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at least a half-century in providing the symbols of Good and Evil to
the great army of [people] who are as avid for values as they are
incapable of discriminating among them. That is why the gulag will
never supplant Nazism as a symbol of absolute evil in the European
consc iousness . That is why people hold massive demonstrations
against the war in Vietnam and not against the war in Mghanistan.
Vietnam, colonialism, racism , imperialism, fascism, Nazism - all these
worlds correspond like the colors and sounds in Baudelaire's poem,
while the Mghanistan war is, so to speak,
syrnbolically rnute,
or at any rate
beyond the magic circle of absolute Evil, the geyse.- of symbols.
469
As Kundera leaps in and out of his subject, he makes a number of
striking remarks. For example, he says of Dostoevsky that he grasped the
madness of reason, and of Tolstoy that he uncovered the intrusions oflogic.
Flaubert, he says, discovered stupidity. He characterizes the realm of Kafka
as the absolute of the serious and that of Schweik the absolute of the unseri–
ous. The novelist, says Kundera at another point, is neither historian nor
prophet: he is an explorer of existence. But behind these seemingly discon–
nected observations are Kundera's two large themes: the centrality of Eu–
rope and the tradition ofliterary modernism, two ideas that are connected
and at the same time constitute the large paradoxes in Kundera's thinking. It
is surely a paradox, and one leading to some of Kundera's inventiveness and
unpredictability, that this exile from a Russian satellite, reared on the provin–
cialism of Stalinism, should have become a spokesman for the culture of Eu–
rope - which he rightly distinguishes from the territory. In this respect, Kun–
dera is a traditionalist and a modernist, in flagrant opposition to those
fashionable attitudes today that would discard the past. Thus he is quite dis–
missive of the cult of verisimilitude in fiction. And in upholding the true values
of modernism, Kundera strikes out against what he calls "establishment
modernism," which he describes as the "modernism of fixed rules, the
modernism of the university...." In an age of specialization, "establishment
modernism," says Kundera , "has proscribed the notion of totality . . .
According to establishment modernism, an impregnable boundary separates
the 'modern' novel from the 'traditional' nove\."
Another paradox - or contradiction - that strikes one is that the mod–
ernism of Kundera's "novelistic essays," as he calls them, raise fewer ques–
tions than his essayistic novels. Though his novels are masterful in their
originality and complexity, they sometimes do not maintain a balance be–
tween pure narrative and intellectual stylization. Perhaps too much should not
be made of this apparent disjunction, for much contemporary fiction is either
too preoccupied with the story or too negligent of it. That Kundera is aware