——Reading Milan Kundera Lu Xinyu Living in the cultural tradition of human beings, we always maintain lofty intentions for words such as "poetry", "lyric" and "beauty".Human beings not only have the ability to express emotions, but also have this need, which is based on the need of survival.In this way, lyric poetry is not only an aesthetic problem, but also an ontological problem, and the lyric attitude has become a category of human existence.The novel by Milan Kundera was originally called "The Lyrical Age".Lyric poetry as a literary genre has the oldest origins, it has existed for many centuries and will continue to exist. G. B. Vico called the way of thinking in the original state of human beings "poetic wisdom". In this sense, everyone is a poet.With the development of civilization and the emergence of social division of labor, "poets" who specialize in poetry have emerged.The division between poet and non-poet arises.Poetry and poets are always associated with some kind of mysterious power.Poets were considered special and mysterious beings chosen and inspired by the gods.Once upon a time, poetry and poets became a symbol of a sacred value system, standing on the throne, enjoying the revered attention and yearning of everyone.

However, for Milan Kundera, an Eastern European writer, he witnessed the era of "combined rule of executioners and poets". When the Supreme Court was sent to the gallows, it publicly and formally dissociated itself from it.He was deeply traumatized.The sacrosanct value system collapsed.Everything became an object of suspicion, including poetry. Under what circumstances can we approach (enter) poetry?The protagonist in the novel, the young poet Jaromil, was born as a poet for the first time when his first love failed.In a kind of disgust and shame towards himself, what he suddenly faced was his own humbleness and insignificance.Relying on writing poems, he discovered a hidden strange world, which made him surpass the clumsiness of reality and obtained the possibility of a second existence.It is not the great and noble passion, but its negativity, that makes Jaromil a poet.Poetry becomes a kind of compensation for the failure of actual behavior.The poet slips through the gap between poetry and reality.Life is dissociated, the sphere of the everyday is a tedious emptiness," while the sky is another world, lit up with signposts everywhere, time divided into a brilliant spectrum. He jumps from one light to the next with great excitement, Every time I firmly believe that I have fallen into a new era, an era of great creativity."

Since poetry acquires the aristocratic meaning of an ivory tower opposed to reality, we should admit that this is no longer the meaning of poetry in the original sense.The eternal split between ideal and reality is a doom that modern people cannot escape.In Kundera's view, the poet seems to have become the symbol and embodiment of this doom. "Jaromil spent his whole life on the edge of the two worlds. Kundera believes that when poets are faced with the basic situation of being unable to break through the real world of action, the way to deal with it is-a lyrical attitude. But poets are not the only ones who are in this situation. This is a basic existence situation of human beings, and it is the doomed fate of human beings' metaphysical pursuit of eternity, sublime, beauty and so on.

The time described was called a "lyrical age" by Kundera. The Czech Republic of the 1950s is seen today as an era of political interrogation, persecution, banned books and legal murder.But, says Kundera, those of us who remember must testify that it was not just a time of horror, but a time of lyricism, a time of passion.The slogans painted on the walls of the college students read: "Dreams are reality", "Be a realist-nothing is impossible"; millions of people raised their arms and shouted, and the mighty parade.Kundera believes that his purpose is not to describe an era, and he does not choose a specific era because he is interested in it itself. Stuff is released.Yes, Jaromil is an "evil" man, he destroyed his lover and himself.But the same evil exists in every one of us, in every young man of all systems and at all times.It's not that Jaromil was produced in a certain era, but that this psychological factor was released in a certain era.All ages spawn potential Jaromil.He is not a villain in a moral sense, he is a villain in a human sense.Kundera shows the logic of the psychological development of this gifted, imaginative and passionate young poet throughout his life. The connotation of this logic is the relationship between man and the real world.Jaromil has been working hard all his life to enter the real world of behavior.Kundera warned, please don't think that Jaromil is an inferior poet, this is a cheap explanation of his life.Each of us lives in the opposition between self and reality, and we all need to realize ourselves in the real environment.In this way, the fear that the self cannot be realized in reality is inherently hanging over everyone's head.Modern psychology believes that it is this sublimation of repression that produces literature.

The question then becomes this: what is the ontological significance of literature? Kundera said, "For the novelist, a given historical situation is an anthropological laboratory in which he explores his fundamental questions, a human laboratory in which he Exploring his fundamental question, what is human existence? "What is human existence?"This is an unanswerable metaphysical question.Human existence itself is the form of the answer to the question.What Kundera does is an unfolding of this problematic form. Jaromil's mother transferred her romantic dream of love to her son. She was obsessed with being the mother of a gifted child, and she was the first to give Jaromil the poet's laurels.There is a phenomenon in the history of literature that most lyric poets were born in families headed by women.This kind of maternity family gave the poet a kind of spiritual shelter from childhood, a kind of breeding ground for indulging in fantasies isolated from reality.The relationship between mother and poet has a mysterious analogy to that between poetry and poet.Maternal love is innate without self-effort. Maternal love is the whole world of children.Children look for self-affirmation, understanding and the relationship with the world in the mother's eyes.When he realizes that maternal love has become an authoritarian force restricting his actual actions, it is often too late, and he has been unable to escape the shackles imposed on him by the world of maternal love all his life.The transition from the world of maternal love to the world of poetry is two sides of the same coin, which foreshadows the destiny of all poets, and this is the split of the two worlds.The real world of behavior is like a distant horizon, always far away. "Life is elsewhere", for the poets, they believe that the real life, the real life with action is always calling, as if it is within reach, but is always blocked by a transparent wall.They are always lost in unsuccessful fantasy worlds.The poet writes poems that revolve around him like planets to compensate for his anxiety about the outside world and his fear of his own smallness.Poetry becomes a sign of compensation for the failure of actual behavior.How different it is from our usual understanding of poetry.

Jaromil created a character named Xavier as his stand-in in the fantasy world.Zeyal's life is a dream, he fell asleep, had a dream, in the dream he fell asleep again, had another dream, woke up from the dream and found himself in the previous dream, the dream The edges blurred, and he passed from one dream to another, from one life to another, without any hindrance.Jaromil negates the boundary between dream and reality in Xavier.And the biggest boundary between dream and reality is: dream is the belief in infinite and eternal possibility, but reality does not.He writes about death in his love poems, and death is a dream about infinity. , because life is insignificant, death is absolute, and death proves the greatness and nobility of love. His desire expressed is to combine with a woman in a kind of death that is close to eternal happiness - omitting the process of reality.He wrote that the old man's love is happy, because the old man no longer has a future, and is no longer invaded by the ever-changing unknown realm.He was dazzled by the girl's naked body, "He didn't yearn for the girl's naked body, he yearned for the girl's face illuminated by the naked body." "He didn't want to possess the girl's body; what he wanted was to be willing to commit himself to He used the girl's face to prove her love." What he needs is not the body, but the abstraction of the body.He writes about wombs and breasts in the tone of a fairy tale for children, because he fears physical love and tries to take it out of the realm of adults, seeing women as children, which means he is incapable of seeing himself as a child. A mature man looks at it.Poetry became his "artificial childhood home".He wishes to confine love to its eternal and unchanging constituents, and thus overcome the potentially dangerous body that unfolds before him.He cancels the body in the poem, replaces the arrogant body of a young woman with the ugly and aging body of naturalism, and strips off the body to pursue eternal love.

In the world of maternal love, the poet is unaware of the opposition of the real world, but in the fantasy of poetry, he escapes this opposition.So, where is the place of man?Should we live our lives in fantasy, or in reality?It is terrible if people lose their illusions.If the literary traditions of thousands of years of human beings disappear overnight, human beings will become beasts.However, the traditional aesthetic principles of literature cannot guarantee that human beings will not become beasts—beasts that kill each other.Modern people are increasingly aware of the role of unconscious psychic energy in the development of history.Hegel has long regarded the "evil" in human psychology as the form in which the driving force of historical development expresses.Literature is often based on the utopian impulse in human nature, and aesthetics endows this impulse with the name of science.And aesthetics cannot and should not become a sacred value standard, because in this way, we will all be immersed in the fog of optimism and cannot recognize our true colors.Jaromil in Kundera's works pursued a sublime aesthetic principle all his life, and practiced it. He used the aesthetic principle of poetry as the criterion and explanation of his realistic behavior, and finally drowned in eternity between reality and fantasy. in the abyss.

Take a look at Jaromil's sexual history.Sex is the most essential state of human existence.Putting sex into the category of what Kundera called "lyrical attitude" gave it another name, "love."Youth, poetry, and love are all expressions of human lyrical attitudes.Jaromil's love always fails when it reaches its real level.So when he first manages to have a sexual relationship, it's kind of interesting.This is an ordinary and not very beautiful saleswoman, so he means a female body that has been relieved of metaphysical pressure.When Jaromil's love fantasy is caught off guard, it is the saleswoman who captures him.So the role of love fantasy can only be made up after the fact.Jaromil pressed the lightened thing back on it.In his view, the saleswoman marks the creation of a physical connection between him and the crowd, the arrival of the real realm of life.He was excited about it, and that's what love is all about.For him, the mere moment of beauty is not satisfying, except as a symbol of the eternal beauty.Therefore, in love, what he wants to possess is nothing but "eternity", belonging completely and forever.He consoled himself by saying that what he needed was not beauty.Falling in love with beauty is not difficult, everyone does it, it's just a mechanical stimulus.But great love seeks to create loveliness out of imperfect creations.And the master of the great creation is he, so the girl must immerse herself completely in the bath of love, content to remain below the surface of the water submerged by his words and thoughts, and must belong wholly to this world, both in body and soul.

The result of the work that love fantasies do: jealousy.Jealousy is resentment over an unsatisfied desire for power.He soon realizes that his love cannot be demanded with an "absolute" concept, and he finds that he is punishing his feelings for the salesgirl to make up for his cowardice in love with the beautiful film girl.He thought the doors of reality had been opened for him, and now he found them closed again, knocking him back to the original world. Jaromil walked into the National Security Agency building, which was the most fateful moment in his life.He saw a mysterious threshold that he had been trying to cross all his life, and beyond that was real life.The name of the threshold of a mature adult man's life is not love, but responsibility.He denounced his lover's brother.He had finally pulled off a real act, the act of a real adult he'd longed for all his life.

We are always puzzled by the fact that Eluard broke up with his friends in Prague, Heidegger was involved with the Nazis, Zhou Zuoren was in the company of traitors... such phenomena, empty moral condemnation is of no avail.What kind of secrets are hidden in the depths of human nature, before the division between good and evil?The "poetry" that flows from that hidden place is not only beautiful, it is also dangerous, it can kill people, turn blood into roses. So how should we reflect on our literature, our aesthetics, our age, our humanity?What Milan Kundera appeals to us is that behind all sacred values ​​often lurks danger.This reminds me of the famous Greek maxim: know yourself.Can people recognize themselves?Thousands of years of civilization history, the smoke of war is still pervasive. "Man, know yourself!" Is it an oracle that hates iron but not steel, or an apocalypse of compassion?What a mysterious language, the fate of mankind lies in it.

Happiness is the self-promise of human beings to their destiny, and the future lying in front of us is waiting in silence.Literature, the flowers that grow from the depths of human existence, bloom sequentially in time; they are watered by human blood and tears, which makes poetry beautiful and enchanting.The tropical jungle of literature conceals the footprints of human history's arduous journey step by step, and under the footprints is the land where the bones of the ancestors are buried, the only real thing.