Hemingway adapted: screening the star author

Abstract

Novelist Milan Kundera, speaking for many a modern writer, concedes how deeply the author’s life is embedded in his work. He believes that life, in fact, constitutes verbal art’s only inevitable source. And yet, in a gesture that crystallizes the incompatibility of self-justifying form with its material source in extra-textual experience, Kundera advises strongly against autobiographical readings:

According to a well-known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. From which it follows that a novelist’s biographers unmake what the novelist made, and remake what he unmade. Their labor, from the standpoint of art utterly negative, can illuminate neither the value nor the meaning of a novel.¹

This provocative metaphor interestingly postulates the interchangeability of the constructive elements of fiction, imagined as building blocks that can be reoriented as biographical lexemes. From these, a ‘house’ of a different kind might be (re)constructed, suggesting the material fungibility that Kundera reprehends, even if the secondary agent upon whom this process depends deals only in the supposed paratextual, in the confection of a text he believes — and wrongly according to Kundera — might constitute a welcome supplement for the reader. Kundera, in fact, constructs a false binary: one can have either the work in itself (a creative rebuilding of the life) or the writerly life, which is furnished by a reading that is nothing more than a misguided rebuilding of a rebuilding, now pointlessly demolished.