Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Thus, to see it all. To be seen. The messages of the face, the enigmatic looks through a keyhole with the girl Magda in her bathtub (as enigmatic as the encounter of the feet of Julien Sorel and Madame Renal in Stendhal’s Rouge et Noir ), the lyricism of the body, of death, of words, of the city, of other poets (Rimbaud, Mayakovsky, Wolker) make up the original poetic repertory of Jaromil. He does not want to separate it from his life; he wants to be, like Rimbaud, the young poet who sees all and is totally seen before becoming totally invisible and totally blind. All or nothing. He demands it of his love for the redhead. This love must be total or not be at all. And when the lover does not promise him all her life, Jaromil awaits the absolute of death; when the lover does not promise him death, but sadness, she stops having a real existence, an existence corresponding to the absolute interiority of the poet: all or nothing, life or death.

All or nothing. He demands it of his mother beyond the foolish and bitter expectations of the woman who wishes to be the frustrated lover of her son. The varied and ambiguous repertory of the absolutist maternal blackmail, nevertheless, decomposes into too many partial emotions: pity and reproach, hope, anger, seduction. The poet’s mother (and Kundera tells us that “in the houses of poets, women reign”) cannot be Jocasta and thus becomes Gertrude, believing she gives her son all so that the son may continue to pay her until he pays the impossible; that is, all. Jaromil will not be Oedipus but Hamlet: the poet who sees in his mother not the absolute he longs for but the reduction that murders.

In the most beautiful page of Life Is Elsewhere (Chapter 13 of the third part), Kundera places Jaromil in “the land of tenderness, which is the land of the artificial childhood”:

Tenderness is born in the instant in which we are pushed toward the threshold of the adult age and realize, with anguish, the advantages of childhood which we did not understand when we were children. Tenderness consists in creating an artificial space where the other person can be treated as a child. Tenderness is also fear of the physical consequences of love; it is an attempt to remove love from the world of the adults and to consider the woman as a child.

This is the impossible tenderness that Jaromil the poet will not be able to find in his mother or in his lover, since both women bear the “insidious, constrictive love, heavy with flesh and responsibility” of the adult age — whether it be the love of the woman for her poet lover or the love of the mother for her grown son. This is the irretrievable idyll in human beings that Jaromil is going to seek and find in the socialist revolution. He needs the absolute in order to be a poet, much as Baudelaire needed, to be a poet, “to exist always in a state of drunkenness, drunk with wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you like it.”

The Credulous Poet

Lyricism, Milan Kundera informs us, is a virtue and man becomes drunk in order to confuse himself more easily with the universe. Poetry is the territory where all that is said becomes true. The same can be said of a revolution. It is the sister of poetry. And it saves the young poet from the loss of his tenderness in the adult, relativist world. Poetry and revolution are absolutes; young people are “passionate monists, messengers of the absolute.” The poet and the revolutionary embody the unity of the world. Adults laugh at them, and so begins the drama of poetry and revolution.

Revolution then shows the way to poetry. “The revolution does not want to be studied or observed; it wants to become one with her: it is in this sense that it is lyrical and that lyricism is essential to it.” Thanks to this lyrical unity, the biggest fear of the young poet is calmed: the future ceases to be a question mark. The future becomes “that miraculous island in the distance” because “the future ceases to be a mystery; the revolutionary knows it by heart.” Thus, there shall never be a future; the future shall always be a known yet deferred promise, similar to the life we conceive in the instant of our childhood tenderness.

When he finds this identity (that is, this faith), Jaromil feels freed from the demands of the deceitful Gynaeceum, where feminine love is partial and egotistical but appears pretentiously disguised as an absolute. The uncertainty of revolutionary eras is an advantage for youth, “since it is the world of the fathers which is thrown into uncertainty.” Jaromil discovers that his mother was the obstacle in his search for the lost mother. This lost mother is the revolution and it demands that we lose all in order to gain all; above all, liberty: “Freedom does not begin there where the fathers are refused or buried, but where they are not. Where man comes into the world without knowing from whom.”

The revolutionary idyll substitutes everything, embodies everything; it is at once parasite and new birth, and it demands more than the fathers, more than the lovers: “The glory of duty is born from the severed head of love.” The revolution contains the idyllic temptation of appropriating poetry, and the poet accepts it because, thanks to the revolution, he and his poetry will be loved “by the whole world.”

This idyll compensates for the insufficiencies of life, of love, of mother, of lover, of childhood itself, elevating them to the lyrical unity of experience, community, action, the future. It is an armed prophecy making an armed prophet of the poet. It is impossible not to surrender before this idyll and offer on its altar all our real actions, actions even more real, more concrete, more revolutionary.

The poet can be an informer. This is the terrible reality stated in Life Is Elsewhere. The young poet Jaromil informs in the name of the revolution, condemns the weak, sends them to the gallows, and innocence shows us its bloody smile. “The poet reigns with the hangman” and not, Kundera underlines, because the totalitarian regime has deformed the poet’s talent, or because the poet is mediocre and seeks the totalitarian refuge. Jaromil does not inform in spite of his lyrical talent, but, precisely, because of it.

We are not accustomed to hearing something so brutal, and it is necessary to let Kundera speak for himself since he has lived something that we only know secondhand, when he addresses “us”:

All the young rebels around you, who can be so sympathetic, would have reacted, in the same situation, in the same manner. If Paul Eluard had been a Czech, he would have been an official poet and his pure and innocent heart would have identified itself perfectly with the regime of the trials and the nooses. I am astonished at the Western incapacity to see its own face in the mirror of our history. The tragicomedy which is being acted out in my country is also that of your ideas, your enthusiasm, your doctrines, your fantasies, your dreams and your cruel innocence.

Kundera is forty-nine years old [at the time of this writing]. At eighty, Aragon could say, “That which we sacrificed in ourselves, that which we tore out of ourselves, out of our past, is something impossible to value, but we did it in the name of the future of all.”

The century is going to die without the need to repeat this sacrifice. It is sufficient to die, in our time, to defend the integrity of the present, to defend the integrity of the presence of the human being; he who kills in the name of the future of all is a reactionary.

The Internal Utopia

We cannot evade the burning question in the novels of Milan Kundera. It is a question of our times and it possesses a tragic resonance because it is a fight within ourselves and affects our possible freedom. The question is simply this: How to fight injustice without creating injustice? It is the question of any man who acts in our time. Witnessing this movement, Aristotle limited himself to stating that tragedy is “the imitation of action.” What is tragic is neither passive nor fatal, but what acts. Perhaps the answer to Kundera’s question, which is our question, is to be found in an order of values capable of absorbing the ethical causality of history, and of elevating it to a conflict, no longer between good and evil, but between two values which perhaps are not good and good, but which will surely not be evil and evil.