Download The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with by Trevor Cribben Merrill PDF

By Trevor Cribben Merrill

Trevor Cribben Merrill deals a daring reassessment of Milan Kundera's position within the modern canon. Harold Bloom and others have brushed aside the Franco-Czech writer as a maker of "period items" that misplaced forex as soon as the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a formerly unexplored measurement of Kundera's fiction. development on theorist René Girard's proposal of "triangular desire," he exhibits that sleek classics reminiscent of The insufferable Lightness of Being and The e-book of Laughter and Forgetting demonstrate a counterintuitive--and bitterly funny--understanding of human attraction.

Most works of fiction (and such a lot videos, too) depict passionate emotions as deeply real and spontaneous. Kundera's novels and brief tales overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding middle and sweaty arms may possibly suggest that we have got came upon "the One" at last--or they can attest to the impact of a version whose wishes we're unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections could owe much less to private flavor or actual chemistry than they do to imitative wish.

At as soon as a accomplished survey of Kundera's novels and a witty creation to Girard's mimetic thought, The ebook of Imitation and wish demanding situations our assumptions approximately human purpose and renews our figuring out of an enormous modern author.

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Extra info for The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard

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He does not experience his imitation as such, however. Rather, he sincerely believes in the authenticity of his feeling, just as the journalist in “Dr. Havel” no doubt believes in the intense erotic desire that overwhelms him in the presence of the wrinkled Frantiska, not realizing that this desire comes to him from Havel. Though on some level his imitation is more deliberate than the journalist’s, Jaromil, too, believes sincerely and wholeheartedly in the conception of love that he has picked up from books.

In repeating Havel’s words verbatim, the journalist allows his master to possess him and to engender in him a new self born of this possession. In Christian’s case, the possession is deliberate and open (though concealed from Roxanne); in the journalist’s case, the process is less strategic, less self-aware. Hence the delicious comic spectacle of a young man whose very self is driven and sustained by the model’s energy, manipulated by Havel as a marionette is manipulated by the marionettist. ”8 The story’s exaggerated depiction of the triangular nature of desire, the transfiguration of an unattractive woman into a beauty by the sheer magic of mimetic suggestion, the way in which the journalist allows his master to speak through him—all of this adds up to a vignette that surpasses in sheer farcical cartoonishness just about any portrayal of desire-by-imitation Into the Labyrinth of Values 17 outside of Cervantes, Kundera’s acknowledged master.

Once it becomes accessible, the object of desire loses its aura and enters the banal and profane circle of the self. Of course, Havel is only fooling himself: he, of all people, should know better than to take the blond woman’s submissiveness as legitimate proof of his seductive powers, since it was he who stimulated her interest by artificial means. Like a dictator who starts to believe in his own cult of personality, Havel has become the dupe of the very propaganda machine he set in motion by parading about town with his trophy wife.

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