MILAN KUNDERA

Editor’s Note: In November 1998, Milan Kundera wrote the following letter in celebration of Carlos Fuentes’s 70th birthday. This month Mr. Kundera reached the same milestone, and Mr. Fuentes has responded. (Book Review is grateful to Alfred Mac Adam and Linda Asher for help with the translation.)

Dear Carlos:

It is your birthday, and an anniversary for me as well: we met for the first time 30 years ago in Prague. It was a few months after the Russian invasion, when you, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez came to express your concern for us, the Czech writers.

Seven years later, I left Prague to live in France at the same time you were Mexican Ambassador. I met you again, and what I met was a friend. I was an anguished exile. You supported me discreetly. You also tried to help other Czech friends. Often, my wife Vera and I were your guests in the embassy where you sometimes put us up (at the time we didn’t live in Paris). I remember our breakfasts, when we would chat endlessly.

It was then I began to be obsessed with the idea of Central Europe, for reasons closely connected to my own fortunes (the kidnapping of that part of the West by Russia) but above all, because of the Central-European cultural specificity, which has existed since the Middle Ages. My intention to understand and define that identity coincided with the discovery that you and I made of the extraordinary similarity between Latin America and Central Europe, the two regions of the world most deeply marked by the traumatic experience of the baroque. For a writer, to be marked by the baroque means having a familiarity with a certain fantastic, magical, oneiric imagination. (By the way, that species of imagination is rather alien to the French. I’ve often wondered how it was possible that Surrealism was born in France. The answer:? It was born not as art but as ideology.)

We also, you and I, found another similarity between our two regions of the world: Central Europe and Latin America have played a decisive role with regard to the 20th-century novel, the novel after Proust and its new esthetic climate. First, during the ‘10s, ‘20s, and ‘30s, came the Central European pleiad: Kafka, Musil, Broch, and Gombrowicz; then, during the ‘60s, came the Latin American pleiad.

I have been shaped by two loyalties. Loyalty to modern art and loyalty to the novel. These loyalties never converge, because the avant-garde (modern art in its ideological version) has always relegated the art of the novel to a place outside of modernism, considering it something whose time has passed, something fatally conventional. Later--during the ‘50s and ‘60s--when the belated avant-gardes tried to create and proclaim their own novelistic modernism, they did it by following the path of pure negativity: the novel without characters, plot, story and (if possible) without punctuation. These novels proudly declared themselves anti-novels.

It’s curious. Modern poetry never claimed to be anti-poetry. Since Baudelaire, poetic modernism sought to radically approach the essence of poetry, its most secret specificity. In that sense, I’ve always imagined the modern novel not as an anti-novel but as the ultra-novel. The ultra-novel concentrates on that which only the novel can say. The ultra-novel revives all the neglected and forgotten possibilities the art of the novel has been accumulating over the four centuries of its history.

Twenty-five years ago, I read “Terra Nostra.” I read an ultra-novel. Your book was the proof that such a thing existed, that such a thing could exist. Fifteen years later, I found the same magic in your “Christopher Unborn”: the great modernity of the novel with all its fascinating and difficult newness.

A warm embrace, Carlos!

Milan

CARLOS FUENTES

So, my dear Milan, the two of us have turned 70! How illusory, how surprising it seems to me to have reached such an age. Perhaps the memory of our meeting in Prague in 1968 is too vivid for me. I simply cannot forget that moment, which was both tragic and exhilarating at the same time, a moment when our political confidence was put to the test, when realities replaced illusions, and when, nevertheless, our hopes did not collapse in the face of indifference. It was the year of Prague, Paris and Mexico. In Czechoslovakia, the noble attempt to implant socialism with a human face was brutally quashed by the Kremlin in the name of communism. In Paris, the youthful critics of post-industrial, consumer society demanded that “imagination seize power.” In Mexico, the mortal calm of the authoritarian regime of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) was broken by young people who asked to have in their everyday life the things they’d learned in schools: democracy, criticism, freedom.

I lived that crucial year of our century with you, Milan, and we shared the bitterness of what at that time seemed like failures. The failure of the Prague spring, crushed by Soviet tanks. The failure of the Parisian May, frustrated by the complicity of the French Communist Party and the cleverness of General De Gaulle. And the failure of the Mexican student movement, shot down in the street by the authoritarian PRI in power.

And yet, 30 years later, what then seemed like failure doesn’t seem so today. Under the cobblestones of Paris, there was no beach, but in fact French socialism was jolted out of its lethargy by Guy Mollet and the Suez adventure. The PCF lost its prestige, and a generation was born that would criticize what we are living through today: global neo-Darwinism. From under the treads of Russian tanks in Prague, no socialism with a human face was born, but Czechoslovakia did announce the end of the Soviet empire 10 years later as well as the beginning of a new era for Russia and Central Europe. Not a better era but an exemplary era: The end of communism did not mean the end of injustice, and the triumph of democracy did not mean instant happiness. In Mexico, finally, the sacrifice of the young people in the Plaza of the Three Cultures signalled the beginning of the decline of the PRI’s authoritarianism and the birth of a Mexican democracy which, in turn, cannot be reduced to electoral campaigns and parliamentary quotas but which must bring, together with freedom, a greater degree of well-being for the 50 million Mexicans living in poverty.

When Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I travelled to Prague in 1968 to be with you and with the democratic hopes of your country, we had to invite to our table both the angels of illusion and the devils of fatality. We could not foresee everything that would happen during the next 30 years. But amid the Russian tanks in Czechoslovakia, the youthful corpses in Tlatelolco, and the police bill-clubs of the Latin Quarter, our words, my dear Milan, did affirm the need for imagination in order truly to understand history. Yes, our words affirmed that literature is indispensable to keep the language and the imagination of a society alive and that without imagination, without language, no society can survive. They couldn’t have survived yesterday’s Russian tanks, Parisian night sticks or Mexican massacres, and they won’t be able to survive today’s jolly supermarket robots, the smiling grave diggers of history or those who cruelly speculate with imagination.

Neither of us thinks a novel can change politics. But what we do believe is that without novels the world of men and women would not only be poorer but also less resistant to the constant aggression of power. Political power would like to be absolute, and it isn’t only because we, all of us, don’t allow it. Writers like you, Gyorgy Konrad, and Jerszy Andrejewski, the cineasts, musicians, and philosophers of Central Europe, Czech, Polish and Hungarian civil society all maintained, despite everything, a margin of freedom under communist tyranny. Will they be able to maintain it under capitalist indifference? Your problems in Central Europe are more difficult than ours in Latin America. From Mexico to Argentina, our goals are clearer. Education, language, books, libraries are the fundamental weapons in the struggle of our countries--which is to unite political democracy with economic improvement for the poorest among us. But both in Prague and in Mexico City, in Warsaw and in Buenos Aires, the novelist creates a space where, surrounded by the silence of the noise (both of them deafening) of the political, economic and religious worlds, the voice of the singular being, of the man or woman who cannot be reduced to ciphers or acronyms, speaks out.

Your splendid novels, my great and beloved friend, Milan Kundera, have given all your readers the gift of the purest and strongest imagination and language. Through the tender and solitary, disoriented and resistant characters of “The Joke,” “Life Is Elsewhere,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “Immortality,” “Slowness” and “Identity” you have created that space where everyone has a right to speak and that time when everything is marvelously present: The past is here, the future is here. Your novels powerfully thwart the progress of authoritarian projects to drown the past in oblivion and to promise a happy but undesirable future. Your characters are heroes and heroines in a resistance against two burials: that of forgetting and that of a lack of foresight. You give life to a present that is conflictive, rich and inclusive. You refuse to exclude. You are a great writer of inclusion, of the embrace. But what you never say to anyone is that inclusion is easy, or that the embrace will not be painful. Like Faulkner, whom we both admire so much, given the choice between suffering and nothingness, you pick pain.

You and I are dancing, my dear friend, the “farewell waltz,” to use one of your own titles. But we are not going to say goodby with resignation, fatigue or satisfaction. We are going to go on living and writing with will, energy and complete dissatisfaction. What a pleasure it is to know we share the works and days of our 70 years, just as we did those of our 30 years.

All best wishes for happiness,

Carlos