Sound Fury and Significance

Milan Kundera's passing took me back to the time I discovered - by sheer chance - his novel 'Life Is Elsewhere'. 

The impact it had on my twenty year old self was nothing like anything felt from any other novel before - or since.

It is easy to say 'before'. 
But admitting to 'since' is an admission to inadequacies in tastes and maturity.

Surely his Unbearable Lightness... is a better novel. Surely there are greater litterateurs.

But this is the novel 'spoke to me' the most. A feeling I sought in the other works I came to read later and was unable to connect with as well.

But did you read 'Life is Elsewhere' again to see if your impression has changed over time?

Or did you not do that, precisely because you worried it may not hold up?

This may be fair gotcha questions to be ask about many other novels.
But not about this one.

For this novel is about maturity itself. 

There are many works of art whose appeal to the reader's exaggerated sense of self-exceptionalisation. The popularity of those works- insofar as they speak to a universality of the experience expiated therein- ought to deflate readerly delusions. But ironically they tend to only heighten self-assessments of refinement!

What sets Life is Elsewhere apart (of course, I would say so wouldn't I !)  is the pervasive self-awareness of the artistic state of mind which precedes the minor detail of artistic creation itself.

While it is a bit of Kundera signature to interject the proceedings of the narratives in his novels to offer his aphoristic assertions, in Life is Elsewhere they are woven into the core concerns of the novel/lead in ways more organic than I found in many other works. 

Segue to the unifying theme of this blog: Me, Myself & I-read

Most of the artists I like tend to be folks who are hyper-aware of the inherent distancing from the primal experience of life, that is occasioned when one adopts an attitude towards art that is best expressed in Oscar Wilde's preface to his 'The Picture of Dorian Gray': "Vice and Virtue are to the artist, material for art"

For instance, Louis CK's I Love You Daddy , while principally being about many many other things, is also about the artistic attitude being utterly at odds with living itself, and a direct tribute to the master Woody Allen's wrestling with such issues. (For a the best essay on the internet about this niche film, please click here)

In his 2017, Wonder Wheel, Woody had tried one more exploration of the 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (previously realised in the 2013 film Blue Jasmine)

Whereas Woody took the edge off the 'art v life' conundrum in his works like 'Deconstructing Harry' with deceptively distracting humour, in Wonder Wheel he lays the eerie core bare. The Terry Malloy "I coulda had class" smoulder is poured into an end-note of chilling descent in Wonder Wheel. 

This was harshly criticised as an inadequately realised vision - which it may very well be the takeaway for those who value mere objectivity.

What I was particularly drawn to, was the portrayal of the aspirant writer life-guard as man who has actually been in the navy and seen the world feels, but considers himself experientially inadequate and is unironically drawn to a young woman running away from suffering and threat. Not only that, he actually verbalises this as the basis for his attraction!

While trying to articulate why this film - and much of the much maligned 'Late Woody' - hits -the-spot so well, I was reminded of Kundera's approach to the art-life duality.  

I wanted to expand on this stub by connecting the two and while researching (the things I do for you, dear reader!) I chanced upon this exceedingly well-argued essay by one Prof. Daniel Just:  Milan Kundera's Theory of the Novel as a Quest for Maturity

Back to Kundera

Truth be told the - I dredged it upon from the bookmarks and finally got around to reading it only to reading only this week.

It was a thorough engagement with - what seems to have been - Kundera's careerlong concern with the place of the novel as a compass for life itself : novel's very idea being the presentation of irreducible complexity, the terrifying 'guideless'ness in a world where we live only once, the difficulty to take life, people, moralistic finalities seriously, but the inevitability of having to contend with these conundrums perpetually, the inevitability of a good degree of posturing, even in the most earnest of stances and so on.

Heck, this very blog's title is inspired by the Kundera-vian idea of 'life' - where we accumulate mere(!) anecdotal evidence for what we gnawingly always new but we aren't the better for knowing in any which way. 

If anything the precocity only affords an exclusion from the emotions than animate others t, if not a degree of numbing from feeling authentic emotions.

Prof.Just argues well that mine is a reductive takeaway and that Kundera's position on maturity is that it deepens rather than detracts from the engagement with experience. I'll rest content with quoting:

Kundera’s theory and practice of the novel, maturity often appears as an
unspoken antithesis to immaturity, which in turn manifests itself via the proxy
of a “lyrical age,” a period of inexperience and a perspective on life that is lacking
in critical insight

the predicament of this period is encapsulated in the formula
“life is elsewhere,” itself the title of a Kundera novel, Život je jinde (Life is Elsewhere), in which the protagonist, Jaromil, finds that the exuberance, fullness, and vitality of life is
always missing. Moreover, in the lyrical age, disappointments are inevitable and changes of strategies for seizing the missing fullness of life ineffectual. Thus, when Jaromil turns away from Modernist poetry to become a Revolutionary poet, he encounters the same emptiness and disillusionment. He remains locked within the same lyrical self-involvement — never finding what he is looking for, but continuing to be unwavering in his convictions and always sure of himself.

The original title that Kundera intended for 'Life Is Elsewhere' is 'The Lyrical Age'. While not many would misunderstand Age to be an era (காலம்), there is a risk this may have been misunderstood as a phase (பருவம்). This is probably why Kundera ironically chose a more 'poetic' title. 

As Život je jinde shows, the lyrical age is more than a period in an individual’s
life. It is an attitude toward life that, irrespective of age, wishes to reclaim experience
in its totality. Nor is this lyricism a consequence of modernity. For Kundera,
lyricism is an integral part of the human condition, an outcome of basic processes
that take place in the human psyche, irrespective of the historical era.

Further, Prof.Just clarifies:

Kundera’s description of the extraordinary moments of amazement, quiet reconciliation,
and beauty of life’s density sounds lyrical, not because it is vague, but
because it resembles poetic clichés. But in spite of this resemblance, the fact
remains that these formulations do not describe a lyricism that excludes reflection
and critical thought. They are, one might say, poetic but not lyrical.
As a form of anti-lyrical poetics, a literary vehicle for fresh ideas and their
unique expression, and a cultural medium that brings to our attention life in its
entirety and concreteness, the novel, as Kundera theorizes it, teaches us how to be
mature. This maturity is not the Bildungsroman ideal of acculturation and coming
to terms with reality. Neither is it a result of accumulating functional knowledge.

This is the level of precision of his artistry which was conspicuously absent in the obituary litanies.