Friday, October 5, 2007

an article on Milan Kundera

Dr. T.K. Nandakumaran


The Wisdom of Uncertainty: A Study of the novels of Milan Kundera

In an interview with Ian McEwan, Kundera expressed his objection to a political reading of his novels because ‘such a reading sees only one aspect’ of the work.[i]As all partial readings are simplifications and hence falsifications, this paper proposes to analyze the novels of Kundera from as many angles as possible in order to bring out his vision of the complexity of human existence with reference to some of his characteristic techniques. This study draws largely on his own theory of the novel as given in The Art of the Novel (hereafter referred to as Art).

It may look paradoxical that while individual novels of Kundera read like separate and independent units, his novels as a whole manifest continuity and interdependence; the sense of fragmentariness is caused by his technical division of the novel into ‘story and digression’, and also by the different methods of narration. The architectonic unity of his works as a whole is caused by the relentless pursuit of his central concern which is none other than the existential situation of man. He is less concerned with characterization and psychology than with what he himself calls ‘meditative interrogation’ of perennial human situations (Art, 31). At worst, all his books read like repetitions of the same situation and theme; at best they read like variations of the same theme which cut deeper and deeper into the problem of human existence. His elliptical method of presentation excludes all physical descriptions of characters and places. Even history and politics appear in his works for their anthropological value: that is, to show what human beings are capable of. That explains why Kundera stated that a knowledge of the history of Czechoslovakia is not necessary for an understanding of his novels (Art, 39).

Kundera never pretends that his characters are real. He always stresses their fictional status: “ It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 39). For him, a character is an ‘imaginary’ self, an ‘experimental’ self, which he is trying to analyze. It is like an experiment in a laboratory, “ an ‘anthropological laboratory’ in which he explores his basic question: ‘What is human existence?’ ” (Art, 311), with the stress always falling on the external forces as determining their fate. Character alone is not destiny, and as in Kafka whom he admired a lot, a hostile world is always there to follow its own course irrespective of the human casualties it treads under its merciless wheels.

Most of his characters act and think alike; or, to be more precise, they act and think like Kundera himself. This is deliberate because he believed that a writer could write only about himself; further, in revealing the thoughts of his characters, he does not show what is happening inside their heads but what he is thinking in his own head in relation to them. This accounts for the similarity we perceive among his characters. All of them reflect variations of the same existential code. But it is not to say that his novels are autobiographical or confessional, because these characters are beings who have crossed a border, “the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 221). In that sense, all his characters are actualizations of the various possibilities of his own potential to become, and it is in the realm of these multiple possibilities that the strength of Kundera lies. His basic effort is to encounter and capture the complexity and ambiguity of existence through persistent interrogative meditations. The ‘novel’, for Kundera, is “a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters” (Art, 83).

Thus his attempts to grasp the essence of the existential problem lead him to investigate the enigmatic nature of human situations. The approach is phenomenological, and the technique employed is the “new art of ‘novelistic counterpoint’”, or polyphony (Art, 73). In this method, which unites philosophy, narrative and dream, recurring motifs link the various parts together, like, for example, the Beethoven quartet in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He himself has referred to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a ‘novel in variation form’ (Art, 82). Thus his novels form a polyphonic composition where all the heterogeneous elements are neatly united.

He uses several methods to connect all his novels together. One way of bringing in his earlier novels into a new book is by overt reference made by the self-conscious narrator. In Immortality he contemplates Paul who “merges in my mind with the figure of Jaromil from a novel that I finished exactly twenty years ago” (155), and later in the novel, the manager of a cafĂ© hands Prof. Avenarius ‘an inexpensive paperback copy of my novel Life is Elsewhere’ (172). Or again, Kundera states, that Part six of Immortality will be ‘a novel within a novel’, which he intends to call The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and he adds: “ That title was supposed to belong to the novel I’m writing now” (267).

Another linking device is the use of the same themes in different works. For example, the various kinds of coincidences Kundera analyzes in Immortality, like mute coincidence, poetic coincidence, contrapuntal coincidence etc., could very well have been part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which deals extensively with the element of chance or fortuity. Or take the case of Jaromil in Life is Elsewhere: After he was thrown into the balcony for insulting somebody at a party, he would not go back to the scene of his shame; he wanted to catch cold and die so that his insulters would feel guilty. This attitude is theoretically developed in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in his meditative digressions on litost: “ Litost is a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self”(122). One of the examples he gives to explain litost – that of a student who makes mistakes deliberately so that his teacher will throw him out of the window so that even if he dies he will be happy to think that the teacher will be punished for murder – fits the bill completely with Jaromil. Similarly, the theory of hedonism put forward through Avenarius towards the end of Immortality becomes a central issue in Slowness. All these devices serve the purpose of bringing the backgrounded texts into the foregrounded narrative, thereby effecting an organic unity among the works of Kundera.

The analyzing of situations and motives forms the most characteristic technique of Kundera. The situations he chooses to analyze may be political, historical, legendary, or purely fictional; they may be probable, artificial, or merely fanciful. But each is chosen with a view to highlight the focus of his existential enquiry. For example, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he develops the theory of kitsch based on the death of Stalin’s son in a German concentration camp – Yakov who died for shit. One perceives the import of this frivolous situation when shit becomes a more important theological problem than evil itself, and kitsch gets defined as a way of living as if shit did not exist (248). Most of his metaphysical speculations are wry musings on the comic side of existence. One may think of his works as a frivolous container with seriousness as content. Let us take an illustration from Immortality: Bernard Bernard, Laura’s lover, is declared a ‘Compleat Ass’ (140) by a stranger who later turns out to be Prof. Avenarius. This apparently stupid incident changes his life completely and begins to threaten his very existence. First he thinks of laughing it away as a joke, but soon he ends up by shaking hands with the stranger. “When a person is declared an ass, he begins to act like an ass”, thinks Paul (141). The reader sees Bernard as a pathetically ludicrous figure. But does not this remind us of another young man who was once accosted by two strangers in his own room and was arrested for no fault of his? When one is accused, one begins to act like a guilty man. It was said that when Kafka read out the beginning of The Trial to his friends, all of them burst out in laughter. In both Kafka and Kundera, these frightening situations have a ridiculous side, as nothing can be more relevant to the Czech situation under Russian occupation than the Kafkan one where accusation means guilt. The frivolous treatment of a serious theme is an important informing principle in Kundera. All the tragic consequences of The Joke originate from a harmless joke: a playful postcard sent by Ludwick Jahn to his Stalinist girl friend. History appears in the form of a dirty underwear in Life is Elsewhere. Many of his similes and metaphors combine the flippant with the serious: the silent copulations of Jan and Ewige in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are “ as inevitable as a man standing at attention when he hears the national anthem though neither he nor his country derives any benefit from it” (196).

Thus it becomes clear that Kundera’s serious phenomenological analyses of existential situations originate from the comic and the ludicrous in human life. The tone is carefully controlled, ironic and playful, giving an aura of lightness which conceals within it and manages to exploit successfully the metaphysical burden of being. The association of ideas in the stream of consciousness novels is replaced here by recurring motifs, and the interior monologue is substituted by philosophical speculations. The resultant conjunction of a frivolous form with a serious content serves a major function: it reveals all our human dramas in their terrible insignificance.

One important part of his counterpoint method is the oneiric narrative; that is, “Imagination, freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought”(Art, 80-81). Thus Tamina’s dream in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in which she enters the island of children is not to be explained in a psychological or moral way. The second section of Life is Elsewhere called ‘Xavier’ is oneiric from beginning to end, a typical case of the so-called mise-en-abyme: “He dreams and in the middle of the dream falls asleep and dreams another dream, so that his sleep is like a series of boxes, one inside another”(80). In the imaginary meeting between Goethe and Hemingway in Immortality, Goethe tells Hemingway that they are “but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own”(240). Similarly, the whole of Slowness occurs in the imagination of Kundera who is spending the night with his wife in a chateau, but why should these fictional characters appear in the dreams of his wife? Or again, at the end of Identity, Kundera asks himself: “Who dreamed this story? . . . At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie?”(152-53). It appears that these things are not meant to be rationally explained. Reality is like Sabina’s paintings: “on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through”(The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 254).

Another distinguishing feature of Kundera’s style is his tendency to classify things in a semi scientific way. There are three kinds of immortality: the major, minor, and the ridiculous; five stages in Ruben’s erotic life: the period of athletic muteness, of metaphors, of obscene truth, of Chinese Whispers, and finally the mystical period. There are two kinds of womanizers in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: the lyrical and the epic. Here it is interesting to note that the man who reveals the perils of systematizing human experience does so by classifying things in a systematic way. He attempts to arrive at the essence of things by analyzing individual words. For example, Part three of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is titled ‘Words Misunderstood’. This is derived from Kundera’s belief that every novel is ‘based on certain fundamental words’ (Art, 84). He coins a term called ‘Existential Mathematics’ and formulates certain laws: “The value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability”(Immortality, 253); or, “the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting”(Slowness, 34-35). Sometimes he introduces a few memorable phrases – ‘sound bites’ – which recur several times in a novel: for example, in Immortality, Bettina’s comment about Goethe’s wife after the breaking of her spectacles: ‘That fat sausage went crazy and hit me’; or Napoleon’s comment on Goethe: ‘There is a man!’; or the Bear’s words about Paul as ‘the brilliant ally of his gravediggers’; or Goethe’s dismissal of Bettina as an ‘annoying gadfly’. Often he introduces clever tricks to manipulate the point of view, as in the sudden shifting of perspective to the middle aged man, a minor

character so far, in Life is Elsewhere, or as in the introduction of a new character called Rubens towards the end of Immortality.

The novels of Milan Kundera do not yield any single absolute truth. Lucie in The Joke remains an enigma despite the two versions of her by Ludwick and Kostka. No answers are provided for the various questions the text raises. As Kundera remarks in Life is Elsewhere: “The questions are already an answer in themselves, for as Heidegger put it: the essence of man has the form of a question (311). In Immortality, Kundera admits: “But I wasn’t certain, and in fact I wasn’t certain of anything” (378). In Slowness, we will never know what the chevalier is thinking as he leaves the chateau, or what kind of a woman Madame de T. is.

Thus the value of Kundera’s novels lies, not in solving any problems nor in answering any great questions, but in displaying a beautiful drama of possibilities. It invokes the famous Surrealist phrase of Lautreamont which Kundera quotes: “the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table” of the same theme (Art, 77). His novels are “an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become” (Art, 26), a “poetic meditation on existence” (Art, 35). The novelist is, in his own words, “neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence”(Art, 44).



Note:

[i] Ian McEwan, “ An Interview with Milan Kundera”, in Malcolm Bradbury, ed., The Novel Today (London: Fontana, 1990),p.209.

Works cited:

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. 1986; Calcutta: Rupa, 1992.

------------------- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. 1978; Calcutta: Rupa, 1992.

------------------- Identity. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.

------------------- Immortality. Calcutta: Rupa, 1991.

------------------- The Joke. 1967; Calcutta: Rupa, 1993.

------------------- Life is Elsewhere. 1974; Calcutta: Rupa, 1992.

------------------- Slowness. Calcutta: Rupa, 1996.

------------------- The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 1984; London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

Bradbury, Malcolm. Ed. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. 1977; rev.ed. London: Fontana,1990.

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