On Roth and Kundera

Philip Roth writes the most amazing sentences; he threads together sparkling strings of words that throw off lights and colours at once bizarre and wonderful, comical and tragic, laden with meaning but flashing with the odd gleam of the absurd. His fiction is unashamedly fictional, his narratives never missing a turn for the comic, the tangent of the tale never missing a beat and never missing a trick. Milan Kundera’s works, in contrast, are more allegorical than absurdist: his novels describe worlds where gravity is literally defied, where weight and lightness are inverted, and humanity is shaken to pieces by the laughter of angels and devils. While it is the fertility of Roth’s imagination that imbues his plots with a delirious comic energy, it is the poverty of Kundera’s world that leads him to create meaning, through his own fiction, out of a past that was harrowing and a future that is forbidding.

The dark overtones Kundera paints, tied to the shadowy history of his country, give his tales of joking angels and children’s islands an unshakeable sense of realism that is too painful to be absurdist, too ironic to be comic, and yet too empty to be ironic, too laughable to be really funny. Yet the laughter in Kundera’s novels has nothing of the halting, awkward Pinteresque quality, like a bad joke that falls flat. On the contrary, it is a laughter as otherworldly as it is tragic, “real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide…bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad…and we laugh our laughter to the infinity of laughter…O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter; to laugh is to live profoundly.” This is the sound that is heard in “the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all words with its jangle.”

Insistent and exigent in Kundera’s novels is an element of self-awareness that subverts all comedy, “the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch”, the metaphysical recognition of one’s own misery that gives litost its torment. Kundera’s characters refer to themselves as Sisyphus, and the boulders they roll up the hill are the burdens they bear for each other; in his novels there is nothing of the scorn that Camus argued would surmount any fate, that would allow us to “imagine Sisyphus happy”. His characters do not laugh with joy. It is the madness of their laughter that gives their laughter its madness.

The time of our lives

Some things I've begun to realise: that living life at a walking pace, living from day to day wholly in the present, without a foot in the past or a hand reaching for the future, is infinitely better than chasing sunlight around the globe and inhabiting the darkness at the brink of a horizon. This is not only the best way to live, it is what life is, the only thing; nothing else is real. We have to live in the sunlight that comes upon us with the inevitability of life itself; we have to live with it, and nothing immaterial can stand up to its dazzling, effulgent glare: the figments of imagination, the ghosts of the past, all exorcised in a single incandescent affirmation that the world is all that is the case, and anything that is not radiant with the immediacy of life we ought to hurl into the fire. The pipe dreams, the hopes held out, the promises unrelinquished, the implications and the inferences and the infelicities are all like ashes in one's mouth, and the sounds of our laughter and wailing should echo and roll away from the single point that is the now: life lived on the knife-edge of time.

When I say

When I say I miss you, it will not be
for the whisper of petals too thin and tremulous
to stay silent about beauty. It will not be
for the trees that hold their arms out
for love, and try to bridge their distance
to the sky. It will not be
for the recurrence of wind and water
or the moaning of the birds
saying they have seen it all.

When I say I miss you,
it is for the silence of the stones and the shadows.
It is for the sediment of age,
the gathering of rain on windowpanes
and the absence of dust on the things
you smiled at.
It is for the howls and the sounds of struggle
that echo across the gap
from pen to page.

It is for the moments when you vanish
from the gaps within the crowd,
for the old habit of thinking you will
reappear, when you are already
receding with distance and in time:
for the last wave,
the last smile, before you
drop from sight.

Lifetimes

He was going too quickly
when she wasn't looking;
he loved the rush
and she adored sunsets,
the trajectory of two lives
like lines in the sand,
ending in right angles.

Perhaps it was
curiosity in the eye,
or hunger in the belly;
maybe it was
love in the heart
or poetry on the mind.
But life has not been harsh
to those who die
with an eyeful of beauty.

We are fools in love,
fools in hope and hatred;
we are fools with time to spare
and innocence to lose.

We make fools of each other.

We are foolish to learn
what fools are like:
that life has fooled us all,
and in death we become

the greatest fools of all.

Dirge without Music

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
_____________________

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
______________________

Words like these make me remember why, amidst all the articles, essays, dialogues, critiques and treatises in the world, a poem can be the most important thing of all.

Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels begin as if with no story in mind, and finish with no end in sight. His narratives hold nothing more than a drift of banalities, the latency of meaning slowly revealed by the accumulating welter of broken thoughts, fractured recollections and fragmented moments of awareness that hazily reflect a crippled and riven world. His characters stand distant from one another, fumbling at the meaning of each other’s sentences, reaching out clumsily and desperately for the companionship of another human being but finally unable to find sincerity, interminably subverted and thwarted by lapses of understanding and lengths of awkward Pinteresque silences. But amidst the anguish and anticipation of human interaction, nobody remains unaware of the indelible influences of age and change in a world that has quietly left them behind. In the last pages of Ishiguro’s most recent novel, he leaves no space even for catharsis; there is no sense of direction nor even the finality of death. Meaning and memory ebb away into an endless vanishing point: “I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up… The fantasy never got beyond that — I didn’t let it — and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”

The imprecision of metaphor

You are the only person I cannot respond to with any pretense; you make me laugh out of your delight, reveal my thoughts because you want to know them, and forget my direction because you are heading another way. You cause the pages of my books to empty themselves of meaning, the chatter of Plato and other ghosts to fall silent; you make the questions of physics and politics grow strangely distant, and literature more and more terribly beautiful. You are the imprecision of metaphor that sets poetry free. I cannot think of you without the world slowly growing perfect; I cannot respond to you without recourse to poetry, and it is a strange thing to be writing about you. It is like writing about inspiration.

And so it goes
and so it goes
and so will you soon, I suppose.