Kundera

"This is how kitsch-making interpretation kills off works of art... Kitsch-making interpretation is actually not the personal defect of some early-twentieth-century Prague conductor (many conductors after him have ratified his alterations of Jenufa); it is a seduction that comes out of the collective unconscious; a command from the metaphysical prompter; a perennial social imperative; a force. That force is aimed not at art alone but primarily at reality itself. It does the opposite of what Flaubert, Janacek, Joyce, and Hemingway did. It throws a veil of commonplaces over the present moment, in order that the face of the real will disappear.
So that you shall never know what you have lived."


October 26, 1997