Why We Sport

With the exception of this month–long quadrennial tournament, tomorrow’s championship game is the most widely watched sporting event in the world.  For that reason, we digress for one afternoon on the subject.

“Sports replace armies and dreams, and although many people derive from them a form of vicarious pleasure, it is excellence that attracts many more.  Grace and excellence.  It is a sense of imagined community and common beliefs and wishes, and is as important territorially as any district line or catchment area.”

Whether you believe the statement above, quilted together from innumerable sources, is less important than the unchallenged place of sports in a society that often discourages antagonism.  Competition, you see, is what made us into the most intelligent life form on this lonely planet, and we would be denying our inner need to excel if we relegated ourselves to more peaceful pursuits and more private achievements (if we used our athletic abilities, for example, to cope with the dangers of urban living and to help those in need in urban crises, which are the aims of this discipline).  Granted, maybe you shouldn't take that last sentence at face value, but what’s in a name?  Sport is shortened from disport, which persons of very choice vocabulary might use to describe amusement or diversion, more evident in the Spanish equivalent.  A few of us are entertained by clashes, by miniwars between evenly matched opponents whose every move may decide the outcome.  Others seek commonality in what they watch: their fellow fans are a sort of surrogate family that rises and falls in unison.  Should sports be a struggle or a bond?  It should be, and is for most adherents, a bit of both.      

Sports are certainly an outlet for violence and frustration, and we needn’t belabor how many of our highly evolved species exhibit signs of bestiality.  Watching something intensely athletic or even ultraviolent, a term apparently coined by this writer, gives us a sense of the Darwinian struggle, of the fittest and the leanest and their right to claim supremacy.  The vanquished foe, someone whom we will never know away from the battlefield, represents the fall of the unjust, of those destined to lose and bow before superior strength.  We hold that superior strength.  We raise our arms to heaven in victory when we halt injustice and evil and hatred and when we champion the triumph of some higher power.  Our wishes have been met, our squad has captured a title and a piece of history (or at least a place in the annals), and all other teams become easy targets of our year–round discontent.  I suppose the majority of sports fans secretly harbor no ill will towards the opponents they jeer and mock, but there is great satisfaction in ventilating the tension of the day on rich young men whom we will never get to know personally and who, in any case, couldn’t care less about what we thought of them.      

Often, these brave new worldbeaters can be seen thanking that higher power for allowing them to win.  Many cynics find such displays of gratitude disingenuous, probably because they don’t thank anyone for anything and believe that they alone are responsible for their lives and accomplishments.  Clearly, many athletes who indefatigably refuse to offer their services unless they squeeze another few million out of their teams are not quite as pious as they may claim; one particularly laughable accessory is a cross or crucifix laden with every gem and precious metal that taste would permit.  Even if separating the righteous from the wicked (insert alternative hyperbole here) is absolutely none of our business, we still find, among the hypocrites and moneymen, players who remain gracious and meek in the face of their extraordinary talent.  These young men should be especially admired because they are surrounded by temptations at every platform of their profession and, as celebrities, are almost coerced into behaving badly (Who, tell me now, finds modest and thoughtful players interesting?  Players humbled by the fact that they have succeeded while the multitude fail?  A few of us, I suppose). 

 

These men — in this country, around the world, in the smallest of society's campsites — are teammates, wear identical uniforms, and work towards shared accolades, but they are no longer of the same ethnic heritage.   No pictures of the French or Dutch national soccer teams are needed to prove that point, nor to explain the policies of centuries ago that resulted in this multiculturalism.  Yet let us remember how exceedingly rare it is to be able to root gladsomely for something apolitical and transcultural, where race, religion, gender, age, native language and homeland mean absolutely nothing.  True, a certain parochial flavor obtains in local rivalries, or even those between two great American cities; but globalization and telecommunications have advanced to such a point that we lucky Jims and Janes now have near unlimited possibilities for living and working where we choose (we being, albeit, still a fragmentary minority), and fans can follow their teams from all the ends of the earth.  Regardless of their distance or the likely fact that they are no longer able to watch the games live, they still feel part of an imagined community, a brotherhood and sisterhood of similar goals. 

 

These affiliations may not replace nations at war, although we would all benefit if they did.  Occasionally, maybe even more often than that, the inflamed passions of patriotism are tempered by smaller divisions and victories.  How often do we hear of better work environments on Monday morning after a local team's victory over the weekend (and the attendant apathy on the heels of defeat)?  Considering how uninvolved we are in each other's lives, and how society affirms that we are all victims who have experienced unique suffering and difficulties, what is wrong in finding an abstraction that gives us a reason to smile kindly upon our cubicled neighbor?  This desire for microsuccess and camaraderie is not, and should never be, anything deplorable.  Some may find it odd that a person like myself, devoted to a long life of learning, would be at all interested in sportsmanship.  But it is precisely a connection with persons I cannot meet that reminds me of our common interests: peace, equality, fairness, and a healthy dose of ambition.  Some (maybe those same some) think that fandom is primarily for underachievers who, enfeebled by a lack of skill or initiative, decide to let others strive and take vicarious pride in those milestones.  Admittedly, a lot of hero worship persists.  That is why the Hellenes had gods of every capacity, why medieval varlets looked upon galloping warriors with such blissful acceptance, and why today we have innumerable leagues of superheroes, one of the most curious collective abstractions in human history.  Whatever the truth may be, we may agree to admire those who can do things we could never possibly accomplish, and yet still work towards our own goals.   There is no mutual exclusivity in this proposal.

 

The turning point in a man's maturity is the exact moment he realizes he will never become a professional athlete, and some men, as we know, never quite arrive at this juncture.  I am certainly proud when I root, but it is ironically the quiet pride of the parent or guardian or teacher that prevails, one that understands that we, as fans, have little to do with any team’s on—field success.  Yet we do have a say in preserving the societal value of sports as a method of learning teamwork, pride, dedication, discipline, and patience, of being gracious in victory and wanting to play the game by the rules.  And most of all, of learning how to lose.  Because loss will always be our building block for strength.

Anticipating the Original of Laura

Is there a greater thrill for a bibliophile than the publication of a newly discovered work by a deceased author he admires?  All literary criticism, bad and good, feels much more comfortable with the dead than with the living, and not only because the dead cannot tell them how foolish and misbegotten their analyses are.  There is, inevitably, a wholeness (especially if the writer reached a decent old age) to the oeuvre of a writer which mimics life’s own swerves and shapes.  From the brash and roguish writings of youth to more pensive middle age, to silver–haired masterpieces, to the last recounting of a long journey into night, a writer’s oeuvre is his photo album, diary, résumé, and testament.  Unless his time on earth was engulfed by extraordinary savageness or sensationalism (and we know the adage on that point), he will only be remembered for the papers he chose to engrave.  Once he is no longer around, his next life, that of a literary figure, may truly commence.    

As such, there has been more than a bit of idle chatter regarding the unpublished manuscript of this great polyglot, none of it, alas, conclusive.  After the same argument is repeated in paraphrase about a dozen times, it is then for some reason suggested that the best justification for adhering to the author’s final wishes to burn The Original of Laura would be that the half–work might endure undeserved critical silliness (as if, we suppose, his other works do merit such scrutiny).  If Nabokov, a fastidious mastermind, got as far as is claimed — roughly thirty normal pages, so maybe about twelve or thirteen thousand words, although this remains pure speculation — one can be sure that the quality of the production will be at the same standards as readers have come to expect.  The only foreseeable drop–off would be in structure, those artificial beams and bridges that often do not materialize until all pertinent details have been mapped.  Yet Nabokov was just as accomplished an architect as he was a portrait painter, a rarity in our age of overspecialization.  And although he famously claimed to have rewritten everything he had ever published at least a hundred times, his clarity of phrasing is evident even in his correspondence and discursive writings.  If anyone were to be protected by the fortress of his own talents and unable to tarnish his image with any posthumous palimpsests, Nabokov would be among the most likely to survive unscathed.

Nevertheless, if these recent rumors are well–founded, his son, translator, and literary executor Dmitri appears to be engaging in a game of handy–dandy.  Encumbered by a number of burdens, not the least of which is the maintenance of his father’s artistic integrity in the face of shifting critical winds, the younger (73–year–old) Nabokov would have burned the document by now if he had really wanted to do so.  After all, July marked the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s death.  Clearly, waters have to be tested, and maybe a bit of creative padding needs to be inserted before we get to see the semi–finished product (a few years ago, some impatient scholars decided to get a jump on the competition).  Having spent a decade working in Nabokovia, my understanding is that we will see the pink elephant in the end, although it will still be dripping with distemper.  Nabokov conceded that he would be remembered primarily for his unorthodox translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (which he justified by Chateaubriand’s rendering of this most sublime of all human creations), and this notorious novel which first brought him censure then worldwide and everlasting glory.  Since soothsayers seem to think that Laura and Dolores Haze are cousins or at least distantly related, a literary executor steeped in the riches and diversity of his father’s works might chafe at the prospect of further Lolitology.  Such is the price of fame and, of course, of original genius.

*Note: The work in question has indeed been published.  You can find a review on these pages.

My Former Profession

A man of awesome learning averred that all knowledge begins with languages, a formula easily taken to heart by a certain type of person (we know who we are).  While it was once Latin, then for a while French, the language of European commerce these days is the mother tongue of Milton, Melville, Whitman, and Hopkins.  Demand for language instruction has also gone up in recent years, and many graduate students living in Germany have found it to be a pleasurable and rewarding method of paying rent and buying liverwurst.  When the sad time came to hand my courses over, each of my successors was furnished with a detailed account of what to expect and avoid.  Names have been altered more out of propriety than privacy, but as you can see, all the participants were so delightful that there could be nothing to hide (Note: Course levels: Grundstufe I - IV, Mittelstufe I - IV, and Oberstufe. Grundstufe = basic level, Mittelstufe = intermediate, Oberstufe = advanced).

 

1) Günther, International Savings Bank
About the student:  About 30, well–dressed, well–off, and with a solid Oberstufe, Günther is a doctoral candidate in economics and a part–time employee of the International Savings Bank, a very pleasant, chatty fellow on the way up in the world who loves talking in equal ration about his job, his travels and his past and future plans.  His English is good and rapid, his vocabulary more advanced than one initially might think owing to his very intelligible but downright bizarre pronunciation (e.g. he lisps in English, but not in German).  In fact, this accent is what leads one to underestimate his level; a good twenty minutes of conversation, however, quickly dispels this notion.  He is invariably late and usually leaves early.  Make sure to provide him immediately with ample coffee (one cream) so that he wakes up.

 
What we did and What to do: All the banking and investment stuff has been dealt with.  We also did some presentation English which he found particularly helpful.  In essence, apart from the aforementioned accent, Günther simply needs vocabulary and the ironing out of a few grammar kinks (note, for example, the frequent abuse of the present perfect,  "yesterday I, etc. have been").  Since there remain but four or five sessions, you should feed him some articles to read and presentation and vocabulary worksheets, all of which he'll absorb and retain very fast.  Grammar points he simply races through as if he were embarrassed about having to do them in the first place.  He is a good conversationalist and has a bevy of interesting opinions to share.
 
2) Technology Unlimited Group I
About the students: Six students, Christian, Dieter, Antje, Claudia, Markus and Uwe, varying in age from about 28 (Christian) to about twice as old (Claudia).  As a consequence of her feeling insecure about her seniority, Claudia will feign ignorance and whine and moan that she doesn't understand what you just said or whatever else excuse.  Ignore any such machinations.  The eye–rolling and unabashed frowns on the part of her colleagues will tell you this routine is old hat.  In  truth, she knows a lot more than she lets on, and simply wants to be left peacefully alone instead of fully taking part in the activities.  Markus is a bit ahead of the others, and reveals flashes of Oberstufe; all other participants have a Mittelstufe I–II with various problems: Dieter is too nervous and giggly; Antje is too shy; Christian is extremely sensitive (woe to you should you mention anything about the Works Council, of which he has been a member since joining Technology Unlimited; our little Language Exercises Section (LES) III discussion he took to be a questioning of his personal integrity); Claudia, as stated, is too unmotivated; and Uwe's accent and grammar are too idiosyncratic to sustain systematic correction, owing in no small part to his very deep voice (he is, in his defense, almost seven feet tall).  That said, they are all darling people and, while not always overflowing with vigor, remain respectful and absorb as much as they can.  This is especially true of Markus, whose superior base of knowledge permits him to dominate the class only at the discretion of the instructor, because, for fear of upstaging his co–workers, Markus will rarely speak unless called upon.  There is much to be done here about ego balancing, with everyone save Antje involved in the melee of teasing, name–calling and general mockery, but, all in all, these guys like each other and exude a certain low–key chemistry that can be put to good use.
 
What we did and What to do: We have already done practically all the conventional grammar, texts and Language Exercises Section (LES) III stuff.  Normally they need a little bit of warm human conversation at the beginning of class to remind them that, if only provisionally, they are no longer IT drones buzzing through the facility's anodyne halls.  You might try some role playing and more independent projects.  I had a very successful class allowing each one of them to present his or her favorite article from the newsletter.  Their bane is still getting out from under the all–too–easy Mittelstufe yoke and making some strides towards the Oberstufe.  Review the tenses and prepositions, because I have been pummeling them with that for some time now and they should be acquiring a better grasp of the subject.  Ask them for their own suggestions and you will get a volley of heterogeneous statements that will ultimately prove to be unproductive.  You will have to make them talk, even on the really half–awake days, and at least through grammar they can have the impression that they might learn something.

3) Technology Unlimited, Group II
About the students: A young and sleepy group.  The primary participants are Azubis Philip and Sandra (about 23) and Creative Planning employees and officemates Daniela and Sven (early 30s).  The others, Janna (late 20s, Creative Planning) and Gabriella (early 30s, Creative Planning manager) come somewhat sporadically, and seem constantly swamped with work.  The last two, Carsten and Wolfgang, relics of the same disbanded group which begot Gabriella, have not come since January.  Why their names are still on the attendance list is not ours to ponder.  Philip, Sandra, Daniela and Sven all have about the same level, i.e. about Mittelstufe II+; Janna and especially Gabriella are somewhat better.  Although late Friday morning is normally not a period that generates awe–inspiring energy, this bunch has always been very endearing and friendly but not exactly talkative or entrepreneurial.  Bear in mind that while Philip and Sandra know each other extremely well and are very good friends, they only see the others — who all work quite closely together —  in this class.  One senses not a fissure (although they will invariably seat themselves on opposite sides of the table) but rather a lack of common history between the two groups that, while never spilling over into petty debate, more often than not results in both sides not wishing to say the wrong thing for fear of creating the wrong image.  This used to produce some awkward silences and monotonous exchanges until I stopped trying to make them function as a unit and acceded to their unsaid wishes of remaining apart.  Since then, things have gone much better.
 
What we did and What to do: The best method is to drown them in grammar, a technique that obliges them to reconsider their reticence and prod them into active usage, even if that simply means complaining about something.  Without fear of perjury I can claim, for all intents and purposes, to have exhausted the conventional grammar resources at hand.  As such, new grammar from anyone of the upper level books (even pre–advanced or upper intermediate books will do as long as they are dense) in the office should be employed.  These should be supplemented by various texts on issues affecting twenty– and thirtysomethings within and without Germany.  Role playing, attempted on a few, courageous occasions, was amusing but hardly beneficial; recourse to the newsletter will only result in deep sighs and histrionic groaning.  The best solution, in the last few weeks, was to vary the material, activity and even level of difficulty, throw in a healthy dose of clowning and stand–up routine and put them in a good mood.  Trying to inject some continuity might be problematic since Philip, Sandra and often others as well cannot remember their binders, much less what was in them from last week.  In our best sessions, we had a lot of grammar, jokes, sardonic remarks and pantomime.  On the whole, some very, very sweet if easily distracted people.

4) Big House Construction, Group I
About the students: Jens, Robert, and Ulrich are all young members of the development branch, each with his own advantages and disadvantages.  Jens's English is easily the best, in terms of vocabulary, grammar and fluency an Oberstufe I–II, yet difficult to understand at times because of his overimitating an English speaker's natural swallowing of syllables.  Robert's English is the weakest, Mittelstufe II or at little better when he has less on his mind, but his fluent French (his partner is French) allows him to draw upon a sophisticated vocabulary common to both French and English that belies his primitive grammar.  Ulrich, Oberstufe I, speaks very clearly and thoughtfully, opting to pass when he cannot find the best word.  Expect Jens to dominate, Robert to lag behind and Ulrich to balance them out nicely.  The fourth participant, Suzanne, has never come and never will, owing to an aversion to early–morning activity.
 
What we did and What to do:  They need to do more English presentations, but this a somewhat recent policy.  Grammar is universally approved and handy for the warm–up part of the class, but do allow them to talk about themselves.  Jens in particular is ready to discuss any topic for any length of time if given the go–ahead.  I used some grammar and mistake exercises, plus a long series of exercises from Jens's prepositions book, all of which was greeted with some degree of enthusiasm.  The construction stuff important to their job needs to come out in the presentations they are to be making in the coming weeks.  By Friday they are, however, normally beat and require a bit of entertainment, so a dose of light chatting will help pave the way to more serious matters.  Newsletter articles and current events get them to speak about their office projects and the missing vocabulary then comes out in the heat of discussion.  A very nice group with, alas, poor attendance by virtue of unpredictable work assignments.  Ulrich seems to be the only one with a confident mastery of the verb tenses, make sure you drill that into them at some point early on.  We spent a lot of time on the passive, which should also be reviewed.  

 

5) Big House Construction, Group II
About the students: Tobias and Bernd both have Oberstufe, but are of strikingly different approaches to language learning.  While Bernd is more wary of making mistakes, and thus the less fluent speaker, he is also the only one who enjoys grammar exercises; whenever you only have him, make sure to consecrate a good 30–45 minutes to some topic.  He is attentive and quite sharp.  Tobias, even sharper, uses his massive vocabulary with little inhibition, and will have nothing to do with any kind of grammar or structured learning.  You can try to correct his fantastic distortions of English syntax (e.g. "This is deepened to/from/by"  is his long–standing idea of  "it depends on"), but he will only correct himself once he has spotted a mistake in a text or in some work of his own.  Both are categorical yet surprisingly deferential at times, and on the whole very nice, with Tobias, the branch’s head honcho, being a hilarious walking encyclopedia of local history.  Bernd is a little colder and slightly pompous, but remember it is Tobias's show, and both he and Bernd expect him to dominate any discussion.
 
What we did and What to do:  At the beginning of the course, I tried feeding them the construction stuff we had prepared with mixed results.  After exhausting our collective patience with the floorplan descriptions, the two of them decided by secret ballot to transform our sessions into a conversation class with an automated corrector (yours truly) who would occasionally relate his own anecdotes and opinions.  With Bernd, grammar and mistake exercises, then some text.  With Tobias or the two of them, the procedure was quite standard: read a text (newsletter, article, etc.) and then pontificate at length on the implications for Germany and the rest of humanity.  Bernd usually asks for vocabulary when he hits a wall; Tobias just keeps talking.  Getting them into discussions about any current event is easy, rewarding and what they want anyway, since their English small talk is what troubles them the most.  As long as they enjoy themselves and learn new expressions, they will be very happy.  A sense of humor is more than vital, it is the main appeal of this brief intermission in their otherwise stress–plagued office existence.  With them it is no longer a matter of building, but sculpting and shaping their expansive block of knowledge.

6) Lenses R Us
About the students: A bright, wonderful and enthusiastic sextet working for one of the world's leading contact lens manufacturers, the group is composed of Monika, Ursula (both in their 20s), Manuela and Max (30s), and Martina and Petra (40s).  Alas, although my perfect group in temperament and desire to learn, their levels are staggered: Ursula, Martina and Max are already Oberstufe; Monika is well on her way; Petra and Manuela are both Mittelstufe II, but whereas Petra is fully conscious of her small disadvantage and giggles her way through it in a most charming and lovely way (she is just an angel in all respects), Manuela has tended to be somewhat disruptive.  A few weeks ago, she informed me that, through ensuing internal discussions, she might very well drop out of the group.  She has not appeared since.  Do not make any inquiries into the matter, it will be (or has been) resolved shortly.  

 

What we did and What to do: A little bit of everything, since the class's success is based on the moods and blood caffeine levels of the students.  They all like to laugh, have a wonderful sense for the infantilization process of teaching and learning (Martina, Max and Petra have three, two and two children, respectively), and go along with just about anything.  They are diligent and most days even perfectionist.  Make use of all this with a balanced diet of grammar, Language Exercises Section (LES) III, texts and vocabulary exercises.  They ask copious questions and want to be entertained.  By the way, we have never done any texts or exercises specifically relating to the contact lens industry, although accounting (Manuela's domain) and telephoning and email writing (Petra's primary responsibilities) have been featured in the past.  With this group, you might do well to ask them whether they have any suggestions of their own.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A long time ago, while still studying Czech, I decided to devote half my master’s thesis to this venerable Franco-Czech writer, an announcement met with sharp criticism from a few other burgeoning scholars, all of whom were women.  They could not quite believe that I, ostensibly an open–minded fellow if a bit carefree, was going to allot a considerable amount of time to such a “sexist.”  “I cannot stand him,” said one particularly disgusted student who happened to attend a few of my classes, “I simply cannot stand him.”  Her small, pretty nose twitched as she said this (the sign of true contempt), but she never explained why she found his oeuvre so intolerable.  Yet I understood why then, and the matter is even clearer to me now in re–examining his most famous novel.

Waves of politics and philosophy undulate through The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but at the core swims a young couple, Tomas and Tereza, who are trying to make sense of that most human condition of all, morality.  They are joined in their quest by two more main characters: Sabina, who is Tomas’s lover, and Franz, who is also Sabina’s lover.  The four live in awareness of one another, but perhaps not in acceptance, and each embodies, with his or her profession, one field of human knowledge.  Franz is a university professor and the most distant from the incredible ecstasy of art; he finds solace in politicized protests and sewn–on labels such as “dissident,” “immigrant,” and “radical change.”  Tomas is a physician and an inveterate rake, but his aesthetic sense perseveres through bouts of wanton behavior and even justifies his emotional immaturity in a German aphorism.  Tomas is clearly superior to Franz in every way, and the reader cannot but smirk when Franz feels burdened by his Philistine wife and bourgeois existence, while Tomas continues to enjoy whatever skirt he can crawl his way under.  Sabina and Tereza, meanwhile, are slabs from the same quarry.  They even pursue variants of the same vocation: Sabina is a painter and Tereza a professional photographer.  They are the pictures for Tomas’s captions, the film for his voiceover.  And both of them adore Tomas for his alleged strength and freedom of spirit, yet acknowledge that these traits only cloak a fear to commit, a fear to love completely and absolutely, and that most primal of male anxieties, the fear of giving up all the earth’s women to receive, in return, only one.  How can one woman possibly compensate for the plenitude of all the rest?  In a way, this is the novel’s essential question.  One may do well to substitute “life” or “soul” for “woman” and ask the question again.                

If all this seems vague and meandering, think of it as a symphony.  After all, that is how Kundera, the son of a well–known Czech musicologist, loves to characterize his works.  He himself once studied composition, and musical references, liner notes, and tidbits of musical history are scattered throughout his writings.  He is particularly fond of the granddaddy of bombast, and a famous quote from the musical genius is repeated throughout the novel.   The plot, if one may call it that, is furnished by the events of the Prague Spring and its aftermath.  The historical happenings are as meaningless for the characters as stage props.  They may stumble and injure themselves on them, even mortally, but nothing can ingress their substance, because the substance of each of them (except, arguably, that of Franz) is entirely outside of any plot or material life.  Someone at one point or another must have already dubbed The Unbearable Lightness of Being a “waltz of souls,” or something to that effect.  If no one has, then I will be happy to use that designation.

On the back cover of the first English version of the novel (translated by this renowned Slavist), one reviewer calls Kundera “an intellectual heavyweight,” which, in my humble opinion, he most certainly is.  But the philosophy in the novel is threadbare, and can be whittled down to the simple statement: if our decisions have no consequences because they repeat infinitely, are we freer or more enslaved?  The question is worth asking, and a topic for students of ethics.  But more important is whether one life, or soul, or woman (which, if she is loved completely and absolutely, can be a life or soul) can matter in the face of churning time.  These characters, called in some places “Kundera's quartet,” represent science, academe, art, and journalism (Tereza’s photographs inevitably chronicle the tumult of 1968), with Soviet tanks providing the military segment.  They become the polyphony of Czech society itself, although it doesn’t need to be Czechoslovakia or 1968  for us to get the idea.  Woven between and among things they could not possibly impact or control, they are both triumphant and trampled underfoot.  They both sublimate and disintegrate, and sometimes it is hard to predict exactly how the fates will turn given all the decisions that have to be made along the way.  A constant pendulum between light and heavy, which may explain the oxymoron of the novel’s title.
             
What then of Kundera the “sexist”?  If you are familiar with Kundera’s ten works of prose fiction, you know that he likely sides with the Don Juans of life, perhaps being one himself, although that needn’t concern us here.  It is women, however, that he sees differently.  He believes, or will have us believe, that women were more liberated before the sexual revolution because they retained their mystique.  Does anyone, he might ask, ever compose odes to a woman’s beauty any more?  Can love for a woman in Western society ever be separated from enjoying her womanhood without inducing mockery?  In a way, such discourse is an oversimplification, because the liberation of women over the last hundred years has to do with much more than sex.  But Kundera is steadfast in his portrayals of modern women: he sees them as equals, yet society certainly does not.  He gives them as much intelligence and fortitude as his male characters then watches them fail.  Whether this makes him a sadist, a sexist, or someone who yearns for the days when women and love could be safely placed above lascivious urges, is a matter of perspective.  Sabina and Tereza are the true heroes of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  They are braver and smarter than everyone else in the novel, but society expects less talent and more prudence on their part.  And so they fail.  And had they succeeded, they might have spared us a lot of nose–twitching.

Cosmos

There was an oppressive profusion of possible links and clues.  How many sentences can be composed with the twenty–six letters of the alphabet?  How many meanings could be deduced from these hundreds of weeds, clumps of earth, and other details?

It was, I believe, Robbe-Grillet who said that the nouveau roman movement of the 1950s (and, by extension, the modern novel) was simply an attempt to take the detective novel seriously.  The product of this manifesto are books such as this recent masterpiece.  Modern readers no longer have any patience for the vaguely connected reflections of the artist and crave a throbbing plot and explanations as complete as a jigsaw, which, I can say without fear of perjury, is a desire that afflicts every one of us from time to time.  Things must fit together, not just fall apart.  And yet sometimes, as in Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos, there is too much fitting.   

Herein lies Witold’s problem (Witold is also the name of the protagonist): he and his fellow traveler Fuchs have come across a hanged sparrow, “too high for it to have been done by anyone but an adult.”  Witold’s subsequent attempts to explain this occurrence leads him to suspect everything and everyone. “In spite of myself,” he says, “I started working out shapes and relationships ... what attracted me about these things was one thing’s being behind another.”  Thus begin the makings of the reluctant sleuth: an otherwise uninformed narrator hurled willy–nilly into the realm of crime and uncertainty, a plot quite in keeping with detective fiction conventions.  “Looking at one point masks everything else,” he continues, “when we stare at a single point on a map we are quite aware that others elude us,” because apart from that point perhaps, “everything is happening on the same level.”  This is of course the antithesis of what a detective is supposed to be doing: that is, configuring a “sort of pattern” within all that he sees, “a kind of confused message [which] could be divined in the series of events.”  “How many ‘almosts’ had I not come across?” laments Witold, who concludes that “there is a sort of excess about reality, and after a certain point it can become intolerable” — an admission not terribly distant from the “ineluctable modality of the visible” that Stephen Dedalus comes to accept.

Witold’s bizarre decision to hang Lena’s cat is important for three reasons.  First, Witold mocks the evil precedent of the bastard son and eventual parricide Smerdyakov, who, as a boy, hanged cats and likely tortured other animals (Witold himself is not evil, despite his action).  Second, our narrator is now a murderer, and the motive for the crime appears to be rather extraordinary.  In Witold’s case, “strangling her [Lena’s] beloved cat had brought me closer to her.”  But the third reason is a linguistic one: the cat’s murder denotes an attempt on Witold’s part to speak Lena’s “language.”  In other words, it has a similar and comparative value to the hanging of the sparrow and might therefore, in relation to this first hanging, signify something of greater importance to Lena (this argument will be familiar to certain linguists).  If what the dead sparrow signifies to Witold were different than what it signified to Lena, one might assume that the linguistic unit of a “hanged sparrow” did not share a common definition for both persons; there appears to be, however, an agreed definition of the linguistic unit “hanged cat.”  Should there “always [be] the same act of hanging, though the object changes”  — and we have several hangings in the novel (the sparrow, allegedly the chicken, a piece of wood, the cat, and, finally, Louis) — then Witold’s concatenation of these events would be based mostly on the fact that they are all hangings and not simply murders, thus supporting this value definition. 

While a reconciliation of the various hangings in Cosmos is logical, we realize that, at the same time, these are separate occurrences (the sparrow, for example, was not hanged several times).  For that reason, Witold seems to find himself caught between linguistic units, since

I [Witold] felt myself to be suspended between those two poles [the dead bird and the ‘hanged’ piece of wood], so to speak, and our sitting together at the table under the lamp here seemed to have a special significance ‘in relation to’ the bird and the bit of wood .... they were two futilities and we were in between them.  

They are ‘futilities’ because “each and every object is a huge army, an inexhaustible host”: each person’s interpretation is bound to vary, if only minutely at times.  The point is such a basic linguistic premise that it almost appears ridiculous to return to it continuously.  But Gombrowicz is well aware of  this convention of (good) detective fiction, where all the necessary events or facts are present within its pages, and simply require ordering and comprehension.  The reader feels cheated when, upon finally reaching the much–desired solution, he finds that a key facet of that solution lurked in certain events and facts to which he had not been made privy.

If there is an ontology in the novel, it is that the sleuth’s task is to bypass the obvious, to avoid the sententious rebuff “one is what one is” and to assume that “there was always something behind everything.”  Yet the number of possible links is practically infinite, so even if we “have spotted one sign ... how many more [which] we had not spotted might be concealed in the natural order of things?"  Which makes “had it really no relation to me? Who could tell?” more than just a plausible epigraph to Cosmos, but a lovely conundrum that modern literature is finally learning to answer rather than avoid.