Many people liked Milan Kundera’s “Die Weltliteratur” (The New Yorker, 8 January 2007, 28-35), but I was slightly bored – perhaps because I am so familiar with the issues this piece raises, but also because it seemed so provincial, limited as it is to Europe and to a few very classic authors. I do realize that Europe is a large and varied place, that it is where Kundera lives, that the authors he cites provide enough reading material for a lifetime, and that this was only a short article. But it is as though Kundera were unaware of the existence of other places (except for Colombia, from whence hails our friend Gabo), or of any writers other than the ones he cites. Then, despite the apparent assumption that Europe is the world (die Welt), there is this sentence: “…the national problematic may be more complex, more grave in Europe than elsewhere, but in any case it is different there.” (28) Different from where? Kundera never says.
Two of his points, however, fit my current mood and concerns well enough to repeat here. The first of these is that modern art is not the same thing, nor does it mean the same thing everywhere.
What was “modern art,” that intriguing storm of the first third of the twentieth century? A radical revolt against the aesthetic of the past; that is obvious, of course, except that the pasts were not alike. In France, modern art – anti-rationalist, anti-classicist, anti-realist, anti-naturalist – extended the great lyrical rebellion of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. It found its privileged expression in painting and, above all, in poetry, which was its chosen art. The novel, by contrast, was anaethematized (most notably by the Surrealists); it was considered outmoded, forever sealed in its conventional form. In Central Europe, the situation was different: opposition to the ecstatic, romantic, sentimental musical tradition led the modernism of a few geniuses, the most original ones, toward the art that is the privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony; that is, toward the novel. (33)
The other of Kundera’s points I wish to underscore is contained in the section “Antimodern Modernism.” See this key passage:
In “Ferdydurke,” Gombrowicz got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century: until then, mankind was divided in two – those who defended the status quo and those who sought to change it. Then History began to accelerate: whereas, in the past, man had lived continuously in the same setting, in a society that changed only very slowly, now the momvent arrived when he suddenly began to feel History moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk; the status quo was in motion! All at once, being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with History on the Move! Which meant that a person could be both progressive and conformist, conservative and a rebel, at the same time! (35)
This being the situation, it became common knowledge that “only a person who delights in being modern is genuinely modern.” And that, of course, disables some critical capacities.
Kundera ends:
It was then that a certain number of Rimbaud’s heirs grasped this extraordinary thing: today, the only modernism worthy of the name is antimodern modernism. (35)
That point has been made before, and I understand it. Yet I do not wish to return to what my father aptly calls “the era before ether.” And yet again it is those critical, delightfully dissonant works in which modernity and tradition ring against each other, that I call modern art.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Thanks for the heads up on the Kundera article.
I love his writing, and yes his analysis of the Western Canon is always a bit subversive since he comes from the very edge of Europe . . . an old Hapsburg dominion/Soviet satellite. To those in real West, he is a bit exotic, explaining in some sage like manner the origin of the European novel, its history and its connection to philosophy.
But I agree, if you align his literary essays to other artistic movements and projects, say those in the New World, his Eurocentricism almost drives you to thinking that the world is flat.
I will have to revisit him, I have had some experience that should help me round out my view.
Whale, yes. He’s sort of in between Eurocentric and not. The Emeritus Professor (a character I have mentioned on this blog before – an actual person who sometimes sends e-mail after reading this blog, but who never comments – but whom I have decided at this moment to transmute into a composite character) – anyway, the Emeritus Professor says make no mistake, Kundera’s points are important, even if not new. He emphasizes that in fact Kafka would not have become famous if he had written in Czech.
His favorite point of Kundera’s, though – and it is worth repeating, although I did not in my post because it is an academically oriented point and this is not an academic blog – is that American professors of foreign literatures, in order to show their expertise as specialists, have to reproduce the provincialism/nationalism Kundera deplores.
The answer to this, of course, is to do away with these national literature departments and just have departments of literature, say I.
I don’t think that Kundera is anything-centric. He just writes about stuff he knows, like everybody else, but his point of view is global, universalist. He makes his points with things he knows, but if he could, he would cite things in
Tibetan, Samoan, etc., whatever was appropriate to what he was thinking. The ideal member of your imaginary Department of Literature would do the same, but in reality the members of such a department in the United States would simply be the same old English Department, as ignorant of Die Weltliteratur as the current English professors are. The same would be the case, though less virulently, in Sweden, Germany, Japan, etc.. The problem is: how can you read Vallejo without really knowing Spanish and a hell of a lot about Peru, Spain, Paris, etc.?
“The problem is: how can you read Vallejo without really knowing Spanish and a hell of a lot about Peru, Spain, Paris, etc.?”
EP – This is the key problem. Ya gotta be freakin’ smart and well informed if you are going to deal with somebody else who is also freakin’ smart and who has a life and readings very different from your own. That means knowing a few Foreign Languages, for starters.
On the Same Old English Department, though, there are a few Comp. Lit. departments which do escape this malaise. What is going on with the UCSD literature program? They seemed to be doing quite well in terms of being specialists, and yet actually having global context, last I checked.
Otherwise your comment is exactly what I would have said on the Kundera article at one point. I do not disagree with it, and in graduate school, I would have carried it as a talisman to protect myself against the myopic English Department!
It is just that now I would say more. For instance, I am not convinced one can extrapolate ‘universality’ from a single place, and I am wary of extrapolating it from Europe – even from the margins of Europe. And there is a difference between quoting Tibetan to shore up a Western point, and actually learning Tibetan and learning from it. (Cf. Said, Orientalism.)
And those, I think are actually the same points as you made about English departments, and about Vallejo.
Or very similar ones.
I actually have much more to say and recount about these matters, so I deduce that the Kundera article was not ‘boring’ after all – despite my first impression! 🙂