Kundera Sucks
Did you know that googling “Kundera sucks” gives you just 4 hits, one to a dodgy porn site?
Rob Doyle said that Geoff Dyer said something about Milan Kundera.
Doyle: “As Dyer once wrote with regard to an illustrious precursor of his, Milan Kundera, ‘If we admired less, might we absorb more?’”
I insta-googled it to insta-frown upon Dyer’s shallow reverence for the illustrious precursor of his. The illustrious precursor makes my eyes bleed. But that’s my problem and I’m going to blab it out! When I got to, and I am shitting you not, The Incomparable Delightedness of Reading Kundera, I rolled my eyes so hard they popped out their bloody depth. How could someone with such great insight be so blind?
Dyer later asks, referring to the fact that Kundera and Barthes had the same thought of dark glasses not just as a way of hiding sorrow but also as a symbol of it: “But is there not a beautiful inevitability about some of the most unlikely coincidences?” Exactly! I love inevitable improbabilities, but there are no coincidences in Kundera because everything is staged. I’m not going to flog a deadish horse: you know what I mean. You will have to choose sides now. Are you with them or with me?
Stay with me.
It was relieving that Dyer did not embarrass me with an insight I might have casually ignored. He even made my insights based on one book and some articles look more insightful, so my aversion bias was reinforced by his observations that left me cold. Not even my hero could change my first and lasting impression. I’m not impressed, gentlemen.
Let me associate and paraphrase Dyer talking about academic criticism:
That is the hallmark of kunderaesque writing: it kills everything it touches. Open high-brow books and there is an almost palpable smell of death about them because intellectuals are busy killing everything they touch.
Even Dyer froze when he touched Kundera.
For the record, I don’t hate Kundera, although pretending to gives me a laugh, but I am a little concerned how everyone (including him) overrates his writing method. And to pay my dues: The emperor is wearing panties! Take him down!
That quest for purity and control and form and one more thing I can’t remember, which is as irrational as it gets, I don’t know, it seems that the only thing that is wrong with them is that they are not me, so maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t be wrong, because I’m true to myself with all the cultural, social, psychological and whatever baggage.
Suddenly, I’m talking to a plumber who makes me feel more stupid than Kundera and Dyer combined, because not knowing something does not seem very clever in his world. I could tell you a lot about the totality of freedom, but I can’t tell him what he wants. I don’t know and he doesn’t understand.
It was a bright day and we passed many cars parked along the narrow road because it was icy with deep ruts that could rip off your oil sump. One greenhorn with an SUV even slid off the road inconceivably. I was an old hand going up where nobody dared to go. This is my road. I am at home here.
You can’t change anything. But you can be nice.
As I’m sitting in the sun doing nothing but writing this for a moment, something is not being written and that unwritten stuff — the unwritten — is very nice but inaccessible to you, unless you happen to be sitting in the sun doing nothing but reading this for a moment. Which seems pretty lame compared to where Barthes and Kundera coincide: soggy sunglasses. Sitting in the sun is too accessible and common to have any literary value. Literature is a scalpel, not your everyday knife (a little blunt). But maybe that’s just me, maybe that’s just the way I see it.
I watch the orphaned cat lick and bite his fur vigorously and doze off.
So I’m writing in the sun and I’ll put the phone in my pocket and enjoy the sun melting my face. It doesn’t get much better than this.
