Le Meur Diana
MILAN KUNDERA, A CZECH WRITER
« Le sens de la vie c’est de s’amuser avec la vie. » M.Kundera
Contents :
First Part : Milan Kundera’s life and beliefs
Second Part : Kundera’s masterpieces : Literature Analysis
Introduction :
Milan Kundera is one of the most important contemporary Czech writers. Kundera has done for his native Czechoslovakia what Gabriel Garcia Marquez did for Latin America in the 1960's and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did for Russia in the 1970's. He has brought Eastern Europe to the attention of the Western reading public, and he has done so with insights that are universal in their appeal. He is one of the few Czech writers who have achieved wide international recognition. Each of his creative works and each of his contributions to the public political and cultural discourse always provoked a lively debate in the context of its time. The story of his writing is a story of many Czech intellectuals of his generation: it is the story of freeing themselves of the Marxist dogma and of gaining and communicating important insights, based on the traumatic experience of life under totalitarianism in Central Europe.
Kundera was part of the Prague Spring of 1968, the promise of Socialism with a human face that was smashed under the treads of Soviet tanks. Publication in Prague of his first novel, ''The Joke,'' was one of that interlude's major events.
He has lived in France since 1975, persuaded to self-exile by the censoring or suppression of his work by the government of his native country. Kundera has long denied any political motivation in his writings, however. His work is always humorous, sceptical, and fundamentally pessimistic in describing the universal human condition, whether under Communism or elsewhere. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is his most celebrated novel. Other highly regarded works include The Joke (1967); Laughable Loves, a collection of short stories originally published in the 1960s, Life Is Elsewhere (1969); and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). In The Art of the Novel (1988), a collection of essays, Kundera repeats his conviction that the novel must be "autonomous," created independent of any system of political belief.
By the 90s, Kundera had started to write his novels in French; he is now sometimes tagged a "Franco-Czech" author. His works are often described as "novels of ideas," but he resists the term "philosophical novel." As he said in an interview with Lois Oppenheim, "There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize."
First Part : Milan Kundera’s life and beliefs
His personal history
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« C'est toujours ce qui se passe dans la vie : on s'imagine jouer son rôle dans une certaine pièce, et l'on ne soupçonne pas qu'on vous a discrètement changé les décors, si bien que l'on doit, sans s'en douter, se produire dans un autre spectacle. « |
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Kundera |
Summary in English :
Milan Kundera was born in Brno in the highly cultured middle class family in 1929. He joined the ruling Czechoslovak communist party in 1948. In 1950 he and another Czech writer, Jan Trefulka, were expelled from the party for "anti-party activities”.
Kundera was re-admitted into the Communist Party in 1956. In all his work written before leaving Czechoslovakia, Kundera is firmly rooted in his home environment. From the middle of the 1950s, Kundera was a celebrity in communist Czechoslovakia. Because of his criticism of the Soviets, Kundera was black-listed and his works were banned shortly after the Soviet invasion 1968.
Kundera's mature work is the result of his unique Central European experience of disillusionments with the left-wing mythology of communism and also the product of his fascination with the West European literary tradition.
In 1975, Milan Kundera and his wife left Czechoslovakia for France. Kundera was invited to teach at the University of Rennes. Yet, he continued to look at his native country from the new, French, vantage point with a mixture of affectionate melancholy. In 1978 they moved to Paris where he taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. It was in Paris in 1982 that Kundera completed the novel Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, first published in Czech in Toronto, 1985, definitive French edition 1987), his most popular work with Western readers and critics alike.
In 1990, Kundera released Immortality. The novel, his first written in French, was more cosmopolitan than his others, with a more explicit philosophical content and would set the tone for his later novels. It still reflects Kundera's Central European experience, but rather indirectly. Kundera again comments on contemporary civilisation on the basis of his experience in France and concludes that the contemporary world is crazy in many of its aspects.
Kundera has highlighted the contemporary crisis of language, a crisis of meaning and a crisis of communication. His novels are novels about various forms of disillusion.
Summary in French :
Milan Kundera est né à Brno dans la famille hautement cultivée de la bourgeoisie, en 1929. Il a joint le parti communiste tchèque au pouvoir en 1948. En 1950 lui et un autre auteur tchèque, Janv. Trefulka, ont été expulsés du partie pour des "activités anti-partie ».
Kundera a été réadmis dans le parti communiste en 1956. Dans tout son travail écrit avant de quitter la Tchécoslovaquie, Kundera est fermement enraciné dans son environnement familial. Au milieu des années 50, Kundera était une célébrité en Tchécoslovaquie communiste.En raison de sa critique des Soviétiques, Kundera a été mis sur la liste noire et ses travaux ont été interdits peu de temps après l'invasion soviétique de 1968.
Le travail mature de Kundera est le résultat de l’expérience unique de l'Europe centrale de la désillusion sur la mythologie de gauche du communisme et également le produit de sa fascination pour la tradition littéraire d’Europe occidentale.
En 1975, Milan Kundera et son épouse ont quitté la Tchécoslovaquie pour la France. Kundera a été invité à enseigner à l'université de Rennes. Cependant, il a continué à regarder son pays d'origine de sa nouvelle position avantageuse, la France, avec un mélange d’affectueuse mélancolie. En 1978, ils ont déménagé à Paris où il a enseigné à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes. C'était à Paris en 1982 que Kundera a complété le roman Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (L’Insupportable légèreté de l’être, d'abord publié en Tchèque à Toronto, 1985, édition en français définitive 1987), son travail le plus populaire auprès des lecteurs occidentaux et même des critiques.
En 1990, Kundera sort L'Immortalité. Le roman, son premier écrit en français, était plus cosmopolite que les autres, avec un contenu philosophique plus explicite et a donné la tonalité à ses romans postérieurs. Il reflète toujours l’expérience de Kundera de l'Europe centrale, mais plutôt indirectement. Kundera présente à nouveau ses observations sur la civilisation contemporaine en se basant sur son expérience française et conclut que le monde contemporain est fou dans plusieurs de ses aspects.
Kundera a mis en exergue la crise contemporaine de la langue, une crise de la signification et une crise de la communication. Ses romans sont des romans au sujet de diverses formes de désillusion.
Source analysis :
This article was written by Jan Culik in 2000 and put online on The Glasgow University website. Jan Culik teaches Czech studies at Glasgow University Scotland, and is the publisher and editor of Britske listy, a daily investigative internet journal which specialises in media analysis and human rights issues. He regularly comments on Czech politics and culture for Central Europe Review.
Lexicon:
Freeing : déblocage affranchissement
Expelled : expulsé, exclu
Inception : origine
Palatable : savoureux, acceptable
Hitchhiker: autostoppeur
Blatant: flagrant
Cramped : étroit, exigu
Threshold : seuil
Whipping : flagellation
Strive : s’efforcer, oeuvrer
Glitter : scintillement
To ascribe: attribuer
Grievances: reclamations
Playfulness: enjouement
Clumsy: maladroit
Link : http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Kundera.htm
A controversial author :
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« Etre courageux dans l'isolement, sans témoins, sans l'assentiment des autres, face à face avec soi-même, cela requiert une grande fierté et beaucoup de force. « |
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Kundera
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Summary in English :
In 1992, three years after the fall of Communism and the unbanning of his books in Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera has still not allowed any of his novels written after 1968 to be published in his native Czechoslovakia. According to a number of Czechoslovak writers he has not got over the hurt he felt as a result of the often hostile reception his smuggled works received among Czechoslovak intellectuals during the Communist period. The criticisms of Mr. Kundera began shortly after the Communist ban on his teaching and publishing finally forced him into exile. A reclusive celebrity in his adoptive country, he has become a French citizen. Kundera promised that around 1998 at the latest, all his novels will be published in his native country.
Summary in French :
En 1992, trois ans après l’effondrement du communisme et la fin de l’interdiction de ses livres en Tchécoslovaquie, Milan Kundera n’a toujours pas autorisé la publication d’aucun de ses romans écrits après 1968, dans sa Tchécoslovaquie d’origine. Selon un certain nombre d’auteur tchèques, il ne s’est jamais remis de la douleur qu’il a ressentie du fait des réactions souvent hostiles à la réception de son travail clandestin parmis les intellectuels tchèques durant la période communiste. Les critiques sur Monsieur Kundera ont commencé peu de temps après l’interdiction communiste de ses enseignements et de ses publications le forçant finalement à l’exil. Célébrité retirée dans son pays d’adoption, il est devenu un citoyen français. Kundera a promis qu’autour de 1998 au plus tard, toutes ses nouvelles seront publiées dans son pays d’origine.
Source analysis :
This article, written by Burton Bollag, was published the 17th of December 1992 in The New York Times special Prague.
The New York Times is probably the most prominent American daily newspaper, sometimes being referred to as America's "newspaper of record". It is a newspaper published in new York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worlwide. It has traditionally printed full transcripts of major speeches and debates. The newspaper is currently owned by The New York Times Company.
Lexicon:
Unbanning: absence d’interdiction
Patch up: rafistoler, rapiecer, réparer
Peer: scruter
Ban: interdiction
Gloss over: glisser sur
Link : http://www.kundera.de/english/Info-Point/Mixed_feelings/mixed_feelings.html
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« L'existence n'est pas ce qui s'est passé, l'existence est le champ des possibilités humaines, tout ce que l'homme peut devenir, tout ce dont il est capable. « |
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Kundera
Summary in English : |
In spite of the fact that in The Art of the Novel Kundera condemns the interview as it is tradiditionnaly practiced, he has accepted to meet Lois Oppenheim under certain conditions. In this interview, which must be considered more like a dialogue, Kundera talks about his vision of novel and what represents for him the central europe aesthetic in litterature. He explains in particular that the only context that can reveal the meaning and value of a novelistic work is the context of the history of European novel. All of his novels vividly document the Czech experience because Kundera lived in Czechoslovakia until he was forty five. In fact his novels are not theoretical but a confession of a practitioner.
Summary in French :
En dépit du fait que Kundera condamne les interviews comme ils sont traditionnellement menés, il a accepté de rencontrer Lois Oppenheim sous certaines conditions. Dans cette interview qui doit être davantage considéré comme un dialogue, Kundera parle de sa vision du roman et de ce que représente pour lui l’esthétique de l’Europe central dans la littérature. Il explique en particulier que le seul contexte qui peut indiquer la signification et la valeur d'un travail romancier est la situation historique du roman européen. Tous ses romans se basent sur son expérience tchèque car Kundera a vécu en Tchécoslovaquie jusqu’à ses quarante cinq ans. En effet ses romans ne sont pas théoriques mais une confession d’un praticien.
Source :
This interview was carried out by Lois Oppenheim and published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in summer 1989.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction is a tri-quarterly journal that features critical essays on fiction writers whose work resists convention and easy categorization. The Review has a special affinity for the works of foreign writers who may otherwise go unread in the United States. It attempts also to expand readers' notions of what fiction is.
Lois Oppenheim, is Pofessor of French and Chair, Department of Franch, German, and Russian, Montclair State University. She is President of The Samuel Beckett Society, and autor of many books.
Lexicon :
Steadfast : Ferme, loyal
Thread: fil
Testimony: témoignage
Pinpoint: localiser
Link : http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_kundera.html
Second Part : Kundera’s masterpieces : Literature Analysis
His literary style :
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« La bêtise des gens consiste à avoir une réponse à tout. La sagesse d’un roman consiste à avoir une question à tout. » |
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Milan Kundera |
Source analysis :
Harper's Magazine is a serious American journal of literature, politics, culture, and the arts published continuously from 1850. Throughout the years Harper’s Magazine has received eleven National Magazine Awards, among many other journalistic and literary honors.
Summary in English :
Milan Kundera is a paradoxial writer. He represented the typical Czech refugee figure and that is why a lot of critics liked his novels. But, simultaneously, he denied this statute. Consequently, should we like him for his suffering or for his talent ?
As far as Ignorance is concerned, there are not much reasons to appreciate it. Milan Kundera’s masterpieces were in fact well welcomed because of the philosophical reflexions and aphorisms they provid. However, Ignorance is a disappointing book, full of bad aphorisms and idle generalizations.
Besides, it is surprising that Milan Kundera’s books were not criticised by feminists since he generally portrays women as sexual objects at the mercy of obscene and violent male characters. Ignorance is the perfect illustration of his misogyny.
Summary in French :
Milan Kundera est un écrivain paradoxal. Il représente la figure typique du Tchèque réfugié et c’est pour cela que beaucoup de critiques ont aimé ses romans. Mais, simultanément, il refuse ce statut.
Par conséquent, devons nous l’aimer pour ses souffrances ou pour son talent ?
En ce qui concerne l’Ignorance, il n’y a pas beacoup de raisons de l’apprécier. Les œuvres de Milan Kundera ont en effet été bien accueillies en raison des reflexions philosophiques et des aphorismes qu’elles nous fournissent. Cependant, l’Ignorance est un livre décevant, rempli de mauvais aphorismes et de généralisations faciles.
De plus, il est surprenant que les livres de Milan Kundera n’aient jamais été critiqué par les feministes, puisqu’il présente généralement les femmes comme des objets sexuels à la merci de personnages masculins obscènes et violents. L’Ignorance est l’illustration parfaite de sa misogynie.
Lexicon :
To rebuke : rebuter
To intersect : entrecroiser
Meander : méandre
Entanglement : enchevêtrement
To wallow in : se vautrer dans
To cow : amadouer
Link : The unbearable slightness
His main themes :
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« Si tout homme avait la possibilité d'assassiner clandestinement et à distance, l'humanité disparaîtrait en quelques minutes. « |
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Milan
Kundera |
Summary in English :
The unbearable ligthness of being deals with the problematic of the panopticon gaze which is a recurrent French theme explored by Sartre, Lacan, Derrida or Foucault.
It can be define as a surveillance mechanism from which you cannot escape.
In Kundera’s book it is expressed by the panopticon cameras of the totalitarian marxist system which control all behaviors.
It is higlighted by Tereza and Tomas’ adventures. They internalize the “ imaginary nonentity” which is always watching them and their idyll becomes the prison they inhabit together.
The fear of hidden cameras is linked to the fear of the totalitarian government. Privacy becomes invaded and the individuals are transformed into automatons.
Summary in French :
L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être traite de la problématique du regard panoptique qui est un thème français récurrent exploré par Sartre, Lacan, Derrida ou Foucault.
Cela peut être défini comme un mécanisme de surveillance duquel on ne peut s’echapper.
Dans le livre de Kundera, cela est exprimé à travers les cameras panoptiques du système marxiste totalitaire qui contrôlent tous les comportements.
Cela est mis en lumière par les aventures de Tereza et Tomas. Il internalisent la non-entité imaginaire qui est toujours en train de les regarder et leur idylle devient la prison qu’ils habitent ensemble.
La peur des caméras cachés est liée à la peur du gouvernement totalitair. L’intimité devient envahie et les individus sont transformés en automates.
Lexicon :
Panopticon gaze : regard panoptique
Subjection : assujettissement
In bewilderment : perplexe, confus
Seer : voyant, prophète
Empowerment : autorisation
To shrink : se dérober, se soustraire
Undercurrent : sous-entendu
Double-edged : à double tranchant
Glaringly : aveuglant, évident
To stretch out : étirer
Peripheral : periphérique
Source Anaysis :
This article was written by Kamila Kinyon from the University of Chicago and it was published the 22nd March 2001. It is a literary critic essay about Kundera’s work done by an academic teacher.
Link : The panopticon gaze in Kundera’s The unbearable lightness of being Highbeam Research
“ Et si l’histoire plaisantait ? “
Kundera
Summary in English :
The subject of humor and laughter is a recurrent theme in Kundera’s novels.
It can be explained by his personal history since totalitarian regimes can be caracterised by the absence of humor.
He sees huor as being antithetical to post-modern dynamism as it is to totalitarian regimes. In fact, Kundera considers humor as a temporal and aesthetic phenomenon.
In The Joke, laughter is opposed to optmism because it is a sign of belief in the future. From Freud to Schopenhauer, laughter is perceived as a way of collapsing human temporality and thus the fear of future.
Kundera took up the theme again in The book of Laughter and Forgetting. He identifies two different kinds of laughters. The first is what he names the Devil’s laughter and which points out the meaninglessness of things. The second represents joy and exists to counter the laughter emanating from the void.
Summary in French :
Le sujet de l’humour et du rire est un thème récurrent dans les romans de Kundera.
Cela peut s’expliquer par son histoire personnelle puisque les régimes totalitaires peuvent être caractérisés par l’absence d’humour.
Il voit l’humour comme aussi antithétique du dynanisme postmoderne que des régimes totalitaires. En fait, Kundera considère l’humour comme un phénomène temporel et esthétique.
Dans La Plaisanterie, le rire est opposé à l’optimisme car cela est un signe de foi en le future. De Freud à Schopenhauer, le rire est percu comme un moyen de détruire la temporalité humaine et donc la peur du future.
Kundera reprend de nouveau le thème dans Le livre du Rire et de l’Oubli. Il identifie deux différentes sortes de rire. Le premier est celui qu’il nomme le rire du diable et qui met en avant l’absence de sens des choses. Le second représente la joie et existe pour contrer le rire émanant du vide.
Lexicon :
Trustworthy : fiable
Kinship : affinité, parenté
To harness : capter
Motility : motilité
Nascent : naissant
Harbinger : signe avant-coureur
Buoyant : de bonne humeur
Ire: colère
Ploy : stratagème, entrée en matière
Excoriated : condamné, réprouvé
To understate : minimiser
Depiction : représentation
In contrasdiction : en contradiction
To overflow : déborder
To slacken : ralentir, se distendre
Void : vide
Source Analysis :
This article was written by Mark Weeks from Nagoya University ( Japan ) and was published in the Journal of Modern Literature in 2005. This journal provides serious literary analysis done by professionals.
Link : Milan Kundera: a modern history of humor amid the comedy of history.
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« La vitesse est la forme d'extase dont la révolution technique a fait cadeau à l'homme. « |
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Kundera |
Summary in English :
Slowness by Milan Kundera is a profound meditation on contemporary life. The story refracts time, history and myth, memory and forgetting, passion and folly through the goings-on of Vincent, the would-be libertine; Berck, the opportunistic politician; Immaculata, the TV producer, Gechoripsky, the Czech entomologist.
The story takes place in two different periods: in the late twentieth century at a scientific conference in a French chateau, and in that same chateau during the eighteenth century. Kundera ruminates on how the pleasures of slowness have disappeared in today's fast-paced, future-shocked world. He explores the secret bond between slowness and memory and the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed.
Summary in French :
La Lenteur de Milan Kundera est une profonde méditation sur la vie contemporaine. L’histoire altère le temps, l'histoire et le mythe, la mémoire et l'oubli, la passion et la folie à travers les départs de Vincent, le soi-disant libertin; Berck, le politicien opportuniste, Immaculata la productrice de télévision et Gechoripsky l’entomologiste tchèque.
L'histoire se déroule dans deux périodes différentes : vers la fin du vingtième siècle à une conférence scientifique dans un château français et dans ce même château pendant le dix-huitième siècle.
Kundera réfléchit sur la façon dont les plaisirs de la lenteur ont disparu dans la rapidité d’aujourd’hui et le monde futur choqué. Il explore le lien secret entre la lenteur et la mémoire et la connexion entre notre désir d’oublier et la manière dont nous nous sommes livrés au démon de la vitesse.
Source:
This article was written by Bell Fraser the 22nd of September 2001 and put online on the Queen’s Quarterly archive website.
Queen’s Quarterly is a Canadian journal which offers the academic and the general reader a collection of analysis and reflection, in fields as diverse as international relations, science policy, literary criticism, travel writing, economics, religion, short fiction and poetry. It relies on the support of the University, the Canada Council.
Lexicon:
Cowardice: lacheté
Hucksters: colporteurs
Frenzy: frénésie
Overwhelmed: submergé
Wisdom: sagesse
Shamble: pagaille
Unquenchable: insatiable
Link: The Unbearable Joke of Speed.(Slowness, by Milan Kundera)(Review)
Conclusion :
As a conclusion, Milan Kundera is a fascinating author which raises philosophical and essential questions in his novel such as the sense of human life, humor, relationships, History.
Besides, his style is very modern and elliptic and, contrary to other authors, like Flaubert as an exemple, he believes that the aim of a novel is not the style but the story and the characters.
Either we like it or not, he invites us in his weird universe and it is worth trying to discover it since it is quite unusual.
Links :
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/english016/kundera/kundera.html : list of his novels
http://www.kundera.de/english/ : website dedicated to Kundera, his life and his novels
Texts :
The unbearable slightness: why do we love Milan Kundera, again?('Ignorance')(Book Review)
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Harper's Magazine; 11/1/2002; Nehring, Cristina |
Discussed in this essay:
Ignorance, by Milan Kundera. HarperCollins, 2002.208 pages. $23.95.
Milan Kundera has always had it both ways. He has lived in a glass house and thrown stones. He has cashed in on his tragic emigre status and mocked those who paid. He has asked to be pitied as a Czech and abandoned the Czechs. He has written provocative fictions and forbidden us to be provoked--dictating, in his essays, the terms under which his novels must be analyzed. Critics, by and large, have been compliant, parting to let Kundera pass. The combination of victimization, exoticism, and intelligence seems to make cowards of us all.
Kundera left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975, seven years after the Russian invasion that turned the Prague Spring into deepest totalitarian winter. It was then that his international reputation soared--in part, at least, because he presented himself (in the words of one observer) as the "representative of `Czech Fate,'" a fate to which the West was extremely sympathetic at the time. Nor did he miss an opportunity to reinforce the value of that sympathy: Art from Prague (and from Budapest and Warsaw), he intoned, portrays "human experience of a kind people here in the West cannot even imagine, it offers a new testimony about mankind."
"If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense," he mused in an interview with Philip Roth in 1980. "A man ... takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life." Since then he has had to realize not only that his "Bohemia" (as he affectionately calls Czechoslovakia) might merge with Russian civilization but that this could very well signal "the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole." From there it is not far to "the destruction of the world" about which Roth was interrogating him.
It is ironic (and typical) that even while Kundera was cultivating the image of the Doom-Saying Exile in public, he was mocking it--and the people who fell for it--in his fiction. The famous Unbearable Lightness of Being features a scene in which Sabina, an exiled Czech painter, receives the brochure for her upcoming German exhibition and sickens at the sight of the barbed wire dramatically transposed over her face. She knows that it is this image that will endear her to her sentimental Western buyers, but she also knows it for a cynical hoax; she has never laid eyes on barbed wire, she has suffered little from the loss of her country, and its fate leaves her rather cool.
Does the fate of "Bohemia" still enthrall Kundera? His most recent novel suggests he is upset that anybody thinks it should. Irena, the heroine of Ignorance, is, like Sabina, a Kundera double, certainly with respect to the psychology of exile. A Czech emigre living (like her creator) in Paris, she is taken aback when a French girlfriend, hearing of the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia during the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989, suggests she should want to go back. "But Sylvie!" exclaims Irena. "It's not just a matter of practical things, the job, the apartment. I've been living here for twenty years now. My life is here!"
Under pressure from boy- and girlfriends alike, she does, however, return to Prague for a visit--and finds, God help her, that her former intimates are drinking beer, not wine. She brings them a fine case of Bordeaux, a case any Parisian would esteem and which she thinks her friends should esteem the more, deprived as they have been, poor sots. But they spurn it! They actually prefer beer. Her nightmares are confirmed. She cannot live in this country a second time--not, that is, unless she is prepared to "lay my whole life ... solemnly on the altar of the homeland and set fire to it. Twenty years of my life spent abroad would go up in smoke, in a sacrificial ceremony."
Despite the melodrama (Irena also talks, at least three times, of "amputating her forearm and attaching [her] hand directly to the elbow," a metaphor, apparently, for resuming life in Bohemia), her reasons for not wishing to return are as banal as they are sensible. She doesn't want to go back because she doesn't want to go back. Why should she? Life is good in France. Her lover, a Swede, has freely left his hometown, and nobody is telling him to return. On the contrary, he is considered admirably cosmopolitan, whereas she is thought saddeningly callous. We take Kundera's point. He is right about Irena. But this novel--more transparently, mercenarily, and querulously, it seems, than any of his previous books--is about Kundera. And it is not about Kundera's being allowed to turn his back on the Czech Republic and remain in Paris (there's no contest there: he's done so for thirteen years now, since the demise of European Communism). It is, rather, about his right to turn his back, remain in Paris, and continue to enjoy the mystique and authority of the suffering Czech exile.
This has proven difficult. For Kundera, like Irena, has smarted from the withdrawal of Special Sympathy. "The more Kundera resembles the French, the less he interests them," announced the Journal du Dimanche a few years back. After 1989, "I wasn't interesting anymore," Irena echoes bleakly. The French, she explains,
had really done a lot for me. They saw me as the embodiment of an emigres suffering. Then the time came for me to confirm that suffering by my joyous return to the homeland. And that confirmation didn't happen. They felt duped. And so did I, because up till then I'd thought they loved me not for my suffering but for my self.
Plainly, this is Kundera's rebuke to us too, though it rings more hollow coming from him than from Irena, first because of the important part he played in the mythologization of his own misfortune, and second because his reputation is still riding very high in the West, despite the fact that it has plummeted in his homeland. These days, much of "Bohemia" celebrates Kundera's failures; bad reviews in Paris make happy headlines in Prague. But this is more than simply a case of a prophet spurned in his own land. After climbing to glory on the backs (or at least reputations) of his fellow Czechs, Kundera has not only abandoned but seriously and repeatedly snubbed them. Ever since he began writing in French rather than in Czech, he has seen to it that none of his new books--and there have been five--are translated into his native language. It is almost unthinkable that Ignorance will prove an exception to this rule, replete, as it is, with insults to all things Czech, from the new accents ("nasal" and "unpleasantly blase") to the old dining habits ("beer mugs" and "macabre dentures").
Nor will Kundera allow for the re-edition in the Czech Republic of most of his old books, which, censored as they were under Communism, are not in adequate circulation even now. First, he says, he must compare them to their French translations, which he now considers more "definitive" than the Czech originals, since they incorporate changes he made after publication. But for this, alas, time is too short. He must give "radical priority" to new projects. And, of course, he has a steady supply of "unacceptable" English translations he must redo. He redid the English version of The Joke, his first novel, five times.
Among English translators, then, and Czech readers, Kundera has few friends. But among critics he remains greatly admired, his fall from emigre grace notwithstanding. Is this legitimate? Should we love Kundera for himself rather than for his suffering, his exoticism, his Central European sexiness? Ignorance does not give us much reason. To be sure, it features a full display of vintage Kundera moves: the surprise love triangle, the peremptory narrator, lengthy flashbacks, engineered coincidences, an etymology lesson, kinky sex, self-conscious storytelling ("Out of the mists of time ... I see a young girl emerge"), and the inter-splicing of multiple narratives that unexpectedly intersect, through sex (again), in the end. But whereas several of these devices astonished and delighted the first, second, third, or even fourth time Kundera used them, in Ignorance they seem worn, mechanical, pale. The "surprise" connections are predictable to any Kundera reader; the unusually long flashbacks are unusually dull, in part because we hardly care about the present of the bland characters in this book, much less about their past. The etymology lesson with which the novel opens (after a brief introductory dialogue) metastasizes into a mythology lesson, a history lesson, and a musicology lesson. Kundera's already loquacious narrator has turned taxingly didactic; indeed he seems to have been transformed into Professor Avenarius from Kundera's Immortality.
But what of Kundera's strongest suits--his trenchant psychological observations, his provocative generalizations, his bold, aphoristic philosophical reflections? For these, in my view, are his greatest gifts to the modern novel: the gift of the Essay-in-the-Novel. Following Robert Musil (one of his favorite authors), Kundera has helped free today's novelists from the ubiquitous taboo against reflecting as well as rendering. Effective as the conventional wisdom to "show, not tell" may be in getting a story across dramatically, it truncates what contemplative talent novelists may have in forcing them to censor their thoughts about the questions their tales evoke. It forces them, in some fashion, to play dumb, to refrain from all comment, to transcribe a dialogue, a crisis, a crime, and then sit back poker-faced and leave all speculation to the reader. This is a piety of our literary age, a piety that has prevented a terrible lot of tedious sermonizing, no doubt--a lot of easy harm--but also some difficult potential good. And Kundera, in some of his novels, has gloriously and productively exploded this piety.
Immortality abounds with engaging, often paradoxical, ideas; if they do not inspire assent, they jolt us into self-examination and into scrutiny of our own creed. Kundera is thought-provoking whether he is discussing modernity ("To be absolutely modern means to be the ally of one's gravediggers"), defending appearances ("`when we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love'"), or contemplating our obsession with speed:
Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk.... What's more, he no longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life.
Ignorance contains an idea or two worth pausing over, but for the most part the generalizations in this book are banal, dubious, pompous, or--most often--all three. "To die [is] much easier for an adolescent than for an adult," Kundera tells us at one point. "All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind," he notes elsewhere. What is sad about such lame pronouncements, especially coming from Kundera, is that they would seem to confirm what many contemporary literary scholars think anyway: that any aphorism is a bad aphorism, that virtue and interest lie exclusively in specific rather than in general observation, and that, indeed, as a rare critic of Kundera once wrote in The New Republic, aphorisms have no place in literature and are "inimical to [its] very spirit." Yet aphorisms have every place in literature; to expel them is to expel comprehensive thought. How much poorer would we be without Shakespeare's sententiae (it's not his plots that we know by heart, after all); or La Rochefoucauld's, or Goethe's or Thoreau's or Nietzsche's or--yes--some of Kundera's. What do not have a place in literature are lazy, throwaway aphorisms, and these are what we get, en masse, in Ignorance.
It is not only the generalizations in this book that are idle; the whole thing reads like the work of a man who is tired of his inventions, tired of his audience. It meanders about chitchattily, telling us about the various roots of the word "nostalgia" (one of which is "ignorance"--thus the title), and assembling some famous exiles (Ulysses, Arnold Schoenberg) for sporadic discussion. We are introduced to Irena's longtime lover, Gustaf, married to a woman in Sweden but residing in Paris and dreaming of Prague: it is he, not Irena, who decides that they will open a business office and begin spending time there. In this way, the couple reunites with Irena's brother and detested mother, a woman whose "vitality" has always intimidated and eclipsed her daughter. As Gustaf feels ever closer to his girlfriend's family, Irena feels ever more distant from him and begins to fall in love with Josef, a man she knew briefly in her youth, who is now living as an emigre in Denmark and visiting Prague as reluctantly as she. A soul mate? she wonders. Kundera disabuses us of this hope through the postmodern but rather facile method of making us look over Josef's shoulder as he reads his old diaries. It is safe to say that nothing--really nothing--happens in the present of these characters until the last twenty-five pages of the book, when, almost as an afterthought, almost as if to rouse us from our slumbers before it's time to go, Kundera tacks on a couple of tawdry and taboo-busting sex scenes. They are sufficiently raunchy to awaken us--in one, Irena's mother seduces her lover; in the other, Irena is undone herself--but at the same time they sound disturbingly familiar. Disturbingly, first of all, because so many of Kundera's situations sound recycled by this time and, secondly, because what's being recycled is so, well, venomous.
It is a miracle of recent literary history that Kundera has gone unskewered by feminists. With the exception of a very diplomatic and qualified book about Kundera's "simultaneous" feminism and unfeminism by John O'Brien, and one or two unqualified but formidably lonely protests like that of Vanity Fair's withering James Wolcott in a review of Immortality, there has been extremely little criticism of Kundera from feminist quarters. On one hand, this is refreshing; on the other hand, one wonders how Kundera is getting away with it.
It's not, as an interviewer once suggested, that Kundera's women are less educated than his men, or even that they are less voluble in the debates that punctuate his novels. Rather it is the recurrent and imaginatively sadistic way in which he portrays them in sexual situations that should give us pause for consideration. A number of Kundera protagonists confess that they enjoy watching damsels in distress (two recent examples are Immortality's Professor Avenarius and Josef, who, as a teenager, provoked and counted his girlfriend's tears because they so excited him). One wonders if it is not something of the same for Kundera. Ignorance ends with a situation one could safely call prototypical of his work. A woman in love--just out of coitus--is not merely abandoned by the hero but, more importantly, disfigured, and humiliated by the author. It is not enough that Irena is bedded and deserted by Josef. She has to be portrayed as being bedded obscenely, drunkenly, ridiculously--her sober companion keeps warning her to stop emptying so many vodka bottles during sex--finally passing out with her legs splayed open. The scene is worth quoting. "Her sobs went on for a long time" (she has just understood that her beloved will leave her):
and then, as if by a miracle, they stopped, followed by heavy breathing: she fell asleep; this change was startling and sadly laughable.... [S]he was still on her back with her legs spread. He was still looking at her crotch, that tiny little area that, with admirable economy of space, provides for four sovereign functions: arousal, copulation, procreation, urination. He gazed a long while at that sad place with its spell broken, and was gripped by an immense, immense sadness.
Putting aside, for a moment, the immense, immense klunkiness of this passage, it is heartbreaking. Here is the abandoned woman, awash in alcohol and emotion, passed out in the most vulnerable and "laughable" possible position, with the man she loves clinically contemplating her used and discarded genitalia. The description serves no purpose in terms of either plot or character revelation. It seems gratuitous, even sadistic, the more so when we realize that uncannily similar scenes recur in so many Kundera novels. Consider, for example, The Joke, not only because it is his first novel and Ignorance is his most recent (we can observe a certain career consistency) but because, like Ignorance, The Joke is ostensibly a novel of "return." The hero, Ludvik, returns not to his home country but to his home village, and, like his colleagues in Ignorance, hates it. Like Josef, he seduces a woman, named Helena, while he's visiting. Like Irena, Helena is in the process of being betrayed by her man--in this case, by her husband, who is leaving her for a student. In Ludvik, Helena sees not only an adored companion but her escape route from marital tragedy, and she gives herself to him with all the weight of a life. Like Irena, she drinks up a small storm while she makes love with him. Like Josef, Ludvik warns his mistress prudently away from her umpteenth vodka and recoils from her in horror the moment intercourse is completed.
She kissed me; it made my flesh creep but I couldn't turn my gaze away from her; I was fascinated by her idiotic blue eyes and by her (animated, quivering) naked body. But now I saw her nudity in a new light; it was nudity denuded, denuded of the power to excite that until now had eliminated all the faults of age.... [H]er physical unloveliness lost all its power to excite and it too became only itself: a simple unloveliness.
The mixture of scientific curiosity and repulsion with which he studies her demystified body is the same, exactly, as Josef's with Irena. Only Helena draws her own degradation even further: ignorant of the fact that she's about to be dumped, and delightedly in love with her companion, she starts to dance for joy. Ludvik's response is cold disgust: "She did a clumsy imitation of the undulating movements of the twist (I stared aghast at her breasts flying from side to side)."
But it's not over till it's over. Kundera has further humiliation in store for his heroine. When she realizes she has been snatched from one betrayal only to be tossed more brutally into a second, she is driven to suicide. Kundera is not in the habit of granting his women characters dignity in tragedy. She attempts to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, and, as luck would have it, she swallows a bottle of laxatives instead. So the book ends with Helena defecating all over herself. It ends with her being dragged from an outhouse; her trying--in shame and desperation-to flee, and collapsing over her own lowered lingerie.
Ludicrously botched suicides are big in Kundera's oeuvre. They are big, that is, among women. Indeed, the previously mentioned love triangle in Ignorance includes a Czech friend of Irena's who possesses only one ear. Why? She tried to kill herself when Josef broke her heart, decades before. She, too, downed sleeping tablets--real ones, this time--and then she lay down in the snow to die. Unfortunately she took too few, and rather than expire mysteriously she revived ridiculously: half-frozen, she had to slog back to her ski camp, apologize, and get her ear amputated. Since then, Kundera tells us, she has preferred beauty to love; she has sacrificed the possibility of intimacy to the secret of her disfigurement. She keeps her hair down in a careful tie and refuses to be touched.
What to make of these situations? Their recurrence, their inventiveness, their lingering detail, make it difficult to think of them as coincidences, gestures toward realism, or anything, really, besides scenarios preferred by their creator. An added touch: the men in these tales consistently hunger for male company after their bulimic entanglement with women. They are filled with disgust for the feminine bodies in whose filth they have wallowed, and long, wholesomely, for absolution among males: "I opened the window, because I yearned for a wind to waft away all memory of my ill-starred afternoon [with Helena]," declares Ludvik:
and when I felt all traces had been removed, I sank into the armchair near the window and looked forward (almost imploringly) to Kostka; to his masculine voice (I had a great need for a deep male voice), to his long, skinny frame and flat chest ...
In Ignorance, Irena's faithless Gustaf--conceived, though he is, thirty-five years after Ludvik--feels very much the same after sleeping with his girlfriend's mother. Whereas Ludvik looks forward to his old homeboy, Gustaf looks forward to his new "son":
From the bathroom comes the sound of water.... In two hours he is expecting the son of his most recent mistress, a man, young, who admires him. Gustaf will introduce him this evening among his business friends. His whole life has been surrounded by women! What a pleasure, finally, to have a son! He smiles and begins to look for his clothes ...
Why is it that feminists--or other humans--have not noticed such crude misogyny? Not that it is not part of our world, not that it does not occur, not that it makes Kundera a worse writer--maybe it makes him the richer and more revelatory writer--but at least it should be noticed and responded to in some not quite business-as-usual fashion.
But then, again, Kundera has always had it both ways. He has written outrageous things in his fiction and very elegantly and authoritatively forbidden people to take offense at them in his critical essays. His novels, he has said repeatedly, contain no "ideologies" or "simplistic" stereotypes; they represent the diversity of "human existence"--the "bisexual" diversity, to use a term he coined in an interview. Nothing old here; his oeuvre offers "a new testimony of mankind."
But does it? Or is Kundera, to the contrary, increasingly fatigued with his own aging stereotypes, self-referential complacencies, and long-standing ease at manipulating the reader? In Slowness (1994), "Kundera's" wife urges him to write "A Big Piece of Nonsense for Your Own Pleasure." Why would an author cite such advice? Why does his partner proffer it? Only because the author is bored almost to distraction, and his wife knows as much. And as we finish Ignorance, we know as much. Kundera is half sick of his own shadows; his postmodern gymnastics look like thumb-twiddling; his once bracing maxims have dwindled into cliche; the notorious coital scenes that--according to his testimony to Philip Roth--served, at one point, to capture the deepest "essence" of his characters
The Panopticon Gaze in Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.(Critical Essay)
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CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction; 3/22/2001; KINYON, KAMILA |
Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published in 1984, the prophetic Orwellian year when "Big Brother is watching." Although Kundera has expressed a low opinion of Orwell, calling him a mere "philosophical writer" rather than a "novelist," there are similarities with Kundera's own rather philosophical text in which characters are mercilessly exposed to a panopticon gaze that takes away their privacy.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the second novel Kundera wrote after his immigration to Paris and the last novel in which he looks back at the Czech situation.(1) The fear of the gaze that the characters experience is connected to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and to the totalitarian regime's invasions of individual privacy. Although Kundera remembers the dangers of the gaze in the context of Czech history, his focus on le regard also places him at the center of French theory. As Martin Jay discusses in Downcast Eyes, there is a denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought that may be traced in writers as diverse as Sartre, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. Kundera's treatment of the gaze in The Unbearable Lightness of Being bears a particular affinity with Foucault's explication of the panopticon principle in his 1975 text Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison.
Foucault draws on Bentham's notion of the panopticon, an automaton for the production of automatons. The panopticon is "a simple idea in architecture," describing "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind." The possessor of this power is "the inspector" with his invisible omnipresence, "an utterly dark spot" in the all-transparent, light-flooded universe of the panopticon (Bozovic 1). Foucault sums up the power of the panopticon principle as follows:
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. [...] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight;(2) it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance. (italics added; 202-03)
Foucault stresses that the surveillance mechanism derives its power from fiction because it is the imaginary gaze of the law that controls human behavior. Within Kundera's novel, in a system of totalitarian Marxism where "God is dead," the mysterium tremendum of God's gaze is replaced by the mysterium tremendum of the panopticon camera,(3) which may be directed at the individual at any time and which thus controls behavior even at those times when it is physically absent. Although all the characters in Kundera's novel exhibit complex attitudes toward the gaze, I focus on the experiences of Tomas and Tereza, who fluctuate between the roles of seen object(4) and seeing subject, setting into play mechanisms of power in which the personal and the political become intertwined.
Tomas is reduced to the role of seen object both through real instances of surveillance and through the even more terrifying fiction of surveillance. He is sometimes confronted with the real gaze of government agents. For example, he goes to the funeral of a dissident friend only to find that all the participants of the funeral are being filmed: "Entering the crematorium, Tomas did not understand what was happening: the hall was lit up like a film studio. Looking around in bewilderment, he noticed cameras set up in three places. No, it was not television; it was the police" (229). This very real threat is supplemented by the fiction of control from which the totalitarian government derives its greatest power. For example, Tomas speaks to an editor in a borrowed apartment. The editor warns Tomas: "This isn't my flat. It belongs to a friend. We can't be absolutely certain that the police can hear us; its only a possibility. If I'd invited you to my place, it would have been a certainty" (212). In Tomas's interaction with the editor, Bentham's principle may be seen at work. The fear of being seen or overheard persists even when there is no actual evidence that one is being observed.
Tomas's wife Tereza also experiences the fear of the panopticon in its fictional dimension. In the attempt to cope with Tomas's numerous infidelities, Tereza has an affair with a man whom she thinks is an engineer. Afterward, she is terrified because she is not sure if the engineer was really an engineer; she fears that he may have filmed their entire affair. Eagleton comments on Tereza's interaction with the engineer:
"No symbol where none intended," Samuel Beckett once remarked; but in "totalitarian" societies, monolithic structures of meaning, one can never be quite certain what's intended and what isn't. [...] Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being makes love with an engineer in his flat, but later she will wonder about the drabness of the place compared to his elegance, that edition of Sophocles on the shelf, the few moments he was away making the coffee. Is it the abandoned apartment of an imprisoned intellectual? Is the engineer a police agent, and was he turning on the cine camera while supposedly making the coffee? (25)
Eagleton connects the fear of the hidden gaze with the "daily hermeneutics of suspicion" typical of life under totalitarian regimes. Kundera has persistently attempted to disassociate his writing from such specific politico-historico-social readings. In Art of the Novel (1986), he argues that the history of Europe is "a single common experience" (39). In his next novel, Immortality, Kundera shows that even in Western Europe, Paris and Switzerland, the gaze that breaks down privacy cannot be escaped. Admittedly, the fear of hidden cameras in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is linked to the fear of the totalitarian government. However, the mercilessness of the media in Immortality is just as menacing in the inescapability of its penetrating gaze. In his subsequent writing, Kundera thus shows that the "hermeneutics of suspicion" pervades contemporary society and does not remain contained within the borders of the repressive countries of Eastern Europe.
Yet even when suspecting the concealed gaze of the Other, the subject is not reduced to complete helplessness. Both Tereza and Tomas resist being turned into seen objects by themselves taking on the role of seer. Tomas feels the Godlike power of seer when he is doing surgery and when he is pursuing women. Tereza, who is made into a symbolic helpless seen object by both the totalitarian government and by Tomas, gains the power of seer when she discovers photography.
The double power of seer that Tomas experiences in his surgery and in his womanizing(5) may be explicated within the larger Foucaultian framework of the gaze. The novel's narrator makes the analogy between Tomas's work as surgeon and his relationship with his mistresses: "Even with his mistresses, he could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since he longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open" (200). Tomas's transference of metaphors from one area to another may be elucidated by Foucault's discussion of this issue in Birth of the Clinic. Gilman summarizes Foucault's argument as follows:
Foucault attributes the origins (of the clinical gaze) to the borrowing of what he calls "epistemological myths" by diagnosticians. [... There is] a borrowing of metaphors from one sphere to explicate another [...] (xi-xii).
Foucault discusses how root metaphors taken from chemistry are brought to bear on the clinicians gaze: "The clinicians' gaze is a gaze that burns things to their furthest truth [...] as combustions reveal their secret through the very vividness of fire [...] One can see that the clinic no longer has simply to read the visible; it has to discover its secrets" (Foucault 120). According to Foucault, the gaze of the clinician, like the gaze of the chemist, is driven by epistemological curiosity. The subject of the clinician's gaze is thus turned into a dehumanized object.
The narrator comments that there is implicit blasphemy in Tomas's desire to gaze into that which was intended to remain hidden:
God did not take surgery into account. He never suspected that someone would dare to stick his hand into the mechanism He had invented, wrapped carefully in skin, and sealed away from human eyes. When Tomas first positioned his scalpel on the skin of a man asleep under an anesthetic [...] he experienced a brief but intense feeling of blasphemy. (194)
Tomas thus takes on the role of God who alone should be able to gaze into that which is secret. In usurping God's role, Tomas takes on the characteristics of a panopticon keeper who "is endowed with divine attributes and apart from being omnipresent is also all-seeing, omniscient, and omnipotent" (Bozovic 10).
Tomas even takes on the symbolic role of panopticon inspector in a dream of Tereza's that she relates to him:
There was a basket hanging from the ceiling and a man standing in the basket. The man wore a broad-brimmed hat shading his face, but I could see it was you. You kept giving us orders. Shouting at us. We had to sing as we marched, sing and do kneebends. If one of us did a bad kneebend, you would shoot her with a pistol and she would fall dead into the pool. (18)
In her description, Tereza places Tomas in the panopticon inspector's position. Bentham envisages his imaginary panopticon inspector in a translucent lantern that does not allow the prisoner to determine whether the eye of the inspector is directed toward him. The layout of Bentham's panopticon is of utmost importance. The inspector is located above the prisoners who are in a circle around the inspector, occupying a lower and peripheral position in the architectural setting. The inspector's partial invisibility is equivalent to complete invisibility, producing the fiction of the all-seeing gaze and thus turning individuals into automatons. In Tereza's dream, Tomas takes on the panopticon inspector's role: He is in a basket above the heads of the women, in a position where he cannot be seen; and he is wearing a broad-brimmed hat that conceals his eyes. Tomas's power stems in large part from his partial visibility. The women are turned into automatons through the fiction of his all-seeing gaze: "Not only were their bodies identical [...]soulless mechanisms--the women rejoiced over it" (57).
The panopticon gaze that cuts into privacy is, for Tereza, linked with Tomas and with the totalitarian government as well as with memories of her family. Tereza's memories of her mother invoke a concentration camp psychology. Privacy becomes invaded and the individual becomes transformed into a symbolic automaton. Her mother had constantly left the curtains open, walked around naked, and even intercepted Tereza's private diaries in order to read them during dinner. Tereza thus sees the humiliating gaze of totalitarianism as an extension of her childhood: "By getting out from under her mother's roof, she thought in all innocence that she had once and for all become master of her privacy. But no, her mother's roof stretched out over the whole world and would never let her be" (167).
Tereza feels helpless under the power of Tomas's all-seeing gaze just as she had felt helpless under the gaze of her mother. But Tereza escapes from being reduced to a seen object when she herself takes on the role of seer while photographing the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The camera serves as Tereza's mechanical eye through which she can pierce the surface of both historical and "personal" forces, thus giving her an illusion of control. By filming the events of 1968, Tereza gains a sense of power over the totalitarian regime. By filming Tomas's mistress Sabina, Tereza gains a sense of power over her personal relationship with Tomas in which, as her dreams had shown, he is traditionally the one who sees and commands.
But, ironically, the very camera that has served to give Tereza a sense of empowerment may become a source of violating its object. Tereza realizes that photographs taken of the 1968 uprising are being used to incriminate people. The father of a boy who had gotten arrested says "This photograph was the only corpus delicti. He denied it all until they showed it to him" (141). Although Tereza is relieved to find that this was not one of her photographs, she suddenly realizes her former naivete in believing that the camera could provide empowerment:
When walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks. How naive they had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police. (142)
The photograph turns the subject into an object, thus making the object supremely violable. The image becomes a double-edged weapon, a power that can be turned against the creator.(6)
As the novel progresses, Prague becomes a symbolic panopticon for both Tomas and Tereza. They therefore decide to "escape" into the country where they will not feel watched by the imaginary eye of the totalitarian Other.
Life in the country was the only escape open to them, because only in the country was there a constant deficit of people and a surplus of living accommodations. No one bothered to look into the political past of people willing to go off and work in the fields or woods; no one envied them. (281-82)
Ironically, the expected escape into the country only confirms the power that totalitarian metaphors have had on Tomas's and Tereza's thinking, because it is here that the myth of the idyll becomes internalized. The narrator speculates:
Why was the word "idyll" so important for Tereza? Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom. (295)
Although the narrator here connects idyllic thinking with the Old Testament, the myth of the idyll is one that the communists made use of. In "The Other K," Fuentes discusses Kundera's response to the communist appropriation of the idyll that becomes a fiction for the controlling of behavior. Fuentes quotes Kundera's claim: "It is no accident that the idyll was the dominant genre under Stalinism."
The idyll is what Bentham would call a "fictional entity," deriving its power from its very fictionality, even when clashing glaringly with external reality. In "A Fragment on Ontology," Bentham discusses how fictions derive power from their ontological status as fictions. For instance, Bentham discusses his fear of ghosts as an example of the real effects of imaginary nonentities. Even though Bentham classified ghosts as imaginary nonentities, even though he therefore did not believe in their existence, he was, in his own words, nevertheless, for his whole life, pathologically afraid of them. Instilling a real fear through an "imaginary nonentity" is the essence of panopticonism. The panopticon principle derives its power not only from architecture but also from language. The panopticon becomes a prison of language, a prison of words (Bozovic 21). Tereza and Tomas are also confined in a symbolic panopticon of words. For them, the word "idyll" is the prison they inhabit. The communist concept of the idyll as a paradise of harmonious and nonmanipulative coexistence is at odds with the reality of country life. Whereas long-time inhabitants of the country are desperate to get away, Tereza and Tomas live as though they were inhabitants of the idyll, identifying with the animals they take care of and convincing themselves of the new-found harmony of their existence.
In the circular world of the idyll, Tereza and Tomas give up their respective missions, photography and surgery, to live in the lightness of a being ripped out of time. When Tomas suggests to Tereza that she take a photograph of their dying dog Karenin, Tereza refuses.
"I know you hate the camera, Tereza," said Tomas, "but take it along today, will you?" Tereza went and opened the cupboard to rummage for the long-abandoned, long-forgotten camera. "One day we'll be glad to have the pictures," Tomas went on. "Karenin has been an important part of our life." "What do you mean, `has been'?" said Tereza as if she had been bitten by a snake. The camera lay directly in front of her on the cupboard floor, but she would not bend to pick it up. "I won't take it along. I refuse to think about losing Karenin." (292-93)
This refusal to use the camera, which had been referred to earlier in the novel as Tereza's "mechanical eye," indicates that Tereza has given up the role of seer. She no longer wishes to preserve the present in an archive that can be referred to at any future moment. Instead, she wishes to live completely in the present, another feature that she shares with animals on the farm.
The concept of the idyll maintains its power over mind even when its status as a fiction becomes evident. Tereza has a dream that reveals a supremely nonidyllic psychological reality. Tomas is asked to report to an airfield. He is shot at, his body shrinks, and he becomes a small helpless rabbit unable to escape. Tomas's reduction to an animal state brings with it the Kafkaesque(7) desire to escape from an irreversibly confining system. The idyllic coexistence of humans and animals no longer holds. Yet Tereza suspects that her dream may express the "real" of her desire(8) more accurately than the idyll she inhabits while awake. In the dream, Tereza is placed in the position of the totalitarian Other, the position of strength. Holding the weak rabbit in the palm of her hand and gazing upon it, Tereza has managed to invert her earlier dream in which Tomas had served as panopticon inspector, commanding women from his basket. Yet the psychological reality of desired control over the Other by no means decreases the power of the idyll as a fiction.
Tereza and Tomas revert to an idyllic mode of thinking as the novel ends. In response to Tereza's self-accusation that she had destroyed Tomas's mission of surgery, Tomas states: "Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions" (313). That statement implies Tomas's rejection of the Nietzschean myth of circular return that had obsessed him earlier as a way of giving weight to existence. Instead, he embraces the light circle of the harmonious idyll. Is this a positive ending? Because Tomas and Tereza are finally together, the novel's ending has been read, by Misurella and others, as a moving comment on "the joys and sadness of the human condition."(9) Yet the ending of the novel is not without its negative undercurrent when one realizes that Tomas and Tereza have embraced the fiction of the idyll. As Kundera states, "it is no accident that the idyll was the dominant genre under Stalinism." In Bentham's terms, the idyll may be viewed as a fiction through which conformity may be induced with the minimum of force.
Ultimately, totalitarian power controls the behavior of Tereza and Tomas, both through the gaze that is directed at private life from the outside and through subsequent action when this gaze has been internalized. Totalitarianism makes use of the power of fictions to effect vision. The threat to Tomas and Tereza's freedom results not only from their fear of being seen and the consequent "hermeneutics of suspicion" under which they must live, but also from their symbolic blindness to their internalization of communist fictions like that of the idyll. The world of Bentham's panopticon is achieved at that moment when cameras and recorders are no longer necessary and when, in Foucault's words, "external power may throw off its physical weight" because its effects have become permanent. The internalization of totalitarian fictions leads to the unbearable lightness of being.
NOTES
(1.) Kundera writes in his author's note at the end of the Czech edition of Immortality: "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I completed in 1978, was a book of nostalgia for Czechoslovakia. But when in December of 1982 I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I had an intense feeling, that something had definitively closed: that I would never again return to the subject of contemporary Czech history" (343).
(2.) Significantly, both Foucault and Kundera draw on the lightness:weight metaphor to explicate their ideas about the tyrannical nature of power. When external power "throws off its physical weight" then Kundera's "unbearable lightness of being" results.
(3.) In later novels, Kundera continues to draw on the analogy between the gaze of the panopticon camera and the gaze of God. Kundera sees such a substitution happening even in western Europe, outside of the context of communism. For example, in Immortality Agnes tells herself that "nowadays God's eye has been replaced by a camera. The eye of one has been replaced by the eyes of all" (31).
(4.) In my essay, I focus on panopticonism as it acts upon a subject who believes that he or she is being watched. For this reason, I do not discuss the novel's first person authorial narrator who also gazes upon his characters, thus turning them into seen objects, but who does so without the characters' knowledge. The narrator, although a voyeur, does not specifically carry out the role of the panopticon keeper; he does not instill in others the fiction of surveillance. The role of the narrator as voyeur is however, worth mentioning. For example, he first introduces the character of Tomas as though he were looking in on Tomas's private thoughts: "I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do" (6).
(5.) The theme of the male doctor as voyeur is one that recurs throughout Kundera's writings. Kundera's first work of fiction, the collection of short stories compiled under the title Laughable Loves, presents a character of a voyeuristic doctor in the story "Symposium." Dr. Havel "is like death" because he "takes everything." The plot centers around the nurse Alzhbeta who seeks to become the object of Dr. Havel's gaze.
(6.) Unlike Tereza's photographs, Sabina's ambiguous paintings cannot easily be used as a power against their creator. Sabina explains to Tereza that her paintings are "on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through" (254).
(7.) The desire to escape as experienced by the animal-human is characterized as specifically Kafkaesque by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure, (Paris: Les editions de Minuit, 1975). Kundera stresses his debt to Kafka in Art of the Novel and in Testaments Betrayed. It is interesting to view in the context of Kafka Kundera's texts in which the animal-human boundary becomes dissolved. Tomas's "becoming rabbit" in Tereza's dream is only one of many instances. Another example may be found in Life is Elsewhere in which the blurring between the human and the animal self is a dominant theme. The poet Jaromil, who as a child drew animals with dogs' heads, proves to be less than human in his later treatment of others. By contrast, dogs, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as in The Farewell Party and in other novels, prove more sympathetic then many of the humans.
(8.) In Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, the dream is seen as the "real" of the subject's desire. The "real" is differentiated from the "symbolic" and the "imaginary" in Lacan's tripartite system. See Jacques Lacan, "Tuche and Automaton," in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981). Because The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains numerous dreams, it is interesting to consider the text in light of Lacan's and Freud's theories. Tereza's dream in which Tomas becomes a helpless rabbit is consistent with Lacan's theory of dreams, because Tereza realizes that she actually wishes Tomas to be weak. Absurd as the dream may seem, it represents a psychological truth.
(9.) Misurella stresses the role of aesthetics at the ending of the novel. He writes: "In their room that night, the last that [Tereza and Tomas] will spend together since we know they will die next day on the road homeward, they see a butterfly ascend from the lampshade and hear the sounds of music from the dance hall beneath them. Another lovely moment: The spirit ascends while the music of death sounds from below" (133). Although I agree that aesthetics is central to Kundera's novel, I read the tonality of the text's ending more negatively. We must ask whether Tereza and Tomas have not become trapped by two of communism's devices for affecting psychology: the idyll and kitsch. Earlier in the novel, kitsch has been defined as follows: "The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share [...] Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch"(251). The ending of The Unbearable Lightness of Being may invoke the second tear. Tereza experiences an odd happiness and odd sadness. "The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together"(313). Tereza is happy not just to hear the beautiful music but also to experience it with Tomas who in turn finds it beautiful because he knows that she feels the same way. When the reader becomes implicated in this relation, also reveling at the beauty of the scene, then the reader too falls into the trap of kitsch. We all become moved together (readers and characters) as "the strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below" (314).
WORKS CITED
Bozovic, Miran. "An Utterly Dark Spot." Bentham's Panopticon Writings. New York: Verso, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Eagleton, Terry. "Estrangement and Irony." Salmagundi 73 (1987): 25-32.
Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic. Trans. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1994.
--. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Fuentes, Carlos. "The Other K." Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction: Critical Essays. Ed. Aron Aji. New York: Garland, 1992.
Gilman, Sander. Seeing the Insane. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Kundera, Milan. Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Ashen New York: Grove, 1986.
--. Immortality. Trans. Peter Kussi. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.
--. Nesmrtelnost. Brno: Atlantis, 1993.
--. Nesnesitelna lehkost byti. Toronto: Sixty-Eight, 1988.
--. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper, 1984.
Misurella, Fred. Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1993.
KAMILA KINYON UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT 2001 Heldref Publications
This material is published under license from the publisher
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Milan Kundera: a modern history of humor amid the comedy of history.
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Journal of Modern Literature; 3/22/2005; Weeks, Mark |
"Rabelais's Merry epic has turned into the despairing comedy of Ionesco, who says, 'There's only a thin line between the horrible and the comic' The European history of laughter comes to an end."
--MILAN KUNDERA (TESTAMENTS BETRAYED 35)
"Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?"
--MILAN KUNDERA (SLOWNESS 4)
While there are certainly funnier writers than Milan Kundera, probably no major modern author of fiction has pursued the subjects of humor and laughter as persistently and thoroughly as the writer of Laughable Loves, The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It is ironic then that at the very beginning of his extended treatise on modern aesthetics, Testaments Betrayed (1993), Kundera observes, "If I were asked the most common cause of misunderstanding between my readers and me, I would not hesitate: humor" (6). The entire book then becomes in a sense a clarification of his position on the subject, but not before he has articulated what is at stake for him in all this by referencing Octavio Paz's assertion that "Humor is the great invention of the modern spirit" and by claiming that this humor's birth, coinciding with that of the novel in Rabelais and Cervantes, is absolutely fundamental to modern European culture (5).
It is perhaps because such aesthetic, social and moral elevation of humor is inevitably attended by a concern for its well-being that the subject has remained, thematically and as a structural principle, at the core of Kundera's work. However, Kundera's history and aesthetics of humor are also inseparable from his own biography, as the writer himself claimed in a New York Times interview with Philip Roth in 1980.
I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was twenty then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor. (Laughter and Forgetting 232)
Here Kundera not only provides a readily comprehensible biographical context--a Czech's experience of Soviet domination--but also an indication of his own understanding of that slippery term "humor." For Kundera it is that which defies the monolithic delimitation of discourse, of political correctness, recalling "the superbly heterogeneous universe of those earliest novelists" that he sees at the beginning of modern Europe (Testaments 4). In this he reflects an obvious kinship with Mikhael Bakhtin, whose polemical notions of the carnivalesque both found a model in Rabelais and were formed in the context of early to middle twentieth century Stalinist state oppression. Kundera's valuation of the "ambiguity" in humor identifies what Bakhtin had called "heteroglossia" and likewise associated with the rise of the novel. Both men were subjected to state aggression because of their intellectual resistance to absolute State power, Bakhtin's intellectual circle being subjected to arrests and the writer himself forced into internal exile, Kundera removed from his own academic position at the Prague Film Academy while having his books withdrawn from bookshops and libraries.
Nevertheless, there are limitations on how far such attractive parallels might be taken. What made Bakhtin an ideological rallying point at the end of the twentieth century was that he had conceptualized humor, specifically in Rabelais and His World, as serving a collectivizing impulse, stressing an irrepressible desire of "the people" driving history, and explicitly contrasting this with merely bourgeois pleasures. Bakhtin may have written against totalitarian Communism, but he harnessed humor to a Hegelian sense of historical momentum. Like Marx, he took up the notion of a comic narrative break serving an adjustment of an apparently inevitable historical course. (1) If Bakhtin had viewed laughter, and specifically carnivalesque laughter, as an interruption of the quotidian rhythm of life, he had nevertheless contained this laughter within what Stallybrass and White describe as a "generous but willed idealism" (10) by equating it somewhat one-sidedly with rebirth, a re-energization, a re-kindling of some ideal communal concupiscence that would propel a particular historical narrative.
Kundera too views humor and laughter as divergences and interruptions, but refuses to subjugate them to an historical linear movement, making his vision decidedly less optimistic. Indeed, linking laughter to death, as Bakhtin does, yet without offering transcendence through socio-historical
immersion in "the folk," Kundera consistently rallies laughter against optimism itself. Partly for this reason, he has been able to extend his concepts of humor and laughter beyond the totalitarian context, adapt them even to the liberal West after he emigrated to France in 1975 and found himself amid the flourishing of a joyous, supposedly ahistorical cosmology of desire, of endless, irrepressible motility. Kundera is somewhat unique in seeing humor as being as antithetical to playful postmodern dynamism--hyperrealism, hyperactivity--as it is to modern linear historicity and totalitarian absolutism. It was from France, as the century drew to a close, that Kundera would discern the emergence in Western Europe of "the total lack of a sense of humor" (Immortality 372) and could still "imagine the day when Panurge no longer makes people laugh" (Testaments 32).
This is possible in part because Kundera's conception of humor is less historical and material than temporal and aesthetic. His father was a music professor who led the writer himself to practice and study music throughout his youth, and if there is a single theme and structuring device that competes with humor over the course of his mature work it is that of music: not only does he frequently discuss musical composition, but he structures his writing according to musical principles. The two are in fact intimately connected for Kundera, and what distinguishes his concept of humor is that, like music, it is conceived as a fundamentally temporal phenomenon, separate from, and even subverting, everyday and historical projections of time. While that sensitivity to time renders history important to Kundera, he refuses to subjugate the aesthetic to the historical, maintaining them throughout his work in critical dialogue, and/or aesthetic counterpoint. A history of how humor has been conceived and deployed is sustained in typically unresolved ambiguity with his own humorous conception of history: if humor challenges certain conceptions of time, then the history of time also threatens to subjugate humor.
In the latter case, Kundera's oeuvre identifies three strategies of control corresponding to three perceived phases in the modern history of how humor and laughter have been described and proscribed: firstly, traditional repression, such as the aggressive marginalization of humor under Stalin; then the recuperation or rehabilitation of laughter to serve neo-revolutionary historical narratives, a strategy which might actually be discerned in Bakhtin; finally, the endless reproduction of laughter, until its temporal effects are submerged beneath its function as a signifier and as a privileged icon of fast, free-floating signification--the postmodern phase. At each stage, Kundera has produced key texts containing consistent, if complex, elucidations of those perceived strategies, poetic descriptions that are often at variance with the popular, and even the dominant academic, wisdom, though there is supporting evidence within the specialized area of humor theory for the positions offered in his writing.
For the Western European or Anglo-American reader, Kundera's statement concerning the genesis of his interest in humor under Stalinism seems clear enough, appealing to an intuitive understanding of how humor works. At least since Freud, humor has been commonly equated with a release from repression, the liberation of energies, with metaphors based on nineteenth century thermodynamics. Though for Freud laughter was merely the dissipation of energy saved by efficient mental and communicative operations within a psychic economy, it is his libidinal model that has been popularly applied here. Humor, and especially the explosive physiological response of laughter, is typically imagined as a reaction against containment, against a monolithic and comparatively fixed structure by ideally irrepressible libidinal energies. Continuity is sometimes observed between the Freudian superego and political oppression on the one hand, irrepressible libidinal dynamism and tendencies toward political subversion on the other.
It was in the 1960s that this conflation of the psyche and the polls achieved a certain degree of cultural currency, particularly through Herbert Marcuse and others of the Frankfurt School, creating supremely optimistic visions of personal political empowerment founded on the rise of what has been called the "cosmology of our secular age," the myth of desire (Bowie 3). Not accidentally, it was then that Bakhtin was introduced to the West in France, most notably through Julia Kristeva's seminars at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in 1965. In that atmosphere of nascent cultural revolution, Bakhtin's optimistic readings of Rabelais as the harbinger of playful transformation were ensured a receptive audience. After all, across the Atlantic at that very moment, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters were joyfully pronouncing the playful liberation of desires to be the key to a radically positive social reorientation.
Yet around the same time, and from within the heavily repressive atmosphere of Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia, Kundera was writing The Joke (published in Czech as Zert in 1967) the first novel in which he seriously thematizes the subject of humor, but in which it is precisely a kind of joyous optimism that is the butt of humor. The inciting event of the novel's plot, based on Kundera's own dismissal from the Czech Communist party, is the narrator/ protagonist's response to the "earnest enthusiasm for everything around her" of his revolutionary girlfriend. Though an active communist himself, Ludvik finds her "happy, buoyant mood" in the face of his own desire an affront, and it is this which he attacks with humor in the form of a message on a postcard: "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!" (Joke 28). The revelation of Ludvik's message draws the ire of his communist fraternity, leading to an interrogation by committee. However, it is not merely the content of the joke that is perceived as offensive, but the very notion of laughing. The leading prosecutor asks for details of the correspondence between the accused and his lover:
Did she mention that a healthy atmosphere prevailed? Yes, I said, I think she said something like that. Did she mention she was discovering the power of optimism? Yes, I said. And what do you think of optimism? they asked. Optimism? I asked. Why, nothing special. Do you consider yourself an optimist? they went on. I do, I said uneasily. I like a good time, a good laugh, I said, trying to lighten the tone of the interrogation. A nihilist likes a good laugh, said one of them. He laughs at people who suffer. A cynic likes a good laugh, he went on. (Joke 28)
There are two pertinent points here. Firstly, the oppressive ideology is anything but static in Kundera's Communist Czechoslovakia, and seems to have been no less dynamic and future-oriented in earlier communist manifestations, including the Stalinism he has referred to as an enemy of laughter. From this point of view, formed under communist rule, if Bahktin was indeed attempting to inspire a carnivalesque revolution, he was drawing what was in some respects a questionable parallel between the comparatively "static," feudal hierarchy of Rabelais's time and the eminently "progressive" and without exception optimistic ideological dominants (both communist and capitalist) of his own modernist period. Secondly, in Kundera's text, Ludvik, seeing optimism as "nothing special," attempts to avoid commitment to the future by deliberately confusing optimism with lightheartedness, a ploy excoriated by the interrogators. Laughter here is actually counterposed to optimism, a belief in the future, and even to a certain joy, what the narrator refers to as "Joy with a capital J" (Joke 23). This is a more complex view of the comic than that we are typically used to, because it does not correspond to the simple paralleled binaries of seriousness/play and stasis/dynamism that would come to dominate Western European and Anglo-American postmodern discourses.
Nevertheless, this is not an entirely new vision. The assertion by a communist sympathizer in The Joke that "no great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at" (Joke 203) could without distortion be read as a restatement of Thomas Hobbes's view, stated less critically, that "They that are intent on great designs have not time to laugh" (Hobbes 455). It is not simply a serious idea, a structure (the Feudal order, God) that is threatened by laughter here, but a "movement," a momentum that not only carries us through time, but actually creates a certain human temporality. In the same vein, Henri Bergson, in his famous long essay on the subject, Le Rire (Laughter), notes near the very end, that in the one who laughs "we speedily discern a degree of egoism and, behind this latter, something less spontaneous and more bitter, the beginnings of a curious pessimism ..." (199). Laughter, according to this view, is not simply opposed to the seriousness of specific project then, but to an orientation towards the future. This is something that popular post-Freudian views of laughter as a release of unconscious drives, of irrepressible energies, have tended to understate, since such views (and even Bakhtin's carnival could be seen to belong to this line of thinking) view the comic as directed towards overcoming stasis, renewing dynamism. Yet it is partly because laughter lacks temporal commitment that Umberto Eco could view both laughter and the ancient carnival, alluding explicitly to Bakhtin, as easily serving conservative ends (6). And it is why Bergson, with his joyous master narrative of a "creative evolution" driven by "l'enthousiasme" and "elan vital"--with his assertion that "Pleasure and well-being are something, joy is more.... They mean, indeed, a halt or a marking time, while joy is a stop forward" (Two Sources 45) and that "the whole of humanity, in space and time is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance, and clear the most formidable obstacles, even death" (Creative Evolution 286)--must eventually denigrate the one who laughs.
This too is why the humorous protagonist of The Joke finds himself at odds with his own revolutionary youth and is forced out of the particular historical momentum he had once, as a leader, helped to define. In contrast to the principally spatial model of centers and margins that poststructuralism would promote, Kundera's rhetoric, including his depiction and deployment of laughter, operates primarily in terms of competing temporalities. Forced from the positive temporality of historical projection into abject laboring subjection and thus "time laid bare, time in and of itself, time at its most basic and primal" (Joke 44), Kundera's Ludvik discovers a new temporal ideal, personified in the character of a young woman. The novel is explicit in establishing that the basis of this romantic phase of the story, Ludvik's attraction to Lucie, is precisely the girl's apparent resistance to time, or rather, her lack of resistance to it, her disinterest riding upon or dominating time. It is her slowness, a term that Kundera will develop as the thesis and title of a novella in 1995, which first draws him to her: "Yes, it must have been the slow pace that fascinated me; she had a slowness about her that radiated resignation: there was nowhere worth hurrying to, nothing worth fretting over. Yes, maybe it really was that melancholy slowness that made me follow her ..." (Joke 56) Through a very direct juxtaposition, Kundera contrasts this with the protagonist's earlier subjugation to historical time as a joyful "fellow traveler". Where "what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, you might say, was the feeling (real or apparent) of standing near the wheel of history," in Lucie he finds someone who "knew nothing of history ... the problems she lived with were trivial and eternal ... enabling me 'to make my exit from history'" (Joke 61). The world personified in Lucie is in a sense pre-historic, and Kundera makes it clear, pre-linguistic, as she offers not symbolism but "an older, vaguer, more instinctive precursor of language ... she instinctively longed for a mute, preverbal stage of evolution" (Joke 68). And, significantly, she opens up a world of simple and immediate experience characterized by "a minimum of gestures, pointing at trees, laughing, touching one another ..." (Joke 68). [All italics in the above quotes are in the text.] Laughter, then, is once again accorded a special position in the novel for its existence in contradistinction to common and definitively modern experiences of time.
Although later overshadowed by Freudian psychic thermodynamics, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose writing influenced the development of the now prominent "incongruity theory" of humor, actually articulated the temporal effect of laughter in the middle of the nineteenth century. In The World as Will and Idea the German philosopher distinguishes "perception," or immediate instinctive apprehension (as in Lucie's prelinguistic gesturing), from "conception," the temporal, discursive knowledge we equate with verbal language. He attributes the pleasure in humor-derived laughter to the defeat of the latter by the former:
For perception is the original kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature, in which everything that gives direct satisfaction to the will presents itself. It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gaiety; moreover it is attended with no exertion.... [While, on the other hand], it is the conceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our immediate desires, for, as the medium of the past, the future, and of seriousness, they are the vehicle of our fears, our repentance, and all our cares. (280)
Schopenhauer's model viewed laughter principally as a way of collapsing human temporality and thus the fear and worry that are generated through human duration, the experience of tenses. That Schopenhauer overlooks the potential for laughter's temporal subversion to erase positive experiences of the past and future tenses along with the bad, is not his attempt to sell laughter but rather typical of his own famously pessimistic worldview. Nevertheless, his model contributes to an understanding of what Bergson and Kundera are recognizing when they see laughter as in some sense opposed to historical projection, however joyful.
Around the time of publication of The Joke, Helmuth Plessner, in his phenomenological study of laughter and crying, emphasized the importance of distinguishing laughter, which is essentially indifferent, from contiguous emotions that are actually equilibrated by the laughter response.
Laughter as such is indeed pleasurable, but not cheerful, even if it usually acquires this effective tone. It is pleasurable as the release of a tension, which in the superabundance of joy, springs from the drive to movement, in titillation from the ambivalence of sexual excitation, in play from the intermediate state between freedom and constraint. (113)
Joy (as opposed to pleasure) as a movement, laughter as a collapse of the tension that maintains that movement: here we can again see what it was in laughter that constituted a threat to Bergsonian Creative Evolution and poses a threat to any myth of a joyful march forward. Consider Bergson's assertion that "However full, however overflowing the activity of an animal species may appear, torpor and unconsciousness are always lying in wait for it. It keeps up its role only by effort, at the price of fatigue" and can be subverted "perhaps even by simple interruption" (Creative 119n, 212), and his observation of the one who laughs: "He slackens in the attention that is due to life. He more or less resembles the absentminded. Maybe his will is here even more concerned than his intellect, and there is not so much a want of attention as a lack of tension" (Rire 196). Compare this with Plessner's observation that "Laughter is pleasurable and 'healthy' as a reaction of letting oneself go in a physical automatism, as a surrender of the controlled unity of man's body, which demands a constant expenditure in inhibition and in drives" (Plessner 114).
That expenditure, which Bergson called "duree" and Freud equated with the "reality principle," is subverted by laughter experienced as a pleasurable detente or "letting go," a kind of petit mort whose ultimate reference is the specter of death. Freud himself had not yet developed his death-directed "pleasure principle" when he wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, but Kundera's The Joke generates its anti-climax precisely through yoking laughter and death, as the protagonist toys with his own non-existence in thoughts of suicide: "... I just tried to imagine myself no longer alive, and suddenly I felt so blissful, so oddly blissful that I almost burst out laughing, I actually may have laughed a bit" (Joke 238). The notion of the proximity of death, the existential void and laughter is reinforced by the final joke of the novel, in which a woman's attempted suicide is foiled by her accidentally taking laxatives instead of sleeping tablets, leaving her on the toilet, with a young man proclaiming to Ludvik, "She doesn't give a shit what happens to you! She told met She doesn't give a shit." That unwitting reference to the woman's literal situation becomes a source of humor: "Nervous tension lowers a person's resistance not only to tears, but to laughter as well; the literal sense of the boy's last words made the corners of my mouth start twitching" (Joke 254).
Recalling the treatment of death by Rabelais, and especially by Sterne in Tristram Shandy, it is immediately after (re)discovering the bliss of non-desire/ non-deferral, through access to the notion of non-existence, that Ludvik is able to reassess the historical narrative that has sought to exclude him: "History the divine, the rational? ... What if history plays jokes? And all at once I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own jokes: I myself and my life as a whole had been involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing) and absolutely irrevocable" (Joke 240). It is clear, because of the centrality of temporality as a theme in the novel, that the joke the narrator refers to is not only a mockery of specific historical narratives such as Marxism. More profoundly, laughter which is the joke's end, by puncturing time, exposes the conditional nature of assumptions concerning temporality underlying narrative in general.
Yes, suddenly, I saw it all clearly: most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion. No one will rectify wrongs; all wrongs will be forgotten. (Joke 245) [All italics are in the text.]
Reflection and revenge are, Kundera seems to contend, forms of the general impulse to preserve, through consolidation of the past and future tenses, the illusion of the preexisting and independent existence of a temporal continuum spread beneath existence. For to dispense with that philosophical position is to hover above an existential void, an outcome potentially more devastating than any historical injustice, though for Kundera it is precisely such hovering--around laughter and death, yet without the interminable angst of absurdism--which underwrites humor and thus the history of the novel, at least up to what he elsewhere describes as the "pleiad of great Central European novelists: Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broc, Gombrowicz" with "their aversion to romanticism ... their mistrust of history and of the glorification of the future" (Art of the Novel 124).
Kundera took up the theme again in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a philosophical novel set in Czechoslovakia but completed in 1978, three years after his arrival in France. In a chapter entitled "The Border," Kundera once more describes the boundary between meaningful historical/existential narratives and the revelation of cosmic meaninglessness as very thin.
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life--and herein lies its secret--takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch. (Laughter 206-7)
The border, the separation, is "so infinitely little" because it is not so much spatial as temporal, being opened through that detente that constitutes the collapse of the durational temporality through which stories are told and meaning is generated, a necessarily instantaneous and apparently nihilistic event that would challenge not only Bergson but numerous modernist grand narrators, from Nietzsche through the Futurists. It is because Kundera views laughter as a ubiquitous and effective means of interrupting and collapsing time--and less because of specific parodic contents--that he can write in The Art of the Novel that the comic is inherently cruel, "brutally reveals the meaninglessness of everything" (125).
Where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting goes beyond The Joke is in dissecting the "willed" misinterpretation of laughter that allows it to be neutralized, and even turned against itself, through appropriation by narratives of historical purpose. Laughter is used, recalling Schopenhauer, to forget the horrors of Soviet domination, but it is also projected as a joyful herald of the future. There are identifiable precedents for such recuperation even within humor theory. Bergson, for example, while berating the pessimism of the one who laughs, would nevertheless, through an assertion that critics have recognized as a triumph of hope over empirical evidence, harness laughter to his grand, death-defying evolutionary narrative by, as Rend Girard puts it, "plac[ing] the man who laughs on the side of the 'elan vital,' on the side of the Gods, in other words" (197). Bergson contends that despite the villainous pessimism, "Here as elsewhere, nature has utilized evil with a view to good," he writes, because "Laughter is above all a corrective" (Le Rire 199, 197). The social (that is, "natural") purpose of laughter is to communicate disapproval, to correct flaws and thereby further human evolution. Yet, as the critic A. R. Lacey argued, "While ... laughter could have the function he [Bergson] assigns to it, he gives no real reason for saying it does have it" (196).
In fact Kundera too identifies laughter with evil, though for the novelist it does not therefore require redemption. Evil, as it was embodied in a certain novelistic humor, born as the counterpoint of an excessive faith in historical projection that might have attended the Renaissance, is good. In what constitutes the second phase of Kundera's evolving modern history of humor, the narrator distinguishes two kinds of laughter. The first and original is what he terms the Devil's laughter, equated with "[t]hings suddenly deprived of their putative meaning" (Laughter 61), recalling Bergson's dark view of the laugher and corresponding neatly to Kant's formula, presented in The Critique of Judgement, "Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing" (Kant 199). From the perspective of those insisting upon an absolute, or absolutely "willed," meaning--the "angels"--the threat is enormous: "The first time an angel heard the Devil's laughter, he was horrified" (Laughter 61). "Angelic laughter" is born as a desperate response to the original: "He knew he had to act fast, but felt weak and defenseless. And unable to fabricate anything of his own, he simply turned his enemy's tactics against him. He opened his mouth and let out a wobbly, breathy sound in the upper reaches of his vocal register ... and endowed it with the opposite meaning" (Laughter 62). Kundera's narrator is speaking in clearly metaphorical, mythopoeic terms here in order to illustrate, in a poetically satisfying way, the birth of something like a counterfeit laughter, a strategic response to existential skepticism by those who would insist on absolute purposefulness: "Whereas the Devil's laughter pointed up the meaninglessness of things, the angel's shout rejoiced in how rationally organized, well conceived, beautiful, good, and sensible everything on earth was" (Laughter 62). The latter laughter, being forced into existence to counter the laughter emanating from the void, though not a "genuine" laughter, is nevertheless effective: "... the angels have gained something by it. They have tricked us all with their semantic hoax. Their imitation laughter and its original (the Devil's) have the same name" (Laughter 62).
This use of an originary myth is rhetorical, designed to support a particular view of how laughter ought to be conceptualized according to a particular, "humorous" vision of Western history that Kundera formulates with special reference to novelistic discourse. Of course, while "false" or "forced" laughter obviously exists, there is no substantial evidence within the various fields of humor theory that laughter essentially serves either a divine or an anarchic worldview. The narrator of Laughter and Forgetting is playing amid that particular ambiguity attending the interpretation of laughter observed by Plessner. The "fallacy" lies in reading laughter as an expression of the joy attending the celebration of a certain narrative, when it is more accurately an equilibrating psycho-physiological response to over-stimulation. The laughter of Kundera's angels is not necessarily false, but is being falsely interpreted by the angels, and by the narrator, as an endorsement of a particular narrative, though it is more correctly a subversion of the overexcited, overconfident, over-investment in a specific narrative momentum. By simplistically, strategically--even if unconsciously--identifying it, through simple contiguity, with joy, laughter can actually be rendered, in an ironic twist, as a privileged symbol of what is ecstatically perceived as an inevitable revolutionary energy. Kundera, again drawing on his own experience, has the poet-revolutionary Paul Eluard, depicted in a circle of "laughing, dancing Czechs," reciting the following poem:
We shall flee rest, we shall flee sleep We shall outstrip dawn and spring And we shall fashion days and seasons To the measure of our dreams.
The joyous revolutionaries respond to the poem by "speeding up the steps of their dance, fleeing rest and sleep, outstripping time ..." (Laughter 67). Laughter is thus identified with historical purpose, a virtually infinite compression of time through the acceleration of joyfully purposeful movement.
There were precedents for this in the modernist period. Futurism, dedicated to technocratic revolution and endless cultural acceleration, for example, attempted to employ laughter rhetorically in very much this way, as in Velimir Khlebnikov's "Incantation by Laughter", described by John White as "the most famous Russian Futurist poem of all" (232).
O you laughniks, laugh it out! O you laughniks, laugh it forth! You who laugh it up and down, Laugh along so laughily, Laugh it off belaughingly Laughters of the laughing laughniks, overlaughs with laughathons! Laughiness of the laughish laughers, counterlaugh the Laughdom's laughs! Laughio! Laughio! Dislaugh, relaugh, laughlets, laughlets, Laughulets, laughulets. O you laughniks, laugh it out! O you laughniks, laugh it forth! (Markov 7-8)
The futurist rhetoric represents a certain modernist viewpoint, yet in its celebration of laughter along with an ecstatic faith in playful dynamism, it reveals something of the arbitrariness in the now traditional modernist/postmodernist taxonomy and the very significant areas of continuity in the cultural history of the twentieth century.
More influential than Khlebnikov's encomium to laughter in this respect is the late nineteenth century celebration of a radically new laughter by Nietzsche, especially in his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which would assume special currency within poststructuralism. Conceived only shortly before Bergson's elan vital, Nietzsche's "will to power" likewise, and even more explicitly, sought to address the nihilism threatening Europe as the force of traditional master narratives (particularly the Judeo-Christian) waned. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche actually provides perhaps the first modernist example of that rhetorical appropriation of the powerful laughter image that Kundera exposes in Laughter and Forgetting. To the extent that there is a plot in the philosophical novel, it could be seen as at least in part driven by the inciting event of the townsfolk cynically (Bergson would say "demonically") laughing at Zarathustra's post-theistic philosophizing: "There they stand ... there they laugh. They do not understand me; I am not the mouth for those ears" (Z:1 "Zarathustra's Prologue"). The story's climax is the character's epiphanic vision of the existential leap into the "inexhaustible permanence of becoming."
No longer shepherd, no longer human--one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now! (Z:3 "Vision and Riddle")
A mythical species of laughter, then, a laughter that would defy the collapse of time in everyday laughter and thereby launch a joyfully unstoppable momentum--a kind of perpetual motion machine--becomes the holy grail of the quest narrative, and is inextricably linked to Nietzsche's notion of "eternal recurrence." In the final part of the story, Zarathustra announces that through his lonely wandering and suffering he has finally attained that grail: "The crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy. Nobody else have I found strong enough for this today" (Z:4 "Higher Man"). While it may be difficult for us to equate Nietzsche with Kundera's "angels," this is surely where he belongs in some respects, the important qualification here being that Nietzsche's writing conveys an acute consciousness of the willed projection--the post-theistic leap of faith--in his own ecstatic mythologizing and his own tactical redeployment of the laughter image. (2)
In large part because of this literary self-consciousness, Nietzsche would come to exercise an extraordinary influence on philosophy, and on literary and cultural studies in the postmodernity that emerged from the 1960s. Drawing on Nietzsche, poststructuralism would announce the primacy of desire and its attendant "becoming" as it operated through signification. Laughter as a kind of ejaculation was then promoted as a privileged icon, a "transcendental signifier," if you will, of a new hegemony of willed desire, the desire to desire. The term jouissance would become ubiquitous throughout continental poststructuralism, from Julia Kristeva to Derrida himself, who explicitly relates the celebration of endless desire to Nietzschean laughter: "we must affirm this [playful desire of endless becoming], in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance" (Derrida 27). Laughter and Forgetting shows Kundera was early engaged with this intellectual stream of postmodernism and detected the potentially oppressive nature of even this apparently most liberal of mythologies as early as the seventies. He refers in the novel to the then recent feminist work "Woman's World" by Annie Leclerc (1974), where laughter is explicitly presented as a special sign of liberated and inexhaustible sexual desire, and the attendant experience of supreme joy is "expressed by the French word jouissance, which is soothing, ubiquitous and uninterrupted" (Laughter 57). This is an "angelic" laughter that Kundera notes, quoting Leclerc, represents (in terms that recall Khlebnikov's poem) "'that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter of delight'" and goes "'far beyond joking, jeering, and ridicule'" (57), being "'serious laughter, laughter beyond joking'" (58). It is a kind of transcendental image of laughter then, which, Kundera's narrator claims, is in fact a willed delusion and is deployed across numerous contexts: "All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties have that laughter in common, they all use the image ... in their publicity for their religion, their product, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing detergent" (58).
Without wishing to render here a critique of Bakhtinianism, it should be noted that even Bakhtin would be seen, from this point of view, to manifest such a tendency. Bakhtin's constant recourse to the notion of ambivalence, which embraces the duality of life and death, is somewhat belied by the idealistic view of Rabelaisian (or Gogolian) laughter as "the only positive hero" (Bakhtin 295). Thus Michael Andre Bernstein notes, "although Bakhtin can describe the Saturnalian laughter as ambiguous, the scope of that ambiguity is strictly limited, as indeed it must to answer his own need for an unmistakably productive agent of liberation" (291). Herein lies the key to that "willed idealism" observed by Stallybrass and White, and the key difference between Bakhtin and Kundera, for whom laughter genuinely is as much an agent of death as of rebirth.
Reasserting laughter against the ecstatic deployment of the image of laughter--specifically within a neo-Erotic mythologizing--near the end of Laughter and Forgetting the reader witnesses a sexual orgy presided over by a domineering hedonist, "eternally vigilant and infinitely demanding" (222), who insists that all present participate with ceaseless enthusiasm and utter abandon. The irony of militant playfulness causes the protagonist, Jan, to burst into conspiratorial laughter with another participant before being chastised for his laughter and asked to leave, with "tears [of laughter] running down his cheeks" (225). The perceived offense committed by the character is not laughter per se since the orgy belongs to a cult of play, but the wrong kind of laughter, the laughter of meaninglessness, rather than the image of laughter that celebrates playful desire. Yet even desire may be subjected to laughter, according to Kundera, who in The Art of the Novel stresses the importance of acknowledging even "the (hard to take) comic side to sexuality" (126).
It was noticed quite early--not only by Kundera, but some of those aligned with the political left in cultural studies, such as Terry Eagleton, Fredrick Jameson, and Ben Agger--that mythologies of playful desire, regardless of their aims, fit rather comfortably with the necessary dominance of desire myths in the historical age of consumer capitalism. Jameson recognized at much the same time as Kundera that laughter was actually a casualty in this explosion of playful desire, of pure difference (differance), noting how postmodern pastiche was a comedy "without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic" (Jameson 66). Kundera would echo the sentiment in the 1990s in his novel Immortality. Referring specifically to a television news broadcast, a character observes how the emotional distinction between seriousness and the comic has been lost: "Humour can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable" (372).
A central irony of postmodernity, then--and it may be at the very crux of the postmodern preoccupation with irony--is that play itself takes on the seriousness of an obsession, and this, in Kundera's universe, is truly demonic.
"Diabolum is characterized by the total lack of a sense of humour. The comical, even if it still exists, has become invisible. Joking no longer makes sense ... This world takes everything seriously. Even me. And that's the limit."
"I should rather think that nobody takes anything seriously! They all just want to amuse themselves."
"That comes to the same thing." (Immortality 372)
This is what Kundera had described in the extended dream sequence of Laughter and Forgetting and had explicitly characterized in The Art of the Novel as a new "infantocracy," "The seriousness of a child: the face of the technological era" (132). Suggesting such a view was not entirely idiosyncratic, around the same time as the publication of Immortality another writer with a broadly philosophical perspective, Tom Robbins, would write from within the economic engine room of the new hegemony, the United States:
A gentleman named Horace Walpole once wrote that "the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."... Ah, but virtually nobody in America thinks anymore, and nobody feels much either.... What can you say about a population to whom the world is neither comedy nor tragedy but a sporting match in a seedy and extremely noisy arena ... (376)
Where Kundera's critique extends beyond Robbins's is in detecting that, ironically, laughter was being projected as the transcendental signifier of this joyous condition. Likewise suggesting that the new order has its center in the United States, Kundera has a character, while looking at a collection of photographs of President John Kennedy, make the following discovery: "the photos were in colour, there were at least fifty of them, and on all of them (all without exception!) the president was laughing. Not smiling, laughing!" (Immortality 361). The narrator remarks that laughter has been elevated as "the privileged expression of the human face" (362), while conceding that this is probably not real, unconscious laughter, but most often to some degree consciously contrived, or forced: "the convulsion shown on photographic portraits is simulated" (362). Laughter, in the age of simulacra, has become a strategic simulation of enormous rhetorical importance. The repeated, ubiquitous act of simulating laughter "only proves that the convulsion of laughter (a state beyond reason and will) has been raised by contemporary people into an ideal image behind which they have decided to conceal themselves" (362).
Once more, Kundera's work, however insightful, could be seen to reflect a broader critical tendency formed as a particular reaction to the cultural dominance of an apparently playful hegemony. The cover of Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1987, for example, shows President Reagan in a clown's red nose. Indeed, a consistently recurring viewpoint amongst various characters in Kundera's fiction from France during the 1990s coincides in important respects with that of Jean Baudrillard, who discerned in the postmodern culture "a secret form of the refusal of the will ... an involuntary challenge to everything which was demanded of the subject by philosophy, that is to say, to all rationality of choice and to all exercise of will, of knowledge, and of liberty ("Masses" 219). Like Kundera, Baudrillard noted "a ludic, aleatory process" which ultimately led, through endless simulation, to the dissimulation of "a parodic behaviour of disappearance" ("Masses" 212), that is, a strategic self-effacement, a dissolution in flux. The convergence is remarkable. What Kundera calls "Diabolum" had been articulated by Baudrillard as "an evil genius" beneath "a halo of derision" ("Masses" 217).
The elevation of laughter as an image, even as it was marginalized as an inner experience (along with other forms of subjective interiority), was viewed as an effect of the general reign of the play of signifiers, the retreat of the referent. Some cultural observers recognized that laugher had even come to represent the ultimate simulation, but that as such it relinquished its power to undermine from outside a hegemony of simulacra. This is an advanced variation on the strategic ("angelic") duplication of laughter Kundera had described in Laughter and Forgetting. Yet what made this strategy so effective was that it could not be countered by those radical postmodern voices that might have been expected to challenge such perceived domination. After all, didn't many poststructuralists themselves champion the ascendancy of ludic energies? And how could poststructuralism, while challenging myths of origins and authenticity, possibly launch a critique of "false laughter?" Consequently, one of those privileged areas not thoroughly deconstructed in poststructuralism is the rhetoric surrounding the image of laughter in the modern and then the postmodern scene. How could it, when laughter had functioned, at least since Derrida's pronouncement concerning a certain Nietzschean laughter and dance, as deconstruction's own transcendental signifier?
One needs to recall at this point that the disabling of laughter has long been for Kundera, at least since The Joke, a fundamentally temporal matter. Laughter did not merely mock history but collapsed and thus exposed the constructed nature of the subjective experience of time as a constant negotiation of conjoined tenses (Bergson's duree) through which history was generated. Despite Francis Fukayama's claim that with the end of the Cold War history was approaching its end, time itself was actually accelerating, and this is where the perceived demise of laughter (except as an image) would appear most devastating, because from Kundera's point of view laughter's function, at least until recently, had been to disrupt the momentum of force, of power, by collapsing time.
It is in that context that at the end of the twentieth century Kundera's novella Slowness elaborates a theme that was already evident in The Joke, the notion of an oppressive ideological momentum. Here that momentum is pictured at an advanced stage in which historical projects may actually appear to have been transcended, as the technologically-enhanced experience of speed in itself--Baudrillard called it "movement for movement's sake" (Transparency 19), "the triumph of effect over cause" (America 6)--becomes for the postmodern subjectivity an end (without end) in itself. Kundera's narrator observes of the millennial subject, "he gives over to a speed that is non-corporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed" (Slowness 4). The bliss of historical momentum which Kundera had experienced, at times indulged, in his youth, seemed to be supplanted by the bliss of immersion in the speeding moment, a transcendence of time, and history, by speed. This experience is the seductive aspect, according to Kundera's worldview, of a playful hegemony others would refer to as "fast capitalism" (Agger) or "turbo-capitalism" (Luttwak), within which the negative pole is an anxiety that one might lose momentum, fall to the wayside.
Kundera has nowhere claimed late capitalism is as violently oppressive as the Stalinism he knows too well, but he does suggest that it is as antithetical to free laughter, which throughout his work has been presented as an equilibrating phenomenon. Nevertheless, this supposed degradation is seen to have been masked by the irony of laughter's elevation as a privileged icon of playful momentum, and of irony itself. The ideological appropriation of laughter, or at least of its image, that Kundera had explored in Laughter and Forgetting is shown as now utterly naturalized. A key scene approaching the climax of his next novella Identity (1998) is a conspicuous vision of individual consciousness lost in motion. On a channel train bound for London, amid a mirthful "crowd of travelers" and a cacophony of forced laughter, the once proudly nonconformist protagonist announces, as he follows his wife to an orgy (again described as a desperate, desultory play of desire), "Whether it's good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward" (123).
In this context, Kundera's writing clashes with the late twentieth century academic elevation of playful desire, including Bakhtin's carnivalesque, as a form of revolutionary alterity. The tunnel image quietly intrudes upon the scene what master narratives of historical momentum and grand mythologies of endless desire--both of which subscribe to an immersion of the self in a moving mass, a momentum--would seek to occlude, to forget: the inevitability of the individual's death. Kundera's writing remains unconvinced by attempts to detach the petite mort of laughter from that mortal reality. Laughter and death, conceived as ends or counterpoints of humor and desire, ensure a genuine ambivalence that precludes some absolute subscription to pessimism, optimism or endless momentum. It is that conception of laughter and humor, not their visibility in the culture, that Kundera equates with the birth of the novel, and which he continues to fear is about to be extinguished.
Works Cited
Agger, Ben. Fast Capitalism:A Critical Theory of Significance. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. "The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol)." Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union. Ed. Henryk Baran,. White Plains, New York: International Arts and Sciences, 1974. 284-296.
Baudrillard, Jean. America, Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988.
--. "The Masses." Jean Baudrillard." Selected Writings. Trans. & ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1988. 207-219.
--. The Transparency of Evil." Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Holt, 1911.
--. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: MacMillan, 1911.
--. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. London: MacMillan, 1935.
Bernstein, Michael Andre. "When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections Upon the Abject Hero." Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 283-305.
Bowie, Malcolm. Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. "Difference." Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1982.
Eco, Umberto. "The Frames of Comic Freedom." Carnival, Ed. Thomas Sebeok. Berlin: Mouton, 1984. 1-8
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960.
Girard, Rene. "A Comic Hypothesis." To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature: Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1978.
Hobbes, Thomas. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume 4. London: Bohn, 1845.
Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New-Left Review 146 (1984) 53-92.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 1988.
--. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Michael Henry Helm. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980
--. Identity. Trans. Linda Asher. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.
--. Immortality. Trans. Peter Kussi. London: Faber & Faber, 1991.
--. The Joke. Trans. Michael Henry Helm. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
--. Slowness. Trans. Linda Asher. London: Faber & Faber, 1995.
--. Testaments Betrayed:An Essay in Nine Parts. Trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
Lacey, A. R. Bergson. London: Routledge, 1989.
Luttwak, Edward. Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Markov, Vladimir. Russian Futurism: A History. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Plessner, Helmut. Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. Trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.
Postman, Nell. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. London: Methuen, 1987.
Robbins, Tom. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.
Schopenhaur, Arthur. The Worldas Will and Representation. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1989.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986.
White, John. Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-Garde. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Mark Weeks
Nagoya University
Notes
(1.) Marx wrote, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in the first issue of Die Revolution.
(2.) See Mark Weeks, "Beyond a Joke: Nietzsche and the Birth of Super-laughter," The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27 (Spring, 2004) 1-17.
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The Unbearable Joke of Speed.(Slowness, by Milan Kundera)(Review)
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Queen's Quarterly; 9/22/2001; BELL, FRASER |
SLOWNESS by Milan Kundera New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
There is nothing so thoroughly disguised as the prose of life; every man seeks endlessly to transform his life into myth-seeks, so to speak, to transcribe it into verse, to shroud it in verse (bad verse).
Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed
FEW of the characters in the fictional world of Milan Kundera are permitted to stay hidden for long within their own illusory bubbles of self-valuation. This is a place in which motives and action are forever at odds; where heroism and cowardice, virtue and vice, egotism and selflessness become promiscuously muddled and are in varying degrees exhibited by almost everyone. Yet at the same time the Kundera universe is a sort of moral neutral zone where judgement is suspended and human beings are given leeway to follow the whims of their perceived destinies, their libidos, their sense of self, their understanding of cause and effect. Whether they be femmes fatales, hucksters, victims or inquisitors, their creator treats them evenhandedly; with affection and with a degree of indulgence. He is their tribune; their advocate, and never the judge or the executioner.
In Slowness the narrator, Milanku, stays well in the background, but with a little smile hovering behind his lips. He shares the joke with us, and like all good jokes it has an edge of malice to it, for it is the type which comes at you from an unexpected angle, in which the laughter catches in your throat. His wife Vera, though, recognizes that there is a frisson of peril within the narrative; she recognizes the subversive quality of her husband's ironic voice. "I'm warning you," she says. "Seriousness kept you safe. The lack of seriousness will leave you naked to the wolves." But Kundera's inimitable light touch is deceptive, for Slowness, like Life is Elsewhere, Laughable Loves, Immortality, is a serious book although it is never solemn and never didactic. As the title suggests, the story explores the pace of human life; it refracts time, history and myth, memory and forgetting, passion and folly through the goings-on of Vincent, the would-be libertine; Berck, the opportunistic politician; Immaculata, the TV producer; Gechoripsky, the Czech entomologist.
The story takes place in two different periods: in the late twentieth century at a scientific conference in a French chateau, and in that same chateau during the eighteenth century, some time before the French Revolution, where a young chevalier has an assignation with the mysterious and beautiful seductress known as Madame de T. The stories seem to parallel one another; time seems to dissolve, at least for a moment. But the two periods are never conflated, for the distance between past and present, Kundera seems to be saying, is not just a matter of two centuries; rather, it is the difference between indolence and frenzy, contingency and art; between "speed" and "slowness."
Vincent's friend, Pontevin, who holds forth at the Cafe Gascon, believes that the characteristic modern type is the "dancer." The dancer is the show-off; he is self-absorbed and wants to keep others off the stage. He practises "moral judo," which in effect means keeping others off-balance and subordinate. The dancer wants to occupy the high ground and to make of his life a work of art. It is not power he seeks, but glory; it is not the lived moment he celebrates, but himself. Everyone in the twentieth-century episodes of Slowness is a dancer, including Vincent -- who thinks he knows better. They improvise as they go along and, as it transpires, speed is their undoing. The problem is that there is no authentic moment of recognition in their lives; there is no form; their memory is a simulacra of the real thing. There are no line-breaks in their personal chronologies. As a result they miss by a mile the salient details.
"There is," writes Kundera, "a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Equation: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting." And how they speed and forget. Take poor Cechoripsky, for example, with his "melancholy pride," his modesty, his mild yet relentless pedantry. He is one of the most prominent scientists in the post-Velvet Revolution Czech Republic, and he is now allowed to practise his profession again after having lost his position at the Entomological Institute during the Russian invasion in 1968. He is to deliver a paper at the French conference, but he is quite out of touch, and his paper is a re-hash of research which is twenty years out of date.
But the Czech too is a dancer; he is a victim of speed. History has overwhelmed him and he has adopted the received role of the heroic exile. The events of Cechoripsky's life seem to converge and then flash into the present and illuminate in his mind as myth. It is his own Official History wonderfully reconstructed. The truth is sadder and more banal. Although he had weakly agreed to co-operate with a pro-Dubceck group after the Soviet invasion, he did so because he was afraid to say no and look like a coward. He lost his job and his children were forced to leave school not for an act of defiance, but for a moment of irresolution on his part.
Nonetheless, he has, as Kundera puts it, been in a Sublime Planetary Historic News Event, and because of that he re-interprets himself. The spotlight illuminates his being and not his memory. As he approaches the podium, "he is overcome by emotion ... he wants for once to obey his feelings, to be spontaneous and tell his unknown colleagues what he feels." He does. He weeps and plays the hackneyed part for his audience. The Czech scientist is overcome, not by the real events of his life, but by his idea of them; by the kitsch version of his history. He seeks glory but finds bathos, for he forgets to deliver his paper.
As Berck seizes the moment of the Czech scientist's heart-rending speech to address the cameras and the nation, the TV producer Immaculata also steps into the spotlight. She approaches Berck not only by way of her professional role, but in her concocted one as object-of-mad-desire -- a reference to an adolescent crush the politician once had on her. 'Vincent too performs the dance-steps in spite of himself. He has gone to the conference in order to mock the proceedings, to raise hell, and to deride the dancers. After all, Vincent is an admirer of the eighteenth century; he is a disciple of Pontevin: "he would wear the Marquis de Sade's profile as a badge on his lapel." At the conference bar, he picks up Julie, a young secretary who becomes Vincent's willing ally, for she too sees herself as a "deserter," and not as one of the dancers. The scene is set for a seduction requiring finesse and discretion. Slowness. Instead, events accelerate; time is telescoped and the forward motion of spontaneous action is stopp ed dead in its tracks by a wall of cosmic laughter.
For Vincent has no talent for slowness. Unlike Madame de T., he does not make the distinction between kitsch and art. Madame de T. has invited her young chevalier to her chateau. We don't really know her true motives. She is having an affair with the marquise, and the chevalier is being used as a blind to deceive her husband. The seduction is perhaps a double-bluff or a triple-bluff Who knows. But there is no question that the two will make love. The night has a ritual to it, like a duel, or greeting an acquaintance in a coffee-house, or going to the theatre. "Everything is composed, confected, artificial, everything is staged ... or in other words, everything is art ... the art of prolonging suspense, better yet: the art of staying as long as possible in a state of arousal." Madame de T. is a diva of slowness; that is her genius, her wisdom. The night takes the shape of a triptych: they walk to the park, make love in the pavilion; then they go to a secret chamber in the chateau where the love-making is conti nued until daybreak.
As Vincent goes out to the lawn with Julie, the voice of the narrator again interjects: "They are transported, without knowing by what, but I know: they are hearing Madame de T.'s river; the river from her nights of love; from the well of the past, the age of pleasure is sending Vincent a quiet greeting." But the message from the past does not really arrive intact; the connection is faulty. Vincent and Julie are after all children of their age; they are products of speed, they are under the camera; they are, in the final analysis, dancers and practitioners of moral judo, for, "Being a dancer is not only a passion, it is also a road one can never again turn from." All of them play off one another. They jostle for positions on the stage: Cechoripsky with his bruised pathetic pride; Berck with his posturing and declamations; Immaculata in her bogus role as heart-breaker; and out on the lawn, the lovers manque -- Vincent and Julie, the supreme solipsists who dance themselves into forgetfulness.
Before the forgetting though there is farce followed by that burst of laughter. Here is Kundera at his comic best; here is the joke in full flower, the trickster waiting in the wings with his custard pie. For Vincent and Julie there is no schemata to the evening; unlike Madame de T. they are unable to impose "... the semblance of a marvelous little architecture ..." to the time they have together. Instead of going upstairs to make love, Vincent suggests that they strip off their clothes and dive into the pool. But when the great moment arrives, Vincent is unable to perform. They simulate copulation there at the edge of the pool; they go through the motions, but as the narrator points out, "They are not exhibitionists ... this is not an orgy they are conducting, it is a show, and during a performance actors try not to meet the audience's eye." Immaculata, all dressed up in her white dress, comes on the scene pursued by her enraged lover. The hapless Czech scientist arrives on the scene as well but he has taste d the poison fruit of heroic celebrity. He has become an actor, and he too is jostling for position. They are all jostling for position -- and the whole stage collapses under their weight. Voices are raised, blows are exchanged; the dancers trip, fall, yell. Bubbles are bursting all over the place. It's an unholy mess.
And there is Vincent stranded among the ruins of the evening. The grand seduction scene he has conjured up will not come off. Yet even in the midst of the shambles he is revising his story in his mind so that he can amuse his friends at the Cafe Gascon. Instead of describing the debacle as it really happened, he will concoct an imaginary orgy. He will create the architecture after the fact. But this is what Vincent and the rest of them cannot see: they cannot see that, "Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands as well as memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory."
While Vincent's absurdist performance contains echoes from one of John Cleese's movies, the chevalier's situation brings to mind the young James Boswell of the London Journal years. Boswell too is the beneficiary of slowness; he obeys the etiquette of the times, and step by step, as he records it in his journal, he pays court to the actress Louisa -- "I talked to her on the advantage of having an agreeable acquaintance" -- until a month later, after tea, teasing, love talk, and clandestine meetings, the great tryst is consummated at Hayward's Inn. "A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed," writes Boswell. "Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa ... declared I was a prodigy ..." Here is the self-satisfaction of the young man, vain in his virility; in seventh heaven. The next morning Boswell strolls down to Drury Lane Playhouse to visit Garrick. He is preening himself. "Thus was this conquest completed to my highest satisfaction. I can with pleasure trace the progress of this intrigue to its co nclusion."
With some justification the chevalier, like Boswell, might now style himself a Man of Pleasure. He travels slowly away from the chateau in his carriage, and "... soon he will drowse off, then he will wake, and all that time he will be trying to stay as close as he can to the night as it melts inexorably in the light. No tomorrow. No audience." Yet ... For in Kundera's novels there is always that ironic inversion, the unstated qualifier. And there is always time for another joke and another laugh. Tomorrow will in fact arrive. The chevalier wonders if he has played the role of Tom Fool, if people will put a jester's cap on his head. Boswell, as he records it in his entry for 18 January 1763, "... began to feel an unaccountable alarm of unexpected evil ..."
We will leave them there - Boswell strutting down Fleet Street, the taste of negus in his mouth; the chevalier lounging and dreaming in his carriage, with no future ahead; just that blissful miniature of a scene with Madame de T. in the secret chamber, the squared-off memory perfectly frozen in time. The narrator's voice is only gently ironic when he says, "I beg you, friend, be happy." As for Vincent, he has neither past nor future. "He knows he will not tell anyone the orgy story. He will not have the strength to lie." Unlike Boswell he will not have to face Signor Gonorrhea, or like the chevalier, the mocking faces of the salon crowd. But Vincent isn't to be envied. He has salvaged nothing from the weekend, not even a good story; not even a joyful memory or a memory of any kind at all. The chevalier at least has slowness as an ally; it is the priceless gift conferred upon him by Madame de T. He will never divulge the story of that night at the chateau.
VINCENT's only desire is to forget everything, and as he mounts his motorcycle "he feels an unquenchable thirst for speed," which will rapidly induce amnesia and create a vacuum in which nothing exists at all -- not even Julie, nor Immaculata, nor the Czech scientist, not even himself. As he races towards Paris he only has some scraps of bad verse to console him. Behind him, in diminuendo, is the rippling sound of the river, the wind in the chestnut trees, an echo of that phantom laughter from the past, rapidly becoming fainter and fainter until that too will cease to exist.
FRASER BELL lives in Victoria and is a regular contributor to Queen's Quarterly.
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