Milan Kundera Czech novelist. (Milan Kundera won the Jerusalem Literature Prize in May 1985. A sentence quoted by Kundera in his speech at the ceremony.) Milan Kundera Czech novelist. In 1967, his first novel "Joke" was published in the Czech Republic and achieved great success. After the Soviet Union invaded the Czech Republic in 1968, it was difficult for him to develop his literary creation, so he moved to France with his wife in 1975. Since then, he has created many sensational works such as "The Record of Laughter and Forgetting" 1978, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" 1984, "Immortality" 190 and so on. Kundera is good at using irony and a humorous tone to describe the human condition, full of life wisdom. Kundera has begun experimenting with writing in French in recent years and has published two novels, Slowness (1995) and Identity (1997). When people think, God laughs (Milan Kundera won the Jerusalem Literature Prize in May 1985. This article is an excerpt of Kundera’s speech at the ceremony.) Israel reserves its most important awards for world literature, It's not accidental, it's tradition. Those great Jewish ancestors were in exile for a long time, and the Europe they focused on transcended national borders. For them, the meaning of "Europe" lies not in territory but in culture. Although the barbaric atrocities in Europe had made the Jews sad and desperate, their faith in European culture remained unchanged. So I say that this small land of Israel, this lost homeland, is the real heart of Europe. This is a strange heart that grows outside the mother's body. Today I came to receive this award named after Jerusalem and based on the great Jewish spirit, and my heart is filled with strange excitement. I accept the award as a "novelist". Not a "writer". The French literary giant Flaubert once said that the novelist's task is to try to disappear from behind the work. He cannot be a public figure. However, in our era of extremely developed mass communication, the opposite is often the case, and the works disappear behind the image of the novelist. Although today no one can completely avoid exposure, Flaubert's warning is still a timely warning: if a novelist wants to become a public figure, it is his work that will suffer. At best, people can regard these novels as appendages to his actions, declarations, and political opinions. Novelists are not spokespersons. Strictly speaking, he shouldn't even speak for his beliefs. When Tolstoy conceived the first draft of "Anna Karenina", Anna in his mind was an extremely unlovable woman, and her miserable end seemed to be deserved. This is of course very different from the final version we saw. It is not that Toshi's moral concepts have changed, but that he heard a voice other than morality. I'll call it "the wisdom of fiction." All true novelists listen to this supernatural voice. Therefore, a great novel always contains more wisdom than its creator. Writers who think they are more insightful than their work might as well simply change careers. But where does this "wisdom of fiction" come from? What about the so-called "novel"? I really like a Jewish proverb: "When people think, God laughs." This proverb inspires me. I often imagine that Francois Rabelais suddenly heard the laughter of God one day, and the first great European novel was born. The art of fiction is the echo of God’s laughter. Why does God laugh when people think about it? Because the more people think about it, the further away from the truth they become. The more people think, the farther the distance between people becomes. Because people are never the same as they imagine themselves to be. When people stepped into the threshold of modern society from the Middle Ages, they finally saw their true face: Don Quixote was thinking about things, and his servant Sancho was also thinking about things. Not only have they never seen the world clearly, they can't even see themselves clearly. The earliest novelists in Europe saw the new situation of mankind and established a new art, that is, the art of fiction. Rabelais, a French monk, physician and novelist in the 16th century, created many new words for French that are still in use today. It's a pity that one word has been forgotten. This is the Greek word Agelaste, which means those who do not know how to laugh and have no sense of humor. Rabelais hated and feared these people. Their persecution almost made him give up writing. The novelist has no room for compromise with these guys who don't know how to laugh. Because they have never heard the laughter of God, they believe that they master the absolute truth and have a strong foundation, and they also believe that everyone must "unify their thoughts." However, the reason why "individual" is different from "everyone" is precisely because he has penetrated the myth of "absolute truth" and "one thousand years old". Novels are a paradise for individuals to use their imagination. No one has the truth there, but everyone has the right to be understood. In the past four hundred years, the birth and development of individualism in Western Europe was guided by the art of fiction. Baruch was the protagonist of Europe's first great novel. He is the protagonist of Rabelais's "Giant". In the third volume of this novel, Baruchi's biggest dilemma is: Should he get married? He traveled far and wide in search of good doctors, seers, professors, poets, and philosophers, who in turn quoted Hippocrates, Aristotle, Homer, Heraclitus, and Plato. It's a pity that despite his poor experience and enlightenment, in the end, Balu was still unable to decide whether to get married due to his strange appearance. We readers can't draw any conclusions. By the end, of course, we have weighed the protagonist's comical and serious situation from all different angles.

Although Rabelais's extensive quotation and Descartes's argument are equally great, they are not the same in nature. Although the novel's matrix is ??entirely rational, it is humorous. One of the greatest failures of European history has been its ignorance of the spirit of the novel's art, the new knowledge it prompted, and its independently developed traditions. The art of fiction actually represents the artistic spirit of Europe. This art, inspired by the laughter of God, does not have the mission of propaganda or reasoning, quite the contrary. Like Penelope, she tore apart the tapestry carefully woven by theologians and philosophers every night. In recent years, it has become fashionable to blame the eighteenth century. We often hear this truism: "The consequences of Russian totalitarianism were planted in Western Europe, especially the atheistic rationalism of the Enlightenment and the belief in the omnipotence of reason." I am not qualified to argue with someone who accuses Voltaire of being responsible for the Soviet concentration camps. argue. But I am fully qualified to say: "The eighteenth century belongs not only to Rousseau, Voltaire, and Holbach, but also to (perhaps even all) Fielding, Sterne, Goethe, and Leroux." "Among the novels of the eighteenth century, my favorite is Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Tristram". This is a peculiar novel. At the beginning of the novel, Stern describes the night when the protagonist began to stir in the mother's body. As he was writing, Stern suddenly had an inspiration that reminded him of another story. In the hundreds of pages that followed, the protagonist of the novel was actually forgotten. This writing technique looks like a trick. As an art, skill is not just about playing tricks. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, every novel must answer this question: "What is human existence? What is its true meaning?" Stern's contemporary Fielding believed that the answer lies in the action and the finale. The answer in Stern's novel is completely different: the answer is not the action and the finale, but the interruption of the action. Therefore, it may be said that novels have had an indirect but important dialogue with philosophy. The rationalism of the eighteenth century was not only based on Leibniz's famous saying: "Everything that exists is reasonable." Based on this concept, the scientific community at that time actively sought the reason for the existence of everything. they think. Everything can be calculated and explained. If people want to live a valuable life, they must abandon all irrational behaviors. All biographies of Wei are written like this: life is always full of causes and consequences, successes and failures. Human beings watched anxiously as this chain reaction rushed rapidly towards the end of death. Stern's novel corrects the equation of this chain reaction. He does not focus on the cause and effect of the behavior, but on the end of the behavior. When the bridge between cause and effect breaks, he wanders leisurely in search of it. When reading Stern's novels, the existence of human beings and their true meaning must be found in irrelevant details. These things are incalculable and unreasonable. Very different from Leibniz. Evaluating the spirit of a time cannot just start with ideas and theoretical concepts, but must take into account the art of that era, especially the art of fiction. When the steam engine emerged in the nineteenth century, Hegel was convinced that he had captured the spirit of world history. But Flaubert was talking about human folly. I think that was the greatest intellectual innovation of the nineteenth century. Of course, people knew about folly long before Flaubert. But there is a difference due to lack of knowledge and lack of education. In Flaubert's novels, ignorance is inherent in human beings. Poor Emma, ??whether in love or death, is inextricably bound up with ignorance. After Emma's death, the conversation between Homer and Bourne Xian was really stupid, like the speech at the funeral. What is most surprising is Flaubert's own view of ignorance. He believes that the prosperity of science and technology and social progress have not eliminated ignorance, but ignorance has grown along with social progress! Flaubert deliberately collected some popular terms that ordinary people often use to show off their eye-catching and keeping up with the trend. He compiled these popular terms into a dictionary. We can understand from this dictionary: "The stupidity of modernization is not ignorance, but the devouring various trends of thought alive." Flaubert's unique insights have a greater impact on the future world than Freud's theory Profound. We can imagine a world without Freud's psychoanalytic theory. But we cannot lack the ability to resist all kinds of rampant thoughts. These floods of thoughts are input into computers and, with the help of mass media, they may condense into a force that crushes independent thought and personal creativity. This force is enough to suffocate European civilization. Eighty years after Flaubert created Madame Bovary, in the 1930s of our century, another great novelist, the Viennese Hermann Broch, wrote this wise saying: "Modern The novel bravely fought against the tide of kitsch and was eventually drowned. "The word Kitsch originated from Germany in the middle of the last century. It describes the mentality and practice of trying to please the majority by any means necessary. Since you want to please, of course you have to confirm what people like to hear. Then put yourself into this established pattern of thought. Kitsch takes this established pattern of ignorance and disguises it with beautiful language and emotion. Even I shed tears for such mediocre thoughts and feelings. Today, another fifty years have passed, and Bullock's famous saying has become more and more brilliant. In order to please the public and attract attention, the "aesthetics" of mass communication must be in line with Kitsch. Under the ubiquitous influence of mass media, our sense of beauty and moral values ??have gradually become kitsch.

The meaning of modernism in modern times is not to stick to conventions, to oppose established modes of thinking, and never to seek favor from vulgarity. Today's modernism (colloquially referred to as "new wave") has been integrated into the torrent of mass media. The so-called "trendy" means deliberately following the trend and catering to the established thinking pattern harder than anyone else. Modernism was dressed in kitsch. This coat is called Kitsch. Those who don't know how to laugh and have no sense of humor not only stick to the rules, but are also vulgar and flattering. They are the great enemies of art. As I have emphasized, this art is the echo of God’s laughter. In this field of art, no one has the absolute truth, and everyone has the right to be understood. This kingdom of free imagination was born together with modern European civilization. Of course, this is a very idealized "Europe", or the Europe of our dreams. We often betray this dream, but it is what brings us together. This cohesion has transcended European geographical boundaries. We all know that this broad field (whether it is the imagination of the novel or the physical entity of Europe) is extremely fragile and easy to die. Those guys who can't laugh and have no sense of humor are always staring at us. In this war-torn city, I reiterate the art of fiction again and again. I think you probably already understand my painstaking efforts. I’m not shying away from talking about issues that everyone agrees are important. I feel that today European civilization is in trouble both internally and externally. The precious heritage of European civilization - independent thought, personal creativity and the sacred privacy of life are all threatened. For me, individualism, the essence of European civilization, can only be stored in the treasure box of novel history. I would like to attribute this acknowledgment to the wisdom of the novel. I should stop rapping. I seem to have forgotten that God saw me here thinking about the speech seriously, and He was laughing at the same time.