Rights in Tension: On the Art of Crafting an Artistic Legacy

Creative Paranoia

Milan Kundera was a brilliant man. He was also, I think, a bit paranoid—understandably so, given that he spent most of his life in an abusive relationship with the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, to which he on-again-off-again belonged, but still, it’s worth noting that the obsessive compulsions in which he took pride were not exactly the statistically normal behaviors of an emotionally well-adjusted novelist. If there even is such a thing.

In Kundera's long essay Testaments Betrayed (1993), an impassioned defense of our right, as artists, to define our own legacies, there’s a great deal to admire. There are also excesses. With no apparent reservations, he reports that he stopped giving sit-down interviews after 1985 because journalists kept reporting what he’d actually said, as opposed to what he’d meant to say, and that he spent years rereading and correcting translations of his books in various foreign languages, waging a relentless crusade against the diabolical translators who'd played too fast and loose with synonyms. Given all that he endured at the hands of his party, which responded to his calls for commonsense reforms by exiling him, revoking his citizenship, and banning his books, his retention of any sanity at all testifies to the life-affirming power of a good sense of humor, which he famously had. We all have our coping mechanisms, and Kundera’s, all things considered, were nowhere near as corrosive as they could have been.

The central argument set forth in Testaments Betrayed is also not all that corrosive. Kundera insists that no one—not editors, not scholars, not even close friends—has the right to pass off any artist’s early drafts as final products in the public record. This should go without saying, though of course it often doesn’t, as a host of examples prove.

Nevertheless, the lengths to which Kundera takes his argument do seem, at times, extreme.

He laments, for example, the posthumous publication of Kafka’s and Faulkner’s drafts, notes, and personal papers on the grounds that these authors forbade it from their deathbeds. In general, he’s unreserved in his belief that artists on their deathbeds should get absolutely anything they want, up to and including the destruction of all that they ever created. 

Would he have had the Aeneid burned, then, just because Virgil, dying, willed it so?

One can only imagine that Virgil, regardless of his feelings at the time, is no longer unduly concerned about the survival of his magnum opus. Even if his current gig as celestial tour guide does leave him with a great deal of free time, he’s almost certainly got better things to do with it than sit around comparing Fagles’ translation, line-by-line, with Mandelbaum’s.

Kundera’s observation that curators tend to overvalue words on paper while undervaluing the editorial discernment required to enhance their impact is ironically mirrored by his own overweighting of the author’s dying wishes at the expense of every other wish that may ever have passed through that same author’s mind.

The impulse to insist on the destruction of one’s work may come from many different psychological places, not all of which are equal. There was a time in my life when I said I wanted everything I’d written burned. It wasn’t true. What I wanted was to hurt myself. As a form of self-harm, this would’ve been quite effective, but it would not have been in keeping with my deeper will.

Concerned as he is with the rights of the artist, Kundera fails to acknowledge that, like all other rights, they are not absolute: they must exist in tension. Don’t future generations, for example, have the right to study and learn from those who’ve gone before without stumbling constantly over the artist’s egoic distortions? Shouldn’t up-and-coming artists themselves get the chance to examine their predecessors’ creative processes and evolutions? I, for one, have learned a lot from reading certain authors’ oeuvres end-to-end, not skipping over the weaker works. I would not like to have the right to do so stripped away.

This is not to say that any artist’s weaker works should be unduly elevated, treated as somehow on par with their masterpieces. Nor is it to suggest that when an artist assigns a composition to the dustbin, some well-meaning bystander ought to immediately fish it out, dust it off, and send it off to the publisher. Kundera is right about this, unequivocally.

There is value in the contents of the dustbin, however, as long as it is clearly labeled. It is as a writer myself, but also, perhaps more importantly, as a reader that I insist upon the preservation of the contents of the dustbin—ideally in a dank and moldy basement somewhere, where only the truly committed will ever get at it. The truly committed have a right to know.

There are many tools available to those of us who seek to craft artistic legacies. Censorship need not be one. It seems to me that it is my responsibility, as an artist, to create at least one masterpiece within my lifetime, one work of such enduring consequence and power that all my weaker compositions, eclipsed, will simply not survive. At least not in the collective memory.

No one who fails to achieve this has any valid reason to waste their final breaths. Works of art that are, by virtue of their mediocrity, destined for the dustbin will not wait for permission from us, their creators.

Instead of wringing our hands over what people will think of our lesser works after our deaths, let's invest that mental energy where it counts and focus on creating things that stand the test of time.

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