The Sentimental and the Authentic Self
Kundera emphasizes the idea that being open to facing the new is a virtue in a novelist, but where he is concerned with the possibilities of human existence, his oeuvre is in fact unified thematically. This recurrence of themes makes it difficult to avoid repetition in the analysis of his novels. To divorce the themes from the works, however, contradicts Kundera’s conviction that a novel has to be conceived as a whole and as a unified thematic composition created by its author. In this and the next three chapters, I therefore analyze each of Kundera’s most important novels, from Life Is Elsewhere to Immortality, in terms of one or more themes that are pivotal in Kundera’s oeuvre as a whole but are dealt with most thoroughly in each specific novel. The same themes in other novels are referred to less extensively in order to provide additional insight. The purpose of such an analysis is to achieve a comprehensive overview of Kundera’s novelistic work, emphasizing both its thematic continuity and the uniqueness of each individual work.
Kundera in his art of the novel aspires to examine some of the possibilities of human existence in the era of “terminal paradoxes,” where trust not only in a metaphysical order but also in History is lacking. In a previous chapter I discuss The Joke, which depicts the basic situation of a man who has fallen out of History. Here I discuss Life Is Elsewhere and Farewell Waltz from the point of view of the two contrasting existential strategies of modern individuals: the sentimental and the authentic mode of existence. The problematic of these two novels still arises out of Kundera’s historical experiences in Czechoslovakia, but in contrasting the sentimental and the authentic mode of existence he examines universal “anthropological” possibilities. In chapter 7 I discuss The Book of Laughter and Forgetting from the point of view of the effect of ridicule, remembering, and forgetting on the individual’s sense of leading a meaningful life. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera explores the three principal modes of sense-making practices available to the nonsentimental individual as Kundera sees them, namely, hedonism, aestheticism, and love. Finally, in the analysis of Immortality, I look at the relevance of the fact of death, or rather of mortality, for efforts by the modern individual to discover meaning in life itself without any underpinning of religion, ideology, or History.
Kundera asks: how does sense giving take place in the contemporary world which the individual cannot hope to change? In other words, in a world where History is no longer an open space of opportunities but a trap? There are two kinds of answers. On the one hand, there are those who do dare to face what they really experience and orient their action accordingly. These individuals have given up on all ideologies and have turned their back on History in searching for the meaningful solely in private life. For Kundera it is only these individuals who represent the autonomous modern individual in search of authenticity and who relies upon himself or herself alone in defining his or her own existence. On the other hand, there are those who identify themselves with ideologies or “grand” ideas and feelings. These individuals might be called inauthentic; the notions Kundera uses are “sentimental” and “lyrical”—in Immortality (218-19), homo sentimentalis and homo hystericus—but “immaturity” and “youth” are for him also close in meaning to the former. Characteristic of this attitude is the adoration of the individual’s own feelings. Homo sentimentalis or homo hystericus is not a human being who has feelings, which we all have, but one “who has raised feelings to a category of value” (Immortality 218). This leads to propping up his or her identity with assumed great feelings. In his criticism of artificially nourished feelings, Kundera actually comes close to Kant and other Enlightenment writers who criticized the (first) sentimental current in literature in the mid-eighteenth century (see Kant 509; see also Jäger; Sauder). Kundera deepens the analysis of the sentimental attitude by connecting it with immaturity, the propensity to give up personal autonomy and let others decide what things actually mean and even what one actually is in oneself. Since other persons function for such an individual as mirrors, he or she is incapable of perceiving others as they in themselves really are.
For the opposite of the sentimental or lyrical Kundera has no name. He sometimes refers to the “epic” attitude as opposed to the “lyrical,” meaning by the former an attitude of acceptance of the plurality and the relativity of matters as opposed to lyrical subjectivity and egocentrism. Accordingly, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “epic womanizers” are distinguished from lyrical ones (194–95). In Life Is Elsewhere, the opposite of the young poet Jaromil is the anonymous “man in his forties.” The appellation here indicates that the attitude which a person in a mature age may have adopted is the opposite of lyricism and sentimentality, typical of youth. However, not everyone achieves this attitude simply by aging; on the contrary, most people reveal at least some propensity to sentimentality. This is why it would be more accurate to speak of a person’s sentimental or authentic attitude toward a certain matter or in a given situation, rather than of a sentimental or an authentic individual in general. Yet often one of these two attitudes prevails in a person to the extent that speaking of either a sentimental individual or an individual striving for authenticity is justified.
The opposition between the sentimental and the authentic types of personality or attitude exists within the framework of modernity. Neither alternative means a return to the premodern order of things in which meanings are determined independently of individuals. It is true that the sentimental individual relinquishes his or her autonomy because of a great truth or a beautiful feeling, but this too is regarded as an individual choice, because the individual could have chosen differently. In all of Kundera’s novels there appear different versions of sentimental individuals and of those striving for authenticity, facing the uncertainty of existence. The author shows a constant interest in unveiling and analyzing inauthentic attitudes, sentiments, and decisions he regards with irony, but the question that bothers him more than anything else is whether it is possible for the individual who strives for authenticity and who searches for meaning without recourse to ideologies, myths, or History to succeed in this endeavor and avoid ending up with the unbearable lightness of being.
Life Is Elsewhere as an analysis of the lyrical attitude
In his second and the third novels, Life is Elsewhere and Farewell Waltz, Kundera continues the analysis of “anthropological findings” in the same political and historical situation which is the basis of the explorations of human possibilities in The Joke. Where Ludvik in The Joke appears first and foremost as a victim of communist rule, Jaromil, the young poet and informer in Life Is Elsewhere, is a perpetrator of terror and ultimately a victim of his own attitude. The novel is not autobiographical, but the reader is aware that Kundera himself, as a young poet and revolutionary, took part in the communist movement after 1948 and that the type analyzed by Kundera therefore includes himself. I agree with Andreas W. Mytze in that few writers have been so recklessly critical about themselves and their country as Kundera is in Life Is Elsewhere (50). In Kundera’s analysis, the fact that the young revolutionary is a poet and therefore unworldly is not offered as an excuse purifying him of all guilt. The new insight that Kundera insists on having discovered is that it is precisely the “lyrical” attitude that makes the poet a revolutionary, an informer, and a perpetrator of terror. Kundera himself contends in Testaments Betrayed that “more than the Terror, the lyricization of the Terror was a trauma for me” (155). It is this complex of lyricism and terror that is his topic in Life Is Elsewhere. Again, he does not analyze historical events as such, but focuses on what the historical situation reveals about human beings, what it demonstrates to be possible for the individual.
The lyrical or sentimental attitude was depicted already in The Joke, although not with the same poignancy as in Life Is Elsewhere. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera calls Helena of The Joke a homo sentimentalis for whom communism serves as “the wellspring of enthusiasm” (13). Actually, any ideological attitude is in Kundera’s view sentimental. In The Joke, this is depicted not only by Helena’s “enthusiastic” communism, but also by Kostka’s Christian communism, Jaroslav’s folkloristic romanticism, and Ludvik’s pact with History. Of the four characters, Ludvik is the one who later distances himself most determinedly from any ideology; as already noted, however, this change does not take place as a gradual process of inner maturation but is precipitated by a sudden blow from the outside. None of Kundera’s novels actually depicts the gradual maturation process whereby a person overcomes sentimentalism, the attitude characteristic of youth. Depicting the psychological development of a human being is of no interest to Kundera, because any search for causal psychological explanations for a person’s behavior—an objective typical of the novels of the age of realism—diverts attention away from what he sees as crucial, namely, the possibilities of existence in a given situation and the choices made by the individual in that situation. Each of Kundera’s first three novels, however, portrays an intellectual at a certain stage of his development, so that they allow us to envisage a certain continuity between the different phases. The Joke is about the disillusionment of a young intellectual, Life Is Elsewhere takes a step back in depicting as its hero a young revolutionary and poet, and in Farewell Waltz one of the main figures, Jakub, is about to emigrate after experiencing deep disillusionment with politics. It is characteristic of Kundera that rather than depicting these as stages in the development of a single character, he splits up the material between three separate novels with three different protagonists and three different settings and scrutinizes each one as a distinct human situation.
The narration in Life Is Elsewhere is bitingly ironic. The novel tells the story of Jaromil and his mother, Mama. According to Kundera, a poet is born from an unusually close relationship between mother and son. The son remains bound to his mother and “will walk in the world like a dog on a long leash” (Life 102). The story opens with Mama convincing herself that her son was conceived on the seashore in a romantic landscape, although a less romantic alternative is actually the more probable. Concomitantly, she embellishes her love for Jaromil’s father into an unfettered elemental force; however, as her husband does not display a sentimental embellishment of his feelings toward her, she starts imagining an alabaster statuette of Apollo, standing on the bedside table, to be the father of her child. From the beginning she thus appears as a sentimental person who adores great emotions and for their sake is willing to retouch reality to suit herself. Disappointed in her husband, whom she vainly expects “to invest an equal amount of feeling in their joint account” (4), she turns to Jaromil for compensation. The joy of suckling her baby gives her the feeling of an “Edenic state”: “the body could be fully body and had no need to hide itself with a fig leaf; they were plunged into the limitless space of a calm time; they lived together like Adam and Eve before they bit into the apple of the tree of knowledge” (9). Paradise represents a state prior to any differentiation. Body and soul, good and evil, self and other are not yet separate. This paradise is a state in the remote, mythic past, a time when the fundamental problems of existence had not yet emerged and the symbiosis between mother and infant represents a temporary return to it. In the case of the poet, this symbiosis does not end with early childhood. The relationship undergoes some changes, but the unity between mother and son essentially preserves its nature: “Their mothers’ skirts spread over them [the poets] like the sky” (The Book of Laughter 185), preventing the sons from growing up into the real world of uncertainty and plurality (typical of Kundera is that his “explanation” ignores the existence of women poets). Jaromil’s mother does everything to preserve the special relationship with her son, to exclude any possible rivals and to protect her son from an encounter with the real world, thus effectively obstructing him from reaching adulthood.
For Kundera adulthood means accepting the expulsion from paradise, the necessity of living separately from others, and the obligation of dealing with the problems of the world. A tendency to regress toward a symbiotic unity is nevertheless common at both the individual and the community level. In the case of revolutionaries, this is manifested as a longing for universal brotherhood, as a desire to be absorbed in the human community and as a dream of returning to the state of unity that prevailed before the emergence of any controversies. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera says that the revolutionaries wanted to create an idyll for all, because “all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter” (11). Those who were unwilling to take part in the common idyll were imprisoned or sent to death. Instead of a political analysis, Kundera thus offers an analysis of the attitude which predominated in the political situation in question.
In this desire to return to a state of unity, we can recognize the romantic aspiration for de-individuation, which we encountered already in The Joke. While Romanticism as a historical movement contributed fundamentally to the birth of the modern understanding of the individual, at the same time individuality was experienced as a burden. The separation of the individual from the collective, the individual’s responsibility, and the uncertainty brought about by autonomy resulted in a longing for a merging with something greater. For the Romantics, this escape from the separateness of the individual was attained by uniting with the beloved, by a religious-mystical experience, by the revival of mythical modes of thinking, or, as the ultimate and most perfect deliverance from individuality, by death; all of these appear, for instance, in Wagner’s operas (see, e.g., Cicora; Williams). In the nineteenth and twentieth century the emergence of nationalism brought about a new realm within which the individual could identify with something greater than his or her own self, namely the nation, and through its participation in History, one could identify with this as well (see, e.g., Hobsbawm). Kundera looks upon all of these aspirations to transcend the individual as sentimental tendencies. In The Joke, Kostka and Jaroslav personify religious-mystical and mythical thinking, respectively; the theme of identification with the nation and with History appears both in The Joke and in Life Is Elsewhere; and the theme of sentimental love occurs in Life Is Elsewhere, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality. To these forms of sentimental merging originating in Romanticism Kundera adds political ideology and the dream of an earthly paradise.
The young Jaromil is in constant need to prop up his ego with appropriated great emotions and thoughts. His mother has incited this habit by praising the richness of his “inner world” as displayed in his childish scribbles: “‘Inner world!’ Those were grand words, and Jaromil heard them with extreme satisfaction” (25). The inner world is supposed to be the source of a poet’s greatness, yet whenever Jaromil “bent over that self in order to peer into it . . . all he could find was the reflection of himself bending over himself to peer into that self” (27). Lacking an “inner world” as a source of true poetry, Jaromil “wrote poems about the artificial childhood of tenderness, he wrote poems about an unreal death, he wrote poems about an unreal old age” (116–17), all in imitation of the surrealist poems he found in books borrowed from his mother’s lover, the painter. The author discovers behind this artificiality the young man’s anguish arising out of his lack of experience of physical love: “he moved toward the undressed body of a young woman as if he were treading on thorns; he desired this body and he was afraid of it; that is why, in his poems of tenderness, he fled from the tangibility of the body to take refuge in the world of childish imagination” (116).
Jaromil’s lyrical poetry originates in the absence of coition, an idea later repeated in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in the part dealing with the student and the butcher’s wife and the poets’ symposium. “Coition” stands here for maturity; Jaromil’s feeling of inadequacy, of lacking manhood, is epitomized by its absence. The weakness deriving from his immaturity drives him to identify with great ideas and to take a radical stand. He joins the communist party to defy his uncle and take revenge on him for having humiliated him. Later he denounces avant-garde poetry in the name of the revolution, because he feels that he has been treated like a child in the circle of those who cultivate this poetry. However, when he raises his voice in opposition to the painter who until then had been his mentor in the world of arts, the unpleasant feeling overcomes him that he is still imitating the painter’s gestures and his manner of speech: “In a fury of humiliation, he expressed his ideas, as he himself was aware, precisely and spitefully. Only one thing unsettled him from his very first words on: once again he was hearing the painter’s distinctive, authoritative tone in his own voice, and he was unable to prevent his right hand from describing in the air the painter’s characteristic gestures” (125). While speaking, he realizes that he is actually denouncing the whole of his own poetry, which he had until then considered as the most precious of his possessions, but “there was something more precious than his poems; something far away he didn’t yet possess and longed for—manliness” (126).
In Life Is Elsewhere, for Kundera what lurks behind poetry, revolution, and the politics of art is the poet’s immaturity. The actions of a lyrical or sentimental individual are always determined by small, private motives that concern his or her ego. Kundera denies the idea that ideologies can ever be the true motive behind our deeds. The display of great ideas and emotions is nothing but a folding screen, used to conceal the smallness of one’s ego. The conviction that the world can be grasped in a single idea, however great, testifies as such, in Kundera’s view, to immaturity. Such a conviction derives from a fear of “the relativized adult world” (186) and “that is why young people are passionate monists, emissaries of the absolute . . . that is why the young revolutionary demands a radically new world forged from a single clear idea” (186–87).
Kundera’s contention that any great ideal or ideology functions merely as a disguise and as a means of self-aggrandizement of a small ego manifests, I argue, more profoundly than anything else his skepticism, or rather his cynicism, about politics and public affairs. When Kundera denounced the ideology he had been committed to as a young man, he was actually not only rejecting a particular ideology—Marxism, its faith in History, its conception of the relationship between individual and community—but also the belief that individuals can ever devote themselves to a “grand idea” simply because they are convinced of its truthfulness and value. This attitude is displayed in the polemic of the 1970s with Václav Havel over a petition for the liberation of political prisoners in which Havel criticized Kundera’s view that the signing of the petition was good for nothing but the manifestation of one’s own moral superiority (Havel, Disturbing 173–77). According to Kundera, the actual, hidden motive is always to be found at a completely different level—one that is petty, private, egocentric—than the arguments offered in support of the idea in question. From this it follows that Kundera’s unveiling and analysis of sentimental or ideological attitudes is less variable than Musil’s or Broch’s rendering. The manner in which Musil’s characters think of themselves is inaccurate, embellishing, and abounding in clichés, but their motives need not be limited to insignificant, personal interests alone. This is even less the case with Broch, who thinks that our actions must necessarily be based on general conceptions of morality in order to avoid the individual’s complete disintegration. In The Sleepwalkers, Broch approves of Esch in his search for an ideology or a system of values, while he condemns Huguenau as a monster precisely for not feeling the same need. Kundera’s skepticism toward any putatively universal ideology or system of values implies that for him only what is “small,” personal, and nonideological can be authentic.
In the dreamlike passages of Life Is Elsewhere, Jaromil’s imaginary alter ego Xavier does whatever Jaromil himself wishes to do: he seduces and leaves women, leads a revolutionary group on its dangerous journey on the rooftops, and keeps a notebook with a “list of all the enemies of the people, who were to be executed on the first day of the revolution” (75). Especially striking and alarming is Jaromil’s flirtation with death. Jaromil’s alter ego wants death, the greatest and most relentless matter of all, to give weight to his deeds: “He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death” (70). He derives satisfaction from the idea that he has caused the death of the blond girl who was in love with him, as well as from the conviction that “she had not stopped loving him and that love lasts beyond the grave” (73). Jaromil’s story shows how dangerous the desire to be measured in one’s actions by the greatest ideas only might be.
In real life, Jaromil needs the alliance with political power and History to conceal his lack of maturity and he becomes a member of the communist party, one who is unwilling to accept any compromise and who checks “the firmness, manliness and harshness of his words” (139) in the eyes of his comrades. Yet this does not alter anything about the fact that “every mirror presented him with the grinning ugliness of his immaturity” (120). Finally, he comes to experience physical love with a salesgirl, but not even this love affair with “the redhead” brings him maturity. Although his original advances were meant for a fellow worker of hers, he now makes his love swell up into immensity. The redhead is not beautiful and when an acquaintance of his once makes an ironic remark about her appearance, Jaromil denies any more intimate relationship with her. Yet a better strategy for denying the significance of the girl’s ugliness is to let it dissolve in the infinity of his love: “Yes, he was ready to make all her faults vanish in the all-forgiving solvent of his love, but only under one condition: that she obediently immerse herself in that solvent, that she never be anywhere else but in that bathtub of love, that she never try, not even in a single thought, to leave that tub” (178). Instead of the girl he perceives only his own passion, aggrandized into an absolute (depicted here with a Musil-like antilyric metaphor, a solvent). The girl has no other right but to be the object of his passion.
Yet the state of being the mere object of the other’s amplified sentiments is dangerous, since one aggrandized emotion can be replaced by another. Jaromil eventually ruins the life of both the girl and her brother by reporting to the police that the brother is about to defect. The girl is immediately arrested and Jaromil never sees her again. The motif of sending a fellow human being to death without the slightest remorse reappears once again, this time with the victim as a lover. Since for Jaromil only his own feelings and not the girl herself are important, he does not lose anything. On the contrary, after the arrest he is overwhelmed by a feeling even greater than love, namely, the sense of having fulfilled his duty: “Of course, it was terrible to sacrifice an actual woman (redheaded, nice, delicate, talkative) for the sake of the future world, but it was probably the only tragedy of our time that was worthy of beautiful verse, worthy of a great poem!” (Life 225).
In the end, Jaromil himself becomes the victim of his own sentimental immaturity. After being ridiculed by a young man in the company of some young intellectuals with whom he aspires to feel equal, to conceal his shame he sits for a long time in the freezing cold on the balcony. As a consequence he catches a cold, develops pneumonia, and finally dies under his mother’s nursing. Kundera draws a parallel with the death of the poet Lermontov in a duel. I add that in The Sleepwalkers the brother of the romantic Pasenow is likewise killed in a duel “for the sake of honor.” Laughter and the sentimental are archenemies which cannot be reconciled. For the sentimentalist, ironic laughter is a matter of deadly seriousness in the most literal sense of the word. In a radio interview, Kundera has said that in the character of Jaromil, he intended to demystify the myth that “a poet can never be a spy and stoolpigeon together” (qtd. in Liehm, “Kundera” 32). Using Kundera’s own expression, we can say that the new aspect of human existence which he has uncovered in Life Is Elsewhere is the fact that being a poet and being a perpetrator are two sides of the same coin. Yet we may add that he has also shown that a poet is as dangerous to himself or herself as to others.
The sixth, penultimate part of the novel takes place after Jaromil’s death and deals with the encounter between the redhead who has just been released after three years in prison and her ex-lover, the man in his forties. As noted, according to the author, this part functions as an “observatory,” opening up a new perspective into Jaromil’s world. Jaromil himself “never knew anything about anyone” but himself (Life 229). While in other parts of the novel the criticism of Jaromil (and his mother) is articulated through the heavy irony of the description, in the sixth part the narration is nonironic and the criticism of Jaromil ensues from the presence of a contrasting, mature attitude. The man, who is presented sympathetically, is himself a victim of the constructors of a paradise. At the beginning of the war he had left the country to fight the Germans with the British Air Force, but when he returned after the war “the authorities determined that he had been too closely tied to capitalist England” to be reliable enough for the socialist army, and he had to earn his living working in a factory (238). Although ever since his wife’s death he has led a “colourful erotic life,” he is “basically an idyllist and saw to it that his adventures were calm and orderly” (235). His attitude toward life is hedonistic and skeptical. He enjoys reading books, taking warm baths, and spending time with his mistresses, none of which demands too much commitment from him. The expression “calm and orderliness in his adventures” suggests that he is no longer devoted to the passionate exploration of existence, but looks for minor love affairs which do not disturb his peace. His hedonistic and skeptical attitude, however, does not exclude being considerate toward his fellow creatures. He is now overwhelmed by feelings of compassion toward the girl and offers her a temporary resting place: “The physical desire had vanished, but his great and steady warmth for her was still there, and he felt a need for light; the man in his forties turned on the small bedside lamp and gazed at the girl” (242). The light of “the lamp of kindness” (243) lit by the man is the exact opposite of Jaromil’s grandiose but imaginary devotion to her. The poet promised the girl never-ending love, while the man does not promise her anything more than he can really give her, some pleasant moments, and she feels that the moments with the man are the most beautiful in her entire life.
The man in his forties is the figure who in Life Is Elsewhere represents maturity and for whom life is here and now. In Kundera’s other novels, other mature characters are depicted, several of them more thoroughly than the man in his forties. Kundera claims in The Art of the Novel that the forty-year-old is of all his characters closest to himself (127; after writing Immortality, however, he has said that he loves professor Avenarius in that novel the most of all of his characters; see “La ‘Parole’” 24). One can imagine the “relief” the author feels when for a moment he abandons his mortifying analysis of immaturity in which he recognizes his own past. Moreover, it is perhaps precisely the brevity of the man’s appearance that allows Kundera to bring him and his hedonistic-skeptical views on stage in a positive light. In his later works, when—through such figures as Jakub in Farewell Waltz, Tamina in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Agnes in Immortality—Kundera penetrates more deeply into the existence of the nonsentimental, autonomous individual striving for authenticity, this existence turns out to be problematic indeed.
While the figure of the man in his forties, outlined in a few strokes, appears as Jaromil’s strict opposite, there are actually fundamental similarities between them as well, making the discerning of the “mature” alternative difficult. For the man, what is essential is the passing moment—enjoying it and making it as beautiful as possible—whereas Jaromil seeks beauty in matters greater than life; nevertheless, what is common to both is the search for beauty. Kundera states that the Czech revolution produced beautiful poetry—because in poetry “anything backed by the power of experienced emotion” may appear true, important, and beautiful (Life 230). The difficulty then remains not only to distinguish between beauty and kitsch, the latter being beauty worn out because used too many times and unable to reveal any new truth, but also to distinguish between the beauty produced by the coloring of the object by sentimental emotions and that found or produced without such embellishments. An example of the former occurs when Mama, after renouncing her lover—because of her exhaustion, caused by his fancies, but telling him that she is giving up her great but guilty love because of her maternal love for her son—feels a “beautiful sadness” (45); she herself believes her noble motives to be true. For Jaromil, it is not only the freedom of movement in his dreams of Xavier that is beautiful (35, 73). Death, too, has for the young Jaromil the beauty of a dream (88), Xavier’s betraying of a beloved woman is beautiful (75), and the feeling that the redhead’s life is in his hands incites in him a beautiful feeling of power that intoxicates him (170). He even admires the “cruel beauty (or beautiful cruelty) of real life in the police’s work” (185) and after denouncing the girl to the police considers the policeman’s face as beautiful: “it was furrowed with deep wrinkles testifying to a hard, manly life” (222). The same word, “beautiful,” is used in the sixth part, when the girl thinks that the most beautiful parts of her life were the moments she spent with the forty-year-old man (238), when the man lit “the lamp of kindness” for her. The task remains to discern between true moments of beauty and beauty produced by sentimental, false embellishment.
Kundera’s interest in moments in which the presence of beauty is immediately sensed resembles Husserl’s idea of phenomenology as the study of what is immediately presented to our consciousness but is still organized by the sense giving activity of the mind. Husserl’s concept for this is the “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart), in which something is immediately experienced as having a certain meaning or sense (Sinn) (see Husserl, Ideen). However, while the question of meaning in our apperception leads Husserl to a philosophical reflection on intentionality, Kundera is in search of the different ways that it is possible for the modern individual to experience life as meaningful.
Farewell Waltz, a “comedy of errors” about life and death
The same catastrophic history of Czechoslovakia which sets the scene both in Jaromil’s story and in Ludvik’s story in The Joke serves as the background to events in Farewell Waltz, but the focus differs. Farewell Waltz is an ironic novel, but the irony is no longer the all-pervasive mode of narration of Life Is Elsewhere. It now has multiple facets and it functions at the level of events rather than in the mode of presentation. In terms of style and plot structure, Farewell Waltz might be called a comedy of errors, for it is full of amusing details, irony, and vaudeville-like coincidences, turns, and revelations. The outcome of these events, however, is not comical. While in a classic comedy or vaudeville (in the French sense, see above), misunderstandings and intrigues are eventually resolved and the status quo is reestablished—with the difference that some marriages are usually arranged and some lost children may be reunited with their parents—in Farewell Waltz, the end shows nothing restored. The accidents and misunderstandings are far from harmless. In fact, just as in The Joke or Laughable Loves, they change the characters’ lives fundamentally and irreversibly and may even lead to their death.
The trumpeter Klima and the intellectual Jakub, who are the protagonists in the two intertwined story lines, have little in common. Klima, a typical Kunderan man, is a womanizer who nevertheless loves his wife. He finds himself in serious difficulties when the bath attendant Ruzena informs him of her pregnancy. Jakub, just like Ludvik in The Joke, has during the worst years of communist rule become aware of the “anthropological truth” that individuals are capable of sending their fellows to death without a wince, but until now he has considered himself exempt from this truth. In the course of the events taking place in the spa town, he is now forced to change this view. Back in the years when Jakub was politically active he had asked his friend, Dr. Skreta, for a poison pill, allowing him to put an end to his life should he find himself in a hopeless situation. During his stay at the spa resort, when the pill accidentally ends up in Ruzena’s hands, Jakub makes only weak efforts to prevent her from unintentionally swallowing it. The reason for his passivity is his antipathy toward her. Seeing her take the part of the old men who are chasing free-running dogs (while he himself saves a dog from being taken away and possibly killed), he concludes that she belongs to the unpleasant company of “the hangman’s assistants” so well-known to him, those who identify with the persecutor rather than the victim (109, 160). Paradoxically, his conviction as to Ruzena being one of the hangman’s assistants turns Jakub himself into her executioner. Jakub leaves the resort believing that the pill was actually not poisonous, since Ruzena—as he assumes—does not die after swallowing it and he never learns the truth that she has in fact died. Nevertheless, he is forced to face this newly discovered aspect of his own character. Until now he has felt superior to those who were prepared without scruple to send their comrades to their death, but he must realize that he is no exception.
Jakub may not appear in every respect sympathetic—in fact, the negative traits in his character are emphasized—but he is definitely someone to be taken seriously. This is because he is a mature and nonsentimental person who wants to see himself as he really is, even if the truth may be unpleasant to face. He plays his role in the “comedy of errors,” yet he is not a comic figure. The weight of the “anthropological conclusions,” drawn from terrible historical experience, is placed above all on his shoulders. In contrast, Klima, whose concerns are of a purely personal character, is from the outset a comic figure. We may ask why this is so, unlike the case of Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, although his situation closely resembles Klima’s. Both men indulge in countless love affairs in spite of their deep love for their wives, both wives are tormented by jealousy and neither of the men understands why, since they believe that their affairs do not imperil their love. Tomas’s reflections and questions concerning his life are nevertheless dealt with seriously, whereas Klima’s sympathetic figure is presented in an unmistakably comic light. The difference in the presentation of the two characters arises, I suggest, from the classical Aristotelian concept of the comic, wherein characters that are suitable for comedy are those inferior to us, the spectators (Poetics 1448b). Tomas does not do anything which in Kundera’s view would be inappropriate for a mature person. Klima, on the other hand, discredits himself and becomes ridiculous from the outset, asking his colleagues for advice on how to persuade Ruzena to have an abortion. In Kundera’s eyes, the fact that he discusses his private life in public deprives him of dignity. After Ruzena’s call, Klima has the feeling that an old fear of his has come true. What exactly this fear consists of is not said, but he is of course afraid of his wife Kamila’s reaction; nevertheless, he seems to be less concerned about the pain he is about to cause her than about the fate of their marriage. Accordingly, both men do their best to conceal their affairs from their wives. The difference between them is that while Tomas acts out of compassion toward his wife, Klima is worried about his own future. In addition, Klima’s helplessness about the emotions that overwhelm him brings a comic overtone or a touch of irony to his depiction.
Ruzena, too, appears in an ironic light right from the start. Instead of keeping the memory of the amorous night spent with the famous trumpeter to herself, she shares the experience with a whole group of colleagues, who are now eager to advise her as to how to take advantage of her pregnancy. The question which preoccupies Ruzena is not whether or not she should keep the baby, but how the pregnancy might offer her a chance to break free from the depressing environment of her home town. This is why she “decides” that Klima, rather than her boyfriend, is the child’s father, although the latter is actually more probable. Nevertheless, Kundera assures us that this is not a malicious design on Ruzena’s part; soon she herself is convinced of the truth of her words (162). The comic distance between Ruzena and the reader is provoked by her inability to think consistently and honestly. For example, she no longer has any clear recollection of the night spent with Klima, yet she claims to be in love with him. Further, she does not perceive the existence of a chasm between her alleged love and her intention to take advantage of her condition. Her attitude is not sentimental in the sense of overemphasizing grand ideas and puffed-up feelings; rather, she is an “ordinary,” somewhat sordid human being incapable of reflection, who in a critical situation chooses instinctively the alternative which appears to be the most advantageous for her. Through the figures of Ruzena and Klima, the character of the mature and skeptical Jakub is thus contrasted not with sentimental, lyrical types, but with ordinary human beings who never ponder the questions that preoccupy Jakub. They do not engage with the great questions of life at the level of reflection, even when these actually come up in their own lives. For them abortion is an exclusively practical issue and not a decision over someone’s life and death.
Jakub reveals his cynical views on humankind in a discussion with his protégée Olga, the daughter of an old comrade, the man who sent him to prison right before he was himself jailed and executed. Olga, an intelligent young woman who only now has been permitted to study at the university, asks Jakub about her father. She finds it difficult to believe that her father was purely the victim of terror and not also its perpetrator, as he was politically active at a time when “a hundred thousand people were put in prison” without trial, “often without any grounds,” and of whom “thousands never came back” (88). She regards as a scandal the fact that “not a single one of those responsible was ever punished” (88). Although Jakub denies that her father took part in these crimes, he acknowledges that those who were imprisoned were in principle the same as those who sent others to jail. He comments on this by saying that “to come to the conclusion that there’s no difference between the guilty and the victims is to abandon all hope. And that, my girl, is what is called hell” (89). This is the mental background to Jakub’s behavior when Ruzena’s life is threatened and to a great extent also to the reactions of others to her death.
In a conversation with Bertlef, the worth of humankind is discussed at a more general, “anthropological” level. Jakub says that the creation of mankind was a mistake on God’s part, which he must regret. When king Herod ordered that all male babies be killed, he made a decision for the whole of mankind: the human race would no longer be propagated (121). Jakub himself does not want to become a father, because he thinks that having a child equals the absolute approval of humanity: “‘Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it’s as though I’m saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that it merits being duplicated.’ ‘And you have not found life to be good?’ asked Bertlef. Jakub tried to be precise, and said cautiously: ‘All I know is that I could never say with complete conviction: Man is a wonderful being and I want to reproduce him’” (118). His disgust with mankind derives from his love of what could be precious in a human being, scrupulousness and high-mindedness, but “he was persuaded that these were not human qualities. Jakub knew human beings well, and that is why he did not love them” (257).
When Jakub discovers the “inner murderer” in himself, he ponders his motives: “Why then had he given the poison to the nurse? Was it simply by chance? Raskolnikov had actually spent a long time plotting and preparing for his crime, while Jakub had acted on the impulse of a moment. But Jakub realized that he, too, had unknowingly for many years been preparing for his act of murder, and that the instant he gave the poison to Ruzena was a fissure into which had been shoveled all of his past life, all of his disgust with mankind” (256). Trying to imagine that Ruzena might already be dead, killed by the pill he has handed her, he observes that he does not feel a shattering sense of guilt: “Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him. And he wondered if this lightness was not more terrifying than the Russian character’s hysterical feelings” (257). The horror felt in the lightness of killing is a theme familiar from Broch’s description of Huguenau at the end of The Sleepwalkers. However, while in The Sleepwalkers it is not the killer himself but the author who is repelled by the casualness of the deed, Jakub, who recognizes his resentment toward mankind as the cause of his act, nevertheless wonders at the lightness of his act. Moreover, Jakub makes other unflattering observations concerning himself. He now realizes that the poison he has been carrying in his pocket for years “had given his every step a theatrical solemnity and allowed him to turn his life into a grandiose myth!” (225). He also becomes aware of the fact that his taking care of Olga, the daughter of a comrade turned into his enemy, has always furnished him with a sense of being high-minded. That is to say, in hindsight he discovers in himself a certain tendency toward sentimental self-flattery, and he now feels laid bare and ridiculous.
Jakub’s opponent in the conversation concerning the value of human life and the dignity of man is the (US) American millionaire Bertlef. In the figure of Bertlef, a comic saint, Kundera’s mixing of parody and seriousness reaches its climax. Bertlef is a paradoxical and laughable combination of Kostka’s religiosity in The Joke and the hedonism of the man in his forties in Life Is Elsewhere. Nevertheless, his thoughts and actions, in offering a challenge to Jakub’s misanthropy, are not devoid of seriousness. Bertlef, a connoisseur of food, drink, and erotic pleasure and an amateur painter, expresses his respect and admiration for God’s creation through his love for women: “Saint Paul would condemn me because I love women. But Jesus would not. I don’t see anything bad about loving women, many women, and about being loved by women, many women” (130). That his love pleases God is proven by the blue halo that surrounds him during meditation: according to him, “people who become attached to God with a particularly powerful love are rewarded by experiencing a sacred joy that flows through their entire being and radiates out from there. The light of this divine joy is soft and peaceful, and its color is the celestial azure” (113).
Bertlef is a curious mixture of sentimental and mature attitudes. He is a hedonist not despite his religiosity but because of it and for him hedonism is a form of devotion. Behind the halo we discern in him personality traits belonging to a mature individual, similar to those of the forty-year-old of Life Is Elsewhere, such as being able to enjoy the good things at hand, and yet—or maybe precisely for this reason—also able to be considerate toward others and to contribute to their welfare. Bertlef declares that we should respond to the challenge of human unworthiness with love for our neighbors. Even when a person is not lovable, treating him or her lovingly improves life. Bertlef demonstrates how this works by spending a wonderful night of love with Ruzena and making the bath attendant feel like a queen for the first time in her life, charming, good, and beautiful. The experience opens up her eyes toward new perspectives in her life and she realizes that she need not cling to Klima, since the future might hold further opportunities for her. Thus Bertlef, who is in principle against the idea of abortion, actually causes Ruzena to decide upon an abortion. When she dies and her death is declared a suicide, Bertlef refuses to believe this. Ruzena had thought positively about life and therefore could not have committed the worst kind of crime, which is to “throw one’s life down contemptuously at God’s feet. To commit suicide is to spit in the Creator’s face” (264).
While Bertlef’s character carnivalizes the Christian ideal of love for one’s neighbor by realizing it in a literal sense in making love to many women, Dr. Skreta carnivalizes the grand ideas of national unity and human brotherhood by producing brothers in the most concrete sense of the word. By injecting in his clinic his own semen into childless women he creates a nation where one truly is “among one’s own” (Farewell Waltz 137). The great ideas, treated in The Joke with earnestness and even nostalgia, and in Life Is Elsewhere with irony and a recognition of their dangerousness, now return in carnivalist, farcical, and satirical form. Jakub thinks of the Holy Family and the Immaculate Conception as he looks at the innkeeper couple with their big-nosed toddler, unquestionably a result of Dr. Skreta’s fertility treatment. Universal brotherhood, patriotism, love of one’s neighbor, the Holy Family—all these important ideas or ideologemes of European culture are turned into objects of ridicule.
While Bertlef is a comic saint, Dr. Skreta is no less a comic version of God himself, the lord of life and death. With his insemination program he has taken over the task of the Creator (who now practices eugenics, as he chooses only beautiful women for his treatment), and in preparing the poison for Jakub he does not hesitate to take the decision over death into his hands as well, passing it on to his friend. This is carnivalization of humankind attempting to fill the vacancy after God’s death; it also can be seen as a carnivalization of Nietzsche’s prophecy of man transformed into an Übermensch who takes the place of God. Replacing God as the ruler of all things was exactly what the makers of History wanted to do. The goals pursued by Bertlef and Dr. Skreta are in fact essentially the same as those that the builders of paradise had aimed at through political action. The Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor is related to the spirit of nineteenth-century nationalism and to the ideal of the universal brotherhood of humanity, as expressed in both the French and the Russian revolution. Dr. Skreta accuses Jakub of remaining stuck in politics, while as a medical practitioner he considers himself able to actually change the world. It seems as if Kundera, having abandoned the idea of reigning History, is seeking opportunities to realize the ideals of the revolution outside politics and History, but he is doing so unseriously, carnivalizing the effort to create an earthly paradise. Nevertheless, while Dr. Skreta and Bertlef appear throughout the novel as comic and eccentric figures, this does not diminish the gravity of their deeds as evinced by the existence of a number of big-nosed children, Ruzena’s consent to abortion, and, finally, her death.
The significance of the moment
Along with the carnivalization of efforts to follow grand ideas, in Farewell Waltz something “serious” is also being said about the possibilities of human existence in the present historical situation. This happens especially through Jakub’s experiences. The novel offers little information as to Jakub’s past or the development of his thinking. Nevertheless, in the course of the five days covered by the plot he becomes aware of certain sentimental tendencies in himself. Now that he has been stripped of the last remaining means to construct an embellished image of himself, what remains for him to live for, outside of History or any ideologies?
Since Jakub believes neither in afterlife nor in History, he has no choice but to look for meaningfulness in his own experiences. While his mind is preoccupied with what will happen to Ruzena, he begins to read hidden messages in concrete situations. After some half-hearted attempts at getting in touch with Ruzena to save her, at the afternoon concert he notices that she is sitting only two seats away from him, which would make it easy to warn her:
And all of a sudden he understood clearly why the young woman was sitting in the same row as he: the unexpected encounter in the brasserie [where he had given the poison pill to Ruzena] a while ago had been a temptation, a test. It had occurred only so that he might see his own image in the mirror: the image of a man who gives his neighbor poison. But the One who is testing him (God, in whom he does not believe) demands no bloody sacrifice, no blood of innocents. The test might end not in a death but only in Jakub’s self-revelation, which might confiscate his inappropriate moral pride. The nurse is now sitting in the same row to enable him, at the last moment, to save her life. (195)
Jakub interprets the incident as a message addressed to him, despite knowing that no sender exists and that consequently there can be no message. God is still preserved as a function, as a gap, an empty space, in the process whereby we try to make sense of the world—even if that space is not occupied by anyone and the individual realizes that identifying messages within events is pure imagination. This coincides with Ludvik’s pondering in The Joke about how we continue interpreting events so as to find in them some meaning related to ourselves, although in reality no such meaning exists.
In a similar manner Ruzena interprets the night spent with Bertlef as a meaningful sign intended for her. That evening, Bertlef had saved her from being humiliated by a convivial company mocking her because of her apparently inconsequent behavior when one of the men makes indecent advances to her. They agree that Bertlef had turned up just at the right moment and with this thought Ruzena is overcome by “a confused but delightful feeling of relief: Bertlef’s appearing precisely today meant that everything that happened had been ordained elsewhere, and she could relax and put herself in the hands of that higher power” (199). The irony in the situation is biting and the reader is aware of the danger Ruzena is in, and in fact she will die the next morning.
Thus Farewell Waltz is a “comedy of errors” on a deeper, more “philosophical” level than its plot alone: it shows that every assumption of benevolent (or for that matter, malevolent) guidance in what happens is erroneous and that life is actually intolerably fortuitous. Jakub’s assumption—that in spite of everything there is a higher power which makes sure that no human life is wasted—proves to be wrong. In fact, the most insignificant and incidental things, the slightest misunderstandings, may have the most serious and even fatal consequences. The case of Jakub and Ruzena indicates this power of misunderstandings and erroneous interpretations. At the brasserie, Jakub observes Ruzena and Klima engaged in a conversation about, as it appears to him, deadly serious matters. Since he has already formed his opinion of Ruzena in the dog-chasing scene, he now assumes automatically that in the dispute at the restaurant, too, she is the one arguing for death and the man for life, although in dealing with the question of abortion the exact opposite is true. Jakub’s negative judgment of her, based partly on this misunderstanding, later restrains him from doing his best to save her. Another false conclusion Jakub reaches is that the pill Dr. Skreta had given him was not poisonous at all, a misjudgment which further contributes to Ruzena’s death as he then gives up efforts to inform her about the pill. As Jakub’s behavior is affected by his loathing of humankind, derived in turn from his experience of the terror, it would be exaggerated to say that Ruzena’s death is a matter of mere chance, but it is certainly true that chance plays an intolerably large part in her fate.
The misunderstanding concerning the pill also changes Jakub’s relationship with Skreta. Until then he had thought that when Skreta originally prepared the deadly pill for him he trusted that Jakub would not misuse it. The two friends, possessing power over life and death but confident that they would not abuse that power, felt “like two gods forced to live among humans—and that was beautiful” (226). Now, if the pill was not poisonous, Skreta had saved his friend from being a murderer—and had taken from him the possibility of committing suicide by swallowing the pill—but at the same time had reduced him back to an ordinary mortal. Jakub’s misconception about his friend will probably never be rectified, because the information about Ruzena’s death does not reach him. She dies at the moment he is leaving the spa, whence he heads right to the border to leave the country for good.
If Providence originating in an unknown source is an unconvincing substitute for God, humankind does not succeed much better when they themselves take the place of God. An individual does not need to be a murderer from conviction, like the perpetrators of terror, to effect catastrophes; rather, in acting he or she is constantly in danger of committing errors which might have the most serious consequences. Accordingly, Farewell Waltz only seems to be a “comedy of errors” in that it lacks the solid basis necessary for laughter available to traditional comedy, namely, the certainty that at the end all the misunderstandings will be clarified and the order of things restored. It is only this confidence that makes errors harmless and comic. The confidence in the harmlessness of errors lacking, is there any escape from the human condition that humankind when left to follow their own faculty of judgment alone is not only ridiculous but eventually also disastrous to themselves and others?
Kundera seems to be suggesting that we ought to abandon the efforts to command the course of events and seek meaning in the experience of the present moment only. The possibilities of meaningful existence found in the momentary experience are analyzed in Kundera’s later novels; yet already in a few of Jakub’s experiences—and even of Ruzena’s—some of these possibilities flash by. During his last day in his home country, Jakub experiences two such moments which open his eyes to new possibilities of existence. At the hotel he runs across Klima’s wife Kamila and her exceptional beauty affects him like a revelation. He wonders what the “message” of this encounter may be even as he is aware of being himself the “sender” of the message. He realizes that it is the timing—his being about to leave his native country for good—that endows every incident with special significance, turning each one “into a symbolic message” (228). The woman represents everything that is desirable but that he can no longer obtain. He feels, however, that the encounter opens his eyes not only to the beauty of this woman, but to “beauty itself” (229). The experience suggests to him, now that he has no time left, “that one could live here in a different way and for something different, that beauty is more than justice, that beauty is more than truth, that it is more real, more indisputable, and also more accessible, that beauty is superior to everything else and that it was now permanently lost to him” (229–30). In this revelation of beauty, Jakub experiences the vivid presence of meaningfulness in a moment (a phenomenon which Husserl describes in similar words) and he now thinks that one could perhaps live outside the realm of politics and History, in search of beauty.
Ruzena, a simple bath attendant who is neither exceptionally intelligent nor exceptionally amiable, undergoes a similar experience of sudden revelation. During the night spent with Bertlef, she asks the man: “‘You love me?’ ‘Yes, I love you.’ Frantisek [her boyfriend] and Klima had already said the word to her, but only now did she see it as it really is when it comes unasked for, unexpected, naked. The word entered the room like a miracle. It was totally inexplicable, but to Ruzena it seemed all the more real, for the most basic things in this world exist without explanation and without motive, drawing from within themselves their reason for being” (200). For Kundera, an experience is real when we do not derive it from anything else by way of reason or sentiment, but have a sense of its immediate presence. Just as the possibility of beauty was revealed in a flash to Jakub, the possibility of love is revealed to Ruzena. For Kundera, both are genuine, nonsentimental possibilities of a meaningful existence, yet in Farewell Waltz these are not developed any further. New possibilities are revealed to both Jakub and Ruzena, but how Jakub will use them is not said—and Ruzena will die before benefiting from this new insight.
On his way to the border, Jakub experiences one more revelation. Again, an event occurring during his last day in his native country takes on a symbolic or metaphoric meaning. Jakub drives past a house where in a window he catches sight of a boy wearing thick eyeglasses. The boy becomes for him a symbol of all those who have to accommodate themselves to live their lives with an inborn impediment, like all of us: “And he reflected further that what he had held against others was something given, something they came into the world with and carried with them like a heavy wire fence. He reflected that he had no privileged right to high-mindedness and that the highest degree of high-mindedness is to love people even though they are murderers” (271). Paradoxically, he discovers this feeling of brotherhood only when he has become aware of being a murderer himself. It is a brotherhood following from humans’ inborn impediment of being a potential murderer of their fellow beings. This is the biggest step toward love of one’s neighbor, of compassion with them, of which the misanthropic Jakub is capable.
Farewell Waltz offers only a few flashes of the possibilities of existence outside of ideology and History, since the author’s primary intention in this novel is to ridicule humankind’s hubris in thinking that the course of events is controllable. That the course taken by an individual’s life is accidental and fortuitous, based on errors and misunderstandings, applies not only to the main characters but also to several of the minor ones. Jakub’s protégée Olga, for example, is irritated by the “museum” or “monument” that Jakub has erected to his own humanity by taking care of her. It is this museum that she intends to demolish in seducing Jakub; by the same token, she tries by this act to reinforce her weak self-confidence as a woman. Jakub gives in to the seduction only out of sympathy toward Olga, but she does not realize this and her feeling of the triumph of her femininity over her protector is thus based on misjudgment. A further example of how human lives are shaped by incident and error is the case of Frantisek, Ruzena’s boyfriend, who is convinced of his paternity and presses her not to let their child be aborted. Ruzena reproaches Frantisek saying that his persistent and aggressive behavior is going to kill her. After the session with the abortion committee, Ruzena meets the furious Frantisek and she swallows the poison, taking it for a tranquillizer, and dies in front of Frantisek’s eyes. As Kundera remarks, Frantisek will throughout his life bear the false—but no less crushing—consciousness of having driven his beloved to her death.
In sum, having taken over God’s role as ruler of the world, humankind is not particularly successful. Having in his earlier novels criticized politicians’ vain and disastrous efforts to create a paradise, in Farewell Waltz Kundera ridicules individuals’ ambition to command the course of events. Although this is impossible to achieve, an individual’s actions may have a tremendous impact both on one’s own life and the lives of others. A human being’s profound insufficiency as successor to God might be a reason to consider humanity a tragic character, were a human being playing God not so utterly comical.
In the carnivalistic end, Ruzena’s death seems to be forgotten by everyone. Bertlef’s young wife and his young son—another big-nosed toddler—arrive at the resort town and so does Skreta’s girlfriend, who has just managed to wring a marriage proposal from him. Blended with the happy end of a marriage is another kind of happy ending, equally typical of classic comedy, when “father” and “son” likewise find each other. Dr. Skreta is accepted as an adopted son in the Bertlef family, guaranteeing him the freedom to travel abroad, even if the “son” is fifteen years junior to his “mother” and in addition the father of his “brother.” Despite this carnivalistic-comedic ending, however, readers do not quit the novel with cordial laughter; in fact, our laughter sticks in our throat. As Chvatík remarks, Farewell Waltz remains a tragicomedy without catharsis (Die Fallen 108). The question posed earlier, whether the carnivalistic end is intended, kitsch-like, to cover the fact of the nurse’s death from the sight of the reader, must be answered in the negative. An attentive reader perceives that in the “forgetting” of the death by everyone present the author depicts an act of repression caused by the fact that the characters are living in a world where people tend to “disappear” suddenly. The forced “forgetting” or repression also applies to the connection between a person’s sudden death and the unpleasant lesson taught by recent history, that every one of us is a potential murderer of our neighbor.