I recently filled in that '10 or More Books' meme thing on Facebook and was inspired to revisit many of the wonderful books I put on that list.
It wasn't on my list but I've been re-reading
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera lately because, godsdammit, I love the man's work. There's something so real and honest about it, as well as the beauty of the language and the wry humour. I'm reading this one because it was the first one I found on my book shelf. I've been hankering for
The Unbearable Lightness of Being but for some reason didn't start with that one. It's taken me a little time to really get in to
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting but I had one of those precious moments the other night when you read something and a little light bulb goes on over your head. This is that something:
"One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."
It seems to me the Internet has heralded the dawn of that age. Any idiot (and I include myself in this, obviously) with access to a computer can write and spout forth opinions and argue and totally ignore what others are saying. Facebook and Twitter seems to be the ultimate form of this. In order to Blog one has to sit down and actually compose a blog entry. This (hopefully!) involves editing and revising and all that good stuff. Well, it does in my case anyway. From what I understand of things like Facebook and Twitter you can write your thoughts down and broadcast them to the world instantaneously.
Now, we could argue that you can't label every person with a Twitter or Facebook account a writer because they don't go through that process of editing etc. However, Kundera seems to have just this sort of person in mind in
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting when he talks of writers. There is a character, Bibi, who is a wholly unremarkable European housewife who wants to write a book and Kundera implies the desire to write is all you need to be a writer. This is perhaps the 1977 (the year the book was written) version of your humble blogger, or the Twitterphile.
I'm not saying the desire to write is a bad thing, on the contrary. I'm just really worried about being in this age of universal deafness and incomprehension because it seems to have filtered into all facets of society. I do believe we are getting dumber, and that's not just because I work in a university! "Deafness and incomprehension" seem to be acceptable excuses for not taking responsibility for your own life these days. "I'm going to sue MacDonald's because the hot coffee I bought was so hot is scalded my lap." Excuse me? Did Ronald MacDonald himself pour the coffee into your lap? No, it's hot and common sense dictates you should be careful handling it.
I apologise, I seem to blog about the general decline in human intellect rather a lot but it does depress the hell out of me. Milan Kundera's writing does not depress me though. You'd think it would but somehow the world seems a little better when you look at it through his eyes. With that in mind I'll leave you with the passage in Kundera's own words. This is chapter 18 of
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
(A bit of background first: Tamina fled Czechoslovakia with her husband for political reasons and has been unable to return. She's been trying to persuade her cantankerous mother in law to give her notebooks and letters to a visiting friend (Hugo) because she's afraid if they are posted the police will read them. Banaka is a local writer who nobody takes seriously. It's been said even Banaka thinks people who read his work are idiots. Bibi is an unremarkable local housewife who wants to write a novel.)
A few days later, Banaka turned up in the café. Staggering drunk, he fell off a barstool twice before managing to stay on it, order a calvados, and put his head down on the counter. Tamina noticed he was crying.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Banaka?” she asked him.
Banaka looked up at her tearfully and pointed to his chest: “I’m nothing, do you understand? I’m nothing! I don’t exist!”
Then he went straight to the toilet and from the toilet straight out into the street, without paying.
When Tamina told Hugo what had happened, he showed her, by way of explanation, a newspaper page with book reviews, among them a sarcastic four-line note on Banaka’s entire output.
The episode of Banaka’s pointing to his chest and crying because he did not exist reminds me of a line from Goethe’s West-End Divan: “Is one alive when other men are living?” Hidden within Goethe’s question is the mystery of the writer’s condition: By writing books, a man turns into a universe (don’t we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe or Chekhov, the universe of Kafka?) and it is precisely the nature of a universe to be unique. The existence of another universe threatens it in its very essence.
Provided their shops are not on the same street, two cobblers can live in perfect harmony. But if they start writing books on the cobbler’s lot, they are soon going to get in each other’s way and ask: “Is a cobbler alive when other cobblers are living?”
Tamina has the impression that a single outsider’s glance can destroy the entire worth of her intimate notebooks, and Goethe is convinced that a single glance of a single human being which fails to fall on lines written by Goethe calls into question Goethe’s very existence. The difference between Tamina and Goethe is the difference between human being and writer.
Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognised, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals: Banaka, Bibi, I and Goethe.
The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: “We are all writers!”
For everyone pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.
Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (P145-147 New English Translation, Faber and Faber, 1996)
Now if you're excuse me I'm off to open a Twitter account....
