The aura of the book

I have often fallen in love with books; I don’t mean books themselves as objects (I don’t think), but the content of those books, which is obviously all that should matter.

It has been too many years since I’ve picked up a novel by Milan Kundera, whose works had a profound effect on how I believed prose fiction should be written, even if I was largely unsure under what pretence I was or wasn’t allowed to use a voice like his—as if grasping the “how” and “why” of his particular literary style could only be the result of a confluence of factors largely out of my control.

What I mean is—how does one gain the authority to write the way he does? Who or why should anyone take him seriously? Is it because his mind truly grasps essential truths, or is it due to something much more arbitrary?  For example, what bearing do the “aesthetic” choices he makes regarding the object he is creating (rather than the content he is forwarding) have?—like the style of font he uses and how it appears on the page.

I have often picked up a book, looked at its appearance and been reminded of a text I was fond of that appeared before my eyes in the same way. I’m sure publishers know and exploit this sleight-of-hand, matching literary styles with literary fonts. The cause for dread comes precisely in being deceived by this sleight-of-hand, understanding oneself to write a more favourable review of a book based on nothing more than its appearance, which (unbeknownst to the reviewer) draws forth some unearthed and subconsciously buried predilection (or distaste).

Obviously reading War and Peace in seven-point font is a different experience than reading it in twelve-point font. I guess for the serious reader of fiction, however, it shouldn’t be (should it?).

Based on all these anxieties, I was quite pleased to discover that I was largely unimpressed with Francois Ricard’s essay on the works of Milan Kundera entitled Agnes’ Final Afternoon (2003). In true mimetic fashion, Ricard unabashedly borrows all superficial monikers of the Kundera novel, including choice of font, the use of the short chapter, the generous spacing of lines, and even, the seven-part “movement” of radically differing lengths—meant to mirror the alternating pace and tempo of classical music, a convention, once again, borrowed from Kundera.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then certainly Ricard’s choice of form mirrors his aesthetic project, which is to heap praise upon Kundera and his work, the sort of praise no doubt in short-supply in academic circles. It is hard not to get on board with Ricard’s opening salvo, neither aggressive nor pretentious, but largely candid:

I would like this essay on Kundera’s oeuvre to resemble Agnès final afternoon. To be immersed in the same climate, to keep to the same movement, thus to proceed from the same absorption with the oeuvre before us and, therefore, with the same disregard for the rules and ambitions of scholarly criticism, which we leave behind in Agnès suitcase, tossed casually on the backseat of her car. Perhaps this is not a study or even a book of literary criticism but rather a meditation, which is probably what the misunderstood art of the essay ought to be called.

Agnès is the protagonist of Kundera’s crowning long-prose masterpiece Immortality, and in it Agnès is the veritable stand-in for what Kundera wants the novel to do—that is to transcend existence not by conquering subjectivity, but by articulating how one is to live somewhat adjacent to it. Indeed, as Ricard would have it, Kundera’s greatest aesthetic discovery is not that some manner of final conquest lies at the end of one’s Hegelian search for identity—whereby spiritual peace is to be found by being at “one” with oneself and the universe—but rather, by co-opting the desire for any sort of “oneness” at all and instead diluting subjectivity for the sake of individual obliteration.

The obvious question then is: is this a Western or Eastern metaphysical ideal? Though it is unclear how exactly Ricard would characterize the nature of this “achievement,” his conclusions seem to bend not only toward the West, but more specifically, to a Western aesthetic achievement that could have only been realized through the novel. Agnès’ final afternoon, that is, can be taken as representative of the dialectic (but not ‘dialectical’) end to whatever it is that the novel, as particular art form, takes up as its principal subject matter.

Perhaps it is something uncouth to demand of Ricard a rendering of Eastern philosophy when he makes no pretensions to be making the claims that he does outside of a Western tradition. So what sort of Western philosophical trajectory does Ricard/Kundera claim the novel to be on? The first part of this trajectory (to which Kundera adds to) Ricard highlights through Girard’s analysis of the nineteenth century novel (Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1966)):

Girard’s analysis are inspired mainly by nineteenth-century works (Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust, with a retrospective detour to Don Quixote), by what I’ve called the “Hegelian” type of novel, built on the relentless fighting between the individual and the world … There is none of this in the Kunderian character … Agnès final afternoon is of course set in the altitude and pure air of the mountains [which may signify a “vertical” ascendance or transcendence of worldly desire].

But the interior experience of which it is the outcome, and which equally marks the existence of the other “principal” Kundera characters, is not so much the discovery of a tranquil summit overlooking the plain where the noise and fury of the world are raging, but rather of a periphery, of a remote, abandoned place, a kind of desert island where it’s not a matter of seeing or of triumphing over someone or something, but rather of no longer being seen, of withdrawing, of escaping all adversaries. The movement that leads to this place is thus not vertical but lateral”.

Because the distinction between “vertical” and “horizontal” is key to what Ricard says Kundera is saying, it is worth quoting him (Ricard) at length. What lies at the dialectic end of numerous petty fights throughout life (carried out for the sake of asserting one’s self and identity in the world) is not a “fight-to-end-all-fights,” through which the outer world is conquered and inner peace attained. Rather, it is a renunciation, a foregoing of the value of human significance, something akin to (though Ricard does not raise the spectre of) nihilism:

For Agnès’s experience is not so much one of stretching of the self to the size of the landscape as one of forgetting, the nullification of all subjectivity. The difference is important. Certainly, the repose and the “happiness” this experience brings Agnès come from the calming—at least momentarily—of the conflict between soul and world. But here the calming does not follow from a victory of the self over the hostility or strangeness of the world—as occurs, for example, in the reveries of Rousseau’s solitary walker, who feels “consolation, hope, and peace” because nature finally allows him to be “occupied only with [his] self.”

Concluding on the above, Ricard says this a bit later on:

The conflicts are not denied, they are abandoned; and it is neither his innocence nor his strength that opens the doors of this idyll to the exiled person; it is only his refusal to fight, the exhaustion of all his innocence and strength.

Ricard addresses what one is to do in this post-novelistic world is by championing the example of the libertine, whose curiosity with the world stems not from an obsession with women per se, but with an obsession with the variety to be discovered through, ironically enough, repetition. He takes this quote from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where he (Kundera) talks about the womanizing habits of his character, Tomas:

There is always the small part [of women] that is unimaginable …. Using numbers, we might say that [in human beings] there is one-millionth part dissimilarity to nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine millionth parts similarity. Tomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other worlds, with the one-millionth part that make a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.

The libertine is less interested, that is, with the “lyricism” of the poet, and hence, his outlook is more “objective,” as his sentiment displays a desire to accept what is given to him by the world rather than seeking to alter or change it. The libertine’s search for meaning (more precisely: knowledge) does not begin by seeking out a preconceived metaphysical notion of “purity” or (romantic) love. In fact, he is necessarily suspicious of lofty phrases and “overstuffed significance.” He instead “cultivates amours with no tomorrow and which for that reason he makes into a bunch of small masterpieces,” each unique in its own way and not causally connected to one another in the least.

A stunning conclusion to be sure, one worthy of serious reflection; but Ricard, for all his pretension to “leave behind” the “rules and ambitions of scholarly criticism” does Kundera’s oeuvre a disservice not because he gets Kundera wrong, but mostly because where he gets it right, he is largely redundant, rehashing much of the same conclusions Kundera himself explicitly puts forward in his two marvelous works of literary criticism, The Art of the Novel (1986) and Testaments Betrayed (1992).

Where Ricard’s book falls short is in his inability to address, with any kind of scholarly concern, those inconsistencies which creep up in his own rendering of Kundera’s aesthetic project. For example, he talks about the prosaic quality of Kundera’s work, which allows him (Kundera) to say “with less exaggeration” than most: “[i]f a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won’t be able to understand it.” Yet previously, Ricard has warned us that one can enter the Kundera oeuvre “through any portal and travel through it in any order.”

Now I suppose one can conceive of ‘beginning anywhere,’ as a sentiment not out of line with ‘reading thoroughly.’ Yet to ‘begin anywhere’ seems to me a way of reading largely congruent with “skipping” pages, a practice both Kundera and Ricard warn us we must take pains to avoid. Perhaps I’m being finicky. But here’s another example: going back to his emphasis of the prosaic quality of Kundera’s prose, Ricard links Kundera’s style to that of “poetry,” though earlier, he has warned us that poets are often guilty of committing a sort of “lyrical” fraud through the “romantic lie” of the “epic” or the “beautiful.” Hence the novelist “is always born atop the demolished homestead of his own lyricism” (Kundera qtd. in Ricard).

One could suppose that here Kundera/Ricard is focusing on the functional rather than the aesthetic value of poetry, where poetic words attest to a “sparseness” and “juxtaposition of themes” the chronological novel is otherwise averse to. This may indeed be the case, but Ricard does not make this clear.

Furthermore, Ricard says that the “modern cult of ‘writing’ and that of the ‘work of the signifier’ … claims to emancipate language by assigning it no aim but its own shimmer”. This seems to be in line with what Ricard says earlier about the successful novel, in its desire to “respect none of the rules of reasoning or of ‘scientific’ demonstration … [being] never subjected to the necessity of proving and drawing a conclusion.” Yet he also says that Kundera’s “style has a classic tinge to it; entirely dedicated to the meaning it must transmit, [and thus] is an essentially modest style that tend[s] toward the bareness and clarity of aphorism” (my emphasis).

If there is, as the reader suspects, some ‘truth’ to this paradoxical view of literature and what it ought to do (i.e., in both having a meaning without imparting a meaning), then what the reader expects of Ricard is some sort of a sustained and rigourous critical attempt at resolving this contradiction—something which , one feels, Kundera’s work demands. Again, Ricard largely squanders the opportunity. His is a work of blissful inspiration to be sure, and at times, his prose is meticulous and masterful (particularly his third section and first major “movement” on Paths: Motifs, Themes, Characters). Yet too often we cannot help but be skeptical of the very “hypertrophy of the soul” both he and Kundera warn us to be wary of.

Discussing the persistence of “kitsch” in the novel, that is, the all-too-ready desire to be “in agreement” with being (i.e., with the beautiful and the sacred), Ricard/Kundera remind us that too often lyric poets (in particular) deny the “existence of shit” for the sake of signifying everything and denying nothing . “Innocence” (66), among other things (i.e., a world without “shit”) is turned into a false prophet.

In this way, the metaphysical unreality of communal immaturity is foisted upon us, undermining the physical reality of the libertine’s (as the opposing figure to the “lyricist”) repetitive engagement with the world. In fact, so radical is this new novelistic “ethic” that Ricard/Kundera seems to consider the libertine’s example the least “egocentric,” while the lyricist’s is more indicative of an “immaturity,” “testif[ying] far more to … [a] nonchalant self-love”. This may be the case, though in wanting to establish the libertine’s example as any sort of “ethic” at all, it seems to me that Ricard makes precisely the sort of “lyrical” move toward an ethic grounded in a unification of human experience rather than a dispersal of it.

If the libertine’s example is indeed the most “ethical,” the obvious next question is: is it sustainable? While Ricard claims that it is (with brief examples in his final Repose), such concerns are not given the philosophical attention they deserve. As such, the claim to have found “meaning” in the works of Milan Kundera is itself subject to eradication upon which the next novelist will build his epistemological edifice. That is, unless the ethical is addressed as something in line with human maturity (rather than immaturity), Ricard and Kundera, by virtue of their very own premises, will never find themselves beyond the realm of kitsch:

[T]his feeling, this need for “agreement with being,” is throughout Kundera’s oeuvre a subject of privileged meditation, about which one of the great discoveries might rightly be expressed like this: the domain of innocence, of lyrical blindness and of kitsch is boundless. “For none among us,” writes the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.”

Is this sort of “novelistic” truth disguisable as anything other than nihilism? Ricard tries to save face, but in doing so, he himself succumbs to a ‘romantic lie.’  The definitive work isolating the currents of optimism in Kundera’s oeuvre remains to be written. The threat of nihilism may indeed be so great that most scholars steer clear. In this vein, Ricard should be lauded for his attempt, despite coming up short in the end.

 

Baramamania

I’ve been making my way through President Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope. The book has so obviously been required reading for any reputable columnist trying to gauge Obamamania. Anyone following President Obama in the print media is bound to have come across an anecdote or two taken from Audacity.

I had first got critical wind of it when I read Andrew Sullivan’s piece on Why Obama Matters, sometime during the primaries. It is on page three that he credits a “candid” and “haunting” voice to President Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father—written in a state of ‘pre-Presidential innocence’—while dismissing, rather hastily, the fruits of the second, equally rich in introspection—perhaps less personal but no less intriguing or profound (to me). Here is a wonderfully “candid” passage, where President Obama is discussing the strain of talking to the media:

Every statement I made would be subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of pundit, interpreted in ways over which I had no control, and combed through for a potential error, misstatement, omission, or contradiction that might be filed away by the opposition party and appear in an unpleasant TV ad somewhere down the road. In an environment in which a single ill-considered remark can generate more bad publicity than year s of ill-considered policies, it should come as no surprise to me that on Capitol Hill jokes got screened, irony became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon, and passion was considered downright dangerous. I started to wonder how long it took for a politician to internalize all this; how long before the committee of scribes and editors and censors took residence in your head; how long before even the “candid” moments became scripted, so that you choked up or expressed outrage only on cue.

I made an earlier posting where I discussed the burden of sending language out into the world only to have it returned to you in a myriad number of ways—that is, to ask whether such a reality is in fact a burden or something to be celebrated.

I can only answer that such ‘celebration’ occurs in a setting a bit less adversarial, where the stakes are a bit less grave, than a political one. The academy is just such a setting—where people tend not to keep score in terms of “spontaneity,” but precisely in terms of deliberation.

This may raise the stakes or lower them. Superficial readings (by others of you) can be dismissed with equally superficial rationalizations. But for those of us who fear (our own) rationalizations, fear what and who they make us become, such a political atmosphere is entirely terrifying (President Obama’s discussion here of ‘internalization’ is precisely that of a loss of identity).

The academy, though far from efficient, is a haven if only because one can hope for the possibility of being interpreted correctly. Though this assumption may be detrimental in the academic sphere as in a political one, one can hardly contend that it is as detrimental.

To be misunderstood by a small coterie of intellectual peers makes easy rationalization impossible; one must address one’s peers and gain their proper acknowledgement.  I suppose also one must address the masses lest he/she be faced with the reality of a misunderstanding during every waking moment of his/her life. Yet, to be misunderstood by a massive audience of strangers is to deal with superficial assessments of one’s self- worth daily. Such assessements can be brushed off just as superficially.  And though such assessments may possess limited power in the short-term, the trick is to fight them off in the long term—which is equivalent, in some respects to shutting oneself off from the world.

But then, one is equally shut off from the world in accepting mass praise. Who is more of a scoundrel—the popular politician or the serious academic (for avoiding, say, the praise of the masses)? I am not entirely sure, but I do know that President Obama can hold his ground in either camp. This makes him either an uber-scoundrel or a model of a man—comfortable enough in his own skin to defer ordinary misunderstandings, and willing to undergo extraordinary scrutiny.