Chapter 18 postscript

King Kaixuan Chinese readers may not be too unfamiliar with Eastern European literature.As early as half a century ago, Mr. Lu Xun and his colleagues paid special attention to the literature on this soil similar to ours, and made a large number of translations and introductions in the "Literature of the Damaged Nation" in the "Novel Monthly".The works of Eastern European writers such as Petofi, Senkwiche, Mickiewicz, Hasek, and Capek have long been our spiritual teachers and helpful friends in the past years.This is not counting Kafka and Rilke, the two masters of modern literature who were born in Prague. Although they belong to the German system, they undoubtedly grew up in the land of Eastern Europe. literary sentiment.However, times have changed. In the past ten years, in the process of opening up to world literature, the introduction and research of contemporary Eastern European literature has been relatively neglected.There are many reasons for this, but one thing seems to be certain, that is, there is something in the works of some contemporary Eastern European writers that we are afraid to face up to.

This is the case with the works of contemporary Czech writer Milan Kundera.This is not only due to the special experience of the author: he was born in Brno, Czech Republic in 1929, joined the Czech Communist Party, worked as a worker, a jazz musician, and a professor at the Advanced Film Academy in Prague. After the Soviet Union invaded Czech Republic in 1968, his works were destroyed He moved to France in 1975; more importantly, his works show the courage and conscience to face the real life, the critical spirit of history and reality, and the deep thinking of human nature and situation.Kundera's other two novels, and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", have been published in China.It is another important work of his, which made him win an important foreign literature award for the first time in 1973 - the French Medicis Award.It is true that winning an award itself has never been a criterion for the artistic excellence of street-level works, but it is undoubtedly a sign of a writer's literary influence and reputation.

is a portrait of a young artist.Kundera created such an image of Jaromil with his unique brushstrokes, and described the passionate but short life of this young poet, which has many characteristics of "developmental novels".Representing an artist (or intellectual) in terms of its subject matter is an important field of literature in this century, because representing our complex age can only be undertaken by complex characters.In this work, the author's analysis of the poet's creative process is subtle and delicate.Of course, the creative process not only refers to the process of writing, but more broadly refers to the entire growth process of a poet.In the author's own words, this novel is "an analysis of what I call a lyrical attitude." It is in this creative intention that the book was originally titled "The Age of Lyricism".What the author wants to express and explore is the passion of the human mind, its generation and its result.Therefore, this book is also a modern psychological novel, expressing the growth of a poet's artistic sense.The title of each chapter in the book shows a stage in the poet's life course.His childhood, youth and youth, how he read books, how he fell in love, and how he dreamed and so on.The whole picture of the era and the activities of others are late and far away, and the focus of all observations is on the protagonist and is related to his inner activities.Like the stream of passion, flowing through the chaotic mountains and rocks of time, the scenery on both sides is not important, what matters is whether the stream will flow to fertile fields or deserts.In other words, what the author cares about here is the psychological and spiritual development of the poet.In order to sneak into the most hidden corners of the characters' consciousness, the author adopts a narrative method that we can call the objective stream of consciousness: time and space are intertwined (things that happen in different periods and places often appear in the same narrative), Reality and fantasy are intertwined (the second chapter "Xavier" is completely a dream within a dream), the plot jumps, the suddenness and incoherence of thinking, and the statement of the subject being deliberately vague all make this book closer to poetry than to poetry. Fiction.If we remove these lyrical elements from the book, there will be nothing left of the content of this work.This form enables us to get closer to the poet's inner activities and feel how the poet's passion is generated and burned.

In the mind of a poet, what is the thing that entangles him with complicated emotions?is the mother.There seems to be some most mysterious connection between motherhood and poetry.Poets often compare the most magical thing in his heart to his mother (although this is an overused metaphor), and mother often plays an irreplaceable influence on the growth of young poets.In this book, the relationship between the protagonist Jaromil and his mother Maman is the most important relationship in the book.One of them is a mother who suffered from love misfortune and transferred all her love to her son, and the other is a son who is sensitive by nature and yearns for maternal love.Since Jaromil was born, he has been placed under Mamen's omnipresent guardianship.She imagined him as Apollo, the handsome god of ancient Greece, and wrote down every sentence he babbled in her notebook. She took him to travel to romantic spa resorts, and sat outdoors together at night to listen. The noise of the river in the distance, she was the first to discover his poetic talent with joy, and always encouraged him to become a poet.She bet all her feelings on her son, and when she found out that he had a lover, the passion dormant in her heart exploded into intense jealousy and elaborate schemes, trying to pull him back to her side.Maman's autocratic and possessive maternal love naturally affects Jaromil's character. His shyness, sentimentality, vanity, vulnerability, and domineering are all related to this most secret passion in his mother.Obviously at this point, this novel has the color of Freud's theory.As the author of this book expressed through the mouth of the protagonist Yakubu in "The Gathering for Farewell", "Freud discovered the baby's sexual desire and told us about Oedipus. Only Jokaska (That is, the mother of Oedipus—the author's note) still remains mysterious, and no one dares to tear off her veil. The identity of the mother is the last and greatest taboo, and it is here that the greatest disaster is concealed." In the heart of a sensitive child, the mother is the bond and axis of his life, and only the mother is the real existence. He loves her and hates her, but he cannot escape from her.In Lawrence's famous book "Sons and Lovers", we can also see this subtle battle between mother and child.The reason why Paul can't enter the world of other women is precisely because he can't get rid of the great emotional shackles of his mother Morel.Like Paul, Jaromil has always longed to get rid of virginity and maternal love in his relationship with other women, so as to cross the threshold of life and become a real man, but no matter where he enters, he feels the mother's love. The soul is always with him, preventing him from entering life.The difference is that Paul's mother dies in the end, making it possible for him to re-enter life, whereas Jaromil never really grew up until he died beside his mother.

However, if we regard this novel as a Freudian work to explain the relationship between mother and child, it would be too conceptual.Since Freud revealed the "Oedipus" complex in human nature, the theme of conflict between mother and child has become a fairly common phenomenon in modern Western literature.This theme has obvious narrowness.Attributing everything to sexuality is neither reliable nor believable.Of course, Kundera is not only here in this novel, as we said earlier, what he wants to explore is the deep passions in people, and in a sense, some events of our time are caused by these passions. produced.

For Jaromil, a mother represents the narrow world around him. What he wants to escape is not only the shackles of maternal love, but also the mediocre daily life.Youth, love, and revolution are the three voices that run through the novel. The author is like a pianist, groping for the inner connection between the three, trying to play a harmonious theme music (the author often appears in the novel) comment directly).This theme is best summed up in the title of the book. "Life is elsewhere" is a famous saying of Rimbaud, a French symbolist poet. For a young man full of longing, there is no life around, and the real life is always elsewhere.This is the characteristic of youth.In youth, who has no desire for honor?Who hasn't rebelled against family?Who has no yearning for the unknown world?Looking around, the life around us is mediocre, narrow, boring, and unchanging. Every day is filled with food, clothing, housing, and transportation, without color or light.It is in order to escape this annoying reality of existence that people endow themselves with passion and imagination.For young people, a life without dreams is terrible. It is the tranquility and silence of old people at dusk and dusk. Young people refuse to admit that the essence of life is mediocrity, and they always yearn for a life of turbulence and fiery struggle.This is why youth, love and revolution stir the young hearts of generations.Obviously, there are common characteristics among the three, and they are all poetic and sublime.In order to express these, the author adopts a technique similar to the flashback in the movie, in the chapter "The Poet Is Running Away", which describes Jaromil's desire to escape from himself and go to the wide world.Stories or poems of poets Shelley, Rimbaud, Lemontov, Mayakovsky, Volker, and Haras are interspersed.Rimbaud ran from his hometown to Paris in order to escape his family; Lermontov joined the army and came to the Caucasus in order to escape the upper class; Shelley went to Ireland with leaflets in order to promote freedom and liberation.Their resistance to reality, pursuit of love, commitment to battle, and desire for honor all show a surprising consistency in essence. "Do I have to die? Then let me die by fire." Jaromil, the protagonist who is familiar with these poets and their poems, wrote.He threw himself into his new life with enthusiasm, and soon he fell in love with a red-haired girl, and he soon experienced the possessive passion that love brought him; he participated in rallies, participated in May Day parades, debated, and shouted slogans Nothing could be more exciting than the publication of his poems in magazines, and the revolution seemed to welcome him with open arms.Therefore, when he faced the love and historical movement in front of him, like all romantic poets, like the students who rebelled at the University of Paris in 1968, like the Red Guards in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he shouted passionately: "Either everything or everything none!"

If we must have a sense of the sublime in order to rise above our own condition of existence, we should also remember that the sublime often leads to absoluteness and despotism.This is a paradox of existence. If there is no lofty thing in the soul, people will appear humble and insignificant, and feel that they have nowhere to turn. Therefore, for thousands of years, people have always been proud of pursuing the lofty.However, tragedy is here, rebellion and tyranny, sublime and cruelty, these are the two poles of a thing, and they often exist in a person or a thing at the same time.This is true of countless successful defiances and passionate loves in history.Jaromil's passionate pursuit of the sublime eventually turns into a ruthless denunciation of his lover.When the red-haired girl made up an absurd excuse about her brother's attempt to betray the fatherland in order to appease him because of a missed appointment, Jaromil denounced them without hesitation.Why she made up such a lie, we don't know, it may be rooted in the casual nature of the Czech nation, sometimes any serious question will be turned into a joke by them, but in our opinion, such a joke But stupid and irresponsible.Either way, she and her brother were arrested and jailed for it, ruining their lives.

Nevertheless, the hero of the tragedy is still Jaromil.He thought he was defending a noble cause, but ended up leaving his girlfriend innocently behind bars.For him, such an outcome signifies the eternal tragic conflict between ideal and reality.From the perspective of aesthetics (for Kant, aesthetics is the bridge between theory and practice), real life should always be elsewhere.When life is elsewhere, it is a dream, art, and poetry, and once the other place becomes here, the sublime sense immediately becomes the other side of life: cruelty.Like a small boat in a stormy sea, it can be seen from a distance but not played with.The tragedy of Jaromil is that he is still young, he does not know that he is living in an era where dreams have become reality and reality has become eternal, and the world around him has no trenches and barricades, only meetings and order; Reality is incompatible, impossible in the past, impossible in the present, and impossible in the future, because the two are completely different things; The only difference is whether it is elsewhere in life or here.In a word, he did not know the qualitative difference in aesthetics between a butterfly and a chrysalis. In an era when there was no poetry, he thought that he could still play the role of a poet like Rimbaud, Shelley, and Lymontov. The times only gave him a chance to act cruelly instead of noble, which eventually led to the destruction of his lover and himself. His death can not help but remind us of the fate of the Red Guards back then.

Jaromil is undoubtedly a tragic figure, in this sense, he deserves our sympathy.He has a rich and sensitive heart and is also very talented.Like Don Quixote, Hamlet, Eugen Onegin, Picholin, Prince Andrei, Raskolnikov, and Moser, he also harbored a passion for the absolute.He became an informer and a persecutor not out of the maintenance of order and self-interest, but out of the pursuit of the noble.Unfortunately, however, this passion does not make him a person who rebels against reality, but a collaborator of reality, which makes his tragedy lose its sublime meaning.In order to cater to the times and pursue honor, he can turn his head and slander the modernist art he once ardently believed in; he can even report on his girlfriend.If we still feel excusable for his behavior (he didn't know what the consequences would be), then the inner justification he made for himself after betraying his girlfriend made us suddenly disgusted, "he didn't It's not that love doesn't mean anything to him that puts his girlfriend in danger—quite the contrary, he wants to achieve a world where people will love each other more than before." It's hard to even tell if it's all mean or childish!However, this sentence clearly shows a well-known logic.It has shown its theoretical clues under Hegel's historical inevitability, and it has shown its brilliance in practice in the twentieth century.Its essence is that when the laws of history conflict with the moral laws, the moral laws must be sacrificed: for the happiness of millions of people in the future, it is worth sacrificing the happiness of hundreds of people today; The main body of history is worth it.But what is puzzling is that if this is the case, what is history?Why is it moving forward?Where is its end?

It is this noble passion for historical development that has haunted many intellectuals in the twentieth century.It was an age of the least thoughtful, yet generally claimed to have been most rightly thought.It seems that after thousands of years of ignorance, people have finally stepped out of the fatalism of history and grasped the objective and inevitable laws once and for all. Since then, everything has become simple and clear.At a literary award ceremony, Kundera once quoted a Jewish proverb: "When people think, God laughs." This wise folk proverb is more powerful than many large-scale literati works. Behind people claiming to have found the ultimate truth, behind people claiming to have the most complete and profound understanding of the world, in fact, there is a lot of arrogance and ignorance, absoluteness and arbitrariness in thought, although they are often outdated. tooth wisdom.In the final analysis, this is just a kind of ignorance of thought, a kind of modern ignorance: there is a wonderful symbol in the novel that more clearly shows the essence of this kind of thought, which appears on the screen under the brush of Jaromil when he was young. All the people on the road have dog heads on their heads.This is perhaps the greatest discovery of the still innocent child since the Emperor's New Clothes.For this kind of dog-headed human figure similar to the surrealist painters, we are already familiar with the parade crowds walking all over the streets during the ten-year Cultural Revolution. Only God and children can't help laughing.

Needless to say, it is not a purely realistic work.In this novel, Kundera instills his suspicion of human passion and exploration of modern ignorance.What he is interested in is not the individuality of the characters, but the commonality of the characters.As he said in the preface, this is a novel of "poetry criticism".His purpose is to summarize the performance and role of poets of all ages (including all intellectuals who are as passionate as poets), portray them, and write for Rimbaud, Shelley, Lermontov, Mayakovsky, Ai Luya, Yesenin and many modern Czech poets portrayed.Therefore, there are few deliberate portrayals of the characters' personalities in the book, and even in the book, except for the poet Jaromil (meaning "he loves spring") and his mother Maman (pronounced "mother"), none of the characters are famous. For those with surnames, we only see "red-haired girl", "filmmaker", "painter", "janitor's son" and so on. Even if the two protagonists, mother and son, are just a symbol, a symbol , representing any poet and his mother of any age.In this sense, the author's thinking has indeed expanded from reality to history, from a society to the entire human race.More precisely, he said that he wanted to use the laboratory of the times to study the sublime and evil of human nature, to see through the darkest and deepest passions in people, and to reveal the tragedies that such passions may lead to. Romantic tragedies are worthless But a profound tragedy. It was completed in 1969, which was the second year after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Against such a historical background, the fate of the publication of this novel can be imagined.Interestingly, this year is also the year when most educated youths in China begin to go to the countryside to join the queue.For them, "living elsewhere" is no longer out of passion, but out of helplessness.The Czech youths who resisted the Soviet invasion and later recognized the reality are the same as the Red Guards and the educated youths. Their fate always seems to be oscillating between the two tragedies of passion and helplessness. The novel first appeared in French in 1973 and in English in the United States the following year.Translator Peter Coucy is a translator, writer and researcher of Slavic literature.The English translation was also translated by him.His translations faithfully convey the spirit and language characteristics of the original works.Many years later, he revised the translation of the book again.Kundera himself prefaced the revised edition.This book is translated based on this revised version of the 1986 edition of Penguin Books.The English translation does not note the names of people quoted in the original book. In order to help readers understand, many names of people in the book are annotated by the translator. May 1988 in Nanjing