Milan Kundera

[Sitaram]

The Circling of Vultures and Eagles

Milan Kundera defines a critic as someone who discovers other people's discoveries.

An eagle is noble, the symbol of churches and nations. A vulture is ignoble and despised, gracing no flag or carpet. But both eagles and vultures are flighted scavengers which circle and wait.

I try to read through this thread from beginning to end each day. My fllights of fancy take a circular path. Vultures such as we must patiently circle for days or weeks before we can finally land and take a bite from our corpse or corpus.

 

[Sitaram]

Lines as the Arrow of Tragedy Missing the Mark

As I meditate upon this thread, I am thinking of circles and lines. Lines make me think of "straight as an arrow". Arrows make me think of Aristotle's Poetics where he uses the Greek word hamarteia to denote the tragic flaw of a hero. Hamarteia was originally a term used in archery. Hamartenein means to "miss the mark." In a competition, even hitting the target, but missing the bullseye, constitutes hamarteia. Hamarteia becomes the Greek word used in the Epistles to denote sin.

In Hebrew, the word KHATAUAU is the analog of the Greek hamarteia. The Greek term has the sense of a missing of the goal, or a straying away from the right path.

The Hebrew "Khata" carries a meaning more closely related to "taking the wrong path" which is considerably different than the Greek "hamartia" - "missing the mark."


One may take the position that anything less than absolute perfection in performance would be "missing the mark."

Can you see any connection between this duo of hamarteia and khata and our two very different games, badminton and goodminton?


The Hebrew word "Khata", on the other hand, is related much more closely to a lifestyle perspective. "Walking the wrong path" is less concerned about individual actions than overall ways of living.

The Old Testament is concerned with actions of the individual, but the emphasis seems to be centered around how a person lives life, not on the specific things that he or she does. Khata reflects this. We see this emphasis also in the Hebrew word for repentance, "shub." "Shub" means "to turn around," which is what one does when correcting for walking the wrong path. The New Testament word, "metanoein" (to repent) also carries the connotation of change, lit. "changing one's mind," but Hebrew is a more visual language.

We may see errors in terms of straight lines. We may see repentance or regret in terms of circles. But, may we ever really return to the same place twice, on the banks of Heraclitus' river?

 

[Sitaram]

e. e. cummings

What you said about the painting and Beatrice reminded me of Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent. The main female character – I always forget characters’ names – had two husbands. The first, an Irish politician worshipped her, put her in a pedestal; the second, a Mexican revolutionary general, was her master. Neither of them saw in her a human being – she was an unreachable queen, a creation of a male imagination or a slave, dominated by elementary forces. In both cases she was a prisoner, although Lawrence did not see it that way. He thought she was free in the second case. The girls in the painting are prisoners and at least one of them is aware of it and is dreaming of freedom, of being rescued, of running away.

Here is an on-line text version of D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/l41p/


The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. - e. e. cummings

In Pynchon's passage, Varo's painting helps Oedipa to realize that she is the sort of prisoner which cummings describes.

Varo's painting is the human mind and culture itself, fabricating its world on the fly, just as our sense of consciousness is fabricated in the brain from moment to moment. Our world is a heaven or hell of our own making. Reality is something we devise and there are different kinds of reality.


In the opening pages of Immortality Milan Kundera speaks at some length about the state between waking and sleeping.

Robert Ornstein studied the manner in which the limbic system synthesizes our moment-to-moment experience of consciousness.


Scientists study the transitory state between waking and sleeping:


http://dreaming.diebitch.net/exploring_the_world_of_lucid_dreaming.pdf

Sometimes the REM systems don’t turn on or off at the same time. For example, you may awaken partially from REM sleep, before the paralysis system turns off, so that your body is still paralyzed even though you are
otherwise awake. Sleep paralysis, as this condition is called, can occur while people are falling asleep (rarely) or waking up (more frequently). If you don’t know what’s happening, your first experience with sleep paralysis can terrifying. People typically struggle in a fruitless effort re or to fully wake up. In fact, such emotional panic reactions are completely counterproductive; they are likely to stimulate the limbic (emotional) areas of the brain
and cause the REM state to persist. The fact is, sleep paralysis is harmless. Sometimes when it happens to you, you feel as if you are suffocating or in
the presence of a nameless evil. But this is just the way your half-dreaming brain interprets these abnormal conditions: something terrible must be happening! The medieval stories of incubus attacks (malevolent spirits
believed to descend upon and have sex with sleeping women) probably derived from fantastically overinterpreted experiences of sleep paralysis. The next time you experience sleep paralysis, simply remember to relax. Remind yourself that you are in the same state now as you are several hours every night during REM sleep. It will do you no harm and will pass in a few minutes. Sleep paralysis is not only nothing to be frightened of, it can be something to be sought after and cultivated. Whenever you experience sleep paralysis you are on the threshold REM sleep. You have, as it were, one foot in the dream state and one in the waking state. Just step over and you’re in the world of lucid dreams.

 

[Sitaram]

A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose

A rose by any other name is still a rose, but how many would agree and how long it took before someone realised that that was the case?

I am glad you brought up Gertrude Stein, since Immortality concerns Hemingway, and what is a Hemingway without a Gertrude Stein.

My high school teacher enlighted us once by point out that (A rose is a rose) is a rose; that is, the simple tautology or solepsism itself is beautiful, like a flower.
=================================

A novel is a long story composed of many little stories or events which we call episodes.

I spent two hours last night trying to find such a passage in one of Milan Kundera's novels. I searched three of his novels manually, flipping the pages. I gave up and went to bed. I couldn't sleep and I though, perhaps it is really in Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot", but it was not. I was certain that I had read it in Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." I was correct! I found what I was looking for, at last, on page 129.

Passing a wolf, a beaver, and a tiger, they came to a wire fence where ostriches were.

There were six of them. When they caught sight of Tamina and Hugo, they ran toward them. Now bunched up and pressing against the fence, they stretched out their long necks, stared, and opened their straight, broad bills. They opened and closed them feverishly, with unbelievable speed, as if they were trying to outtalk one another. But these bills were hopelessly mute, making not the slightest sound...

Tamina gazed bewitched, as the ostriches kept on talking more and more insistently....

"It was as if they were trying to tell me something very important. But what? What were they trying to tell me?"

Much later in the book, I shall have to search where, a reference is made to this scene. We realize that for Kundera, the behavior of the ostriches represents the behavior of the majority of people, mouths moving constantly, urgently, but saying nothing. The reader is fascinated by the initial scene with the ostriches, wondering what it might mean and what Kundera is trying to tell us. We are shocked and amused, much later in the book, when we realize what it is that Kundera is trying to tell us.

Notice how perfectly this device of the Osteriches is INL (Native Language Independent). Such a device would survive and work in any translation.

=================================

The painting was part of a tryptic. The painter said it represented her years in a convent school. The embroidery represents creation, women as creators. The hooded figure in the centre reading is simply that. There was always a nun reading when the girls were doing needle work, so they would not talk and would not think. That was the purpose of reading during meals and other tasks in monasteries and convents.

You see, I actually do re-read these threads and pay attention. I hope to say more about this when I have more time available, on the week-end.
You raise an important question.

It seems to me that if Varo had an "only this and nothing more" mentality, then she would not have been a Surrealist. I think she would have been like that artist who did all the Saturday Evening Post covers, Norman Rockwell.

http://www.nrm.org/norman/

Of course, it is always possible that I am mistaken. And, even if I am not mistaken, it is always possible that I am boring.

Question: When is it that a Surrealist is mistaken?
Answer: When they are boring.

The goal of the Surrealist is to capture our imagination. But the imagination is unique in that it is only in captivity that it finds freedom.

 

[Sitaram]

Milan Kundera on Tragedy

This morning, I would like to touch upon something Milan Kundera brings up, regarding tragedy, both in The Unbearable Lightness of Being TULOB and also in The Art of the Novel.

We shall be striving to articulate the nature of tragedy in modern drama, and how it differs (if it differs) from the tragedy of Shakespeare, and how they both differ from the tragedies of Sophocles.

As a preface to our exploration of what Kundera said, let us consider our own choices in a hypothetical scenario in which we are the victim.

Consider this exercise a moral calculus, a what-if scenario in the spreadsheet of the imagination. It is an interactive create-your-own-tragedy in which fate, necessity, and your freewill all interact. This will be an unusual way for you to step into the shoes of Oedipus and evaluate his choices, for he did have choices, inspite of the tragic notion of ineluctible Fate.

Imagine yourself and your child being held prisoner by a madman who has total control over you both. Now, some who read this will be male and others, female, some shall be old, some shall be young, some with children of your own. You are free, in this what-if scenario, to imagine yourselves as a mother with a daughter, or with a son, or as a father with a daughter or a son.

Now, this mad man, who presently has you in his clutches, is quite well known. He always operates in exactly the same fashion. He is absolutely notorious for keeping his word in the bizarre offers of alternatives that he makes to his prisoners. Since it is a given that the madman will abide by his word, you must not allow into your reasoning that if you make a certain choice, that the madman will fail to live up to his word.


The madman has you and your child both securely bound. You see before you a surgical table with instruments, and next to it a bed. The madman tells you that you have several choices. Once you both make your choices and agree to it, he will makes certain that your choice is carried out, and then you will both be free to go, with no further harm. This scenario is a modern day Oedipus with a Sophie's Choice twist.


Here are the two broad choices that he presents to you.
Either, (1) You will choose between you which of you will climb upon the operating table and have your eyes surgically removed (like Oedipus, who chose to blind himself as his reaction to incest),

OR (2) you will both elect to climb upon the bed and perform some incestuous act of your choosing.


Within the framework of these two main choices, you have some leaway of permutations and combinations of who suffers what and who does what to whom.


Your captor tells you that you will have one day to discuss your options, and then he will return and ask for your decision, and see that it is carried out.


He warns you that if you both fail to agree, and fail to make a choice, then you will both be tortured in the most hideous fashion imaginable, a fate worse than death, which shall last for weeks before you finally die.


If we really wanted to make this interesting, we could give our madman a weapon of mass destruction. He could tell you that if you refuse to choose, then he shall destroy the entire world together with all humanity and human culture. If we allow this, then you place yourself in a Christ-like position, as savior of the world, if you choose, at the price of taking sin upon yourself (for it is said that Christ literally became sin taking upon himself all the sins of all mankind, past present and yet to be born).


Now remember, Oedipus hears a prophecy that he shall kill his father and marry his mother, and when he discovers that it has come to pass, he puts out his own eyes.


One instructive assignment would be for you to write this as a story, and compose the dialogue which transpires between parent and child.


Sometimes, life itself is our cruel captor, forcing upon us terrible choices. Consider the expectant mother who is told that her fetus is seriously abnormal and the child will be born into a dreadful, pointless life of suffering and misery. You are then offered the choice of terminating the pregnancy or giving birth to the child.


I personally knew a man in his eighties who was diagnosed with cancer. He had the choice of undergoing very uncomfortable chemo and radiation therapy, in the hope that he might gain several extra years of life. He chose instead to take his one year of life expectancy, in relative comfort. During that year, he was able to do a little traveling, eat well, take a drink or two.


While you are pondering your predicament with your madman, I will now tell you what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus.

from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (TUL0B)- page 177

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiently that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

I am always mindful of Socrates point that no person willingly desires what is bad. Everyone by nature desires what they deem to be good (even madmen).

I am also always aware of Plato's Euthyphro problem: "Is the good good, ipso facto, by fiat, simply because God loves it, OR is there something objective, some inherent quality, in the nature of Goodness that inspires God to choose it. God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Sarah asks Abraham to father Ishmael. Madmen try to play God, but God never plays the role of madman.


Another movie I am going to suggest for consideration in this exploration of tragedy is Indecent Proposal. I shall mention more about that movie later, and it will be a SPOILER, so, forewarned is forearmed.

Did they really know?
TULOB page 176 -

Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists; You're the ones responsible for our country's misfortunes...

And the accused responded: We didn't know! We ere deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?

...

Is a fool on a throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

...

It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus:

Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by "not knowing," he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your "not knowing," this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the signt of what you've done? How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

The analogy so pleased him that he often used it in conversation with friends, and his formulation grew increasingly precise and eloquent.

I will now turn to what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus in The Art of the Novel

Afterwards, I will try to gather my thoughts and bring some of this to bear upon the question regarding the nature of Tragedy (ancient, Elizabethan, and modern) and the connection between Tragedy and Deity, fate, destiny, predistination, necessity, chance and freewill choice.

 

[Sitaram]

The Art of the Novel

"The Art of the Novel" - Milan Kundera


(a continuation of Milan Kundera on Tragedy from the post above)

We have seen what Milan Kundera says about Oedipus in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (TULOB).

Oedipus is a figure who becomes aware of his crime and then seeks his own punishment of self-inflicted blindness.

Now, let us look at what he says about crime and its punishment in The Art of the Novel (TAOTN).

Kundera discusses the Comic and the Tragic in the world of Kafka.

We may see Kafka as that elusive fellow which Socrates spoke of in the Symposium, the one who is master of both Comedy and Tragedy.

from The Art of the Novel, Part 5 "Somewhere Behind" - page 106


(In The Castle) it is a small consolation to the engineer to know that his story is comic. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a bowl; he doesn't find it funny. Indeed, a joke is a joke only if you are outside the bowl; by contrast, the Kafkan takes us inside, into the guts of the joke, into the horror of the comic.

In the world of the Kafkan, the comic is not a counterpoint to the tragic as in Shakespeare; it's not there to make the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesn't accompany the tragic, (the Comic) destroys (and annihilates the Tragic) in the egg (while it is still inchoate and nascent) and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. The engineer looses his homeland and every body laughs.

(Sitaram experiments with adding a soundtrack of applause and laughter to Silence of the Lambs)

from TAotN, Part 5 "Somewhere Behind" - page 105

Raskolnikov cannot bear the weight of his guilt, and to find peace he consents to his own punishment of his own free will.

In Kafka, the logic is reversed. The person punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s70778.htm

from The Bible as Shakespeare before Shakespeare

David Zane Mairowitz: Well of course Jews in Prague at that time are Jews anywhere in Eastern Europe at that time who were always considered to be the outsiders and did not have all the rights that non-Jews had, and couldn't work wherever they wanted and so on. And for someone like Kafka, who immediately accepts the moral judgement of society against himself, if somebody points to him on the street and said, 'Dirty Jew', instead of defending himself, he takes that upon himself. One thing we know about Kafka is that he was always fascinated by animals. You find animals in his stories all the time. Of course he transforms himself into a cockroach and a dog, and a mouse, and so on. And a lot of this has to do with real epithets that were used against Jews at that time on the streets. Someone would see a Jew and say, 'You dirty dog', or 'You're nothing more than a cockroach', or something like that. For Kafka, this became a kind of literal condemnation which he accepted into himself. OK. 'You point a finger at me and call me a dog, the next thing I have to write is a story about a dog,' in which a dog has human qualities; or he transforms himself into a cockroach. A lot of this has to do with the anti-Semitism that was absolutely rampant all around him at the time.

...

the mythical Bible, that is, the (Old Testament) is a huge book of stories where man is ... totally rotten, it's not at all like the New Testament. In the Bible you see no-one is saved, the (essential nature of man) is to fail, to be evil; David is an adulterer... So I think Kafka knows about that but he has the freedom that Jews have (this is my opinion of course, it's not at all something that I can theorise in a way that would be orthodox). I think there's a kind of freedom that Jews have because there's no dogma. You know, the Bible is Shakespeare before Shakespeare; it's just a mass of Macbeths, of King Lears, of Richard IIIs, but it's a vision of mankind which is absolutely merciless, and so it's true to reality. So I think that it gives Jews the freedom to look at human beings as being tempted. They're tempted beings. They're not saved, they're tempted.

http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/tragedy/

from Abandonment - Blanchot:

The tragic heroine is thrown against necessity; she is abandoned to what she cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom, necessity: the former breaks against the latter. The grandeur of tragedy lies in her rebellion. She is dashed to pieces - but for a time, she brought herself into a splendid freedom.
...

Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd.

...

Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

...


What can be retrieved of Greek tragedy today? Schelling and Hölderlin understood each in his own way the fatedness of the tragic for our age.



‘Our age’: but what does this mean? Schmidt, to whose excellent On Germans and Other Greeks I am indebted here, gives a clue: Kant argues that limits do not merely belong to human experience but are its condition; then it is possible to write what might be called a ‘tragedy of reason’. See the opening sentence of the first Critique with the reference to the ‘peculiar fate of reason’.

By the way, take a look at what L. James Hammond has to say about Tragedy and "the desire to die".

http://www.ljhammond.com/cwgt/02.htm#33

 

[Sitaram]

Oedipus' Tragic Choice

If you did choose to do the exercise of the "what-if" scenario, and if you chose self-inflicted blindness, then it seems to me that you choose to imitate Oedipus in his horror at the thought of incest. Why does Oedipus blind himself? Does Oedipus have a choice?

For me, the greatest tragedy in Oedipus is that he chose to blind himself when he could have chosen to get on with his life.

Hamlet resists the temptation to harm himself, and in the end, he gains revenge and justice, even if it costs him his life.

There are honorable and valiant ways to sacrifice ourselves, and then there are tragic and selfish ways.

Condemned to be free...


The question "are Shakespearean tragedies more tragic than Greek tragedies" arose during a conversation with a stranger in a bookstore about fate/destiny/necessity/predestination/election vs. freedom.

That discussion arose because I was trying to help a student with a paper
on fate/destiny in Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannis. I was approaching the cash register with my purchase of The Theban Plays when the person behind me ask my opinion regarding degrees of tragedy; Shakespeare vs the ancients.

What I had been saying (to the person in the bookstore) is that there is a kind of spectrum which ranges from the gods of Hesiod and Siddhartha Gautama, who are subject to fate and necessity and karma, ranging to Allah, who is not even bound by Allah, but may abrogate and revoke and change rules, and ranging all the way to a godless world of Sartre in which we are CONDEMNED to be free, and condemned in the sense that we must take total responsibility for all actions and consequences. SO, the idea is that, somehow, for the Greeks, someone like Oedipus is predestined or fated to suffer certain things, and there is nothing he can do to escape it,.... whereas for Shakespeare, there is perhaps MORE freedom of choice available to his characters, and hence MORE TRAGIC in the sense that those who suffer COULD have conceivably acted otherwise... so, when something tragic is unavoidable, then perhaps it is less tragic and more inevitable that something which COULD have been avoided. This is more or less where the question is coming from. I don't know if all this casts the question in a different light, or sheds more light.

He who is master of himself is slave to himself. Hence a deity who is bound by its own word and is therefore voluntarily self-limiting (think of Tsimtsum, the divine contraction, which we encounter in the Life of Pi by Yann Martel), is not quite as powerful as a deity who is not even bound or limited by its own words but may abrogate or change anything, as depicted in the Qu'ran.


Compare and contrast with the Judaeo-Christian portrait of a self-limiting deity.

"with Whom there is no shadow of turning" (James 1:17),

Who is "the Lord, who changeth not" (Malachi 3:6),

Whose Word "endureth forever" (I Peter) 1:23-25

for God cannot lie (Heb. 6:18),

The Final Tragedy


I suppose this rambling that I am engaged in demonstrates one way to make the classics come alive as part of our daily life and thoughts.

Modern drama, at least some of it, is the product of people who have been at some point students of Shakespeare and the classics.

And what can we see in history which constitutes "tragedy"? Our word "tragedy" has taken on such broad dimensions. Mass genocides, mass suicides such as in "Jonestown, Guyana", suicide bombings and the threat of nuclear or biological world war are certainly some of the lyrics to the theme songs of modern tragedy.

If human life ends as a result of global warming, or an ice age, or an asteroid impact, then we would deem that a tragedy, but not so tragic as an avoidable tragedy, let us say, our irrevocably upsetting the delicate balance of the ecosystem through the wanton tampering of our genetic engineering. The real fuel to the flames of any hell is our eternal regret, that we could have avoided so much suffering if only we had acted differently.

What is the last tragedy? Will the last tragedy even have an audience to applaud or boo it, or critics to give it rave reviews or a "thumbs down"? What is the ultimate tragedy?

The thought occurred to me yesterday that the ultimate tragic figure is an omniscient and omnipotent deity who fails in his creation. But then, the merest hint or suggestion of such a tragic deity is blasphemy in any religion. God is beyond good and evil!

Another good movie to consider as an example of tragedy is Forbidden Planet

S * P * O * I * L * E * R

A scientist lands on a deserted, dead world, once inhabited by the most godlike, technologically advanced race the universe has ever known, the Krell. The Krell discovered how to harness limitless power to be at the beck-and-call of their own thoughts, but they forget about the "monsters of the id", and hence they destroyed themselves. The scientist, with his daughter, taps into this same power and technology. A rescue party fails to heed the warning not to land, and the entire tragedy is reenacted. Though there is the element that the scientist himself was not aware of "the monsters of the id". It is only the dying words of the ship's officer which reveal the terrible secret.

We may, in theory, repent of sin, and perhaps even be forgiven or forgive ourselves, but can we ever repent of tragedy?

Socrates debates whether the same person might be the master of both comedy and tragedy.

It seems to me that tragedy is at it's most tragic when someone is the sole author of their own tragedy, and had the means to foresee such tragedy and destruction from the very begining, and yet chose to proceed with their destructive course of action in spite of their knowledge of the consequences.

 

[wiggle]

A Romanian friend has been reading a French copy of Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves (Risible Amours), a collection of short stories. Has anyone else read this?