Sixteen Measures of Infinity. On Milan Kundera [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 399-409]

Cross Currents 7(1988)
A Yearbook of Central European Culture
SIXTEEN MEASURES OF INFINITY
Nina Gladziuk
Warsaw
"I one day took the Freedom to tell his Majesty,
that the Contempt he discovered towards Europe,
and the rest of the World, did not seem answerable
to those excellent Qualities of Mind, that he was
master of. That, Reason did not extend itself with
the Bulk of the Body: On the contrary, we observed
in our Country, that the tallest Persons were usually
least provided with it." Jonathan Swift, A Voyage to
Brobdingnag.
It is no accident that the works of Milan Kundera cannot be read simply as political or psychological novels, or as novels about everyday life.
For the subject of these literary explorations are the eternal antinomies
of human existence, broken down into the spiritual and the carnal, the
historical and the timeless, the collective and the private. The Kundera
novel is not concerned with any specific human being but with the human
condition as such. Its subject is life as intrinsically contradictory fate,
and not as Czech, communist, emigre or erotic folklore.
This doesn't mean that Kundera's heroes lack that delicious fullness
offered by naturalistic literature. On the contrary, Kundera's plots writhe
with life. His characters are decidedly not only literary manifestations of
a philosophical thesis. And this is precisely the point. Kundera's prose
is marked by a scrupulous realism, even though the life he presents shuns
naturalistic folklore and speaks to the reader as parable, as life-in-general,
as life-as-discourse. What is it that gives Kundera's prose this universal,
or simply philosophical, character? How does he force us into a reflective
kind of thinking? Kundera offers us tidbits of Czech life just so we can
dispense with them as crude particularities and perceive the philosophical
kernel therein. In the test tubes of variational possibility, Kundera, before
our very eyes, dazzles us with an alchemist demonstration of "the internal
variety concealed in all things."
Reflective reading means that the novels of Kundera are not just
to be read, but are, above all, "to be thought." We read Kundera like we
read an 18th century writer-which means, like a philosopher. For the
founders of the European novel-and Kundera makes this point himself
399