[Mourning Milan Kundera] Wen Qing's boundary, and mourning Milan. Kundera

(The original text was published in Function Words Intangible )

Text｜ Deng Zhengjian

It's certainly not kitsch to mourn the death of an idol from your literary youth, as long as you don't shed tears, especially in the second line. Because of Milan Kundera's death, I realized that there are far more people who were young for him than I thought, and only then did I know that people who hated him hated him more than I thought. I understand. I also once hated this literary idol I once loved, when I was about to write a book review for the newspaper on his last novel "Celebrating the Pointless". At that time, the Chinese translation of the novel had just been published, and I read it wholeheartedly. Fortunately, it was short and did not have the volume of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", so I didn't need to spend too much time. The book review was quickly written and published. It was not until many years later that netizens suddenly shared this short book review in the wave of mourning that I remembered that Kundera lived a long life. From the time I wrote that book review with a trace of dislike for him until now , that kind of dislike has long since disappeared, disappearing without a trace, as if I have always liked this novelist.

I used to hate Kundera because he was nothingness. Please remember that it was midsummer 2014 when I read "Celebrating Meaninglessness". It was a time and space overflowing with "meaning". It is disgusting nothingness. Going back further in my memory, I read Havel carefully in the past few years. Kundera’s fellow countryman and contemporary, but he symbolized a completely different intellectual outlook. When they were young, they had a literary battle, and later they each had their own careers, but they attracted other scholars who read them to make irresponsible remarks, claiming to believe in Havel's spine and scorn Kundera's face. Then, not to mention I learned later that Kundera was involved in a storm known as the "Dvorhasek Incident". He was accused of being an informer to the regime in the communist Czech Republic. Verhasek went to jail.

It took me a long time to understand: so what? Literary theory tells me that the text and the author are not the same, there is a sense of rupture between the text and the author, which can be ambiguous, contradictory, complementary or expressive, and when the text is produced, the author should be Put it outside the context of the text, because in the literary sense, the "author" is dead, and then... well, that's my attempt to use an abstract theoretical language to explain why I can spare Kundera may have been I ignored the inappropriate incident, and temporarily forgot about his seemingly empty old age, and continued to like him to the end. "Don't talk nonsense because of others", the middle-aged me finally learned to explain my emotions in simple words, or in other words, when I heard that Kundera passed away, all the bad things about him were automatically in my heart Being pushed aside in my memory, I only try to remember his goodness, so the few words of condolences I wrote online are also kind words. Compared with some people writing long articles about how they hate Kundera, I feel that I am much happier.

There are a lot of Kundera's works on the bookshelf, at least "Immortality" is missing. I remember that it was the Taiwan Times "Master's Famous Workshop" edition, but I gave it away when I was moving house. At that time, I was discussing Kundera with my friend. I read "Immortality" and he read "Slowness". We both thought it was good, so we exchanged the books in our hands to read. I later gave him "Slow" and told him I didn't like it, "Immortal" was much better. However, he didn't return "Immortal" to me in time. After a long time, I said I wanted to move house, so I didn't have to return it at all. I suspect that the dislike for Kundera that began to brew in my heart came from "Slowness". The explanation I gave myself at the time was that "Slowness" was written in French, not Kundera's mother tongue. The heaviness of reading Immortality.

heavy. Life is light, but it is heavy to read because it is unbearable. I'm actually not quite sure if "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is the first Kundera I read, maybe not, because it may be because too many people said that it was the first Kundera he/she read. Della, causing me to have false memories. But it may be true, because I still have the book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" on the shelf, which is also a Chinese translation of the Times edition, translated by mainland novelist Han Shaogong. This translation was translated by Han Shaogong based on the English translation, and it was completed in about 1985. The Times edition was first published in 1988, and the book in my hand has three editions and sixteen brushstrokes. It was published in 1999. The time of crazily gnawing on literary classics-it should be said that it is the classics of Wenqing. Marquis, Calvino, and Haruki Murakami, (called the four idols of Wenqing (!)), all read it during that time. In hindsight, kitsch? perhaps.

But one thing, what impressed me more about Kundera than the other three is that his novel narrative is closest to my literary youth. Marquis's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" penetrates too far in time and space, creating an unattainable sense of sublime; Calvino has a book titled "Memorandum for the Next Round of Peace and Prosperity" as the translation, and the span is also vast. As for Haruki Murakami, sorry, I did read "Norwegian Wood" with the mentality of reading a romance/erotic novel at first, after all, the bag book of Boyi's version fits that kind of imagination too well. However, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is different. I always remember that the translated name of the book is "the lightness", not Han Shaogong's real word "zhilightness". The prose of the characters also establishes the rhythm of reading for the title of the book: the unbearable lightness in life, when you read it, there is a kind of life that sinks quickly to the unbearable level, and then slowly floats up. The feeling of returning to the surface is very in line with my self-imagining in the Wenqing era: I always feel that my life is very heavy, but when I try to press my life to a heavy position, my life is like a balloon that is pressed down, and I let go of it a little , and floated up lightly.

Therefore, I absolutely hate that the mainland version later translated the title of the book as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", with "de" and "zhi", without that kind of rhythm. not good.

Also, I have to confess that when I first read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", I didn't understand many things, but I was attracted by his narrative. At first, I knew the concepts of "return to eternity" and "kitsch" , all from this book. There are many descriptions of love and sex in the book, but compared to the romantic/pornographic Haruki Murakami, Kundera’s advantage is that it is packaged with philosophical discussions, and everything becomes more tasteful—of course I’m talking about back then The intuitive feeling of reading novels in the Wenqing era, rather than formal commentary analysis, so in the future, when many haters attacked Kundera by "pretending to use philosophical discourses", what they really attacked was actually only the haters' own Wenqing The style is superficial.

And it was a book called "Heavy Flesh" that really started me into "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". The author of the book is Liu Xiaofeng, the inland scholar who later often used Schmidt's political theory to defend the authoritarian regime and was degraded by many people as a pedantic scholar. The cover of this book is an elegant purple, and the sleeping half-naked female body is low-key but not vulgar. The book is published by Oxford University Press. The book length is the classic long form of Oxford Publishing. You can hold the book horizontally with one hand. This also reduces the number of words per line in the typesetting, making it easier to read smoothly. The book paper is deliberately rough. After many years, I found this book from the bookshelf, opened it, and the smell of yellow paper came to my nose. I turned to a chapter in the book also entitled "Heavy Flesh". In this chapter, Liu Xiaofeng borrowed some Greek philosophical concept books to explain the love story in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", especially Thomas in Sabina. and Theresa's choice. There are many topics of ethics, body theory and modernity involved in the discussion. After years of dabbling in philosophy and theory, I reread Liu Xiaofeng while mourning Kundera. I was so shocked when I read this book at the beginning of the year.

Then, I finally understood that the reason why Kundera was able to take root in my heart during my literary youth was because he showed me the possibility of a literary philosophical narrative: of course, what Kundera wrote was not strictly philosophy; Satisfying the intellectual needs of a young man (rather than the intellectual needs of young intellectuals), this way of writing is very attractive, and I even think that is the ideal way of writing Zhepu (popularization of philosophy). Liu Xiaofeng's "Heavy Flesh" further strengthened the richness of this narrative form. If I remember correctly, "Heavy Flesh" was also a momentary choice for the literary youth group, or to be more precise, it was the intellectual literary youth. The instant choice of the group, because Liu Xiaofeng wrote "The Unbearable Lightness in Life", which has a strong texture but is difficult to straighten out in a moment, in a semi-prose and semi-literary commentary style, which made the literary youth Readers are enlightened and enlightened, awakening the intellectual side of the literary youth's emotions, so that they will not indulge in the absolute restlessness of the literary youth, and will not be able to extricate themselves even in middle age.

I am grateful for this reading history. Over the years, I have even suspected that the form of prose criticism I often pursue is partly based on the two texts "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" and "The Heavy Flesh". Therefore, many years later, I continued to read Kundera, almost all of his early and late novels, as well as his collection of essays. I still miss my gifted copy of "Immortality" and I read "The Book of Laughing and Forgetting" later, not most of the other Kundera's works that I read in the e-book archives later. Perceptually speaking, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" and "Immortal" are not all written in Czech after Kundera left France, and are generally considered by critics to be his three most accomplished works. I am particularly partial to these three novels, but these three novels can best demonstrate the charm of Kundera's writing. The charm of this kind of writing is very attractive to the literary youth, but it also has the resilience like a mellow wine, which is enough to make many people even in adulthood or middle age (like me) still not be ashamed to admit that it symbolizes the era of the literary youth. A long-standing fondness for him.

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