Laughter, Oblivion

I enjoy the work of Czech-born writer Milan Kundera.  I'm not a scholar, just a fan.  Over the years, I've read the two of his books that I own, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, each a couple of times.  Lately, I followed an interest in the Czech composer Janacek, which was sparked by Murakami's 1Q84, to Kundera's book of essays, Testaments Betrayed, and the novel Immortality.  Though one is fiction and one non-fiction, both books offer dramatic narratives and insightful interpretative exposition, delivered by a speaker whose imagination and wisdom are incredibly engaging to me.  There are so many stories and ideas in these books that I love--the story of Max Brod betraying (allegedly, possibly) Franz Kafka's last will which would've had many or all of his works destroyed.  The story of Rubens, a virile but aging man whose sex life is overtaken by his past and eventually reaches a conclusion that resonates like a symphonic adagio.  Near the end of the novel, Immortality, though, I was particularly struck by a passage that expresses the fearsomeness of pervasive laughter in a way that, I think, might help people (me) maintain their (my) bearings in the midst of campaigning and advertising--the onslaught of everyday imagery we (I) now experience.

     "Rubens came upon an old collection of photographs of President John Kennedy: the photos were in color, there were at least fifty of them, and on all of them (all, without exception!) the President was laughing.  Not smiling, laughing!  His mouth was open, his teeth bared.  There was nothing remarkable about it, that's what contemporary photos are like, but the fact that Kennedy laughed in all of them, that not a single one showed him with his lips closed, gave Rubens pause.  A few days later he found himself in Florence.  He stood in front of Michelangelo's David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy.  David, that paradign of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile!  Since then, he had often tried in his imagination to retouch figures in famous paintings to give them a laughing mouth; it was an interesting experiment: the grimace of laughter could ruin every painting!  Imagine Mona Lisa as her barely perceptible smile turns into a laugh that reveals her teeth and gums!
     "Even though he spent so much of his time in galleries, it took Kennedy's photographs to make Rubens realize this simple fact: the great painters and sculptors from classical days to Raphael and perhaps even to Ingres avoided portraying laughter, even smiles....  For classical sculptors as well as for painters of later periods a beautiful face was imaginable only in its immobility.
     "Faces lost their immobility, mouths became open, only when the painter wished to express evil....  the faces of women bent over the body of Jesus the open mouth of the mother in Poussin's Slaughter of the Innocents.  Or the evil of vice: Holbein's Adam and Eve...."
     "Laughter is a convulsion of the face, and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason.  And that is why the classical sculptor did not express laughter.  A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannot be considered beautiful."

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