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A review by screen_memory
Encounter by Milan Kundera
4.0
Encounter, a collection of essays, offers an illuminating and historicist perspective to a myriad of topics such as the brutal gestures of the “rapist hand” of Francis Bacon which endeavors to discover the buried self; a novel perspective on humor, or “The Comical Absence of the Comical,” in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Gabriel Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as representative of the arch-novel; a meditation on the blacklist as inspired by Kundera’s lover for the blacklisted Anatole France; numerous tributes to Rabelais, Bach, Louis Aragon, Oscar Milosz, Schoenberg, and of course Kundera’s precious composer, Leoš Janáček.
He writes of life in exile; the liberation of exile, as explained by fellow Czech writer Vera Linhortova; the lives of fellow émigrés; the Prague Spring of 1968 and its coincidental historical nearness to the French May of the same year; etc. Inspired by his upbringing at the hand of his pianist father, Kundera writes extensively of Bach’s fugues, Schoenberg’s legacy (the forgetting of Schoenberg as well; our fight to ensure that the Nazi murderers may never be forgotten at the expense of our memory of Schoenberg), Janáček’s “antiromantic expression,” Stravinsky’s ouvre. Numerous poets and novelists also find their place within Encounter. Even the medium of film is examined by Kundera’s critical prose.
Approaching the subject from the angle of the celebration of 100 years of film, he states that “the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old),” and laments the generation that has forgotten Frederico Fellini. Fellini, who Kundera believes has achieved through film the greatest aspiration of Surrealism by incorporating the dream into reality, had, in his later period, argued with the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi over his “allowing televised films to be interrupted by advertising” — “A confrontatiion between two different legacies from the brothers Lumière (history’s first filmmakers): between film as art and film as agent of stupidity. We know the outcome: film as art has lost.”
Encounter is as tragic as it is triumphant. In it art the artist’s laments over a generation that has reached the border of all art, of all music, of all life. Many ideologies, mediums, movements, etc. see their demise before them, if it has not been delivered already. We are living in the age of forgetting, of loss. Indeed, we have forgotten about Schoenberg, about Fellini, we gravely misunderstand Janáček. Additionally, we are forgetting about the novel as an art form.
As is the case with Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? And the author’s own Testaments Betrayed, one would be best off establishing a firsthand familiarity with the artists, composers, and other figures Kundera explores before returning to this work. It is, even with only a cursory or non-existent knowledge of most of Kundera’s subjects, an enlightening and penetrating read.
He writes of life in exile; the liberation of exile, as explained by fellow Czech writer Vera Linhortova; the lives of fellow émigrés; the Prague Spring of 1968 and its coincidental historical nearness to the French May of the same year; etc. Inspired by his upbringing at the hand of his pianist father, Kundera writes extensively of Bach’s fugues, Schoenberg’s legacy (the forgetting of Schoenberg as well; our fight to ensure that the Nazi murderers may never be forgotten at the expense of our memory of Schoenberg), Janáček’s “antiromantic expression,” Stravinsky’s ouvre. Numerous poets and novelists also find their place within Encounter. Even the medium of film is examined by Kundera’s critical prose.
Approaching the subject from the angle of the celebration of 100 years of film, he states that “the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old),” and laments the generation that has forgotten Frederico Fellini. Fellini, who Kundera believes has achieved through film the greatest aspiration of Surrealism by incorporating the dream into reality, had, in his later period, argued with the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi over his “allowing televised films to be interrupted by advertising” — “A confrontatiion between two different legacies from the brothers Lumière (history’s first filmmakers): between film as art and film as agent of stupidity. We know the outcome: film as art has lost.”
Encounter is as tragic as it is triumphant. In it art the artist’s laments over a generation that has reached the border of all art, of all music, of all life. Many ideologies, mediums, movements, etc. see their demise before them, if it has not been delivered already. We are living in the age of forgetting, of loss. Indeed, we have forgotten about Schoenberg, about Fellini, we gravely misunderstand Janáček. Additionally, we are forgetting about the novel as an art form.
As is the case with Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? And the author’s own Testaments Betrayed, one would be best off establishing a firsthand familiarity with the artists, composers, and other figures Kundera explores before returning to this work. It is, even with only a cursory or non-existent knowledge of most of Kundera’s subjects, an enlightening and penetrating read.