality, his double status as both philosopher and writer, lends support to the idea that the existential orientation of the twentieth-century theater and novel must come from the influence of a philosophy. This is still the old ineradicable error, the belief that the relation between philosophy and literature goes only one way, that insofar as ‘professionals of narration are obliged to have ideas, they can only borrow them from ‘professionals of thought” (C, 63). This error (when novels think, they think philosophi-

cally) obscures the image of thought that governs the attunement and practice of the novel.°*> What matters to Kundera’s practice of the novel, what entitles it to know what belongs to its practice by right, demands that the dogmatic image of thought that governs many practices of philosophy be suspended:

Novelistic thinking, as Broch and Musil brought it into the aesthetic of the modern novel, has nothing to do with the thinking of a scientist or a philosopher; I would even say it is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters’ lives; those lives feed it and justify it. (C, 71) The novel is not trying to convince its readers of a particular philosophical position and it does not marshal arguments toward any particular goal. It allies itself with the plurality of human experience with its ambiguities and paradoxes and eschews the demand for a definitive conclusion: Although I favor a strong presence of thought in the novel, this is not to say that I like the so-called philosophical novel, that subjugation of the novel to a philosophy, that “tale-making” out of moral or political ideas. Authentically novelistic thought (as the novel has known it since Rabelais) is always unsystematic; undisciplined; it is similar to Nietzsche's; it is experimental; it forces rifts in all the idea systems that surround us; it explores (particularly through its characters) all lines of thought by trying to follow each of them to its end... Now, a person who thinks should not try to persuade others of his belief; that is what puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the “man of conviction”; but what is a conviction? It is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed. (7B, 174)

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Novelistic thought attempts to tear through the “curtain of preinterpretation” (C, 122), to pierce the habits of collective misperception that make possible forms of intellectual inertia and perversity like kitsch. It poses problems but it does not have a driving thesis nor does it unequivocally take the side of any one of its characters. “A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. . . . The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”*? How then does a novelist craft this kind of interrogative voice? How does one deploy themes without answers and share novelistic insights without sacrificing their ambiguity and their hypothetical nature? How then does Kundera speak of the “art of the novel,” including his own? “A novelist talking about the art of the novel is not a professor giving a discourse from his podium. Imagine him rather as a painter welcoming you into his studio, where you are surrounded by his canvases staring at you from where they lean against the walls. He will

talk about himself, but even more about other people, about novels of theirs that he loves and that have a secret presence in his work” (C, 78). Although Kundera is only speaking about his own practice of the novel, he still speaks of the novel, albeit not from on high. (Kundera points out that his own Pleiades would not necessarily have appreciated each other’s work or company.) Paradoxically, one’s particular practice of the novel, a practice that demands an affirmation of one’s solitude, assumes a sense of the novel as such. This general intuition into what belongs by right to the practice of the novel is an ineluctably indefensible assumption, but it nonetheless shapes the novelist’s creativity. It is as if one were taking a plane of the universe—a slice of its infinite expanse—and reserving it for a particular practice of the novel. Deleuze and Guattari, in their final work together, What Is Philosophyv, wrote of a hybrid creation that does not obfuscate or reconcile the differences in kind between philosophy and the novel. This hybrid form, from the perspective of the plane of philosophy, gives thinking a range and com-

plexity and broadening of theme that it does not have on its own. This alternative plane is the planomenal universe of the novel (the intuition of what counts as a novel, what by right belongs to the manner in which the novel allows image and thought to appear).

On this vast plane in which even the form of the novel is an ongoing history of discovery and innovation, themes (questions and problems) interact with situations in such a way that heterogeneous characters express different aspects of the problems. Characters in the same situation

might express the same theme with the same words, but these are what

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Kundera called “words misunderstood,” expressing different, often irreconcilable and paradoxical elements of the problem. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example, Kundera lists under this rubric the irreconcilably different ways that Sabina and Franz understand the same words. Sabina hates parades and seeks privacy and solitude; Franz, convinced that the solitude of the scholarly life is a betrayal of the real and the true, never misses a major demonstration. Laughter and forgetting, gravity and memory, mean different things for the different characters in Zhe Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Novelistic unity is produced through thematic variations, just as musical variations lead to “the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things” by using the “form in which concentration is brought to its maximum.” This allows “the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter,” moving with each variation farther and farther away from the initial variation so that the final variation resembles the first “as little as a flower its image under a microscope” (BLF, 226). Through the multiplication of thematic perspectives (irreconcilable dimensions of a given problem), the novel supports an immense heteroglossia that is allergic to any single conclusion or any one position, a polyphonic “equality of voices: no one voice should dominate, none should serve as mere accompaniment” (AN, 75). In this respect, novels can be more philosophical than philosophy itself, but, paradoxically, only because they are less philosophical than what has been enshrined as the standard procedures of philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari:

These thinkers are “half” philosophers but also much more than philosophers. But they are not sages. There is such force in those unhinged works of Holderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud, and many English and American novelists, from Melville to Lawrence or Miller, in which the reader discovers admiringly that they have written the novel of Spinozism. To be sure, they do not produce a synthesis of art and philosophy. They branch

out and do not stop branching out. They are hybrid geniuses who neither erase nor cover over differences in kind but, on the contrary, use all of the resources of their “athleticism” to install themselves

within this very difference, like acrobats torn apart in a perpetual show of strength.” At this hybrid border, however, it is important to consider what it means to be “much more than philosophers.” Half philosophers are doing something that no full philosopher can do! “Hermann Broch’s insistence in repeating: The sole raison détre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown 24 « Tamina at the Border

segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality”

(AN, 5-6). Kundera’s friend, the late Carlos Fuentes, admitted that he shared “more and more with the Czech novelist—a certain vision of the novel as an indispensable element, an element not to be sacrificed, of the civilization a Czech and a Mexican can have in common: a way of saying things that could not be said any other way.””! A Novel Symposium Kundera’ early short story, “Symposium,” which reworks Plato’s dialogue of the same name, is an exhibition of a philosophical work transformed by a novelistic sensibility. Although it may be Plato’s most generous and literary dialogue, the one that comes closest to the polyphonic complexity of the novel, it is also hard not to conclude that Socrates’ speech, despite the eloquence of all the other speeches, is not intended to be the best as it soars into the empyrean realm of ideas. Moreover, although they have much philosophical power, dialogues advance, moving to and fro, to some provisional consensus (“Yes, that is so, Socrates”). This gives the dialogue its admirable focus as the interlocutors sort through a philosophical problem. Even if the problem remains unresolved or even irresolvable, there is a measure of unity, thematically as well as dramatically, that distinguishes them from the heteroglossia not only of the novel (in Kundera’s sense) but also from some other forms of theater. Plato’s Symposium is striking because there is not only no effort to corral the many speeches on €pa@c into a shared conclusion, but the encomia all have their respective charm and insight, even if they culminate in Socrates's own encomium. Nonetheless, after Socrates's speech, the final speech features one of the memorable dramatic episodes in all of the dialogues: Socratess infamous rejection of the drunken amorous advances of the strikingly handsome, willing, and lascivious Alcibiades. What in the world could be better than a drunken roll in the hay with such a comely and enthusiastic participant? An idea! This gave rise to the notion of Platonic love, a love based not on the corporeal cravings of the body, but on the eternal erotic splendor of the idea—not a beautiful body, but the idea of beauty itself.4? As Socrates told the crestfallen Alcibiades: “If I really have in me the power to make you a better man, then you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description and makes your own remarkable good looks pale in comparison. But, then, is this a fair exchange that you propose? You seem to me to want more than your proper share:

you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing in itself, ‘gold in exchange for bronze’” (218e).** As Alcibiades Tamina at the Border m= 25

remarked, Socrates was not immune to the charms of youthful flesh. Hoping to exploit this, Alcibiades had invited him to work out with him in the gymnasium. “He took exercise and wrestled with me many times when no one else was present. What can I tell you? I got nowhere” (217c). Socrates was always able to discern and esteem the eternal in the temporal. Socrates in the Charmides, for example, managed to conduct his dialogue with the beautiful title character about the nature of sound-minded discretion (GW@poobvn), even though he had peaked inside Charmides’s cloak and witnessed something even more beautiful than Charmides’s face, causing Socrates to become inflamed and lost in ecstasy (155d). Although such temperance may strike us as strange (inflamed with Eros, I nonetheless strive to midwife an idea), we should remember that we rely on ideas to try and make sense of all parts of our lives, including our sexual lives. We mediate our bodies with language, knowing that the anarchic silence of the body and its urges—everything is permitted—is too much for us. Platonic love, libertinage, cupidity, chastity, abstinence before marriage, polymorphous perversity, and grand romance: these are all ideas through which we unilaterally address our taciturn bodies. Sexual urges do not counsel us to be either celibate or a philanderer. For Socrates, there are many beautiful bodies, but there is only one pure idea of beauty. Alcibiades proposed to exchange the fleeting beauty of his willing body for the eternity of Socrates’s moral beauty, an inequitable offer of bronze for gold. Alcibiades provided the revelers with a lot of laughs, but as the evening wore on and his audience steadily lost consciousness, Socrates continued his discourse, finally arguing that authors “should be

able to write both comedy and tragedy: the skillful tragic dramaturgist should also be a comic poet” (223d). The dialogue itself, with its solemnity and humor, had lived up to Socrates’s expectations. As the dialogue is reborn as the comedy of laughable loves in Kundera’s “Symposium,” an element of the comic mode of disclosivity reveals itself:

the comedy is not that we use ideas to make decisions about our bodies; it is found rather in the kinds of ideas we employ. Kundera called his story a ‘farce in five acts” (like Farewell Waltz) in which there is “enormous

stress on plot, with its whole machinery of unforeseen and exaggerated coincidences.” This is a “theatrical” and “stylized” version of Plato’s “long discussions on love” (AN, 93). Plato had also trained to be a dramatist before he fell in love with Socrates, and it is often his dramatic setting of Socrates’s voice that rings truest.** The farcical structure of Kundera’s story, however, permits many voices to speak with equal validity, but in a milieu

that highlights the comedy of our various attempts to translate our bodies into the world of ideas. As the woman doctor remarked to her speech26 su Tamina at the Border

mad colleagues: “Your theories are plausible in themselves and astonishing, because they reveal such a deep knowledge of life. They contain only one little imperfection: there isn’t an iota of truth in them” (ZZ, 146). The literary repetition of the symposium where revelers give drunken encomia about €pwc took place in the doctors’ staff room of hospital “in any ward of any hospital in any town you like” (ZZ, 109). The plot device

that animates the action through a series of coincidences is itself a repetition of Socrates’s refusal of a sexual encounter for the sake of an idea. The doctors and nurses were copiously drinking wine and Elisabet became demonstrably flirtatious toward Havel, who, despite having a reputation for being like death and consuming everything and everyone (LJ, 111), uncharacteristically rejected her. For what idea did the sexually omnivorous Havel reject the comely Elisabet? For the idea of freedom! “To throw off the dismal predictability of the world’s course by means of the free will of caprice” (LL, 115). The idea of a groundless act (reject Elisabet for no reason whatsoever) is the idea of freedom itself, a small indication that we are not trapped within our own mechanisms. The idea of freedom, however, carries none of the gravity of a grand idea like Platonic beauty. Havel was no heroic Don Juan, no conqueror of those who at first resist his seductions: “How can you be a conqueror in a domain where no one refuses you, where everything is possible and everything is permitted” (LL, 133)? Havel, like death, was a great collector, but since he never met any resistance, he had become “like breakfasts and dinners, like stamp collecting and table tennis, if not like a ride on the streetcar or shopping” (LL, 133-134). Havel was not a tragic figure because he inhabited a realm, like death itself, of utter levity (everything is permitted), and hence “the comic sadness of my womanizing existence” (ZL, 134-135). The female doctor, however, was unconvinced by Havel’s account of the absolute lightness of free eroticism. In Plato’s Symposium, we learn that the gods had a feast to honor the birth of Aphrodite, and the guests included the “inexhaustibly garrulous” Poros, whose name means “way,” “passage,” or “resource.” Poros got hammered on nectar and sleepily headed to Zeus’s garden where he passed out. Penia (“poverty” or “need”) seduced the barely conscious Poros and eventually gave birth to their illegitimate child, Eros, who Socrates recounts was “neither mortal nor immortal,” “neither ignorant nor wise, neither destitute nor rich for “anything he finds his way to always slips away” (203e). Eros is an intermediary between body and idea, the vicissitudes of experience and the eternal, and, as a messenger (the literal meaning of angel), he transits between the two realms, coming to rest in neither. In “Symposium,” the woman doctor echoed this Platonic myth when she associated Havel with such an intermediary quality: “You're so Tamina at the Border m= 27

damned cunning: calling yourself a beggar, but choosing words so majestic that you sound more like a king. You're an old fraud, Havel” (ZZ, 135). The doctor was correct about Havel. He was a figure of the comic Eros of ideas. No ideas produce firm convictions yet at the same time he is not fully at peace with the absence of gravity in his life. When the woman doc-

tor later arrived to seduce Havel, he explained that he could not cuckold her husband because “such friendship unblemished by the idiocy of eroticism is the only value I’ve found in life” (LZ, 152). In a realm where ideas flitted about, shedding no light on bodies, friendship offered a rare anchor. That, however, was precisely why the woman doctor considered Havel to be an ideal erotic candidate: he would not kiss and tell! When he later met her husband, the two old friends pretended to believe some tragic account about Elisabet’s ardent desire to commit suicide. The account was false and the story was ugly, but it had the weight of tragedy in a comic world of fluttering ideas.

The youthful Flajsman discovered even greater weight in the idea of Elisabet’s supposedly tragic behavior. Much like Jaromil in Life is Elsewhere, he was overwhelmed by the very adult problem of Eros and sought refuge in the lyricism of great words, ideas whose grandeur distracted him from the confusion of maturity. Dr. Havel had given Elisabet some sleeping pills, misrepresenting them as stimulants. Elisabet passed out while trying to make coffee but eventually recovered. Not knowing the outcome, but thinking that she had committed suicide, Flajsman believed that she had died for him and he concluded that a great love logically expresses itself as a Liebestod, thus purifying it from the contingent realm of human affairs. “The absolute? Yes. This was a young man only recently cast out

into the adult world, which is full of uncertainties. However much he ran after girls, above all he was seeking a comforting, boundless, redeeming embrace, which would save him from the horrifying relativity of the freshly discovered world” (LI, 149). When he learned that Elisabet was still alive, he was not anxious to see his great love. Lesser lovers imagine that happiness is found in being with their beloved, but although they had just met and had never shared their passions carnally, Flajsman concluded that experience tarnishes the greatness of pure ideas and that happiness can only mean a life devoted to a great idea: “I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they dont live together and when they know about each other only that they exist” (ZZ, 158). Better to love the idea of a relationship than the relationship itself! (This is a theme that shall return with a fury in Slowness.) Flajsman assumed that such a noble woman would even deny that she had attempted to commit suicide in order not to burden others with the gravity of her actions. With the distance from the 28 wu Tamina at the Border

reality of death that youth affords, he took pleasure in the idea of “splendid and comforting death” (LZ, 161), an idea that allowed him to soar above his otherwise confusing life. In the contrast between Flajsman and Havel we can glimpse the problem of the paradoxical weight of ideas: the heavier the idea, the lighter it is; the lighter the idea, the heavier it is. Flajsman’s serious, important ideas (the absolute, death, great love) do not have sufficient weight to anchor him to the earth. They allow him to soar to the heavens as if on angel’s wings, just as the idea of beauty allows Socrates to soar above the vulgar Alcibiades and just as the teacher and her two students in 7he Book of Laughter and Forgetting form a ring that ascends above the earth, “while from on high, the dumbfounded students heard the fading radiant laughter of three archangels” (BLF, 104). The more serious the idea, the more heavenly its ambitions! In contrast, the lightness of Havel’s ideation is unbearable (everything is permitted), and it plunges to the reticent earth, just as Kundera’s persona, “expelled . . . from the ring dance” never stops falling “into the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out,” drowning out all of his words (BLF, 106). Serious convictions soar while melancholy,

doubt, laughter, and wonder surrender them to the devil’s gravitational pull. The erotic body, despite all of its urges and promptings, is unbearably

light, unable to soar with confidence into the serious kingdom of great ideas. Although the author should, as Socrates counseled, be able to write both tragedy and comedy, one should also recall Jan at the nudist beach as he listened to a fellow nudist enthusiastically pontificate while “their bare genitals stared stupidly and sadly at the yellow sand” (BLF, 312).

Itinerary of This Work Kundera claimed that his “novels are variants of an architecture based on the number seven,” a commitment that he ascribes to a “deep, unconscious, incomprehensible drive” (AN, 86). For similarly mysterious reasons, with no coherent account of what it accomplishes or why it is of value, I have impishly settled on seven as the number of this book’s experiments. With the exception of the final two chapters, which speak directly to each other, each chapter can also stand on its own. All seven chapters, however, are variations on a theme: the universe of the novel as practiced by Kundura on the border of philosophy itself, with each left to its own, but neither left alone.

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Caught Looking The Universe of the Novel What would this experience of the obscure, in which the obscure offered itself in its obscurity, be?

—Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation’

Works in the Time of Books Although Kundera concedes that his novels are personal creations, they nonetheless make implicit assumptions about the nature of the novel, even though they are fully aware that they cannot legitimately speak for all novels. This is a paradox of novelistic creation: one writes in solitude but of the greater world of human affairs, as if one were one of Leibniz’s monads, expressing the universe from an oblique and irreducibly singular perspec-

tive. From the opacity of solitude (no windows through which one can gaze upon one’s true self), one mirrors the universe in one’s own ways. Nietzsche wrote his Zarathustra for everyone and no one, writing from his solitude to the solitude of his readers, communicating the multiplicity of himself to the multiplicities of his readers. Nietzsche’s singularity does not mean that he is mathematically ove, but rather a singular perspective

on a universe of multiplicities, including the multiplicities that express Nietzsche the author. Similarly, one writes a novel from the personal, nonuniversalizable sense of how one construes the novel as a whole, a personal take on what is at stake in the novel as such.* This personal sense is to an important extent singular, but it is not unitary. Given this, how do characters, gestures, situations, and philosophical

ideas circulate within what Kundera called the “universe of the novel” (AN, 78)? How do novels speak and what kinds of claims do they make?

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How does one think a story (AN, 139)? What is the work of thought within a novelistic work? As discussed in chapter 1, Kundera’s novels, while more intellectually ambitious than a lot of the standard practices of philosophy, are not literary applications of philosophical ideas. “My disgust with those who reduce

a work to its ideas. My revulsion at being dragged into what they call ‘discussions of ideas.’ My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works” (AWN, 131). His novels are not “‘tale-making’ out of moral or political ideas.” Taking a cue from Maurice Blanchot, a conscientious

defender of works, one could say that novels are works in an age of the hyper-production of books (a profusion that is now accelerating as books, no longer limited by the cost of paper and printing, proliferate in the electronic big bang that is giving rise to the universe of e-books, social media, and information on demand). Blanchot lamented in The Infinite Conversation that “we are still in the civilization of the Book.”? This, at first glance, is a strange claim to make at the beginning of a very long book. For Blanchot, however, the “Book” (with a capital B to distinguish it from the fact that works can be published in book form) does not designate a certain kind of object but rather the civilization of the Book names a culture that understands itself to be a book

and which writes books about the kind of book that it is. The “Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the premise of a communication that would one day be immediate and transparent.”* This is the culture of the grand march of history, of common sense, of the natural attitude, of recognition, which Deleuze once called “the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which thought ‘rediscovers the State, rediscovers ‘the Church’ and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object.””

Good books are therefore coherent books that tie up all of their loose ends into a unified vision, books that reinforce the received nonthought according to which we habitually recognize ourselves. Their spirit is opposed to what Blanchot dubbed “plural speech,” a practice of writing in which “the continuity of the movement of writing might let interruption as meaning, and rupture as form, intervene fundamentally.”° Kundera also writes in (and against) a civilization of the “Book,” but with recourse to an alternate history, another place, without the “refusal of death,”” in a universe where novels are not books. They belong to the history of the contestation of the book. The history of the novel is the novel’s revenge on his-

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tory itself (7B, 15-18), its struggle against Hegel’s “extrahuman reason . . . [t]he meaning of an art’s history is opposed to the meaning of history itself. Because of its personal nature, the history of an art is a revenge by man

against the impersonality of the history of humanity” (7B, 16). The art of the “novel is deeply non-ideological, for ideology always represents the world from a single point of view, from the point of view of a single truth, as an illustration of that truth. And hence the novel is as essential to our insanely ideological world as is bread.”® From the perspective of the insanely ideological world, images are vehicles for their underlying (state-sponsored) ideas just as novels are books that reinforce a manufactured consent. How has the image come to suffer? Why are the novel and other artistic innovations not accorded the same value as science and thereby elevating it to the other great moniker of European modernity? From the perspective of history and the state, from the

comfortable nonthought of recognition, the novel appears optional and eccentric. The Serbian-American poet Charles Simic imagines the image's fall from grace in a history of literature “from Plato to the Inquisition to Stalin and all their followers”’—a history in five phases of literature told from the perspective of its totalitarian vanquishers: 1. Separation of content and form, ideas from experience. Literature is primarily its content.”

Plato (or at least Platonism) banishes the poets from the polis. That this itself takes place in a dialogue that is informed by literary values largely remains a lost irony. We too rarely read Plato's dialogues as dialogues, but rather as sources of arguments to be abstracted and philosophically analyzed. The dialogue form is nothing but a quaint receptacle for content. In the same spirit, we read thinking-novels as stealth forms of philosophy and the task of reading is to distill them back down to their original concepts and arguments, to dissolve the accident of their form and the derivative nature of images.

2. The content needs to be unmasked, revealed for what it truly is. The cop slapping the young poet and demanding to know who ordained him to write like that is the secret ideal.” The fact that the novel is first and foremost a novel becomes unimportant,

a trifling and inessential consideration of its form. Since the content is all that matters and composition is just ornamental, its ideas can be subjected to interrogation and tested for alignment with the prevailing political agendas. “Good” (recognizable) content provides no surprises, makes no discoveries. Novels reinforce the obvious and thrive on the recogniz32 wm Caught Looking

able. When the Soviet novelist Abram Tertz (the nom de plume of Andrei Sinyavsky) was on trial in 1965-1966 with Yuli Daniel for publishing antiSoviet literature in foreign venues,” he reminded his prosecutors that he had even given a qualified defense of the Stalinist purges in 1937 and that he was proud to be a part of the Soviet dream, but that he was also novelist, not a propagandist’—“T am not a political writer. No writer expresses his political views through his writings. An artistic work does not express political views.”'* His magical realist novels deployed extravagant metaphors, but they were just metaphors, “just my special way of perceiving reality.” If you take them literally, “it would be the end of the world.”"* In his final plea, an exasperated Tertz, unable to make the prosecutors understand literary irony, humor, or the literary character of magical realism, returned to basics: “the most rudimentary thing about literature . . . is that words are not deeds, and that words and literary images are conventions: authors are not identical with the characters they create.””” Tertz was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. It would be unwise to assume that the Academy is always a reliable antidote to the interrogation and prosecution of works. For some, the idea of a good novel and the development of good taste in novels have become quaint, extra-academic ideals and professional scholars often live in a different universe from the works they study and teach. Kundera: “Now that historiography and literary theory are becoming ever

more ‘misomusistic, writers are the only people who can say anything interesting about Rabelais” (£, 67). It now often seems quixotic to defend literature as a serious mode of inquiry into the complex and ambiguous truths of the human condition. 3. Literature is clever propaganda for a particular cause.

4. Literature on its own terms is socially dangerous. Pure art is a blasphemy against authority. 5. The poet and the writer are never to be trusted. Trust the critics and the censor for their constant vigilance."

Even at the level of politics, if everything becomes political, as Jacques Ranciére has argued, then nothing in particular is political.” The novel is not politics by other means any more than it is a series of philosophical arguments by other means. In the increasing politicization of everything, the novel can no longer discern its specific modes of disclosure and resistance. “Europe was moving into the age of the prosecutors . . . professors and

connoisseurs were no longer interested in either paintings or books, only in the people that made them; in their lives” (F, 149).?° If one conveys one’s philosophical standpoint in the form of a novelistic book (for all books are standpoints become tome, the treatise passing Caught Looking m= 33

itself off as a work), it is still customary to call such a book a literary work.

These reduce reading to the distillation of primordial philosophical essences from their literary mash. How often is a course on philosophy and literature dedicated to the detection of philosophical standpoints within literary works? If a writer eschews such standpoints, if they have nothing in particular to say (no univocal “message”), then the novel is regarded as a scintillating deployment of surfaces, an exercise in diversion, escapism, reverie, or it is condemned to the faint praise of the nebulously postmodern (a word that, despite its laudable origins, has now come to say everything and hence nothing in particular). Kundera complained: “Philosophers who write novels are nothing but pseudonovelists who use the form of the novel in order to illustrate their ideas. Neither Voltaire nor Camus ever discovered ‘that which the novel alone can discover.’””' The novel is propagated neither by philosophers who dream of being novelists nor by novelists who dream of being philosophers. When thinking is transformed—that is, when it enters the “universe of the novel”—one might even say that the novel transforms the very nature of philosophical thinking by dismantling its claim to have been a unitary activity.*? When it is transported to the universe of the novel, philosophy sheds the illusion that it has an identity or is a self-evident task. “The moment it becomes part of a novel, reflection changes its essence. Outside the novel, we're in the realm of afhrmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge. Within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and of hypotheses. In the novel, then, reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical” (AN, 78). This transformation, however, does not simply reverse the fate of the tragic poets and altogether banish the philosophers from the polis of the novel. The novel and philosophy come to dwell in intimate proximity with each other so that the horizons of both are dramatically and significantly expanded. This hybrid form, however, does not collapse the delicate and

mobile border between them. The art of the novel, with its unique and pluralistic “polyphonic” modes of expression, challenges the art of philosophy to expand its modes of expression and range of concerns. Conversely, philosophy, abandoning its historic obsession with a single point of view to be defended at all costs, can offer provocations and a level of rigor that can be deployed in the novel. (One need only think of Hermann Broch or Robert Musil, both of whom had pursued philosophy at the doctoral level, but who abandoned philosophy in order to transfigure their thinking into the universe of the novel.*?) What emerges is something like the novel as philosophy and philosophy as the novel, with this as operating as a pivot of 34 w= Caught Looking

mutually reinforcing enrichment and radicalization. In this respect, Kundera spoke of his novels as “experiments” and as “meditative interrogation” and “interrogative meditation” (AWN, 31).

It would also be a mistake to assume that characters are mere personifications of ideas, as if they were the same things as their ideational codes, no longer subject to chance, but rather wholly determined by their governing ideas. Character is not fate; characters are not ideological automata.” Characters, subject to chance, but also, as such, never equal to themselves— self-understanding as one of our most persistent self-deceptions—are “an itinerary; a winding road; a journey whose successive phases not only vary but often represent a total negation of the proceeding phases” (7B, 213). The picaresque is not only an exaggerated plot strategy, but it is an insight into the nonidentity and variability of our self-conceptions. “All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self” (AN, 23). Characters in Kundera’s history of the novel resist what Hannah Arendt notably characterized as the “logicality” of ideology. As Arendt put it, “an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond” runs like this: “You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet.”” In contrast, the universe of the novel with its situations and characters remains contingent upon the roll of the dice.”° In an effort to better appreciate the transformation of philosophical thinking when it enters this new universe, a universe that does not need philosophy as such to think, let us by way of analogy consider the following poem by Charles Simic: A Letter Dear philosophers, I get sad when | think. Is it the same with you? Just as ’m about to sink my teeth into the noumenon, Some old girlfriend comes to distract me. “She’s not even alive!” I yell to the skies.

The wintry light made me go that way. I saw beds covered with identical gray blankets. I saw grim-looking men holding a naked woman While they hosed her with cold water. Was that to calm her nerves, or was that punishment? I went to visit my friend Bob who said to me: “We reach the real by overcoming the seduction of images.” I was overjoyed until I realized Such abstinence will never be possible for me. I caught myself looking out the window.

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Bobs father was taking their dog for a walk. He moved with pain; the dog waited for him. There was no one else in the park, Only bare trees with an infinity of tragic shapes To make thinking difficult.’

The poet, addressing philosophers, is caught looking. At what? While talking to Bob the philosopher about the danger of images, he espies Bob's father through the window, who, presumably getting on in years, “moves with pain” while his dog waits for him. There is no one else in the park, and the trees are bare. This image, “an infinity of tragic shapes,” is not the mask of a concept that, once liberated, provides access to the real. To the contrary: the sudden reassertion of the image makes the use of the concept more difficult. The seduction of images denies the concept its easy continence, its self-declared ability to sink “its teeth into the noumenon.” The concept narrows by becoming paradoxically more precise as it becomes more abstract. Caught looking at the concrete, the image opposes the reduction that makes abstraction possible, becoming larger, more complicated, “an infinity of tragic shapes.” Characters and situations—images— are more complicated than ideology and more complex (and opaque) than any coherent and wholly abstract idea. At the beginning of /mmortality, Kundera’s persona was waiting in his health club for Professor Avenarius when he was caught looking at a woman in her early to mid-sixties. A young lifeguard was teaching her to swim and after the lesson, she walked past her teacher, but after a few steps, “she

turned her head, smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl!” This woman must have known that, despite this charming gesture, her body was no longer charming, but for that moment, she was outside of time, beyond all of our habitual patterns of recognition. “The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me” (JM, 3-4). This was how Agnés, pure of the flesh of time and with a soul beyond the clutch of history’s grand march, came into the world. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s opening meditation on Nietzsche's eternal return of the same and the mysterious border between gravity and levity produces not a new argument or an advance in our conceptual repertoire. It produced Tomas, about whom Kundera had thought for many years, but who now, “in the light of these reflections,” suddenly appeared “standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do” (ULB, 6). The gravity 36 = Caught Looking

of choosing something once and for all was unbearable to him. “Einmal ist keinmal” (ULB, 8), to have done something once is not to have done it at all; there is no one human life that is the human life.

With these two examples we see images giving rise to thought, not thoughts being illustrated with images. This is the novel’s strange empiricism, its rejection of the rationalist preordering of the universe and of its refusal of the ancient divide of the sensible and the intelligible. The imagi-

nation is the coming to sense in both senses of sense, meaning nothing beyond itself.8

Books versus Jokes In Kundera’s first novel, Zhe Joke (1967), one discovers a triple irony. While

the novel has several movements, all of which develop the themes of the novel in heterogeneous ways, the thread of Ludvik’s travails runs through all of them. In his youth, Ludvik, mistaking his surging hormones for the vocation of a great love, became desperately enamored with Marketa, a coy prospect, but an enthusiastic communist. Recognizing the absurdity of his desires and their object, Ludvik, in both frustration and caprice, quickly penned an impish postcard and “didn’t give it a second thought” (/, 38): “T could not accept: that she should be so happy when I was missing her so much. So I bought a postcard and (to hurt, shock, and confuse her) wrote: Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik” (/, 34). Despite Ludvik’s history of party loyalty, his zealous schoolmates soon interrogated and condemned him for being a counterrevolutionary Trotskyite. “As it is, you wrote what you really felt. As it is, we know who you are” (/, 38). He was expelled from the university and sent to a work camp for reeducation. His crime was not something he had committed; it was who he was. It was not a matter of Ludvik’s criminal intention (mens rea), but an issue of Ludvik’s essence. He had not “completely merged with the movement into one collective entity” (/, 46). At this point we confront the novel’s first irony: this is a novel about a joke in the deadly serious world where the business of writing great political books allows for no humor. There is nothing funny about the movement because the gravity of belonging to the movement grounds one in a solid identity. The sudden levity of laughter is an unacceptable digression.” The history of this particular novel confronts us with the second irony: the communists could neither take a joke nor The Joke. “For if agélastes tend to see sacrilege in every joke, it’s because every joke is a sacrilege. There is

an irreconcilable incompatibility between the comical and the sacred, and Caught Looking = 37

we can only ask where the sacred begins and ends” (C, 107-108). The early destiny of Kundera’s novel resembled the fortunes of Ludvik’s postcard. The book was panned, eventually banned, and Kundera (both the person and the persona) was eventually relegated to writing horoscopes: “The pay was pathetic and the task itself neither amusing nor remarkable. The only amusing thing about it all was my existence, the existence of a man erased

from history, from literary histories, and from the telephone book, of a dead man now returned to life in an amazing reincarnation to preach the great truth of astrology to hundreds of thousands of young people in a socialist country” (BLF, 84). Kundera the astrologer—the kind of absurdity that can lead one to imagine that God is having a good laugh at our behalf! The Joke, the book, as well as the Jaromil Jires film (whose screenplay Kundera coauthored), became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, predicting that laughter is a sacrilege in the civilizations of the book. Outside the vice-grip of history, this situation appears paradoxically laughable (our laughable gravity, the unbearable lightness of what we take most seriously). As Nietzsche wrote in the Gay Science: “And again and again the human race will decree from time to time, “There is something at which it is absolutely no longer permissible to laugh.’”°? Humanity, from time to time, will demand to live in the civilization of the Book. As the novel develops, we come to the third irony: Ludvik, embittered by his past, was predisposed to redress history, to make it answer for its indifference to his plight. He had been slighted! In a moment of serendipity he stumbled upon a possible solution: Helena, the lonely wife of one of his former accusers. He schemed to have an affair with her and exact his revenge upon her husband. The rendezvous was successful, but shortly afterward, during the annual performance of the ancient Bohemian ritual of the Ride of the Kings, a tradition whose significance grew more and more remote every time it was reenacted, Ludvik came across Helena’s husband, Pavel Zemanek, accompanied by his attractive new collegiate paramour, Miss Broz. Pavel was no longer riding the coattails of the grand march of Bohemian communism. He now taught philosophy (fashionably repackaged Marxist-Leninism) and his students found him cool and hip. The paramour, a lyrical vacuum of self-obsession, was indifferent to the class struggle and could care less about the political travails of the prior generation. She had elected to dedicate her intellectual energies into dividing the world into those who pick up hitchhikers (adventure lovers) and those who ignore them (subhumans cowering before the adventure of life) (J, 274). What is more, Pavel, wholly unmoored from the gravity of his earlier communist commitments (as if he had forgotten them), was actually relieved that Ludvik has taken up with his lonely wife. As events recede 38 m= Caught Looking

into the past, whether they are crimes or Bohemian rituals, they begin to discard the load of their original significance. Ludvik, infuriated by his inability to redress his history, bitterly rejected Helena, who consequently resolved to commit a beautiful and heroic act of suicide, only to mistakenly ingest her assistant’s anticonstipation medicine. Instead of the beautiful corpse of a betrayed lover, she was wildly flatulent and diarrheic. It suddenly dawned on Ludvik: the joke was on him. History has not committed an error, but he was the butt of its joke. Rejecting any rational account of history, Ludvik wondered: “What if history plays jokes? And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable” (/, 288289). Ludvik’s thoughtless joke revealed itself to be a grande plaisanterie de l'histoire, even une blague, a jest or trick by the laughing trickster God.* Por Ludvik, this laughter rang hollow: injustice, justice, along with all of our other great metaphysical speculations, disintegrate in the great amnesia of history. “No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten” (/, 294). The heavy hand of history suddenly loosened its grip, and everything seemed light, absurd, ungrounded, the unnerving levity of a world without justice, a world where nothing really mattered. Ludvik “felt the oppressive lightness of the void that lay over my life” (J, 250). The Joke is therefore not a book about the miseries of communism or the horror of Stalinism or the yearning for the good life of late capitalist Western Europe.* It is a melancholy and comic love story between Ludvik, trapped in history, and Lucie, who, at least in Ludvik’s imagination, stood outside of time. It is not a fitful complaint from the oppressed side of the Iron Curtain, but rather, like Agnés coming into being as she waves to the lifeguard, it is born out of an image. “When in 1980, during a television panel discussion devoted to my works, someone called The Joke ‘a major indictment of Stalinism,’ I was quick to interject, “Spare me your Stalinism, please. The Joke is a love story!’”** Kundera elsewhere disclosed the source of this originating gesture, “the spark that started me off” on The Joke:

It was an event in a small Czech town: the arrest of a girl for stealing flowers from a cemetery and offering them to her lover as a gift. As I thought it over, a character took shape before my eyes, the character of Lucie, for whom sexuality and love are two completely different, irreconcilable things. Her story then came together in my mind with the story of a male character, the character of Ludvik, who concentrates all the hatred he has accumulated during his life in a single act Caught Looking = 39

of love. And that is Zhe Joke: a melancholy duet about the schism between body and soul.» This image, making thinking difficult, appears in the novel as Ludvik, recoiling from the “absolute solitude” of the work camp (/, 111), longingly reached out to this elusive and opaque person. He imagined that Lucie’s

soul was uncompromised by the trap that the world had become, and it seemed to offer Ludvik an escape from the miseries of his corporeal world. Lucie came to the fence almost every day when I was on the morning shift in the mines and spent the afternoons in camp; every day I received a small bunch of flowers (once during inspection the sergeant

threw them on the floor) and exchanged a few words with her (always the same, because we actually had nothing to say to each other; we didn't exchange news or ideas; we simply wished to assure each other of a single constantly reiterated truth); at that time, I wrote her almost daily; it was the most intensive period of our love. (/, 103) Ludvik, trapped in history, vainly trying to make sense of it and his life, was drawn to Lucie because he imagined that she was his antithesis. Lucie, who regarded the body as “something ugly” and love (the power of the soul) as “something incorporeal” (/, 251), transcended the iron cage of history. She appeared as his salvation, the mirror in which he could glimpse his own soul. This, Ludvik realized years later, was the narcissism of youth, the juve-

nile error that the problem of time is a subset of the problem of finding oneself. Youth, “that stupid lyrical age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people (no matter how dear) are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth’ (/, 251). Today, as people fall in love over the Internet and plan to make lives together even before meeting each other, we again realize just how opportunistic the mirror play of lyricism can be. Ludvik, adrift in his mirror world, had not commiserated with the devastated things; in his anger at the world and in his desperate desire to seek refuge in a life elsewhere, he had not embraced the affairs of the world in their original innocence (J, 313). He had loved only himself.*° If history was not an error, then it was a cruel or indifferent joke. But who or what intercedes among the devastated things? Where is the innocence of becoming afhrmed? This is the antilyrical vocation of the novel. Like Lucie, the novel appears within the devastation of history from a place outside of it, 40 w= Caught Looking

from a place commiserating with the insoluble riddles of the human condition. “Have you come to intercede for the devastated world” (/, 313)?

The Age of Graphomania Lyricism turns the world into a book so that we can talk about ourselves. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which is the opposite of a book in our present sense, Tamina tried to help her colleague Bibi meet the writer Banaka so that he could help her write a novel. Tamina also “knew that there wasn't a single book at Bibi’s and that reading bored her” (BLF, 122). When Bibi and Banaka met, Bibi announced that she wanted to write a novel “about the world as I see it” (BLF, 123). Banaka astutely informed her that a novel has different kinds of characters, many of whom might see the world differently from Bibi—surely she could not be interested in that! But neither was Banaka who considered novels the “fruit” of the “illusion of the power to understand others” (BLF, 123-124). Banaka drew the obvious conclusion: “All anyone can do... is give a report on oneself. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie” (BLF, 124). Bibi was overjoyed. All she had wanted to do was to offer up her own report. Yet what had Bibi done? Not much in terms of adventures and other great actions. But Bibi had the hunch “that my experience inside is worth writing about and could be interesting to everybody” (BLF, 124). Banaka was sympathetic: since Joyce brought Homer's Odyssey into the realm of interior life, we can now see that although we have done little with our lives, our inner thoughts make us all great adventurers and it is the way of great adventurers to want to share their stories with everyone. Bibi could hardly contain herself: “I often have the impression my whole body is filled with the desire to express itself. To speak. To make itself heard. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy, because I’m so bursting with it | have an urge to scream... . | want to express my life and my feelings, which I know are absolutely original” (BLF, 125). And so goes the great war of all narratives against all narratives as we fill the stores and clog bandwidth with our books and blogs, interrupting each other to make sure that it is our narrative that prevails. Listening to the narrative of another becomes a momentary pause before we pounce, changing the subject to our own experiences. Oh, yes, that reminds me of when I... Our obsessive autonarrativity is like the mute ostriches that rushed to meet Tamina, their mouths opening and closing as if they were desperately trying to communicate something. Tamina could never decipher their secret speech but Kundera’s persona had a hypothesis: “Each one

of them came to tell her about itself. . . . They are standing in front of Caught Looking = 41

Tamina and talking to her all at once, vehemently, insistently, aggressively, because there is nothing more important than what they want to tell her” (BLF, 145). At the dawn of the novel, among the literate, most people read but few people wrote much more than letters. In the ascendancy of the age of the book, this proportion has more or less reversed itself: we write and publish more, but read less. We are all writers (and now “content providers”). In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera’s persona recounted a conversation with a “garrulous” taxi driver who had survived the sinking of his

ship during World War II. When asked what he was doing with his new lease on life, he responded that he was writing about his experiences. “Are you writing it for your children? As a family chronicle?” He chuckled bitterly: “For my children? They’re not interested in that. I’m writing a book. I think it could help a lot of people.” That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer’s occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. You might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. (BLF, 126)

Graphomania—as opposed to writing—is fundamentally /yrical, imposing one’s own life, thoughts, feelings, experiences, views, and dreams upon

others. Allergic to works, it can only produce books, but in so doing, it expresses the underlying loneliness, neediness, and consequent aggression of its authors. “Innocence with a bloody smile” (AN, 138). All books are autobiographical in this sense, regardless of whether the authors explicitly talk about themselves. Some books may even disguise themselves as treatises and studies, and propound vast and arcane theories, models, and systems, but as Nietzsche saw, apropos of Spinoza (a thinker that he other-

wise admired), the system is a feat of misdirection that draws attention away from the fact that it is really my system! “Or that hocus-pocus of mathematical form with which Spinoza masked, as if armored in bronze, his philosophy—'the love of Ais wisdom to interpret the word correctly and fairly.” Although the scourge of graphomania has become ubiquitous, the deceptively benign empire of Chicken Soup for the Soul is a particularly emblematic instantiation of it (and it anticpates the explosion of narcissism that now reigns in social media and the age of “selfies”). This wildly popular and hugely successful publishing enterprise collects freely donated

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inspirational stories aimed at improving our lives and contributing to our overall wellness. At the time of writing, almost two hundred different titles, translated into over forty languages, have appeared since its inception in 1993. US and Canadian sales alone have hit 112 million books. Recent titles in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series include, Angels Among Us, The Power of Positive, Finding My Faith, The Gift of Christmas, Think Positive for Great Health, and Messages from Heaven. Some years ago, Cynthia

Gorney reported: “People who walk into airport bookshops in search of a two-hour read may find themselves gazing at entire shelves full of nothing but Chicken Soup paperbacks, as though some bacterial growth had taken over a fifth of the inventory; in certain stores, the books have become their own category, as in Diet and Buddhism.”** Originally conceived by two highly motivated motivational speakers as an anthology of uplifting tales (paraplegics who become mayors, rogues shamed by the kindness of others, etc.), the series began to solicit personal stories, and the mania moved into high gear. “The submissions that arrive by mail tend to be written by hand, sometimes on pages ripped from spiral notebooks, and often with the tremulous depth of feeling of a person accepting for the first time a serious invitation to tell a personal story to an audience of strangers.”°*” Unable to take satisfaction in the people that we know personally, a huge audience of anonymous readers makes us feel more significant. Not to be snide: this loneliness belongs to one of the great human problems. How do we make our peace with death and insignificance, always lurking on the other side of the border? “For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words” (BLF, 147). For Bibi, the novel seemed like a lifeline because she would be able to convince others that she was important. Hugo also wanted to write a tell-all book about his conquests and “tell everything about me, about what I am and what I think” (BLF, 156), hoping thereby to trap Tamina in his own lyrical universe. For Tamina, however, the most important writings were the letters and journals that she shared with her husband, mementos that kept him from slipping away altogether into the sea of oblivion. Mirek, by way of contrast, wanted his lost letters back because, in love with his destiny, he was trying to orchestrate a beautiful (lyrical) death and he therefore needed to stage-manage his image. He could not leave behind evidence that he had once been madly in love with Zdena and her pronounced proboscis. For Kundera’s persona, the novel attempts to hear voices other than its own, voices that complicate and relativize our received truths under the shifting

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borders opened up the ambiguous, irreducibly complicated, funny and sad, themes of laughing and forgetting. The novelist categorically eschews autobiography (in the sense of the world as me), whether it is in a fancy literary Chicken Soup book or pack-

aged as a philosophical system. Graphomania reduces the work to the book; it is “the mania not to create a form but to impose oneself on others. The most grotesque version of the will to power” (AWN, 131). In the reign of Chicken Soup, an author's sex life or political indiscretions are more

important than their works. “Ihe moment Kafka attracts more attention then Joseph K., Kafka’s posthumous death begins” (AN, 145). Kundera’s Immortality includes literary characters like Goethe and Hemingway as they posthumously struggle with the scandal of their posterity, their worry about their own graphomania, and the parasitic graphomniacs who intervene in the legacy of these works. Graphomania is the desire to live forever, to escape death and solitude, to manage one’s image in the memories of

others. “Bettina, who aspires to grand immortality, wishes to say: I refuse to die with this day and its cares, I wish to transcend myself, to be a part of history, because history is eternal memory” (JM, 168). The novel is not allied with the ego of the author, but with the devastated things and the enigmas and forgotten corners of the human condition. “One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived” (BLF, 147). If the creation of works asks that we first die to ourselves, that we allow our lyrical selves to drown in the sea of anonymity, we suddenly wake up to everything human, including the sadness and laughter of the sea itself.

Kundera had already examined a form of graphomania in his early novel, Life is Elsewhere, which he originally wanted to call The Lyrical Age.

The novel recounts the ambitions of a youthful poet, who, before the vast silence of death, the confusion of adult life, the dissolution of his family, an overbearing mother, the steep learning curve of awakening to erotic life, political turmoil, and generally life itself, escaped into an elevated sense of his imagination, envisioning its random creations to be of value to the world. Soon he metamorphosed into a surrealist, thrilled with what he supposed were the singular products of his imagination, convinced that they should command the attention of others. “The genius of lyricism is the genius of inexperience. The poet knows little about the world, but the words that burst forth from him form beautiful patterns that are as definitive as crystal; the poet is immature, yet his verse has the finality of a prophecy by which he himself is dumbfounded” (LE, 287). Soon his positions shift and he is a communist ideologue, and eventually, out of jealousy—but officially in the name of the good of humanity— 44 uw Caught Looking

he turns his young girlfriend, the redhead, over to the police. “Jaromil had exposed his girl to danger precisely because he loved her more than other men loved their women; precisely because he knew what love and the future world of love were. Of course, it was terrible to sacrifice an actual woman (redheaded, nice, delicate, talkative) for the sake of a future world, but it was probably the only tragedy of our time that was worthy of beautiful verse, worthy of a great poem” (LE, 356). Eventually Jaromil, who dreamed of a great poetic life and death, dies quietly and stupidly, beyond his “poetry house of mirrors” where all of life reduces to various chapters in his autobiography (LE, 391). He did not die poetically and heroically in the grandeur of fire, but rather in the senseless fluidity of water. “He looked at his face on the surface of the water. Suddenly he saw great fear on that face. And that was the last thing he saw” (LE, 419). Jaromil did not die a beautiful death—that is the lyricism of youth in which we see ourselves even in our own death, “as it is beautiful to all those who dream of it when they are very young, when death is still unreal and enchanting, like the bluish voice of distances” (BLF, 143). Tamina will also struggle to hold onto the “tuning fork of silence,” wanting to shelter it as she drowns in the sea “with a stomach full of tablets that brought her not death but unexpected peace” (BLF, 144). The water itself is utterly stupid water, so utterly innocent that it defies affirmation, posing no problems, confirming no agendas, terrifyingly unserious and unbearably light, and

it shatters the lyrical blinders that reduce works into books. This water is like the avaricious appetite of forgetting, consuming all things equally, leaving nothing behind. It is the devil’s laughter without countermeasures, wholly destroying the fanaticism and dogmatism of lyricism, but leaving nothing but absolute skepticism in its wake. The novel navigates these twin dangers, seeking to find a way beyond official reality, without abandoning our ongoing search for new clearings and new modes of disclosure of the real. Kundera and his four “Pleiades of Central Europe’s great novelists” each experimented with the poetry of the novel in their own way, but all of them were, each in their solitude, “impervious to seduction by the /yrical” (C, 51). When Simic is seduced by images, by “an infinity of tragic shapes,”

he, too, is seduced by the imagination in its resistance to the inherited nonthought of our reflexive conceptual habits. The imagination resists the kitsch of “realism,” but not because it is self-obsessed, like Jaromil who took refuge in his imagination as a way to escape the world. The imagination struggles against the “trap the world has become” and hence Kundera’s four Pleiades were “hostile to the transformation of the novel into personal confession; allergic to the ornamentalization of prose; entirely focused on Caught Looking m= 45

the real world.” They “conceived the novel to be a great antilyrical poetry” (C, 51; emphasis mine). Resistance to the seduction of the lyrical, as well as Simic’s refusal to abstain from the seduction of images and think only in concepts, wrenches the image back from its ensnarement in imagology. In Immortality, “Kundera” remarks, “imagology has gained a historic victory over ideology.” After the watershed analyses of Hannah Arendt as well as Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School, it seemed that ideology had us irrevocably in its grip, but Kundera’s persona insists: All ideologies have been defeated: in the end their dogmas were unmasked as illusions and people stopped taking them seriously. For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capital-

ist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, they felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people

at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time in an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And 46 w= Caught Looking

since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent

session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break this power. (JM, 118-119)

Kundera composed /mmortality during the first scandal-mongering eruption of the Heidegger affair; Sein und Zeit, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Die Beitrdge, none of these works should be taken seriously any longer because there was a radical shift in Heidegger’s image. This does not mean that the question of Heidegger's politics, naive and self-absorbed as they may have been, should not be subjected to philosophical scrutiny. While there was suddenly much attention devoted to this question, something decidedly unphilosophical was also beginning to take shape: a change in Heidegger’s imago. Heidegger was no longer the daring thinker who ventured the ontological difference. Heidegger was now just a Nazi bastard. For most people, that is all they know about him. Whether one loves or hates Heidegger, he is a difficult thinker, but the rift in his imago provided an excellent opportunity not only to avoid reading Heidegger, but also to know incontrovertibly in advance that he was wrong. Kundera: “If at the time I was writing these pages everyone decided that Martin Heidegger was to be considered a bungler and a bastard, it was not because his thought had been surpassed by other philosophers, but because on the roulette wheel of imagology, this time he landed on an unlucky number, an anti-ideal” M, 120). Sein und Zeit is nothing compared to the Schwarzen Hefte. Imagology refuses the concept because it refuses thought altogether. The novelistic imagination, however, is an art of thinking with images (through themes developed heterogeneously by the voices that are revealed within specific situations). Images do not need philosophy to think, but they do need to think. The perversion of the thinking image by imagology is a lyrical ambush potentially more dangerous than the perversion of the concept by ideology. In the latter, ghostly traces of the concept (misapplied and gone awry) haunt the deductive violence of ideology’s unthinking agendas. In imagology, thinking has vanished into oblivion against the background din of blaring televisions. This is the age when Kafka survives as a face on a t-shirt advertising that one has been to Prague.

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Laughter Humor: the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humor: the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that comes of the certainty that there is no certainty. —Kundera, Testaments Betrayed

Laughter and Collective Truth In The Joke, Ludvik, having been imprisoned for a joke in a political climate

that could not take a joke, finally realized that the joke had been on him. In Immortality, the mysterious Avenarius confided to his friend “Kundera”: “Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable” (JM, 344). Kundera’s persona realized that this drove Avenarius to play a lonely game with the world, amusing only himself, knowing that no one will laugh, playing “with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother” (J, 357). Avenarius corrected Kundera and told him that he has not been altogether abandoned. He has Kundera and Kundera knows that the universe of the novel, with its mobile, unfixable borders, is under assault. In our unrelenting gravity, we no longer take the novel seriously enough. “But we know that the world where the individual is respected (the imaginative world of the novel, and the real one of Europe) is fragile and perishable. On the horizon stand armies of agélastes watching our every move” (AN, 164). The agélastes, the enemies of the comic, the wearisome warriors against the God whose primary source of laughter is human thought, are ridiculously, comically serious, not at all serious about the border of the serious. Indeed, the comic is far crueler than the tragic, offering little consolation “as it brutally reveals the meaninglessness of everything” (AN, 126). When 48

the critic Fred Misurella comments on The Joke, for instance, he winces at the pitiless fate of Helena, who is a pawn in Ludvik’s hard-hearted plot to redress past wrongs by seducing his enemy's wife. “The idea that one man would use a woman to gain revenge on another man repulses us, and it is very hard not to condemn Ludvik’s actions and thoughts here and, by extension, not to condemn Kundera for voicing them through his principal character.”! Ludvik will later realize that he had not commiserated with the devastated things and that he had injured them and himself, but here the novel does not wince before the cruelty of devastation; the novel, born of the comic spirit, does not advocate a politics of cruelty, but within its own universe it practices what Clément Rosset, writing in the spirit of Nietzsche, called a “joyful cruelty,” which is “necessarily cruel, by virtue of the carefree attitude it exudes when faced with the most fatal destiny as well as the most tragic considerations.” Such cruelty is inseparable from the novel’s comic spirit. The title character of Cervantes’s comic masterpiece, for example, is often mocked, humiliated, and physically assaulted, losing teeth, and suffering numerous broken bones. Moreover, the figura cura (a cruel mockery of the Man of Sorrows, Christ absorbing in death the pain and suffering of human finitude) is mentally ill, having lost his wits from poverty and bad books on chivalry (a pleonasm, admittedly). He is fragile and vulnerable, yet since this frailty in part stems from the fact that he is out of his mind, he innocently and haplessly runs headlong into situations that he has no capacity to handle and falls prey to cruel turn after cruel turn. It is a long novel and just when it seems that yet another humiliation of the good don could not still be funny, he is again degraded and, like a fine wine that gets better over time, his misery retains its comic appeal. Is this because we are sadistic and we do not admire this beleaguered and misunderstood idealist as he dreams his impossible dreams? Since Cervantes “long since stopped taking seriously men’s seriousness” (C, 109), has this become some anarchic cruelty that we no longer can admit to enjoying in educated company? As Nietzsche observed: “Today we read all of Don Quixote with a bitter taste on our tongues, almost as if being tortured.”?

Kundera’s persona insists that we speak too quickly when we speak of laughter, that laughter is a false composite, concealing two categories wholly different in kind. “There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other” (BLF, 87). The provenance of laughter is the disobedient devil, who has no allegiance to the ordained way of things. Laughter is the devil’s rebellion. In the trap that the world has become, it does not seem like things could be otherwise, that their relative weight has been irrevocably apportioned, but the devils’ laugh interrupts the order Laughter = 49

of things. Foucault, for example, explains that his Les Mots et les choses emerged out of a shattering laughter that resulted from a passage in Borges that disrupted “all of the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought” and broke up “all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things.’* The passage in question quotes a Chinese encyclopedia that divvied up the classes of animals as follows: “(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look flies.”° Borges’s taxonomy unleashes a devilish laughter, which does not confirm any particular taxonomy as correct (least of all our own), but in so doing relativizes and historicizes taxonomical thought as such. When the angels “laugh,” however, it has nothing to do with this primordial disruption. They take delight in truth, and titter in the joy of pure obedience; “their laughter has no object, it is the expression of being rejoicing in being” (BLF, 81). How lovely that the order of things is the order that it is! If there are only angels, we live in the hell that we call paradise on earth, where everything is as it should be (and those who are not as they should be will be reeducated and, failing that, eliminated). This is the dream of a world liberated from shit. Yet, if there were only devils, then all human affairs become as light as feathers, and nothing makes any difference and it is the same whether we respect each other or kill each other. “The good of the world, however, implies not that the angels have the advantage over the devils . . . but that the two sides are nearly in equilibrium. If there is too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels’ power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils’ reign), we could not live either” (BLF, 86). In his interview with Philip Roth, Kundera reflected on the danger of losing this equilibrium between the angels and the devils: “Both kinds of laughters belong among life's pleasures, but when it is carried to extremes it also denotes a dual apocalypse: the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world’s significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy. And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime. Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.”°

The history of modern philosophy has its own version of this dual apocalypse, but the difference in the manner in which it is composed and 50 «= Laughter

understood is instructive. Kant inherited a philosophical civil war in which the rationalists, who thought that thinking could find a way to move from itself to the reality of things, were pitted against the empiricists, who began from experience, but, as David Hume soon demonstrated, had to accept

that this was shaky ground and that skepticism could not be altogether overcome. These were the twin dangers that beset knowing as Kant began his great critical project. Rationality, left to its own devices, lays claim to

knowing the thing in itself and, as such, is subject to the fanaticism of dogmatism, what Kant, following Luther, called Schwarmerei (throngs of fanatical bees “swarming” around some divine truth). The works of David Hume, presented to an early, precritical Kant by Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), had aroused Kant from his dogmatic disposition and convinced him that experience threatens knowing with the Charybdis of an all-consuming skepticism. How to use the Scylla of rationality (which always threatens thinking with the seduction of Schwarmerei) without succumbing into the swirling waters of absolute skepticism, what Kant called the “euthanasia of reason”? Kant’s critical philosophy (derived from the pure transcendental conditions that make possible experience as such) deftly attempted to navigate the waters of dogmatism and skepticism, but one could not say that such an enterprise was a barrel of monkeys. The critical project is serious business— after all, Kant is saving thinking from the abyss of the devil’s absolute skepticism. This is evident in Kant’s discussion of laughter in the third Critique where he argues that it is a kind of temporary excursion into the foreign: the operations of the understanding are temporarily suspended by something nonsensical, but then laughter quickly and salubriously alleviates the crisis. The interruption of the understanding before the unexpected and its subsequent relief—“for laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing’—does not surrender the eminence of the understanding but rather “produces an equilibrium of the vital powers in the body.”” Laughter allays the crisis of the absurd and allows the understanding to resume its composure. Kant provides a couple of examples. An Indian in the old British East India Company stronghold of Surat witnesses the contents of a bottle of ale, having been under pressure, suddenly come pouring out as froth. The Indian is seized with vociferous delight, and when pressed by an annoyed Englishman as to why he was responding in this way, the Indian explained that he did not find it funny that all of the ale had suddenly come flowing

out, but that it was amazing that they had got so much ale into so tiny a bottle. Another example: the heir to a rich relative wants to honor his benefactor by providing him with many properly grieving mourners, only Laughter m= 5/

to learn that “the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the merrier they look.”®

The ignorance of the Indian’s response and the crushed expectations of the dimwitted heir are not the source of our laughter. We are not laughing at them, as Hobbes surmised, because they are stupid and we are not (a feeling of “sudden eminence”). Rather the understanding hits a wall in its operations, but laughter discharges the temporary disorientation (its expectations are reduced to nothing and the stress is relaxed, as if one were exhaling) and no damage is done “to the spiritual feeling of respect for moral ideas.”? Although in limited quantities the devil’s laughter can also be relaxing, relieving us of some of the weight of a burdensome conviction, in pure doses it has the overwhelming force of Kant’s inhospitable sea as it stupidly and absurdly drowns the little island of the understanding. Kant’s wholesome laughter shields him from the devil (who governs the hell of the skepticism, Kant’s sworn enemy); it protects the understanding from the abyss, relieving it of the tension of its sudden encounter with the strange. No doubt, we laugh Kantian laughs, just as we laugh Hobbesian laughs (taking delight in an opportunity for condescension) and Bergsonian laughs (“We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing”). But all of these philosophical approaches make the same mistake: they seek to explain the one thing that laughter is, but laughter is a false composite, confusing things different in kind. Is not a serious and unitary (angelic) theory of laughter itself laughable? When Georges Bataille read Henri Bergson’s account of laugher, he broke out in convulsive laughter.’ Speaking of Annie Leclerc’s celebration of female jouissance, including the intentional pleasure of frequent bouts of laughter, Kundera’s persona concludes: “Only a fool could laugh at this manifesto of joy. All mysticism is excessive. The mystic must not be afraid of ridicule if he wants to go to the limits, the limits of humility or the limits of sensual pleasure” (BLF, 89). Indeed, “laughable laughter is disastrous” (BLF, 87), a “comical absence of the comical” (E, 21). The angels who take delight and express their glee in their categorical agreement with being (this is the joy of accomplished lyricism) imagine that they can also

understand laughter. This presumed understanding, however, gives us a glimpse of God’s devilish side, because the devil’s laugher makes the understanding as such feel as if it has been fooled by a joke or a trick. Serious hygienic laughter (laughter as a healthy, normal part of a functional life) is utterly laughable. “And seeing the angel laugh, the devil laughed all the more, all the harder, and all the more blatantly, because the laughing angel was infinitely comical” (BLF, 87). The devil insinuates himself across the

52 um Laughter

border that Kant had erected to preserve the gravity of Reason and the understanding. This is not to malign Kant or the greatness of his critical project. It is, however, to reexamine critical philosophy from the perspective of the universe of the novel. This does not mean that the novel is providing us with

illustrations, examples, or applications of philosophical problems. The problem of dogmatism is transformed into the problem of angelic laughter (and in his way, Kant is right to delimit the power of the angels and Schelling was more insightful to later condemn them as the most boring of all creatures). The problem of skepticism is transformed into the problem of the devil’s laughter, which denotes “the absurdity of things” (BLF, 87), and as such it is revealed to have its origin in “the devil’s domain,” which “has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be” (BLF, 86). The revelation of a comic reversal is devastating and does not have the relative consolation of a tragic reversal, although in lesser doses it can provide comic relief—“things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness’ (BLF, 86). Kant’s precritical anxiety before the looming abyss of skepticism meant that he had to go back to the drawing board and, in the wake of the collapse of the rationalist certainty found in thinkers like Descartes or Christian Wolff, discover a humbler but more secure little island for knowing amid the inhospitable seas of ignorance and stupidity, an island “surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands.”" Again the threat of watery and amorphous oblivion! In the parallel history of the novel, however, we can also say, perhaps impishly, that it is laughter that forms the rough waters that make thinking difficult, that the problem of dogmatism is the problem of angels and the problem of skepticism is the problem of fallen angels. We can also say that Kantian aesthetics dwell in an alternate universe from that of the novel—to put it lightly, one cannot read the third Critique as in any way a vindication of novelistic thought and the only thing devilishly laughable is Kant’s account of laughter (Kant’s own account is the prophylactic work of angels). In another universe, it is laughter that awakens us from Kant’s fabled “dogmatic slumber,” and Zarathustra vindicates his new seas when he announces: “And we call false every truth that is not accompanied by a laugh!” In its unalloyed, purely devilish form, laughter is absolutely nothing, but in its moderated form (the détente between the angels and the devils, obedience and disobedience), we no longer have Kant’s universal

Laughter m 53

transcendental forms (space and time) that give the understanding its modest stability, but rather the ambiguity that is the dynamic instability of novelistic thought. This ambiguity renders every theory of laughter (the explanation of the one thing that it is) laughably serious, a view of laughter from the outside. From this perspective, one could say that the modern project for Kun-

dera, far more unfinished than the Enlightenment, is, paradoxically, to take more seriously the Jewish proverb, “Man thinks, God laughs. Inspired by that adage, I like to imagine that Francois Rabelais heard God’s laughter one day, and thus was born the idea of the first great European novel. It

pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter” (AN, 158). This is a very different response to the threat of the euthanasia of reason and hence: “The novel’s wisdom is different from that of philosophy. The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor. . . . The art inspired by God’s laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them. Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before” (AN, 160). The malicious aspect of comedy is not therefore the violence of ideology and imagology. Farewell Waltz opens with a brazenly inappropriate situation. Ruzena, scheming to escape the spa town (and its fertility clinic) where she was born, informed Klima that she was pregnant and that she had no plans to have an abortion. A terrified (and married) Klima conferred with his fellow band members and, after exploring several strategies to get Ruzena to change her mind and have the abortion, they finally come up with what they regarded as Klima’s best strategy: he should confess that he is madly in love with her, despite not having had any contact with her since the night in question. Lovers always succumb to such irrationality, so great and mad are the forces of true love! He will announce that he is willing to leave his wife and give her the world, but, since this was such a great love, she should have the abortion so that they can enjoy “their marvelous future together” (FW, 13). It was a counterintuitive approach (don’t run away from the problem, but run headlong into its heart), but it just might work. The guitarist, however, was disappointed that Klima was taking what still amounted to a cowardly approach. Klima should be bolder and the guitarist recalled the only line “he knew of Nietzsche's collected works”: “When you go to see a woman, arm yourself with a whip” (FW, 13). And

what would the whip look like in this situation? “The guitarist offered to go with Klima to the spa, lure the young woman out onto the road, and run her over: “Nobody could prove she didn’t throw herself under my

wheels” (FW, 14). The guitarist is clearly a misogynist and his attitude 54 au Laughter

toward women is cruel and unacceptable. While he may not be funny— murder is no mere joke—the situation itself is quite funny. As a species we have not generally taken compassion and justice toward each other very seriously and it is obvious that we should take it more seriously, although it is improbable that we will. But Farewell Waltz is not a political or a philosophical treatise about our obligations to each other. “We are laughing not because someone is being ridiculed, mocked, or even humiliated but because reality is abruptly revealed as ambiguous, things lose their apparent meaning, the man before us is not what he thought himself to be” (C, 109). This is not a Kantian false alarm against which laughter serves as a prophylactic. This is a revelation, an event of being. There is, however, a proclivity in our species to be reactive, automatically to want to conserve the status quo and fly innocently into the bright skies of the future while the devil, suspicious of the collective’s categorical agreement with being, plummets to the earth like a stone (BLF, 95). Kan-

tian laughter is happy to return to the comforts of knowledge, while the angels’ laughter resonates with its “shrill, spasmodic sounds” (BLF, 101). A sense of humor resists the gravity of the agélaste, a neologism coined by Rabelais and derived from the Greek, meaning “a man who does not laugh, who has no sense of humor” (AN, 159; see also C, 107). “No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste. Never having heard God’s laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are” (AN, 159). Again, it is important to avoid the temptation of moral smugness. It is not the lot of the novel to condemn angels for being angels. It is not their fault. “While I do not detest them [agélastes],

I give them a wide berth” (C, 107). We are taken to the limits of human communication as we struggle to explain to the humorless that Cervantes did not write his novel to inspire us to attack and mutilate each other. In The Joke, Ludvik, attempting to seduce Marketa, improvised an impressive anthropological discovery: “I made up a story about some dwarf tribes living in the Czech mountains, documenting it with quotes from an alleged scholarly paper devoted to the subject. Marketa was astonished that she had never heard of them. That was no surprise, I said. Bourgeois scholarship had deliberately concealed their existence, because they were bought and sold as slaves by capitalists” (/, 40-41). Yes, the devil is cruel, but the comic does more than just relativize and complicate prevailing ideologies. It not only refuses, but it also has its own mode disclosure. Beyond comic relief (Kantian or otherwise), it is also a mode of thinking, a delicate and demanding mode of access to a new clearing of being. “The real geniuses of the comic are not those who make us laugh hardest but Laughter m= 55

those who reveal some unknown realm of the comic” (AN, 126). The good lord gives, but the devil does not just take away.

A Brush with the Comic Let us consider a passage from the Japanese Kamakura period (1185-1333) classic Essays in Idleness ( Tsurezuregusa {1330-1332]) by the Buddhist monk

Kenko Yoshida. This text does not in any significant way influence the development or practice of the European novel and it antedates its appearance by several centuries.'’ I do not turn to this text for any historical reasons but rather because it offers a precise glimpse into the comic sensibility,

a sensibility that will later be taken up in its own way within the lineage that Kundera celebrates. Essays in Idleness is a classic, along with Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book (1002) and Kamo no Chémei’s Hojoki (An Account of My Hut (1212]), of a celebrated genre of Japanese writing called zuzhitsu, literally, following the

brush. One does not write to execute a preconceived notion. One writes by adhering to the spontaneous path of thinking, as if one’s writing brush were taking the lead and the artist were being pulled along its path. Such writing allows ideas to emerge on their own terms and at their own velocity. Kenk6 began his 243 brief studies by speaking of the idleness out of which his writing originated: “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.” This is not the confession of a member of the leisure class, vainly passing the time. Kenko, from a family of Shinto priests, had broken ranks and become a Buddhist monk. The Kamakura period was a time of great political instability and Kenko is still celebrated for his terse reflections on the sadness of all beauty, a sadness that emerges from a concomitant awareness of its impending decay. Furthermore, it is immediately striking that Kenko’s Buddhist strategy is not to celebrate himself, not to engage in writing as if it were a mirror of himself; Kenko follows his brush because he does not follow himself. In a Buddhist sense, Kenk6 the author has perished—the authorial ego has been overcome—and it is from this spirit that Kenko follows the errant development of “idle [tsurezure, literally, having nothing to do]” thoughts. These are not the thoughts pursued as one pursues an errand, but rather thoughts that emerge in accordance with no preordained task. Kundera’s own work, like Nietzsche’s self-overcoming of the self, assumes the possibility of Kenk6’s kind of stance: “Nietzsche's refusal of systematic

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thought has another consequence: an immense broadening of theme: the barrier between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher's thought. That too brings philosophy nearer to the novel: for the first time philosophy is pondering not epistemology, not aesthetics or ethics, the phenomenology of mind or the critique of reason, etc., but everything human” (TB, 175). This same range of themes governs the way of following the brush—a way of following the transience and impenetrability of life. According to Kenko, “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” One follows the brush because one has experienced what the Mahayana tradition has called the Great Death, the dying to oneself that fosters an awakening and grateful attentiveness to the full complexity of things “just as they are.” As Kenko mused: “A man should bear firmly in mind that death is always threatening, and never for an instance forget it. If he does this, why should the impurities bred in him by this world not grow lighter, and his heart not develop an earnest resolve to cultivate the Way of the Buddha?”’® Death is an event so certain that we can think it, as Heidegger did, as our one great

property. We cannot outsource our own deaths; we must die ourselves. Finitude is the one quality that we cannot disown because it is the promise that we will lose all of our other qualities. Death is the property that will annihilate all that we imagined to be our properties, as if it were the pure laugh of the devil, preserving nothing, consigning everything to oblivion. According to Nishitani Keiji, the Zen tradition did not understand the Great Doubt and the Great Death to be the termination of our mortal coils, but the death of the self as a fixed point of reference. “It is like the bean whose seed and shell break apart as it ripens: the shell is the tiny ego, and the seed the infinity of the Great Doubt that encompasses the whole world. It is the moment in which the self is at the same time the nothingness of self.” And hence Zen pronounces: “In the Great Death heaven and earth become new and that by which heaven and earth are born anew.” This is not the revelation of some new thing, but an opening to the horizon of presentation as such, “the true reality of the self and things, in which everything is present just as it is, in its suchness.”'’ The overcoming of the fixed subject (rebirth as the selfless self) does not condemn awareness to the dreary and unequivocal gravity of suchness; it is the awakening of a deep, abiding sense of humor. This is the spirit that informs the following story that Kenko recounts about a priest at Ninna-ji (the ninth century headquarter temple of the Omuto sect of the Shingon School of Buddhism in the western district of Kyoto): Laughter m= 57

A farewell party was being offered for an acolyte about to become a priest, and the guests were all making merry when one of the priests,

drunk and carried away by high spirits, picked up a three-legged cauldron nearby, and clamped it over his head. It caught on his nose, but he flattened it down, pulled the pot over his face, and danced out among the others, to the great amusement of everyone. After the priest had been dancing for a while he tried to pull the pot off, but it refused to be budged. A pall fell over the gathering, and people wondered blankly what to do. They tried one thing and another, only succeeding at bruising the skin around his neck. The blood streamed down, and the priest’s neck became so swollen that

he had trouble breathing. The others tried to split the pot, but it was not easily broken and the reverberations inside were unbearable. Finally, when all else had failed, they threw a thin garment over the pot, which stuck up like horns, and giving the priest a stick to lean on, led him off by the hand to a doctor in Kyoto. People they met on the way stared at this apparition with unconstrained astonishment. The priest presented a most extraordinary sight as he sat inside the doctor's office facing him. Whatever he said came out as an unintelligible, muffled roar. “I can’t find any similar case in my medical books,” said the doctor, “and there aren't any oral traditions either.” The priest had no choice but to return to Ninna-ji, where his close friends and his aged mother gathered at his bedside, weeping with grief, though the priest himself probably could not hear them. At this point, somebody suggested, “Wouldn't it be better at least to save his life, even if he loses his nose and ears? Let’s try pulling the pot off with all of our strength.” They stuffed straw around the priest's neck to protect it from the metal, then pulled hard enough to tear off his head. Only holes were left to show where his ears and nose had been, but the pot was removed. They barely managed to save the priest’s life, and for a long time afterwards he was gravely ill.’®

The Shingon acolyte no longer had a nose nor ears, and he was consequently gravely ill for a very long time, but what gives this story its comic effect, despite its grisly conclusion? Kenko remained detached and the un-

derlying ambiguity (the interdependence and dependent co-origination of things) allows the conventional meaning (the poor, pitiable training monk) to loosen its semantic monopoly. Nothing clearly stands alone. Such humor has also perhaps characterized the Zen tradition and is the trademark of many of the greatest Zen masters. One finds, for example, in The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshi, the following teaching: 58 w= Laughter

A monk asked, “What is that which is spiritual?” The master said, “A puddle of piss in the Pure Land.” The monk said, “I ask you to reveal it to me.” The master said, “Don’t tempt me.””

The slowing down of life in heightened attentiveness allows the comic suchness (tathata) of the way of things to flash forth.

The Silenic Box, the Joy of Human Destiny At the dawn of what would become the European novel, Frangois Rabelais (c. 1494-1553), who had endured questionable tenures as a Franciscan and

then as a Benedictine, wrote at the end of the poem to his readers that opens Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534): “Laughter is man’s proper lot [rire est le propre de !homme|”*° Laughter, not finitude, is what is ownmost to

the human. It is, in a manner of speaking, that which speaks to our most essential possibility. It is our destiny, properly understood. In his prologue, where he identifies his readers as buveurs tres illustres, most illustrious drinkers, he associates this new and as such unrecognizable

form of writing with a Silenic box, aligning it not with angelic laughter, but with the deformative force of the Dionysian. On the outside, the box appeared silly and unimportant, and it could be easily dismissed because it lacked the gravity of great things, but its inside was not without its own formidable power. “A Silenus, in ancient days, was a little box” whose outside was covered with light and mirthful images, “lightheartedly invented

for the purpose of mirth, as was Silenus himself, the master of good old Bacchus. But inside these boxes were kept rare drugs.””' This, Rabelais tells us, is how the drunken Alcibiades in the Symposium understood Socrates.”

On the outside he looked and acted the buffoon: he had a snub nose, dressed poorly, was unlucky with money, awful at politics, and ugly to boot. He drank his fellow revelers under the table and was given to frequent laughter. Inside, however, concealed underneath the apparent mirth of Socrates, was the destiny of humanity itself: “But had you opened that box, you would have found inside a heavenly and priceless drug: a superhuman understanding, miraculous virtue, invincible courage, unrivalled sobriety, unfailing contentment, perfect confidence, and an incredible contempt for all those things men so watch for, pursue, work for, sail after, and struggle for.”’? Rabelais understood himself, as well as his strange new book, to be Silenic boxes. Laughter, like Socrates's idiocy, conceals a marvelous, concept-defying wisdom, and “the drug within is far more valuable than the box promised.”** The author counsels us that we should treat his

Laughter = 59

book as dogs treat bones: one should gnaw through it to the precious marrow within.” The wisdom concealed within laughter is not the wisdom of grand conclusions. Socrates, after all, confesses in the Apology that his wisdom is a “human wisdom, perhaps” (20d). He admits that such wisdom is “worthless” (23b) and that he knows that he does not know (21d). The rise of the universe of the novel and its related values led to a contestation over the figure of Socrates. On one hand, the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment championed Socrates and his indefatigable search for the true and the good and his relentless testing of all ideas as

part of their own struggle against dogmatism and fanaticism and their promotion of science and rationality. On the other hand, as soon as Socrates drank the hemlock, the nature of his legacy came into dispute. The first great cynic, Diogenes the Dog—sleeping in bathtubs, dismissing the advances of empire makers, defecating in the theater, and masturbating in public—publically contested Plato and his academy’s interpretation of Socrates, insisting that his canine way of life was more authentically Socratic.

Within the intramural struggle for the European Enlightenment, Johann Georg Hamann embraced this other, less serious, more marginal Socrates. During his early debates with the precritical Kant, Hamann introduced him to the works of David Hume, triggering Kant’s awakening from his “dogmatic slumber.” When Kant struggled to save reason in the first Critique from the virulence of the skeptics, that “species of nomads, despising all settled modes of life” who, like the Mongol hordes, “broke up from time to time all civil society,””° he also had in mind his unsettling encounters with Hamann, a threat that Kant equated with the implosion of the newly won and still fragile Enlightenment. In his battle with Kant (as well as Berens, who had instigated the turmoil between them), Hamann wrote Sokratische Denkwtirdigkeiten (1759). Hamann’s Socrates dwells at the border of reason: history “is, like nature, a book that is sealed, a hidden witness, a riddle which cannot be solved unless we plow with another heifer than our reason.””’ Reason cannot find its way to the bottom of things “because we were made in secret, because we were formed in the depths of the earth” and because our “concepts were made in secret” so that Socrates, emulating the midwifery of his mother, continually helps give them birth.*® In so doing, he also imitated his father, a sculptor, “by removing and cutting away what should not be in the wood.” There was no end to this paring, giving the leading lights of his time “sufficient reason to cry out against him that he was cutting down all the oaks of their forests, spoiling all of their logs, and that he only knew how to make chips out of their wood.””? Socrates the laughing chipmaker 60 u« Laughter

had nothing substantive to offer save for the “the eruptions and secretions of his ignorance.”°° Nietzsche, as previously discussed, also inhabits the strange, shifting border between the novel and philosophy. Nietzsche, however, will have

nothing to do with Socratic irony, which he regarded as too tainted by the Enlightenment. Nietzsche’s “one-eyed” Socrates, in contrast with Rabelais and Hamann, is the opposite of Silenus and gave rise “to a new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the work of art that was Greek tragedy perished of it.”°! Nietzsche consigned Socrates—the restless critic who “believed that he had to correct existence’**—to an obsessive search for Apollonian form, oblivious to the Dionysian formlessness and excess (Uberma/s) expressing itself within form. Cleaving the Socratic from the Dionysian, Nietzsche embraced the latter, recalling the wisdom that Silenus imparted to the hapless Midas: “Best of all is for you entirely

out of reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is for you—to die soon.” This was the secret Silenic cheerfulness (Heiterkeit).

This all happens in Nietzsche's first work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), a work marked by a somewhat youthfully tragic gravitas (the heavy spell at the time of Wagner). Serious and theoretical, it is not marked by the music of which it speaks and it lacks the levity of Nietzsche's later comic style. In 1886, Nietzsche appended an “Attempt at a Self Critique,” admitting that it “should have sung, this ‘new soul’—and not just talk.”* As the force of Dionysian laughter deracinated the settled habits of serious discourse, Nietzsche's thinking became more polyphonic and experimental, ranging over a vast array of themes and, in Rabelais’s sense, it became more Silenic and more radically Socratic, its laughter

approaching the laughing God that Kundera extolled as the ground of the novel.*? Almost three and a half centuries after Gargantua came into the world and immediately got hammered, these two universes came into closer proximity, although one should also remember that in the century after Nietzsche's death, his spirit thrived more readily in the novel. One need only compare Heidegger’s impressive but exceedingly somber and grand Nietzsche lectures (where the destiny of the whole Seinsgeschichte

is at stake) with Robert Musil’s unfinished and perhaps unfinishable The Man without Qualities to appreciate the limits of Heidegger's perspective. In contrast with his sober and focused discussion of causality and positivism in his doctoral dissertation in philosophy (Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs),°° Musil’s novel is enormous, the plot is scant, and thought-

ful inquiry is ubiquitous, polyphonic, and often penetratingly comic. Kundera: “Musil is a great thinker only in his novels” (7B, 237).

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Musil assembles a dizzyingly vast and experimental (essayistic) array of themes, moods, and perspectives, including that of the psychotic Moosbrugger, who sat in jail awaiting execution after murdering a prostitute, all the time extravagantly hallucinating. He was, however, “pleased that he had this knack for hallucination that others lacked; it enabled him to see all sorts of things others didn’t, such as lovely landscapes and hellish monsters.”°’ When Moosbrugger could muster some control over his chaotic imagination, he would engage “in thinking,” although he had no idea what that really meant. “He called it thinking because he had always been impressed with the word.”°* It described something passive, as if thinking “were planted in him.” And what kind of “thoughts” came to him when he was “thinking”? “A Squirrel in these parts is called a tree kitten . . . but just let somebody try to talk about a tree cat with a straight face!” Moosbrugger was, however, convinced that such designations were regionally specific. In Hesse a tree kitten was “called a tree fox. Any man who's traveled around knows such things.”*’? Deep down, however, Moosbrugger’s “experience and conviction were that no thing could be singled out by itself, because things hang together.” It usually took “his enormous strength to hold the world together.’*° Moosbrugger vainly struggled to hold back the border that retained the annihilating laughter of the lightness of being. Concealed within the Silenic box of the novel is a transformative power that clips the angelic wings of the Seinsgeschichte and makes Mach’s otherwise flat positivism intone its nascent polyphonic song. After situating his strange new creation in the Silenic cynicism of the other Socrates, Rabelais, regarding nothing as sacred, unleashes one of the more politically incorrect books ever written. Mere minutes after he was born, Garganuta demanded booze and commenced a lifelong bender. The story is filled with idiocy, indolence, womanizing, indulgence, debauchery, feasting, farting, shitting, vomiting, death, and constant binge drinking. When Gargantua attempted to acquire knowledge, he began his own rudimentary experiments with toilet paper: seeking the finest solution to wiping his almost constantly dirty ass, he sampled most every material that he could find. After his exhaustive inquiry, he concluded that the neck of a living goose was best: “You get a miraculous sensation in your arse-hole, both from the softness of the down and from the temperate heat of the goose herself.”*! Rabelais, presaging in the Renaissance a different modernity than did the great painterly architects of form, unleashes the drug concealed within

the marrow of the novel, as each and every idol, towering above common life, descends to the darkness of its original ground. From the border

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between the novel and the discontents of philosophy, we can see that Rabelais’s medicine for the suffering of the grave human animal anticipates Nietzsche’s discovery that it is our relationship to the burden of meaning that makes us the saddest of all animals: “The human has gradually become a fantastical animal with one more condition of existence to fulfill

than any other animal: the human must from time to time believe and know why he or she exists... . And again and again the human generation will declare from time to time that ‘there is something about which one is not permitted to laugh.’”” This is the humorless agony of our angelic life as we ascend in our magic circles—“a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back” (BLF, 92). If we step out of the circle as it continues its ascent, we are like a “meteorite broken off from a planet” (BLF, 92), irrevocably hurtling back down to the earth. We were not permitted to laugh in the circle, and hence no questions are audible as Walter Benjamin’s angel of history continues its bloody progress, leaving a wake of corpses.” Comic Tears

In a letter in support of Christina Nehring’s excoriation of Kundera as a misogynist, a Harpers Magazine reader supportively responded: “I suggest to Christina Nehring that feminists are not falling short of their duty because “Kundera has gone unskewered.’ Feminists are doing their job, for Nehring has acquired the intellectual tools to critique him. With a few thousand years of misogyny in literature and politics to discuss, we just hadn’t got around to Kundera.”** The author of this letter is right when she claims that misogyny—and myriad other forms of hatred and intolerance—has plagued the history of humanity and has caused incalculable suffering. Is the best response to the hateful character of the history of humanity to begin a skewering project? In agreeing with the politics that seek to redress and correct the many historical injustices, do we have to thereby condemn the novel to the interrogation room as we reduce its complexity and ambiguity to a particular political agenda, however laudable?® “The spirit of the trial is the reduction of everything to morality; it is absolute nihilism in regard to craft, art, works” (7B, 229). We no longer read works, but we interrogate and prosecute ideas. As an exasperated Bataille once reflected on the political incorrectness of Nietzsche's writing: “It’s frightening to see thought reduced to the propaganda level—thought that remains comically unemployable, opening to those whom the void inspires. According to some critics, Nietzsche exercised a great influence

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on his times. I doubt it: No one expected him to dismiss moral laws.’*° The hateful do not need to read difficult and time-consuming works of literature to validate their passions. In his essayistic analysis of kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’ persona reflects: “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into

kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion” (ULB, 278). We will be either on the right side of history (the position vindicated by the “Grand March”) or we will belong to its refuse. “Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements” (ULB, 251). Gulags, both literal and figurative, actual skewerings as well as academic and journalistic skewerings, are the septic tanks for “totalitarian kitsch to

dispose of its refuse” and eliminate what it finds offensive (ULB, 252). These kinds of politics, which traverse the right and the left, neaten up the house, making it morally tidy and proper, and flush away all of the shit and dirt. It excises what Bataille once called da part maudite, the shitty, accursed, unacceptable part, the part that emerges on the other side of the border of what we can directly tolerate and afhrm. Kitsch maintains a clean, immovable border between itself and the other side, and on the acceptable side things appear hygienic, regular, predictable, obvious, normal, right. As one of Kundera’s commentators frames it: “As an esthetic expression of the narcissistic need to gaze at oneself in objects and to regard as beautiful only that which reflects our image back to us, kitsch is given to denying all heterogeneous knowledge and therefore all ambivalence.” In a separate letter in the same issue, another reader defended Kundera,

arguing that there are also women in his novels who are more powerful than some of the foolish and humiliated men. Nehring had concentrated on Helena, but failed to recognize that Ludvik is humiliated by history itself or that Lucie is an “angel of purity.” We can easily appreciate the reader's point. Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for instance, is more powerful—far less burdened by compassion—than Tomas; her lover Franz is somewhat ridiculous in his devotion to grand historical gestures when compared to a character as complex as Tereza, who, despite the agony of living with Tomas, is not a one-dimensional victim. Franz lives as if he were on the side of history while Tereza knows, with all of its vertiginous disorientation, that to love a compulsive womanizer like Tomas is to experiment with her own death.

The author of this second letter (Boris from Portland, Oregon) performs a valuable service. Such a stance at least defends the practice of reading (as opposed to monitoring) in our reigning “age of prosecution.” It is

also important to remember that for Kundera, the art of the novel is not about the politics of revenge, settling scores, or any other manner of pass64 m= Laughter

ing moral judgment on the novel’s characters. Novels are explorations and investigations, not battle plans: “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and every-

one; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil” (7B, 7). Kundera made this claim in a context that included a defense of Rabelais as well as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, the latter subject to a fatwa, the details of which we can now read in Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton (2012). “With a heavy

heart, I imagine the day when Panurge no longer makes people laugh” (TB, 33). Yes, serious times are sad—and sadly obvious—times. In the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche had the same heavy heart with regards to the fate of Cervantes. Having already argued that “today pain hurts more,” Nietzsche admitted that “Today we read all of Don Quixote with a bitter taste on our tongues, almost as if being tortured, which would seem very odd and very dark to its author and his contemporaries—they read it with the clearest of consciences as the most cheerful of books and they practically laughed themselves to death over it.”** As valuable as such correctives are, however, they do not entirely get at the most salient issue. It is true that Kundera’s novels all escape the facile world of stereotypes, but whether it produces ethically inspiring characters or not, the novel is not in the business of telling us how to live. The novel is not in the business of rehearsing our prevailing moral positions. Kundera’s universe of the novel (in the sense of “what only the novel can do”) is not ethical philosophy by other means. As we shall see in the fifth chapter, kitsch and its rejection of all that does not accord with itself—

“Kitsch has its source in the categorical agreement with being” (ULB, 256)—ignores what the novel cultivates, namely, the devil’s laughter, the sudden levity of being, ambiguity, irony, polyphony, complexity, paradox, and all of the rigors of novelistic inquiry as modes of access to the often overlooked enigmas of human affairs. Politics in the grand sense administers what it already believes to be true, while the novel contests such a curatorial and bureaucratic skewering of being. Even Tereza, for all of her suffering and nightmares because of Tomas’s philandering, refuses kitsch, both in her love for her dog Karenin and in her understanding of her own nightmares. “Tereza’s dream reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is

a folding screen set up to curtain off death” (ULB, 253). This becomes even more obvious in Tereza’s remarkable, albeit tortured, friendship with Sabina, Tomas’s libertine paramour: “In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, Laughter =» 65

then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through” (ULB, 254). At this point, one might ask in what way a discussion of The Unbearable Lightness of Being bears upon our discussion of humor. ‘The novel is elegiac

and poignant, but not wildly comical. This protest misses the point. The novel, whether funny or not, is always on the side of the comic because, like comedy, it is under the experimental sway of the question (problems emerge in the détente between the angels and the devils, each humbling each other’s fundamental ambitions). It is a mistake to assume that the novel is exalting any of its characters (comedy leaves heroism to the vainglory of politicians) just as it is also fallacious to assume that the novel is defending any particular position. The novel is not autobiographical but rather casts its lot with humor insofar as humor—whether or not laughter is present—takes the side of the question, not the side of either dogmatism (clear and unambiguous answers) or nihilism (the complete absence of answers and new discoveries). “The characters in my novels are my own

unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘T’ ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become” (ULB, 221). In one sense, Kundera’ persona embodies Ulrich’s (in The Man without Qualities) essayistic reserve. “Ulrich felt that he was basically capable of every virtue and every baseness.”* This distance, however, does not consign thinking to “the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivism” and “terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable.” The essayistic voice occupies an intermediary zone where the philosophical and the artistic enter into indiscernability, a “domain... between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry.””! Ulrich, “the man without qualities,” a “possibilist ... who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself,”?* sometimes comes across as adrift, a boat lost at sea. In the voice of Kundera’ persona, however, one can also detect the compassionate detachment (commiserating with the devastated things) of comic distance that allows it to engage all things human with more vulnerability and sensitivity to the pain of hu66 m= Laughter

man folly.*° But this sensibility is extraordinarily dificult to communicate. Kundera confessed as much when he recounted the story in which he was flabbergasted by a professor who counseled him to better appreciate the moral beauty of sperm. Farewell Waltz had inspired the professor, especially Dr. Skreta’s unorthodox techniques at his fertility clinic in which he solved “the problem of rational procreation of children” by “curing” his female patients (who typically had sterile husbands) by secretly injecting them with a syringe filled with his own seminal fluid (FW, 136). It is a darkly comic situation as the Bohemian countryside became indiscriminately populated with little Skreta babies while Skreta himself confessed that while there may be a “higher justice,” he does not understand it and considers himself to be “living here in this world beyond justice” (FW, 273). The professor had some minor qualms about Skreta’s specific techniques:

The professor invites me to a conference on artificial insemination. He pulls out a sheet of paper from his pocket and reads me the draft of his own presentation. The gift of sperm must be anonymous, free of charge, and (here he looks me in the eye) impelled by a threefold love: love for an unknown ovum that seeks to accomplish its mission; the donor's love for his own individuality, which is to be perpetuated

by the donation; and, third, love for the couple that is suffering, unfulfilled. Then he looks me in the eye again: much as he admires my work, he does have one criticism: I did not manage to express powerfully enough the moral beauty of the gift of semen. I defended myself: this is a comic novel! . . . I realize: there is nothing harder to explain than humor. (7B, 6-7) One is forced to grant the professor “a wide berth” (C, 107), but how does one awaken the sensibility to the enigma of life’s great problems? One cannot legislate wonder any more than one can teach another person to have a sense of humor. Such problems confronted the young Jaromil in Life is Elsewhere, but he could not accommodate them and grew up to be a ferocious lyricist and demagogue, a person for whom there were only answers, not questions. Yet in his youth—a time of ceaseless enigmas—there was

nothing but questions. For example, how does one communicate with someone sexually and romantically? Contemplating buying and using his first condom as he prepared to shed his virginity, Jaromil is overwhelmed by his queries:

But how could he procure that sock? Jaromil would never overcome

his shyness and go into a pharmacy to buy one! The sock seemed ridiculous to him, and he couldn't bear the idea that the girl would

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know about it! Could he put it on in advance, at home? Or did he have to wait until he was naked in front of the girl?

These were questions he couldnt answer. Jaromil had no trial (training) sock, but he decided to get one at all costs and practice putting it on. He thought that speed and dexterity played a decisive role in this area, and that these couldn't be acquired without training. But other things, too, tormented him: What exactly was the act of love? What did it feel like? What happened in your body? Was the pleasure so great that you started to scream and lose control of yourself? Didn't screaming make you look ridiculous? How long did the whole thing actually take? Ah, my God, was it even possible to embark on something like that without preparing for it? Until then Jaromil had never masturbated. He had considered this activity to be something shameful, which a real man should guard

against; it was a great love he felt destined for, not onanism. But how do you achieve a great love without some preparation? (LE, 167-168)

Jaromil went on to become a destroyer, siding with the ferocious angels of progress. A Tale of Two Assholes

To honor Simone de Beauvoir on what would have been her hundredth birthday, the cover of Le Nouvel Observateur featured a 1952 photograph of the great philosopher taken when she was visiting her paramour Nelson Algren in Chicago. She is naked, fixing her hair in the mirror, and the photograph, taken from behind, reveals her ass. It is still fair to ask: what is more important in the eyes of the public: her oeuvre or her ass (and by implication her notorious love life)? By the numbers, the latter would likely win out, and, as we have seen in the first two chapters, this speaks to the fragility of works.

Beyond the painful and lamentable humiliation in which an author’s biography is more important than their works, however, the image of the ass overshadowing works has other implications. The ass, that ignominious counterpart to the head (the seat of the mind and the soul), is in a tug of war with its more revered end, analogous to laughter’s combat with gravity. The head aspires to a categorical agreement with being, while the ass symbolizes the transformation of the triumphs of the head into shit.

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In Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, a novel that Kundera ranked among the finest written after Proust, the thirty-year-old Joey realized “an inbred superlaugh of my bodily parts” and that “all my parts were wildly raping each other in an all-encompassing and piercing state of panmockery” and soon Pimko had dragged him back into his immaturity.” He was stripped of the coveted forms of accomplishment befitting his age eroup— I was neither this nor that—I was nothing.”’° Demoted back to the identity wars of high school, Joey was in bellum omnium contra omnes, where students fought each other for superiority with aggressive grimaces and “dealt each other the pupa,” a humorous colloquial Polish term for ass. When one is dealt the pupa, one has been humiliated, infantilized, robbed of maturity, put back into place, belittled. In the battle for the limelight, for the supreme forms of humanity, one must deal the opposition the pupa, cast them down from the heights of the soul into the ignominy of the ass. In an essayistic intervention that interrupts Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz’s authorial persona announced that his novel, however, refused to partake in this battle for perfect form: “Stop identifying yourselves with that which delimits you!””” The authorial persona was a specialist in inferiority, creating in the “element” of “unending immaturity,” but resisting the final resting place of an allegedly consummate form, so that the “bard will scorn

his own song” and “the leader will shudder at his own command” and “the high priest will stand in terror of the altar.”®® The novel does not take itself seriously, does not believe its proclamations, distrusts its feelings, and does not wage war for the perfection of serious art. “T haven't signed a contact with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works.”” Gombrowicz later reflected that Ferdydurke was the “ferocious battle between man and

his own Form (that is to say his battle against his way of being, feeling, thinking, talking, acting, against his culture, his ideas and his ideologies, his convictions, his creeds).”° At the end of the novel, after idol after idol had been shattered (the hip modern school girl, young love, the bucolic idyll, etc.), “the moon sailed from behind the clouds, yet it was not the moon, it was the pupa. A pupa of tremendous size atop the trees. A child’s pupa atop the world. And the pupa. Nothing but the pupa.”” Fleeing with Zosia, Joey panicked and felt compelled to grab on to something, anything, anyone. At dawn, the sun rose, and it too had become a brilliant, horrible, humiliating, relentless pupa. Soon Joey and Zosia desperately convinced themselves that they were in love with each other and “together we kept on walking under the rays of the merciless, brilliant, blazing, and infantile, and infantilizing pupa.” The solar pupa “ravaged the valleys of this world,”® and the camouflage

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of their hasty love became apparent: “Oh, what torture I had to endure to save this pretense of maturity.”"°* The pupa sun scorched everything with its elemental, formless immaturity, shooting “its golden, glistening rays on this vale of tears,”® shrinking even the world itself. Oh, there was no escaping the pupa, just “speed, speed, speed through all mankind.”® We fight to the death against the pupa, humiliated that we are not anything in particular, that we have no fixed form, no permanent identity. In Slowness, Kundera’s persona announces that he had written a novel “with not a serious word in it.” It is an immature novel, a resistance to the idols of humanity, but its lack of seriousness prompted the persona of Véra (Kundera’s wife) to warn him that it “will leave you naked to the wolves” (S, 91). The exposure of the pupa is humiliating, even a matter of life and death! Think of Immaculata’s plunge into the pool with her white evening dress and piercing scream, echoed by the blathering of her hapless and subordinate cameraman. “These movements sing the yearning to live in the heights or else perish in the watery deep” (S, 127). Dealing someone the pupa was what Pontevin dubbed “moral judo”: the elory-obsessed dancer who desires sole possession of the limelight “throws down the gauntlet to the whole world: who can appear more moral (more courageous, more decent, more sincere, more self-sacrificing, more truthful) than he” (S, 19)? Moral judo’s equivalent of the winning strike involves a sneak attack in which the assailant is asked a question that they can neither accept nor refuse. Will you quit your professorship and save the starving babies? If the professor says no, they do not love babies. If they say yes, they are out of a valuable job. If this were a private conversation, the professor could just laugh, but although regular judo can be conducted by the combatants in seclusion, moral judo is a battle for the regard of countless anonymous eyes; it is the struggle among “the elect” to flee “commonplace life... and rise to a higher level” (S, 49). Since I am equivalent to how I am perceived, I cannot bear to be dealt the pupa judo chop. Slowness, like the short story “Symposium” or the novel Farewell Waltz, is farcical and Kundera deploys this form’s “enormous stress on plot, with its whole machinery of unforeseen and exaggerated coincidences” (AN, 93) to interlace episode upon episode of moral judo, developing multiple pecking orders of domination and submission. In one thread, Pontevin and his rambunctious circle convinced Vincent to attend an entomology conference in order to humiliate the great dancing politician Berck. Vin-

cent had not yet found a way out of the chrysalis of his lyrical immaturity and the adventure went poorly. Vincent unleashed a sneak attack on Berck, castigating him for his love of media attention—‘the television is his only master, his only mistress” (S, 83)—but unbeknownst to 70 ww Laughter

him, he had stepped on a pupa landmine. Another person in the audience launched a counterattack, defending the fate of the dancer in a media obsessed world—“I would even say: either we're dancers or we're deserters” (S, 84)—and Vincent, unable to commandeer a suitable counterattack, was dealt the pupa “amid jeering laughter” (S, 84). The humiliation of the pupa became a “painful splinter” (S, 85): how would he still be able to muster some kind of victory? It dawned on him that his pending evening with Julia was his only hope for recuperation. He endeavored to impress her with talk of the Marquis de Sade and orgies and suddenly the image of her ass hole appeared from nowhere to liberate him from this painful sliver. “What several glasses of whisky could not accomplish, an ass hole has achieved in a single second” (S, 89). He knew that Pontevin and his circle would all take delight in his daring libertinage. What a glorious story this would make! He did, however, have a daunting logistical problem: he was rather shy, but he was again saved by another unexpected inspiration. Pointing at the moon and commanding Julia’s attention, he exclaimed: “It looks like an ass hole drilled in the sky” (S, 97). Alas, poor Vincent trapped himself by transforming his libertine ambitions into the lyrical and was “stuck in his metaphor like a fly in glue” (S, 99). All he could do was concoct metaphor after metaphor about the wonders of the anus. They ended up at the hotel swimming pool under the imagined gaze of the “silhouette of Pontevin, who like some Trotsky, is running a huge uprising . . . from his Paris bunker” (S, 102). Vincent devised a new outrage: they would consummate his anal fantasy right then and there! Yes, the ass hole that had so far humiliated him would still be his glory! Alas, Vincent’s member, “as small as a wilted wild strawberry” (S, 120), did not join the dance, and Vincent and Julia had to go it alone, furiously “simulating coition’” (S, 121). Later, unable to find Julia, Vincent imagined what his lyricism had occluded, and his member arose “uselessly, senselessly, and immensely” (S, 137). Even it had dealt him the pupa! The next morning, Vincent, utterly trounced, tried to invent a more suitable report on the evening’s debacle. He would tell everyone that he had initiated a public orgy, but upon meeting the chevalier from Denon’s eighteenth-century novella Point de lendemain and quickly earning his contempt, Vincent conceded defeat and lost all desire to persist with his mendacity. He was nothing, crushed by the pupa “and in this moment he feels an unquenchable thirst for speed” (S, 154), for the speed that allowed him to forget himself, “noncorporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed” (S, 2). And so the pupa sends us on our way to the oblivion of speed as we try to forget the unbearable nullity of ourselves. Vincent and all of the

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other guests at the entomology conference were not laughing, trapped, as were Nietzsche’s dogmatists, in “the gruesome seriousness and awkward importunity with which the dogmatists previously tended to approach the truth,” now revealed to be “maladroit and indecorous [ungeschickte und unschickliche| means.’°’ Had we slowed down, we would have had a lot of laughs, and perhaps some tears, at the polyvalent and ambiguous pupa at the heart of our ideas. “It is from the pupa that all action begins”;°* the pupa is like time itself, which empties all forms of intrinsic being.

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Dogs and History Take good notice of Milan’s dogs.

—Josef Skvorecky'

Leni’s Claw In the first of the Duino Elegies, Rilke proclaims that “the sly animals see at once how little at home we are in the interpreted world.” Where then are we at home? The very notion of home is an interpretation about where it is that we think we are. If we are not at home in the interpreted world, then it also follows that we are also not at home with ourselves because we are our selves by virtue of our interpreted selves. And where do these animals dwell, these animals who, even when they share our homes, know that we are not at home? Dogs, whose strangeness reawakens our attention to the fact that we take them and our homes for granted, often inhabit Kundera’s novels, as if, Francois Ricard tells us, “this speechless creature from a uni-

verse unconcerned with the passions and destiny of human beings were always bringing them a message they cannot understand.”° In Farewell Waltz, the town’s population turns against the dogs, rounding them up “because to hunt men in our country is to hunt the privileged: those who read books or own a dog” (FW, 109). Roger Grenier, in his little book The Difficulty of Being a Dog, reports that in the communist Bohemia that Kundera evokes, “having a dog was like turning one’s back on the collective” because it “was seen as a superfluous consumer and a sign of individualism, selfish introversion.”* In the great collective home, there should be no filthy, resource intensive, vanity-inducing dogs. Grenier recollects:

73

During the period of this repression against dogs, I was walking mine in the streets of Prague when a young man cried out, “Long live the dogs!” Old people came up to me and explained, in the French they had once learned, that life in the old days in their country was hap-

pier for dogs. It was their way of saying what they thought. Dogs were not allowed in restaurants. Still, one night, they let us in. And, even though there wasn’t much to eat, the headwaiter brought a plate of meat for Ulysses and set it conspicuously on the ground, right in the middle of the restaurant.° Just as manicured poodles can be a capitalist celebration of conspicuous consumption, these politicized dogs can also be statements, albeit ones that rebel against the collectivist status quo. In a world where we are all the same, we use our dogs to distinguish ourselves. In Slowness, after Immaculata had been humiliated by Berck, she demoted her loyal and starstruck cameraman to an “adoring dog” so that they could enter the chateau as a “tragic-grotesque couple, a queen with a mutt following behind her” (S, 109).

The politicization of animal life is an old and strange story. Edward Payson Evans's curiously sober study, Zhe Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), documents 191 instances where nonhuman animals were subject to legal proceedings and excommunication.® “Not only were insects, reptiles and small mammals, such as rats and mice, legally prosecuted and formally excommunicated, but judicial penalties, including capital punishment, were also inflicted upon larger quadrupeds.”’ Evans observes that animal trials disproportionately fell to pigs: “The frequency with which pigs were brought to trial and adjudged to death, was owing, in a great measure, to the freedom with which they were permitted

to run about the streets and to their immense number. The fact that they were under the special protection of St. Anthony of Padua conferred upon them a certain immunity, so that they became a serious nuisance, not only endangering the lives of children, but also generating and disseminating diseases.”® Dogs, too, could be deemed anathemas and subjected to ecclesiastical or legal trial under trumped up charges: Mornacius also relates that several mad dogs, which attacked and tore to pieces a Franciscan novice in 1610, were “by sentence and decree of the court put to death.” It is surely reasonable enough that mad dogs should be killed; the remarkable feature of the case is that they should be formally tried and convicted as murderers by a legal tribunal, and that no account should have been taken of their rabies as an extenuating circumstance or ground of acquittal. In such a case 74 w Dogs and History

the plea of insanity would certainly seem to be naturally suggested and perfectly valid.’ A mad dog, like any mad person, has no mens rea, no guilty mind, no conscious intent to commit a criminal act.!” In madness, the practices of recognition as such go awry. But are dogs in any state of mind ever capable of a guilty mind? Despite the fact that we can train dogs to kill for us or to fetch beers from the fridge for us, and that in so doing we reward the desired behaviors and punish the unwanted ones, does it really make sense to assume that dogs are truly capable of moral anguish and guilt before the law? On this problem, we can look to Kafka’s The Trial, his masterpiece of anguish before the law that exacts guilt but in so doing keeps the content of its commands in abeyance." Kafka’s law makes binding claims without revealing the nature of those claims. Herr K., living in a great mechanical bureaucracy that operated without a discernable head and whose efficiency rendered its founding and guiding ideology optional, was arrested “one morning without having done anything truly wrong.”” He spent the rest of his life attempting to discover what law he had broken and what therefore justified his guilt. After his accusation, Kundera notes, “the person punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense” (AN, 102-103). Although Herr K. never learned the nature of his crime, at the end of his life he discovered his punishment: “But the hands of one man were right at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and

turned it there twice. With failing sight K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the verdict. “Like a dog!’ he said.”'> Herr K. died like a dog, yet his death, despite its canine character, is no more intelligible than his life. To die like a dog is to die without the dignity befitting what we understand to be our humanity. Although we do not want to live or die like a dog, we do want dogs to recognize that we are human and they are not. Grenier tells us that when the great ethicist Emmanuel Levinas was a prisoner of war working in a “forest work detail,” he met a stray dog who took the company of Levinas and his fellow prison-

ers, reminding him that for “the dog, there was no doubt we were men.” Grenier is referring to the dog Bobby that Levinas described in Difficult Freedom. Although the dog recognized Levinas as human, Levinas knew that his ethical responsibility to a dog could not match that toward his fellow beings because a dog had “neither ethics nor /ogos.”” When Odysseus returned to Ithaca, only Argos, his now old and mangy

dog, recognized him. As touched as he was to have been recognized in Dogs and History = 75

such an inhospitable world, Odysseus will soon demean Penelope's suitors by calling them “dogs.” Levinas’s face-to-face encounter does not include one’s pet, unless it is Derrida’s cat.'’ Dogs recognize us simultaneously in both our humanity and hecceity, and we may prosecute and punish dogs as if they were human, or anthropomorphize them in countless other ways, but we do not want to recognize ourselves as a dog. We do not want to die like a dog. When K. the land surveyor and Frieda copulated for the second time in The Castle, they pawed at each other like dogs and licked each other’s faces. In The Trial, moments before consummating their tryst, Herr K. and Leni discussed the photograph of Herr K.’s sweetheart, Elsa. Leni was dismissive of her, but Herr K. defended her on the grounds that “she doesn’t know

anything about my trial, and even if she did, she wouldn't think about it. She wouldn't try to talk me into giving in.” Leni countered that this is hardly a real advantage, and offered up something better: “Does she have a physical defect of any sort?” “A physical defect?” asked K. “Yes,” said Leni, “I have a defect of that sort, look.” She spread apart the middle and ring fingers of her right hand, between which the connecting skin extended almost to the top knuckle of her short fingers. In the darkness, K. couldn't see at first what it was she wanted to show him, so she guided his hand to feel it. “What a whim of nature,” K. said, and added, when he had examined her whole hand, “What a pretty claw [Was fiir eine hiibsche Kralle|"*

Dogs, Grenier observes, “and the few other animals in Kafka are, in general, merely metaphors for our behavior and our condition.” From this perspective, it would seem that Kafka sacrifices the strangeness of the dog for the familiarity and centrality of the human. But before making such a hasty conclusion, we could ask: What manner of refuge is Kafkan humanity? The rational human city is a labyrinthine bureaucracy where the guilty seek their punishment in an environment too frenetic to slow down and offer a comprehensible explanation of what is going on. And then there is Leni’s claw!

What if Leni’s semi-human claw were more like Sabina’s depiction of a human arm tearing through “an idyllic still life of apples, nuts, and a tiny, candle-lit Christmas tree” in The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Of her painting, Sabina concluded, “On the surface, an intelligible lie; under-

neath the unintelligible truth” (ULB, 63-64). As Roberto Calasso has shown, the facade of Kafka’s world is saturated by a subterranean incomprehensibility—“the threshold of a hidden world that one suspects is implicit in this world.”’° The sudden appearance of Leni’s claw, and Herr K.’s 76 w Dogs and History

even stranger embrace of it, is as peculiar as Gregor Samsa, who woke up one morning to discover that he had metamorphosed into an insect. At the end of his short life, dust covered and with “the rotting apple in his back,” he realized that he was no longer able to walk. Rather than lament this, he concluded: “it seemed unnatural that he should ever actually have been able to move these feeble little legs.” Finally, and even more strangely, he “then thought of his family with tenderness and love.””! If dogs and other animals for Kafka tell us about our humanity, then our humanity, in sudden and surprising ways, tells us about our animality, including the dogs whose manner of death we wish to avoid. Deleuze and Guattari, infamous for condemning dogs and cats as state animals, remark that things are very different in Kafka’s universe. The dog, “the Oedipal animal par excellence,” undercuts any domestic familiarity because it is redeployed to erase “every idea of resemblance”: “through the dog’s solitude, it is the greatest difference, the schizo difference that he tries to grasp.”” Dogs, these abruptly astonishing creatures, usually fade into the background assumptions governing our world. They are entangled in our history without being accorded the dignity of being considered in our selfunderstanding of that history. As Rilke concluded in his poem “The Dog”: “neither excluded nor included.”

Cynical History The title of this chapter, “Dogs and History,” does not speak of a history of dogs, as if I were constructing a natural history of dogs, or a cultural history of man’s relationship to his “best friend,” or even a scholarly catalogue of all the things that Kundera has said about dogs or of all of the places in which dogs appear in his novels and critical works. Nor am I proposing that the image of the dog is the hermeneutic key to unraveling the immensely variegated universe of Kundera’s work. I am rather asking about the dog’s relationship to history as such in Kundera’s work, and in so doing, reflecting on what this relationship gives us to think about time, historical or otherwise. Dogs haunt history as ciphers of another, no less worthy, mode of consciousness. The psychologist and dog lover Stanley Coren has written a surprising history of these animals, almost always there, but whose solitude rarely commands our respect. His stories include the saga of the fifth Edo period shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646-1709), the “Dog Shogun,” widely considered the greatest failure of all the Tokugawa shoguns. Inspired by the bodhisattva ideal of compassion, Tsunayoshi passed the Edicts on Compassion for Living Things (Shdruiawareminorei), in part to protect the Dogs and History = 77

many stray and often abused dogs in Edo (contemporary Tokyo). Some people thought that the compassionate treatment of dogs was too onerous and consequently abandoned them, increasing the amount of stray dogs. Not being able to kill dogs, however, left people vulnerable to attack by wild packs of dogs, so Tsunayoshi ordered the samurai to build dog kennels, which were paid for by a specially designated property tax. Without the normal perils of poverty, neglect, and random cruelty to help thin the dog population, it soon exploded, and there were eventually forty thousand dogs in kennels. When one encountered a dog, the law dictated that it be addressed as “O-inu-samu,” an honorific traditionally reserved for members of Japan's highest social strata. Resenting these burdens, a samurai crucified a dog in protest and was consequently ordered to commit seppuku. By the end of Tsunayoshi’s thirty-year reign, somewhere between

sixty thousand and two hundred thousand people had been executed or exiled in accord with these laws.”* Tsunayoshi and his eccentric Laws of Compassion are well-known in Japan, although, one might surmise, this is likely because of their strangeness (perfect fodder for idle talk) and their sublime toll on humans (more fodder). Each time, however, a new puppy is born in Japan, it does not grow up to either resent the ungrateful samurai or revere Tsunayoshi’s extravagant elevation of the species. Resentment and reverence belong to historical memory, the memory that tortured Ludvik in 7he Joke and drove Tamina in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to do everything in her power, even at the price of considerable humiliation, to retrieve her correspondence with her late husband. “Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death” (BLF, 119). Kundera, when asked about his “way of treating history,” responded with four principles: (a) Treat historical circumstances with a maximum of economy; (b) present historical events not for their own sake but to the extent to which they reveal the existential codes of the characters; (c) reject historiography; and (d) most importantly, take up history not merely as the existential situation for a character, but as an existential situation per se (AN, 36-38). Kundera carefully resists surrendering the whole horizon of the novel to history, leaving it prey to the brutality of the angelic progression of history. The novel attempts to wake up from the nightmare of history. Broch’s The Death of Virgil, for example, tells us little about Brundisium in the first century BCE and its historical touch points were “sought in standard works so generally known that a bibliography seems superfluous.”” The only ref78 wm Dogs and History

erence point that Broch provided is a long quotation from “one example of the legends which grew up about the figure of Virgil during the Middle Ages.””° This is not a historical novel, that is, a work that concentrates its historiographic gaze on a given period. Its central event, Virgil’s awakening in the face of death, cuts through the curtain of history and tries to wake up from the sleepwalking of history and its betrayal of how death teaches us to see. Before the opacity of our deaths, the iron grip of history loosens and does not have the final word. Realizing that he was dying, Virgil woke up, awakening to what Wistawa Szymborska also observed: “In our planning for tomorrow, it has the final word, which is always beside the point.” The collective march of history obscures solitude and its responsibilities

and entitlements. In explaining his rejection of historiography, Kundera cited the following example: “Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events that my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography. Example: In the years that followed the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the reign of terror against the public was preceded by officially organized massacres of dogs. An episode totally forgotten and without importance for a historian, for a political scientist, but of the utmost anthropological significance! By this one episode alone I suggested the historical climate of Farewell Waltz” (AN, 37). This work, the novel “dearest” to Kundera “in a certain sense” (AN, 93), is inspired by the question: “Does man deserve to live on this earth, shouldn't the ‘planet be freed from man’s clutches’? To bring the extreme gravity of the question and the extreme lightness of the form—that has always been my ambition” (AN, 95). Farewell Waltz does not concede that we deserve the earth that we take for granted. When we take something for granted, we assume that it is unquestionably at our disposal, ours for the taking. We do not readily commiserate with devastated things and so harm them further. Even though Kundera accelerates the tempo of this novel to the speed

of farce, its tone in the end, befitting its theme, is quite melancholy, in part because it confronts the unbearable experience of all things (history, values, meaning) suddenly losing their gravity, what he famously dubs “the unbearable lightness of being.”** Jakub, who had always understood himself to be conscientious, carelessly precipitated the death of Ruzena, who mistakenly consumed the blue pill that Jakub had always carried with him in case unbearable circumstances drove him to suicide. He had ample opportunity to warn Ruzena about the pill, but inexplicably he did not. As he departed from Bohemia and reflected on Ruzena’s demise, he was perplexed that he felt none of the ethical gravity that undid Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky’s protagonist thought that he was one of the “extraordinary” Dogs and History = 79

ones who were above the dictates of the ordinary conscience and who, like Napoleon, could commit heinous crimes for a higher purpose. He attempted to regard his axe murder of a “lousy” and verminous pawnbroker and her half-sister as something light, but he soon became feverish and he eventually “experienced his crime as a tragedy, and eventually he was overwhelmed by the weight of his act” (FW, 257). That was not the case for Jakub who abhorred violence and who had nonetheless been unexpectedly careless when it came to Ruzena. There was no fever, no heavy selfrecriminations. Jakub loathed how easily we succumbed to unconscionable acts, yet he had done nothing when so little was required to save the life of another. When even one who had considered himself the master of his conscience could not escape the weight of murder, would not the weight be felt even more heavily by someone who valued human life and who took seriously the demands of conscience? What Jakub had first experienced as heavier than Raskolnikov (no one is so extraordinary that they have the right to murder), he now experienced as lighter (it was so unexpectedly easy that

it amounted to inexplicably not sharing a tiny but important bit of information and that the repercussions were not significantly heavier then the initial carelessness). “Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him. And he wondered if this lightness was not more terrifying than the Russian character's hysterical feelings” (FW, 257). The great crime was, in the end, not so great, just as Woody Allen also so effectively depicts such scenes in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005). Grand crimes shed their intensity in memory’s fickleness, becoming misdemeanors. As Lester (Alan Alda) in Crimes and Misdemeanors, a true philistine, quips: comedy is just tragedy plus time. Great sadness is always subject to the inevitable forces of forgetting. In Match Point, when the ghosts of his murder victims confront Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) with the gravity of his crime, he glibly remarks that it can all be swept under the carpet. Jakub the proud ethicist has been humiliated by his inaction and, most terrifying of all, this betrayal lacked the expected ethical gravity. He then

unexpectedly espied a poor little boy fated to wear cheap wire-rimmed glasses and he recognized that this must be one of the many indiscriminately sired Skreta babies. The sudden revelation of the immensity of Skreta’s negligence spurred Jakub to confront his own carelessness and hypocracy and he was consequently seized with melancholy. “It was as sudden as the spread of water over countryside when riverbanks give way.

It had been a long time since Jakub had been sad. Many years. He had 80 u Dogs and History

known only sourness, bitterness, but not sadness. And now it assailed him,

and he could not move” (FW, 270-271). The vast and insuperable veil of melancholy suffused all of nature just as Schelling in his famous 1809 Freedom essay diagnosed: “The human never receives the condition within their power. . . . Hence, the veil of melancholy that is spread out over all of Nature, the deep, indestructible melancholy of all life.””? This was not a descent into self-pity, but rather an awaking. “He saw in front of him the child dressed in his wire fence, and he pitied that child and his whole country, reflecting that he had loved this country little and badly, and he was sad because of that bad and failed love” (FW, 271). Suddenly Jakub could see what his bad and failed love had occluded; he could in his melancholy epiphany finally commiserate with devastated things. Earlier in the novel, however, Ruzena’s father had become obsessed with

the incursion of dogs into human world and he was going to put these uppity dogs back in their proper place. “Our towns will never be clean as long as dogs leave their loads on the sidewalk. And it’s also a question of morality. It’s intolerable for dogs to be pampered in housing constructed for people” (FW, 49). Dogs were vestiges of bourgeois entitlement who refused to use toilets. Soon the brigades came after the canine intruders but Jakub was able to rescue a boxer from this surge of moral hygiene. As

he led the dog back toward the hotel steps, the old men assaulted him. One screamed that Jakub’s intercession was “an attack on law and order!” And another vociferously asserted that the dog “ran on the grass! He ran in the playground, where it’s prohibited! He pissed in the kids’ sandbox! Do you like dogs more than children” (FW, 106)? Finally Ruzena intervened and scolded Jakub: “This is a hotel for patients, not a hotel for dogs” (FW, 107). Ruzena and Jakub engaged in a tug of war over the dog and when Jakub pried Ruzena’s wrist from the dog’s collar, she angrily rejoined: “Youd rather see poodles in cradles than babies” (FW, 107). In the calm of his hotel room, Jakub was pleased by the dog’s affection. Dogs were “familiar, affectionate, devoted, and at the same time entirely incomprehensible. We will never know what actually goes on in the heads and hearts of these confident, merry emissaries from incomprehensible nature’ (FW, 108). Outside, the prolixity of history raged on while inside a canine caesura took refuge. Dogs brought inexplicable signs from the abyss of being as if the sound of their bark and the lick of their tongues expressed the silence at the heart of nature. As Jakub reflected on the violence that had just erupted over the boxer, he was horrified by the presumed virtues whose smiles hide their taste for blood. “Jakub was always horror-stricken by the idea that onlookers are ready to restrain the victim during an execution” (FW, 109). Dogs and History = 81

Dogs haunt the universe of the novel where the mystery of their ground—and ground as such—is both protected and investigated. In a review of a translation into Polish of Peter Teichmann’s When Your Dog Gets Sick, a text that for over four hundred pages catalogs canine illnesses,

Szymborska argued that although it seemed encyclopedic, it failed to be exhaustive. Teichmann had only cataloged physical illnesses, but took no account of the psychic life of dogs. If he had, he would have found “all kinds of neuroses and psychoses.” In taking ourselves as points of reference, it is hard to appreciate the nonhumanity of dog life, but if we looked into dog life as such: We'd surely find out that our Rexes and Rovers don’t have an easy time of it. They spend their whole lives trying to understand us, to adapt to the conditions we impose, to catch the drift of our words and gestures as it pertains to them. It’s an enormous strain, endless stress. A dog is filled with despair every time we leave the house: we may be gone forever. Our return is bliss bordering on shock—some miracle has preserved us. These farewells and greetings touch us, but we should also be appalled. When we leave for several weeks, we have

no way of telling the dog when we'll be back; we can’t cheer him from the road with a postcard or long-distance phone call. The dog is doomed to an eternity of hopeless waiting. But this isn’t all. There are a hundred other situations in which the dog may lose his equilibrium while endlessly juggling the demands of his own nature and the foreign world around him. Finally, he begins to chase his own tail, which is not, so we are told, a harmless pastime, but a sign that our ward has lost touch with reality.*°

This is an old story. When Odysseus finally returned home, he ended a twenty-year adventure among the dogs of war and the many monsters that attempted to subvert his homecoming. When the “long-suffering” hero used his cunning ("t1¢), combined with the lucky intervention of some gods, to make his way back to Ithaca, he quickly learned that he still needed to confront the rapacious suitors, who are likened to dogs itching

to invade his house and home. While walking in disguise, his identity hidden even from his companion, Eumaeus, he stumbled upon Argos, his equally “long-enduring” dog. Odysseus had trained Argos as a puppy and the dog had quickly matured into a powerful hunting dog, readily chasing down “wild goats and deer and hares.” But now old Argos “lay there, castaway, on piles of dung from mules and cattle” and he was “infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect” (17:328).°!

82 m= Dogs and History

Even if Argos had avoided his demotion from the home to the dung pile, his old age would have caught up to him. Yet, movingly, the dog, after all of these years, suddenly recognized 4is master, is owner, who had returned to reclaim what was Ais: his property, 4is humanity. “But the

moment he sensed Odysseus standing by he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped, though he had no strength to drag himself an inch toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side and flicked away a tear, hiding it from Eumaeus” (17:330—335). As soon as Odysseus and Eumaeus went into Odysseus’s palace, however, old Argos’s twenty-year odyssey came to an end and “the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos’ eyes the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away” (17:359-360). But why are we moved by this little canine odyssey, with its bittersweet conclusion (Odysseus had finally returned home at the moment of Argos’s death)? Why do we identify so quickly with Odysseus’s tear as if it were our own? Because dogs are first and foremost our dogs. They recognize us as their masters and owners. With his loyal pets, man as master and proprietor of nature, is at home with himself. Odysseus, after much patience and many tears, has survived the dogs of war and the monsters of the sea to be at home with his pets as a measure of being at home, as if dogs were little mirrors by which we contemplate ourselves. Both the death of old Argos and Odysseus’s tear belong to the ambiguous pleasures of nostalgia, the pain of homecoming. They are the yearnings and agonies of what Kundera in /gnorance called the “Great Return.” Odysseus had grown weary of adventure. He fell from grace with the sea and its ceaseless motion. He was tired and wanted to return home to himself, to sleep in the bed of his own being. “Rather than ardent exploration

of the unknown (adventure), he chose the apotheosis of the known (return). Rather than the infinite (for adventure never intends to finish), he chose the finite (for the return is a reconciliation with the finitude of life)” (7, 8). The novel begins with Irena, a Czech emigrée living in Paris, being told that she should hurry back home to Prague now that the Velvet Revolution is complete. Shouldn't she? Does she not yearn for her exiled land? Is she not human? Is she a monster? Or is she cynical, as is Kundera when he sympathizes with the jilted Calypso: “Calypso, ah Calypso! I often think of her. She loved Odysseus. They lived together for seven years. We do not know how long Odysseus shared Penelope's bed, but certainly not so long as that. And yet we extol Penelope’s pain and sneer at Calypso’s tears” (J, 9). Calypso was one of the many obstacles on the way home and home is where we all belong. She was not part of the destination and adventures threaten the Great Return. (Novels have no destinations, but they do have

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dogs.) Penelope, even after twenty years, remains the figure of the obvious, where we secure our identities. Calypso’s bed belongs to a life of wandering, to something that we do not recognize as our own, even as we lie in it. Calypso’s unfamiliar love was like that of a wild dog. Such undomesticated love is more like that of Diogenes of Sinope, called by his detractors a dog, a “Socrates gone mad.” He had been captured by pirates at sea and sold into slavery and he kept no possessions. This wild dog, even when owned, could not properly be property. “I am Athens’ one free man.’** He lived among the stray dogs of Athens, dogs that can still be

seen benignly wandering about. He wanted no home of his own, opting rather to live in a bathtub. He purportedly reported: “I pissed on the man who called me a dog. Why was he so surprised?”** Kundera writes within the tradition of dog history, a cynical history, a

history without a grand march or a great return (no place to go, no place to return; no future paradise or past idylls). In direct contrast to those who train the canine guardians of Plato's polis to keep the order and remain under the iron sway of the /ogos, Kundera conspires with dogs to help guard the mystery of being. In so doing, he and the novel are at war with history. As Diogenes reflected, “In the rich man’s house, there is no place to spit but in his face.”* The novel, guided by the cynical wisdom of God’s laughter, guards the mysteries of being during the time of their oblivion. “Here

I am making a declaration of involvement in the history of the novel, when all of my novels breathe a hatred of history, of that hostile, inhuman force that—uninvited, unwanted—invades our lives from the outside and destroys them” (7B, 16).

Hounding Lyricism For the Greeks, lyric poetry imitated music and was performed with the lyre, but by the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the muses had taken flight and lyricism was the gushing forth of self-expression. Although this nostalgically evoked the Greeks, lyric poetry was so far removed from Greek poetry that Nietzsche had already targeted it as one of his enemies in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Lyric poetry “always says ‘I’ and in front of us belts out the whole chromatic scale of their passions and desires.”*° It had degenerated into giving free artistic reign to one’s subjectivity and shamelessly expressing one’s affect. For Nietzsche’s Greeks, the lyrical did not originate in anything subjective, but rather “the ‘T’ of the lyricists resounded from out of the abyss of being: their ‘subjectivity’ in the sense of modern aesthetics is an act of the imagination.”*’” The authorial “I” has no

more authority than any of the other creations within a work. Although 84 m Dogs and History

Nietzsche would later say that his first book “should have sung... and not just talk,”°® the critical problem of lyricism was nonetheless already present to him. For the modern lyrical subject, art and thinking are self-aware activities of a self-possessed agent; they unleash our inner worlds, which we have convinced ourselves are of interest to everyone. Kundera: “a lyric poet is only the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard” (C, 88). Nietzsche’s concerns can also be found in Gombrowicz’s cheeky and strategically “immature” essay, “Against Poets.” “Gombrowicz,” a character in the diary that has no authority outside the world of this work, recommended the following thought experiment to flush out the violence masking itself as the Muses:

Imagine that in a group of several people, one rises and begins to sing. This singing bores the majority of listeners, but the singer does not want to acknowledge this fact. No, he acts as if he were captivating; he demands that all fall to their knees before this Beauty; he demands ruthless recognition of his role as Seer; even though no one attaches great importance to his singing, he acquires a mien as if his word had decisive meaning for the world. Full of belief in his Poetic Mission, he casts thunderbolts, thunders, roars, and goes crazy in a vacuum. ... Behold, he not only vaunts Poetry, he is also enamored of it; being a Poet, he adores the greatness and the importance of the Poet; he not only demands that others fall to their knees before him, he, too, falls to his knees before himself.*°

The lyrical poet is committed not only to holding life hostage to the authorial ego; it is convinced that its ego, in its mere capacity to perceive, is ipso facto special, just as Bibi desires to give a report on her life, which she knows to be “absolutely original” (BLF, 124-125). The novel, how-

ever, maximizes complexity. Kundera is unequivocal about this. “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.’ That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear it amid the din of easy, quick answers that

come faster than the questions and block it off’ (AN, 18). Dogs remind us that they are not simply Argos whose raison détre is to be its owner's mirror.”!

Life Is Elsewhere is Kundera’s most thorough investigation of the lyricism of youth, what Ludvik in The Joke called “that stupid lyrical age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside

himself and when other people (no matter how dear) are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth” Dogs and History m= 985

(J, 251). Confronted with the looming mysteries of one’s young life, the enormous questions that make us feel even smaller, one counterattacks with the delusions of grandeur that lyricism provides. This is precisely where young Jaromil’s inexperience with women drove him: When he gets home he angrily sits down at his desk and writes rapidly and with hatred: “Looks run out of your eyes like urine / I fire my rifle at those scared sparrows, your idiot thoughts / Between your legs, a pond jumping with toads...” He writes on and on, and then reads his lines several times over, greatly satisfied with his fantasy, which seems to him marvelously diabolical. I’m a poet, I’m a great poet, he tells himself, and then he writes it down in his diary. “I’m a great poet, I have a diabolical imagination, I feel what others do not feel.” (LEZ, 136)

Jaromil had a diabolical imagination, which endowed his random musings with the aura of surrealism. A lesser person is not born to be a poet. They produce spastic utterances, while a native genius is special enough to produce art. Pure genius does not need to compose or to craft their vision. Their talented unconscious belongs to the elect and automatically produces the gold of surrealism. Jaromil does not use art to investigate the life-world. To the contrary, this is precisely what lyrical “art” is trying to avoid. His special visions both obscure his feelings of inferiority and prevent him from seeing anything but himself. It should come as no surprise that early in his life Jaromil became lost in reveries about dogs. These reveries revealed nothing about the dogs them-

selves, but rather made them pawns of his imagination, so much so that the dogs were not even dogs, but rather variations of humans: Daydreaming about dogs became the passion of his solitude, even leading him into a peculiar Manicheism: for him dogs represented the goodness of the animal world, the sum total of all natural virtues; he imagined great wars of dogs against cats (wars with generals, officers, and all of the tactics he had learned while playing with tin soldiers) and was always on the side of the dogs, in the same way as a man should always be on the side of justice.

And since he spent much time with pencil and paper in his father’s study, dogs also became the chief subject of his drawings: an endless number of epic scenes in which dogs were generals, soldiers,

soccer players, and knights. And since as quadrupeds that could hardly perform their human roles, Jaromil gave them human bod86 mu Dogs and History

ies. That was a great invention! Whenever he had tried to draw a human being, he encountered a serious difficulty: he couldn't draw the human face; on the other hand, he succeeded marvelously with the elongated canine head and the spot of a nose at its tip, and so his daydreams and clumsiness gave rise to a strange world of dog-headed people. (LE, 26-27)

Jaromil’s mother prompted the art teacher (and surrealist painter) with whom she was conducting an awkward affair to examine Jaromil’s fantastic drawings and he baptized Jaromil’s lonely musings with a noble epithet:

they were the workings of a rich “inner world.” This further encouraged Jaromil to respond to his loneliness not by reaching out beyond himself, but by further entrenching himself within himself. Jaromil received “the confused idea that the originality of his inner world was not the result of laborious effort but rather the expression of everything that randomly passed through his head; it was given to him like a gift. From then on he paid great attention to his own thoughts and began to admire them” (LE, 38). Indeed, lyrical prowess is the automatic life of the unconscious and an unconscious that ipso facto has merit. Jaromil, according to the painter, had an “original, nearly mad imagination” (LE, 48). When Jaromil later endeavored to negotiate the difficult passage from a life of incessant masturbation to a great love, he attempted to seduce a young student with the lyrical prowess of his imagination. “He wrote poems about the artificial childhood of tenderness, he wrote poems about an unreal death, he wrote poems about an unreal old age. These were the three blue flags under which he fearfully advanced toward the immensely real body of an adult woman” (LE, 186). Who would be able to resist something so special?

The young student, thinking that she was offering some friendly but constructive comments, criticized them. Jaromil was humiliated. He had expected her to surrender unconditionally before the shock and awe of his powerful Muse. “What had become of the marvelous mirror of her enthusiastic admiration in which he had first discovered his uniqueness? Now every mirror presented him with the grinning ugliness of his immaturity, and that was intolerable” (LE, 191). Jaromil succumbed to what Nietzsche called ressentiment. The other person—the one who is more beautiful, or cleverer, or more popular, or richer, or more intelligent, or more mature— becomes a mirror in which the rancorous can only see their inadequacy. What began as the lyrical desire to see the whole life-world as an extension of oneself becomes the violently rancorous gnashing of the teeth at whoever resists the machinations of the lyrical. Dogs and History = 87

Ressentiment, what Kundera’s persona analyzes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as litost (part 5), finds itself at a fork. It can rise up to the

level of that which is resisting it—that is, it can affirm the heights not of oneself but of life—or it can vanquish the resistance to retrieve the delusion of one’s own superiority. Jaromil the lonely masturbating surrealist will eventually become Jaromil the brutal communist, Jaromil who sends his red-headed girl friend to prison for defying his lyrical aspirations, for not succumbing to the sway of the lyricism of his great love. Lyricism hates dogs and books (the ones that you have to read, not the ones you are always writing). It is ressentiment against both the nonhuman and human world, for it, like Jaromil, is “always surrounded by a wall of mirrors, and he cannot see beyond it” (LE, 218). The lyricism of Jaromil’s self-referential world (the earth is comprised of chapters in my autobiography) is an extension of what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously called the “mirror stage.” At an early age, my morcelated, nonidentitarian body catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror and concludes that it and the reflection are the same. This is the fateful turn: the birth of one’s ego, the illusion of a self-same identity that one will carry with oneself through time. One becomes the fixed reference point of the self and thereby also develops “a consciousness of the other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder.’* Against lyricism, the novel takes not the perspective of any fixed self that has been revealed in the mirror, but of the mirror itself. The mirror receives and discloses everything without judgment. It does not discriminate between the beautiful and the ugly. We may hate what we see in the mirror but that is because we take the perspective of the fixed self as it disapproves of what it sees (this is not supposed to be me!).

Dog Time Dogs in Kundera’s ceuvre are not (a) accidental or ornamental accoutrements to the human adventure, (b) domesticated extensions of our humanity, or (c) banished to the ghetto of pure alterity. They are what Donna Harraway has called “companion species”: “All the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex-nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages.“ Kundera’s dogs are silent emissaries that both inhabit and complicate our being.

We are not atoms in an environment. Our being is a shared being and we are the bioregions and cultures that sustain us. However, we have not often cultivated gratitude, compassion, and mindfulness for those creatures 88 m= Dogs and History

with whom we share our world, those denizens that inhabit our worlds even as they dwell in their own worlds. (Heidegger was more than uncharitable when he condemned animals to being weltarm, poor in world. This

bequeathed the standard and sole ownership of authentic worldhood to humans, dulling our senses to the presence within our lifeworld of nonhuman life-worlds, worlds that partake in our world but which remain even more unfathomable than our world.) Despite the ambiguity of nonhuman worlds that everywhere share in and complicate the human world, the preeminence of the human world, as we also see in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has been relentless: “Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it’ (ULB, 289).

In Farewell Waltz, presaging the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, dogs were rounded up and euthanized. Dogs are not given to moral selfimprovement; they do not fight for the future progress of their species, although they can be killed as a part of the human striving to advance its species. In this early novel, however, this contrast in world-specific temporalities remains implicit. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the temporality of a dog’s world is more richly developed without sacrificing the strangeness and final incomprehensibility of this world. Canine temporality is (a) a clue to understanding Kundera’s reading of Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same” (and thereby a contrast between Tomas’s temporality

and that of the dog, Karenin); and (b) a direct contrast with ordinary human time, which we helplessly imagine to be linear. The circularity of canine time suggests something profound about our desire to imagine that human temporality is linear and as such given to progress. The role of dogs, tellingly peripheral to the graver concerns of human activity, discloses what otherwise lies “deeply buried from view.” In Immortality, Professor Avenarius asked Kundera’s persona about the novel he is writing, only to learn that he was working on a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Avenarius recognized that such a novel already exists (it is the novel that Kundera wrote before /mmortality), but Kundera’s persona explains that he “was wrong about the title then. That title was supposed to belong to the novel I’m writing right now” (/M, 244). Immortality is a novel about the denial of mortality, the unbearable evacuation of meaning that death promises. Kundera elsewhere explained: The original title considered for The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The Planet of Inexperience.’ Inexperience as a quality of the human Dogs and History m= 89

condition. We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience. (AN, 132-133) Amid the lightness of things, their lack of gravity (witness the poignancy of the almost weightless death of Tomas and Teresa), a dog (Karenin), an emissary of silent nature, emerges as a teacher of innocence, a creature capable of the afhrmation of inexperience par excellence. Karenin’s life and eventual death reveal the invincible ignorance at the heart of Tomas and Tereza’s often excruciating relationship. The novel begins with a discussion of Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same, in which one makes a choice not for a whole life, but for all of eternity. How would one know precisely what to choose? The responsibility is enormous. A choice for all eternity is a choice that robs the future of its mystery. Tomas contends that einmal ist keinmal, once is not enough, and always moves away from the unbearable gravity of choosing once and for all, choosing for all of eternity. “If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all” (ULB, 8). To be clear: Tomas is not a figure of wanton levity. He is serious about the difficulty of being completely serious (to chose one thing once and for all). Having just met Tereza, he is pensive and confused, knowing that we cannot figure out how to live in the future perfect (what will have been the right choice?). Is Tereza his one great love, someone without whom he could not live, whose death he would not survive (ULB, 7)? Or was he taking this chance encounter too seriously? He “realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love” (ULB, 7). The easiest solution would be to conduct multiple different lives in which we could live out the consequences of our choices and then weigh them before living a new life. We could compare the life of the saint with the life of the libertine with the life of the bureaucrat. But how can one really live two lives in the space of a single life? How

does one enact this mathematical impossiblity? Despite our efforts to fudge things, we have only one life and we do not live it in the future perfect tense. The problem of the future is that it offers no secure vantage point by which to judge right now what the good life will have been. “There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for 90 uw Dogs and History

life is life itself” (ULB, 8)? The agitation of Tomas’s experience of human temporality endows him with a hatred of kitsch, of an immense suspicion and distaste for all of those who act as if they knew exactly what should have been in the human experience. They have acted not on behalf of today, but on behalf of all eternity. Tomas, like the novel, resists, even while investigating, the “trap the world has become” (AN, 26-27). In direct contrast to the planet of inexperience stands “the brotherhood of man on earth” which “will be possible only on a base of kitsch” (ULB, 251). The future, however, with its unexpected revelations and pervasive ambiguity, is at the heart of a healthy sense of humor (the inability to take everything completely seriously). The best way to make God laugh is to develop plans. Tomas recognizes no decision with the gravity of eternity. When his marriage dissolves, he is not devastated. “The future was again a secret” (ULB, 30). He womanizes according to his rule of threes: “Either you see

a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart” (ULB, 12). He walks away from his career as a brain surgeon because he will not sign a retraction for a comment he once made about the Soviets and Oedipus, even though he is not particularly attached to it. No statement can speak with the authority of eternity. Nor is any sexual encounter definitive, but since bodies are far more alike than different, Tomas was on the prowl for that relative modicum of difference that made his one life magically appear as if it were more than one life. And then there is Tereza. Tomas is extravagantly unfaithful to her, causing her enormous distress and anguish. Although this relationship is both

ruinous and far away from the kitsch of a great love, there is plenty of room for ambiguity and it would be unfair to characterize the relationship as altogether loveless. “Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)” (ULB, 15).

Tereza, however, is not the least convinced by this distinction. For Tomas, no body is really special, no body passes the test of eternity. Tereza, by way of contrast, is the child of a vulgar mother in the literal sense: nothing is special, everything and everyone partakes in the immense throng of the vulgus. In an atmosphere where every body is just more of the same,

Tereza wanted to be special. She dreamt of the singularity of the soul, where no two souls are alike, despite the massive generality of the human body. Tereza’s mother rancorously flaunted her body, publicly farting and

walking about the house naked, inhabiting “a vast concentration camp Dogs and History = 91

of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible’ (UZB, 47). In contrast with the soulless mass being of her mother, Tereza wanted to close the door when she used the toilet. She was not everybody else and hence she “guarded her nakedness apprehensively, as though trying to express the value of her body in terms of the modesty she accorded it” (ULB, 46). Although they were obviously in many ways bad for each other, Tomas and Tereza, each in their own opposed character, nonetheless stood out against the wrath of the march of history. For Tomas, because the good as such is not present now, nothing in particular is the good for all time. He is like Ryuji in Mishima’s Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea, who,

before his fall, rejects history in the affirmation of his solitude, taking the greatest pleasure in good-byes. At least in his erotic adventures (the erotic as fundamentally adventurous), Tomas lives like Ryuji: always at sea, innocently engaged in adventure, unburdened by the nostalgic demand of a home port. Tereza also moves against the immense depersonalization of history, in which we are just numbers, just cogs in the movement of Spirit, in which our singularity is sacrificed in what Hegel once called the “slaughter bench of history.” The brotherhood of man on earth is the extinction of the sisterhood of singularity.” Both characters contest the implacable movement of history, but one affirms the no-place of freedom (einmal ist keinmal) while the other affirms the singularity of freedom (the nonsubstitutability of the soul). Tereza’s commitment to her singularity, however, is not separate from the ambiguous, erotic call of her own death. Tomas is in some way a specter of her death. His libertinage is predicated on the noneternity of the particular. Her singularity is predicated on the eternity of that which cannot be assimilated into historical time, into “concentration camp uniformity” (ULB, 57). The combination, however, is combustible. “She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies” (ULB, 58). This is an agonistic and paradoxical love between freedom as nothing in particular and freedom as something singular. For Tomas, the erotic call of the other keeps the future open and settles on nothing. Each little encounter preserves the absolute futurity suggested by our inability to have said what death will have been (although it is simultaneously what transpires as einmal ist einmal). For Tereza, the erotic call of Tomas is sirenic, a song calling her away from her safety zone into disaster. The result of the desire to be special colliding with the call of the enigmatic nothingness of death is vertigo. As philosophers like Schelling and Kierkegaard had already argued 92 w= Dogs and History

in the nineteenth century, vertigo is not the phobia of falling from great heights, for who is utterly fearless before such precipitous falls? Not to be afraid in any way would itself be a pathology. Vertigo, however, is the dizziness that one feels before the simultaneous attractiveness and repulsion of the fall. “It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves” (ULB, 60). Both Tomas and Tereza erotically experience their torment in a linear

time, albeit one that resists the particular linearity of the grand march. Tomas moves serially from body to body in his own version of Kierkegaard’s “rotation method.’*° Tereza endeavors to preserve her desire to be recognized as someone special by smoothing out the chaotic circles of the adventure of time into a stable and commodious line segment of time, a segment that leads to situations and people who can testify to the uniqueness of her soul. Despite their irreconcilable, polar opposite trajectories, Tomas and Tereza’s respective longings for freedom are symptoms of the biblical Fall, the descent from the circular time of paradise into the linear time of the human. “The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man” (ULB, 296). After the Fall, the desire for the “more” or “the special” originates in the sense that we somehow /ack them, that we are born without something that we nonetheless need. We conclude that life can never have been long enough or that our soul aches for recognition. Before the Fall, paradise was the circle of repetition that did not produce boredom, as it does in Kierkegaard’s account of the rotation method,” but rather happiness. To be human is to be the animal that knows itself to have irretrievably lost the happiness of the infinite repetition of the same. Tereza

hoped to solve this problem by returning to paradise in the form of the idyll of the countryside, “the condition of the world before the first conflict; or beyond conflicts; or with conflicts that are only misunderstandings, thus false conflicts” (AN, 131). We imagine that cities are the places of conflicts, and that we can escape them by romantically returning to nature. “As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of recurring seasons, they retained at least a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll” (ULB, 296).** The idyll, however, despite being the mood of classical metaphysics (the peace of the great system where everything is at last put back into its proper place), is the longing for kitsch and another symptom of the human inability to confront the problem of time. As the collision of Tomas and Tereza’s agendas (body versus soul) indicates, human temporality is the reality of conflict.

Into this agonized love story enters Karenin, their dog. Although she is their constant companion throughout the book, she remains “deeply Dogs and History = 93

buried from view” until the last chapter. Karenin knows nothing of the anguish of human time. “Adam,” not yet cast out into the perils of adventure (the turmoil of the future), “was like Karenin” (ULB, 296), as if the emissary of a secret nature were an emissary from circular time. “Dogs were never expelled from paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the du-

ality of the body and soul and had no concept of disgust” (ULB, 297). Throughout her entire life with Tomas and Tereza, through the move to Switzerland, through the hasty move back to Prague, through the flight to the Bohemian countryside, through the Prague Spring, through the Russian invasion in August of 1968, through the presence of ceaseless human

heartaches, Karenin abided by them. In turn, they loved Karenin, who was subject to none of the mutual anguish between Tomas and Tereza that made their relationship a living hell. “It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting

it short” (ULB, 297). Karenin never tired of playing the game with the newspapers and sweet rolls, playing it again and again and again. The play did not have to recognize the singularity of Karenin’s soul nor did it restlessly shift from game to game, as if ein Spiel ist kein Spiel. Karenin played

a game with no meaning as if it had the force of eternity. In so doing, Karenin alone enacts the affirmation of the eternal return of the same as the afhrmation of the circle of time, that is, of dog time. “If Karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, ‘Look, I’m sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can't you come up with something different?’ And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition” (ULB, 298). In the penultimate chapter of the book, we hear of Tomas and Tereza’s death when the brakes of their cheap vehicle fail in the Bohemian countryside. The final chapter concentrates on a more subterranean measure of death. Karenin’s smile at the end of her life is a smile that Nietzsche, the thinker of the eternal return, had recognized in the happiness of animals. Nietzsche, who philosophized at the border between the respective universes of the novel and philosophy, understood that in writing we reclaim a small taste of the lost paradise of our animality, the silent emissary that is the circular destruction of the murderous line of history.

94 uw Dogs and History

Tereza keeps appearing before my eyes. I see her sitting on the stump petting Karenin’s head and ruminating on mankind’s debacles. Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hostel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche

went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears. That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse. And that is the Nietzsche that I love, just as I love Tereza with the

mortally ill dog resting his head in her lap. I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, “the master and proprietor of nature,” marches onward. (ULB, 290)

When Nietzsche left the linearity of the “long road” for the circle of the eternal return, however, this was not the idyllic hope to shed humanity and pretend that cynical time was the futile ambition that we pretend that we are dogs, copying their way of being as if it were our own. “Only animals were not expelled from paradise” (ULB, 298). For humans, repetition is not the eternal return of either the same rules or their recursion in the same phenomena as they are in the dream of the idyll. What returns is not the object of the return, but rather the medium of the return, that is, the return itself (“die Wiederkehr selbst”) eternally returns as the discontinuity and disequilibrium of time. In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze argued that the eternal return of the same is the “principle” of “difference and its repetition.”” Beyond the idyll of a fixed world in which we all recognize the same things and take the same delight, human temporality is the eternal repetition of difference. According to Deleuze, “It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is afhrmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the Nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs.””® For humans, it is the guestions that mark our temporality that always return. To dream of an idyll is to dream of a life without questions and thereby a life of stability and not the chaotic ambiguity of difference. Nonetheless, Tereza realizes, as her

Dogs and History m= 95

dream indicated, that she had turned Tomas into a rabbit. She had not loved him for who he was, but rather made her love the measure by which he always fell short. Soon he would be an old man and she could contain him in her arms. Tomas in the end also capitulates: “Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize

youre free, free of all missions” (ULB, 313). On the eve of their death, these two poignant question marks touch, beyond any idyll or rotation, and we glimpse the happiness and sadness of the human problem. If the work of the novel is to pose problems and to create characters and situations that explore them, what problems does The Unbearable Lightness of Being pose? We could consider: In the planet of innocence (we are born without a priori instructions to direct our lives) are we well served by our

subsequent ideas? Our ideas motivate us to become hopeful, to strive to realize them in our personal and political lives, but is this always a good thing? These questions express an aporia or terminal paradox: we must employ ideas yet we are not properly equipped to do so. This is the novel’s version of the aporia (Verlegenheit) that Kant argued characterized our species and for which we cannot be held to blame (“it is not our fault”). “Human reason has a particular destiny in a species of its knowledge: it is burdened by questions that it cannot avoid . . . but which it cannot answer because they surpass every faculty of human reason.””! This perplexity drove Kant to the delicate antinomies of his critical project, but it inspires a different

sensibility in the universe of the novel. Political and existential exigencies may condemn us to negotiate our lives through ideas, but does not Karenin invite us to have a better sense of humor about all of our ideas? Contrary to Aristotle’s elevation of humans over animals as the sole life forms having Jogos (Politics, 1253a), can we not enjoy some solidarity with our fellow animals who do not rely on the mixed blessing of the /ogos to be happy?

The Fuss about the Eternal Return About a quarter of a century after he composed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera observed with approval a passage by Louis-Ferdinand Céline from his novel From Castle to Castle that compares the death by cancer of his dog—*“by far nothing so beautiful, discreet”—with human death: “the trouble with men’s death throes is all the fuss . . . somehow man is always on stage . . . even the plainest men” (£, 23). Death is presented as dramatic, important, profound, and if one of us walks away from this exhibitionism, perhaps to die like a dog, others will make even our escape a part of the drama: “Because it’s not always the man himself who climbs 96 uw Dogs and History

on stage. If he doesn’t do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man’ (E, 23). We who did not want to die like a dog are committed to the indignity of dying noisily on stage, with all its bluster and fuss. Either no possible death is good enough for us (einmal ist keinmal)—for how could death, the essence of the einmal, ever be meaningful enough?—or we head to-

ward death, hoping that the circumstances of our particular death will resonate with the dignity of our souls (a beautiful death).** Or our public is waiting to dramatize our last breaths. Céline, whose political blacklisting allowed him to hear the silence of his own life as “utterly devoid of fuss,” discovered the hidden gift in ignominy: “That experience allowed him to

see vanity not as a vice but as a quality inherent in man, a quality that never leaves him, not even in his death throes; and against the background

of that irremovable human fuss, the experience allowed him to see the sublime beauty in a dog’s death” (£, 24). Céline’s observations about the death of dogs also resonate with some themes in /mmortality, whose very title evokes the flight from the unbearable lightness (utter lack of fuss) of death. In the afterlife (an awful Wirkungsgeschichte which traps famous artists in the public eye like tar-trapped dinosaurs), Goethe confided to Ernest Hemingway that to “be mortal is the most basic experience”—einmal really is einmal—“and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead” (JM, 220). And then there is Kundera’s beautiful creation, Agnés, who concluded that what “is unbearable in life is not being but being ones self” (the greatest nightmare is that this self would never die but rather be the hell of an eternal trap). Agnés reclined in the grass by the bank of a stream, “cleans-

ing her of the self, the dirt of the self” (J, 265),”° and in so doing, she “participated in that primordial being, which manifested itself in the voice of fleeting time and the blue of the sky,” which is present before God’s creation and not subject to it (as if it were the primordial humus that Virgil discovers on the brink of his death in Broch’s The Death of Virgil). If she were a person of Zen, one would be tempted to say that her ontological bath opened her to what the late Tang master Linji called “the true person of no rank,” her Buddha nature beyond any manifest self. Agnes later crashed her car into a ditch, and her husband Paul rushed to the countryside to be with her. “Now he thought of nothing else except reaching her while she was still alive. To be able to kiss her one more time. He was possessed by the longing to kiss her” (JM, 273). Paul was going to haul her back on stage and kiss her on the face that she had endeavored so hard to wash away. When Agnés learned that Paul was rushing to the Dogs and History = 97

hospital, she felt that “the basic pattern of her life was repeated: she was running and someone was chasing her.” It was going to be a race as to who would be faster: “her dying or his arrival?” Agnés did not want Paul “to see her dying. She had to hurry with her dying” (JM, 276). And hurry she did, dying without fuss, denying Paul his dramatic kiss. He would not be able to reopen the curtain on the stage of his wife's death. Recalling at the moment of her demise that kitsch is the pernicious illusion of a “categorical agreement with being,” we can also appreciate another dimension of the birth of the one “trying to live in a world with which you disagree” (JM, 264). As we have seen, Agnés came into being in the imagination of Kundera’s persona after he saw an older woman who—after taking swimming lessons with the lifeguard at Kundera’s health club— turned, waved, and smiled at the lifeguard. Agnés was an older woman, perhaps “sixty or sixty-five,” but “at that gesture I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year old girl” (JM, 3).** Her older body is the reminder of the press of time on all bodies, but at that moment something beyond the vice-grip of history flashed forth: “a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time” and in gesture, “she was unaware of her age” (JM, 4). Unsurprisingly, the lifeguard “burst out laughing,” reminding us that history quickly reacts in order to guard its prerogatives.

This gesture out of which Agnés was born repeats itself anew in other situations. For example, Agnés’s father was an Enlightenment-style deist

who regarded God not only as an absentee landlord but also as a Creator who “loaded a detailed program into the computer and went away” (IM, 12). The deus absconditus had loaded the existential DNA into the unfolding of being, and its basic patterns implacably played themselves out, although the exact details of their occurrence were left to chance. The historical specifics of individual wars (when and where it took place, who fought, who lost and won, etc.), for instance, were left to chance, but there would always be wars because “man is aggressive by nature” (JM, 12). Our bodies, too, are the intersection of the impersonal computer program of

fate and the play of chance. This tension most clearly plays out on our faces. Each individual face has a trait of singularity within its otherwise predictable play of regularities and hence our faces are like the serial number on a car: Each number is different, although each car resembled every other car of its type, in the same way that every snowflake is unique, although each snowflake is basically just another snowflake. Or one could

make this point more radically, just as Jean-Luc Nancy has done in his Being Singular Plural: Singularity—tevealed, for instance, in the singular-

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ity of death (no one can step in and die the death of another and death itself limits all metaphysical speculation regarding our ultimate identity) —

cannot be individual. Uniqueness cannot stand alone as mathematically one, but is already the way in which we coappear with others. We die and this speaks to our simultaneously shared yet partitioned strangeness. Singularity is already how we share our being with others. We are together in our solitude (and hence oneness has nothing to do with sameness or the atomism of individuality). Every face may therefore be unique, but it does not follow that the face expresses our soul, that its eyes are windows to an underlying singular sub-

stance. When we look into the mirror, we see our unique serial number, itself the result of chance. But just as Jacques Lacan in “The Mirror Stage” lamented that when we identify with the face in the mirror we inaugurate the pathologies that will accompany us for the rest of our psychic lives, Agnés lamented that we aggressively and passionately identify with our historical appearance, concluding that it “embodied something unique and irreplaceable, something worth fighting or even dying for” (JM, 14). We fight for our historical embodiment, our desired coextensiveness with our temporal manifestation, as if we were fighting for life itself. The singularity of solitude mistakes itself for the uniqueness of individuality and precipitates Hobbes’s war of all against all. Agnés’s gesture echoes Foucault’s quip

that he was “no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not as me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” Agnés’s gesture signals a fundamental disagreement that extends beyond simply according or not according with intellectual accounts of things. It marks solitude’s resistance to historical appearance. In another variation of the gesture that gave birth to Agnés, she covered her ears when walking down a noisy street, and a passerby consequently cast her an “angry glance” and tapped his head to indicate that Agnés must be crazy. Agnes had cut herself off from the tacit consent that characterized Thoreau’s “mass of men” who “lead lives of quiet desperation” and her carefully cultivated eccentricity conspicuously opposed the great equalizing force of the received nonthought about who and what we are: “That man was censuring her for the trespass of her gesture. It was equality itself that reprimanded her for refusing to undergo what everyone must undergo. It was equality itself that forbade her to disagree with the world in which all of us live’ (IM, 25). The name Agnés derives from the Greek ayvdc (pure or chaste), but her purity is not that of the angel of pure obedience. She is the soul’s gesture

Dogs and History m= 99

born of the encounter between satanic cynicism (absolute skepticism) and angelic afhrmation (absolute dogmatism). Her cynicism is not the desire

for a return to the idyll of nature, but an afhrmation of a human-canine sensibility (an affirmation of living and dying beyond the bluster of history). She is a creature of the border, a border that evokes the ambiguous intersection of dogs and history: “neither excluded nor included.”

100 uw Dogs and History

Kitsch In the park was a grave, the grave of a girl, the grave of a girl transfixed by a knife. In the face of death all things are permissible, free, gratis, so to speak, and strangely inconsequent. —Broch, The Sleepwalkers'

The Ubiquity of Kitsch In a letter to Tomas Kulka regarding the latter's book, Kitsch and Art, Kundera lamented:

You write to me in a rather melancholy mood, that your book on kitsch is not “politically correct,” that postmodernism has washed away any difference between kitsch and art, that kitsch itself is so ubiquitous and omnipresent that any attempt to unmask it will appear as an act of elitism. This is precisely the situation. To talk about

kitsch became impolite at the very moment when the world itself was turning kitsch. Notice that Kafka writes about bureaucracy at times when the bureaucracy is still almost an innocent creature. Later on, when it swallowed our lives, it became self-evident and thus invisible. In his novel Explosive Monster, Jaromir John describes the horror of the automobile. Yet in his time, there were very few cars in Prague. The point I want to make is this: The only time when one can recognize a phenomenon in all its horror is when it is still new. The moment it achieves omnipresence, it becomes something “natural,’ something that we know since our birth, something we can account for, something we do not wonder about. We are surrounded by kitsch. Kitsch is everywhere: television, newspapers, our private lives, politics. Even war is presented as kitsch. (Look how they write I01

about Sarajevo!) This is the reason why, even if it will be misunderstood, this book is needed. More than ever.’

Taking Kundera’s alarm seriously, and noting that the word kitsch itself is subject to the forces that it seeks to expose, I devote this chapter to the exploration of the following hypothesis: In the mode of disclosure germane to the universe of the novel (“what only the novel can do”), kitsch is not bad art, but radical evil. Kant, in his meditation on radical evil in the Religion essay (1793), did not argue that we are intrinsically evil (we do not understand ourselves and in ourselves we are free). We have, rather, a free but inverted and perverse (verkehrt) propensity to act from self-love, which Kant thought was “precisely the source of everything evil.”> Rather than making self-love subordinate to the moral law, the moral law becomes subordinated to self-love. One does not have to be sympathetic to the categorical imperative—Nietzsche thought it “smelled of cruelty” and its absoluteness has no place in the universe of the novel—to appreciate Kant’s

broader point. Despite our freedom, we are given to perversity and seek kitsch as if it were art. To break the hold of our propensity for lyricism, we need an awakening, what Kant called a Wiederkehr zu dem Guten,* a turning back or conversion to the good that we had unknowingly betrayed. Kundera’s persona suggests that the problem of kitsch is not exclusively an aesthetic problem by speaking in 7he Unbearable Lightness of Being of a theodicy of shit (ULB, 247). If God’s creation is good, then God cannot

contradict His goodness by creating creatures in an unacceptable manner. Kitsch is the categorical agreement with being (ULB, 248) and its aesthetic admits no room for the unacceptable, the filthy, the shameful, the dark, that is, for evil. To call kitsch (the categorical agreement with being and its attendant denial of shit) radical evil, however, is to claim that the simulacrum of the good (kitsch) is the hiding place of radical evil. Evil is not most in evidence in Ivan Karamazov’s compilation of artistic evils in which we ingeniously violate the innocent (children and animals). Radical evil, which speaks to an inversion in which we demand evil as if it were the good, makes—as Nietzsche was so good at demonstrating—our much-vaunted and seemingly obvious virtues a far clearer example of the

desecration of genuine value. Moreover, kitsch should not be confused with cuddly puppies and Hallmark Cards. It is everywhere. It is in our bones. It is no longer an allusion to isolatable works from the Nineteenth Century— ‘for (and this is another well-known axiom of existential mathematics) any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence” (S, 41). Hence my hypothesis has two corollaries: 102 «= Kitsch

1. Kitsch is nonart, posing as art. 2. Its failure is therefore not only aesthetic but also ethical (the ethical transgression of antiart masking itself as art). Radical evil speaks to a fundamental inversion, eine verkehrte Welt: we have the propensity to pursue kitsch as if it were art, like pursuing slavery as if it were freedom and stupidity as if it were wisdom.

The Dirty Mirror That Represents the World to Itself without Seeing Itself In the Majjhima Nikaya (Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha), part of the ancient Pali Canon, we find the Canki Sutta, in which the Buddha discusses the nature of truth with Kapathika, whom he calls Bharadvaja. The young Brahmin student asks Master Gotama about the capacity of the Vedic oral and scriptural traditions to come to a “definite conclusion,” in effect saying, “Only this is true, anything else is wrong.”? Although the Buddha observes that no Brahmin worth his salt would ever say such a thing, the question is nonetheless a good one. On what authority would one know that the oral tradition was certain? Or that faith or reasoned cogitation or the approval of others or sutras were indubitable? Many traditions and many “truths” were vying for one’s allegiance. How does one find one’s way? Bharadvaja was understandably confused. How does one find a teacher to guide one through this thicket when there are so many choices, all of which claim to have all the answers? How does one identify a good teacher before you learn what a good teacher is and before learning what they have to teach? (We do not live long enough to have studied with all allegedly good teachers and to have read all allegedly good books.)

The Buddha gave a deceptively simple answer. If one finds a potential teacher, they should be examined from the perspective of the three poisons (trivisa) or unhealthy roots (akusala-mila): greed and its attachments (7éga), aversion and its abjections (dvesa), and their shared cause, ignorance and delusion (moha and later avidya). These poisons distort the workings of consciousness, leading it awry so that “with his mind obsessed by those states, while not knowing he might say ‘I know’ or while not seeing he might say, ‘I see, or he might urge others to act in a way that would lead to their harm or suffering for a long time.”° This ancient insight should not be lost on us. One might say, “Only this is true, anything else is wrong,” not just to oneself but also to the throngs that one seeks to convert into followers. One may be motivated by certain deep convictions or soaring ambitions (attachments) or by self-hatred that

Kitsch m 103

seeks to fill the void of oneself with the attention of others (abjection) or by one’s inability to solve certain fundamental life problems (delusion). In Life Is Elsewhere, for example, young Jaromil, woefully unable to negotiate the travails of pubescent love and the pending trials of adulthood, became convinced that his great love, the redhead, would not be able to live up to the high standards of a great love, despite her mildly coerced agreement that “she couldn't and wouldnt’ live without him, and they repeated those words again and again until a great, nebulous ecstasy took them into its arms” and as they made love, he suddenly “felt on his hand the wetness of tears rolling down the redhead’s face” (LE, 344). Tears! For Jaromil a tear did not mean that one had actually solved the difficulties of growing up, but rather with the delusional “aid of a tear, a man escapes the limits of material nature, merges with the distances, and becomes an immensity” (LE, 344). Jaromil and the redhead, tears aplenty, in their lovemaking “flowed together like the waters of two rivers .. . and at that moment they were outside the world, they were like a lake that has got loose from the earth and is rising toward the sky” (LE, 345). Alas, how long can such ecstatic tears maintain their intensity beyond postcoital enthusiasms? In this case, only a few minutes. Jaromil began to probe the depth of her commitment to a life of sadness if she had to go on without him. There was a clear warning sign: she “had not promised him her death.” One can live out one’s life in sadness. Does that not mean that one is keeping some of one’s life in reserve and not completely sacrificing it to the voracious ecstasy of a great love? “She didn’t at all grasp what was going on; she promised him her sadness, he who knew only absolute criteria, all or nothing, life or death.” So, “full of bitter irony,” he asked her: “How long would you be sad? A day? Or even a week” (LE, 346)? She gestured

intimately with her body that “it was not in weeks that she measured her sadness.”

This forced Jaromil, thinking he had partaken in absolute immensity, to make some preliminary calculations: What exactly was her love worth? A few weeks of sadness? All right. And what is sadness? A bit of depression, a bit of languishing. And

what is a week of sadness? No one is ever sad all of the time. She would be sad for a few minutes in the daytime, a few minutes in the evening; how many minutes in all?’ How many minutes of sadness did her love merit? How many minutes of sadness did he rate? Jaromil imagined his death, and he imagined the redhead’s subsequent life, a life unconcerned and unchanged, coldly and cheerfully rising up above his nonbeing. (LE, 346)

104 « Kitsch

Shortly thereafter he informed on her at the police station. His reasoning? (1) “He mused about the mysterious threshold an adolescent must cross so as to become a man; he believed he knew the name of that threshold; its name was not love, the threshold was called ‘duty’” (LF, 352). Of course he did not want to sacrifice the redhead, but then again, it was his duty to follow principle and not his heart. This delusional deployment of deontology (sternly acting out of duty in opposition to one’s inclinations) is reminiscent of Arendt’s amazement that Adolf Eichmann understood his whole life to accord not with the longings of his heart but with “a Kantian definition of duty.”” When he learned that he would have to help orchestrate the Final Solution, his Arbeitsfreude was annihilated. “I now lost everything, all joy in my work.”®

(2) The elevation of principle over a tear-drenched great love, he reflected, “had caused him to enter tragedy,’ which in turn “filled him with a kind sweet, fragrant, and noble substance, so that it seemed to him that he was growing bigger” (LE, 354). The math behind lyrical tragedy is magical: because the world overwhelms me and I will never be able to meet it on its own terms, my ideas suddenly make me larger than the physical universe. (3) Even though this act involved few people, its adherence to principle

allowed Jaromil’s tragic sensibility to participate in the grand march of history, a march that Jaromil would lyrically immortalize. “Jaromil had exposed his girl to danger precisely because he loved her more than other men loved their women; precisely because he knew what love and the future of love were . . . it was probably the only tragedy of our time that was worthy of a beautiful verse, worthy of a great poem” (LE, 356). (4) The woman who had eluded his grasp, despite now being molested, perhaps even severely tortured, by the interrogators, was at last fully his, more so than she could have been in a monogamous relationship. She “is his victim, she is his creation, she is his, his, his. Jaromil is not jealous; he is sleeping the manly sleep of men” (LE, 357). As we have seen, the mind in the Mahayana tradition is likened to a mirror. A distorted, dirty mirror makes everything that it represents look dirty and filthy and one begins to think that the filth is found in the things themselves and not in the mirror of one’s own mind. It does not belong to the way of the mirror to be able on its own to see its distorting and contaminating qualities. On the contrary, it accuses the world of being guilty of the dirt that it projects onto it. In the Vimalakirti Sutra, the Buddha declared, “when the mind is pure, the Buddha land will be pure.” A pure mind enables one to live in a pure world. Shariputra was confused: if the world must be purified, does that mean that it is originally impure (and given that the Buddha’s mind was pure, how could the world have been impure?). The Buddha responded, Kitsch m= 105

“Are the sun and the moon impure? Is that why the blind man fails to see them?” To be clear: for the dusty mirror of the mind, all of nature becomes kitsch.

Furthermore, the reduction of being to kitsch further assumes the elevation of the dusty mind to the sacrosanct point of reference for all of being. This is why lyricism is the enemy of the universe of the novel. In the former, all of nature becomes potential chapters in one’s self-obsessed autobiography. In direct contrast, the universe of the novel strives to dissolve this standpoint and to undo the poisoned and poisonous mind that declares: “Only this is true, anything else is wrong.” As Kundera afhrmatively quotes Flaubert: “The artist must make posterity believe he never lived”

(C, 95). The author is not hidden behind the mask of the novel, waiting to be discovered, but rather “seeks to disappear behind his work, that is, to renounce the role of public figure” (AN, 157). This dusty mirror takes on added dimensions in market-driven economies because the reduction of being to kitsch is reinforced by its transformation into kitsch for sale. This contributes to the triumph of a particular configuration of what Kundera called “misomusy’—the hatred of the muses. This is not an insensitivity to or ignorance of art, which is not a catastrophe either for art or for those oblivious to it. “A person can live in peace without reading Proust or listening to Schubert” (AN, 141). Each goes his or her separate way. The misomusist, however, “feels humiliated by the existence of something that is beyond him, and he hates it” (AN, 141). Degraded by creativity, the misomusist channels all of their creativity into a wholesale assault against it. Reminiscent of how “Kundera” understands litost,'° Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (1886) called this crippled and humiliated creativity ressentiment. “The slave revolt of morality begins at the point where ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values... . While all noble morality grows out of a triumphing Yes-saying to itself, slave morality from the get go says No to an ‘outside, to an ‘other, to a ‘not-self’: and this No is its creative act.”"

Misomusy gains strength as it ascends from personal anguish and revenge to public policy. From a totalitarian perspective, one need only think of both the National Socialist and the Communist “war on modern art.” In National Socialist Germany Paul Klee was demoted to the class of the degenerate, Hermann Broch was jailed, and we saw in their stead clichés that reinforced the stubborn habits of bourgeois ideology; the Soviet Union produced the monstrous oxymoron called “socialist realism.” These two examples are just the tip of the iceberg, but in all such debilitations of art, creativity becomes a rancorously creative exercise in nay saying, that is, in saying the same approved message in new and unexpected ways. The 106 «= Kitsch

stupidity of these pseudoworks was “not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.” Such perniciously stupid works translated “the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel” (AN, 163).

Although free market systems do not dictate kitsch as a public policy from above, its force remains considerable. We are free to consume whatever art strikes our fancy as long as our wallets can accommodate our tastes. It would, however, be naive to assume that the market is a prophylactic against the rancor of misomusy. Kitsch, after all, enters the German language in the wake of the early triumph of liberal capitalism in Central

Europe. Where, then, does the dirty mirror of market lyricism exercise the creativity of its ressentiment? The market, it turns out, never met anything that it could not subject to its rancorous alchemy, turning gold into kitsch.

Kundera, for example, mourns the humiliation of Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, for years banned in Russia, yet surviving in the West in its enervated translation, only to be subjected to the kitsch of a big and self-important Hollywood production—“poor Pasternak!” exclaims an exasperated Kundera (AN, 135). Who could forget how touched millions of us were by Bridges of Madison County as it embraced the mysteries of love?

Or the sublime proliferation of the works of the late Thomas Kinkade, the “painter of light,” whose oil paintings depict the inviting and familiar comforts of cozy, well-lit cottages and lighthouses as they offer us refuge from the dark nights of our lives? Kinkade, who has sold more works than any other painter in the history of art, alarmingly demonstrates what Kundera has called “democratic misomusy: the market as supreme arbiter of aesthetic value” (AN, 141). When the marketplace of opinion decides on the value of the muses’ works just as it decides on the truth-value of judgments, kitsch is the reign of misomusy and misology, the triumph of radical evil.”

After That Awful Silence: A Report Card Hermann Broch, after selling his textile company and retiring from a stint as what he disparagingly called “a captain of industry,” studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna. Europe was still reeling from the technologically accelerated slaughter of World War I, which had been

brutal enough to shatter the worldview that had been used to justify it. Broch consequently understood himself to be living in the wake of the death of God, whose putrefaction provoked him to write a kind of postKitsch m= 107

mortem divine comedy of time, a trilogy of past, future, and present (in that order), but without the solace of a purgatorio or paradisio. The Sleepwalkers is an interlinked trilogy, each part progressing in fifteen-year intervals, all of which are variations on the temporal dimensions of the death of God and the decay of values. The terminal illness of a once powerful God drove the bourgeois Romantic age into reactionary nostalgia (as it did Broch’s Pasenow in the Romanticism of 1888). Pasenow sought refuge from the trauma of change in his military uniform, “whose

true function” is “to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life” and to force “the uncertainty of life, yes, life itself,” to recede into a harmless distance (SW, 21). His prophylactic uniform also extended to his eventual marriage to the socially respectable Elisabeth (despite his passion for his Bohemian lover, the socially unacceptable Ruzena): “it was not Elisabeth whom he really wished to protect and save; he had merely hoped to save his own soul through her sacrifice” (SW, 154). Pasenow’s properly restored household would now be protected by Chris-

tian grace so “that they might not wander on the earth unenlightened, helpless and without meaning to their lives, and lose themselves in the void” (SW, 158).

The expiration of transcendent and absolute values drove the subsequent age to the anarchy that produced the aggressive revolutionary fervor of a demand for new future absolutes without any clear idea of what those absolutes should be (as it did Broch’s Esch in the Anarchy of 1903). The polar opposite of Pasenow, Esch raged against the tradition, awaiting the utopian arrival of new values in “the coming of the kingdom of salvation in this ageworn world” (SW, 334).'® When he was forced to look at the past,

he reacted with violent wrath, frequently and brutally beating Mother Hentjen, “this perfect and absolute love of his” (SW, 317)—“she was stupid and callous, and being so he had to beat her” (SW, 320). Esch finally realized that the world “would never attain a state of innocence in this life until the end of Time” because “fulfillment always failed one in the actual world, but the way of longing and of freedom was endless and could never be fully trod” (SW, 339-340). He consequently declared détente with the present, admitting, “we have all to go our ways on crutches” (SW, 340).

Esch embodied the reactionary violence of hope as it rages against the present on behalf of a better tomorrow, vindicating Spinoza’s contention that hope, in its attraction to the return of past events or its anticipation of future events, could not take constant joy in the present. Pasenow anxiously fled to the past and Esch wrathfully hoped for a radically new future, but what character emerged from the underlying presence

of the vacuum of the death of God? Wilhelm Huguenau, a “philistine” 108 «= Kitsch

(SW, 628) and “man of business” (SW, 347), found himself during the war dispatched with exhausted soldiers, and “there was not one among them who did not know that he was posted there as a solitary creature to live alone and to die alone in an overwhelmingly senseless world, so sense-

less that he could not comprehend it or rise beyond describing it as ‘this bloody war’” (SW, 344). Huguenau, however, “could not get rid of the notion that he was on a school excursion” (SW, 344), and so he deserted the army in pursuit of business opportunities. That the trenches produced not unprecedented carnage but unexpected business opportunities is the triumph of Sachlichkeit (Huguenau in 1918), a matter-of-fact reign of positivism, unperturbed that the facts are not governed and organized by values. Sachlichkeit is the triumph of pure presence; things are simply what they are. War is just war, killing is just killing, and business is just business.'* Huguenau eventually encountered Pasenow,

who was now a major in the war, and on the verge of madness as his reactionary values could no longer make sense of the immense violence all around him. Pasenow’s nostalgia for endangered values was no match for “an incomprehensibility behind which all the unchivalry of unchivalrous weapons, treacherous friends and broken pledges was concealed” (SW, 515). He also encountered Esch, who ran a small newspaper. Huguenau eventually raped Esch’s wife, Frau Hentjen, who “like a criminal trying to save the hangman trouble . . . undid her underclothes” (SW, 610). Huguenau, having conducted his business, concluded that “everything was as it should be, everything had been put right” (SW, 610). So he made his way “into the devastated kitchen, stole over to the bread cupboard and cut himself a good slice . . . settled himself comfortably . . . and began slowly to eat” (SW, 611).

Huguenau then went out and found Esch and “ran the bayonet into his angular back.” Esch was dead, “no doubt about it,” and Huguenau even felt “grateful to him—all was well now!” The transaction had been successful. Huguenau “clapped the dead man benevolently, almost tenderly, on the shoulder” (SW, 614). This was all in a good day’s work and even the murder

of Esch, while it hardly came within the provenance of his duty as a business man, was not thereby an infringement of the business code. “Yes, it belonged to the exuberance of a holiday, but it was “quite in accordance with business ethics” (SW, 629). Huguenau successfully schemed to accompany Major Pasenow, now grasping Huguenau’s finger in infantile regression, back to Cologne after which Huguenau was permitted to return home to Colmar. “His war Odyssey, his lovely holiday was at an end” (SW, 623). In the insanity of business as usual (a sandwich after a hard day’s work is no different than a sandwich after a rape, selling stocks is no different Kitsch m= 109

than driving a bayonet into someone's back, leading a corporation is no different then leading a company of soldiers into the oncoming enemy),” one confronts a double insanity. How could business as usual ever have appeared sane? As Bertrand Miiller, the philosopher of the decay of values in the final volume of the trilogy, concluded: “We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad” (SW, 374)? The mad-

ness of the normal is the symptom of the underlying madness by which the normal (the Sachlichkeit and positivism of a nihilism of values where nothing really matters) ever could have appeared as acceptable. Let us not underestimate the critical provenance of this novel: this was the work of a disenchanted doctoral student in philosophy who had studied with the Vienna Circle, including Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap. For the Vienna positivists, philosophy was to be liberated from its metaphysical misadventures and subjected to a sober rehabilitation. The Vienna Circle’s enforced philosophical modesty was both evidence of positivism’s

inability to address the decay of values in the wake of the death of God and a striking confirmation of that very death. The madness that resulted from the collapse of a shared normative framework is already evident in the madness of the Vienna positivism: Europe had turned itself into a graveyard of trenches and venomously colonized much of the rest of the non-European world, and the best that we could do is worry about protocol sentences.

Nietzsche underestimated the symptoms of the death of God. The problem was more severe than reactionary nostalgia (Pasenow) and despair

about the present (Esch), both of which Nietzsche diagnosed. Pasenow had gone mad chasing God back into the security of his childhood, and it is his madness that vindicates Nietzsche’s contention that nihilism was the reign of das Umsonst. Nothing matters, all is in vain! Pasenow, his atavistic values crushed, muttered to Esch: “Well, it doesn’t matter [Na ist ja egal]” (SW, 550). Esch’s angry revolution was futile and his rage was not sustainable. The most insidious symptom, a symptom that Nietzsche had not fully realized, is the concealed madness of Huguenau, who runs our companies, edits our newspapers, produces our films, sorts out the problem of protocol sentences, and then enjoys a nice sandwich. This is “the absolute isolation” and forlornness of humanity (SW, 400). The Vienna Circle may not have been a particularly robust and expansive chapter in the history of philosophy, but its impotence had an inadvertently salutary effect on Broch. “If one judges by the ethical content then positivistic ‘scientific’ philosophy is philosophy no longer.” Philosophy had collapsed, its sole convincing metaphysical gesture being its capac110 «wu Kitsch

ity to articulate its own demise, and, as Bertrand Miller lamented, his resignation resonating within the novel in which his essay on the decay of values is found: “I try to philosophize—but where is the dignity of knowledge to be found today? Is it not long defunct? Has philosophy itself not disintegrated into mere phrases in face of the disintegration of its object? ... Philosophy itself has become an aesthetic pastime, a pastime that no longer really exists but has fallen into the empty detachment of evil and become a recreation for citizens who need time to kill time in the evening” (SW, 557). And so Broch himself abandoned his philosophy studies “for what only the novel can do.” As Broch claimed elsewhere, the “problem of art itself has become an ethical one.”””

Given that the Huguenau types have taken the reigns of philosophy, and given that they have simply filled the vacuum that emerged when philosophy lost its traditional metaphysical and soteriological framework with the sedative of positivism, what did Broch hope that the novel could do in response? What unique powers of disclosure did it possess such that it could absorb a philosophical essay—as The Sleepwatkers absorbs Bertrand Miiller’s essay on the decay of values—yet not remain subject to the values that had humiliated philosophy in its time of crisis? What gnosiological powers does the novel possess in these needful times, when we otherwise have little to say about evil, and the spell of Sachlichkeit’s amoral positivism has little or nothing within itself to drive to consciousness its suppressed madness, much in the way that Heidegger later argued that the Gestell, left to its own movement, disallows the human subject from ever becoming a question to itself? “Huguenau had committed a murder. He forgot it afterwards; it never came into his mind again, while every single business coup that he had successfully brought off... remained accurately imprinted on his memory’ (SW, 637). Huguenau was “a man whose first inquiry about everything in life usually concerned its price and the profit it might yield.” As he and his family obliviously grew fat, and as his amnesia continued to displace the putrefaction of God, he would, from time to time, and always as if from nowhere, sense something akin to Dasein’s Angst before the Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness that haunts the delusion of the familiar. There was something strange and weird that “he could not account for at all; and then in sudden perplexity he would ask, “What is money?’” (SW, 641). Money, profit, and business no longer seemed obvious. They were a form of somnambulance

that resorted to kitsch to detach itself from the anxiety that it sensed in prophylactic platitudes. “The artistic expression of the age is to be seen in the enormous tension between good and evil within art. For the evil in art is kitsch.”'® Sachlichkeit and its internal spell of self-presence was the kitsch Kitsch m= JI

that there is no kitsch and this, as Broch’s good friend Hannah Arendt saw, was the most unsettling manifestation of Kant’s conception of radical evil: that evil would simply become banal. Eichmann was just doing his job; he “never realized what he was doing.” In the first part of the trilogy, Pasenow or Romanticism (1888), Helmuth,

the brother of the protagonist Joachim, stupidly died in a duel with a Polish land proprietor. His face had been “mutilated by the bullet” (SW, 41). As Joachim returned to his father’s estate in Stolpin for the funeral, he found Helmuth’s letter, in which he confessed that he did not know if he would survive the duel, this “rather unnecessary affair. Naturally I hope so; still it is almost a matter of indifference to me” (SW, 40). Helmuth hoped that his brother had found more value in his life than he had in his and finally wished that Joachim “might be less lonely than Helmuth had been.” Their unnerved father, promptly declared: “He died for honor, for the honor of his name” (SW, 41).

This is the kitsch of declared values in their inattentive reaction to the present and Romanticism, far from its initial stirrings in Schelling or Coleridge, is filled with such kitsch. Joachim hid in his uniform, “for it is the uniform’s true function to manifest and ordain order in this world” (SW, 21). He rejected his Bohemian lover Ruzena for the bourgeois purity of Elizabeth, whom he imagined as a helpless but pure Madonna who could rescue him from the whorishness of his disorderly desires. Yet the reactionary kitsch of the nostalgic posture is haunted by the specter of the chaos that it attempts to suppress. Joachim was overcome by a “terrible feeling of remorse” when he realized that “he had merely hoped to save his own soul thorough her sacrifice” (SW, 154). Joachim’s father slowly went mad; the discrepancy between his self-deceptive account of his son’s “noble” death and the reality of its implacable stupidity became unbearable. Getting blindly drunk in front of the pastor and dismissing his package of metaphysical consolations, the father exclaimed that “when you see double you feel less lonely” (SW, 67). Finally, in the third novel, Joachim and the honor of his uniform were crushed by their inability to transhigure the trenches into something honorable. If Pasenow hid in the nostalgia for a past order, then Esch, the orphaned rebel, raged against the vacuity of the present, demanding that it be redeemed in a better future. His was “the yearning of the captive soul for redemption’ (SW, 197), a “desire for the unambiguous, the absolute” (SW, 271). The pleasures that most pursue for their own sake, Esch pursued for a “higher purpose, a purpose which he could scarcely name and yet felt bound to obey, but which nevertheless was nothing but the compulsion to put an end to a tremendous fear that extended far beyond himself” (SW, 112 «a Kitsch

196). Kundera: “Esch: the fanaticism of the era with no God. Because all values have hidden their faces, anything can be considered a value” (AN, 52). This was precisely the anarchy against which Esch angrily revolted, but since he believed in absolutes yet had no capacity to identify them, the anarchy that inaugurated his rebellion was the anarchy that governed his rebellion. Esch beat Frau Hentjen and denounced Bertrand for his homosexuality, yet in these microcosmic acts one can see the totalitarian rages of the twentieth century's great ideologues. Esch collected little trinkets of kitsch: a small replica of the Eiffel Tower, “a replica of the Schiller Memorial outside the Mannheim theater” (SW, 220), and “a small bronze Statue of Liberty” (SW, 267). Awaiting the redemption of the future, he told Frau Hentjen that “love is only possible in a strange country. If you want to love really, you must begin a new life and destroy everything in your old one” (SW, 272). Esch resisted the present, “as if all words were orphan strays” (SW, 293), but the future is always still to arrive, and so Esch rages on with nowhere to go. Yet the anarchic permanent revolution and its constant demand for new symbols (Sinnbilder), new walls of kitsch, could not fully universalize itself. Alfons, a gay man estranged from the world futilely presaged by Esch’s “stupid fury,” concluded that “all men of that type sowed evil.” They were

not greedy for life “which they obviously did not see, but for something which lay outside of it” and so to gain it they destroyed life “in the name of this love of theirs” (SW, 325). Unlike the rage of Esch, Alfons, a fat homosexual orchestra player who did not occupy any place in the great value systems of the past and for whom no revolutions were being waged, identified with those who wept at the death of another “not because they had lost a possession, but simply because something they had touched and seen had been good and gentle” (SW, 326). This tear is not the second tear-

ing of kitsch, which sees nothing but itself against the background of all humanity. It is the tear that shatters kitsch, the same tear that returns at the very end of the novel, commiserating with the “unforfeitable brotherhood [and sisterhood] of humbled human creatures” (SW, 648).

Death Perception In the Umbrian hills at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Francesco di Bernardone, while riding his horse, came upon a leper. Like most people, he first responded with revulsion, perhaps tempered with pity, which, as Nietzsche saw, allows one to hide in the posture that one is superior to the miserable. As mysterious and unexpected as Nietzsche’s embrace of the dying horse in Turin in early January 1889, the non sequitur that removed

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Nietzsche from the kitsch of humankind, Francis suddenly saw the leper. He encountered the leper with an awakened attentiveness and the curtain of preinterpretation was torn. Francis dismounted and embraced the leper. He later said: “What seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body.” Francis later called this new sensibility the perfect joy, a joy not held hostage by the dualism of fortune and misfortune, likes and dislikes, mine and yours. We can appreciate the radicality of this attunement by looking to an earlier account of it that precedes the official sanitized account in I Fioretti that Kajetan Esser brought to our attention. When Francis attempted to explain the complete joy to Brother Leo, he distinguished it from the times in which we get what we want. It is not learning that all of the great teachers and scholars of Paris have become Franciscan monks, or that the kings of France and England have joined the order. It is not even the receipt of enough grace to perform miracles and cure the sick. The perfect joy demands the vanquishing of the idolatry of one’s obsessive self-importance:

I return to Perugia and arrive here in the dead of night; and it is wintertime, muddy and so cold that icicles have formed on the edges of my habit and keep striking my legs, and blood flows from such wounds. And all covered with mud and cold, I come to the gate and after I have knocked and called for some time, a brother comes and asks: “Who are you?” I answer: “Brother Francis.” And he says: “Go away; this is not a proper hour for going about; you may not come in.” And when I insist, he answers, “Go away, you are a simple and stupid person; we see so many and we have no need of you. You are certainly not coming to us this hour!” And I stand again at the door and say: “For the love of God, take me in tonight.” And he answers: “T will not. Go the Crosiers place and ask there.” I tell you this: If I had patience and did not become upset, there would be true joy in this and true virtue and the salvation of the soul.””°

The perfect joy is the surrender to the full range of the human condition, even, as we hear at the end of the Canticle of the Sun, written after a nightmarish night of great turmoil, to “sister death.” The preferential option for the poor is the opposite of the nightmare of Mitleidsgeftuhl (feeling pity) that Nietzsche eschewed in which we constantly submit ourselves to pornographic images of Third World poverty. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the stars and committed intellectuals and progressive politicians rushed to publicize the sufferings of the Cambodians. “What remains of the dying population of Cambodia? One large photograph of an American

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actress holding an Asian child in her arms” (ULB, 277). The actress had looked long into the camera to make sure that it could capture the drama of her tears (ULB, 264). The Franciscan style of conversion, however, is transformed by the novel’s mode of disclosure, becoming what Kundera approvingly calls a “myth.” It now names the upheaval of the normal “relation to the author's ‘self’”: “in order to hear the secret, barely audible, voice of the ‘soul of things,’ the novelist, unlike the poet or the musician, must know how to silence the cries of his own soul” (C, 61). This is also the kind of conversion that arose from out of the decay of values in The Sleepwalkers: the unforfeitable brotherhood [and sisterhood] of humbled human creatures. It also animates Broch’s later novel The Death of Virgil, as the title character came to Brundisium on the Calabrian coast to die. Jolted into awareness by his proximity to his own death, he was confronted with the humus of being, the “unborn state of the precreation,” the unfathomable element of the ground of birth and death, and he suddenly realized that he was guilty of a great perjury: “It was to await him, the unknown god, that his own glance had been compelled earthward, peering to see the advent of him whose redeeming word, born from and giving birth to duty, should restore language to a communication among men who supported the pledge.” Virgil, the poet of the Roman Empire, had surrendered language both to empire and representation. This pledge, broken again and again, first comes back to us as something that we abruptly remember that we have forgotten. It is a two-fold duty won in the face of the silent depths of the earth and aroused by the thought of our own deaths: the “duty of helpfulness, the duty of awakening.””! The pledge was to maintain vigilance against the somnambulance that obscures a compassionate relationship with the enigma of selfhood. Death removes the scales of the monocular vision of the natural attitude and makes possible a binocular vision that sees things from the depths of “death perception.” Virgil realized what he must do: burn the Aeneid, that perjury of the oath, that betrayal of the solitude of truth for the seductions of glory and the crowds they inspire.

It was de rigueur for national epics to feature an episode where the protagonist sojourned into the underworld to be among the dead. Most famously, in the eleventh chapter of Zhe Odyssey, Odysseus, in compliance with Circe’s instructions, descended into the domain of the shades to seek the counsel of Tiresias regarding his homecoming. In so doing, Odysseus

honored a mythic tradition (the not always successful rescue missions of Orpheus for Eurydice, Theseus for Persephone, and Hercules for Alcestis). Virgil, reflecting on his own variation on this theme, concluded that it was fraudulent, mere kitsch about death—a variant of Tereza’s “folding screen Kitsch = 115

set up to curtain off death” (ULB, 253). Aeneus had not really been with the dead or confronted death. He had not been serious about death because he had not genuinely confronted his own death. His literary peregrination was nothing but a beautiful metaphor, and “life was only to be grasped in metaphor, and metaphor could express itself only in metaphor; the chain of metaphor was endless and death alone was without metaphor.”’? The Aeneid and its founding metaphors had perjured death by pretending to represent it, and betrayed the pledge that language will communicate the nonmetaphorical solidarity of death perception. The Aeneid was destined to be the founding poem of the Roman imperium, an imperium vouchsafed by the beautiful intoxicated and intoxicating metaphors that created the masses that they united. Struggling to retract his perniciously beautiful epic from the Emperor Octavian, Virgil insisted: “Beauty cannot live without approval, truth locks itself off from applause.”’? Language must strain to achieve perception and not the glory of empire because “the commonly shared vision of the infinite is the basis of all communication, and without it even the simplest things are incommunicable.”** Enough with the grounding and setting into work of truth in the work of art and its collectivizing metaphors! Virgil’s deathbed conversion awoke him from the rage of metaphor and the impatient hatred of the constant need for the founding metaphor. Kundera often warns against being trapped by our metaphors—think of

Vincent “stuck in his metaphor” of the moon as an asshole “like a fly in glue” in Slowness (99). This is not to say that metaphors as such are fraudulent or can be altogether avoided. They have the power, for example, to reveal the existential codes of characters. Death, however, exposes the range and nature of metaphors: they disclose and define without representing; they present while simultaneously withdrawing, much like Heidegger speaks of the belonging together of Anwesenheit (presencing) and Abwesenheit (absencing) in das Ereignis (the event). In the context of his discussion

of Kafka, Kundera approvingly speaks of a particular kind of metaphor that he calls the existential or phenomenological definition. Opposed to the metaphor as a “/yrical flight of fancy,” it is “driven exclusively by the wish to decipher, to understand, to grasp the meaning of the characters’ actions” and their “situations” (7B, 106). It defines not by conceiving the absolute reality of its ideatum, but within the fog and ambiguity and humbled expectations of the universe of the novel. Broch, Kundera suggests elsewhere, was also a master of this epiphanic revelation (AWN, 140). The pledge is broken when writing confuses metaphors that shed light on the human condition with representations of it. Death alone is without

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metaphors but it makes possible what Virgil calls “death perception,” a way of commiserating with things beyond our capacity to recognize and represent them or to know them absolutely. By way of contrast, Thomas Mann's “death-beauty” is “naively entrancing,’ which is only possible when youth

(Mann was twenty-four when he wrote the story) makes death seem remote and hence “still unreal and enchanting” (BLF, 143). Death, like the laughing God, exposes the nonrepresentational character of the clearing (Lichtung; the mode of disclosure) within which metaphors have their disclosive power.” Virgil awakened to this unknowable god and having failed to wrest back his epic, he composed his will, itself a literal kind of death writing, as an act of generosity occasioned by a nonlyrical relationship to death. This kind of conversion is present in Kundera’s works. In The Joke, Ludvik awakened from the lyrical stage to commiserating with the devastated things: “A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid /yrical age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside of himself and when other people (no matter how dear) are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth’ (/, 251). At the end of the novel, Ludvik prepared for the first time in many years to play the clarinet. Flooded with memories—“once again Lucie emerged before my eyes”—Ludvik mused that these ghosts indicated that “our life stories were kindred and coupled, because they were both stories of devastation”: “We lived, I and Lucie, in a devastated world; and because we did not know how to commiserate with

the devastated things, we turned away from them and so injured them, and ourselves as well” (/, 313). Ludvik awoke to a humbled solidarity with human beings in their inevitable folly. As discussed in chapter 4, Jakub in Farewell Waltz also underwent this kind of awakening: “He saw in front of him the child dressed in his wire fence, and he pitied that child and his whole country, reflecting that he had loved this country little and badly, and he was sad because of that bad and failed love” (FW, 271). Despite his political passions and willingness to die for them, Jakub had been cavalier and careless, but he could now commiserate with devastated things. Kundera in his own reflections on his work locates the conversion of the author away from lyricism, the “tearing away” from one’s “lyrical chrysalis” (C, 90), as the necessary condition for writing. “A lyric poet is only the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard” (C, 88). Like Jaromil, the inexperience of lyricism quickly becomes the perjury of personal glory and the betrayal of the redhead.

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If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a “myth,” that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world. (C, 89) The anti-lyric conversion is a fundamental experience in the curticulum vitae of the novelist: separated from himself, he suddenly

sees that self from a distance, astonished to find that he is not the person he thought he was. After that experience, he will know that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people. . . the soft gleam of the comical. (That gleam of the comical, suddenly discovered, is the silent, precious reward for the novelist’s conversion). (C, 91)

The laughing God calls us back from the perjury of kitsch, from the “the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost” (AN, 163).

The Philistine Rage A variation on Kundera’s figure of the misomusist was anticipated in the work of Hermann Broch, especially his novel The Guiltless (1950), in the related figure of the philistine. How, one might ask, did the Philistines, a traditional enemy of the Israelites, the people of the Palestinian coast to whom Delilah delivered an enervated Sampson, come to be associated with an obdurate intolerance of artistic and scientific discovery? This label does not reflect any serious historical study of the Philistines themselves. We owe this particular usage to the German language. The classic German etymological dictionary Kluge confirms the term’s origin in a seventeenthcentury practice among German fraternities to call the nonstudent type a Philister (synonymous with a Spie/Sburger or alter Herr), a proudly and defiantly uncultivated (and presumably uncultivable) person, ein ungebildeter Mensch.” The force of the term has little to do with student snobbery and academic elitism. Goethe and Schiller frequently and influentially deployed the term to characterize a self-interested bourgeois shopkeeper mentality that was allergic to real literary exploration or scientific curiosity.”” For example, in the Rain and the Rainbow (1813), Goethe castigates the philistine for loving rain because it waters the crops, but finding the rainbow dispensable.”®

Goethe declared war on the SpiefSbirger: the antibohemian, misomusist, change-phobic guardian of the familiar. In /mmortality, this fact is subjected to a cruel twist: When Bettina von Arnim, in her “battle for

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immortality” (JM, 67), reflected on “the crazy sausage” (Frau Goethe, whose act of knocking Bettina’s glasses to the ground was defended by her husband), she concluded that Goethe was a “dead poet, who on coming face-to-face with great emotion behaved like a cowardly philistine and sacrificed passion to the miserable tranquility of marriage” ([//, 80). This painful irony should not be lost on us: Goethe, the tireless archenemy of the philistine, was posthumously charged with philistinism because in his old age he could not be shaken out of the “miserable tranquility” of his Spie/sbuirger marriage. Goethe—the womanizer, scientist, and literary pioneer—a philistine! The aging Goethe had grown fatigued, crossing this “silent bridge leading from the shore of life to the shore of death” and immortality now revealed itself to be a “ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind” (JM, 75). He had slipped free from his self-administered essence, and he now attempted to evade the immortality bedazzled clutches of Bettina. But in Bettina’s eyes, he had succumbed to philistinism, terrified by the sublimity of his feelings and the life-afhrming excesses of a great love. Bettina achieves a philistine’s definition of philistinism, a kitsch account of kitsch. This irony indicates the naiveté of merely opposing the philistine to the bohemian. It is not a question of opposing the educational elite to ordinary citizens or artists to shopkeepers. When Nietzsche, in his essay on

David Strauss, examined this popular vocabulary inheritance from German student culture, he found it inadequate to say that the philistine was simply “the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture.”"”? This does not explain what Nietzsche here dubs the cultural philistine who astonishingly “fancies that he is himself a son of the muses and man of culture.” Everywhere the cultural philistine sees his culture echoing his philistine values. “He perceives around him nothing but needs identical with and views similar to his own; wherever he goes he is at once embraced by a bond of tacit conventions in regard to many things, especially in the realms of religion and art.”*' No art, however, can dare challenge the sacred cows of his ego investments. While such a philistine dabbles in art and philosophy,” he “sternly segregates the ‘serious things of life’—that is to say, profession, business, wife and child—from its pleasures. . . . Therefore woe to an art that starts to take itself seriously and makes demands that touch upon his livelihood, his business and his habits, in short, his philistine ‘serious things of life.’”*’ Philistines are the true barbarians, adhering to what we will call a simulacrum of culture. Kundera: “In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a Kitsch = 119

knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it” (UZB, 254). We can see here that the cultural philistine, just like the romantic philistine (Bettina’ss dream of a great love with a great poet that elevates both of them into the firmament of immortality), can regard what contests their hermetic manner of life as philistine. The others, who I know to be hopeless philistines, cannot challenge my way of life! Following Nabokov (another trenchant critic of the philistine), we can appreciate four features of this problem: (1) In agreement with Flaubert, Nabokov claims that the philistine is bourgeois, which is a “state of mind, not a state of pocket in the Marxist sense.”*4 (2) The philistine is not a local phenomenon, restricted to Germany or even to the European West. It

is ubiquitous. “Philistinism is international. It is found in all nations and in all classes. An English duke can be as much of a philistine as an American Shriner or a French bureaucrat or a Soviet citizen. The mentality of a Lenin or a Stalin or a Hitler in regard to the arts and sciences was utterly bourgeois.” Philistinism transcends its cultural heterogeneity to name a malady of the soul. Hitler could claim that entartete Kunst was a moral scandal, yet preside over a war that claimed over fifty million lives. (3) Philistinism is not an avocation, but a “total type . . . the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity.”*° It is manner of being, an existential

code that animates a proclivity for a certain way of living. (4) The philistine, a simulacrum of culture, despite thinking in nothing but clichés, trucks in what they imagine to be the great cultural values and, in simulating them, is a sham: he “is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as “Beauty, ‘Love,’ ‘Nature,’ “Truth, and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them.”*” Nabokov tells us that the Russian language has a “special word” for philistinism, poshlust,

a word that clearly indicates that philistinism does not essentially name a predilection for bad art, but rather the ethical perversity of turning art into sham art. “To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust.”°*

Kitsch and Evil Broch takes this problem up in The Guiltless, a late novel that, much like Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, began as a series of short stories that Broch later developed into a novel by heightening the thematic unity that collects otherwise largely disassociated narratives. Like The 120 «a Kitsch

Sleepwalkers, the thematic unity coalesces in a specific historical situation, in this case two decades starting on the eve of World War I—1913, where “war is not the worst of all evils, it is assuredly the stupidest, and by it, the Father of all Things . . . For stupidity [Dummbeit] is lack of imagination;

it mouths abstractions, babbles holy concepts” (G, 8)—and ending with the year that saw the rise of Hitler. Broch turned to the novel in order to capture the “totality” of this Zeitgeist. He did so by dealing with the “conditions and types prevalent in the pre-Hitler period,” choosing characters that, while often chilling, were “thoroughly ‘apolitical’” and whose “vague and nebulous’ political ideas did not make them “directly ‘guilty’ of the Hitler catastrophe” (G, 289). They are the gui/tless of the novel’s title, but as such, they are guilty of this guiltlessness, guilty of the indifference upon which Nazism “derived its energies” (G, 289). As Broch set out to explore the guiltlessness of the interwar Zeitgeist, he discovered in the philistine, what he dubs “der SpiefSer,” its clearest manifestation. Der SpiefSergeist, the spirit of the SpiefSer, gathered momentum in the ethical vacuum of the Lost Generation—“in such a vacuum no one can hear his neighbor’—and, despite the defeat of Hitler, it still appeared

that in 1950 the “concentration camps are on the increase” and that “the philistine Nazi spirit [SpiefSer Nazigeist] was becoming paradigmatic for a large section of humanity” (G, 290). These words only grow increasingly apt, and the guiltless philistine still lurks in the shadows of noble values— “even as a criminal he always acts from the noblest motives” (G, 289). This opposition between the perceived nobility of the philistine’s motivation (always nebulously abstract yet self-righteously asserted) and the brutality of their actions forms the paradox of the SpiefSer, who has “the mentality of the prudish beast of prey, which accepts the worst cruelty, not least the horrors of the concentration camps and gas chambers, without a murmur, but takes any reference to sexual facts, especially abnormal ones, as a personal affront, whereby, to be sure, he gives himself away” (G, 289). This was written more than a decade before the arrest of Adolf Eichmann, but Broch could already detect in the philistine a new permutation of the Sachlickeit that allowed Hugeneau to operate his moneymaking schemes so guiltlessly during World War I.

Broch’s friend, Hannah Arendt, created quite a stir when she did not confirm that Eichmann had exhibited the ruthless genius of an “Iago.” Eichmann did not exemplify the sublimely repellent “artistry” of evil that was Ivan Karamazov’ principle of selection for his collection of reports of human depravity against innocent children and animals. Eichmann was not only a banal bureaucrat who concealed his thoughtlessness behind a barrage of high-sounding clichés, but he was also, amazingly, a Zionist. Kitsch m= 12]

He had lost all of his Arbeitsfreude (joy for work) when he was forced to renounce this Zionism and, in a simulacrum of Kant’s categorical imperative, execute his sullen deontological responsibilities with regards to the Final Solution. This was the Sachlichkeit that Eichmann esteemed in himself and others, “talking about concentration camps in terms of ‘administration’ and extermination camps in terms of ‘economy.’”*' The atrocities were masked in a vague abstraction: they were mere “medical matters.” Eichmann’s very manner of thinking (“duty,” “the categorical imperative,” “fate,” “Zionism,” etc.) was a simulacrum of thinking, concealing his horror vacui. This produced the paradox of the banality of evil at the heart of the SpiefSer: “thinking” in high-minded abstractions and confined to an unrelenting prudishness, yet capable, in clear conscience,** of unimaginable atrocities, so long as they were mere abstractions. (Eichmann was squeamish and repulsed by the sight of blood.) Arendt detected this telltale paradox of the philistine (a prudish mass murderer whose victims are the abstractions of Sachlichkeit) in Eichmann. When a young police officer charged with Eichmann’s “mental and psychological well-being” gave him a copy of Nabakov’s Lolita for relaxation,

Eichmann indignantly returned it after two days, claiming that it was “quite an unwholesome book—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch.” Indeed, Eichmann could not think at all because he subjugated his thought process to clichés and was thereby “surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”“4

Kundera’s lyrical philistine Jaromil agonized over the uncontrollable contingencies of love, knowing that the redhead “had not promised him her death” and “she didn’t at all grasp what was going on; she promised him her sadness, he who knew only absolute criteria, all or nothing, life or death” (LE, 346). Broch’s philistine is Zacharias, a high school math and physics teacher who, like Eichmann, had a “small talent for exact disciplines” (G, 26). However, he was utterly bereft of intellectual curiosity and “neither contemplated the higher principles nor aspired to the higher tasks of the discipline in question” (G, 26). He found such pursuits schrullenhaft, a word often used for elderly curmudgeons to describe their crotchety irritability.° Zacharias was unmoved by problems of existence—what most

mattered was that his operational and combinatorial problems produce solutions that “came out even” (G, 27). Nonetheless, Zacharias, who regarded women as an alien species, somehow—startling evidence of the miracle of being—became the subject of Philippine’s sexual fancies. It was not that she conceived of Zacharias’s existence as an intractable highlight of her destiny. Their coital ambitions 122 «a Kitsch

converged by “spatiotemporal chance” and “authentic accident” (G, 30). One might imagine that Zacharias, who seemed doomed to a life without carnal exuberances, would be jubilant about his good fortune. But his good fortune, alas, is nonetheless fortune, and, as such, it mocks his intolerance of indivisible remainders in our existential problems. Zacharias and Philippine were not made for each other; the element of chance evokes the contingency of coupling and the substitutability of partners. Like Flajsman in Kundera’s “Symposium,’*° Zacharias was attached to love as a great idea and so he concluded that a real love could only be a fulfillment of destiny: “What now struck him as really monstrous was the unwilled, fortuitous character of his love’s so sudden beginning and the knowledge that the desire which had so surprisingly welled up from her hands ever since, differed hardly at all from that which he had experienced in the arms of those women whom he today looked down on as whores. . . . He was unable to look upon Philippine’s love as unique and infinite” (G, 33). The irreducible remainder of contingency caused Zacharias to suffer more from the possibility of being cuckolded than from actually being

cuckolded. If the origins of their love are random, then there is nothing special about it. What solution absolves love of its contingency and reunites it with the infinite? Zacharias devised an equation that would make his problem come out even: they should proclaim the ultimacy and uniqueness of their great love through a Liebestod. One can only die one

time for another person and in dying for another, one retains nothing extra for oneself. One gives away all that one has for all time. Zacharias and Philippine would meet “in infinity, like the straight lines that join to form an eternal circle” (G, 37), having broken down the bridges that, while connecting them, nonetheless held them apart. It would unleash “a structure of perfect order, clear because it came out even, of supreme reality’ (G, 36). Face to face with death, perhaps because it is not interested in our circles and it mocks the ideas that we assign to it, Zacharias and Philippine did not commune with the absolute. Instead, they got married. We meet Studienrat (secondary school teacher) Zacharias a decade later, drinking fine Burgundy with a character who hides behind the almost anonymous name A. Zacharias reminisced about the wine from his wartime experience in “Frogland,” although neither the wine nor anything else about France seem to have aroused his slumbering curiosity. He had also been decorated with the Iron Cross, although he had nothing to report about his wartime experiences. He now had three children, including the first born, Wilhelmina, the result of his early “copulation,” but who, Zacharias confided to A., “has been vegetating along with a somewhat Kitsch m= 123

extinguished mind or, to put it unkindly, is inclined to idiocy” (G, 146). Wilhelmina’s incapacity, however, seemed to provoke little anguish in her father and she was certainly not a love child that memorialized marital life in the wake of the aborted Liebestod. Nonetheless, “under his model guidance the whole family wore soft felt slippers in the house to protect the well-waxed linoleum flooring” (G, 135). As a physics teacher, he had contact with Einstein’s theory of relativity,

but the “theory repelled him by being so hard to understand” (G, 135). Not only did it sully the elegance of a fixed curriculum with the burden of new material, but also the idea of relativity did not square with his demand for a fixed order. “Wasn't a teacher justified in insisting that the boundaries of knowledge must be definitive? If not, what was the good of the teacher’s examination’ (G, 136)? As A. and Zacharias got inebriated, Zacharias gave four speeches, each one progressively demonstrating his self-proclaimed aversion to hypocrisy. He extolled precision and claimed that Germany is “a nation of teachers, of world teachers” and that it was “the nation of the infinite and hence of death, while the other peoples are bogged down in the finite, in shopkeep-

ing and money-grubbing” (G, 143). Right from the outset, the paradox of Zacharias’s philistinism became evident: an anally retentive obsession with control, familiarity, and the already-known that masqueraded as an alliance with the infinite; this was a voice of total control that concealed itself in the name of the absolute: the war of the few against the multiplicity of all. After degrading women as whores, and celebrating his courageous acknowledgement that the world is loveless, Zacharias confessed, “we are left with nothing but the darkness of the infinite, the uncertainty and shame of the infinite” (G, 146). He then began to weep. With his failed Liebestod still haunting him, Zacharias bemoaned love's “playful dream of twoness” (G, 151). What could destroy those disgraceful bridges that divide us while

uniting us? Zacharias offered a chilling solution: the “brotherhood” of complete unity between all men—“the foulest stinking fart can’t make a dent in comradeship” (G, 152). Dismissal of finite concerns will elevate all men into the “absolute certainty” of the “infinite” as they are hardened by death (G, 153). Of course, such a brotherhood will need a father, a great leader, to get everyone in line. After listening to the four drunken speeches, A. accompanied Zacharias home, where Philippine was waiting for Zacharias, ready to discipline him.

She made him face the wall and pull his pants down and then she brutally caned him. Zacharias moaned: “Yes, yes... oh, yes... more, more, more... drive the disgust out of my body .. . make me strong, my angel” 124 «a Kitsch

(G, 163). The paradox is evident: to want very little as if it were to want the

infinite; to discipline oneself in such a way that one erupts in uncontrollable irrationality, to disguise one’s shyness and fear in fantasies of courage and the heroic embrace of death. Broch concluded, “humor comes hard to the German” (G, 165); regardless whether that is a fair assessment, it is clear that laughter belongs to ambiguity and, as such, is the enemy of kitsch, whose totalitarian aggression “despises in-between solutions” (G, 165). It is a simulacrum of clarity that declares war on ambiguity, and which insists that its small refuge from the relativity of human affairs is really the infinity of the real. As Kulka remarked: “Kitsch artists never have to explain how their pictures should be looked at. . . . Kitsch cannot afford to be, and hence never is, confusing.”*” The precision of ideology, that is, its intolerance of ambiguity, enables the received stupidity of ideology, the simulacrum of thinking, to appear as if it were inevitable and obvious. The perversion of nature appears as if it were a force of nature.

Kitsch as the Simulacrum of Art Kitsch is a kind of perverse idealism, a way of seeing so that things appear without appearing. It is a way of seeing without seeing and thinking without thinking so that there are only pseudoappearances and pseudothoughts. I see what I can bear to see and I live in a world that already preaccords with my manner of seeing. This is a world of pretend beauty, a world without “the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said” (AN, 122). Alain Badiou, in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, sketches out a provocative account of evil. Regardless of how one responds

to his work (and it is not my intention either to defend or condemn it), these particular reflections are helpful for our present investigation of kitsch. He begins by defending thinkers like Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan against the standard charges (found in thinkers like Habermas) that such thinking is quietistic, ethically impotent, and unable to critically engage the social world. He also protests the smugness with which we have celebrated the doctrine of human rights as a great breakthrough since the end of World War II. Such rights appeal to the seeming self-evidence of the presence of evil and promise us protection from it. Ethical consensus depends on a shared recognition of evil.48 A human right names no positive good (these all supposedly lead to utopian catastrophes), but rather promises us deliverance from certain positive evils. “‘Human rights’ are rights to non-Evil,’” the nature of which is supposedly obvious to everyone. Upon closer examination, such ideology is inherently nihilisitic, lacking any moral imagination and investigative prowess into the singular ethical

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truths that are occluded by a grand moral consensus: “ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death.””° This renders it unable to critique “the selfsatished egoism of the affluent West” and its “advertising” and its demand that the powerless be subservient to the powerful. It protects the interests of the few as if they were the interests of the many.

Badiou counters the ideological pseudo-obviousness of evil, which grants cover to the many ethically dubious practices that it cannot counter, by insisting that we begin with a positive idea of the good; but not in Levinas’s sense, which always associates it with the appeal of the other, an other who is always tacitly religious, always a “good other,” and always uncritically linked with “parliamentary democratic, pro free-market economics.” In beginning with the good, however, one does not really begin with a the as if one were speaking of a unity or a one. As we know from Aristotle: “the good can be said in many ways,’ and as Broch observes in The Guiltless: “the good is self-evident, but it is diffuse” (G, 264). For Badiou, there is not a one, but only the “multiple ‘without-one.’”” Beginning with the singular truths of the good, however, does not obviate the problem of evil. Unlike Broch, Badiou eschews the category of radical evil, but he has his own way of framing our present problem. He sketches three features of evil: (1) Evil is a simulacrum, that is, something

that mimics the good, or superficially looks like the good, but which “mimics an actual truth-process.”” It is “the process of a simulacrum of truth. And in its essence, under a name of its invention, it is terror directed at everyone.”* One becomes “the terrorizing follower of a false event,” demanding unity where there is multiplicity.” (2) As such it is a betrayal

of truth in which I must renounce even what I know to be true about a certain singular truth. It is to “give up on a truth in the name of one’s interest.”°° This is the perfidious perjury, the violation of the oath, which directed Broch’s Virgil to respond by attempting to burn the Aeneid rather than permit it to give poetic validation to empire. (3) The betrayal that is the simulacrum is catastrophic, displacing the multiplicity of truths with “a disaster of truth induced by the absolutization of its power.’”’ This is what Kundera means in naming the metaphysical impulse of kitsch totalitarian: “Everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life” and in “this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse” (ULB, 252). Just as sophistry is the simulacrum of philosophy, kitsch is the simu-

lacrum of art. It may look like art, it may hang in galleries, and it will certainly claim to speak on behalf of what is good in art, but it is not bad art (this is simply a failed work of art, a work that could not successfully 126 « Kitsch

pose its questions or find the media and creativity to address them effectively). Kulka speaks of the “essentially parasitic nature of kitsch.”** Indeed,

“kitsch may indeed look like other paintings. The point is that it does not function the same way.” For Broch, art needs an open system so that it can continue to evolve, while kitsch feeds on an evil form of imitation, mimicking art, but with a disposition that turns art against reality (locked in the detached demand for abstract ideas while closing down art’s capacity to evolve through new discoveries). Broch’s “open system” of art also recalls Schelling’s “system of freedom,” an open, breathing, living, ever progressing ecology that begins ever anew. The “open system,” the everevolving system of freedom, also recalls the compositional evolution and quest for discovery that Kundera locates in the “universe of the novel” (see chapter 2). Kitsch, Kulka argues, mimics art, but it has an entirely different function, which is parasitic upon art. “The crucial point is that kitsch must not question the basic metaphysical and moral assumptions of human existence. . . . Kitsch is indeed totally incompatible with even the mildest form of questioning; that is, with irony. Kitsch always means what it says, and says it literally. There are no two ways of reading kitsch. (Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, or as a parody, it ceases to be kitsch.)”°? Kulka’s insightful perspective allows us to appreciate two important phenomena. First, humor and irony, the motors of difference, are lethal to kitsch. Kundera: “Irony means: none of the assertions found in a novel can be taken by itself, each of them stands in a complex and contradictory juxtaposition with other assertions, other situations, other gestures, other ideas, other events” (7B, 203). In kitsch, everything means what it says, although it is not telling the truth; irony recovers the complexity that kitsch denies.

One can recall, for instance, the embrace of some of the exemplars of kitsch Americana by some who are part of the queer culture in the United States:°' the ironic adoption of the ideological avatars of a culture that refused them immediately disabled them. Kitsch ceases to be kitsch as soon as it is unmoored from its totalitarian and allegedly self-evident context and nothing does this faster than a good sense of humor. “In the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously” (ULB, 252). When pop art embraced the maligned icons of kitsch, it did not erase the distinction between art and kitsch. As Kulka observes: “Kitsch never questions anything.

Pop Art, especially in its early stage, was (among other things) a protest against the increasing commercialization of art.”® In the immense broadening of theme and media that is the world of contemporary art in the last century, there is some truth in the claim that everything can be art. There is also an equal measure of truth in the claim that everything can be kitsch. Kitsch m= 127

What distinguishes the two is not their choice of media or theme, but their allegiance to the ethic of discovery and investigation in what Broch called the “open system of art.” Second, I would take exception (while smiling) to Italo Calvino’s criticism of “Kundera’s” definition of kitsch as “the absence of shit,” which Calvino reads as “absolute metaphysical negativity,” to which he objects: “For pantheists and for the constipated (I belong to one of these two categories, though I will not specify which) defecation is one of the greatest

proofs of the generosity of the universe (of nature or providence or necessity or what have you). That shit is to be considered of value and not worthless is for me a matter of principle.” Despite the admirably cheeky quality of his observation, it seems to me that Calvino misses the point. One need only remember that Kundera’s persona’s discussion of the theodicy of shit ends with Sabina’s fantasy, likely unsettling even to a libertine like Tomas. She imagines “Tomas seating her on the toilet in her bowler hat and watching her void her bowels” (ULB, 247). The innocence of shit exposed the limits of Tomas’s otherwise admirable tolerance for the complexity of human affairs. The Garden of Eden, after all, where everyone and everything is obedient to their true natures, did not know excitement, which originates in the guilty pleasure of sin and the transgression of taboo. Not only does the presence of shit, at least in the protected recesses of her imagination, appear as an erotic sign of “the generosity of the universe,” but the fact that our persona requires some measure of taboo to avoid utter disassociation also suggests the poignancy of kitsch. What makes something kitsch is not found in the object itself (the emblems of heterosexist culture become the ironic icons of homosexual culture; shit, the waste of the universe, becomes for the constipated the gold of the universe); it is located in the disposition of what Broch called the Kitschmensch, the one

who, as Kundera’ persona puts it, demands “the categorical agreement with being” (ULB, 257). The most unambiguous fruit of the Kitschmensch can be converted into art by the ironist. If we can detach ourselves from the catastrophic violence of totalitarian kitsch, we can also see that kitsch emerges as the threshold of our capac-

ity for affirmation. Even the trace amounts of kitsch in the free thinker indicate the aspects of life that one cannot muster the courage and love to bear. People on the Zen path train their whole lives to better embrace suchness (tathatd) and Nietzsche required his test of the eternal return to help him continuously maximize his capacity for afhrmation. But there is no amount of Zazen and no test that can transform the maximization of affirmation to the achievement of total affirmation. (The pristine figure of the person of pure affirmation is itself, alas, a rarefied symptom of the 128 «a Kitsch

Kitschmensch.) Kundera writes: “As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie

it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition” (ULB, 256). Kulka’s admirable study, which rightly sees kitsch as pseudo-art, an imposter in the open world of artistic thinking, does not fully emphasize the ethical dimension of the problem. Bad art is an aesthetic problem and a liability for even the best artists. Kitsch is a simulacrum of art and, as such, an expression of evil in which we betray the open history of art for the disingenuously closed system and the absolutization of its power (Badiou). Broch, however, insists that the problem of kitsch is a problem not chiefly of aesthetic values, but of the underlying values that govern one’s selection of aesthetic values or their simulacra. In kitsch, evil in its betrayal

of singular truths, assumes the guise of art, although it hates everything that animates art. In his address to the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” Broch argued that kitsch, a “fixed form of behavior toward life [Lebenshaltung],” is “the evil in the value-system of art.” It simulates art in the way that the system of the Antichrist simulates the system of the Christ, allowing Lucifer’s evil to appear as a divine good.® Although it puts art in the service of abstractions, always familiar and recognizable, these abstractions allow one to avoid hearing anything. (Nero considered the screaming of his subjects to be a form of music.) It speaks the language of noble values, but it is deaf to all value and is “the malice of a universal life-hypocrisy [die Bésartigkeit einer allgemeinen Lebensheuchelei].”°° With Kundera’s Jaromil, for example,

we come to understand the philistinism of lyrical poetry: it retreats from the complexity of the novel’s version of Kant’s Mindigkeit (maturity) and hides in the self-righteous simulacra of thought. When Broch gave his kitsch address and published Zhe Guiltless, he was at Yale University researching and composing the initial stages of a study on mass hysteria. The loneliness of our isolation and alienation from the world creates a tacitly operating “pre-panic,” which drives us “toward irrational values as implied in the feeling of mass fellowship.”°’ This is the group ecstasy of rock concerts that Kundera laments—“Is the century hoping to forget itself in this ecstatic howling? To forget its utopias foundering in horror? To forget its art?” (7B, 235). This prepanicked loneliness makes one vulnerable to a leader “who may provide him with ‘security and ‘super-gratifications.’”® There is, alas, no logical way out of a hermetic

and totalizing system on its own terms—it is the trap that the world has Kitsch m= 129

become. The outside must find some way to break into the closed system, making possible a “conversion,” the “healing . . . change from a closed value system to a more open one.”® And the occasion of this conversion? Por Broch, this breakthrough included the modern novel and its mode of disclosive awakening, which “has made a heroic attempt to stem the tide of kitsch, and how, in spite of this, it has eventually been overwhelmed

by kitsch.”” Kundera’ /mmortality, which confronts both novelists and the novel itself with their respective mortalities, resonates with a comic variation of Broch’s despair: the novel must also confront its own border, beyond which lurks the unbearable lightness of kitsch.

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Idiocy on the Verge of the Novel All being would become a “fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain, dogs and other animals would be at home, nature would extend ev-

erywhere, there would be no more world, no more laughter or love, no more paths or exile. And no more novel. —Francois Ricard, Agnés’s Final Afternoon

Itinerary In chapters 6 and 7 I broadly take up the question of imitation (pipnotc) or repetition in relationship to the universe of the novel. How does the novel take itself up again when it does not claim the power to represent itself to itself, and when its compositional forms are subject to ongoing negotiation? The novel does not recognize itself because it both eschews representation (of its universe and of itself) and continues to experiment with its forms. Ricard: “Few contemporary novelists have taken note of the exhaustion of the Hegelian novelistic model (and the historical and metaphysical consciousness that underlie it) as precisely and perceptively as [Kundera].”’ Nonetheless it is possible to speak of a history of the novel, albeit a history that is a revenge on the grand march of self-representation that we call history. What is this elusive temporality that allows the novel to develop discernible lineages without ceasing to be a question to itself? How do we grasp the history of the novel, “which is not a mere succession of events but an intentional pursuit of values” (AN, 154): Given that this present study locates itself in the mobile border between

the universe of philosophy and the universe of the novel, chapters 6 and 7 will address the problem at hand by examining the borderline persona of the idiot. This word is not one of the sixty-three words that comprise Kundera’s dictionary. The present study opts to explore this word and its

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complex assemblage of meanings in an effort to think about the kind of thinking and writing that straddles these borders.

Toward a Hybrid Genealogy of Idiocy

This book is a minority report, a view from below, and its strategy is broadly genealogical in Foucault’s sense of pushing “the masquerade to its limit” and thereby preparing “the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing. . . . Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.”* Genealogy does not take concepts and characters at their word

but rather investigates them from the perspective of their provenance: what kind of philosophy, what manner of thinking, entitles one to have such concepts and produce such personas? My genealogical strategy will itself undergo a transformation as it transitions from the universe of philosophy to the universe of the novel. Together, chapters 6 and 7 comprise a hybrid genealogy of idiocy located in and around the fluid border where these two universes intersect. But why the idiot? In the idiotic—carnivalesque—history of the idiot (as opposed to the perspective that views the idiot entirely from a supposedly nonidiotic per-

spective), I hope to indicate the confrontation of a conceptual persona proper to the plane of the philosophy at the moment it intermingles with a character proper to the plane of the novel. And who is this mixed breed? Who is this idiot whose maximal intensity straddles two planes, unleashing without reconciliation the power of both? On the plane of the novel, this mélange of conceptual persona and character is the persona of the author. The idiot is the cross pollination of the novelistic character of the author (e.g., the authorial persona of Kundera) with the postpedantic philosopher at the border of the novel.

Jesus Was an Idiot Nietzsche finished The Antichrist in 1888, the last year in which he partici-

pated recognizably in the human community, but the text was not published for another seven years when the editorial nightmare that was his sister, Elisabeth, published an expurgated version. Thirty-six years later, in an extensive essay published in the Stiddeutsche Monatshefte, Josef Hofmiller recuperated a particularly striking passage that Elisabeth had censored.* He did not, however, provide this and other passages as an act of editorial charity. He argued that it was a particularly clear piece of evidence

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for his central contention: the late works of Nietzsche are only comprehensible as the works of a madman. Given that The Antichrist was already not a book for delicate sensibilities, what passage among its ongoing excoriation of the Christian tradition was so troubling that Elisabeth deemed it unpublishable and Hofmiller a symptom of mental illness? It was only three words. Nietzsche begins §29 by announcing that he is concerned with the “psychological type of the Redeemer’—the “type” that may be “contained in the Gospels despite the Gospels.”* Is it still possible to retrieve the type of the Redeemer? Has it been indirectly and unintentionally handed down, concealed within what has been directly and intentionally handed down?

Nietzsche was not the first to attempt a genealogical investigation into the hidden investments of tradition, including the Christian tradition, although Nietzsche had a more suspicious and less “traditional” genealogical eye. This was already apparent in his early grappling with David Strauss (1873), author of Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1835), a work

that attempted to distinguish the historical, nonsupernatural Jesus from within the heritage of the mythic, miracle-performing Jesus.’ Por Strauss, Christianity’s strength rested on its moral authority, not on the mythic overlay that distorted historical fact. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche similarly turns to Ernest Renan, the author of Vie de Jésus (1863), whose work concentrated on psychologically reconstructing the exemplary humanity of Christ, which he claimed to have recuperated from a critical reading of the Gospels. He attempted to discern the psychological type of Jesus, first by rejecting the divinity of Christ and second by attempting to excavate psychological and philological insights into the nature of Jesus's person. In this sense, Renan sounds like he could be Nietzsche’s predecessor. Who was Jesus underneath the deformations to which his legacy gave rise? Nietzsche, however, did not consider Renan a suitable precursor but rather a “Hanswurst in psychologicus,’ a buffoon psychologically speaking.° The term Hanswurst had already appeared a couple of years earlier in Beyond Good and Evilin a critical passage: “Perhaps it is right here that we will still discover the realm of our invention, that realm in which we can still be

original as something like the parodists of world history and the buffoons of God.”’ The latter is a translation of the more archaic Hanswiirste Gottes. Since the sixteenth century, Hanswurst has been used to designate—with derision—the corpulent, as in Hans, who is fat like a Wurst (a sausage). For Luther the Hanswurst was a clumsy fool (ungeschickter Tolpel), and this was

later generalized to include those whose coarseness and rudeness resulted

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from the fact that they were ungainly peasants. He became a character type in German theatrical comedies, especially those of Central Europe. In the folk comedies of Joseph Anton Stranitzky (1676-1726), this type was presented in the guise of Wienerischer Hanswurst (who was porky and vile like a Wienerwurst): an unkempt, obscene, unstylish peasant from Salzburg

who could not speak the learned German of Viennese society. He was obsessed with bodily pleasures and monetary gain, and his cowardly, selfinterested manners displayed immense vulgarity. There was something of Sancho Panza in him and it is already worth noting that variations of this type feature prominently in the Bohemian novel, including Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, or the opportunistic bartender in Hrabal’s J Served the King of England. The Hanswurst, whether an uncoordinated fat person or a maladroit peasant, lived low on the totem pole of social accomplishment, but for Nietzsche, the Hanswiirste Gottes, despite their ignominious social statuses, belonged to the psychological type that Nietzsche dramatized with the persona of Zarathustra. But Renan was—ironically as the one who in psychological terms disavowed the divinity of Jesus—a mere Hanswurst, lacking divine laughter and irony. He ironically lacked a sense of irony; he was just another Sancho Panza in theological garb. The psychological types that Renan attributed to Jesus indicate something about his own psychological type: just another buffoon run amok with a fool’s psychology. Renan was a celebrity as a result of his controversial, but much read and discussed text. (It remains in print to this day, including in an English translation.) One could infer that his buffoonery reflects that of his admirers: they all take themselves too seriously and think too highly of themselves and their buffoonery includes no self-knowledge. Profane buffoons think that the divine buffoons are just buffoons, and that is part of what makes a regular buffoon such a buffoon. Divine buffoons have a sense of their buffoonery, even though buffoonery also indicates the impossibility of conclusive self-knowledge. I am a buffoon before everyone, especially myself.° To be a buffoon paradoxically indicates some self-awareness of one’s inability to represent oneself to oneself. Mundane buffoons, on the other hand, sublimate self-knowledge in their high self-regard.

What psychological types did Renan think characterized Jesus, but which ironically provided evidence of Renan’s own type? Renan “brought

to bear on his explanation of the Jesus type the two most inappropriate concepts that can ever be given: the concept of the genius and the concept of the hero.”? This kind of passage sheds light on why Nietzsche claimed in the preface that “this book belongs to the fewest. Perhaps not one of them

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is even living.’ If one can get beyond the immense scandal of secularizing Jesus, would not most people, even the most ardent atheists, admire Jesus, that ero of patience and charity, and that ingenious deviser of parables and sermons? Was he not rare and accomplished in his works, and an inspira-

tion for us all with his extraordinary life? Did he not succeed in doing what Renan hoped to do for himself: to become a figure commanding our emulation, whether we are religious or not? Heroes indicate what the grand march of humanity admires and wants to emulate. Christians imitate Christ, the Son of God and post-Christians may still emulate Jesus the courageous and brilliant humanist. Nietzsche relegates these chains of repetition to what Kundera’s persona dubbed “moral judo” and denies that Jesus was the founder of Christianity." That dubious distinction belonged to Saint Paul. Christians mistake the blind mimicry of the life of Jesus and institutional conformity with a more radical repetition, a repetition that does not repeat a fixed identity: “the disciple’s love knows nothing of chance.”” It was not Jesus who taught slavish adherence to the letter of his teaching and life. Who are we to blame for the myriad mindless tourists gathering around the pyramids? Do we blame the pyramids for being so grand and mysterious, or do we blame the tourist mind for running in droves to these ancient monuments because this is what everyone else does? Slavish imitation (“the disciples’ love”) knows nothing of Jesus, nor does it grasp the problem of imitation. Moreover, that Jesus would appear as a hero says more about the way that we view him than it does about the type of person that he was. The latter requires an uncommon eye for the sudden illumination of psychological types. If Jesus did not belong either to the hero type or the genius type—such diagnoses make “absolutely no sense in the world in which Jesus lived”’>— what is the Redeemer type? Speaking with the “rigor of a physiologist,” Nietzsche identifies “an entirely different word,” which more aptly diagnoses this type. And what is this word? It was the key term in the three-word phrase censored by Elisabeth Foérster-Nietzsche: “the word idiot.” Is this the madman’s final insult, calling Jesus an idiot? In common parlance, an idiot indicates a person with severe and profound intellectual limitations. In medical parlance, an idiot, as well as an imbecile and a moron, wete once terms to indicate the diagnosis of profound mental retardation, which is itself a term that has been softened more recently into the less barbed intellectual disability. Nietzsche, however, did not eschew Christianity because its central figure had an intellectual disability. In §31, it becomes clear that Nietzsche had in mind a much more

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difficult type to appreciate, namely Dostoevsky’s literary array of idiots, including Prince Lev Myshkin, the title character of The Idiot, but perhaps also Alyosha Karamazov, as well as the latter’s teacher, the Elder Zosima. We know from Twilight of the Idols (1888) that Dostoevsky was “the single psychologist . . . from whom I had something to learn” and that he “belongs to the most beautiful lucky breaks in my life.” Prince Myshkin, who afhrmed his pledge to the murderous Rogozhin to the point in which he utterly disassociated and “no longer understood anything of what they asked him about, and did not recognize the people who came in and surrounded him,””® is, for both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, a repetition of Jesus. I will postpone for now my discussion of Kundera’s own qualms about

this novel; it is enough for now to illuminate the persona of the idiot. Speaking of Jesus as a décadent-type, as he had of the Buddhists, Nietzsche reflects: “one may regret that a Dostoevsky did not live in proximity of this most interesting décadent, | mean someone who knew precisely how to be sensible to the gripping charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sick, and the child-like.” Idiots have an extreme sensibility (Empfindlichkeit), a wide capacity, to experience and to suffer in their thinking and creativity;

their sensibility threshold, so to speak, was large enough to confront the compelling albeit simultaneously shattering excitement (Reiz) to which they are subjected. At the end of The Idiot, Myshkin’s self utterly disintegrated and he collapsed back into “his sick and humiliated condition,’” much like Nietzsche's own embrace of the beleaguered horse on that January morning in Turin. Those who do not have such a penetrating sensibility, such a thoroughgoing, even self-destructive, capacity for suffering, cannot fully affirm the power of the idiot. Only one with an elevated sensibility can affirm the idiot type. But what else does Nietzsche say about this type? Jesus, far from being a hero, was closer to other décadent-types like Epicurus and the Buddhists. Jesus had a “sickly excitable sense of touch.” He was so sensitive that everything made him suffer, and so he fled from the manifold pains of reality to the otherworldly realms of the “ungraspable” and the “incomprehensible.””° Jesus (much like Schopenhauer) belonged to the décadent-Buddhist type, beyond good and evil, eschewing all metaphysical comforts, but suffering from an “outsized excitability of the sensibility.””’ They suffered too easily and hence in the end could no longer suffer their

suffering. They could not bear their ability to bear so much. Zarathustra had such an idiot strain, but it metamorphosed into the camel that can bear its suffering, and into a lion that can roar at morality’s enervation of the camel’s capacity to suffer, and finally into a child who has no need to flee. The Zarathustra-type (the divine buffoon type), unlike the unbearable 136 wu Idiocy on the Verge of the Novel

excitability of the idiot-type, can bear inordinate excitability. It can endure the unbearable lightness of being. The Zarathustra type, the critic of Christianity, emerges out of the idiot type. He is a new type of idiot, an Uberidiot, a divine buffoon. That being said, I do not think that Nietzsche has the last word on the Buddhist tradition (Mahayana eschews the need for flight), on Jesus (was he really an otherworldly, hyper-excitable idiot?), or on Prince Myshkin. There is another universe to which I shall soon turn, in which the idiot type already

speaks to a maximization of afhrmation, even though such affirmation risks and at times cultivates the disintegration of the self. Nietzsche was much closer to the idiot types from which he strove to distance himself. The wedge that Nietzsche drives between himself and Jesus, or Mahayana, or Prince Myshkin, paradoxically displays an unwillingness to more thoroughly suffer this type. Karl Jaspers has provocatively arsued this in his Nietzsche and Christianity, but | think that it was Georges Bataille who, in his remarkable essay, “Nietzsche and Jesus” most lucidly sensed the affinity of types that Nietzsche so ardently denied. Although Nietzsche had accused Jesus of idiocy, “doubtless in the sense given to the word by Dostoevsky,” there remained “a deep kinship between Nietzsche and Jesus. .. . Above all, both were moved by the feeling of sovereignty that possessed them and by an equal certainty that nothing sovereign could come from things. Nietzsche sized up this resemblance. He was in a position opposite Jesus!”*? Nietzsche’s excoriation of Saint Paul, who is suddenly very fashionable again (Agamben, Badiou, Zizek, Taubes, Marion, etc.), also did little to settle the issue. Stanislas Breton’s study of Saint Paul, The Word and the Cross, speaks of the shattering power of the “word [Adyo