"How we read one another"

The above is the subtitle to Milan Kundera's essay in the January 8 issue of the New Yorker (not online). That's right, here it is, the 23rd, and I am both behind in my magazines and still haven't managed to pick up a book this year.

But the relocation of Erin's Library (and her cat and other possessions) has occurred, and I'm expecting reading to get back to normal soon.

Until then, I'm reading catch as catch can, and this evening came across this Kundera essay. He's an interesting guy, and I greatly enjoyed the novels (most of his Czech language ones) that I read while in college. Since he started writing in French, however, he's gotten strange(r) and his arguments less cohesive.

This piece is called "Die Weltliteratur" and deals with the creation of world literature, and the ways art and literature can be placed within the historical context of the culture in/for which it was written, or within the historical context of the art form itself, sans borders. Most people can only view their own culture's literature within the former; he argues for the importance of the latter.

Kundera analyzes the national/supranational debate from the standpoint of the Central European, who had to watch as his culture and nation (one of many within C. Eur.) struggled for autonomy. And as a history student of that region, I was most drawn not to his larger argument, but to his comparison of the people of the European powers to those of the European strugglers:

What distinuishes the small nations from the large is not the quantitative criterion of the number of their inhabitants; it is something deeper. For the small nations, existence is not a self-evident certainty but always a question, a wager, a risk [emphasis mine]