A master of paradox: Memories and impressions of reading Milan Kundera in the 1990s

As a bachelor’s student in political science in a small railway colony town near Guwahati in the early 1990s, I was reading more literature thanks to my chance meeting with an English lecturer in my college, Upal Deb. I discovered Milan Kundera’s Immortality at the Guwahati Book Fair. The cover photograph was a headless, naked torso with reams of paper floating upwards from the throat. It was magically bizarre. Rupa Publications was doing a huge favour to readers of literary fiction in India by distributing Kundera’s books at a very affordable price. Encouraged by Deb, I reviewed Kundera’s novels in the Assam daily, The Sentinel, which gave me the opportunity to meet its chief editor, DN Bezboruah.

Immortality (1988) introduced a whole new world to my imagination. It was a funny, sad, intellectual, alluring and erotic novel. The characters were shadowy, but left behind strong impressions. Kundera loved providing variations to famous lines by others. To Luis Aragon’s line, “Woman is the future of man”, Kundera makes his male protagonist say: “Either woman will become man’s future or mankind will perish, because only woman is capable of nourishing within her an unsubstantiated hope and inviting us to a doubtful future, which we would have long ceased to believe in were it not for women.”

The European condition

It was a comment on the logical and mechanised idea of history that men were forcing down Europe’s throat. Kundera extends and twists Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration in A Season in Hell (1873), “It is necessary to be absolutely modern” to write: “[To] be absolutely modern means: never to question the content of modernity and to serve it as one serves the absolute, that is, without hesitation.”

If this was a broad statement against the cult of progress, Kundera is alert to the grim and ironic humour of modern lives: “[To] be absolutely modern is to be the ally of one’s gravediggers.” It is not just the desperate nature of seeking success, but also a deep hypocrisy in making one’s way through the world that Kundera draws our attention to. The leitmotif of the longing for immortality is juxtaposed against its limit principle: “Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.” This forgetting of death has a special modern dimension, especially in Europe. Walter Benjamin, for instance, has written on the invisibilisation of death in Europe’s social sphere. Recently, Annie Ernaux mentioned it in her interview to me.

Kundera is a master of paradoxical formulations like the French aphorists, like this one in Immortality: “Shame means that we resist what we desire, and feel ashamed that we desire what we resist.” The absence of this tension may result in humiliation. Kundera draws the picture of Europe’s last generation that experiences the tension of shame. In a section on ambiguity, Kundera conjures up funny erotic scenes where ambiguity intensifies and arrests desire. Kundera is a master at conjuring up paradoxes.

In Life is Elsewhere (1973), a title borrowed from Rimbaud that was later found scribbled on the walls of Sorbonne in 1968, the young poet Jaromil is a figure put into question. In his postscript, Kundera speaks of his era as “ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet.” It calls to mind the French anarchist poet Benjamin Péret’s 1945 essay where he wrote on “the dishonour of poets” in the 20th century where poets sided with totalitarianism and fascism.

Kundera recollects in the postscript (and in some detail in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) Paul Éluard’s moral timidity in 1950 when he did not condemn the hanging of his friend, the Prague writer, Zavis Kalandra, whose crime was his condemnation of Stalin’s shadow trials in 1936. To side with state crimes in the name of revolution is ideological complicity of the worst kind. Kundera draws the story of this betrayal with a precise image and simile: “Poets found themselves in the proscenium for the first time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious European drama and had no inkling that the theatre manager had changed the program at the last moment and substituted a trivial farce.”

This image is echoed in the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov’s description of the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution in The Apocalypse of Our Time and Other Writings (1913):

With a clang, a creak, and a scream the iron curtain drops on Russian history.
“The performance is over.”
The people get up from their seats.
“Time to put on your coats and go home.”
They look around.
But the fur coats and the houses have all vanished.  

The Russian experiment at home and in countries it occupied threw people into a world they do not recognise, where one thing ruled in the name of another, where power was so intriguing, it was difficult to differentiate between what was legitimate and what was a crime.

‘Bound together like the snail to its shell’

As a member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, Kundera suffered the label of being “anticommunist”, a slur used against critics. Even decades after the end of the cold war, it is upheld as a justified accusation. After being expelled from the Party, Kundera left Prague for Paris in 1975, and slowly gave up writing in Czech in favour of French. He wrote a few memorable novels since he began a new life in exile, including some spirited essays on literature.

In The Art of the Novel (1986), Kundera reveals interesting aspects of his own craft. For instance, how the architecture of his novels follows a pattern of seven sections based on musical compositions that determine length, tempo and emotional atmosphere. In a conversation with the French writer Christian Salmon, who describes Kundera’s work as “a poetic meditation on existence”, Kundera responds with a metaphor to his interpretation, or understanding, of Heidegger’s concept of “in-der-Welt sein” or being-in-the-world as human beings and the world “bound together like the snail to its shell”. He distinguishes fiction from history saying, “Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography.”

He gives a striking example: when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, state terror against the people was “preceded by officially organised massacres of dogs”. This bizarre event became the historical backdrop to his novel, The Farewell Party. In a section titled, ‘Somewhere Behind’, Kundera makes certain illuminating observations on Kafka. In contrast to the case of Raskolnikov, the character in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), who succumbed to his guilt and where, Kundera says, “the offence seeks the punishment”, in Kafka’s The Castle (1926), Kundera explains, the matter is reversed: “the punishment seeks the offence”.

Kundera’s insight is that Kafka tells us, the fear of being guilty is dangerous for it seeks the guilt that may not exist. It is a state, at once political and existential, where the situation of extreme vulnerability before excessive power is imagined not in mere bureaucratic/rational, but in mythic/imaginary terms.

In Testaments Betrayed (1993) Kundera stands up for Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). His central, philosophical defense of Rushdie’s book is that it was difficult for the theocratic mindset of those who attacked Rushdie to entertain the “different universe based on a different ontology; an infernum where the unique truth is powerless and where satanic ambiguity turns every certainty into enigma.”

A fine essayist, Kundera’s talent and fame will however rest in his early novels. The student Ludvik’s casually irreverent proposition in a letter to a girl in The Joke (1967) – “Optimism is the opium of the masses” – gets him into trouble. Kundera tells us, living under a totalitarian state means, a mistake committed privately in zest can change the entire course of your life. The psychological impact of totalitarian regimes is so tremendous that your loved one, or even your own self, will betray you through a larger design of oppression. Fear prompts moral chaos and infirmity. You are precariously balanced between obedience and rebellion. The feeling of powerlessness can affect the will.

Exhausted by the daily trial of caution protecting others, people often turn against themselves. Even the Kafkaesque is exceeded: the imaginary fear of punishment induces guilt for a supposed crime (protecting someone) that you overcome by committing a real one (confessing to the authorities). Repressive regimes obsessed with total control treat human freedom as a joke. If you resist or lampoon that control, your life will turn into a joke. The joke will be on you.

For the record, The Joke was banned in Czechoslovakia after the Russians invaded and crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. Totalitarian power takes literature seriously, a fact Osip Mandelstam learnt to his peril after writing the poem, “Stalin Epigram” (1933).

The see-saw of human experiences

Kundera’s most quoted novel is probably The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978). The excommunicated communist leader Clementis erased four years later from a historic photograph alongside Klement Gottwald taken in February 1948, reduced to his hat on Gottwald’s head introduces the motif of collective forgetting that a political regime imposes on people. The famous statement on memory and forgetting being “the struggle of man against power” is mentioned in the context of a man, Mirek, who wants to record his daily, professional life to convince himself and others that he wasn’t hiding anything from the authorities. It was a method to ward off guilt from creeping in.

If you forgot a detail, your self-confession is rendered incomplete, and you are guilty. Mirek is engaged in forgetting the contradictions within his real self through his daily act of memory. Kundera’s mastery places the important warning against power in a farcical context, mudding its message, and enriching its polysemic possibilities.

The eroticism in the novel explored through the ménage à trois between the couple, Karel and Marketa, and their friend Eva, is an interiorised drama. Sexual mores in a society under political repression get pushed into the private zone. Losing political agency, people seek to desperately recover a semblance of free will through their sexual agency.

Kundera’s interest in sexuality is primarily through the erotic. Eroticism is a tense, ambiguous, risky sphere where sexual desire is enhanced and constrained by the nature of the game. Its consequence is often tragi-comic, as Kundera showed in the two short stories in the collection, Laughable Loves (1969): “The Hitchhiking Game” and “Symposium”.

The most memorable character in the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the 33-year-old Tamina, the waitress who illegally escaped Prague with her husband (after he was betrayed by his family) to Western Europe. Kundera imagines her with a golden ring that she tightly holds in her mouth to preserve her silence. It is Tamina’s resistance to the growing cacophony around her, but also a means to guard her fear of her past slipping out of her tongue.

The most chilling image in the novel is the description of what Kundera calls “Circle dancing”, where people join together, holding hands, or putting their arms around shoulders, in the name of a paradisiacal future. After being briefly part of it, Kundera discovered it as the giant dance of forgetting (“absolute injustice and absolute solace at the same time” as he put it in The Art of the Novel) where political crimes were not just collectively ignored, but endorsed. No one wanted to befall the fate of someone who fell out of the ring, for “once a circle closes, there is no return.”

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Kundera approaches Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal via Parmenides’ opposites, by seeing “weight” (the burden of eternal return) and “lightness” (the insignificance of a single lifetime) not as binaries that are negative and positive respectively, but as paradoxes, illustrating the see-saw of human experience. Kundera explores this theme by introducing paradoxes within paradoxes exemplified through his characters.

Tomáš is loyal to his wife Tereza, but loyalty did not mean fidelity. He indulges in “erotic friendships” with other women, where the idea of freedom was ensured by the absence of sentimentality. Tomáš realises what distinguished love from sex was “the desire for shared sleep.” A neurosurgeon, Tomáš loses his job at the clinic for taking part in a public debate through a letter to the newspaper that the communist regime found politically inflammatory. His denial of having written it exactly the way it was published and his claim that one-third of his piece was edited out, was not accepted. Newspapers wouldn’t publish his denial.

Kundera focuses his attention on the sense of social abandonment of the individual caught in such circumstances: “People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.” The thickening shadow of the incident forces Tomáš to migrate to the countryside with Tereza.

Tomáš realises what distinguished love from sex was “the desire for shared sleep.” Yet again, Kundera makes the intricacies of sexual love the pivotal axis of human life that is heavily conditioned and cornered by political power. It was doomed to failure. Tomáš broke away from the circle by voicing a discordant note that displeased the authorities. Kundera’s pessimism of human life under totalitarianism is absolute, a no-exit situation.

The man that he was

In 1983, Kundera gave a rare interview to the Indian journalist, author, and columnist Madhu Jain in Paris. It was published in The Book Review (Jan-Feb, 1984 Vol. 8, No. 4). I discovered the interview in the late 1990s at the JNU library. When I wrote to Jain about the interview and shared it with her in April 2016, she said to my surprise that she had forgotten about it. She remembered Kundera as being “elusive and widely admired at the time”. In the short note before the interview, it is mentioned Kundera was averse to the press and kept changing his phone number, and Jain had a tough time tracking him down. Interestingly, we learn Kundera agreed to the interview because he loved Indian culture and cuisine. He said he was at home in Paris and did not feel isolated, or like a foreigner.

By “destiny” and “friendship” Kundera acknowledged he belonged to the left, however adding: “I do not share all their political obsessions”. He spoke about the influence of Rabelais, and Nietzsche, “not so much as a philosopher but for his method of meditation, for his aphorisms.” He liked the Plato of Symposium. The dreadful possibility of “organised forgetting” bothered him. It is a serious political warning Kundera has left us with. As history gets rewritten, the history of life must be registered.