After a fourteen/fifteen year hiatus Milan Kundera, now aged
86, has returned. His last published novel was “L’Ignorance” (‘Ignorance”) in
2000 and therefore the arrival of “La fête de l’insignifiance” (“The Festival
Of Insignificance”) meant a trip to the bookshop was in order. Many readers
would be aware of his best-selling novel “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” (“Nesnesitelná
lehkost bytí”), from mid 1980’s, written in Czech before he switched to French.
Kundera is a meditator on the melancholy; his works are
generally filled with little gems that you have to sort from the worthless deposits
that surround them. And his latest very slim work is no different. However when
you have limited alluvium the gems are hardly worth recovering, the effort is
too great for too small a reward. My edition runs to 115 pages, the font is
larger than usual, there are many blank pages between the seven parts so in
total we are possibly looking at 50-60 pages of text.
In Enrique Vila-Matas’ “The Illogic Of Kassel” (translated
by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom) we have the concept of McGuffin’s, a
red-herring in the text that keeps you reading, a trap, something to hook the
reader in, a devise which has little to do with the plot, but allows the story
to advance. “The Festival of Insignificance” is full of McGuffins.
Part one of our work is called “Introducing the heroes” and
opens with Alain meditating on the navel, as young girls walk around Paris with
a “naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short.”
A book that is going to contemplate the navel? Be warned... of course this
section introduces us to the dramatis personae, a group of friends,
acquaintances who at some stage will also contemplate insignificance.
Part two “the Marionette Theatre” gives us the story of
Stalin relaying his tale of shooting 24 partridges, it is a joke, but
Khrushchev treats it with distain – Stalin is lying:
After a moment Charles said: “Time
moves on. Because of time, first we’re alive – which is to say: indicted and
convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who
knew us, but very soon there’s another change; the dead become the old dead, no
one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of
them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people’s memories, but,
lacking any authentic witness now, any actual recollection, they become
marionettes. Friends, I am fascinated by that story Khrushchev tells in his
memoirs. And I cannot shake off the urge to draw on it and invent a play for
the marionette theatre.”
As our story builds momentum you suddenly find the story cut
off by what seem trivial events, are these ticks, will the whole come into
focus before our book is done? One of
Stalin’s advisers, Kalinin, suffers from an enlarged prostrate, causing him to
be unable to hold his pee, part of Stalin’s humour included lengthy dissertations
to amuse himself on Kalinin’s discomfort. We then learn of this association
through the bizarre naming of a city Kaliningrad.
To hell with the so-called great
men whose names adorn our streets. They all became famous through their
ambitions, their vanity, their lies, their cruelty. Kalinin is the only one
whose name will live on in memory of an ordeal that every human being has experienced,
in memory of a desperate battle that brought misery on no one but himself.
Our book is peppered with insignificant events, which are then
debated, for example Alain is bumped by a rude woman walking in the opposite
direction, he apologises:
“Feeling guilty or not feeling
guilty – I think that’s the whole issue. Life is a struggle of all against all.
It’s a known fact. But how does that struggle work in a society that’s more or
less civilized? People can’t just attack each other the minute they see them.
SO instead they try to cast the shame of culpability on the other. The one who
managed to make the other one guilty will win. The one who confesses his crime
will lose. You’re walking along the street, lost in thought. Along comes a
girl, walking straight ahead as if she were the only person in the world,
looking neither left nor right. You jostle one another. And there it is, the
moment of truth: Who’s going to bawl out the other person, and who’s going to
apologize? It’s a classic situation: Actually, each of them is both the jostled
and the jostler. And yet some people always – immediately, spontaneously –
consider themselves the jostlers, thus in the wrong. And others always –
immediately, spontaneously – consider themselves the jostled ones, therefore in
the right, quick to accuse the other and get him punished. What about you – in that
situation, would you apologize or accuse?”
The impossibility/insignificance of language is also
explored, through a character Caliban, named after the “savage” in Shakespeare’s
‘The Tempest’, he is actually an actor who to remain aloof, has created his own
language, he becomes an actor without an audience. Using this invented “Pakistani”
he ends up in conversation with a Portuguese maid, of course the concept is
just absurd.
I have just reviewed Enrique’s Vila-Matas’ “Bartleby &
Co.” (translated by Johnathan Dunne), where the ‘literature of the No” is
explored in a book with no text, a novel of footnotes. And to delve straight
into this book I suddenly found myself with a number of references to this
literature of the No:
...the greatness of this very
great poet who, out of his humble veneration of poetry, had vowed never to
write a single line.
“You understand, my play for
marionettes, it’s just a game, a crazy idea, I’m not writing it, I’m just
imagining it,”
This is a small work, a limited work, an insignificant work,
but isn’t that the point? Reality, existence aren’t they insignificant?
No comments:
Post a Comment