Lévy on Kundera

For Milan Kundera’s Honour

I don´t think I care to know if it was really Milan Kundera, the young guy, who, on March 14, 1950, turned up at a Prague Police station, to blow the whistle on his fellow student from the University.

First of all, I don´t believe it.

No, frankly, I can´t possibly fancy the author of Laughable Loves, not in another life, not even in prehistory, assuming the role of a sneak.

Anyway, this affair stinks of coarse manipulation: The authenticity of the presented document not established by any means; the fact that it waited, sound asleep, in the police archives to be taken out, incidentally, on the eve of the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature; the strange attitude of the police which thus denied itself, in times it was almighty, the use of such dreadful a weapon against one of its most outstanding and most annoying opponents.

But this, in fact, is not the problem.

It is not, nor should it be, to find arguments against those easy games to whom it sufficed to wave a piece of paper under the nose, with “period” typewriting on it, to rise to it and to take it for Gospel.

Indeed, the problem lies in the eagerness.

It lies in the febricity of those periodicals which, all around the world, rushed to grasp this magnificent occasion to search for the writer whom, in most cases, they never had had time to read; to catch him in the act; and, as a result of a summary process, to brand him with one of those ex post-indictments which have the sole virtue to make some people rejoice.

The problem, the real one, is the joy, the enthusiasm, the smugness in slander.

The problem is the exhilaration oozing from the plume of so many columnists at the very idea that one of the greatest living writers might have been a pathetic informer, a cheat.

And the problem is the jubilation, all the more obscene as it was felt by those rare ones who had read some bits of him and who believed that, all of a sudden, they got hold of the key they´d missed, a piece of a puzzle, the ultimate reason, hidden, hence decisive, of this particular text of his young days, of this particular page, the outstanding mystery of a novel of his maturity or, better still, of those idiosyncrasies in his CV which have always been so irritating and for which, abruptly, they found their humane, excessively humane explanation: his exile, for instance… his reluctance to formulate, once exiled, any kind of appeal, not even to dissidence… his disturbing choice of French …. His habit, whenever he returned to his country, to check in hotels under assumed names … his rejection of interviews ... aha! There it is! …

It ought to have sounded the alarm, this blunt refusal to abandon his body and soul to the curiosity, to the request of truth and transparency, to the lust for indiscretion which all add up in the principle of what we call nowadays an interview with the author … and we ought to have gotten the message from his obsession, when finally he did give one, to rewrite it completely, word by word, from beginning to end – but in order to wipe off what, for Chris sake? In order to neutralize what obscure, what murky secret? Oh, I see now … now we got it … at long last, we understand … oh! The bad guy … the illustrious sod … thanks to the archives of that wonderful Stalinist police which helped us to see clearly … bravo! for the persevering work of the Thought police which managed to nose out the precious incriminatory piece, the purple letter, the police report no one ever hoped to find … but things happen … it just takes some patience … we can breathe again…

I´m thinking of Milan Kundera

I´m thinking, even though I hardly know him, about the despondency one has to face, being the literary giant and having to watch, in the evening of his life, the mob of spiteful dwarves swarming around, ready to unmask you in order to spit in your face with more ease.

I´m thinking about the mad rage, forlorn, about words which cannot help, about press releases which do have to be produced, while everybody knows they´ll only make things worse for you.

I´m thinking about the stage-managed ballet of the literary war in which, as all will know, second blows do not count, never, and if a review which, to add an extra touch of irony of fate, dares to title itself “Respekt”, decides to square accounts with you and to crush you, there´s no other way for you but to take the blow, send them all to hell and to decide to live on, until the last of your days, along with the despicable shadow which isn´t even the yours.

But I´m also thinking about this very mean epoch for which “Admiration Prohibited” has become the loudest of all slogans and where prevails the spirit of vengeance, bitterness and childish hatred for writers and, more than that, for all that´s great.

I´m saying to myself, how sad the spirit of the times where people take the pride to criminalize, disqualify and smear all they fail to understand or that stands greater than them.

Luckily, the books are here and, that´s yet another rule, they survive to the jut jaws of generalized  squealing.

Bernard-Henri Lévy in "Le Point"

Translated from the French by Alena Hanusová