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of the problem, however, would seem to be indicated by his very clever re–
mark that "great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another
line of work." At the same time, to counter those who lean toward the linear
novel of quotidian life, Kundera says emphatically, "A novel examines not
reality but existence."
Perhaps Kundera has swung somewhat in his novels to one pole of the
fictional equation. This would seem to be indicated by his scorn of the de–
basement of modernism by kitsch . Citing Hermann Broch's definition of
kitsch , Kundera says that:
... kitsch is something more than simply a work in poor taste. There is
a kitsch attitude. Kitsch behavior. The kitsch-man's need for kitsch: it
is the need
to
gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be
moved
to
tears of gratification at one's own reflection .... the opposite
of serious art is light, minor art .. . I never minded Agatha Christie's
detective novels. Whereas Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Horowitz at
the piano, the big Hollywood films like
KrameT venus KrameT, DOC/aT
Zhivago
-
those I detest, deeply, sincerely. And I am more and more
irritated by the kitsch spirit in certain works whose form pretends
to
be modernism.
As
a postscript to Kundera's summary judgement of kitsch, one might
add that kitsch has spread lately to politics and to academic thinking, where it
is not so easily recognized as in its literary form.
So much for the accents of Kundera's novelistic thinking. But, taken as a
whole, his envelopment in modernism reminds us of the gap we took for
granted in the past between the waywardness of the literary mind and the
demands for practicality of the political mind. Kundera himself insists that the
novel pursues human possibilities, not truth. Hence it cannot go beyond the
probing of ambiguities. Indeed, he says further, in keeping with some of the
latest thinking, there are no final truths in existence itself.
This view - or is it a sensibility - which nurtures eccentricity and does
not yield to the demands of political responsibility is bound to clash with the
rational and pragmatic concerns of politics. In recent times, however, so
insistent have been the demands of politics in a world ruled by confusion,
ideology, and rapid change, that politics and literature have tended to be ho–
mogenized. The approach to politics has been estheticized, and as Tsvetan
Todorov noted in a striking piece on Heidegger and de Man in
The Times
Literary Supplement,
the movement to deconstruct values and truths has led
to an emphasis on originality and interesting ideas in political thinking.
As
a
