Kundera and Modernity

The Thematic Structure of Kundera’s Novels

Kundera has commented extensively on the structure and technique of his novels. Nevertheless, his comments in the novels themselves and in his novelistic essays call not only for text-based examination and systematization but also for supplementation, in order to grasp the essence of the Kunderan art of constructing a novel. In speaking of his own art of the novel, Kundera overlooks, for instance, the point that ellipsis and polyphony are more than mere techniques: they represent specific modes of thinking and thus contribute to the cognitive function of the novel. What is more, Kundera’s analysis of the thematic composition of his novels is far from comprehensive. He ignores, for example, the pattern of polarity in his thinking and the organizing role of the “architheme” of sense giving.

Ellipsis as a technique and a mode of thinking

In an interview, “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” in The Art of the Novel, Kundera speaks about the structural principles of his novels. What inspired him in The Sleepwalkers, he says, were the innovations Broch had introduced but not carried out. What is not achieved in his work shows the need for “1) a new art of radical divestment (which can encompass the complexity of existence in the modern world without losing architectonic clarity); 2) a new art of novelistic counterpoint (which can blend philosophy, narrative, and dream into one music); 3) a new art of the specifically novelistic essay (which does not claim to bear an apodictic message but remains hypothetical, playful, or ironic)” (The Art 71). As noted by the interviewer, Christian Salmon, these three points seem to delineate Kundera’s own artistic project (71). “Radical divestment” describes the manner in which things are discussed in the novel. The second point concerns the relations of the different lines of the novel. Narratives are only one of the components of the novel; the second is “philosophy,” which in the novel appears in the form of a novelistic essay, and the third is dream or dreamlike narrative. The interplay between these different components, or lines, takes place in a “musical” manner, following the principle of a “novelistic counterpoint.” The third point deals with the question of what a specifically novelistic essay should be like. I start by examining Kundera’s idea of radical divestment and then analyze the dreamlike and essayistic discourses in his novels; finally, I ask how he understands the intertwinement of the different lines.

Radical divestment, as Kundera understands it, is not in the first place a matter of style, but comes close to what he calls the art of ellipsis. The rendering of the complexity of the contemporary world in a novel necessitates a technique of condensation: “There are anthropological limits—the limits of memory, for instance—that ought not to be exceeded. When you reach the end of a book you should still find it possible to remember the beginning. Otherwise the novel loses shape, its ‘architectonic clarity’ is clouded” (The Art 71–72). Kundera refers in this connection to The Man Without Qualities, but he also claims that excessive and superfluous length is a general feature of the novel as a genre. Like a sonata, in which musical themes are developed following particular rules so that the composition of the work involves a great amount of purely technical elaboration, the novel “is weighed down by ‘technique,’ by the conventions that do the author’s work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into a historical situation, fill time in the characters’ lives with superfluous episodes; each shift of scene calls for new exposition, description, explanation” (73). Kundera found a model for the construction of his own novels in the music of Janáček, in which everything superfluous is omitted so as to keep only the essential: “My own imperative is ‘Janacekian’: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense” (73).

So what is actually “superfluous” for Kundera? In the novels following The Joke, Kundera leaves out everything that is thematically insignificant. This method can be contrasted on the one hand with the traditional novel, above all the realist one, and on the other hand with the art of the novel as practiced by Musil and Broch. Kundera himself does not in this connection distinguish between these two; however, when speaking of the traditional verbosity of the novel, he is thinking about the realist novel. Its “superfluous” lengthiness follows from detailed descriptions of the milieu and the historical context, from the depiction of the characters’ appearance and background, and from the construction of the plot in the form of a gapless chain of causes and effects (The Art 34, 56–59). Without inquiring into the different functions of these conventions, Kundera speaks of the automatism of constructing a novel, as though the conventions were without any justification at all. If, like Roland Barthes, we consider the detailed, rich description typical of the realist novel as a means of creating an illusion of verisimilitude and enhancing the credibility of the story (see Barthes), it certainly is true that these goals do not accord with Kundera’s conception of the task of the novel. To him, a novelist should not strive to make the reader identify with the fictional characters; rather, the fictional events should incite the reader to ponder over questions of human existence. He also objects to the assumption that a human being can be “explained” by his or her life or living conditions. An individual’s life story is incidental and arbitrary to such an extent that for Kundera it seems completely futile to search in it for the individual himself or herself. For these reasons, anything that is not relevant to the themes of the novel is ignored, including the major part of what the characters experience.

In rejecting the goal of causal explanation or striving for the reader’s identification with the characters, Kundera is following the model set by Broch and Musil; however, neither of them is an “elliptical” writer. The bulkiness of their narratives results from the fact that, in their view, the analysis of human existence requires a detailed description of scenes and especially of what happens in the minds of the characters, comprising all the heterogeneous materials that one’s experience actually contains. By choosing a different method, Kundera assumes for himself, and assigns to his readers, a different cognitive task. I postulate the difference as follows: while Musil and Broch depict the chaotic and heterogeneous elements of the human experience in which the significant can be distinguished from the insignificant only by great effort if at all, Kundera focuses exclusively on what is existentially and thematically essential to his characters. In contrast to Musil and Broch, Kundera does not confront readers with the problem of distinguishing between the meaningful and the insignificant; in his novels all that is insignificant has been eliminated. Thus, his elliptical narration is not merely a matter of narrative technique, but it also redefines the cognitive task of the novel by confining the analysis to the existential themes in the novel.

An example of how ellipsis functions in Kundera’s narration is as follows. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the main character of the part entitled “The Border” is named Jan, but we are given no information about his age, his appearance, his profession, or even his most important human relationships, nor are we given an outline of his life story or his experiences as a whole. He simply appears, along with other characters, in a series of concrete situations. One of these characters is Edwige, with whom Jan often meets up for long and enthusiastic conversations. We are not told what the topics of these conversations are, and as a rule these evenings end with their lovemaking. Jan is not sure what the sexual act means for Edwige and he is astonished when on one occasion she reveals her opinion to him: “In the ensuing silence Edwige’s face took on the blissful smile that indicated it was getting late, that the time was coming for Jan to unwind the empty film reel on her body. After an instant’s reflection, she added: ‘Ultimately, making love isn’t that important.’ Jan’s ears pricked up: ‘You don’t think making love is that important?’ She smiled at him tenderly: ‘No, making love is not that important.’ In a moment, he completely forgot what they had been discussing, because he had just learned something that mattered much more: for Edwige, physical love was merely a sign, merely a symbolic act that confirms friendship” (The Book of Laughter 289–90). We are not told anything more about Edwige. The significance of the scene lies in the fact that it makes Jan comprehend a completely new possibility within the thematic complex of love-friendship-sexuality, namely, that physical love can function as a sign of friendship. Thus, Jan infers from Edwige’s remark a general “truth,” which has nothing to do with her personality or the particular relationship between them. From a particular scene he abstracts a universal human possibility, thus acting as the reader, too, is supposed to.

Kundera’s novels have often been criticized for not representing the characters as real men and women with rich personalities, but rendering them as the carriers of abstract ideas (see, e.g., Škvorecký; Woods, Translating 171). For Kundera, what is essential in a human being is his or her life theme representing one universal human possibility. In any situation, by identifying the existential theme we can tell what is essential to this human being and we do not need to take a detour through the individual’s whole life or the traits of their character to understand them or what exactly this particular situation means to them. In his article, “Esch is Luther,” Kundera has further sharpened the universal aspect of characters in novels in general, suggesting that characters should not be understood as individuals but rather as incarnations of certain typical attitudes of being-in-the-world: the character of Esch in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is the twentieth-century counterpart of Luther (270–71; see also The Art 54–56). This is certainly an exaggeration with regard to the modern novel as a whole, but the comment is relevant when we want to understand Kundera’s own art of the novel.

The following quotation from Life Is Elsewhere exemplifies Kundera’s art of presenting what is essential in a character. Here the narrator analyzes Jaromil’s actions after joining the communist party when he follows the example of many of his fellow students in reporting on his professors’ political opinions:

Now that Jaromil has become a rigorous militant whose reports affect the destiny of adults, can I still maintain that he is on the run [from the skirts of maternal love that a lyricist sticks to]? Doesn’t it seem instead that he has reached his goal? Not at all. When he was six years old, Mama had put him in the position of being a year younger than his classmates; he is still a year younger. When he is reporting on a professor who has bourgeois opinions, it is not the professor he is thinking about but rather the young people whose eyes he is anxiously watching to see his own image in them; just as he checks his smile and hair in the mirror at home, so he checks in their eyes the firmness, manliness, and harshness of his words. He is always surrounded by a wall of mirrors, and he cannot see beyond it. (139)

Here the narrator does not give an account of any particular event; instead, a recurrent situation typical of the period after 1948 is depicted, in which Jaromil informs the Political Council as to the ideological orientation of his professors. The narrator describes the situation from a point of view that extends beyond Jaromil’s insight into his own position: he does not realize that by constantly searching for his own image in the eyes of others he is avoiding any real encounter with the world. From the recurring scenes, the narrator abstracts the essential; thus, what is presented to the reader is an explicit analysis of a universal phenomenon which manifests itself in the particular scenes. The author is not in search of the uniqueness of a person or a situation, but of the universally human as it appears in a person and a situation. In “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” Kundera says that in his novels he aims at “encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world” (The Art 71). Actually, he is not interested in the world’s complexity in its entirety or even in the complexity of an individual’s experiences as a whole, but in the complexity of particular aspects of being.

In each of his novels Kundera explores a number of themes whose complexity is demonstrated through different variations. In one of the self-reflective passages of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera defines his novel as “a novel in the form of variations” (227). Through variations on a number of themes, he endeavors to penetrate the bottomless depth of the themes. He compares such variations in a novel to Beethoven’s later musical variations, which to him represent an invitation to undertake a journey into the infinity of a theme (226; see also The Art 92). According to Kundera, we can accept the fact that we will never be able to grasp the infinity of the universe, but we cannot bear the sense of having missed the opportunity to exhaust the infinity of something within our reach, like the infinity of a beloved person such as our father (The Book of Laughter 226). The parallel Kundera draws between Beethoven’s variations on a theme and his own feelings of remorse at his father’s deathbed is strange and is actually somewhat misleading. While he urges his readers to explore the infinity of their loved ones, in his novels he does not inquire into the infinite richness of his characters’ personalities and their actions. Instead, just like Beethoven, he delves into the infinite possibilities of variations on a number of themes. Kundera’s directing his attention to certain aspects of human existence which he explores as themes is exactly what he means by his technique of ellipsis.

That a Kunderan novel is a composition of themes means that the central subjectivity in the novel is not that of any of the characters but of the author. For Kundera, it is he himself who is the creator of the work present in it as well as the one who narrates the events and comments on them, not the implied author or the narrator as separated from the real author: Kundera considers these to be unnecessary theoretical constructions, at least in his own case (see O’Brien, “Meaning”; Vibert, “Milan Kundera,” “En finir”). The author does not in his works simply mediate the world as experienced by the characters. He is free to make use of experiences selectively for his own purposes, that is, to explore the universal possibilities of human existence. Instead of giving his readers the sense that they have direct access to the experienced world of his characters, the author makes his own presence constantly felt, both as the originator of the characters and their situations and as the most important reflector of what is generally relevant in their experiences. Kundera believes that every great writer in the history of the novel discovered some possibility of human existence and examined this possibility as a theme. In Kundera’s view, the only significant difference between his own novels and the main tradition of the novel is his method of eliminating from his works all that is thematically dispensable.

The themes are in Kundera’s novels examined in connection with the characters: “Even if I’m the one speaking, my reflections are connected to a character. I want to think his attitudes, his way of seeing things, in his stead and more deeply than he could do it himself. Part 2 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with a long meditation on the interrelations between the body and the soul. Yes, it is the author speaking, but everything he says is valid only within the magnetic field of a character. It is Tereza’s way of seeing things (though never formulated by her)” (The Art 79–80). Kundera’s reflections are intellectual and distanced and he strives for clarity, even when the character’s experience is a mixture of various, not easily discernible ingredients; however, his reflections are more focused on a specific theme than those of Broch and Musil. Kundera often names the “life theme” of a character directly. For example, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas’ life theme is expressed by the words “lightness” and “weight” and in the sentence “Einmal ist keinmal,” while Tereza’s existential problem is the irreconcilability of body and soul. These examples show that a character’s existential problem does not originate in any ideology determining his or her ways of thinking. While in The Joke Kundera explores four different variants of communist ideology through the four focalizers of the novel, in his later novels the different possibilities of existence are not ideological. These possibilities are personal in the sense that they provide a key to understanding the character’s way of experiencing life; yet only in some cases is it explained why or how a certain existential question has become a particular character’s “fate.” For instance, what lies behind Tereza’s experience of the painful irreconcilability of the body and the soul is her mother; and betrayal as Sabina’s life theme in The Unbearable Lightness of Being derives from her father and her socialist education, but we are never told why “weight” and “weightlessness” are the central themes in Tomas’s life.

In fact, it is the themes and not the individuals that “bear” them that interests Kundera. Unlike the way in which individuality has been understood in modernity, that is, as the singularity of one’s personality and of one’s way of experiencing the world, in Kundera’s fiction it refers to the actualization or revelation of a universal possibility in a particular human being. Thus, the universal or general has priority over the particular. A particular case appears as an instantiation of the theme or of some of its numerous variations—but not as an individual variation on it. It is because of this presentation of his characters as carriers of general themes, along with his elimination of all nonthematic material, that Kundera’s depiction of his characters is highly abstract. Kundera himself seems to be aware of the fact that his elliptic mode of presenting characters is removed from the way we perceive human beings in everyday life. Asked in an interview about the central themes or existential questions of his own life, he replied that they are countless: “In my life, in everyone’s life, there are hundreds of motives, hundreds of themes, and I don’t know which is the important one” (Kramer 46). A real human being thus cannot be identified with any given set of life-themes. This, however, is exactly what Kundera does with his fictional characters. We might say that Kundera subordinates the verisimilitude of his fictional characters to the thematic elaboration and composition of his works.

In a sense, the reduction of his characters to their existential problems reflects Kundera’s pessimistic view of history. That the world has become a trap implies that people cannot be identified with their own experiences, which are externally and incidentally attached to them, nor with their deeds, whose consequences are beyond their control. Consequently, an individual is nothing but his or her existential problems. This view, paradoxically, includes an element of freedom with respect to History. Individuals are sought in what they themselves, standing outside of History, experience as the most important thing in their existence. The idea that individuals are “found” in the existential questions peculiar to themselves resembles Nietzsche’s idea that their character is equivalent to the recurring, typical experience in their life (Nietzsche, Beyond 59). In Kundera’s view, what characterizes an existential experience, in addition to its recurrence, is the significance ascribed to it by the person in question and its generally human validity.

Essay and dream

As quoted earlier in this chapter, in Kundera’s opinion the novel should blend elliptic narration, philosophy, and dream. In emphasizing that the post-Proustian novelists conquered territories which earlier had belonged to philosophy, he is not claiming that it is only starting with these writers that the novel has explored human existence in competition with and as supplement to philosophy. In his view, the whole Cervantean tradition of the novel has been such an exploration. What is new in the post-Proustian novel in this respect is that philosophy appears in the novel in the form of nonfictional, essayistic sections dealing with the themes of the novel.

Since in Kundera’s novels the reader’s attention is constantly diverted from the concrete events of the fictional world to the themes of the novel upon which both the characters themselves and the narrator-author reflect, the remaining step, bringing the author to the inclusion in the novel of a speculative essay, is not a great leap. The difference is further diminished by Kundera’s imperative that the essayistic sections must be “novelistic” as well. The themes are to be dealt with in the same experimental, hypothetical, playful manner as in the story (The Art 65, 78–79), resisting any tendency to present apodictic truths, to systematize, or to take a didactic tone. We can conclude that Kundera’s ideal of the specifically novelistic essay is more akin to the essayistic parts of Musil’s novel than to those of Broch’s trilogy. Despite his admiration of The Sleepwalkers, Kundera does not hesitate to maintain that the essay on the disintegration of values included in it appears more like the author’s independent study on the topic and thus lacks the relativity which is indispensable for the spirit of the novel (65, 73; on Broch and Musil see also Goltschnigg).

The demand for the creation of a novelistic essay concordant with the spirit of the novel is thus not only a matter of style but also of the concept of knowledge. For Kundera, all comprehensive theories and systems of knowledge are suspect and he regards them as connected with immaturity, lyricism, and totalitarianism. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera praises the philosophical discourse of Nietzsche as an appropriate model for introducing ideas into the novel. Nietzsche does not strive for a system of thought, but insists that we “neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us,” namely, as sudden insights or revelations; no deductions or explanations are used to bring coherence to them (148; with regard to Nietzsche’s experimental thought, see aphorisms 7, 51, 110, 289, 319, 324 in The Gay Science; see also Kaufmann 63–67). Nietzsche’s “experimental thought” corresponds to Kundera’s conception of the phenomenological exploration of themes in novels (Testaments 172–73). A further similarity between Nietzsche’s experimental and hypothetical method and Kundera’s quest for truth is that neither of them tries to grasp even a single theme in its entirety and define it once and for all, but both of them explore it in new variations over and over again.

Kundera’s “skepticism” should thus not be understood as deconstruction (see O’Brien, Milan Kundera 68; Pelikan Straus). In sharp contrast with phenomenology, deconstruction denies the possibility that the object of knowledge can be grasped directly through experience in which it presents itself to our consciousness independently of all preconceptions. Instead, deconstruction argues that an object of knowledge, or a sign, cannot be determined directly per se, but only through an endlessly regressive series of other (linguistic) signs on which it depends and which remain equally undefined (see, e.g., Derrida, On Grammatology; Writing; “I Have a Taste”). Kundera does not deconstruct experience by tracing it back to something absent or hidden, but like the phenomenologists aspires to grasp content present in experience. Kundera is of course no true phenomenologist in the strictly philosophical, Husserlian sense of the word, since he does not distinguish between the factual existence of things and their constitution in consciousness, which for Husserl is a basic tenet of phenomenology. In Kundera’s phenomenology, it is not the “natural” attitude that is being opposed, namely, the assumption that things exist independently of human consciousness. The main target of his criticism is psychologically oriented literary realism. What makes Kundera’s approach “phenomenological” is his focus on the essential and universal as it manifests itself in a given situation. His thinking can be labeled as skeptical only insofar as each discovered truth represents merely a partial truth about the phenomenon in question. Within the context of Kundera’s novelistic essays, “playfulness” does not refer to the free interplay of linguistic signs, but rather to the open-endedness of the exploration of existence.

Yet the novelistic essay contains another important aspect which Kundera hints at in saying that the essayistic meditation of themes takes place in connection with his characters, for example, in Tereza’s “magnetic field” (The Art 79–80). This indicates an intimate connection between storytelling and a meditation on themes. “Novelistic thought,” as he remarks in connection with Musil’s essayistic work, is thought that feeds on concrete situations and characters (in his opinion, Musil is a great thinker only in his novels; see Testaments 235). Kundera believes his essays are always novelistic. As Bertrand Vibert puts it, while the storyteller Kundera constantly feels the essayistic temptation of meditation, the essayist Kundera constantly takes recourse in storytelling (“Milan Kundera” 121–25). For example, Kundera’s essay dealing with “great” and “small” national cultures illustrates the difference by referring to the historic treaty between Hitler and the Western powers in 1938, which sealed the fate of Czechoslovakia. He quotes the words by which Chamberlain, the British prime minister, sought to justify the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia: “A faraway country of which we know little” (The Curtain 32–33). In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera begins his essay on the comic in the novel with an example from Rabelais: “The pregnant Madame Grandgousier ate too much tripe, and they had to give her a purgative” (3). Even the Cervantes essay starts in narrative form by telling about Husserl giving his “celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity” (The Art 3) and his outline of the history of the modern novel starts by telling what happened when God had left his throne and Don Quixote “set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize” (6). Kundera thinks concretely through examples and stories and that is why the essay and storytelling are for him not two separate matters, but are interconnected. The difference between a novel and an essay is not categorical but only relative. Where in a novel the existential themes of the characters are the subject of authorial meditation, in a novelistic essay the story is a means for dealing with the abstract theme of the essay.

The third constituent in the “musical” composition of the novel, in addition to elliptical narration and “philosophy” (in the form of the novelistic essay), is the dream. On several occasions Kundera praises the beauty of dreams or the poetry and imagination they contain (see, e.g., Unbearable 17, 55; The Art 80–81, 130–31; see also Ceska). Jaromil’s daydreams about his alter ego, Xavier, in Life Is Elsewhere, Tereza’s nightmares in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the final part of Tamina’s story in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are all told in a dreamlike narrative. In the Cervantes essay he declares that it was Kafka, with his fusion of dream and reality, who awoke the “slumbering imagination” of the novel (The Art 16; in a later essay in The Art of the Novel [81] he mentions Novalis as the first writer to have integrated the dream into the novel). It remains unclear why Kundera considers Kafka’s innovation just as crucial as Cervantes’s “discovery” of the adventure, which signified the beginning of the modern novel, or Broch’s and Musil’s introduction of “thought” into the novel, which initiated a new era in the history of the novel. Are beauty and imagination not generally present in the novel? What makes dreamlike narration so important that it becomes one of the three main components of the novel, along with elliptical narration and the novelistic essay?

Kundera’s enthusiasm for the dream as imagination, which “freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought” (The Art 81) can easily be related to his high regard of surrealism. His views are reminiscent of the surrealists’ conception that dreamlike imagination opens up the way to “surreality,” to a “truer” and “more real” reality than the rationally accessible everyday reality (see, e.g., Breton). Yet Kundera views dreams primarily from the aspect of individual existence: it is precisely in dreams that a character’s existential problems come most clearly to the fore. Jaromil’s daydreaming about Xavier reveals his immaturity, Tereza’s recurring nightmare shows how Tomas’s infidelity executes her metaphorically, and the dreamlike closing of Tamina’s story brings with it “the forgetting of forgetting” which she had both feared and longed for. Thus, dreamlike narration does not manifest the novelist’s imagination alone but also that of the fictional characters. The images and events occurring in our dreams are rooted in our deepest desires and fears. In Kundera’s view, the significance of a dream lies precisely in the fact that it represents a realm of free subjectivity. An individual’s existential problems are exhibited more clearly in dreams than in real life, since dreams escape the pressure of incidental external circumstances. They arise exclusively from the individual’s inner world. Through this mechanism, dreams in their own language reveal the individual much more accurately and completely than his or her actions and experiences in the “real” world.

The idea that dreams are a form of subjective creativity rooted in the individual’s subconscious is the basis for Freud’s theory of dreams. What is less widely known is that the idea actually goes back to Herder and the early Romantics. Peter Bürger summarizes Herder’s conception of dreams as follows: “dreams do not come from a superior world, but from the one who dreams; it is his hopes, desires and intuitions that gain shape in the dream. Dreaming is the spiritual-sensual activity in which the individual encounters himself, a locus where he gives shape to himself and his life” (182–83). In Kunderan terms, it is Herder who “discovered” the dream as a form of creative imagination akin to poetry. This is part of Herder’s idea that individuals naturally form their experiences into meaningful images and linguistic expressions (see Über den Ursprung, Vom Geist, “Über Bild”). Later, Freud demonstrated that meaning emerges in dreams following the same symbolic, metaphorical, and metonymic means of sense giving as in poetry (Freud; see also Jakobson). As we can see, Kundera’s concept of the dream and its origins, tightly intertwined with his concepts of beauty, poetry and imagination, has its place in an established tradition originating in Herder’s work and the early Romantics through Freud and Kafka to the surrealists, although he himself places its beginning somewhat later.

Kundera claims that the dream was incorporated into the novel in an era when the world around human beings started becoming darker and darker. He locates this moment in the time between Goethe and Beethoven: “Beethoven’s work begins where Goethe’s centre ends. It is located in the moment when the world starts gradually losing its transparency, darkens, becomes more and more incomprehensible, rushes into the unknown, while man, betrayed by the world, escapes into his self, into his nostalgia, his dreams, his revolt, and lets himself be deafened by the voices inside him so that he no longer hears the voices outside” (Immortality 85). Listening to inner voices clearly refers to Romanticism, while the outside world’s loss of transparency applies to nineteenth-century developments leading to a disappointment with History. With the individual alienated both from History and from his or her own actions, the only remaining realm of unlimited freedom is that of dreams, that is, the realm of pure subjectivity. Naturally, dreams as the realm of pure subjectivity represent as well a domain of unreality. Appropriately for the literature of an era of terminal paradoxes, it is only in the unreality of dreams that the individual free of all external constraints is found.

In The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche’s idea of human cultural creativity actually comes close to that of Herder, he uses the word “dream” as a metaphorical-metonymical name for man’s Apollonian, figure-creating activity. Myths, according to Nietzsche, are indispensable for the construction of a meaningful, shared life-world for a society: “Only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement. Myth alone saves all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollinian [sic] dream from their aimless wanderings” (The Birth 135). This is to say that in order to become culturally significant, dreams—the products of individual creativity—have to be accepted by society as part of its sensemaking practice of collective mythology. By this means the subjective “idiocy” of the dream is overcome and the figure-forming creativity of the individual is made beneficial to the whole of society. In contrast, Kundera does not see myths as a genuine source of meaning at all. Kundera suspects or even repudiates all forms of collective sense giving, such as indisputable religious truths, ideologies, or collective symbols. Where for Nietzsche the imaginative figures created by a dreaming individual are dubious until they have been accepted as meaningful by a collective, without which they remain useless or are even regarded as madness, for Kundera it is precisely the ineradicable subjectivity of a dream that makes it an authentic and reliable expression of human existence.

The polyphonic novel as a contrapuntal thematic composition

Although Kundera lists elliptical narrative, the novelistic essay, and dreamlike narration as the main components of his novels, he employs other types of discourse in them. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for instance, he uses historical anecdotes and autobiographical narrative. Following the principle of “novelistic counterpoint” (The Art 65), Kundera composes out of the different ingredients a whole, which—using another musical metaphor, borrowed from Broch—he calls a “polyphonic” novel.

For Kundera, the unity of a novel is traditionally based on unity of action, yet this need not be the case: the “novel in the form of variations” is one where unity no longer depends on the story, but where different stories are connected on the thematic level alone. We can understand this form of the novel as a further development of Kundera’s idea of the interconnection between novelistic and essayistic writing. The novel in the form of variations is, in a sense, an intermediate form between a novelistic and an essayistic structure. The themes, reflected upon in essayistic passages, are developed through multiple narratives. The concept of polyphony is a further development of this idea.

In the polyphonic novel, the different lines, not all of which need to be narrative, stand with each other in a relation which he calls “contrapuntal,” together forming the polyphonic whole of the novel. Kundera refers to the third volume of The Sleepwalkers as an example. The book comprises several heterogeneous narrative lines: the novelistic narrative, the intimate short story, reportage, and poetic narrative. These lines tell completely different stories, which means that their characters never meet each other within the same fictional world; they also represent different types of discourse. In addition, the work also contains the line of a series of philosophical essays. The different lines deal with the same or similar themes in different variations, with the effect that the appearance of a theme in one line stands in a contrapuntal relation to its appearance in another (The Art 73, 75). The other musical metaphor used, polyphony, or a plurality of “voices,” refers to the same phenomenon from a slightly different perspective: the themes in different lines (voices) sound together contrapuntally, and in combination the lines form a polyphonic composition. Of course, the different voices of the novel cannot be truly simultaneous, in the way they are in a polyphonic piece of music. What Kundera (following Broch) means is that in a polyphonic novelistic composition, the voice of a particular part persists in the background while the reader is engaged with the following parts (this resembles Husserl’s description of retention in listening to music; see Husserl, Zeitbewusstsein 390–96.) The impression of the simultaneity of voices is enhanced by dividing a line (voice) into several parts, thereby ensuring that the first voice remains audible across the gap when another voice is heard.

While in the third book of The Sleepwalkers the narrative dealing with Huguenau and the Esches has superior status as the main story in relation to the other narrative and essay lines in the novel, Kundera demands that all the different voices in a polyphonic novel be equal and indispensable parts of the composition (The Art 75–76). He does not explain why this equality of voices is so important; he may consider the use of the musical metaphor as a sufficient argument, since music is truly polyphonic only when the voices are at all times both simultaneous and mutually independent. Such true equality of voices, however, can be questioned even in Kundera’s own novels. Life Is Elsewhere, for instance, tells the story of Jaromil, despite the fact that the author compares the character and fate of the young poet to those of known poets of literary history, and although the sixth section, which in Kundera’s words “opens a secret window through the novel’s wall” is about another person, a “man in his forties” (85). The Unbearable Lightness of Being is primarily the story of Tomas and Tereza; that of Franz and Sabina is an important parallel sideline in which the same themes are partly repeated and varied, while the other lines, like the story of Stalin’s son or the author’s digressions, constitute smaller units completing the composition. Immortality focuses more on Agnes and her close relatives than on Goethe and Bettina Brentano, and even in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which more than any other of Kundera’s novels follows the polyphonic principles of distinctness and simultaneity of voices, Tamina’s figure rises above the other characters simply because she appears in two of the seven parts, whereas the others each appear in just one.

In addition to polyphony, Kundera stresses alternations in tempo and in the mathematical proportions of the length of different sections as significant factors in the composition of a novel (The Art 85–93). In these respects, too, a novel is comparable to a musical composition. Kundera points out that his own novels emerge mostly as seven-part compositions, obeying an inescapable “deep, unconscious, incomprehensible drive, an archetype of form” (86). In an interview with Norman Biron, however, he offers an explanation for this “inner imperative,” as a means of creating formal unity in a novel: “Had a novel two, four or eight parts, it would tend to be split up into two halves. It is not sufficiently bound up, unified, compact. To ensure genuine unity of construction, this construction must be indivisible. That is the meaning of uneven numbers” (Biron 9).

The analogy of a musical composition should be seen as Kundera’s answer to the question, “what are the constitutive principles of the whole of a novel?” While the idea of the “musical composition of a literary work of art,” according to David Christoffel, is often taken by French scholars as a vague idea inspired by German Romanticism and a “poor metaphor” (Christoffel 287–88), for Kundera the concept has a well-defined meaning. It means that a novel is an artistic whole, consisting primarily of its themes in relation to each other, and secondarily of the mathematical relations of its parts. With this understanding of the construction of the novel as a whole, Kundera is definitely distancing himself from the realist tradition of the novel, which suggests that the work as a whole emerges seemingly without any overt act of construction by the author. The latter is merely following nature; in other words, events in the fictional world follow the inevitable course of events in the real world. In rejecting the idea of the “natural” coming into being of the form of the novel, Kundera agrees with modernist authors who doubted authorial insight into the order of things in either the natural or the human world. Yet Kundera does not follow those modernists who find that the author has to focus on a person’s subjective, incoherent, inner experience only. The thematic composition of a novel, as Kundera understands it, is not derived from any object of presentation itself, but is a product of the creative imagination of the author. Assigning the novelist a role, as composer of the novel, similar to that of the musician as creator of musical compositions means ascribing to him the part of omnipotent, omnipresent organizer of the whole. Kundera stresses that the composition is an important part of the author’s individual creation, “an invention that engages all the author’s originality” (Testaments 170). However, just as in a musical composition, nothing hinders the writer from developing a theme—one of his or her own or one borrowed from someone else—in new works in ever newer variations.

In a contrapuntal composition of themes, the whole is not equal to the sum of all the themes, or of “ideas and witticisms simply stand[ing] by themselves” (Welfing 110), nor is it their synthesis (see Le Grand, “L’Esthétique” 57, 63). Thinking of the work as a synthesis of themes would imply that each and every individual theme is mediated through the others as a whole. In contrast, in Kundera’s “phenomenological” thinking, each particular theme is grasped through the concrete situation in which it appears; as such it does not presuppose any mediation through the others. A contrapuntal composition maintains precisely this mutual independence of themes: they are separate and appear only in a contrapuntal or oppositional relationship to one another. The partial truths unveiled in the themes remain distinct and are not synthesized in a higher truth (in the Hegelian sense). This corresponds to what Kundera says about Nietzsche’s aphoristic philosophizing as a model of his own novelistic compositions: the thematic materials are dealt with nonsystematically, building up a composition in which the themes appear bare and clearly articulated (Testaments 165–68). In addition, in Kundera’s novels themes tend to challenge rather than support one another.

The thematic composition, in addition to being a manner of dealing with truth, is an aesthetic composition as well (see, e.g., The Art 64, 79, 154). Beauty, for Kundera, is at least in part a concept that is related to form or structure. As noted, beauty arises when two things that we are not used to think together suddenly meet (“Umbrella”): “it is the surprise I experience before something which hasn’t already been said, demonstrated, seen” (Elgrably 4). It is in the aesthetic principle followed in a contrapuntal composition where Kundera’s affinity to the Romantic idea of wit (Witz)—the ability to create meaning and beauty through surprising connections—appears most clearly. The example Kundera gives is, however, not from his own works: When Anna Karenina at the end of Tolstoy’s novel commits suicide by throwing herself under a train, recalling the crushed man she had seen at the station the day she first met Vronsky, this gives “her love story a finished, beautiful shape” (The Curtain 25). Thus, an event which appeared incidental takes on additional significance when connected to another. Poetry, the beauty in a literary work of art, a concept which Kundera contrasts with lyricism (see The Curtain 51, 82), is the opposite of the “prose” of everyday life, in which things preserve their separateness and concreteness (see The Curtain 8).

As thematic compositions not all of Kundera’s novels are equally elaborated. The polyphonic principle is realized most consistently in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and to a somewhat lesser extent in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, whereas in his earlier novels, and the three late short novels, only few polyphonic features are present. On the basis of these compositional differences, Kundera’s fictional oeuvre can be divided into three periods (see also Boden, Irritation 42). The first group consists of The Joke (1967), Life Is Elsewhere (1973), and Farewell Waltz (1973). These novels were written in Czechoslovakia and they reflect Kundera’s experiences in his native culture; however, they are not autobiographical but deal with issues on a general, thematic level. Each novel is set in a single fictive world and tells a single story, which, especially in the case of the first two novels, coincides with the life story of the main character. The second group of texts encompasses the polyphonic novels The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and Immortality (1990), all created after his emigration to France but still written in Czech (or, as in the case of Immortality, in both languages simultaneously). The third group consists of Kundera’s late, short novels, Slowness (1994), Identity (1998), and Ignorance (2000), which originally appeared as “French” novels, and which, I argue, are less significant than the works in the other two groups. Moreover, as noted, the composition of the final version of Laughable Loves, comprising seven short stories in which love and ridicule are combined, already heralds the polyphonic structure of the novels and may therefore be viewed as a bridge between the early works and the polyphonic novels (see Carroll). Kundera has partly objected to such a division but partly supported it. On the one hand he stresses the continuity of his oeuvre, in which he has always explored the possibilities of human existence, of which socialism and the Western world merely offer different variations (“La ‘Parole’” 24). On the other hand, he has acknowledged two breaks in his novelistic work, the first after Farewell Waltz, the second after Immortality. He says that after Immortality he knew that he had completed a cycle of novels and that if he were to start something new this would be a completely different thing (Morello, “Questions” 145).

The architecture of the one-story novels

The story told in The Joke has an inner coherence, although the narration is chronologically nonlinear and the perspectives of the four first-person narrators vary: the different perspectives in The Joke are perspectives on the same reality. As I mention previously, the composition intertwining the voices of four characters results in a polyphony that stands closer to the Bakhtinian idea of polyphony than to Kundera’s later conception of the novel as a thematic composition. Most of Kundera’s pivotal themes, although enfolded in the story, are already present in this early novel. Such themes are those of laughter, lightness turning into heaviness, the relationship between the private and the public, the idyllic and the circle dance, the lyrical age, the hardly bearable lightness of life without ties, disharmony between body and soul, fidelity, forgetting, and escape and falling. The themes do not draw the reader’s attention away from the fictive world, because they are elaborated solely by the characters themselves, above all by Ludvik.

Life Is Elsewhere, like The Joke, covers the most important events in the life of its main character, this time from the moment of conception until death. The reason for this is not Kundera’s trust in biography as the natural grounding structure of the novel, but rather his conviction that a lyrical poet is the product of a special kind of mother-son relationship, a relationship that is in control of the poet’s life until the very end. Kundera confesses that he originally intended to entitle the novel The Lyrical Age, but was persuaded by his friends to change it at the last moment (The Art 31–32). He admits that in hindsight he regrets having accepted their advice. The original title corresponds much more closely to his wish to reveal the “main category” of the novel already in its title, as in the case, for instance, of The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (The Art 32). We should note, however, that while many of the titles of Kundera’s novels do indeed articulate a main theme, it would be misleading to identify these keywords with the main categories of the work, for the keywords in the title usually represent merely one aspect of the thematic core of the novel. The title of The Joke, for instance, masks the point that the novel is not only about joking, but about how a joke suddenly turns into a serious matter. In his naming the novel The Joke we can actually discern a typically Kunderan sort of irony, an intimation that an enunciated truth is always just one part of a larger truth. The title Life Is Elsewhere is an ironic quotation of a piece of graffiti from the 1968 Parisian student revolts, itself a quotation from Arthur Rimbaud, the same with which André Breton ends his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism. The title evokes the modernist lyrical tradition, as well as alluding to the parallel Kundera draws between the Czech revolution of 1948 and the Paris riots in 1968. The slogan expresses the young poet Jaromil’s attitude toward life, toward which Kundera takes an ironical stand. His own conviction is closer to the opposite view, namely, that life is here and now (as represented in the novel by the man in his forties). The titles in Kundera’s novels do not simply display the main theme but are highly ambiguous; they mostly manifest only one aspect of a matter, and conceal its opposite, which is equally important.

Jaromil’s character is meant to represent the “anthropological” truth that being a poet, a revolutionary, and a denouncer essentially belong together and are all associated with youth and immaturity. Kundera depicts a piece of Czech history—and in Jaromil’s story also a great part of his own “lyrical” youth—but elevates the perspective to what he considers universally relevant. Characteristic of the lyrical attitude is egocentrism: the individual’s inclination to regard one’s fellow human beings as mirrors of oneself and to prop up one’s weak ego by borrowed or fancied grand ideas and feelings. For Kundera it is important that his readers take Jaromil seriously as a poet. If he is regarded merely as a daydreamer, the story loses its point (Testaments 231).

Kundera also speaks about polyphony in connection with Life Is Elsewhere (The Art 85–89), although it consists almost solely of the story of Jaromil the poet. Kundera’s reason is that the various parts of the novel make use of different modes of narration and different angles on the events narrated. First, in the midst of realistic narration, the novel contains two sections of dreamlike narrative that relate Jaromil’s daydreams about Xavier, his idealized, imaginary alter ego. Second, part 6, entitled “The Man in His Forties,” is set outside Jaromil’s story. It takes place three years after the poet’s death and depicts an encounter between the forty-year-old and Jaromil’s former beloved, after her release from prison. In Kundera’s words, the purpose of this part is to serve as an “observatory,” looking at Jaromil’s life from a different perspective, and it should be regarded as an essential part of the composition (Life 229–30; The Art 85). The novel, however, is not polyphonic in the strict sense, in that the individual stories are held together solely by means of their thematic unity. Instead, all chapters are either part of Jaromil’s story or are closely connected to it. Kundera fails to mention in this connection that the novel also includes short digressions, such as passages about Rimbaud, Lermontov, and Shelley—figures parallel to the poet Jaromil—or references to the 1968 demonstrations in Paris which are presented as a parallel to Czechoslovakia in 1948. Sometimes Kundera brings together incidents in Jaromil’s and other poets’ lives in a single sentence, for instance, “a shot rings out, Lermontov clutches his chest, and Jaromil falls to the icy concrete floor of the balcony” (Life 254; see also Chvatík, Die Fallen 82–83). This transparency between Jaromil and other poets, making present and past meet, as Kundera himself remarks (Biron 4), has the effect of emphasizing the general and thematic aspects of events. The digressions into other poets’ lives and other political events do not, however, form independent and distinct lines of a polyphonic composition.

The original title of Farewell Waltz—Epilogue—shows that Kundera thought of it as the last in a series of three novels intended to conclude his career as a novelist when he was barred from publishing (Testaments 165). The three novels form a thematically unified whole, giving an account of the author’s past experiences viewed at the level of existential themes. The Joke is a story about falling outside History as a consequence of being expelled from the communist party. In Life Is Elsewhere Kundera looks back at the young communist and lyrical poet, and in Farewell Waltz one of the main characters is a middle-aged cynical intellectual who has suffered his punishment for a political “crime” and is about to emigrate. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera characterizes Farewell Waltz as vaudeville (in English translation “farce” likely changed because for the English reading public “vaudeville” has a somewhat different meaning). In vaudeville—in the French sense of the word—a light and amusing theatrical piece, often interspersed with songs and dances, Kundera is attracted by “a form that puts enormous stress on plot, with its whole machinery of unforeseen and exaggerated coincidences” (The Art 93). By borrowing the form of vaudeville, Kundera suggests that the action of a novel need not follow verisimilitude, which dominated literature from nineteenth-century realism onward (The Art 93–94). The construction of a realistic plot is merely a convention which can be replaced with another. Kundera believes that the vaudeville form enables him “to bring together the extreme gravity of the question and the extreme lightness of the form,” which has always been his ambition (The Art 95).

The events in Farewell Waltz take place during a period of five days in a small Czech spa town. While The Joke and Life Is Elsewhere tell the story of a single character, Farewell Waltz intertwines fragments from the lives of several characters within a spatially and temporally limited framework. The narration is more elliptical; the characters are pictured rather sketchily as they are portrayed through their life themes which come to the fore over the five days. In the main story, the famous trumpeter Klima tries to persuade Ruzena, a bath attendant from the spa, to abort her baby. The novel begins with Ruzena calling Klima to let him know that she is carrying his child and ends with Ruzena’s death owing to an oversight just after she has obtained the committee’s permission to have the abortion. Another storyline follows an intellectual called Jakub, who just before his emigration pays a farewell visit to his friend, Dr. Skreta, as well as to his protégé Olga, who is staying for a treatment in the same spa. The two story lines intersect when the deadly pill that Jakub, who is the ethical focus of the novel, has carried with him all these years accidentally gets into Ruzena’s hands and eventually causes her death. Thus, the novel not only is Kundera’s farewell to his audience, but also deals both with Jakub’s farewell to his home country and Ruzena’s farewell to life; nevertheless, the gravity of parting for good is wrapped up in the light form of a “waltz” or vaudeville. The main story-line also includes the development of the relationship between Klima and his wife Kamila, and Olga, Dr. Skreta, and a patient of his, the (US) American millionaire Bertlef, appear in several scenes.

What brings the whimsical turns of the plot and the diversity of action to simple, mechanical order is the tight chronological frame of events. The novel is divided into five parts, entitled “First Day,” “Second Day,” and so on, according to the five days covered by the events of the story. The division is not entailed by the inner logic of the plot, but by the external course of time. Unity of time and space is of course a characteristic feature of classical tragedy, as is the division into five parts or acts. Thus, a playful vaudeville hides in its structure an allusion to tragedy. The further division of the parts of Farewell Waltz is content based. Each of the short chapters presents a scene or a phase of a conversation. For example, the encounter between Klima and Bertlef takes up several short chapters. In the first an account of how they first meet is provided, in the second Klima speaks about his problem with Ruzena, in the third he gains Bertlef’s approval for the idea of abortion, in the fourth Bertlef talks about his similar experiences in the past, and so on. The division of the action into such elementary scenes endows the narration with a quick, light rhythm. Farewell Waltz is a good example of how the chapter functions as a unit in Kundera’s novels. The typical Kunderan chapter, as François Ricard remarks, is characterized by a tendency toward brevity, extreme condensation, and maximal expression (163). A chapter always means a moment in the exploration of a theme. Consequently, it is closely comparable to the aphorism—called “chapter” by Kundera—in Nietzsche’s writings. It is the basic unit of the book and as such the basic medium of the enquiry into the thematic complex of the work (see Testaments 167–68).

Farewell Waltz bears a resemblance to the vaudeville—more generally the drama of the prerealist age—in terms of its content as well insofar as deception and pretense play an important role in it. Ruzena pretends to be absolutely sure that Klima is the father of her child, Klima pretends love to persuade Ruzena to have the abortion, Jakub pretends to be a colleague of Dr. Skreta in the presence of the doctor’s patients, and Dr. Skreta cheats childless women in his clinic by injecting his own sperm into them in the name of treatment. The novel appears as a carnivalistic comedy, but in spite of its playful form it deals with the most serious matters. The fifth act begins with the death of the “heroine,” when Ruzena accidentally swallows a poison pill and dies. Shortly before, Jakub discovered the hidden murderer in himself; he has not done everything in his power to prevent the death of the nurse. Yet the end scene of the novel gives us a hilarious family reunion of Dr. Skreta and his financée, Bertlef, his wife, and their young son where everyone seems to have forgotten the death of the nurse which took place only a few hours earlier. One might ask whether Kundera has achieved the intended balance between extreme lightness of form and extreme seriousness of content. In Kundera’s opinion, it is a characteristic of kitsch to hide the fact of death behind an artificial screen, so my question is whether Farewell Waltz, then, ends in kitsch.

The architecture of the polyphonic novels, polarity, and the “architheme” of sense giving

The definition of the novel as a thematic composition raises a question: what distinguishes a novel from a collection short stories linked thematically? In the “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” the interviewer Christian Salmon asks whether, by Kundera’s criteria, Boccaccio’s Decameron should not be defined as a novel. Its stories, after all, are connected by the common theme of love and are narrated by the fictional characters of the frame story (The Art 83). Kundera is reluctant to be so “provocative” as to call Boccaccio’s work a novel, but he acknowledges that The Decameron is one of the first “large-scale composition[s] in narrative prose” which deserves “a place in the history of the novel at least as its source and forerunner” (83). As we can see, Kundera’s thematic concept of the structure of the novel blurs the borderline differentiating a collection of short stories from a novel. In this respect his own collection of short stories is a good example. The seven short stories of Laughable Loves are linked by the same or similar themes; in each of them, love or lovemaking is connected one way or another with laughter. The theme is provocative. In the modern view, originating from the time of Romanticism, love is conceived of as something sublime and irreconcilable with laughter. Indeed, in this link between love and laughter we recognize one of Kundera’s “discoveries” in the same sense as, according to him, the separation of love from sexuality and the triviality of the sexual act were “discovered” by Kafka and Broch.

The themes of ridiculousness and love appear in the short stories intertwined in many different ways with each other and with several other themes. In the first story of the collection, “Nobody Will Laugh,” a young man finds that it is an illusion that we are able to “saddle events and control their course” (40) and that we “pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded” and only later discover the actual meaning of a past experience (5). In the story, “The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire,” the first-person narrator introduces a middle-aged friend of his, whose main preoccupation is seducing women. Seduction has become for him a pastime in which physical love in itself is of little importance. The mere idea or possibility of sexual intercourse is enough for him; he only needs to make the first moves of his well-planned seduction scheme to maintain his image of a womanizer. The protagonist of the last short story, “Eduard and God,” is a young teacher who “always tried hard to distinguish between the serious and the unserious” (244–45), regarding everything he was compelled to do, such as his education and profession, as not serious, and searching for the serious in that which is a matter of free choice. In his girlfriend he supposes her religious commitment to be serious, that is, an authentic and ineradicable part of her very essence. The girl considers sexual abstinence as God’s commandment; nevertheless, she eventually gives up her principles and is willing to become Eduard’s lover. At that moment, however, Eduard realizes that he no longer has any interest in her. In giving up her principles without any remorse, she has lost her integrity and authenticity in his eyes. Eduard reaches the conclusion that human beings are conglomerations of heterogeneous, incidentally acquired features and that they lack an authentic self. He longs for God, who is “essence,” but is too honest to believe in him or to find anything essential in his own life.

In Laughable Loves, it is the individual short stories rather than the individual themes that parallel one another. Connected to the main themes are several other typical themes of Kundera, including the impossibility of controlling the course of events, the problem of the self, the great variety of intellectual and spiritual content potentially bound up with the sexual act (in contrast to the uniformity of the bodily movements), and young people’s need to see themselves mirrored in the eyes of others. Yet here the themes are not elaborated as abstract keywords or reflected upon in digressions, but are built into the stories. The repetition of the combination of love and laughter, however, makes the text more unified than a traditional collection of short stories. In addition, Dr. Havel—the main character of the sixth short story, “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years”—makes his appearance already in the fourth one. In this way the structure of the work as a whole resembles that of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where Tamina is the main character in two of the seven parts. Furthermore, Kundera’s remark that the collection (published in the West) follows his “unconscious imperative” of a seven-part composition shows that he sees the work as a novel-like whole rather than as a collection of separate stories (The Art 85–86). Although his criteria for the novel—thematic unity and variation, along with a composition consisting of individual parts that are indispensable for the whole—are fulfilled in the case of Laughable Loves, Kundera nevertheless does not consider the text to be a novel (qtd. in Misurella 189). One possible reason for this is that the short stories were originally written independently of each other and published in various combinations. Only when Kundera arranged them in their final form did they emerge as a coherent whole, approaching the form of a (polyphonic) novel.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting opens a new phase in Kundera’s oeuvre. The novels are now more elliptical than the earlier ones, meaning that the narration focuses increasingly on thematically important scenes alone. They are also more abstract in the sense that the themes are even more clearly than before examined from an existential and anthropological point of view, rather than being considered part of a particular historical setting. The narrator comments amply on both the themes and the structure of the novel. It is in these novels—The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality—that the polyphonic architecture is developed to its highest point.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is Kundera’s most expressly and programmatically polyphonic novel. Unlike in the case of Life Is Elsewhere, here we can no longer talk about any main story and digressions from it, since the story lines—highly elliptical, focusing on the thematically essential—are equal and independent of one another. Tamina’s story acquires special significance only insofar as it is rendered in two of the seven parts of the novel. The thematic approach is foregrounded not only in the title of the novel—which names two of the central themes of the work: “laughter” and “forgetting”—but also in the titles of the individual parts, which refer to further themes. Two titles appear twice in the work. Both the first part, about Mirek, and the fourth, about Tamina, bear the title “Lost Letters,” while both part 3 and part 6, the latter in which Tamina’s story is taken up again, are entitled “The Angels.” This doubling up stresses the thematic coherence of the otherwise independent parts.

The parts may further consist of components of different kinds. The first chapter, for example, opens with a report of a historical event, the Czech revolution of February 1948 and how this historical event was subsequently retouched. In a photograph taken at the historic moment, a politician who had fallen from grace was later airbrushed out of the image. This opens up a perspective on the story of Mirek, who preserves documents of political significance risking his own and his companions’ safety. At the same time, however, he strives to revise his own past by destroying some love letters, which in hindsight he finds compromising. This demonstrates that the same willingness to retouch the past occurs in both public and private history writing. Part 3, “The Angels,” consists of four kinds of material: the story of two (US) American girls interpreting Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (the story starts realistically but ends with a surrealistic ascension to the heavens), essay-like reflections on laughter, the author-narrator’s recollections from soon after 1968 when he earned his living by writing an astrology column for a popular Prague weekly, and the description of a circle dance of young communists in 1948, which again ends with the surrealistic ascension of the dancers. The passages, which differ entirely in their contents, are united by the theme of laughter. The essay-like passages on laughter serve as a commentary on the girls’ interpretation of Ionesco’s play as a comedy in the sense of an innocent amusement. The narrator’s laughter at the party functionary who believes in horoscopes is “devilish,” ironic in nature, whereas the laughter that accompanies the ring dance of both the young communists and the girls and their teacher represents an affirmative rejoicing in existence, which Kundera calls the “laughter of the angels.” All four lines focus on laughter in one or both of its two opposite variants: the ironic, mocking laughter of the Devil and the rejoicing, jubilant laughter of the angels.

Part 2 of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, entitled “Mama,” has a single story line dealing with a young couple, their friend, and the husband’s mother. Similarly, part 4, “Lost Letters,” is set in a single fictional world. Its central character is Tamina, a Czech emigrant, who attempts with great effort to get hold of her own diary and letters, dating from the time of her marriage, in order to preserve the memory of that time. Part 5, “Litost,” gives an account of a night of the love affair, laughable but gilded by poetry, between a student and a butcher’s wife. Part 6, “Angels,” describing Tamina’s death, consists of several kinds of material. It begins with examples from contemporary Czechoslovakia or from recent or more remote events in Czech history showing how a nation is forced to let its own past sink into oblivion. Parallel to these events, the author-narrator describes his father’s death and how before his death he lost the faculty of speech. The narration then returns to Tamina, who finds herself on the “children’s island.” Here the narration, as Kundera says himself, is dreamlike (The Art 76). In the seventh and last part of the novel, “The Border,” the central character is a 45-year-old Czech emigrant called Jan, but the events narrated are only loosely interconnected. This lack of unity of events directs the reader’s attention to the thematic level.

In the first, fourth, and sixth parts of the novel the themes of forgetting and remembering take various forms. While in the first part the tendency toward deliberate forgetting or the retouching of the past is depicted as a characteristic of both the community and the individual, in Tamina’s story involuntary forgetting is presented as an inexorable constant of human existence. In the first part of her story (in part 4), Tamina does her best to save the past from falling into oblivion, because all that is significant for her was her marriage, yet in the second part of her story (told in part 6) such forgetting has taken place. Some of the contrapuntal passages of this part deal with exhortations by the political leaders of a totalitarian regime to its citizens to forget the past, while others depict the process of forgetting that takes place when human life comes to an end, in the story of the last phase of the author’s father’s life. Part 2, “Mama,” reveals the connection between remembering past events and experiencing the present as meaningful, thus supplementing the exploration of this theme in Tamina’s story. The part concerning the student and the butcher’s wife, “Litost,” deals with the “lyrical” view of the world and how this generates an experience of meaningfulness. The seventh and last part focuses on the experience of the “border,” exploring how a meaning suddenly turns into its opposite. A serious thing, for instance, becomes comical, an important matter unimportant, and vice versa. Looking back at the previous parts from the perspective of the last one, we now realize that the theme of the border is present throughout the whole novel. “Mama,” for example, deals with the changes that occur in the meaning of the sexual act; in the part describing the student’s love affair with the butcher’s wife, the pathetic turns into the comic and the comic by the force of poetry back into the pathetic; in the section about the girls interpreting Ionesco, the mocking laughter of the audience turns into the angelic laughter of delight by the girls and their teacher.

An analysis of the structure of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting shows that the term “novel in the form of variations” applies to it well. As noted, writing a novel “in the form of variations” is not merely a matter of the technical construction of the work, but also assumes a specific manner of dealing with “truths” in the novel. A theme appears within different contexts in a number of variations, each of which represents a partial truth about it. However, another important aspect of the thematic composition of Kundera’s novels, namely, his tendency to think about themes as pairs of opposites, is not encompassed by the concept of the “novel in the form of variations,” nor does he ever refer to this, although it is present in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as well as in both earlier and later novels. He often speaks of his intention to explore particular themes in different variations, but what actually interests him is the ambiguity of things, the intimate relationship between something and its opposite, and the sudden shifts and reversals which take place between the two extremes. His analysis of remembering is intertwined with that of forgetting, the joke is weighed against and contrasted with seriousness, the “lyrical” attitude with maturity, weight with weightlessness, mortality with immortality, haste with slowness. Both opposites are studied in several variations. What fascinates Kundera is the experience of the boundary at which a matter is suddenly transformed into its opposite or where its value suddenly changes. For instance, forgetting, which is generally thought of as negative, may under certain circumstances seem beneficial; the act of love-making, which has felt like hard work performed out of a sense of duty, may suddenly turn into a supreme feeling of floating in an ocean of human love only to lose this meaning once more within a second. The most solemn and serious thing can all of a sudden appear ridiculous and vice versa whereby the ridiculous and insignificant can turn into something serious. Laughter in itself has two meanings. The malicious laughter of the devil can at any moment be transformed into the joyous laughter of angels praising the perfection of creation. What is crucial here is precisely the experience that a given phenomenon may at any moment reach the border, where it completely changes in meaning. In the experience of the border, we can perhaps discern an important further dimension of what Kundera calls the skepticism of the genre of the novel. His skepticism does not derive merely from his recognition of the infinite number of (partial) truths, but also from his conviction that it is impossible to determine a phenomenon definitively, because it may undergo an abrupt and total change of meaning.

The oppositions in Kundera’s thinking are polar. In other words, they are opposite ends on one and the same scale: weight and weightlessness, maturity and immaturity, forgetting and remembering. In one case only Kundera’s opposites cannot be thought of as polar, but as a metaphysical, dualistic antagonism between two entities which exist independent of each other and are in constant struggle. Such a dualistic antagonism is that of the body and the soul (and their derivatives). It is characteristic of his thinking in polarities that a phenomenon cannot be permanently fixed at either pole of the scale, but keeps fluctuating between them. What appears weightless (for example a joke) may at any moment become heavy. Similarly, the values of the poles resist being permanently fixed and may change from positive to negative or vice versa; for instance, weight and weightlessness, and remembering and forgetting, may both be perceived either negatively or positively.

Kundera’s thinking has occasionally been labeled as based on binary oppositions (see, e.g., Jefferson). Yet the structuralist concept of binary oppositions refers to the definition of linguistic signs through their opposites, whereas in Kundera’s fiction the characters experience the phenomena directly and independently of each other in a given situation, in a word, “phenomenologically,” without the mediation of their opposites. Rather than considering two opposite meanings as mutually interdependent, what attracts Kundera are the fluctuations of a phenomenon between the two poles, which is a temporal phenomenon. Examples of this kind of thinking are found, for instance, in Goethe and Nietzsche (see Degner; Schmitt). Of these two, Kundera’s thinking in polarities resembles more closely that of Nietzsche. For Goethe, polarity as a mode of thinking does not exclude progress or the struggle for a synthesis, whereas Nietzsche conceives changes in phenomena as a constant oscillation between the poles, excluding any idea of (historical) progress or the possibility of an all-encompassing synthesis. In Kundera’s work, it is precisely the border where this oscillation alters the content or value of a phenomenon that forms the hidden, “inverted” center of his non- or antisystematic thinking; “inverted,” because the oscillation of phenomena at the border makes it impossible to fix them through definitions and consequently to construct a theoretical system of knowledge based on these definitions. As the point at which a phenomenon changes its meaning, border is a concept that does not have a thematic opposite. One can talk only about a shorter or greater distance from the border or from the point where the meaning changes. The modern individual’s existence is essentially being close to this border, which implies an uncertainty in his or her sense giving.

Kundera’s thinking is rooted in the mode of human existence typical of modernity in which the individual is caught up in an endless search of the meaning of events and his or her own actions with no guarantee that the meanings discovered will be true or definitive. It is not an exaggeration to say that sense giving, in this modern sense, is the cornerstone of Kundera’s entire novelistic thinking. It is, I argue, the “architheme” underpinning all his explorations of the different themes of human existence in his novels. Moreover, it is the architheme which he follows in his sketches of the history of the novel. The modern novel was born when the all-inclusive theological-metaphysical system of truth had lost its credibility. With the Enlightenment, universal reason was assigned the task of defining the content and meanings of different phenomena; and after the beginning of the nineteenth century it was the prevailing view that such content and meanings develop within the historical process within which we produce our own reality. Sensemaking, as the central problem in Kundera’s work, has to be seen within this frame. On what grounds, he asks, do we experience something as significant? Is any significance now possible, once man has fallen outside of History, or now that History has been transformed from the realm of the realization of human ideals into a trap? Unlike Broch, Kundera refuses to take for granted that the state of the modern individual who has to determine the value of things by himself or herself is unbearable. In the last essay in The Sleepwalkers, Broch writes that “the final indivisible unit in the disintegration of values is the human individual. And the less that individual partakes in some authoritative system, and the more he is left to his own empirical autonomy . . . the narrower and more modest does his ‘private theology’ become, the more incapable is it of comprehending any values beyond its immediate and most personal environment” (628). Kundera’s object of scrutiny, in contrast, is precisely the individual’s construction of meanings, changes in them, and the preconditions of meaningfulness outside of History.

It is from this perspective of sense giving that remembering and forgetting, as well as the two different kinds of laughter, are examined in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Remembering is the precondition for experiencing life as meaningful, while forgetting deprives things of their meanings. The matter is made more complicated, however, by retouching, a kind of retroactive improving of the meanings of past things, and by the fact that beneficial kinds of forgetting also exist. The ironic laughter of the devil questions given meanings, while angelic laughter expresses absolute trust in the highest meaningfulness of everything. The latter is actually a kind of utmost seriousness, as illustrated in the following quotation from The Joke: “It was the first year after February 1948; a new life had begun, a genuinely new and different life, and its features, as I remember them, were rigidly serious. The odd thing was that the seriousness took the form not of a frown but of a smile, yes, what those years said of themselves was that they were the most joyous years, and anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or (what was equally sinful) giving way individualistically to inner sorrows” (31). The absolute approval of existence can again turn into the experience of complete meaninglessness, as Tamina realizes on the children’s island. Likewise, the themes of “weight” and “weightlessness” fall under the architheme of sense giving, insofar as they refer metaphorically to the experience of meaningfulness and meaninglessness, respectively.

In Kundera’s novels, the architheme of sense giving is implicit or invisible in the sense that it is never named as a theme. It does not appear in any of the titles of the novels or their individual parts, nor among the sixty-three keywords listed in The Art of the Novel, by means of which Kundera defines some of the important themes of his novels. Why Kundera does not recognize this architheme as a theme at all may be owing to the fact that he sees the novel in general as a genre dealing with the existence of the modern individual who is occupied with the problem of determining the content and meaning of things. Thus he does not regard the architheme as characteristic of his own novels alone, in contrast to those themes which he considers as his own discoveries. Unearthing the architheme of sense giving, as well as Kundera’s typical thinking in terms of polarities, shows that his own comments on the thematic composition of his novels are far from exhaustive. He speaks of polyphony and of the novel in the form of variations from a primarily technical perspective, and in so doing overlooks the extent to which the thematic structuring of his works is rooted in modern existence, in problems of sense giving and of changing meanings.

The title of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is only ostensibly of the same type of title as Romeo and Juliet or Sense and Sensibility, titles referring to two things which either go together or are opposites. The title actually conceals as much as it reveals, the second half in each of the two pairs of themes “laughter” and “seriousness,” that is, “forgetting” and “remembering.” Similarly, the title of The Unbearable Lightness of Being refers to only one of the two central themes, while the opposite of lightness, namely, weight or weightiness, remains concealed. “Lightness” and “weight” refer, as in The Joke or in Tamina’s story in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, to the experiences of meaninglessness and meaningfulness, respectively: life is light when it lacks the weight of important, meaningful matters. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, lightness and its opposite are examined as threats and as possibilities in the individual’s life. Most parts of The Unbearable Lightness of Being bear thematic titles as well, once again underlining the thematic composition of the novel. The first and fifth parts both bear the title of “Lightness and Weight,” while the title of both part 2 and part 4 is “Soul and Body,” again emphasizing the variation of the themes and the structure of the whole as a novel in variation form. The remaining parts are entitled “Words Misunderstood,” “The Grand March” and “Karenin’s Smile.” The pair, “lightness” and “weight,” articulates the existential problem of the male protagonist, Tomas: what makes a certain experience or issue, or one’s life, “weighty”?

“Soul” and “body” are the keywords of his wife Tereza. The question is how they are interconnected with each other, separated from each other, in opposition to each other. In both of the parts entitled “Soul and Body,” as well as in the last one, “Karenin’s Smile,” the story is narrated alternately from Tomas’s and Tereza’s perspective. The narration proceeds in a single line, even though the events are not chronologically ordered. The novel contains some dreamlike passages which convey Tereza’s nightmares, yet these passages are not separate from the narrative concerning the couple’s life. The parts entitled “Words Misunderstood” and “The Grand March” deal with the other couple of the novel, Franz and Sabina, who belong to the same fictional world as Tomas and Tereza, Sabina being one of Tomas’s lovers. The fictional world of the novel is thus more unified than that of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in which, following the principle of polyphony, different fictional and nonfictional worlds exist separately from one another. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the characters are linked both through concrete events and theme. Sabina experiences the same problem of lightness as Tomas; the expression “the unbearable lightness of being” is actually used in reference to her.

Part 3 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words,” a list of words and concepts—including, for example, “fidelity,” “betrayal,” “woman,” “cemetery,” and “Grand March”—which Sabina and Franz conceive of differently and which thus stand in the way of their mutual understanding. The motif of the Grand March is taken up again in the eponymous part 6. The “Grand March,” as a demonstration of the common will to fight for a better world, is for Kundera a synecdoche-like representation of “leftist kitsch.” The main theme of part 6 is in fact kitsch, defined by Kundera—just like the angels’ laughter, but from a different viewpoint—as the absolute approval of existence. Throughout the chapter, the concept of kitsch is elaborated on the abstract level, but it is also elucidated through a brief story about the death of Stalin’s son in which the opposite of kitsch is introduced, namely “shit,” a word by which Kundera refers to whatever is in principle unacceptable in the world order. The title of part 7, “Karenin’s Smile,” is again a synecdoche or metaphor, which by way of Tereza’s dog refers to the part’s main theme, the “idyllic.”

Another important theme that appears at the story level in all of Kundera’s novels, but is usually not reflected upon at the thematic level, is death. Many of Kundera’s protagonists die: in Life Is Elsewhere the poet Jaromil, in Farewell Waltz Ruzena, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Tamina, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being Tomas, Tereza, and Franz, and in Immortality Agnes. In addition to these protagonists, several minor characters die. Kundera mitigates the strikingness of the ubiquitous presence of death by way of, for instance, foreshadowing, announcing the death long before it actually occurs and thus removing the suspense or not placing a death at the end of the novel. For example, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, readers learn about the fatal accident that will cause Tomas’s and Tereza’s death around the middle of the novel and several of the following parts deal with their problems and the development of their relationship. Consequently, their death does not constitute the final point of the narrative and death does not present itself as the final “truth” about their story; rather, it is the perspective from which we look back at their lives. This is a necessary perspective, because concealing the inescapability of death means kitsch, as is said in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, following Broch (“Evil” 36–37).

Immortality is another example of the way in which the thematic titles of Kundera’s novels both reveal and conceal simultaneously. In this novel, the main theme is not the one announced by the title but its opposite, death or mortality, which is an inescapable part of human existence. The novel deals with the reality that, despite our mortality, we “cannot” die. While Heidegger declares that humanity’s existence is “being towards death” (Being 46–53), Kundera claims that the individual does not take his or her mortality into account. This manifests itself on the one hand in a longing for immortality, on the other in the attitude of kitsch which denies or veils the fact of death. The novel consists of four lines, two of which are intertwined. The main line, taking up four of the seven parts, tells about Agnes and her family members, her husband, her daughter, her sister, and the sister’s lover. Except for part 3, “Fighting,” which describes Agnes’s relationship with her sister Laura in twenty-one chapters with titles of their own, the chapters of the parts are merely numbered. In part 2, “Immortality,” and 4 “Homo sentimentalis,” the main characters are Goethe and Bettina Brentano. In these parts, death and the longing for immortality are widely reflected upon. Similarly to the sixth part of Life Is Elsewhere, here too part 6, “The Dial,” functions as a window opening up onto the world outside. It tells about the erotic life of a man called Rubens, connected loosely to Agnes’s story. The part deals with the temporality of human existence and with remembering and sense giving, which are connected to it. With the vanishing of meaningfulness, death is looming. The fourth line, intertwined with all the others, deals with the author himself, as he is writing the novel. He describes how the idea of the heroine was born in his head, originating in the gesture of a sixty-year-old woman. A car accident, just like the one in which Agnes will die, is reported in the news he is listening to on the radio. In the last part of the novel its author makes an appearance as a character and meets with Professor Avenarius, a character in Agnes’s story, and at the end he becomes acquainted with Paul, Agnes’s husband, who after her death has married her younger sister Laura, who makes a brief appearance. The alter ego of Kundera points out that the characters are his own creations; nevertheless, he discovers some features in them he had not expected them to possess. Thus, the creative process of writing the novel is presented within the work itself with capricious playfulness, which makes it metafictional in a different manner than Kundera’s earlier novels, resembling the metafictionality typical of postmodern literature.

Besides death, mortality, and the longing for immortality, further themes elaborated in Immortality are body and soul, beauty and ugliness, the temporal dimension of human life, and the individual construction of the self by either subtracting or adding attributes, as well as homo sentimentalis and “imagology.” The themes reflect Kundera’s thinking in polarities: for the opposite of homo sentimentalis no name is given, but in the story an opposition emerges between on the one hand Bettina and Laura, depicted as sentimentalists, and on the other Agnes, who, like Tomas and Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, can be seen as an individual striving for authenticity and autonomy. This opposition is similar to that between a “lyrical” or immature view of life and an adult or mature one. While the former are determined from the outside, using other people as mirrors, the latter endeavor to determine their identity independently of others. Kundera’s concept of imagology, however, raises the question of whether an individual is even in principle able to construct an identity independently of the public image ascribed to him or her. The author-narrator and several of his characters reflect upon a contemporary world dominated by the visual and the image.

In comparison with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality is more clearly a thematic composition or a novel in the form of variations. With regard to the degree of the independence and distinctness of the narrative lines, Immortality occupies a place somewhere between The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. What distinguishes it from the earlier novels is that in Immortality, the author-narrator as a person penetrates into the fictional world of his protagonists. The intersection and entwinement of the different narrative lines violate one of the basic criteria of the polyphonic novel, that of the independence of the voices.

The architecture of the short novels

The blending of different narrative lines or different types of discourse is also characteristic of Kundera’s three late short novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance. Slowness is set in a French château which has been transformed into a hotel. In the frame story of the novel, Kundera and his wife arrive at the château, which in the fictional story is also hosting a conference on entomology. It is during this conference that the first encounter takes place between Vincent and Julie, and the young man makes it clear early in their conversation that he intends to sleep with her. According to the author-narrator, the château had once been the setting of another love affair, between its lady and a young knight, as told in Vivant Denon’s novella Point de lendemain. The different narrative lines are not kept separate. The entomological conference, a fictional event invented by the author, appears in the author’s wife’s dreams as well. As Vincent is leaving, he meets the Chevalier of the eighteenth-century story and the author and his wife see Vincent mount his motorcycle and leave the château. The three different story lines—and three different realities—thus cross and are at odds with one another. The main theme in the novel is hedonism, the possibility of which is scrutinized through the opposition between the rapid pace of the contemporary world and the slowness of the eighteenth century. This pair of themes is connected with the themes of beauty and meaning or of their absence. Further themes of the novel are the construction of the self by performing in front of others—characteristic of particular individuals, whom the author now calls “dancers” (17–20)—and the instability of individual identity in the modern world.

The title of the novel Identity calls attention to one of Kundera’s main themes. Its themes—how the individual self is distinguished from others, how a man’s gaze selects a woman as an individual in a crowd, questions of self and remembering, soul and body—are familiar from Kundera’s other novels, but are here developed in new variations. The themes are embedded in a single narrative line about Chantal and Jean-Marc, keeping the structure of the novel simpler than those of Kundera’s other novels. The only point where Identity differs from a plain, chronologically told narrative with flashbacks is its ending, where Chantal gets locked up in an odd house in London and Jean-Marc wakes her up. It turns out that some of the events have taken place only in a dream. Unlike the part describing Tamina’s sojourn on the children’s island in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the Xavier passages of Life Is Elsewhere, or Goethe’s and Hemingway’s celestial conversations in Immortality, here the dreamlike narrative is not a distinct line separate from the realistic narration. The dream in Identity—unlike Tereza’s dreams in The Unbearable Lightness of Being—does not appear as an integral part of the realistic narration either. The transition between realistic narration and dream is blurred, and the author-narrator asks “Where is the border?” (153). Here the concept of border has a new meaning. Where earlier it referred to the point where the meanings of things suddenly change, it now represents the point of transition from reality to dream, and this point cannot be grasped or defined. The structure of the novel is not polyphonic in the sense of mixing different story lines; yet Identity is a composition of themes rather than an account of the protagonists’ lives, although the chronology of events is followed more closely than in many others of Kundera’s texts. By dissolving the border between dream and reality, which in Kundera’s earlier novels are kept distinct, the novel comes closer, in a sense, to the “ontological uncertainty” that is often regarded as characteristic of the postmodern novel (see McHale 10; Saariluoma [Steinby], Der postindividualistische [40–41] where I argue that rather than the shift from epistemological to ontological questions, it is the weakness of the epistemological subject that should be seen as the cause of ontological uncertainty).

Ignorance does not contribute anything essentially new to Kundera’s way of composing novels, but it resumes some of his themes and develops them in a partly new way, especially the theme of the temporality of human existence. Where in Slowness and Identity the events are set in France, Ignorance is set among Czech emigrants shortly after the turning point of 1989. The novel is about Irena, a Czech émigrée living in France who is confronted with the fact that after the events of 1989 both her French friends and her old Czech acquaintances expect her to return to her native country. To her, this expectation is equal to a demand to deny or forget that she has spent the most important years of her life in France. Irena’s dilemma—whether or not to return—is compared with the experiences of the mythic traveler Ulysses returning to his home in Ithaca. Another Czech émigré, called Josef, who is visiting his relatives in Bohemia, has similar feelings. When the two of them meet by chance, Irena recognizes in him someone to whom she had once been attracted, but picking up their thread from that point proves problematic. When Josef decides to return to Denmark to cherish the memory of his deceased wife, Irena comes to realize that nothing remains for her for the rest of her life (as she thinks) but solitude. The story is simple and the themes are familiar, although the variations are new: the immaturity of youth, the sense of duty toward the deceased and therefore endlessly weak spouse (Tamina was guided by a similar feeling toward her late husband), repetitiveness leading to the transformation of physical love into something insignificant, and forgetting—even of the most important things connected to one’s love—as human destiny. In Ignorance, the themes appear in the form of individual motifs or ideas rather than as elements of a complex thematic structure. The prevailing sense is the feeling of having reached the last phase of life and of looking back retrospectively, whereupon melancholy supersedes the ironic playfulness to which we are accustomed in Kundera’s novels.