Modern Language Studies

Surviving History: Milan Kundera's Quarrel with Modernism

Author(s): Eugene Narrett
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 4-24
Published by: Modern Language Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3194935
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SurvivingHistory:MilanKundera's
QuarrelwithModernism
Eugene Narrett

In Europe we are living at the end of the Modern era: the end of
individualism;the end of art conceived of as an irreplacableexpression
of personal originality; the end that heralds an era of unparalleled
uniformity.
Musicin our own time has returnedto its primordialstate, the state after
the last issue has been raised and the last theme contemplated-a state
that follows history.

Manis a child wanderinglost-to cite Baudelaire'spoem-in the "forests

of symbols."(The criterionof maturity:the abilityto resistsymbols. But
mankindgrows younger all the time.'
ABSTRACT

MilanKundera'sessays and fiction reflect on the intertwiningof

aestheticsand politics, of personaland social issues in our era which he
sees as increasinglydessicated by pressuresto conform. To resist the
ongoing devolution of history into a global State tenuously unified by
genericsymbols, slogans,and "ambulanteverlastingwar,"he has forged
what he terms a "new art of novelistic counterpointwhich can blend
philosophy, narrative,and dream into one music."He champions and
practicesthis form as a vehicle of inquirywhich can expose and satirize
the urge for certaintywhich increasinglymars personaland public life.
Kundera'sculturalcritique has involved a sustained meditation
on Modernism which he sees as divided into "establishment"and
"skeptical"branches. In establishmentModernism'sreductive histori-
cizing and rage againstthe past, he discernsidealizationsof childhood,
revolt, and an urge to forget which are rooted deeply in Judeo-Christian
eschatology. His complex response to these tendencies is stated most
fully in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and leads him to an
aesthetics of resistance based not on revolutionarycertaintiesbut on
recovery, multivalence,and fortuity.

Duringthreedecades of writing,MilanKunderaincreasinglyhas focused

his concerns on the devolution of history into an oppressive "infan-
tocracy" unified through generic symbols and slogans and focused
obsessively on the present. His quarrelwith the West'sidealizationof
childhood and innocence is intriguingin itself, and adds to our critical
appreciation of Modernism by contextualizing it within Judeo-
Christianity'score values.
Kundera'sessays complementhis fiction in positingthe novel as
"the image and model" of the Modem "Westernworld,"which like it
is "groundedin the relativityand ambiguityof things human"(AN, 6,
13). He sees history, and especially the Modern (post-Cartesian) era as
a matrix of paradoxes, now unraveling and revealed. Having fostered

4
the West'sprivilegingof individualism,the Modem ethos is producing
"an era of unparalleleduniformity."Its skeptical empiricism, which
recognizedand acceleratedthe decompositionof "thesingledivineTruth
.0.into myriadrelativetruthsparceledout by men"(AN, 6), now yields
a "din of quick easy answers"to existentialproblems for "justas God
long ago gave way to culture,culturein turnis givingway"as "wereplace
thoughtwith the non-thinkingof the mass media."2He suggests further
that the Modem era'sorientationtoward discovery and the future (the
temporaland metaphysicalorientationof the Bible itself) ironicallyhas
produced a zeitgeist which "reducestime to the presentmoment only"
because it distrustsand shrinksfrom the narratizationsof thought.3
This line of argumenthas led Kunderato propose that a seriesof
relatedmeta-ironiesnow govern our condition.For one, that the dream
of separatecivilizationsunitingin lasting peace has produced a global
villagein which"war,ambulantandeverlastingwar ... guaranteesunity"
(AN, 10-11).The Biblicaldreamof peace and harmonyfoundits Modem
type in the doctrine of "progress."But technical inventionsand social
reformsgroundedin reasonhave led to chronicwar because

in thecourseof the Modernera,Cartesian rationalityhascorroded,one

afterthe other,all the valuesinheritedfromthe MiddleAges.Butjust
whenreasonwinsa totalvictory,pureirrationality (forcewillingonly
its will) seizesthe worldstagebecausethereis no longeranygenerally
acceptedvaluesystemto blockits path.(AN,10)

Or, as he sees Broch suggestingin The Sleepwalkers,"the Modem era

is the bridge between the world of irrationalfaith and the reign of the
irrationalin a world without faith" (AN, 54). Kunderais with Broch,
Adorno, Weber, and Freud in perceiving "the indefatigable self-
destructionof Enlightenment,"andhis essaysarea wealthof meditations
on what he calls the "terminalparadoxes"of the Modem era.
To these developments, Kunderaconsciously opposes what he
terms the novel's "wisdom of uncertainty"which he sees as a supreme
because supremely flexible mode of inquiry.Toward this end, by the
late 1970she had developed "anew art of novelisticcounterpointwhich
can blend philosophy,narrative,and dreaminto one music"(AN, 7, 65).
The Book of Laughter& Forgettingexemplifies this aesthetic and the
discussion of Modernism at its thematic center (Part VI) integrates
Kundera'sartof the novel withhisoverarchingpoliticalandpsychological
concerns.Againstthe rushto a futurewhich discouragesreflectionand
difference, Kunderaopposes himself and his practice of the novel "as
a form of meditationwhich cannot live in peace with the spirit of our
time"(AN, 19).
I wish to follow Kundera'sdigressive,layered,"musical"approach
to historicalanalysisby focusingon the issuesclusteredin PartVI of The
Book. These brillianttwenty pages give full play to the form he has
createdto carryhis criticalappreciationof the Modem.
Kundera'sambivalence about that quintessenceof the Modern
called "Modernism" is sufficientlysevere thathe identifiestwo opposing

5
kinds:an "establishmentmodernism... that in lyricalecstasy identifies
with the modem world"(AN, 65-6, 140-1);and an "antilyrical,skeptical,
critical"Modernismhe associates with, among others, Kafka, Broch,
Musil,and Ionesco, and which he sees as distinctivelyCentralEuropean
in its "disabusedview of history,"its reservationsabout the doctrineof
progressand the interpretiveand political simplificationsthat doctrine
demands.4Suchmainstreamingconsumesthe grammarand thusthe very
meaning of history (and of individual lives). Kundera accordingly
presentsthe crisisof our times as a tragedy of "lostletters"(the title of
two of the seven Partsof The Book), and thus, of meaninglessness(the
theme of The Book'sPartVII, "TheBorder").
To oppose the reductivenessthat lyrical modernism(like ortho-
dox religion, viz., "St."Clement Greenberg) seeks to impose on life,
Kunderashapesfictionswhich build themselvesfrom a web of mutually
constitutingironies.His dialectic opposes the millenariancelebrationof
the new and its impulse toward resolution(toward a timeless state) to
the novel's commitment to uncertainty and discovery (to history).
Championingcriticalmodernism,Kunderaassertswhat may resemble
a Modernistadversarialitybetween his new form and his age:

if [the novel] is to go on discoveringthe undiscovered,to go on

"progressing"asnovel,it canonlydosoagainsttheprogressof theworld.
(AN,19)
But the adversarialityKunderaenvisions redefines avant garde affir-
mationsof progressand its understandingof resistance.He arguesthat
for ourtime,resistancerequiresnot impatiencewith the pastbut recovery
of it, a spiritualand political unearthingof what is and has been over-
looked, repressed, forgotten in society's rush toward uniformity and
"happiness."Kunderadoes not mention Freud, but his aestheticis very
close to that CentralEuropeantitanof "criticalmodernism."
In his drive to recover and continuallytest meaning and value,
Kundera poses an ur-heroic model of aesthetics. With his lifelong
immersionin musicand use of it as a model for narrativeform, we might
expect that Die Zauberflotewould resonatefor him. It emerges in the
name, Tamina,the heroineof The Book. LikeSchikenader'sTaminoand
Pamina,she too will endurefire and water, thoughwith a far less Come-
dic resolutionfor Kunderadistrustssynthesis,and his dialectic is ironic,
restless,and tragic.
KunderaintroducesTamina,one might almostsay he allows The
Book's themes to discover her, in Part IV, the second section on "Lost
Letters."ExiledfromPrague,numblywaitingtablesin "asmallprovincial
town in the West of Europe,"she strugglesto preservememoriesof her
dead husbandwith whom she had fled Czechoslovakia.

I picturetheworldgrowingup aroundTaminalikea circularwall,and

I pictureherasa smallpatchof grassdownbelow.Theonlyrosegrowing
on thatpatchof grassis thememoryof herhusband.(83)

6
The metaphor suggests the embattled, isolating,and mortal nature of
memory.Tamina'sstrugglein fact is drivenby the erosionof hermemory
of her marriage'ssequence of events. More than the loss of any single
memory,it is thislossof temporaldiscreteness,of history,whichdistresses
her. Her distresscenters on her failing ability to connect her husband's
pet names for her to specific times and places. Unable to contextualize
them in a logic of lived experiences,it is as if the names themselveshad
lost meaning, as if the grammarhad evaporated from a paragraph,
turningsenseto noise.One "namesheremembersperfectly,and canenter
it with confidence in the year 1964.But all the other names are soaring
freely, madly outsidetime, like birds escaped from an aviary"(86).
Through this dilemma, Tamina increasingly embodies the
problems addressed in The Book, and faced by the novel as a genre,
for it is the chronology,
the sequence of discoveries (not the sum of what was written) ... that
constitutesthe historyof the Europeannovel. It is only in such a
supernationalcontext [like Tamina's]that the value of a work [or
memory]canbe fullyunderstood.(AN,6)
Justas the texture,the specific detailsof experienceorganizethe history
of a people, a personalrelationshipor pet name, so "each work is an
answerto precedingones, each work containsall the previousexperience
of the novel." Kundera, that is, sees conversation and the novel as
complementaryforms,bringingthe presentintothe futureby integrating
and hearingthe past.
But the spiritof our time is firmlyfocused on a presentthat is so
expansiveandprofusethatit shovesthepastoff ourhorizonandreduces
timeto thepresentmoment.Thenovelis nolongera work(athingmade
to connectthepastwiththefuture),... buta gesturewithno tomorrow.
(AN,18-19)
Like the novel in culture,Taminain her exile is an isle of fertile,resonant
silence surroundedby self-indulgenttalkers,"graphomaniacs" like her
false friend,Bibi. WhileBibi's"epiphany"is to affirmher desire to write
about herself (89), Taminais strickenby her loss of "theother."She tries
desperatelyto retrievefrom Praguethe love letters and journalsof her
eleven years of marriage,not to publish them, but to buttressmemory
and the living past. Let down by family at home and betrayed by Bibi,
Tamina attempts suicide but (like the novel) she survives throughan
innatevitalitywhich for Kunderaaccompaniescommitmentto the past.
She "resolvesto live in and for silence"(97). Similarly,should the novel
seem to disappear,"itwill do so not because it has exhaustedits powers,
but becauseit existsin a world grownaliento it"(AN, 16), the deaf world
that has grown up "likea wall"aroundTamina.
Tamina'squest to retrieveher "letters,"the grammarand history
of her life, forms a main motif in Kundera'smusicalmodel of novelistic
structure.Her storyis a variationon the thematicstructureof PartI, also

7
titled"LostLetters,"whichcenterson Mirek,an academiccashieredafter
the Russianinvasionof Czechoslovakiain '68.
As his story opens, Mirekis desperateto recover the love letters
he sent in his youth, 25 years past, to the obstinatelyStalinistZdena. His
politicsseem to give him prudentreasonsfor doing so. An activistamong
those who made the Praguespring,Mirek'scredo (we are told on The
Book'sfirstpage), is "thatthe struggleof managainstpower is the struggle
of memory against forgetting"(3). At considerable risk, he has kept
diaries,correspondence,and minutes of clandestinepolitical meetings.
Trailedby secret police, loved by a loyal son, principledprotagonistof
a chapter filled with criticismsof the Russiansas the enforcersof for-
getting, Mirekis a sympatheticfigure. Like the best of his "generation
who revoltedagainsttheirown youth,"he has,however,"anurgeto reach
back into the past and smashit with his fist, an urge to slashthe canvas
of his youthto shreds"(13,20). Thisis an urgewhich Kunderaprofoundly
mistrusts.Why does Mirek really want his letters back? Not because
Zdenahas welcomed the Russiantanks,but because she was and is ugly,
andhervolubilityabouttheirpastaffair,herown refusalto be airbrushed,
bruisesMirek'svanity.
Mirek is suffering from litost, another of the book's organizing
themes, and the Czech word Kunderadescribes as "a state of torment
caused by sudden insightinto one's own miserableself" (122).5Zdena
has become a blemishon his reputation,and he wishes to eraseher from
his history. For this Kunderalavishly details Mirek'scomplicity with
Communistidealizationsand oppression.In fact, he uses Mirekto argue
thatCommunismin its essenceis not uniquebut the epitomeof a universal
humantendency:

Mirekis as much a rewriterof historyas the Communistparty,all

politicalparties,allnations,allmen.Peoplearealwaysshoutingthatthey
wantto createa betterfuture.It'snot true.The futureis an apathetic
void, of no interestto anyone.The pastis full of life, eagerto irritate
us,provokeus,andinsultus, temptus to destroyorrepaintit. Theonly
reasonpeoplewantto be mastersof the futureis to changethe past.
Theyarefightingfor accessto the laboratories wherephotographs are
and
retouched biographies and rewritten.
histories (22)

These comments speak incisively to the links between denial and our
obsession with representations,with stories and images. To emphasize
this psychological,one could say, ontologicalconjunction,he opens The
Book with a visually and thematically striking piece of history that
resonatesthroughoutand beyond Mirek'smisadventures:the story of
Czech Communists Gottwald and Clementis addressing, in 1948, a
crowd from the balcony of the Castlein Old Town Square."Therewere
snow flurries.It was cold, and Gottwaldwas bareheaded.The solicitous
Clementis took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald'shead."
Clementiswas later chargedwith treason,hanged, and airbrushedfrom
the millions of official photographsand posters commemoratingthe
event. "Allthat remainsof him is the cap on Gottwald'shead" (3). Thus
8
the urge to forget grows from the struggleto controlthe past, and under-
lies all crisesof "lostletters."
Does Mirek'slitost-fed vanity give the lie to his politics? For
Kunderait's no small issue, for Mirek'sattempt to revise his agonized
youth is a paradigm of his generation'srevolt, in the Prague Spring,
againstits own past:
these young intelligentradicalsstartedshoutingto their deed, calling it
back,scoldingit, chasingit, huntingit down.If I wereto writea novel
aboutthatgeneration of talentedradicalthinkers,I wouldcallit Stalking
a LostDeed. (9)

Kunderain fact has writtenseveralnovels (includinghis first, The Joke,

and his most recent,Immortality)which examinethisconditionof being.
As the makersof the PragueSpringare purged for attemptingto recall
theirdeed, so Mirekis arrested,caughtby the incriminatingjournalshe
delayed destroyingwhile pursuinghis mission to Zdena. As Clementis
had been to Czech Communists,so Mirekhoped, Zdena would be for
him, "merelya phantom to be blotted out" (13). But his commitment
to memory and history (his "letters"),Zdena's pride and irreducible,
separateidentity,and his litostitself counterbalancehis idealizingvanity.
His airbrushingfails,and on being arrestedhe resolveson litost'srevenge:
"murderby suicide ... to stretchout full length over [the Communist]
idyll like a blemish.And to stay there,like Clementis'cap on Gottwald's
head"(149,24). And like the memory of Zdena insidehis own.
The motif of "the idyll" developed in Part I is central to the
remorse,forgetting,and wish for relief from the past thatdrown Tamina
in Part VI. In discussingPart I, indeed wherever one enters The Book,
one discussesTaminafor "LostLetters"is her "categoryof existence,"6
the orientingmetaphorwhich makes her the decenteredcenter of Kun-
dera'smeditationson history,and on the novel as the expressiveform
throughwhich he means to resistthe reductivecentralizingof our times.
The Book
is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina is absent it is a novel
for Tamina.She is its maincharacterand mainaudience,and all the other
stories are variationson her story and come together in her life as in a
mirror.It is a novel about laughterand forgetting about forgettingand
Prague,about Pragueand the angels. (165-6)

To adopt Kundera'sapt metaphor,Tamina'sstory organizesthe novel's

themes like a tone in Schoenberg'sdodecaphony. Tamina'ssituationin
PartVI accordinglyshould be approachedby trackingthe motif of the
idyll which burgeonstherehavingbeen statedin PartI. It is a motif which
bearscruciallyon Kundera'sreadingof Modernism.
In PartI, Kunderawrites that the Czech Communists

had a grandiose program, a plan for a brand new world in which

everyone would find his place..,. and they lost no time in turningtheir
dream into a reality:the creationof an idyll of justice for all. (8)

9
There are major Biblical referents, in Isaiah and Revelations, for this
"brand new world" of "justice for all":

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth... and I heard a loud voice
proclaimingfrom the throne:"Now at last God has his dwelling among
men." (Rev. 21: 1-3)

a scion shall arise from the stock of Jesse,

and from his roots a bud shallblossom ...
Justice shall be the band aroundhis waist...
for the earthshall be filled with the knowledge of the
Lord / as water covers the sea. (Isaiah11: 1-9)

As Kundera sees it, in 1948 just as in 90 AD or in 720 BC, the gospel of

perfect justice required that the "old order" pass away and that an idyll
of reclaimed innocence ("the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb") be
established. The participants in the "pseudo-revolutions imported from
Russia," he writes, "were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and
... eschatological faith in an absolutely new world."' This is that same
"faith in progress, in revolution, and so on" that Kundera associates with
"avant garde ideology," with the "establishment modernism" which "in
lyrical ecstasy" calls for "the necessity of a radical break" with "the history
of art and of the novel," considering them to be played out.8 The
revolutions of 1948, he argues, embodied a "collective lyrical delerium"
(234) which he sees as the reductive and millenarian qualities Modernism
shares with totalitarianism and, troublingly, are rooted in the West's most
venerable religious ideals. Stalinism in Eastern Europe "was not only an
epoch of terror, but an epoch of lyricism .., ruled hand in hand by the
hangman and the poet." "Lyricism and youth, longing for the absolute
and revolutionary fervor," complement each other.9 Biblical, Commu-
nist, and avant garde orthodoxies "exploit archetypes deep inside us all
. the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in
harmony, united by a single common will and faith" (233). These millenial
anti-historicisms all hark back to the archetypal idyll of Genesis, the time
before death, pain, doubt, disunity:

An idyll is an image thathas remainedwith us like a memory of Paradise:

life in Paradise was not like following a straightline to the unknown;
it was not an adventure [as is the novel whose "sequenceof discoveries
... constitutesits history"(AN, 6)]. It moved in a circle among known
objects . .. in Paradise,man was not yet man. Or to be more precise,
had not yet been cast out on man's path [history]. The longing for
Paradiseis man'slonging not to be man.'1

Kundera here develops his view that the urge for transcendence and for
progress is self-negating. In his terms, the idyll both expresses and seeks
to abolish litost, for its approach to history is "murder by suicide" (it
expresses "man's longing not to be man"). The Bible's eloquent
millenarian visions of hope and redemption, like litost, embody the
persistence of acute, past irritations-indeed, they see history as an

10
irritation-and the wish to resolve them once and for all. For Kundera
history is an elaboration of litost, and in the "purifications" that
accompanythe Modernist,Isaiahan,Johanine,and Communistmillenia,
the youth-obsessedtormentsof litostseek relief in an adversarialrhetoric
of sheep and goats, in "a dance of innocence;innocence with a bloody
smile.""Likethe arousedproletariat,when the messiahcomes with "the
belt of Justice"...
He shall strikethe ruthlesswith the rod of his mouth,
and with the breathof his lips he shall slay the wicked.
Then the wolf shallbe the guest of the lamb;
and the leopard shalllie down with the kid;
The calf and the young lion shall browse together,
with a little child to guide them. (Isaiah11:4-6)

All will be sheep;all will be as children.Thuslitostand its idylliccounter-

formation lead to what Kundera calls "Infantocracy: the ideal of
childhoodimposed on all humanity"(AN, 133).
With Blake and against the messianic visions noted above,
Kunderabelieves that "one law for the lion and the ox is oppression."
The danger in the nostalgic desire for a life which "moves in a circle
among known objects"is that abstentionor dissidence (dissonance)is
forbidden:
Now let me repeat:an idyll, for all. People have always aspired to an
idyll, a garden where nightingalessing, a realm of harmonywhere the
world ... and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire
lighting up the heavens is the fire burningin the hearts of all . . . (8)
A fire thatburnsin every heartis a flame that shows to all eyes the same
reality, giving each a "categorical agreement with being":
God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from theireyes;
there shall be an end to death and mourning and to pain ... Every
accursed thing shall disappear . . . the Lord God will give them light
and they will reign for evermore. (Revelations21: 3-4, 22: 2-5)

As in the archetypal apocalypse, so in Czechoslovakia during the incipient

post-history of the Communist idyll, a pure light will distinguish sheep
from goats who, like Clementis,Mirek,Zdena, must be expunged.The
"danceof innocence"will have a "bloodysmile"because
where every man is a note in a magnificentBach fugue... anyone who
refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily
caught between the fingers and squashed like an insect ... Since by
definitionan idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate
were implicitly denying its validity . .. nightingalessang, and the body
of Clementis swung back and forth like a bell ringing in a new dawn
for mankind.(8-9)

An idyll for all requires adherence and inclusion. One cannot abstain from

11
the song nor introduce dissonance. Living outside the city of light creates
unacceptable shadows, and we know where the shadows must go. "The
gates of the city shall never be shut" but "nothing unclean shall enter it."
The "unclean" that is, are banished to another place. "The people who
have emigrated,... and the people who have been silenced and removed
from their jobs . .. are invisible and forgotten" because "Angel-fanatics
are so convinced of the world's significance, that they are ready to hang
anyone not sharing their joy" (23, 235). Just so, in Tamina's dream-voyage
to the isle of children, it is her difference, the facts of body and memory
her dream can't cancel, that ultimately force her to resist the children
and thus provoke their enmity. "In the eyes of the children, the very fact
of her adulthood made her grotesque." Part of the horror of angels is
the "objective" manner of their rage. "Angels"inflict pain without bitter-
ness and hate. "Their only motive for causing pain to someone not of
their world is to glorify that world and its law" (184-5).
So Mirek's tawdry pursuit of his love letters and his stubborn
accumulation of journals establish themes for Tamina's struggle with the
angels within and around her. As Kundera develops these themes, he
dramatizes the analogy between personal and political events so crucial
to the shifting perspectives of his narratives and to his understanding of
history: "the psychological mechanisms that function in great (apparently
incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as those that
regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations" (AN, 109).
Through this conjoining of the personal and political, apocalyptic
temporal ruptures entwine Tamina's story with The Book's meditations
on forgetting, and support Kundera's claims for the novel and its
ambiguous place in the Modern tradition.
A desire to trash the "tattered trousers of the established order"
(8) have been essential to Modernist self-definition:

We are on the extreme promontoryof ages! Why look back? ... Time
and Space died yesterday.We alreadylive in the Absolute... The oldest
among us is thirty;... when we are forty, let younger and more daring
men throw us into the wastepaperbasketslike useless manuscripts!'2

Marinetti'smanifesto is a prime example of that "longing for the absolute

and revolutionary ardor" that Kundera sees as a dangerous primal
tendency within culture. Here it speaks in the "lyrical ecstasy" of
"establishment modernism"

according to which an impregnableboundary separatesthe "modern"

novel from the "traditional"novel (this "traditionalnovel" being the
basketinto which they shovel all the differentphasesof the fourcenturies
of the novel). (AN, 67)

Kundera considers such aesthetic reductions akin to the political-religious

orthodoxies which have sought to purify cultural life and expel dissent.
Just as the "pseudo-revolutions" of 1948 and 1918 contained "genuine
eschatological faith," so

12
 behind establishment modernism there is a residue of ingenuous
eschatological belief: that one History ends and another (better) one
begins, founded on an entirelynew basis. (AN, 67)
Marinetti'swords both echo John'sApocalypse and provide Kundera
with a prototype for The Book'sclimaticspeech by GustavHusak,"the
president of forgetting,"who oversaw the suppressionof the Prague
Spring,and proclaimed:"Children:never look back! Children:you are
the future!"(174).
So Kunderalinks Modernisturges to break with the past to the
idyll'swish for epistemologicsimplificationsandits idealizationsof youth
and newness. He presents hebephrenia, amnesia, reductiveness,and
politicalintoleranceas a clusterof tendenciesaccompanyingthe numbing
pace and volume of the mass media.
Nowadays, History moves at a brisk clip ... The bloody massacrein
Bangladeshquickly covered over the Russianinvasion of Czechoslova-
kia, the assassinationof Allende drowned out the groansof Bangladesh,
the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende ... and so on
until everythinghas been forgotten. (7-8)

Technology has become a form of airbrushingand anesthesisworking

togetherwith millenarianidyllicisms.Withpersonallives dwarfedby the
"sparklingdew of novelty"dishedup by the media,people seek and cling
to reflectionsof the self. So while "the invention of printingoriginally
promotedmutualunderstanding,"
in the era of graphomaniathe writing of books has the opposite effect:
everyone surroundshimself with his own writings as with a wall of
mirrors,cutting off all voices from without. (92)
Thatis, the cult of "individualism,"
as WalterBenjaminargued,obscures
the diversityand exchangeof voices which give individualityits meaning.
A related"terminalparadox"operateson the global level. Not only does
the dazzlingimmediacyof history'spresentationnow defeat ratherthan
inform sense, it drains the texture from individuallife. "No longer a
backdrop, history is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted
before the commonlyaccepted banalityof everydaylife"(8). The media
concentrates culture's deep-rooted idyllicism as its over-stimulations
desensitize,makingindividualsinterchangeableabstractionswho drown
in vast, hypnoticallyintoned trends:
Man is caught in a veritable whirlpool of reduction where Husserl's
"world of life" is fatally obscured and being is forgotten . .. like all of
culture,the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media; as
agents of the unificationof the planet'shistory, the media amplify and
channelthe reductionprocess;they distributethroughoutthe world the
same simplificationsand stereotypesacceptableby the greatestnumber,
by everyone, by all mankind. (AN, 17-18)

Exploring these views in fiction, The Book weaves together the stories

13
of Mirek,Tamina,of the novel, Westernmusic, the death of Kundera's
fatherand of Czechoslovakia,to suggesthow Historyyields post-history,
Modernismgeneratespost-modernism,and the spiritof inquiryexposes
its self-negatinglust for certainty.As Kunderahas remarkedof Tamina's
dilemma,"Hellis alreadycontainedin the dreamof Paradise"(234).
The resumption of Tamina'sstory in Part VI, is preceded by
autobiographicalreminiscenceon the death of Kundera'sfather.During
his last years, the years of the flowering and suppressionof the Prague
Spring, he became engrossed in studying the variation form. While
political airbrushingproceeded, the old musician'sfaculty of speech
deteriorateduntil

in the end he had only a handful of words left, and all his attempts at
saying anything more substantialresulted in one of the last sentences
he could articulate:"That'sstrange!"(160)

Kunderapresents his father as a terminalparadox. In that "he knew

everythingbut no words,"his condition,like Tamina's,reflects that of
the antilyricalnovel which today cannot be heard because "it exists in
a world grown alien to it."
Throughthe decline of his father,Kunderarevaluesthe putatively
enlightening defamiliarizationsof Modernism (and of the Romantic
sublimefrom which Modernismderives)intoa paradigmof physicaland
social decay. Prague, too, has suffered such defamiliarizations.Just as
Kundera'sfather,thoughhis voice is lost, remainsintellectuallyacute, so
is Prague'ssocial voice buried in a living, Kafkesquenightmare.People
who live "in cities with nameless streets, or with streets with different
names than the ones they had yesterday [have lost] continuitywith the
past, and people withouta past are people withouta name"(157).
Here again is the motif of "lost letters," and one can hardly
overstress the centrality of the stories drawn together in Part VI to
Kundera'sreflectons on the detumescence of history and meaning. As
he sees it, it has been on or nearthe contested,renamedstreetsof Prague

in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses:

psychoanalysis, structuralism,dodecaphony, Bartok'smusic, Kafka's
and Musil'snew aesthetics of the novel . .. and we cannot dismiss the
possibility that the end of CentralEurope markedthe beginningof the
end for Europe as a whole. (230)

This is Kundera'sown apocalypticism,leavened by the same skeptical

curiosity that focuses on history's terminal paradoxes. Amid our
milleniumof noise in which the variationsbeloved by his fatheryielded
the "stereotypedharmonies"and "hackneyedmelodies"of rock and roll
which cancelshistoryin "theeternityof music"(180),so Czechoslovakia
epitomizes the West which has been colonized by its own "ingenuous
eschatologicalbelief" and which, like Tamina, lives in an "immense
loneliness," a void "from which culture is slowly withdrawing."'3
Blurred distinctions that force words, individuals, and whole

14
nations across the border from meaning into meaninglessnessare the
cursewhich shadowsTamina'slife and makesher,for Kundera,an avatar
of our condition:
The silenceof my father,whom all wordseluded,the silenceof the
hundred and forty-five historians who have been forbidden to
remember, that myriad-voiced silence resounding from all over my
country forms the background of the picture against which I paint
Tamina.(161)
As time erodes everythingbut her remorse,she is visited one day by the
mysteriousRaphael,a young man who seductivelyinvitesher to "forget
forgetting,"to "travelto a place where things are light as a breeze,
... where there is no remorse.""Yes,"she answers dreamily,"a place
where thingsweigh nothingat all"(163-4).
His father'sdeath is only part of the autiobiographicalmaterial
Kunderauses to exploreour weaknessfor "thedemagogy of the angels"
(65). His own story, too, developed in Part III (the first of two parts,
with PartVI, titled "TheAngels"),helps to establishthe metaphysicsof
Tamina'sconflict by introducingthe image of "the circle dance" as a
symbol of uniformity.
In 1948 Kunderawas of the angels' party, and affirmed a new
order "rationallyorganized, well-conceived, beautiful, good, and sen-
sible" (62). "I too once danced in a ring,"he writes. "Circledancing is
magic. It speaks to us throughthe millenia from the depths of human
memory"(65, 63). It occupies the same archetypalspace as longing for
the idyll.
PartIII intermixesautobiographyand essayisticdigressionswith
the fable of the "angelic"pedagogue, MadameRaphael,a prototypeon
whom Tamina'sseduceris a variation.Likethe youngKundera,Madame
Raphael"longedto dancein a ring.Allherlife she had looked for a group
of people she could hold hands with and dance in a ring."Having tried
many hip and unhip"churches"from the Methodists,Communists,anti
and pro-abortionists,to Zen, Maoism,the noveau romanand Brechtian
theatre,she finally
hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant
that she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought
and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a
single ring and a single dance. (63)
A "laughingangel ... is infinitelylaughable"but Kunderais quite clear
on its sinisterundertone.The circle dance is a type of that City whose
gates are always open-to the righteous.Kunderaknows what it means
to be a note who begins to improvise away from its chord. "One day
I said somethingI would better have left unsaid.I was expelled from
the party and had to leave the circle."Reflectingon this experience,he
emphasizesthe primallonging that powers the dance: "likea meteorite
broken loose from a planet," those banished from the idyll continue to
fall "and always retain a muted nostalgia for the circle dance" (65).

15
 Here, too, earlyin PartIII, Kunderaembellishesthe "idyllic"pre-
occupationof youthwith perfectionhe firstalludedto when commenting
on Mirek'slitost and paltry self-esteem as an adolescent. Part III thus
furtherpreparesfor Tamina'ssojournon the isle and Kundera'ssustained
critiqueof the "lyrical"impulse in avant gardism.At its most comically
trivial,this impulseis embodied in the circle dance of MadameRaphael
and hersycophanticAmericanstudents,archangelicallynamed Gabrielle
and Michele. In the midst of a feckless discussion of Ionesce's
Rhinocerous,they literallyascendto heavenwith theirteacherin a rapture
of mutual incomprehensionand "brilliantfading laughter"(74). Their
ascensioncounterpointsthe interspersedaccountof Kundera'sLuciferian
fall, trashes the pointed humor of Ionesco, and primes us to receive
ironically Tamina's wish to journey "to a place where things weigh
nothingat all."
Tamina'svoyage revealsthe costs of choosingto float ratherthan
to fall into uncertainty;to choose an ideal of History (an idyll) against
the messinessof history. Kundera'srelentlessand multifacetedcritique
draws on his own experienceof "the terrorof Stalinism... supported
above all by young people"who saw in it "arevoltagainstthe old world."
He insistson the historicalspecificity of his skepticismabout youth:"the
critiqueof youth has always interestedme ... it's a self-critique."•14He
has written that the origin of this attitudewas an apocalyptic moment,
a rupture,ironically,of the sort he criticizesModernismfor abusingas
a paradigmof progress.When

I heard my admired poet Paul Eluard publicly and ceremonially

denounce his Prague friend whom Stalinistjustice was sending to the
gallows ... [it] hit me like a trauma: when an executioner kills, that is
after all, normal;but when a poet (and a great poet) sings in accom-
paniment, the whole system of values we considered sacrosanct has
suddenly been shakenapart. Nothing is certainany longer.'5

The meta-ironyof the contemporarycrisisof meaningin which Kundera

situates himself is that it is an apocalypse suffered in the name of
coherence,of "thedreamof a world unitedby a single common will and
faith."In its wake, as in the passagecited above, Kunderavoices his own
lament for meaning, "the desperate need to find once again a moral
authorityin a world stripped of values;"'"a yearning which he finds
satisfiedonly in the fruitfulstrifebetween the angelicneed for coherence,
and the devilish impulse to question.Tamina fails to bind the two, and
to this extent she carriesKundera'sdeepest fears for himself, his genre
(his voice), and his culture.It is throughher that his own experiences
of apocalypticrupturebecome a contextfor the satireon "infantocracy"
that unifiesPartVI of The Book'smeditationson death.
These meditationsbegin with historicalreflection defining both
1948 and 1969 as the sort of rupturesassociatedboth with Modernism
and with the Biblical concept of kairos, the revelatory, transforming
interventionof divine force in human events. "The Russiansbrought

16
 Husakinto power in 1969. Not since 1621has the history of the Czech
people experienced such a massacre of culture and thought"(158-9).
Consistentwith metaphysicssince the late Enlightenmentand Romantic
period, Kunderais concerned to demystify apocalypse, to detail how
such changes result from human thought and action ("I find it highly
significant... that Husak secretly dismissed some hundredand forty-
five Czech historiansfrom universities");but he also retainssomething
of a religiousaura in his keen sense of the sensory derangementssuch
events produce, of their source in that 20th century correlativeof the
divine,the unconscious."Rumorhasit thatfor each of [thesehistorians]-
secretly,as in a fairy tale-a new monumentto Leninsprangup."Since
his first novel, The Joke, completed in 1962,Kundera'sfascinationwith
the uncanny,with the "mysteriouscoincidences"of human experience,
hasreflectedhisview thatthe novel, likepsychoanalysis,"doesnot invent,
it discovers"the surrealtextureof everyday life. Note his emphasisthat
it is a "surrealistpainter"who was martyredin 1950 by Stalinistangels
who forbade that any incongruitybe alleged or demonstratedto be
intrinsicto life. In the terms of Kundera'stragic and ironic "semantics
of death,""7 the surrealistwho insistson life'sreal incongruitiesis yanked
from the solid groundof his insightsinto the air (idyll) of the angels so
that, like Clementis,he becomes a bell ringingin their dawn. Even in
such terrible ironies, Kundera'scommitment to history and the novel
stems from his love of theirability to reveal life's seeminglyimpossible,
tragic,and "beautifulfortuities."'8
Kundera'svigorous critique of apocalyptic historicismmay be
powered preciselyby his own sense for the greatand petty recognitions
and misperceptionswhich are the structureof the ironicand surrealand
which in his works (unlikein traditionalapocalypses)complicaterather
than resolve experience, exposing the limitationsof each protagonist's
view of self and world. Rupturesof sense and expectationin his fiction
are not definitive but transientand routine. His fascinationwith the
misinterpretedturningpoint and its multiple ironies derives from: his
interest in the bureaucratic "world where actions have become
mechanicaland people do not know the meaningof what they do" (AN,
113); his aesthetics of the novel which "is the realm of play and
hypothesis"(AN, 78); and from his psychology:"we need only examine
ourown lives to see how muchthisirrationalsystem [of symbolicthought
and surrealcoincidence]farmore thanany reasonedthought,directsour
attitudes"(AN, 62). His elaborationof the surrealismof everyday life
presents an inimitably postmodern apocalypse of indeterminacythat
posits and presentsthe novel as its main field of representation.
As a thematiccoda to Tamina'sstory, The Book'sPartVII ("The
Border") gathers Kundera'smeditations on meaning and presents a
situationthatdistinguisheshis apocalypsefromthe traditionalapocalypse
of moral and historicalclosure. The narrativecan be contextualized
aptly by his discussionin The Book'safterwordof "angelic"and "devil-
ish"laughter.He argues that each, unalloyed, threatensan apocalyptic
end to the fullness of human life which "is bounded by two chasms:

17
fanaticismon one side, absoluteskepticismon the other"(233).Kundera
inclines to the devil's party, but The Book's impassionedcritiques of
the meaninglessnessthat accrues to the angelic position demonstrate
that his discomfort with "absoluteskepticism"is similarlysevere. (In
similarspirit,Shelleywrote that"allHigh Priestsbelieve in nothing,"and
sought faith via skepticism.)Given free reign, angel and devil produce
each other in endless, vindictive collaboration,the lust for certainty
(positivism)inducingnihilism,and pushingculture"acrossthe border"
into meaninglessness.
What then do we have? Kunderaas "moderate?"Is he a neo-
conservative sentimentallyattached to High Culture and denouncing
"extremistsof the rightand left?"I doubt it, because that pundit'scliche
is just the sort of "progressiveidea" Kunderaloves to satirize.As Part
VII unfolds, Kundera'scritiqueof apocalypticextremismbecomes also
a satireon progressiveideas and the "middleway," ideas "provocative
enough so supporterscan feel proud of being different, but popular
enoughso the riskof isolationis precludedby cheeringcrowds confident
of victory"(200). His critique,that is, highlightsthe diffusion of avant-
gardismas a common social attitude.The aggressivelycorrect position
he singles out for special ridicule is that "we will soon be freed, once
and for all, from the bonds of Judeo-Christianthought"(228). Such
dimestore apocalyptics itself demonstrates the inexorable grip of
Hellenisticarcadianism(asepitomizedby the "DaphnisandChloe"motif
threadedthroughPartVII) and Biblicaleschatologyon Westernlife, the
idealization of innocence that, as Tamina discovers, ravages identity,
difference, and eroticism.
Kunderaunderminesthe appeal (indeed,the viability)of a middle
way in the contexthe sets for presentingthe "progressive"idea of a new
paganism.As its proponentdronesout "statements... heardten, twenty,
thirty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand times before," the man's
audience stands gatheredon a nude beach which robs eroticismof the
mystery and excitement crucial to its meaning. They "listened with
interest,their naked genitalsstaringdully, sadly, listlesslyat the yellow
sand"(228).
The deadening banality,repetitions,frightfulness(mass "nudity
is a shroud,"the uniformin which "theJews had filed into Hitler'sgas
chambers")of the sentimentjolts Jan, Kundera'sspokemanin PartVII,
out of his dreamy "overpoweringdesire to go back to Daphnis,back to
his own belongings, to the beginningsof mankind"(227). Priorto this
speech,Janhad been in the ultimatelyricalmood:"heyearnedfor yearn-
ing ... to be completely innocentof physicallove" (227). But the gross
ironiesof the speech jolt him from the primordialdesire for "thegarden
where nightingalessing,"from man'slonging not to be man,"from the
idyll'sself-negations.
As we have noted, Kunderaunderstandsthat hell lives in such
dreams. The political subtext of Part VII's satire,satire throughwhich
Kunderadistanceshimself not only from the dual apocalypse of angels
vs. devils but from the progressive"middleway"as well, illuminateshis
quarrelwith the existentialpositionrepresentedby Jan'sfriend Edwige
and her desexed bliss on the nude beach:
18
 Axiom:the more opaque the affairs of the State, the more transparent
an individual's affairs must be; though it represents a public thing,
bureaucracy is anonymous,secret,coded,inscrutable, whereasprivate
manis obligedto revealhishealth,hisfinances,hisfamilysituation,and
if the massmediaso decree,he will neveragainhavea singlemoment
of privacyeitherin love or in sicknessor in death.(AN,150)
The dream of "transparency" (in the New Jerusalem"therewill be no
night")and humanlyunnatural"naturalness" in force on the nude beach,
the dream of transcendingguilt, the dream of innocence regained, is
Judeo-Christianity's most cherishedidyll and thus linked in Kundera's
thoughtto the repressionsof Modernismand Statism.Underlyingtheir
appeals, and that of progressivismtoo, is the nostalgiaof kitsch, those
attitudesand socialformsmeantto dissembledeath.Kunderarecognizes
the morbidity in this impulse and the content of "the Border's"satire
prefiguresthe essay on kitsch in Part VI of The UnbearableLightness
of Being. Kundera'sefforts to demystify the extremismsand collabora-
tion of angel and devil sets him outside the circle of consensus-minded
moderation while it also distinguishes his apocalyptics from the
traditionalsheep vs. goats dualitiesthat characterizethe idyllicism he
critiques.
The intense nostalgia and privileging of innocence in Biblical
prophecy is anatomizedin Tamina'slast struggle. Once she abandons
her vigil of silence and memory, Kunderabuilds a clusterof signifiers
for death, noise, and the loss of identity. Raphael leads her through
countrysidewhose Dantesque sombrenessdeepens Kundera'srevalua-
tion of the term "angelic"via referenceto the darkwood, infernalriver,
and tyrannicalferryman,heretransformedinto a leeringtwelve yearold.
As if by death or dream ("itis a fairy tale, it is a dream,"164),
Tamina'spassage stimulatesher memoriesof her husband.She realizes
that he is "stillalive in her grief, just lost, that'sall, and it was her job
to look for him!"(167). But whether or not this revelationis more than
the promptingsof guilt, it's too late for her to go back; too late at least
in the dream which, as a dream, recursforever (like Tereza'sdream of
drowningin The UnbearableLightnessof Being). Tamina'sdream is a
parable, in Kundera'swords, "a fairy tale" about the consequencesof
forgettingwhich is "aform of death ever presentin life" (235).
Her acquiescenceto forgetting,brief and regrettedas it is, is an
apocalypse which severs her from history, delivering her into a
nightmarishmilleniumin which life does not develop but recurslike an
endless game of hopscotch, one in which she experiencesan alienation
more severe than in her exiles within and then outside her native land.
Seeking to jettisonmemory and pain, she enters a dream in which her
identity, her gravity,as an adult and lover is lost. "To identify with the
children"on the island, to join their circle, Tamina"hadto give up her
privacy"(175), to enter the existentialspace of the nude beach and the
death camp:
"Youmean I'm going to have to sleep in a dormitory?"Tamina
protested.
"A child doesn't need a room to itself."
19
 "Whatdo you mean? I'm not a child!"
"We'reall childrenhere!"
"Butthere must be some grownups!"
"No, no grownups."
"Thenwhatam I doinghere?... I didn'twantto comehere!"
"Now,nowTamina,don'tlie. Nobodytakessucha longjourney
without knowing where it ends." (169-70)

Hadn'tTaminaknown and, like the West, chosen?The journeyends in

the place "wherethingsare light as the breeze,"in the land of the angels.
Kunderais not quibblingmerely with Longushere. He is developing an
intense critique of Isaiah'svision and of the New Testament'sechoing
vision of "theLamb"and the "kingdomof God:""Amen,I say to you,
unlessyou turnand become like children,you will not enterthe kingdom
of heaven"(Matthew18: 1-4).
In an earlierdigressioninitiatedin Part VI by the account of his
father'sdeath, Kunderahas informed us of Tamina'sthoughts about
dying, so we know thatshe associatesit preciselywith the loss of privacy,
the loss of one's ability to restrictphysicalintimacy,requiredof her on
the island:"one minute you are a human being protected by ... the
sanctityof nudity and privacy, and the next you die and your body is
suddenlyup for grabs.Anyonecan tear your clothes off" (171-2).Death
is like forgettingis like rape:all, it is implied,areviolations.The violation
of the past, moreover, is like the violationsof inquirycommon to our
age. Inquiry, discovery, complexity (variation)are for the novel, for
Tamina, for Kundera, for his father, a struggle against death and
forgetting,an effort to appreciatepersonaland temporaluniqueness:
It is no wonder then that the variationform became the passion
of the matureBeethoven,who (likeTaminaandlikeme) knewall too
thanlosinga personwe have
well thatthereis nothingmoreunbearable
loved-those sixteen measures and the inner universe of their infinite
possibilities. (165)
This autobiographicalintrusionsuggeststhat Kunderawrote The Book
impelledby "grief,sympathy,remorse,and an indefinablelonging,"that
is, by litost. If in the impossibilityof fully graspingan individual'sor an
art form's potential there is an induringinvitationto inquiry, so must
success always be imperfect and desire incompletely fulfilled. Part of
Kundera'sunreconstructedRomanticismis thus to present yearningas
the human inheritance,although as an ideal he finds it deadly. This
conflict is at the heart of his tragic vision and ironic aesthetics. It
underscoreshiskeencritiqueof the idyllwhich,builton longing,promises
its end; promisesthat, finally,everythingand everyone will be perfectly
understood("transparent"), litost erased, and history,with its sequence
of discoveries,conclude.
This paradox gives a tone both bittersweet and horrible to
Tamina'squest. Her surrenderof historymeansregression"to the place
she had always longed to be," to the time when "her husband did not
exist in either memory or desire and where consequently she felt neither

20
pressurenor remorse."This alluringregression,which simultaneouslyis
a violation,occurs in the bathroom."Thelarge tiled bathroomstood at
the centerof the children'slives and thoughts... all prizes and penalties
were given out in the bathroom"(175-6).After observing,and wiping,
and inspectingTamina,the children
took her back to bed, where again they found all kinds of nice little
excusesto pressup againstherand strokeher all over.Therewere so
many of them swarmingaroundher that she could not tell whose hand
or mouthbelongedto whom.(177)

In this absence of discrimination,there is the pleasure of Brave New

World's"solidarityday service"in which "itis one'sduty to be infantile."
In the bathroom,Taminarecovers"buriedmemories"of pre-pubescent
sexuality (the Daphnis & Chloe motif) and shucks the "constant
interrogation"(inquiry)of adult love. Riding the idyllic impulse "to go
back to the beginningsof mankind,"Tamina,

"whoalways had sucha well-developed sense of modesty (modesty was

the faithfulshadowof love) . .. now felt hernakednesswas no longer
immodest;it had lost all meaning ... a body whose every inch was part
of the history of love had lost its meaning and in that loss of meaning
was peace and quiet."(176)

Tamina'stime of peace with the angels is brief, for as Calgacus

said of the Roman "peace,"the loss of meaning actuallyis violence. As
her thoughtsabout what it means to become a corpse have indicated,
the pleasuresof her regressionsoon taste of death. She first notes this
while observingthattwo of the swarmingchildrenarewatchingthe signs
of her approachingorgasmas if they were "examiningthe workingsof
an open watch or a fly whose wings had been tornoff" (177).This objec-
tifying, distant,and entertainedgaze follows her to her death:
The boat was almost upon her, and five children'sfaces peered eagerly
down ... No one held out an oar or hand to her, no one tried to save
her. They justkept staringat her,wide-eyed and eager. Herhead ducked
underwater. By strugglingviolently, she managed to raise it back up
several times, and each time she saw the boat and the children'seyes
observing her.
Then she disappearedbeneath the surface. (190-1)

The childrenare as remote from her and from the gravity of death as
Eluardand the angelsof Praguesoughtto be from the hangedsurrealist.
To the extent of her difference, Taminais both interestingand, like any
individualin an idyll (likeJohnSavage in BraveNew World),ultimately
impermissible.She is outside the circle (in Ken Kesey'sterms,she is "off
the bus"). So the erotic pleasureshe experienceswith the childrenis a
type of death:the death of intimacyand reciprocity.Unable to reconcile
her awareness of this loss with the "cradlelike pleasure" the children give
her, she sinks ever deeper into her seductive nightmare, into "the world

21
of thingswithoutweight,"into the idyll which flees fromhumiliationand
remorse into dreams "light as a breeze" ("from debasement the only
escape is to move upwards").19 Her body reverts"to what it originally
had been: a toy for the production of sensual pleasure." Tamina's
sexuality,"freedfrom its diabolicalties with love, had become a joy of
angelic simplicity"(182), and for Kunderathat means death.
Tamina's agony presents a message simple to articulate and
devilishhard to live: that forgettingcannot cancel but only complicates
remorse by vitiating integrity and orientation. It dooms one to the
metaphysics of the "namelessstreets"of Kafka'sand Husak'sPrague.
Having sought to escape the struggleto remember,Taminacrossesthe
border into the meaninglessnessthat comes with the loss of distinctions.
Having done so, this "first-rateswimmer,"who earlierin life had been
unable to drown herself "even with the assistanceof a whole vial of
tranquilizers,"finds her legs "gettingheavier and heavier [until] they
draggedher down like lead weights"(96-7,191).Hereis the denouement
and passagewhich bequeatheda theme and titleto Kundera'snextnovel.
Tamina'sescapismcompoundsthe anguishof her lost letters,becoming
an "unbearableabsence of weight"(188).For her as for Czechoslovakia,
the idyll's dream of lightness,of rising in a ring, ironicallyproduces a
sinkingfeeling of anomiewhere the extremismsof angeland devil merge
in "astate that follows history."
Committed to the particular, ambiguous, partial, and ironic,
Kunderarepresentshow idyllicismconsumesthe historythatcreatedand
containsit; how "theambiguityof this epoch, which is decline and prog-
ress at the same time ... like all that is human carriesthe seed of its
end in its beginning:"

Culturehasalreadybowed out. Its disappearancewhich we experienced

in Prague as a catastrophe,a shock, a tragedy, is perceived in Parisas
something banal and insignificant,scarcely visible, a non-event.20

As he sees it, the developed West is so addicted to "radicalideologic

postures,"so immersed in "lyrical,neurotic expectationof some great
deed" (231), that it inhabitsa sort of nude beach in which the deathsof
modesty, of the novel, of cultureare scarcely visible. Kundera'smode
of resistanceto ourdesensitizederais the "antilyricalnovel"andits efforts
to "scrutinizeman'sconcretelife and protect it againstthe 'forgettingof
being."'His stance is both skepticaland prophetic:"I thinkof the novel
as a form of meditation.But I know that I'm going counter-currentto
the times."21This adversarialityis his ongoing response to the cultural
apocalypsesof his life:
Once upon a time I too thoughtthat the future was the only competent
judge of our works and actions.Lateron I understoodthat chasingafter
the futureis the worst conformismof all, a cravenflatteryof the mighty.

He recreatesthe oppositionalstance toward culture,the tellingblend of

radical and conservative views of the second generation Romantics who

22
saw in theirage a morbid repressionof the past and future.As a result,
"the future will pass judgmenton us, of course, and without any com-
petence" (AN, 19-20). Canonization is kitsch because reductive
interpretationsof historyare "foldingscreensthat curtainoff death."
Kunderasuggests that we commit ourselves to such simplifica-
tions, to nostalgia,to childhood as a culturalideal througha naturalbut
dangerousinabilityto abide the paradoxes,the "tension,fear, agitation"
(182) that historydemands. As a result,explorationof the unique, tran-
sient and fortuitous(the individual)that is the essence of history,now
seems"abandoned,lonely,andsuddenlyas humbleas some littlepersonal
story we'll forget by tomorrow."This detumescencegives to the fiction
of Kundera,as to thatof his elective companion,Broch,"themelancholy
sense of historydrawing to a close" (AN, 56, 67). To oppose the "dis-
integrationof values"which he sees as Broch'smain concern, Kundera
commits himself to the novel whose "extraordinarypower of incorpo-
ration makes it one of the last outposts where man can still maintain
connections with life in its entirety"(AN, 65). In this conserving and
adversarialeffort, Kunderaintermixesgenres, turns assertionsagainst
each other, and everywhere uncovers the playful logic of "absolute
fortuity"in the large and small momentsof history.

BentleyCollege

NOTES
1. These quotations,in order,are from:Kundera'sessay "Sixty-ThreeWords;"
an interview of Kunderaby Philip Roth appended as an "Afterword"to
the Penguin edition of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Penguin,
1981);and from Kundera'sessay, "Notes Inspired by [HermannBroch's]
The Sleepwalkers."The essays are collected in the volume The Art of the
Novel (New York:Grove Press), 1986. Subsequent quotations from this
volume will be cited in text by AN in parenthesis,with page number.
Quotationsfrom The Book of Laughterand Forgettingand its Afterword
will be cited simply by page number,in parenthesis.
2. MilanKundera,"The Tragedy of CentralEurope,"New YorkReview of
Books, April26, 1984,p. 36.
3. AN, 18and JasonWeiss,"AnInterviewwith MilanKundera,"New England
Review & BreadloafQuarterly,Spring 1986,p. 407.
4. "The Tragedy of Central Europe,"36. Kunderaalso details this view in
"TheAfterword"to The Book:"Mynative country... is thussinkingunder
the weight of history, and looks at the world with immense skepticism"
(231).
5. Kunderahas said that "a novel is based on certain fundamentalwords. It
is like Schoenberg's"tone-row."In The Book of Laughterand Forgetting,
the "row"goes: forgetting,laughter,angels, litost, border. Over the course
of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studied, defined,
redefined, and thus transformedinto categories of existence"(AN, 84).
6. AN, 84. See also Kundera'sLife is Elsewhere (preface to the revised
edition), Viking-Penguin,1986,v.
7. Ibid., vi.

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 8. AN, 141, and Lois Oppenheim,"Clarifications,Elucidations:An Interview
with MilanKundera,"The Review of ContemporaryFiction,Summer1989,
p. 8.
9. Life is Elsewhere, 270-1;vi.
10. The UnbearableLightnessof Being (NY: Harper& Row, 1984),295-6.
11. Life is Elsewhere, 270.
12. F.T. Marinetti,"TheFuturistManifesto,"firstpublishedin Le Figaro,Feb.
20, 1909.
13. "TheTragedy of CentralEurope,"36.
14. Weiss,409.
15. Life is Elsewhere, vi.
16. "The Tragedy of CentralEurope,"36.
17. Life is Elsewhere, 289-90.
18. The UnbearableLightnessof Being, 51-2.
19. Life is Elsewhere,58.
20. "The Tragedy of CentralEurope,"37.
21. Weiss, 406.

Beyond the Limitsof Realism:

Metaliterature,The Uncanny,Simulacra...
This conference will explore contemporary forms of art and
literaturethatchallengetraditionalnotionsof representation.Specialses-
sions will be organizedfor graduatestudents.Papersmay relate to the
generalconferencetopic in any interdisciplinary manner,suchas through
literature,film, history,philosophy,religion, art. Also sessionson the
or
translator'srole in renderingsuch challenges.For information,contact
Prof.AntonioSobejano-Moran, Dept. of RomanceLanguageand Litera-
tures, SUNY-Binghamton,P.O. Box 6000, Binghamton,NY 13902-6000;
phone:607-777-4635or 2644.

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