Forests of Symbols - Milan Kundera

Forests of Symbols

We must read The Sleepwalkers carefully, slowly, linger over actions as illogical as they are comprehensible, in order to perceive a hidden, subterranean order underlying the decisions of a Pasenow, a Ruzena, an Esch. These characters are not capable of facing reality as a concrete thing. Before their eyes everything turns into a symbol (Elisabeth the symbol of familial serenity, Bertrand the symbol of hell), and it is to symbols they are reacting when they believe they are acting upon reality.

Broch shows us that it is the system of con-fusions, the symbols of symbolic thought, that underlies all behavior, individual as well as collective. We need only examine our own lives to see how much this irrational system, far more than any reasoned thought, directs our attitudes: a certain man who, with his passion for aquarium fish, evokes some other who in the past caused some terrible misery will always excite insurmountable mistrust in me...

The irrational system rules political life no less: along with the last world war Communist Russia won the war of symbols: it succeeded for at least a half-century in providing the symbols of Good and Evil to that great army of Esches who are as avid for values as they are incapable of discriminating among them. This is why the gulag will never supplant Nazism as a symbol of absolute evil in the European consciousness. This is why people hold massive demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and not against the war in Afghanistan. Vietnam, colonialism, racism, imperialism, fascism, Nazism - all these words correspond like the colors and sounds in Baudelaire`s poem, while the Afghanistan war is, so to speak, symbolically mute, or at any rate beyond the magic circle of absolute Evil, the geyser of symbols.

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera.

Man is a child wandering lost - to cite Baudelaire`s poem again - in the "forests of symbols."

(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time)

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Taken from THE ART OF THE NOVEL, Harper Perennial, 2000, translated by Linda Asher.