The Judgment of the Past by the Present
It is perhaps obvious how indebted I am to Milan Kundera for my political and artistic sensibilities; as often as I mention Errol Morris (thanks, Riaz!), it is Kundera who has primacy among my influences and for whom I have the most affection.
On a day when, as Doree noted, he has been implicated as a one-time informer (in 1950, when he was 21), I was heartened to see quoted by Bunnynico a passage from my favorite of his works, Immortality. She relates the following quote to our American election:
Of course, imagologues existed long before they created the powerful institutions we know today. Even Hitler had his personal imagologue, who used to stand in front of him and patiently demonstrate the gestures to be made during speeches to fascinate the crowds. But if that imagologue, in an interview with the press, had amused the Germans by describing Hitler as incapable of moving his hands, he would not have survived his indiscretion by more than a few hours. Nowadays, however, the imagologue not only does not try to hide his activity, but often even speaks for his politician clients, explains to the public what he taught them to do or not to do, how he told them to behave, what formula they are likely to use, and what tie they are likely to wear. We needn’t be surprised by this self-confidence: in the last few decades, imagology has gained a historic victory over ideology.(….)Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that could break this power.
Bunnynico has more very interesting analysis on these ideas here, and links to an article called Milan Kundera and Image. I consider his commentary on politics and media to be of tremendous value and quite accurate in their assessment; as I’ve expressed, I believe it is image (or we might say “the personal” or “the demographic-aesthetic”) that is responsible for almost all “political” beliefs.
But I want to mention something else: if you’ve read Kundera, you are familiar with his utter hostility to (1) the reduction of artists to their biographies, which he considers not merely a useless form of analysis for art but in fact one that misleads and distorts and (2) the judgment of the past by the present.
This latter phenomenon is perpetual and embarrassing: we are so happy to condemn those whose historical context was to them the fluid and impossible terrain of the present, but is to us the exposed and dissected landscape of the textbook. As Kundera once wrote, man proceeds through life as though walking down a path in the fog. He can see perhaps a few steps ahead of himself, and a bit to the woods on either side, but not more. When we look back on him, we see only the path and never the fog. It is all so clear!
Perhaps these themes interested him because he knew that in his early, revolutionary youth –at a time when most of our intellectual heroes were enthusiastically embracing murderous cretins like Stalin, Mao, and Che– he stumbled on his path. Or perhaps his interest was merely that of the artist: generalized, human, investigative.
Kundera never speaks to the press, but he’s spoken about this to emphatically deny it. My affection for his work biases me, so I offer no conclusion. I think, however, that we ought to remember the fog of the time, the youth of the man, and the impossibly inertial forces of history, which have now reached across fifty-eight years to grasp at an artist who’s spent his life fleeing them.
