Kundera, a European Novelist
Milan Kundera (born in 1929) is one of the most prominent and widely read authors in contemporary France and is also acknowledged by an international reading public. This apparently simple statement is not, however, free of paradox: paradoxes are apparently not only a distinctive feature of Kundera’s fiction, but also characterize his image as an author and the reception of his works. It is arguable whether Kundera, who in 1975 emigrated from Czechoslovakia to France and who until the early 1990s wrote his novels—which are mostly set in Czechoslovakia or in the circles of Czechoslovak émigré(e)s—in Czech, should be called a French author at all. Calling him a Czech author, however, is no less problematic. From the very beginning, he refused the label of Czech emigrant dissident, which until 1989 was attached to him frequently (see, e.g., Petras 69–70). His irritation stems from the purely political content of the concept of “dissident.” Kundera does not position himself as a political thinker, but as a novelist, one whose existence implies independent thought—not, however, primarily in the sense of a critique of a particular political system, but more generally (see, e.g., Finkielkraut 37; McEwan 24; Petro 82). He compared Western journalism—which views an “East European” emigrant author in an exclusively political light—with the falsifications of Stalinism (see, e.g., O’Brien, “Meaning” 7).
There is, however, more to it than that. Kundera does not want to be regarded as a Czech author, since in his opinion the habit of classifying authors according to their nationality is misguided and he argues that in European literature national boundaries are not essential. He claims to represent European culture as a whole; more specifically, he suggests a cultural division of Europe that he considers more valid than that defined by the borders of nation-states and thinks of himself as representing Central Europe. Prague and “Bohemia,” as he calls his country of origin, are parts of Central Europe, that is, of the Habsburg Empire—particularly its nineteenth- to the twentieth-century formation, the Austro-Hungarian empire—which Kundera considers one of the most culturally creative parts of Europe (see, e.g., Kundera, The Art 124–25; “The Tragedy”; The Curtain 45–47; “The Czech Wager”; see also Pichova, “Milan Kundera”). His former home country is important for Kundera insofar as it represents the culture of Europe but at the same time he views his act of moving from Prague to Paris as an escape from the situation in his Europe of culture, that is, a Europe that undergoes dramatic and negative changes. He moved to France because he was convinced that the “Russian night” which had fallen upon Czechoslovakia in 1968 would last forever and that hence his Europe of culture was forfeited in his home country (“An Introduction” 476; Finkielkraut 35–36).
One might presume that Kundera’s commitment to a European identity rather than to any particular national one makes it impossible for him to identify even with French culture, although from his youth he had admired French literature, especially surrealism and avant-garde poetry (see Bauer 111; Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 149–51; du Plessix Gray 49); subsequently he often expressed his admiration for and indebtedness to the eighteenth-century French novel, especially Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (see, e.g., An Introduction; Testaments 77; see also Pierce; Raynard). Kundera’s self-identification as a European author rather than as a representative of any particular national literature may explain his decision not to return to his native country even after the political shift whereby Czechoslovakia was released from Soviet domination and later divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Yet Kundera says that the reasons to not return were partly “existential and incommunicable”; incommunicable because “too intimate” but also because “too wounding for the others,” for “what is worse [than the emigrant’s pain of nostalgia] is the pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign” (Testaments 93). To the disappointment of many of his former compatriots, he declared himself to be satisfied with his life and work in France.
An author living in translations
Another paradox in Kundera’s identity is that regardless of his emphasis on a shared European culture and on the need to overcome national boundaries, the fact is that an author’s very instrument, his or her language, represents a fundamental restriction on such unity. During most of his career as a novelist, Kundera has been deprived of his native reading public, and as a consequence of the political changes he was bereft of his audience already before his emigration. During the 1950s and early 1960s Kundera had established himself in his home country as a poet and the author of two successful plays; and the publication of his first novel Žert (The Joke) in 1967 was an event that provoked considerable discussion. After 1968, when Soviet tanks crushed the “sister nation’s” efforts to build a “human-faced socialism,” Kundera lost his teaching position at the film academy and the possibility of pursuing his career as a writer. In 1970 all his works were blacklisted and removed from public view (see Kundera, An Introduction 469; see also Misurella xiii) and he became persona non grata. He wrote his next two novels, La Vie est ailleurs (Life Is Elsewhere; Život je jinde) and La Valse aux audieux (Farewell Waltz [also published in English as The Farewell Party]; Valčík na rozloučenou) not knowing whether they would ever be published (Elgrably 66). Yet, as his first novel had brought him fame—it was received favorably in France and was translated into several languages—Kundera was able to have his next two novels published in France in 1973, where La Vie est ailleurs was awarded the publisher Gallimard’s Medicis Prize for best foreign novel of the year; other translations in several languages followed. Život je jinde (Life Is Elsewhere) and Valčík na rozloučenou (Farewell Waltz) were first published in Czech in 1979 by an emigrant publishing house in Toronto (Sixty-Eight Publishers) run by Joseph Škvorecký and thus it reached only a negligible fraction of the Czech reading public.
Well before Kundera moved to France in 1975, he was an author who established contact with his readers almost exclusively through translations. In France he continued writing his novels in Czech and publishing them in translation, until 1993, with the publication of L’Immortalité (1993) (Nesmrtlnost; Immortality; it has emerged since that Kundera himself, simultaneously with the Czech version, created the French “translation” of the novel allegedly prepared by an “Eva Bloch,” see Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 154). The essay collection, L’Art du roman, published in 1986 (The Art of the Novel, 1988), was Kundera’s first book written directly in French. Subsequently Kundera published La Lanteur (1994) (Slowness [1996]), L’Identité (1997) (Identity [1998]), and L’Ignorance (2003) (Ignorance [2002]), but these novels in French do not change the fact that the major, and weightier, part of his fiction was originally written in Czech, and hence accessible to most of the reading public only in translation.
Thus, Kundera is literally an author living in translation. He himself acknowledges that for him, translations mean everything (e.g., The Art of the Novel 121). His books are read, criticized, judged, accepted, or rejected as translations; consequently, he cannot possibly afford not to be scrupulous about the translations of his texts (see Woods, Translating 25). Between 1985 and 1987 Kundera dedicated a great deal of time to the editing of the French translations of his novels written in Czech (see The Art 13, 41) and he recognized these as equally authentic with regard to the Czech versions. He also intervened in the translation of his novels into other languages, especially English, and rumors of his fierce disputes with the translators have reached the public (see Crain; Woods, Translating; “Traduction”). From Kundera’s point of view, the conflict has arisen from his insistence that the translations be absolutely faithful to the original. He considers his own language to be clear and explicit and thus his insistence that the translator find exact equivalents; he also insists that nothing in the repetition of words or in the punctuation is allowed to be altered (see Crain 44; Elgrably 63–64; Woods, “Traduction” 200; see also the chapter on translating Kafka in Testaments). His demands are often difficult to meet and conflict frequently with the translator’s efforts to produce a translation that is as natural and easy to understand as possible.
The problem with the translations, however, goes deeper than Kundera’s interest in accuracy. Michelle Woods, who has studied the Czech originals and the various translations of Kundera’s works, argues that the difficulty—in addition to what I discuss above—is caused by the fact that Kundera takes the opportunity of close cooperation with his translators to rewrite parts of his texts with the result that the “translations” actually are new, authorized versions of the original. The changes may be—as in the case of The Joke—abridgements Kundera considered necessary, since the omitted passages required background knowledge available only to Czech readers (see Crain; Stanger). Woods also finds differences in wording, sentence structure, as well as other aspects of the text. For example, this process of rewriting is repeated in different versions of the English text and the “original” Czech text is revised for reprinting as well. In the case of The Joke, Woods counts four different versions in Czech, three in French, and no fewer than five in English, leading her to speak of Kundera’s “pathology of rewriting” (Translating 66). According to Woods, “Kundera has rewritten almost all his Czech ‘originals’ so that the translations have no original text to be faithful to” (42–43). She concludes that in Kundera’s oeuvre, the “definitive” (or the “authentic”) text “is not necessarily a final one. It represents two things: firstly, Kundera’s belief that it is the best version in the language at the given time, and, secondly, the degree of Kundera’s own involvement in the translation process” (83).
This textual plurality causes confusion not only among readers but especially among scholars, who are faced with the question of where to find the “real” Kundera. Against his critics, Kundera has defended his right to do whatever he likes with his texts: “Because what an author creates doesn’t belong to his papa, his mama, his nation or to mankind; it belongs to no one but himself; he can publish it when he wants and if he wants; he can change is, revise it, lengthen it, shorten it” (The Curtain 98). Yet, however important he considers the author’s freedom to change his texts, Kundera certainly does not aim at encouraging critics and scholars to focus on comparing the different versions of his texts.
Kundera’s alterations demonstrate that he does not conceive of his readership as “an entity so abstract, so vague that I couldn’t even try to predict its reaction or taste,” as he once stated (qtd. in du Plessix Gray 51; see also Elgrably 67). On the contrary: ever since he began to write “for [his] translators only” (“Comedy” 4), he has sought to ensure that his texts have reached his readers exactly as he has meant them. Since his first book written in France, Le Livre du rire et d’oubli (1985) (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [1979]; Kniha smíchu a zapomnění [1981]) he has striven to write as clearly and simply as possible and to choose expressions which are semantically accurate and unambiguous (see Biron 3; Chvatik, Die Fallen 114; Garfinkle 55; Gautier 53; Richterová 51–52) so as “to minimize the translator’s potential interference” (Baranczak 249). He also elaborates upon certain concepts with the help of several other European languages. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for instance, Kundera elucidates the Czech word “lítost” by means of several examples, and in L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (1984) (The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]; Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí [1985]) he discusses the concept of “compassion” in the light of the etymology of the word in different European languages.
The fact that Kundera can reach his readers only through translation may, however, not be the only reason for his struggle to control readers’ encounters with his texts. In his work on the development of the Czech literary scene during 1967–68, written shortly after the Soviet invasion, Dušan Hamšik tells us that Kundera was already then well-known for his habit of constantly reformulating and rewriting his texts as well as for his reluctance to give way to the dictates of censorship, often at the cost of being unable to publish his writings at all (83–86, 91). Kundera also introduced considerable changes in new editions of his works, for instance, his early collections of poems. Not merely a personal trait of the author, this process probably also indicates the author’s vigilance concerning changes in the political atmosphere. What was allowed to be said, and how, changed considerably over a relatively short period of time, with the general atmosphere becoming more permissive in the 1960s. Kundera’s great concern for transmitting the author’s meaning to readers as authentically as possible is probably to some extent a legacy of being able to publish his texts for twenty years only under more or less severe censorship (see Hamšík 83; Hybler 79).
Kundera’s career as a novelist is characterized by yet other paradoxes. What brought him general public recognition was the 1988 film adaptation of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Philip Kaufman. The paradox here is Kundera’s objection to the film versions of novels in general. He values the novel, along with music, more highly than any other art form and relegates the adaptation of a novel to another medium, the screen, as a banal oversimplification of the original work. In Immortality the author’s alter ego says: “The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential” (266; see also Testaments 165). The film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being also fueled the misconception that Kundera’s work deals above all with “sex and politics” (see Petro, “Authenticity”). It is true that the topics of sex and politics could easily account for Kundera’s popularity; however, he denies that his novels deal with politics. Indeed, in his work human behavior is analyzed in the context of specific historical-political conditions, but his attention is always focused on human beings, on their “anthropological possibilities”; the political system or ideology merely constitutes the framework for the manifestation of particular human possibilities (see, e.g., The Art 143; see also O’Brien, “Falling” 95). Moreover, although sexual intercourse is abundantly depicted in Kundera’s novels, this is not an end in itself either. The reason for the presentation of the sexual act again and again derives from Kundera’s conviction that it is precisely in this act that the individual’s deepest concerns and the true nature of the relation between two human beings are acutely revealed (see McEwan 30; Raddatz 100).
All in all, Kundera can be regarded as a paradoxical “product” of the historical tumults of twentieth-century Europe. He is a novelist for whom the novel represents the art of the word and the very essence of European culture, but whose texts are conveyed to his readers in translation only and who is an expatriate representative of Central Europe who for a long time, during which he created his most important works, considered that this Europe no longer existed. Nevertheless, Kundera would disapprove of regarding a novelist as the product of any particular historical circumstances. To the contrary, for him being a novelist means breaking away from the grip of history and residing in the realm of freedom (Testaments 15–16). The novel as a genre has a history of its own in which the individual author occupies his place; but this is a history in which, unlike world history, freedom is realized (Testaments 15). If the relationship between these two kinds of history seems contradictory or paradoxical, this should come as no surprise from an author according to whom all of Europe, that is, the world to which he himself and the entire tradition of the novel belong, are living in, as he calls it, “the period of terminal paradoxes” (The Art 13).
Brno, Prague, Paris
Ann Jefferson has made the interesting remark that Kundera’s leaving Prague for Paris was in fact already his second “exile” because he had earlier chosen to leave his home town, the Moravian city of Brno, to move to Prague. The fact that his father was an influential figure on the Moravian cultural scene—he was a teacher at the Brno Conservatory, a pianist and a scholar of Moravian folk music and of Leos Janáček—suggests that Kundera’s leaving the regional center for the capital of the country is to be understood as a conscious choice of his future circle of influence (see Jefferson 120–21). In arguing that Janáček’s remaining in the province definitely obstructed recognition of his true status as a great innovative composer on a European scale (see Testaments 132–39, 179–95; Encounter 127–42), Kundera is commenting obliquely on his own decision not to remain in the province, which he later extended to the demand that not only he himself but also authors, composers, and artists in general should ignore national borders and take their place on the European scene. Nevertheless, Kundera acknowledges his debt to his native town not only by expressing his great admiration for Janáček but also by regarding himself, as a composer of novels, a follower of Janáček’s “aesthetic rule,” according to which “only absolutely necessary (semantically necessary) notes have a right to exist” (Testaments 187–88). Kundera says that his own “art of ellipsis” is a result of following this “Janáčekian” imperative: “to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense” (The Art 73). Furthermore, in his first novel, The Joke, when the protagonist returns to his Moravian hometown after several years of absence, he is once again smitten by the spell of Moravian folk music, whose different historical layers are reflected upon in a digression with score samples. In the novel, this re-encounter has of course other than merely autobiographical relevance: identification with folk culture is presented as an alternative in art and life.
Kundera started out as a student of music, but later chose literature as his main field of art. That musical structures serve as patterns for the construction of his novels suggests how closely related these two fields are in his conception of art. However, on the literary scene of the early 1950s Kundera appeared neither as a novelist nor as a distanced observer, but as an author who was well adapted to the prevailing cultural climate. Of his first three published works, two—Člověk zahrada širá (1953) (Man, the Vast Garden) and Monology (1957) (Monologues)—are collections of poems, while the third, Poslední máj (1955) (The Last May) is a long poem on a single topic. These works secured him a significant place on the Czech literary scene.
Since the nineteenth century, lyrical poetry had been dominant in Czech literature. During the First Republic of 1918–1938, the traditional national romantic current in lyrical poetry competed with that of the the modernists, who found their ideals in Apollinaire and other French surrealist and avant-garde poets (see, e.g., Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 149–51). After the communist coup in February 1948, only the former mode of writing was permitted. The young Kundera was a devoted admirer of surrealist and avant-garde poetry and translated a number of Apollinaire’s poems into Czech (Chvatík, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 151). He joined the communist party at the age of eighteen, just before the February coup; but only a couple of years later, in 1950, he was expelled from the party because he had written a parody of a poem by the celebrated communist poet Vítězslav Nezval (see Steiner, The Deserts 207). He was restored to party membership in 1956, but expelled once again in 1970 during the period of “normalization,” that is, the reestablishment of Stalinist rule after the Soviet invasion in August 1968.
Člověk zahrada širá (Man, the Vast Garden) is a Stalinist collection of poems, the kind of poetry allowed to be published at the time. It includes a sequence of six poems entitled “The Grand March” (see Hybler 83), the socialist myth of the people’s common battle for a better future; a myth that Kundera later ridicules and criticizes in The Joke and especially in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. During the Prague Spring—a period that actually started in the early 1960s and culminated in 1967–68, a time of the slackening of Stalinist rule in Czechoslovakia in which the loosening of censorship allowed innovative literature to flourish and critical voices to be heard (see Finkielkraut 34–36; Elgrably 62)—Kundera was asked in an interview with Antonin J. Liehm if it was difficult for him to be a poet in the Stalinist period in the 1950s, as he was not allowed to follow his taste for the avant-garde. He answered that although he saw that the introduction of socialism caused a darkening of the cultural scene, he was in favor of socialism because he saw it as a necessary stage in the process of the liberation of humankind (96). He added, however, that now (in 1966) he was inclined to see in his then willingness to cooperate with Stalinism a gesture of an intellectual’s self-negation: an intellectual is an individual who doubts everything, and nothing more than himself, and therefore he can end up acting in contradiction to his dearest convictions (Liehm, “Interview” 96–97). Kundera also commented that although the poems in his first collection were relatively conventional, they were criticized by the censors as overly individualistic and even hostile to the party (Liehm, “Interview” 98).
Poslední máj (The Last May) is a long poem about the communist poet Julius Fučík’s heroic resistance against his nazi interrogator. Fučík, who was executed by the nazis, was in the 1950s an icon of communist heroism and it has been suggested that Kundera wrote the poem in order to be restored to party membership (Hruby 5). The book was reprinted twice, and Woods has examined the revisions that Kundera made for the reprints in keeping with the loosening of the ideological climate: in the 1961 version the most conspicuous communist ideologemes have been removed and in the 1963 version the prisoner’s name is not mentioned at all, reflecting a shift from an explicitly communist context to a national one (Translating 71). In The Joke, written during 1961–65, and again in Life is Elsewhere, the Fučík icon is taken up again from a different, critical and ironic perspective.
In contrast to the previous books, Monology (Monologues) is a collection of erotic poems. In these poems, eroticism and sexuality are stripped of the veil of sentimentality; non- or even anti-ideological in its attitude, the collection opposes conformism, hypocrisy, grand emotions, and conventional patterns in the realm of eroticism (see Haman 141–43; Steiner, The Deserts 207). The book was criticized for its “intellectualism” (Haman 143) and “cynicism” (Liehm, “Interview” 99) and for presenting love “deprived of its social content” (Hruby 5). Subsequent critics remarked that in this collection the author’s attitude, as well as some of the themes and motifs, already come close to Kundera as we know him from his prose works (Chvatik, Die Fallen 21). In the interview with Liehm, Kundera says that what he himself still likes in the collection are “the analytic poems which demythify the erotic situation strained to the point of rupture,” and that he has removed from subsequent editions poems which were not of this kind but rather of the romantic type of “grand demonstrations” of sentiment (99).
Already in the 1950s Kundera was a respected author, not only because of his poetry but also because of his articles in a number of literary magazines (see Čulík 212). In the 1960s, when the cultural atmosphere opened up, Kundera gained further in stature. During this decade he published short stories, two plays, and a novel, Žert (1967) (The Joke). The first of the plays, Majitelé klíčů (The Owners of the Keys [1962]), is set in the period of the nazi occupation. Typical of Kundera is the conflict between the individual’s great ideological commitment and his private, intimate relationships, a dilemma for which no good or honorable solution is found. Despite its questioning of heroism, Kundera later disliked the play and considered it clichéd (see Hruby 11). The second play, Ptákovina (Nonsense [1968]), a satirical farce of eroticism and the misuse of power, written in just a few weeks (see Porter 31), was even more daring. It remained in the repertoire of several theaters until 1970 and Kundera—as an exception—allowed it to be staged in Prague again in 2008 (see Thirouin, “Le Mystère” 13).
In 1963 Kundera published Smĕšné lásky (Laughable Loves) as three booklets, containing in all ten short stories; of these, the volume published under this title in the West—first in France in 1972—contains only seven. In the stories, which in Kundera’s opinion have the novelty of combining laughter or ridicule and love, we already meet with some of the most essential themes in Kundera’s novels, such as the problem of personal identity and the unpredictable repercussions of one’s actions. Undoubtedly the most important work of this period, however, is The Joke. As Andreas W. Mytze puts it, in this work Kundera abstains from retroactively mystifying his Stalinist youth, but on the contrary “unveils this youth as what it really was and what it wanted to be but because of an inherent insufficiency could not be” (38). Kundera subjects the shared experience of the politically active youth of his generation to ruthless analysis. Although he was not the first to deal with Stalinist terror, Peter Steiner may have been right in saying that “it was Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke that in 1967 managed to vent in public the suppressed guilt of the past with unprecedented force” (The Deserts 22).
On the whole, when Kundera in an interview from the eighties describes himself as having prior to his emigration been “a relatively unknown Czech writer” (Roth 49), this is misleading; on the contrary, those familiar with the 1950s literary scene and literary-political developments in Czechoslovakia bear witness that Kundera had a high profile in the Czech literary life of the time and even more so in the 1960s (see Jungmann; Liehm, “Interview”; Porter). This is supported by the fact that from the end of the 1950s, as Milan Jungmann contends, “no significant congress or conference of the Czechoslovak Writers Union could do without his speech, and his articles were anticipated for their immense impact on public opinion” and he was known as a critic of all kinds of dogmatism and a spokesman for the need to open up Czech culture to Western and world culture (122).
Kundera’s importance is reinforced by the role he played at the legendary June 1967 Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. It was there that Czech writers for the first time clashed openly with the communist leadership and where Kundera gave the speech which, in Jan Čulík’s words, “is regarded a landmark in the history of independent, self-critical Czech thought” (214). In his speech, Kundera demanded that writers have to be independent of politicians and of ideological guardians. Typically of Kundera, however, the speech focused on literature rather than on politics. He commented on the tumultuous nature of Czechoslovak history throughout the twentieth century. The collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of World War I was followed by a brief period of democracy, cut short in 1938 by nazi occupation, World War II and after that the turn to Stalinist socialism in 1948, and now (in 1967) a period of reformed socialism. The experience of these turns and catastrophes, he pointed out, offer writers “an inexhaustible mine” of materials which compels them to ask the most essential questions concerning humankind, its being, and its history. In his speech, Kundera exhorted Czechoslovak authors to transcend national limits, that is, to reject provincialism and to strive for significance on the European literary scene. In his opinion, a people legitimizes its existence as an independent nation—its refusal to be assimilated into a greater culture (which meant, for Czechs in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, into German culture)—only by original cultural achievements which signify important innovations at a European level (see Hamšík 169–70).
The government’s censors prohibited the printing of Kundera’s speech in the Writers’ Union’s periodical Literární noviny, which was one of the most important channels of the reform movement (for a description of the congress and the ensuing difficulties with the censors, see Hamšik). In the following months, however, the influence of the reform movement increased in all areas of society, culminating at the beginning of 1968 in the election of a new, reformist Central Committee headed by Alexander Dubček. Liehm comments on this development, saying that it was literature, or more generally Czechoslovak culture, that overthrew the regime (Trois 15). Tanks of the Soviet army brought a violent end to the anti-Stalinist reformist movement in August of that year, but the subsequent process of “normalization,” that is, the overturning of all reformist changes, took several more months to complete.
In an article entitled “The Czech Destiny,” published in the Christmas 1968 issue of Literární noviny, Kundera comments on the situation. He starts out on a general level, repeating the idea that the small European nations have to legitimate their existence by contributing something essential to European culture. According to Kundera, the Czechs have now achieved this through their attempt to create a democratic socialism—an attempt which has altered the history of the twentieth century (“Le Destin” 95). In the developments of the autumn of 1968, he insists on seeing a “battle of retreat,” which does not necessarily signify ultimate defeat: there is still the hope that the spirit of the Prague Spring has not been vanquished but may be able to turn the future, “not the distant, but the near future” into something better (“Le Destin” 96; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine). Kundera’s views were heavily criticized by Václav Havel, then a playwright and a noncommunist, who in an article entitled “The Czech Destiny?” accuses Kundera of glorifying the past—especially the near past of August 1968—at the cost of neglecting the necessities of the present. It is true that everything has not yet been lost—people are not yet imprisoned because of their opinions—but the fundamental civil rights of citizens, such as freedom of speech and assembly, as well as the legalization of political pluralism, are endangered. According to Havel, rather than soothing ideas about a “Czech destiny,” what is needed at the moment is taking responsibility for the present by concrete political action (see Havel, “Le Destin”). Kundera responded in an offended and offensive tone and Havel continued in a similar vein (see West). In the light of what actually happened in Czechoslovakia after 1968, it is easy—perhaps too easy—to judge who was wrong in the debate and who was right (see Haman 153–54; West). I suggest that it is relevant to observe that the two writers are arguing from different perspectives: where Havel is arguing from the perspective of the concrete political situation in Czechoslovakia, Kundera even here, after the dramatic political defeat, is looking at the situation from a more general cultural perspective.
In France, Kundera tirelessly emphasizes that he is a novelist, not a political thinker or a philosopher. This view of his might be seen as the reason for his repudiation, after his arrival in France, of his early, politically committed works. However, Kundera himself has commented on this, saying that a writer is entitled to exclude from his oeuvre whatever he considers to be immature or unessential. The oeuvre, Kundera declares, “is what the writer will approve in his own final assessment” (The Curtain 96). When Kundera moved to the West, he left his past behind. Except for Laughable Loves and The Joke, he forbade any reprints, translations, or performances of his works published before 1970. In an essay written for the planned publication of his collected works in Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the 1990s, Kundera lists the works he considers as belonging to his oeuvre, assigning them opus numbers like the ones composers give their works. The list includes Laughable Loves and all his novels up to then, as well as the play Jacques and His Master, a “free variation on Diderot’s novel, Jacques le fataliste,” and the essay collection The Art of the Novel (see Misurella 164). The catalog of his works is based on well-defined principles: it excludes everything he considers immature (such as his poetry) or incomplete (such as his two first plays) and everything incidental resulting from external circumstances, such as most of his essays, almost all interviews, and the numerous articles on Czech literature he published in Western newspapers (Misurella 162–64). Thus, Kundera swept aside most of his literary career in Czechoslovakia, presenting himself to the international public as a “mature” novelist (Crain 47). He took the opportunity offered by his emigration to the West to construct a stylized and simplified public image of himself as an author—an opportunity most authors do not have.
Kundera has been accused by his compatriots, and more recently by others as well, of trying to airbrush his collaboration with the Stalinist regime by “forgetting” his lyrics (Bílek, “The East” 110; Gautier 53; Woods, Translating 86). It has even been speculated that because of this he has now definitively lost his chance for the Nobel Prize in Literature, since he is no longer acceptable as a “moral institution.” For example, Doris Boden asks whether it is right to assign a writer such a role, independently of his or her willingness to assume it (“Kein” 16).
Kundera definitely rejects the idea of judging a writer according to his or her political or moral merits and faults: a writer is responsible only to his or her art and is to be judged solely by literary criteria. In part 8 of Testaments Betrayed, entitled “Paths in the Fog,” Kundera discusses—and condemns—the contemporary practice of placing writers and thinkers before a tribunal which judges them according to their iniquitous political commitments. First, it is too easy to condemn someone for his or her political ideas in retrospect when the repercussions of a policy have become evident to everyone; the people living through that situation were walking in a fog where they could see scarcely anything in front of them (see also Palouš 41–42). For example, Mayakovsky is “a tremendous poet, one of the greatest” despite being a Stalinist and Céline, despite his early anti-Semitism, is one of the great novelists of the century and one who was able to transform the horrors of century “into existential wisdom” (Testaments 231–32). Kundera does not refer to himself in this context, but it is clear that he is responding to the “tribunal” by which he now feels he is being accused. Moreover, the comment, “Some of these people are undergoing a double trial, first accused of betraying the revolution, then accused for services they had rendered it earlier” applies to him as well (Testaments 230).
Kundera is probably powerless with regard to the habit of the Nobel Committee, and of the general public, of judging writers in terms of their moral and political integrity. In France he consistently followed the principle that the writer’s task is not to participate in politics, nor to apologize if he or she has once done so—since this would be futile—but to use his or her experience as material in achieving some fundamental knowledge of human beings (see also Woods, Translating 103). He has seen this in particular as the task of the novelist. Thus the shift from lyrical poetry to the novel did not mean for him merely a change of literary genre (Testaments 156), but a profound transformation in his view of the world, a transformation which he compares to a religious conversion: “I did not leave poetry, I betrayed it. For me, lyrical poetry is not only a literary genre but above all a conception of the world, an attitude vis-à-vis the world. I left this attitude as one leaves a religion” (Biron 17). Renouncing lyrical poetry, or, rather, the lyrical stance, meant for Kundera renouncing an attitude to the world which makes acceptance of a totalitarian ideology possible. In his novels from The Joke onward, Kundera describes what he now calls the “lyrical attitude” and in Life Is Elsewhere, which tells the story of the young revolutionary and poet Jaromil, this is the main theme.
Kundera’s ironical attitude toward lyricism, which in his opinion is typical of young age, does not merely reflect his distance from his own youth; rather, the subject of analysis in his books is the experience of a whole generation (see Liehm, Trois 16, 21). In a sense, his own development follows the general development of the cultural climate: he feels that his new “novelistic” attitude accords with the atmosphere of the reform movement of the 1960s, which was opposed to the “lyrical” 1950s. In his view, the reformist movement of the Czech 1960s expressed a certain skepticism based on experience, thus being the direct opposite of the 1948 revolution, which was a manifestation of the lyricism of youth (Encounter 117; Finkielkraut 36). For Kundera, skepticism is a sign of maturity and therefore something to strive toward. He describes the culture of the 1960s as open-minded, innovative, and creative; in general, culture then played a leading role in society (“The Tragedy”; see also Finkielkraut 34–35). This was all lost after 1968. To illustrate the experience of this loss, Kundera uses the example of the horror with which the Czech intelligentsia received the news that all cultural periodicals were being banned. This horror remained completely beyond the grasp of Kundera’s French acquaintances who long ago had laid cultural periodicals aside and were discussing television programs instead (“The Tragedy” 37).
In Czech literary history, a concurrence and alternation of two modes of writing existed, corresponding to the lyrical 1950s and the skeptical 1960s: “an artistic, poetic tradition” and a “far more intellectual, rationalist, practical, pragmatical” tradition of prose writing (Wellek 30) often characterized precisely by the word “skeptical” (Holy 29). While Kundera suggests that it is only the former which was closely connected to politics, Steiner emphasizes that, starting with the nineteenth-century national revival, Czech literature as a whole was assigned an important role in society. Writers were assigned the status of “pundits expected to proffer authoritative positions on all relevant public matters” (Deserts 6; see also Hamšík 161). Peter Petro connects Kundera and his whole generation of writers with the skeptical—but not nonpolitical—atmosphere of the 1960s (“Authenticity” 44). It is true that Kundera’s novels and short stories are comparable to the writing of a Bohumil Hrabal or Ludvík Vaculík in their sense of irony, satire, and the absurd and the set of their imagination against both realism and lyrical sentimentalism (see Hattingh; Liehm, “Interview”; Rostinsky) or to the works of Vladislav Vančura, about whom Kundera published the study Umění románu (The Art of the Novel) in 1961 before starting his own career as a novelist (see Chvatik, Die Fallen 38–43). However, when he speaks about the art of the European novel in general or his own novels in particular, he scarcely mentions earlier or contemporary Czech authors, albeit he has published several articles on Czech literature and Czech authors in various periodicals (Misurella 163–64). Just as in his study of Vančura he emphasizes the author’s position as part of European literature (Chvatik, Die Fallen 38), he does not locate himself in the Czech literary tradition but stresses being part of the European tradition of the novel. This is not inconsistent with his avowed attachment to the Czech tradition of skepticism in that he often names skepticism as the core of the Europe novel as a whole.
To make his point, Kundera in his later writings introduces the Goethean concept of Weltliteratur. For him “world literature” does not refer merely to works which are commonly ranked as supreme in terms of all literatures—even if this evaluative aspect sometimes seems to be decisive in Kundera’s thought (see Biron 3; on the concept of world literature, see, e.g, Auerbach 301; Birus; D’haen, Damrosch, and Kadir; Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári; Varsava). Even more important is the point that national literatures are no longer seen as self-sufficient entities, coming into contact with each other only in certain special cases; rather, for Kundera there exists a common tradition of world literature, or at least Western literature—or, what is most important for Kundera, of the European novel (The Curtain 31–56; see also Garfinkle; Slater; Tachtiris). This is the context within which he places himself as a novelist and within which he wants to be read and evaluated.
In The Curtain Kundera defines an intermediary entity between the “large” context of the world and the “small” context of the nation and says that for him this entity is Central Europe (45). Kundera’s concept of Central Europe resembles a tendency among Czech intellectuals reaching back to the so-called Revivalism of the nineteenth century to place their nation in the center of Europe (see Macura). Kundera’s conception is, however, neither nationalistic nor political but cultural. He emphasizes his attachment to the Central European novel of the twentieth century, whose main representatives for him include Jaroslav Hašek, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, and Witold Gombrowicz. These authors—three of whom wrote in German, one in Czech, and one in Polish—are for him “the Pleiades” that revealed to him the possibilities of the “post-Proustian” European novel. It is their innovations which he takes up and goes on to develop in his own work (see “The Tragedy” 109, The Art).
Kundera develops his idea of Central Europe in several connections, but of special importance is the article “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” originally published in The New York Review of Books in April 1984. In defining Europe, the opposite for him is not the Americas; rather, he sees the cultures of Americas as extensions or—in the case of South America—as a fringe of European culture (The Curtain 82). The juxtaposition is thus not one of the “Old” and the “New” World, nor is it the one of Europe and an underdeveloped Third World. Kundera ignores the critique of Eurocentrism common in contemporary political and cultural debates. The postcolonial perspective emphasizes that European history and art, or what in Europe is defined as rationality, cannot be identified with history, art, and rationality as such, as assumed traditionally following the Enlightenment; critics of Eurocentrism see in this generalization an unjustifiable claim to European supremacy. Conversely, according to Kundera, it is precisely Europe—as a cultural entity—which today is threatened and in need of advocates. Rather than acting as colonizer, Europe is in danger of being colonized (on this, see also Finkielkraut 45). The first time Kundera experienced this happening was when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and European culture was forced to withdraw.
For Kundera the antithesis of Europe is thus “the East,” which for him is practically equivalent to Russia (a name he used to refer to the Soviet Union). The opposition between “Europe” and “the East” he sees as a cultural antagonism, an opposition between (Western) Europe and Byzantium (see also The Curtain 43). For him Europe embodies the great adventure that started with the Reformation and the Renaissance, when, after the dethronement of God, man became the measure of everything; “the East” was excluded from all of this (“An Introduction” 476; see also Matejka). In Kundera’s view, the spirit of Europe is essentially the same as that of the novel: a spirit of quest, adventure, questioning, and challenging, a spirit of the relativity of truths and even of skepticism. “Russia” signifies for him a preference for emotion over reason, which in his opinion leads to totalitarianism and a prohibition on questioning things and on pluralism (Kundera’s view was opposed by Joseph Brodsky, the Russian emigrant poet and Nobel Laureate, who pointed out that Soviet communism was of Western origin; see Brodsky; Cooke; Petro, “Apropos” 80). Kundera argues that the geographical area which in the West is indistinctly and mistakenly labeled as Eastern Europe, that is, those parts of Europe that after World War II belonged to the political sphere of Russia (the Soviet Union), actually consists of two different cultures: on the one hand Russia, the genuine “East,” on the other such countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, which belong to the West and to the cultural Europe. In fact, Kundera considers the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy the cradle of twentieth-century European culture: not only did they give rise to the creators of the “post-Proustian novel,” but also to figures like Husserl, Freud, and Schönberg, who led European culture in new directions.
Kundera’s “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” soon reprinted in several languages, attracted much attention and had an impact on the ongoing discussion on European identity (see, e.g., Abrams 195; Bílek, “Constructing”; Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller 444–46; Waever 178–80). A particularly lively debate was provoked by the German translation of the article, in which “Central Europe” was translated as “Mitteleuropa.” The notion of “Mitteleuropa,” which refers geographically to approximately the same area as Kundera’s “Central Europe,” has a political and ideological history of its own (see, e.g., Hagen; Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller). It was first introduced in 1915 by the German liberal-nationalist politician and author Friedrich Naumann as referring to the area east of Germany, indicating that this was an area of German hegemony. During World War I, the Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk suggested the existence between West and East, that is, between Germany and Russia, of a middle zone, which might function as a bridge between the two (see Le Rider; Schulze Wessel). Kundera, however, objects to both uses of the concept, and rejects the notion of “Mitteleuropa” as a whole; this part of Europe is for him not a bridge between East and West but definitely part of the West, even if at present (in 1984) occupied by the East. If anything is specific to this geographical part of Europe, it is its nature as “a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural variety, a small arch-European Europe,” characterized by “the greatest variety within the smallest space” (“The Tragedy” 33). Thus, the discussion provoked by the article adds another paradox to the Kunderan list of paradoxes: his defense of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary as essential parts of Europe, or even as a small-scale “arch-Europe,” has contributed to the discussion of the specificity of Central and East European culture (on the terminological designations and history of terms and concepts for the name of the region, see, e.g., Ash; Cornis-Pope and Neubauer; Tägil; Tötösy de Zepetnek, “Comparative Cultural”).
Kundera, who in socialist Czechoslovakia warned his countrymen of provincialism and advocated an opening up in particular to French literature, thus comes to Paris, the European cultural metropolis, to represent Central Europe, which he claims to be at the center of European culture, or at least to have been so in the first half of the twentieth century. He comes to France believing that the most significant event of twentieth-century history has been the destruction of the essence of Europe in its very heart, in Central Europe. The downfall of Central Europe is the downfall of Europe in miniature (on this, see also Finkielkraut 44). This of course is his judgment at that particular historical moment, when he expected the “Russian night” that had befallen Central Europe to last “forever” (“An Introduction” 476). His concern already at this time, however, was more comprehensive, making it still, after 1989, valid: Europe did not erode merely by an attack from outside. Kundera found it scandalous that West Europeans did not share his insight, that the question of “East[ern] Europe” was considered merely in terms of a power struggle between two different political systems and not as a cultural issue. He claimed that this is because Europeans do not recognize who they really are, that is, they do not realize that the essence of Europe is its culture. As a consequence, the greatest enemy of Europe is Europe itself. In the West, a certain process of self-destruction is taking place: we live in an age of “journalism,” the dominance of the superficial and homogenizing media, which has abandoned the spirit of experimentation and questioning (“On Criticism” 14; see also Elgrably; Kramer; McEwan; Weiss). This conviction has remained unshaken by more recent historical turns in Central Europe and in his later works, Kundera’s warnings about Europeans forgetting their true identity have in fact grown even louder. Thus, as an emigrant arriving from the “edge” of Europe in one of its metropolises, Kundera speaks up on behalf of European culture to Europeans who do not see what is happening to them.
In saying that “Central Europe” is an essential part of European culture, Kundera is placing his fellow countrymen Janáček and Kafka right at the center of cultural Europe (see also Bílek, “The East” 103). In so doing, he can profess his own commitment to Czech culture without having to renounce his European identity. For Kundera it is essential that all cultural achievements be evaluated from a European perspective. He objects to artists being pasted into a national family portrait, which according to him is often the fate of the artists of “small” nations: thus, for example Gombrowicz, rather than being placed in the “large context” of the “international modern novel,” is seen as a Polish author and is thus pushed back “into the small context of the national” (Testament 192). Kundera’s protest of course concerns himself as well: he regards a “nation’s possessiveness towards its artists’ works as a small-context terrorism, reducing the whole meaning of a work to the role it plays in its homeland” (The Curtain 39) and he insists on being viewed in the “large” context, that is, within the European tradition of the novel. However, just as little as Kundera has been able to convince critics and the reading public that writers should not be judged by their political and moral positions but only by their artistic achievements, no more has he been able to prevent his novels being read in a “small,” national context. His Czech readers, who are familiar with his “prehistory,” have read his works published in the West—insofar as these have been accessible—as part of his overall career. His image as an author has therefore appeared to them less coherent than it has to his Western public, which knows him only as a novelist (see Crain 47). And it is probably not exaggeration to say that his Czech readership has tended to see his elision of the past in beginning anew in France as an act of dishonesty (see Bílek, “A Journey”; “The East” 110; Boisen, “Le Malentendu”; Thirouin and Boyer-Weinmann). In general, the reception of his work in Czechoslovakia was reserved even in the 1980s, when his fame in the West was at its highest (Petras 71).
In France, Kundera was perceived until 1989 as a dissident writer who was read in the political context of his native country, and that doubtlessly contributed to his high esteem and popularity (Baty-Delalande 237; Petras 69–70). After 1989, as Kundera was not interested in returning “home” and as his novels were no longer written in Czech or set in Czechoslovakia or among Czech emigrants, he began to be viewed as a French author, although of foreign origin (see Tautz). The reception of his works was favorable, but no longer enthusiastic (Gautier 56). Applying French standards to Kundera’s works entailed harsh criticism of the language in his first two novels written in French, La Lenteur (Slowness) and L’Identité (Identity); at the time nobody guessed that Kundera himself had already written the French “translation” of Immortality. Kundera reacted by publishing his next novel, Ignorance, first in Catalan and Castilian in 2000 and only in 2003 in French. Moreover, a French author, even one of foreign background, is expected to value French literature above all. Kundera is thus often asked about his relation to French literature, the French connection is emphasized in critiques of his works, and he is censured for intimating that he does not hold Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables in particularly high esteem (Tautz 80–81). Even more significant are certain misunderstandings, which derive, as I see it, from the inability of the French to distinguish between Kundera’s understanding of the term “European” and the French one: for the French, equating “European” with “French” appears natural (see Kundera’s analysis of the “provincialism of large nations” in The Curtain 40–43; see also Miletric 89, 116–17, 156; Slater 925; Waever 184).
In most cases—enumerated by Marie-Odile Thirouin as traits in Kundera’s novels which cause an adverse response in his French readers—it is precisely this or a similar conceptual misunderstanding that is involved. For example, when Kundera says that he follows the principles of musical composition in his novels, the French perceive only a vague metaphor, referring primarily to a kind of emotional effect (see Christoffel; Thirouin, “Le Mystère”)—which is opposite to the meaning which Kundera gives to the notion. Moreover, French critics cannot understand his unwillingness to accept the idea of littérature engagée, which is supported by well-regarded advocates of French literature (see Thirouin, “Le Mystère”). Coming from a society in which literature was subdued to political control and used as a tool in ideological work, Kundera understands the notion of “engaged writer” in the sense of the writer’s being a propagandist, a proponent of a given truth (see Baty-Delalande 236–37; Encounter 163). For Kundera, in contrast, absolute intellectual freedom is the first prerequisite to being a novelist. Furthermore, in Thirouin’s opinion, the French, who love their lyrical poetry, have difficulties with Kundera’s “antilyricism” (“Le Mystère” 14–15). In saying this, Thirouin does not pay heed to what “lyrical” for Kundera actually means. Unfortunately, those writers who, like Virginie Sauzon and Stéphane Chaudier, try to understand Kundera’s “antilyricism” by connecting it with French rationalism and the Enlightenment do not grasp Kundera’s critical approach to the lyrical attitude either, which is “Central European” rather than French. The difference is connected with the fact that Kundera’s concept of analysis differs from that of French rationalism. Consequently, Sauzon and Chaudier complain that the Kunderan analysis does not simplify, as the French one does—by reducing a complex thing to its simplest, already known constituents—but on the contrary makes the matter appear even more complex (249). This observation is correct, but it leaves undefined how Kundera’s analysis actually functions and to what purpose. Another concept difficult for French critics, as Kundera himself has remarked, is that of “kitsch,” an important concept in the Central European discussion of the arts since the Romantic era, but at least earlier fairly unknown in the West (see The Curtain 51–56).
Despite the criticism and misunderstandings, Kundera was in June 2012 awarded the prize of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in recognition of his life work as a writer in the French language and in 2007 he was awarded the Czech State Literature Prize. In addition, he has won the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, the German Herder Prize in 2000, and the Romanian Ovid Prize in 2011. The reception and the recognition of Kundera’s works show that his readers place his oeuvre in several national contexts in addition to a European context. However, this does not imply a common understanding of what a “European” writer would be and thus the identity of “the European novel” represents a more complicated problem than is suggested by Kundera’s emphasis on a common European tradition. In turn, this implies that the image Kundera has constructed of himself as a European novelist is not enough for the analysis of his texts. Instead, we need to take into account not only his specific understanding of the word “European,” but also other contexts of various extensions in order to grasp the specificity of his work, such as European modernity in literature, philosophy and history—especially the history of twentieth century—the modern “life-world” (Lebenswelt) and its changes, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. In general, I agree with the view that determining an accurate literary and cultural context for the study of an author’s work is an important methodological element in the contextual and comparative—that is, nonnational—study of literature (see, e.g., Tötösy de Zepetnek, “From Comparative”; “The New Humanities”; Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári).
Studying Kundera’s art of the novel
There are certain circumstances that make the study of Kundera difficult and that may explain why, despite his established standing, he has not been extensively studied. There is, of course, a plethora of reviews of his books and of articles, but larger-scale studies remain few. The first and most obvious reason for this is the traditional requirement for philological research that the works of the author are to be read in the original language. The reading public may read the texts in translation, but for the scholar to rely on translations is problematic, since certain features of the original text may be lost or distorted in the processes of translation. In addition, for those unfamiliar with the Czech language, it is difficult to grasp the original context of his early writings with sufficient accuracy. However, Kundera’s own insistence that he should be perceived within the great tradition of the European novel justifies an approach which does not place him in a primarily Czech context. Kundera opposes the habit of “professors of foreign literatures” of demonstrating their expertise by making “a great point of identifying with the small (national) context of the literature they teach” (The Curtain 37). Aware of the scandal of discarding the sacrosanct philological rule, he even writes: “Do I mean by this that to judge a novel one can do without a knowledge of its original language? I do indeed mean exactly that!” (The Curtain 36). The statement opens the way for international scholarship on the author’s work. Moreover, Kundera has declared the French editions of the novels written in Czech, rather than the Czech versions, to be the definitive ones (Woods, Translating ix); along with his interference in the English translations of his novels to the point that they too are as good—at least provisionally—as authorized, this means that the problem of language with regard to the works he counts as belonging to his oeuvre proper practically vanishes. While it is difficult to make a virtue of not knowing Czech in studying Kundera’s works (as in my own case), the author himself has made the disadvantage as easy to bear as possible.
Another factor that makes the study of Kundera’s works problematic is the manner in which he constructs his novels, namely, his inclination to speak out on things which are traditionally left to be articulated by scholars. He displays the thematic level of his novels conspicuously: the characters and their situations are used to unfold a theme named explicitly and often reflected upon by the narrator-author. In addition, in both his novels and his essays Kundera tells us about his own technique of writing, his concept of the novel, and how he relates to the tradition of the European novel. This means that Kundera speaks directly in the language of abstract reflection typical of literary scholarship; he writes, as it were, in a manner that saves scholars from their usual task of grasping the thematic content and formal features of the work and expressing them in the language of abstract concepts. This “assistance” may turn into a drawback, since it often seems difficult to avoid repeating what has already been said by Kundera himself. When he himself describes the structure of his novels, defines concepts such “the novel in the form of variations” or “polyphony,” or explains the most important themes of his works, for instance in the essay “Sixty-three Words” in The Art of the Novel, the scholar finds himself or herself in a difficult position in trying to avoid repeating the already known.
Nevertheless, Kundera himself is far from thinking that the author makes the work of the scholar redundant. In his article on the importance of literary scholarship and criticism he professes the view that without contextualizing reflection—“the” task of scholarship—the author would remain invisible and undefined as a literary phenomenon; the objective of scholarship and criticism is to define the place of the author in the continuum of European culture (“On Criticism” 13; see also Testaments 23). Kundera emphasizes that although his novels contain essay-like passages, he is foremost a novelist. This implies that his explanations in the essayistic parts of the novels, or in separate essays, are hypothetical and playful, rather than exhaustive, systematic, or striving for incontestable truths (The Art 78–80; The Curtain 77–78).
The scholar’s task does not consist merely of assembling and systematizing an author’s thoughts; rather, she or he has to make the author’s work more comprehensible by pointing out aspects and connections which might have escaped the attention of the author or which the author might have left unmentioned because he or she considers them self-evident. The process of making the work understood may also urge the scholar to shed light on connections which the author hopes to escape. This does not imply that the scholar should not take into account the author’s statements about his or her own work. On the contrary: what the author himself or herself focuses on can serve as a sensible starting point for research, even if his or her comments should not be considered to contain the exhaustive truth about the work. Whether in the case of Kundera or any other author, we can say that while in general the author’s comments are not “false,” they are often one-sided in that they fail to cover all relevant aspects or to elucidate the matter from a point of view which seems essential to the scholar.
As the starting point of the present study, I take up the question put forward by Kundera himself as to the place of his novels in the history of the novel and in European culture in general. Which literary periods and trends, which questions, which representatives of the novel can his works be seen as associated with, and how is he distinct from these?
Kundera has often been called a postmodernist author, a notion which associates him with the literary avant-garde of his time (see, e.g., Adams; Atkinson; Berlatsky; Bilek, “Journey” 21; Cordle 130–33; Cravens 106; du Plessix Gray 57; Eagleton 28; Gaughan 15; Lafargue 256; Lahtinen; Lodge 143, 149; Makarushka; Morello 142; Richter 58; Rizza 351; Ross 351; Weeks 142). Certain features of his novels, such as the absence of a consistent illusion of reality, metafictional reflections on the structure of the novel, the combination of different text types, or the abandonment of the “grand narratives” of history have been considered as evidence of his postmodernity. Kundera himself, however, does not call himself a postmodernist, nor does he talk about postmodernity or postmodernist literature as a phenomenon of the contemporary world (in fact, in Encounter, he mentions the word “postmodern” in a pejorative sense [117]). This, however, does not necessarily imply that he cannot be regarded as a postmodernist—albeit as yet no consensus has been reached as to the criteria of postmodernism. Yet, Kundera himself defines his identity as a novelist in relation to the various meanings of the concept of “modern,” some of which are positively valued, others negatively. First, he views European culture as a fundamentally modern phenomenon and in this sense for him being modern is necessarily positive (The Art 151–52). He relates himself, however, to a narrower form of modernism and sees himself under the roof of the “post-Proustian” European novel, which he has characterized as “antimodern modernism” (The Art 141–42, The Curtain 56; see also Oppenheim 9). He also is an admirer of the twentieth-century avant-garde, especially French surrealism, although it did not favor the novel (Elgrably 56; Testaments 149, The Curtain 81). At the same time, he relates with “deep mistrust” to “fashionable modernism,” which he sees as conformist and incapable of creating anything new (Raddatz 107). “Fashionable modernism” is equivalent to the endeavor to be “absolutely modern,” which eventually means nothing but keeping up uncritically with the dernier cri, whatever it implies (see The Art 42). His own concept of modernity takes a stand against this attitude of being fashionably modern.
On the basis of Kundera’s novels and with regard to his own comments, I argue that the relevant contexts of his works include European modernity in a broad sociohistorical and cultural sense, as well as the modernism of the European and especially the “Central European” novel, but also his own specific historical experiences during his youth in Czechoslovakia. Modernity in the broad sense thus refers here to modern European sensibility and thought as they are manifest in social thinking and practice, in art and philosophy. This corresponds to Kundera’s general understanding of Europe, with the novel at its heart, yet with regard to history it is less broad than in his conception. What Kundera understands by modernity does not begin, as he claims, with the dawn of the modern age in the Renaissance, but with the outgoing eighteenth century which gave birth to modern conceptions of reality and the human being. Kundera stands in this tradition but at the same time, as I endeavor to demonstrate, his views differ from it at certain crucial points, namely, in his understanding of history and individual autonomy. In literary modernism authors of special importance to Kundera are his five Central European “post-Proustian” authors, above all, as we will see, Broch and Musil (see Steinby, “Ein mitteleuropäischer”).
Elevating questions of modernity and modernism to a key position in interpreting Kundera is not inconsistent with what he himself has said about his novels; in contrast, tracing his novels to the historical events from which he sought an escape as a novelist contradicts his view. The analysis of his works and the study of their background reveal several other features which are at odds with his statements. Among other things, his thinking shows a much higher degree of thematic and even systemic unity than is implied by his conception of the novel as preoccupied with the exploration of human existence in a problem-oriented and nonsystemic way. This, however, does not mean that each and every work should not be studied as an independent entity. The attempt to study Kundera’s oeuvre “as a single text” (Le Grand, “Kundera” 1; see also Ricard 46–47) conflicts with Kundera’s basic conviction that the whole of an individual work and its composition are of the highest importance. It is not enough that the work communicates something new, it has to be original in its composition as well (Testaments 170). Thus, in Kundera’s case the concept of the “work” cannot, as in the view of structuralists or poststructuralists, be replaced with that of the “text,” seen as part of a group of texts or of a certain discourse, without losing something essential to its character.
Some of the concepts I employ to define the object of study stem from Kundera himself, but are elaborated; I also introduce new concepts in order to deal with aspects which Kundera has ignored or which he has seen differently. In my analysis of Kundera’s works, I do not apply any particular theory in the sense of a preconceived conceptual apparatus. Such a mechanical application of theoretical concepts is, I believe, what Kundera is referring to when he says that contemporary historiography and literary theory are becoming ever more “misomusistic” (Encounter 67), that is, less and less sensitive to the specificity of literature as art and more and more prone to reduce it to something—history, philosophy, theory—that preexists the literary work of art. Unlike Kundera (“On Criticism” 13), however, I do not claim that in order to be open to what is new in a literary work of art, the scholar must proceed in an essentially nonmethodical manner. On the contrary, there is a great deal of method in the way a literary scholar encounters a literary work of art by reflecting upon his or her concepts and readjusting them to fit more closely the phenomenon in question, relating different aspects of a work to those of another work in the endeavor to uncover its logic, and building up a coherent picture of the object of study without overlooking its discordances. I hope to grasp the essence of Kundera’s art through the application of carefully considered concepts and by placing it within literary history and more generally within the cultural history of Europe.
My study proceeds in a hermeneutic circle in the sense that in each chapter I analyze Kundera’s novelistic oeuvre from a different point of view so as to gradually deepen our insight into it. I start out with the essay in which he defines his own place within the “tradition of Cervantes” and identify the most important traits of his conception of the novel. In the following chapter I attempt to grasp the basic tenets underlying Kundera’s novelistic creation through an analysis of his first novel, The Joke, which already displays most of his later themes and basic questions concerning the structure of the novel. As the next step, I compare Kundera’s concept of the novel and his method to that of the authors of the “Pleiades,” above all Broch and Musil. Next, I tackle the compositions of his novels and his themes in a synoptic analysis, taking into account Kundera’s reflections upon these points. Following that, I discuss his novels separately, from Life Is Elsewhere to Immortality. Thus, I proceed from a preliminary outline of Kundera’s art of the novel toward a deeper understanding based on a detailed analysis of individual works. In the closing chapter I focus on Kundera’s most recent short novels and present some final conclusions.