The slowness

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Slowness (French original title: La lenteur ) is a novel by the Czechoslovakian- born writer Milan Kundera , which was published in 1994 . The German edition was published in 1995 in a translation by Susanne Roth by Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich. It is the first of Kundera's three so-called “French” novels, which, after moving to France, he no longer wrote in Czech but in French (later followed: The Identity [ L'identité ], 1998, and The Ignorance [ L ' ignorance ], first published in Spanish in 2000 , in French in 2003).

content

The first-person narrator Milan, a writer and Kunderas alter ego , visits a hotel with his wife Vera for one night, which is operated in a castle in the French provinces, because they both want it (p. 5 of the bound German first edition). They drive there in a car, harassed by a car that follows them. In view of the dangers of road traffic, Vera wonders why drivers aren't afraid when they are behind the wheel. The first-person narrator tries to answer her. From this scene the leitmotif of the story is developed, a reflection on the acceleration in the modern age, which is contrasted with the "slowness" of earlier times: "Why has the pleasure in slowness disappeared?" (P. 7).

Two narrative threads follow; one goes back to the 18th century , the other expires in the present.

The story Point de lendemain (in German: "No Tomorrow") by the French author Vivant Denon , in which a young Chevalier was told by the experienced Madame de T., played in a very similar castle to this one, still in the times of the Ancien Régime . is seduced according to all the rules of the art of love and in this sense "slowly" and with pleasure . The couple know they would only have this one night to themselves. Madame de T. uses the production to deceive her husband about her true lover, the Marquis . The latter in turn later revealed to the Chevalier that Madame de T. was frigid , which the competitor had not known. He notes that there will be "no tomorrow" for that night. The first-person narrator recapitulates and reconstructs this story in the given setting of the chateau while he and his wife spend the night there.

The other plot describes an international conference of entomologists that is imagined in the same castle in the narrated present. At the conference, the Czech scholar Čechořípský, who had to work as a construction worker for twenty years after 1968 due to an occupational ban, will give a lecture on his former subject, fly research. After the fall of the Wall, he was rehabilitated. The situation then completely overwhelms him, so that, overwhelmed by his feelings, he forgets to give his prepared speech and only speaks about himself and his unsuccessful life (p. 63 ff.). It turns out that the loss of his position at the institute was not due to his political work, as he was not a political person and did not act out of moral motives. Rather, he had not dared to deny a group of opposition members who had put him under pressure to meet in the institute: he feared they might make fun of him (p. 59 ff.).

On the fringes of the congress, a group is formed around the intellectual Pontevin, who has developed a theory according to which hedonistic and narcissistic intellectuals and politicians serve the media society in a hysterical manner as “dancers” (p. 21 ff.). Their intention is to seduce an invisible audience with their "moral judo" (p. 22), above all the intellectuals Berck and Duberque: "... the dancer throws the glove at the whole world: who is capable of being more moral, ( more courageous, more decent, more sincere, more willing to sacrifice, more truthful) than he? ”(ibid.). The other side of the media is represented by the television director Immaculata, who is in love with Berck (p. 43).

The ornate amours in Vivant Denon's story are then juxtaposed with a brief contemporary affair in which the conference participant Vincent fails in an attempt to sleep with the young stenographer Julie because he saw the opportunity in the hotel's public swimming pool results, does not get an erection (p. 117 ff.). In doing so, he develops rough anal-erotic fantasies that are widely described. On the edge of the scramble in the bath, Čechořípský also loses his last tooth crown (p. 127).

In contrast to Kundera's other works, The Slowness is written in the present tense . Fictional and essayistic passages are mixed in the text. Apart from the “spatial coincidence”, the “ unity of the place ”, the narrative strands are connected by Vera's nightmares , from which she wakes up twice (pp. 88, 134) while Milan stands at the open window of the hotel room and looks at the whole Make up history. The overlapping plot invades her dreams again and again. “Milanku, stop joking. Nobody will understand you, ”she says to him before she falls asleep again for the first time (p. 89).

The story ends with motifs similar to those at the beginning of the narrative. Everyone leaves the castle. Vincent and the Chevalier meet immediately in a bizarre dialogue (pp. 144–149). The first-person narrator and his wife get back into their car, and Vera fears that Vincent, who drives away on the motorcycle, could drive "too fast". “He likes driving fast? He too? ”-“ Not always, but today he'll drive like a madman. ”In contrast to the Chevalier, who is picked up by a coachman . When this picture has disappeared in the fog, the first-person narrator starts the engine of his car and drives home with his companion (p. 150 f.).

reception

Slowness , only 150 pages long and divided into 51 numbered sections, is a postmodern text in terms of content . It appeared at a time when people wrote and thought about acceleration and deceleration as a social phenomenon, about speed and slowness. Sten Nadolny's novel The Discovery of Slowness was published as early as 1985 , the writings of Paul Virilio were widespread at the end of the 20th century, ten years later Hartmut Rosa's habilitation thesis Acceleration came out. The change in time structures in modern times.

The contemporary literary criticism largely rejected Die Langsamkeit : Andreas Kilb summed up in Die Zeit that the characters in the novel are all ridiculous. "Or better: the story makes it ridiculous." Kundera's "narrative constructs" lack the "dance grace" of his earlier works, so they seem "like pragmata of a theorist." He considers Slowness to be a failed novel. Also Stanisław Barańczak threw Kundera in The New Republic in a veritable slating before, with the slowness "shallow as a writer and boring" to have become. The aphorisms with which the band is peppered are only "a bouquet full of clichés, even a taxi driver who drives you to the airport would be ashamed to tell them". At a certain point, everything that follows has become predictable for the reader, there are no more jokes and no more surprises. Hubert Spiegel described the story in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a "long sigh".

Martin Lüdke , on the other hand, pointed out in the Frankfurter Rundschau that any attempt to summarize the complex narrative of the novel could "[by no means] trace the course of the plot". The novel is “ composed à la Janacek : in its technique. And it satisfies another requirement of Kundera: polyphony . ”In every action sequence,“ at least the following motif of reflection is already struck ”. Kundera was thus fully up to date with the discourse at the time.

In a contribution to Milan Kundera's 85th birthday in 2016, Peter Mohr judged in literaturkritik.de that in Die Langsamkeit “the narrative, subtly constructed plea for a return to medial slowness, for a return to the written word”.

The “French novels” are often separated from the rest of Kundera by literary studies and only viewed as a subordinate accessory.

It is true that Kundera's recourse to the classic French novel before Balzac , which he had renewed, was appreciated . The old ideas of “slowness” and enjoyment have given way to “the dictates of the public 'image'”. “Today's people are programmed by the outside world, ethical and aesthetic standards are set by the media.” Here is the secretive, intimate hour , there the public and unsuccessful performance in front of a random audience, and ultimately the end of the private person and privacy through the media . From this point of view, the processes would no longer be lived artistically by people, but determined by external circumstances. The figure of the “dancer” also receives attention, based on Kundera's dictum that there was “fame before and after the invention of photography” (p. 42).

Tim Jones emphasized that the three motifs of slowness , identity and ignorance were " variations " in the musical sense of themes that were already laid out in his earlier work.

Doris Boden emphasized that the subject of the book was “personal authenticity”. What the three “French novels” Kundera have in common is that the characters they describe are denied the “desired self-realization ” in order to let them fail in a ridiculous way instead. Although the world has become more and more difficult to see through, everyone believes that they are acting independently . By mixing fictional and essayistic styles, the reader also retains the “illusion of individual autonomy”.

expenditure

  • La lenteur . Gallimard, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-07-074135-4 (French, first edition).
  • The slowness . Hanser, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-446-18288-8 (French: La lenteur . Translated by Susanne Roth, German first edition).
  • La lenteur (=  Collection Folio . No. 2981 ). Gallimard, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-07-040273-8 (French, French paperback edition).
  • The slowness . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-596-13088-3 (French: La lenteur . Translated by Susanne Roth, German paperback edition).

literature

  • Doris Boden: Irritation as a narrative principle. Studies of reception control in the novels of Milan Kundera (=  Westostpassagen . No. 4 ). Olms, Hildesheim 2006, ISBN 3-487-13026-2 (Zugl .: Leipzig, Univ., Diss., 2005).
  • Doris Boden: Kundera, Milan. The 'French' novels . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . 3rd, completely revised edition. 2009.
  • Małgorzata Cieliczko: "Being a dancer is not only a passion" - dance forms in the prose works of Milan Kundera . In: Bohemistyka . No. 2 , 2018, p. 151–174 (English, edu.pl - hdl.handle.net ).
  • Tim Jones: Milan Kundera's Slowness - Making It Slow . In: Review of European Studies . tape 1 , no. 2 , p. 64-75 , doi : 10.5539 / res.v1n2p64 (English).
  • Tim Jones: Slowness, Identity and Ignorance: Milan Kundera's French Variations . University of East Anglia, Norwich 2012, p. 22-66, 2, passim (English, uea.ac.uk - Univ., Diss., University of East Anglia).
  • Maria Rubins, Andrea Huterer: In foreign tongues: Milan Kunderas and Andrei Makines French prose . In: Eastern Europe . tape 57 , no. 5 , 2007, ISSN  0030-6428 , p. 169-188 , JSTOR : 44934181 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to the entry in the French National Bibliography.
  2. ↑ According to the publisher, the novel was published in January 1995.
  3. ^ A b Maria Rubins, Andrea Huterer: In strange tongues: Milan Kunderas and Andrei Makines French prose . In: Eastern Europe . tape 57 , no. 5 , 2007, ISSN  0030-6428 , p. 169-188 , 170, 171, 172 f. , JSTOR : 44934181 .
  4. ↑ Vivant Denon: Point de lendemain , first edition 1777, in the French Wikisource .
  5. ↑ Werner Morlang: So beautiful aside: The forty pages of Monsieur Denon . In: You: The magazine of culture . tape 58 , no. 9 , 1998, pp. 11 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-300029 .
  6. ^ A b Robert Tashman: Love and other fictions . In: The Nation . May 6, 1996, p. 58-62, 58 (English).
  7. ↑ a b c Doris Boden: Kundera, Milan. The 'French' novels . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . 3rd, completely revised edition. 2009.
  8. ↑ Tim Jones: Milan Kundera's Slowness - Making It Slow . In: Review of European Studies . tape 1 , no. 2 , p. 64-75, 69 , doi : 10.5539 / res.v1n2p64 (English).
  9. ^ Dan Gunn: The book of betrayals . In: The Times Literary Supplement . No. 4854 , April 12, 1996, pp. 21-22, 22 (English).
  10. ^ Andreas Kilb: Apreslude . In: The time . No. 42 , 1995.
  11. ↑ The increcible Lightness . In: The New Republic . September 9, 1996, p. 42-47, 43, 45 (English).
  12. ↑ Hubert Spiegel: Slowly in the shade. Milan Kundera kneads one knee . January 20, 1996, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net ).
  13. ↑ Martin Lüdke: thought figures. Milan Kundera's provocative draft novel “The Slowness” . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . October 14, 1995, p. 9 .
  14. ^ Peter Mohr: The tolerable lightness of the novelist - For the 85th birthday of the writer Milan Kundera. In: literaturkritik.de. November 21, 2016, accessed June 4, 2019 .
  15. ^ A b Tim Jones: Slowness, Identity and Ignorance: Milan Kundera's French Variations . University of East Anglia, Norwich 2012, p. 22-66, 2, passim (English, uea.ac.uk - Univ., Diss., University of East Anglia).
  16. ↑ Maria Rubin, Andrea Huterer: In foreign tongues: Milan Kundera and Andrei Makine's French prose . In: Eastern Europe . tape 57 , no. 5 , 2007, ISSN  0030-6428 , p. 169-188, 172 f ., 170, 171, 172 f. , JSTOR : 44934181 (with reference to: Helena Kosková: Milan Kundera . Prague 1998, p. 156, as well as to the term “hypersexuality” according to Michail Naumovič Èpstejn.).
  17. ↑ Christopher Spinney: Slave to the Camera, Becoming a Dancer . In: The Lehigh Review . tape 8 , 2000, pp. 119-122, 119 ( lehigh, edu ).