Milan Kundera - In Memoriam

Milan Kundera, who charmed readers for decades with a mix of humor, brilliant story-telling, and historical insight, died recently at the age of 94. He made his mark in the 1970s with two masterworks, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and his reputation was further enhanced when the latter book was made into a popular film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Stripped of Czech citizenship by the then-Communist government, he moved to France, which became his second home. His later efforts—Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance—written in French, are shorter than the masterworks of his middle age but hardly less engaging. 

I can still remember how delighted I was during my warehouse years to find a copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, sans dust jacket, in the bottom of a shroud of hardcover remainders we'd received from Random House. The title was intriguing, though I had no idea what the book was about. Nor was I familiar with Kundera's polyphonic approach to narrative construction. It was thrilling to read a novel that was brisk, witty, and full of moral challenge, and with nary a hint of humdrum social criticism or ill-disguised allegory.   

That was a long time ago. But one passage in particular from that early novel has stuck with me, and just now I looked it up. The narrator, Karel, and his wife, after much soul-searching, have invited his widowed mother to stay with them. She had always been difficult, but when she arrives they notice a change, a softening in her.

Once when they were out walking, she gazed into the dis­tance and asked, “What’s the name of that pretty white village?" There was no village, just stone road markers. Karel felt an upsurge of pity when he realized how much his mother’s sight had deteri­orated.

Karel soon notices something more fundamental: what seems large for them is often small for her.

One night, for example, the tanks of a huge neighboring country came and occu­pied their country. The shock was so great, so terrible, that for a long time no one could think about anything else.

 It happened to be was August, and the pears in Karel's garden were nearly ripe. His mother had invited a neighbor to come and pick them, but he never came, never even apologized. Karel's mother never forgave him, though it was likely he had more important things on his mind at the time.

And here Kundera adds a final twist.

But are tanks really more important than pears? As time passed, Karel realized that the answer was not so obvious as he had once thought, and he began sympathizing secretly with Mother's perspective—a big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight. So Mother was right after all: tanks are mortal, pears eternal.

When the Soviet Union collapsed Kundera's “Eastern European” offerings lost some of their cache. (Decades later, Kundera himself was denounced as an informer--falsely, as it turns out.) But he kept finding new things to occupy his attention. Ignorance, (2000) for example, deals with Goethe's problematic infatuation with a young admirer, and also with The Great Return, by which Kundera means, among other things, the émigré’s return from exile. And in his seven-part essay The Curtain (2005), Kundera himself returns to re-examine, from a more mature perspective, some of the material he first dealt with in The Art of the Novel (1986).

One section of The Curtain originally appeared a free-standing essay in the 

New Yorker. I found it so brilliant that I cut it out and stuck it in my copy of The Art of the Novel. In that piece Kundera defends the practice of reading literature in translation, even going so far as to assert that it is only through translation that literature from small countries will ever escape the tyranny of nationalistic enthusiasm to make its mark on the wider world.

The broader theme of The Curtain is the history of the novel itself, and very early on Kundera makes a stab at underscoring why that art form is so important.

“…human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That—that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel.”

Kundera’s approach to the subject is freewheeling; he refers again and again to a fairly small selection of authors, jumping back and forth in time to suit his purpose: Cervantes and Rabelais, Sterne and Fielding, Balzac and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Musil and Broch, Kafka and Gombrowitz. At one point he contrasts his approach to the more strictly chronological one we often find in conventional histories.

“ ‘History as such,’ the history of mankind, is the history of things that no longer exist and do not join directly in our lives. The history of art, because it is the history of values, thus of things we need, is always present, always with us; we listen to Monteverdi and Stravinsky at the same concert.”

This analysis is not entirely sound. History of every sort concerns itself with things that remain valuable and conjoined to us. But in the history of art those connections become blatant. They're far more immediate.

Kundera analyses the density of Dostoyevsky’s plot-constructions, Flaubert’s attempt to de-theatricize fiction, and Tolstoy’s success an exposing the largely random musings that pass through a character’s mind, even during moments of extreme crisis. He explores the significance of the fact that until recently, the French language had no word for “kitsch,” and jostles Hegel’s theory of lyricism just to see what will fall out.

Music and poetry, Hegel says, have an advantage over painting: lyricism. And in lyricism, music can go still further than poetry, for it is capable of grasping the most secret movements of the inner world, which are inaccessible to words. Thus there does exist an art in this case, music that is more lyrical than lyric poetry itself. From this we can deduce that the notion of lyricism is not limited to a branch of literature (lyrical poetry) but, rather it designates a certain way of being, and that, from this standpoint, a lyric poet is only the exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard.

We may be reminded here of  Croce’s simple maxim: Art is lyricism. Yet just a few pages further on, Kundera underscores the anti-lyric conversion a novelist must undergo to establish distance between himself and the characters he’s creating. He credits Cervantes for tearing through the curtain of self-identification. “..his destructive act echoes and extends to every novel worthy of the name: it is the identifying sign of the art of the novel.”

At this, as at other points in Kundera’s argument, we might be tempted to offer counterexamples. In particular, Kundera’s theories are better fitted for comic literature than to some other kinds. Indeed, at one point he observes: “Humor is not a spark that leaps up for a brief moment … to set us laughing. Its unobtrusive light glows over the whole vast landscape of life.”

But the problematic character of some of Kundera’s assertions doesn't diminish the originality of his perspective, the dazzle of his wit, the ironic music of his prose, or the estimable brevity and courage with which he took up such issues as soul, tragedy, history, humor and the meaning of meaning itself.