The Curtain, drawn back.

Files recently unearthed from the Soviet archive reveal that Milan Kundera, as a student, may have reported a suspect who turned out to be a Western agent (as a result, the agent was ostracised–that is, exiled from the country from ten years. I didn’t realise that was still a punishment in modern times). In one of his earlier novels, The Joke, the main character reports someone who is trying to escape the communist regime out of love for the girl who has told him this ‘fact’ (except that said someone wasn’t actually trying to escape–it was an excuse she gave him so as not to tell him she as having an affair–and both the ‘escapee’ and the girl were interrogated, the girl ending up incarcerated for covering up for an ‘agent’). A similar situation, perhaps? Was the author writing what he knew? We may never know the truth.

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And I believe there is needing to know the truth for purposes of justice, but not necessarily for literary criticism. Regardless of what Kundera may or may not have done as a 21-year-old before he himself left the country to escape the regime, that doesn’t change his place in literary history as a communicator of Czechoslovakia under the Soviets, a writer of originality amongst his contemporaries, a major player in developing a certain kind of Central European philosophical approach and thought.

I’m listening to the debates on the Czech radio if he has the ‘right’ to be moralistic if he did indeed report a fellow citizen–and yet I’m not sure if they have really read his work, there isn’t exactly anything heroic about his characters. They don’t fight the system and win; the Soviet regime is indeed portrayed as all pervasive, yet his characters are essentially human. The protagonist of ‘The Joke’ is of an unfixed, changing mind, protesting the regime and then fervently supporting the communist philsophy, before realising the impact that his attempts to be both a good citizen and lover (not that it necessarily makes him a better person). His novels are explorations–there is never exactly a happily ever after.

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I think it reflects this kind of hunger that we’ve developed for information on everything about another person–there is so much difficulty in trying to know and come to terms with ourselves, yet an insatiable pursual of all things trivial. Tabloids sell more copies than more sober newspapers, there are celebrity magazines and ‘human interest’ magazines, where the general public are invited to write in their own stories to become a part of the magazine (or at least there is here–they’re magazines like Take 5 and the sort). Celebrities have behaviour clauses written into their contract, their future success is judged against their past actions, we google our companies, our acquaintances, and they return the favour, in order to verify our existence and also to develop their perceptions of us, based on things we may not necessarily have wanted them to know.

The quality and impact of his work should not be rejudged based on his personal history. In The Curtain, a recent book of literary criticism on the history of the novel, he talks about how authors and artists select works they feel best represents their oeuvre, what they feel is their definitive work–and historians (?) still push through to uncover letters, first drafts, revised manuscripts, abandoned juvenilia. That personal ‘right’, if there ever was one, to represent a mature personal philosophy based on selected works is overridden by the sheer availability of information and the curiosity of those who choose to study them.

I had thought along the lines of the literary historian (and as a historian in general); that in order to capture an overview of how an era was lived out and how a line of thought was developed, it is important to gain as much information as is available. And yet, as a lover of literature, I can suddenly see his point when his ability as a writer is suddenly questioned because of the apparent hypocrisy of being caught in the same passion/dilemma/day to day existence of the Czechoslovakian in the 1950’s–and choosing to become a published, well-known author from it.

Kundera’s Czech cycle of novels played a part, albeit much on a smaller scale, similar to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Day in the Life–revealing to the world what it was like to live under the regime. Except instead of tales of hard labour and punishment in the gulag camps, his novels revealed the impact on what are essentially fragile lives and relationships, trying to exist and love under constant surveillance, the fervour of those who did believe in the philosophy, and the difficulty of trying to leave (and the even greater difficulty of trying to return once one had left). Smaller scale, yes, but no less human.

Perhaps the tale of Kundera’s protagonist choosing to report the supposed ‘escape’ in order to protect the woman that he loved rings true because Kundera himself had been there before. Unless he chooses to publicise the truth–unlikely, as he is a private person and this comes through clearly in his own literary criticism–that’s purely speculation. And it’s the kind of speculation that has become rife in today’s society, where the ‘desire’ to know all about others becomes the ‘right’ to know–and perhaps they could stand to read a little more closely than just scanning over the words. Because even if Kundera’s characters end up more lost than they had been when they started, it is due to the choices that they make in self-discovery–or the lack of it.

It took moving overseas to find the world news.

Back in Australia I was introduced to ABC Newsradio by a friend, and enjoyed the ‘world perspective’ that was often sorely lacking–but that was because at night it cut to BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands. As the daughter of migrants from a country that wasn’t economically or politically important to Australia, it meant that the piecemeal bits of news that we could get from ‘home’ either came in the form of major disasters or ‘amusing’ trivia. There is an economy of information in the local and national press, a demand and supply curve that can only fit in so many pages of doom and gloom before they have to call out for more advertisers, most whom probably don’t want to share page space with doom and gloom in the first.

So the internet was a boon for myself as an information seeker, particularly when I started to listen to the foreign radio–Radio France Internationale for a broad world coverage that included Africa and the Middle East (that was not just about the war of the time), Radio Nacional de Espana for Spain and Latin America. And with the study of new languages came a new appreciation of the intricacies of how culture shapes perceptions. And, dare I say it–how perceptions, in a way, shape culture.

My Australian upbringing, in comparison, feels very sunny, isolated–not so much naive, but that separation by kilometres and oceans and history probably has a real bearing on its laidback culture. I miss it–on the other hand I just feel lucky to have been raised in such a place, and the day to day realities I face now remind me not to take these things for granted.