Kundera and Modernity

The Dangers of Forgetting and Laughter

Kundera wrote that at the beginning of the 1970s he thought he ended his career as a novelist with Farewell Waltz (Testaments 165). After emigrating to France he took up writing again with the intention of creating a continuation to Laughable Loves. Instead of a collection of short stories, with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting something “entirely different” (Testaments 165) was born: a “polyphonic” novel. Yet there is a thematic continuity, in that the theme of laughable love is tackled once again in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Love is an issue in all the story lines and in several of them it appears in a ridiculous light. The themes of love and laughter, however, appear in this novel in a new manner, intertwined in a complex thematic web.

In a thematic synopsis of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in Testaments Betrayed, Kundera makes the novel appear as a successor to The Joke in having history as its main theme. According to his account, part 1 “introduces the theme of man and history in its basic version: man collides with history and it crushes him”; part 2, “Mama,” contrasts historic events with small, perennial, quotidian ones; part 6 deals with the death of the heroine, thereby seemingly forming “the tragic conclusion of the novel”; and the last, part 7, touches upon the experience of the loss of meaning of the greatest events in history (166–67). Added to this theme of history, as a commentary on it, is the theme of two kinds of laughter (167). Yet this synopsis is a one-sided account of the thematic content of the novel. As a whole, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is neither in its composition nor in its themes a new version of either Laughable Loves or The Joke. There is compositional as well as thematic continuity, but there are also important differences. Not only does The Book of Laughter and Forgetting represent a decisive step toward a new kind of thematic composition, but the enrichment of the themes is considerable as well, and in dealing with these themes the universal existential aspect is even more pronounced than in previous works.

Where in Farewell Waltz Kundera suggests that authentic meanings can only be discovered in the present moment of experience, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting can be read as an elaboration of this thesis, making it appear a more complex matter. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting shows that what is experienced as meaningful in the present moment is, despite its apparent immediateness, closely connected with remembering. However, remembering can also falsify the experience; this occurs especially in sentimental recollection. Laughter is similarly ambivalent in that it can either deny or corroborate the meaningfulness of what is present. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is not merely a thematic composition of the themes named in the title or even of the two themes and their opposite poles, seriousness and remembering. Variations on remembering and forgetting, on laughter and seriousness are regarded as parts of the process of sense giving in either a sentimental or an authentic form, this process being mostly connected with the theme of love. The novel in its entirety can then be conceived of as a study of the “architheme” of sense giving.

The first part of the novel, “Lost Letters,” deals with the question of selective memory—that is, deliberate forgetting—in three different variations. The novel begins with a recollection of a historic scene which was later retouched by those in power. Kundera writes that when the proclamation of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia by the communist leader Klement Gottwald took place in February 1948 on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague, Gottwald stood side by side with foreign secretary Vladimir Clementis, who had lent him his fur cap. Some years later, Clementis was accused of treason and hanged and was airbrushed from the historic photograph of the memorable moment on the balcony. According to Kundera, all that remained of Clementis in the photo was his fur cap on Gottwald’s head. The anecdote exemplifies the sensitivity to the past of those holding political power. Functioning as a legitimization of the present, the past—in this case the crucial moment of the founding of the new order of the state—is allowed to contain only elements which are acceptable from the perspective of the present. For Kundera, this does not only hold true in the case of an autocratic party’s dealing with history but is common to all societies and individuals (The Book of Laughter 30; see also McEwan 32–33).

According to Hana Píchová, Kundera has fabricated the airbrushing of the historic photograph (102). In addition, the building where the event took place was not a Baroque palace (such palaces are characteristic of Prague), but “a typical rococo style building of the eighteenth century” (Bílek, “The East” 111). Why does Kundera alter historical facts? Is it a joke, a playful, self-reflective gesture to demonstrate the truth of his claim that each of us is constantly rewriting history? One difficulty with this hypothesis is that Kundera, who is now writing for a non-Czech readership, cannot expect his readers to detect such “falsifications.” On the first pages of The Book of Laughter we encounter an instance of another kind of “falsification” of historical facts. When the protagonist of part 1 meets his former lover, who is in tears because of the death of the Soviet statesman Masturbov, any reader understands that this is not the actual surname. Readers also realize that the “falsification” does not change anything in the truthfulness of the kind of incident told here. Kundera probably considers his freedom to alter historical facts as the authorial privilege of the novelist who is searching for truth in terms of the essence of things and not of historical details.

Mirek, the protagonist of part 1, resists the political system by refusing to obey the order to “forget” given by those in power. His opposition manifests itself in the act of preserving a bundle of political notes in his home, which may at any time cause him trouble. As he is “in love with his destiny” (14)—that is, he wants to be recognized as an opponent of the system—he refuses to destroy the notes to save himself. Mirek’s choice is a sentimental one. With no political significance, his sole aim is to create a certain image of himself in the eyes of others. Moreover, as is typical of a sentimentalist, Mirek disregards the consequences his action might have on the lives of his friends and family. At the end of part 1, the narrator mentions laconically how many years of imprisonment he, his son, and his friends were sentenced to.

Yet, shortly before his “destiny” is fulfilled, Mirek makes an effort to recover his letters to Zdena, his love in early youth. The main reason he wants to destroy the letters, thereby erasing her from his life, is that with her very big nose she is uncommonly ugly. The passionate love letters he wrote to her would reveal him to everyone as a wretch who thought of himself as being worthy only of an ugly woman’s love. This “wretchedness” now appears as a blemish on his otherwise beautiful “destiny.” Mirek is driven by the same desire as those in power, to revise and embellish the past. The paradox is twofold in that his love letters were themselves the product of a sentimental act of embellishing himself. He tried to convince himself—and his imaginary audience—of his passionate love, because only then, he thought, could his affair with an ugly woman be excusable.

An individual who chooses beauty instead of truth is following the principle of kitsch in his or her search for meaningfulness. Like all sentimentalists, Mirek looks for the image of himself in the eyes of others. He now recognizes that the political radicalism of his youth was actually conceived to “conceal his pimples,” that is, his adolescent immaturity (24). For Zdena, on the other hand, faithfulness plays a similar role as deliberate forgetting does for Mirek. She has remained faithful to party ideology because ever since Mirek left her she has valued fidelity higher than anything else—whether to a person or to an ideology. In Kundera’s view, fidelity is an ideal of the sentimental. It is a stubborn insistence on something that has already lost its meaning. Since Zdena’s faithfulness to the communist party is motivated by her unrequited love, her private life, despite appearances, actually outweighs her public, political activities. The pattern is typical of Kundera in that adherence to grand ideas has private motives related to the individual’s sentimental project of self-making.

For the sentimental person or the follower of an ideology, remembering might be embarrassing; for the nonsentimentalist, who is interested in truth alone, what is problematic in terms of human sense giving is not remembering, but forgetting. The “anthropological fact” that a human being forgets even that which once was most significant to him or her is explored especially in part 2 of the novel, “Mama,” and in the storyline concerning Tamina. Part 2 begins with Karel’s and his wife Marketa’s observation that his mother’s remarks have lost their former edge. Mama’s reproachful words, which earlier were a sufficient reason for the couple to avoid her, no longer have the same effect now that she has grown old. When she visits the couple, she appears small, fragile, and harmless: “Mama had relinquished the marshal’s baton of her motherhood and gone into a different world” (41). The “different world” is old age where nothing new or significant ever happens and when recollection alone is important; everything that is significant lies in the past. Rather than trying to interfere in her son’s life, the mother only wants to talk to him, his wife, and their friend about her youth. She recalls a school celebration organized on the occasion of the declaration of the country’s independence where she recited a patriotic poem. According to the old lady’s account, she could not remember the closing lines and the principal of the school himself consoled her. It turns out, however, that her memory has played a trick on her. She had left school before the declaration of independence; the occasion was actually a Christmas celebration, and the poem was a seasonal one. An important personal reminiscence from her early years was by a slip of memory connected to a historic event. There is no reason to assume that she deliberately wanted to heighten the significance of the incident in the eyes of her son and her daughter-in-law. When she recognizes her mistake, however, she is reluctant to correct the story, because she does not want to diminish herself in their eyes. In other words, she is unwilling to take back the unintended retouching of the past. This shows that the mother too speaks to an “audience,” even if that audience consists of just two or three persons. The incident has no consequences, since the couple knows that the mother’s world has always been limited to petty, personal issues. When the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, she was worried about the pears in her garden not being picked, something that at that time infuriated her son and daughter-in-law.

When the mother is introduced to the young couple’s friend, Eva, whom Karel and Marketa invited for an erotic threesome, she discovers immediately some resemblance between Eva and an old-time acquaintance of hers, Nora: “Nora lacked kindness and modesty, and Mama had often been wounded by her behaviour. But she wasn’t thinking about that now. What mattered more to her was that she had suddenly found a bit of her youth here, a greeting reaching her from the distance of half a century. She was thrilled by the thought that everything she long ago experienced was still with her, surrounding her in her loneliness and speaking to her. Although she had never liked Nora, she was glad to meet her here, all the more because she was thoroughly tamed and embodied in someone who appeared to be filled with respect for Mama” (58). The mother is happy about Eva’s friendly behavior toward her, but the encounter gains further importance from the connection between present and past. What Kundera is saying is that for someone who is living in the “different world” of old age, even the most superficial connection with the past—a resemblance to an unsympathetic acquaintance from decades ago—may give significance to the present.

In a different way, the recollection of Nora makes the experience of the present more meaningful for Karel as well. Through Karel and Marketa Kundera explores questions of love and sexuality, the difficulty of reconciling body and soul and the meaningfulness of sexual encounters. Physical love is a source of pleasure, but Kundera’s novels often voice the view that pleasure is of too little significance to confer meaning on the endlessly repeated movements of the physical act of lovemaking. In remembering Mrs. Nora, Karel is able to use physical lovemaking as a way to read-dress a piece of the past. Karel recalls vividly how as a child, in the dressing room of a spa, he once caught sight of Mrs. Nora’s beautiful naked body, which back then seemed enormous to him. Now, in making love to Eva, in his imagination he takes possession of Mrs. Nora’s body and experiences a feeling of great satisfaction: “He had the impression that this leap onto her [Eva’s] body was a leap across an immense period of time, the leap of a little boy hurling himself from childhood to manhood. And then, while he was moving back and forth on her, he seemed incessantly to be describing the same movement, from childhood to adulthood and then in reverse, and once again from the little boy miserably gazing at the gigantic body of a woman to the man clasping that body and taming it. That movement, usually measuring fifteen centimetres at most, was as long as three decades” (66). Karel experiences the junction of two ages as beauty: “beauty is an abolition of chronology and a rebellion against time” (73). A coupling of the childhood recollection with the present moment bestows an unexpected significance on the latter.

The theme of forgetting appears in part 2 in connection with that of repetition. Karel, who is a womanizer, has observed that he has forgotten most of “his two or three thousand acts of love . . . no more than two or three are really essential and unforgettable, while the others are merely recurrences, imitations, repetitions, or evocations” (71). Here repetition appears in a new sense. In contrast to the repetition of a theme in different variations, “the same” recurs without any noteworthy differences. The two types of repetition, as Eva Le Grand points, resemble what Gilles Deleuze and J. Hillis Miller call “Platonic” or mimetic repetition, in which “the same” is conceived as a replica of the same archetypal model, and what they call “Nietzschean” or variational repetition in which similarities are detected between different concrete phenomena without recourse to any archetypal model (“Voyage” 91; see also Boisen, Une fois 29–30). The resemblance, however, is only a remote one in that in Kundera the relevant difference does not derive from the presence or absence of a Platonic model. His nonsentimental individuals acknowledge no Platonic models. The difference between the two types of repetition is that where in variational recurrence the differences between various cases are important, in “pure repetition” they are not. In Karel’s case this means that every act of love is different, but that after having the “same” experience a number of times the differences no longer matter. Instead of an infinity of variations, one faces monotonous repetition (see also Ignorance 80). In Kundera’s novels, we find a shift taking place from the predominance of an experience of infinite variation to that of a tedious repetition of the same. In addition, we encounter in Kundera’s works further variants of the theme of repetition, indicating that repetition in itself is for him a theme with important variations.

During the lovemaking scene between Marketa, Eva, and Karel, it turns out that nonremembering may mean relief as well. Marketa and Karel’s marriage is based on a “contract.” The husband would, despite the wife’s jealousy, be unfaithful, but “Marketa would have the right to be the better of the two and Karel should feel guilty toward her” (51). For both, the contract is heavy to bear. When Marketa now imagines her husband as a headless male body making love to Eva, that is, when she ignores his “soul,” she can forget her jealousy and enjoy the erotic pleasures of the threesome. Having switched off the person in the body, Marketa is able to enjoy the “light,” purely physical pleasure of sex. In her case, forgetting brings a weightlessness experienced as something positive, even if it means loss of meaningfulness.

The storyline concerning Tamina in parts 4 and 6 deals with making the present significant through remembering the past, as well as with the lack of sense caused by forgetting. While for Marketa forgetting for a moment everything and enjoying purely physical pleasure means relief and is therefore desirable, for Tamina, forgetting threatens to bereave her of everything precious. In her case the turning to the past and the danger of forgetting do not ensue from great age but from the special conditions of her life, which make it impossible for her to preserve the significant moments of the past from sinking into oblivion. If the storyline concerning Tamina is the main story of the novel and the other stories merely variations on it—contradicting the principle of the equality of lines in a polyphonic composition—this means that the main themes of remembering and forgetting are elaborated in the narration already before they are presented in the main storyline.

Part 4, “Lost Letters,” introduces readers to the “heroine” of the novel (100), Tamina, who lives as an emigrant in a small West European town where she works as a waitress in a café. She left Czechoslovakia a few years earlier together with her husband, who soon thereafter fell ill and died. Although they loved each other very much and their marriage was happy, to her astonishment she now realizes that she can no longer recall the details of their shared life. According to Kundera, it is an “anthropologic fact” that a human being forgets even what was most important in his or her life. Tamina feels a need to get hold of their love letters and her diaries from the time of the marriage, which she left in Prague, so that she can construct “a house she can live in” out of the important details of the past (119). Otherwise nothing is left for her except the bare present, “that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death” (119). The question is not one of her insistence on fidelity to her late husband. She simply does not find anything of significance in the present but everything of value to her lies in the past. The narrative does not contain a detailed account of her present life, but it is obvious that the owners of the café and its customers are not the kind who would realize that the quiet waitress has had her important experiences too. Kundera stresses that Tamina’s preoccupation with the past is not sentimental: “She does not want to give back to the past its poetry. She wants to give back to it its lost body” (119). Unlike Mirek and Mama, she does not want to embellish her past in order to impress an audience, but she needs the details of the past for herself alone. A mere vague idea of her past happiness and love is insufficient for the construction of a habitable “house” in the present, and that is why she needs concrete details such as what her husband looked like, what endearments he used to call her by, and where they spent their summer holidays.

Tamina’s efforts to evoke the past are contrasted with another kind of interest in recollection in Bibi, one of her regular customers who plans to write a book about herself. Kundera calls this kind of desire to write “graphomania” and he regards it as a form of the perpetual “battle to seize the ear of others” (110). People want to have someone who listens to them without their having to listen to anyone in return. Behind this desire, Kundera recognizes people’s narcissistic tendency to impose themselves on others, which is “the most grotesque version of the will to power” (The Art 130). All those whose scribbling derives from the desire to expose their personal life to others and who do not make it their task to explore universal aspects of human existence are graphomaniacs. In Kundera’s view we live in an age of universal graphomania, where “everyone [is] surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside” (The Book of Laughter 128). The difference between a graphomaniac and Tamina lies in the former’s attitude toward publicity. Tamina’s notes are not meant for the eyes of anyone else. She feels degraded when it turns out that her mother-in-law has seen her notebooks. Thus the difference is precisely between those who construct meanings for themselves only and those who do it for the gaze of others, which is the difference between the authentic and the sentimental attitude. For Kundera, the individual striving for authenticity wants to keep his or her private realm hidden from the eyes of outsiders.

In part 6, “The Angels,” the author-narrator draws a parallel between Tamina’s forgetting the past and his own mortally ill father losing the ability to speak, and suggests both cases as the disappearance of previously available distinctions. Tamina cannot evoke the details of her past love and the father is unable to make the distinctions enabled by speech, so that for him things “merged into single, undifferentiated being” (219). What happens to the individual through losing—forgetting—speech or memories is compared to the forgetting that takes place in the public sphere of politics. As the father lies dying, president Gustav Husák gives a speech to young pioneers: “The President of Forgetting” encourages the children to think of the future only and never look back (217, 239). In conformity with this, Prague is presented as the city of forgetting, serving both as the background and as a historical-political parallel to Tamina’s story. More than once in the course of history, successive rulers forced Czechs to forget their past, thus crushing the identity of a nation and ushering it to its death. In the replacing of Czech street names in Prague with Russian ones, Kundera saw a step toward Bohemia’s becoming a colony of the Soviet Union and toward the obliteration of the Czech nation. Analogously, Tamina is prevented from keeping in touch with her private past. In both cases, constraining circumstances cause the fulfillment of the same anthropological possibility of forgetting. In both cases, forgetting causes the loss of meaningful existence, a condition that foreshadows death. Interestingly, in speaking of the annihilation of a nation the author-narrator’s tone becomes tragic. Although Kundera underlines a common European identity, it is evident that the nation too is an indispensable entity for him (see Macura 23). In accordance with a tradition going back to Herder (Ideen; see also Irmscher 136–41), Kundera ascribes a singular identity and the claim of autonomy not only to the individual, but also to the nation.

The circumstances in which the past does not endow the present with meaning are elaborated in Kundera’s depiction of the “children’s island.” For him the word “child” is deprived of the positive connotations usually attached to it since the age of Romanticism. In his usage, the word refers to the original state of humankind, to the zero point prior to any development. Childhood is a state of pure existence with no self-reflection and with no relation to either past or future. It precedes even the immaturity of adolescence where questions first arise concerning the individual’s own existence (and are answered in the sentimental mode). Kundera refuses to extol children’s innocence and genuineness (see Gaughan 19; Webb 357). Children are rarely present in Kundera’s novels and loving couples, such as Tamina and her husband or Tomas and Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, do not seem to be longing for children. If children do make an appearance, they are mostly depicted as noisy and disturbing, and adults who prefer children are depicted as poor judges of humanity. For Kundera, childhood has a primarily metaphorical meaning. Humans are proceeding toward “infantocracy,” that is, a thoughtless life in the present moment (see The Art 132). To this perpetual present Kundera prefers history, which means constant change, history being the “epic” or adult form of experience: “History is a series of ephemeral changes, while eternal values are immutable, perpetuated outside history, and have no need of memory. Husak is president of the eternal, not of the ephemeral. He is on the side of children, and children are life, and living is ‘seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying’” (The Book of Laughter 257; Kundera’s quotation is from Annie Leclerc’s Parole de femme, see The Book of Laughter 106).

The dreamlike passages describing Tamina’s sojourn on the children’s island show how unbearable a childlike life is for an adult. Childish “innocence” is a state prior to guilt and responsibility, right and wrong. Being in this state, children may from an adult perspective treat those who do not belong to their world with utter cruelty. Anyone different is excluded, and the children’s world is characterized by total uniformity. “Infantocracy” is a state which precedes individuation, separation of body and soul, of private and public, and the coupling of the perspectives of past and future with the present. It is playing hopscotch and plain corporeality, sensuality without shame (shame being for Kundera the beginning of eroticism and indicating the presence of the “soul” in physical love), it is living in the present of physical sensations and the rules of the game. Childhood may be a paradise—children’s unquestioned celebration of their world, a kind of angelic laughter, corroborates this—but Kundera cannot esteem a paradise that is actually a state of existence prior to distinctions, which alone create significance. The childish existence in the pure present stands in contrast to Tamina’s efforts to preserve the past, which would make the present meaningful. The end of Tamina’s story is dreamlike similarly to Kafka’s Amerika, which ends with the absurd dreamlike scene of the young protagonist joining the enormously big Oklahoma Outdoors Theater (see Testaments 79). The dreamlike narration sets the narrator and the reader free from the framework of a realistic story. The fantastic, unrealistic narration reveals something essential in the character, which, in Tamina’s case, is the last phase of forgetting, the forgetting of forgetting. The children’s island represents this forgetting of forgetting metaphorically, as a return to the primary state preceding all distinctions. By the same token, the fantasy of the children’s island symbolizes the future to which the Czech nation will be led by “the President of Forgetting,” and which to Kundera all humankind is approaching.

Kundera’s analysis of “infantocracy” shows that authentic existence is not equivalent to living in the present in the sense that a child is. For Kundera, a mature, nonsentimental person makes distinctions, and she or he knows that genuinely significant moments are rare. Making distinctions presupposes memory. A significant moment is set off from the flow of all experienced moments only by the help of memory, which makes comparison possible, even if one seems just to be enjoying a spontaneous encounter with something unexpected. Moreover, in order to be able to build the foundation of our existence on moments of the living presence of meaning, we must preserve them in our memory.

Yet remembering the past can also prevent one from experiencing the present moment as meaningful. This phenomenon is explored in the last, seventh part of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The Border,” which offers a further variation on the relationship between temporality and sense giving. As I have noted, the border refers to the point where the meaning of a thing suddenly changes. The woman with whom Jan was in love had talked to him about the border at which everything loses its meaning: “It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter” (281). The passage contains the essence of Kundera’s view of modern human existence as characterized by an openness to meanings which may reveal themselves at any moment only to vanish in the next. Any attempt to consolidate meanings as permanent transforms them into an ideology, which destroys the individual’s openness toward the actual present. Jan discovers the willingness to accept this continuous shift of meanings in his mortally ill friend, Passer. In general, however, he thinks that humankind is marching in the direction of a total disappearance of meanings, of sinking into an existence where no distinctions are made any longer. He regards this as a consequence of repetition, a theme which was introduced in part 2 and is now taken up for more thorough examination.

According to Jan, repetition deprives experience of its meaningfulness: “He tells himself it is because he is getting old: When things are repeated, they lose a fraction of their meaning. Or more exactly, they lose, drop by drop, the vital strength that gives them their illusory meaning. For Jan, therefore, the border is the maximum acceptable dose of repetitions” (295–96). The narrator comments on this by saying that it is not true that repetition creates the border where meaningfulness disappears, it makes the border between the meaningful and meaningless visible (297–98). The idea is illustrated by the story of Jan’s failed attempt to seduce a girl on a train. He has recourse to his routine, well-tried gestures, but this time they fail to work. Jan feels that he is standing in front of a “board of examiners, which knew full well that he was repeating himself and informed him that all repetition was mere imitation and all imitation was worthless. Jan suddenly saw himself through the young woman’s eyes. He saw the pitiful pantomime of his gaze and gestures, that stereotyped gesticulation emptied of all meaning by years of repetition” (284). A recalled pattern of behavior fails to produce a new, meaningful experience; on the contrary, repetition turns the action into a meaningless imitation of a meaningful action. Here, repetition is connected with the temporality of human experience. Jan is afflicted by the fear that the female body—the erotic dream of his youth—might as a consequence of his increasing experience soon become completely unerotic for him. He longs for the moment just prior to entering the world of eroticism, the time depicted with so much beauty in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. These reflections indicate that for Kundera an erotic encounter is not something unique, resulting—as assumed by the Romantic concept of love—from the meeting of two particular individuals; rather, it is a repeatable act in which the individual encounters a member of the opposite sex, or rather the body of a member of the opposite sex.

In part 7, eroticism is seen from the perspective of human history as well. Jan ponders the fact that our erotic experiences are a repetition of the eternal pattern between man and woman, where the man chases the fleeing woman. Edwige protests against this clichéd way of thinking, but Jan questions whether eroticism is at all imaginable without such clichés (289). Here we once again meet a Kunderan paradox. Some pages earlier, Jan claimed that repetition deprives the erotic experience of its significance, yet now he is saying that the meaning of an erotic experience is based on the repetition of a supra-individual and transhistorical pattern. The contradiction, however, is only seeming. The individual’s experience can be fresh and new, even if others have had the same experience countless times in the course of human history. Nevertheless, the closing scene of the novel suggests that eroticism is a historical phenomenon which is vanishing today. Jan visits a nudist beach, which does not present itself to him as a place of erotic liberation, but as one where nakedness has lost its erotic significance. In other words, eroticism as a world-historical phenomenon reaches its end on the nudist beach.

The intertwining of the themes of remembering, forgetting, and meaning in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting illustrates not only several of Kundera’s crucial ideas about humankind and history, but also his method of composing a novel out of different themes. The reader is expected to approach the novel with the same attentiveness to change that is required of human beings living in the modern world. We have to be able to recognize the precise meaning ascribed to a particular thing in a given context and to accept that the same thing or theme may be repeatedly redefined in new contexts. The whole of the novel which explores and elaborates these themes is more contrapuntal than synthetic.

Kundera, Nietzsche, and the vanishing of heaviness through laughter

In Kundera’s novels there is much laughter, yet they are not humorous or even particularly amusing (see my discussion above; see also Galmiche). The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a study of laughter rather than a book that makes the reader laugh, and The Joke is far from being a comical or jocular novel. What, then, does laughter actually mean for Kundera?

In Kundera’s works, the objects of laughter are mostly people who experience something other than they imagine or expect to, or who act out of different motives from those they are aware of. A falsely beautified self-image and a sentimental attitude are often the object of ridicule and irony. Laughter is likewise provoked by cliché-like attitudes or by a comic clash between incompatible views or when events slip out of the participants’ control, with unexpected outcomes. In fact, there is little that Kundera cannot laugh at. The actions of revolutionaries, consequential and dangerous as they might be, are not void of ridiculousness, nor is love or human aspirations to immortality. History, which subjugates individuals and nations, can also poke fun at them; even God—if he existed—would be a joker and even he would be afraid of becoming an object of ridicule: “God can’t make Himself ridiculous by constantly changing His decisions” (Farewell Waltz 121). Of human beings, the most ridiculous for Kundera are the sentimental, who take themselves with absolute seriousness; but overall, few are completely or nearly safe from being laughed at—of his characters only the “positive” heroes such as Tamina, Agnes, Tomas, and Tereza. In fact, only art is for Kundera exempt from universal ridiculousness; ridicule does not attach to music, painting, or the novel. Artists themselves, on the other hand, do not stand above ridicule; this applies to Hemingway just as much as to Rimbaud or Goethe. While the history of the novel is not ridiculous, laughing and playfulness are of course important characteristics of the novel as a genre and Kundera’s attribution of the birth of modern novel to Cervantes or Rabelais makes this clear. Laughter is a possibility which in Kundera’s opinion ought to have been exploited in the novel to an even greater extent than has actually been the case.

While all of Kundera’s novels contain some matters of ridicule, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the author-narrator offers an explicit discussion of the different functions of laughter. The two main kinds of laughter are explored in relation to sense giving and remembering. In Kundera’s genealogy, the original form of laughter is the malicious laughter of the Devil, which reveals that something is not what it seems to be; it is less valuable, serious, or weighty than it appears. Despite its maliciousness, this mocking laughter also carries a certain “beneficent relief,” suggesting that “things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness” (The Book of Laughter 86). When the angels first heard the devils’ malicious laughter, aimed against God and his creation, they did not know how to respond to it except by producing a similar sound—yet in a higher key—which they endowed with the opposite meaning (86–87). Angelic laughter was born, then, to express their rejoicing over God’s creation.

Kundera gives several examples of this kind of laughter. The laughter of children running on grass conveys their joy of existence and is an approval of existence in its primordial state. The young communists’ ring dance in the street is likewise a form of angelic laughter which proclaims their rejoicing over the revolution and their faith in the paradise that is about to arise. In their self-assured innocence they ignore the evil they themselves commit: “And the dancing young Czechs, knowing that the day before, in the same city, a woman and a surrealist had been swinging from the end of ropes, were dancing all the more frenetically, because their dance was a demonstration of their innocence, in shining contrast to the guilty darkness of the two who were hanged, those betrayers of the people and its hopes” (92–93). In the ring dance, evil is excluded. Those who do not join the circle of the jubilant remain beyond the magical border. If someone doubting the goodness of existence is hanged, this does not disturb the rejoicers in the circle. Kundera reveals that he himself was once a participant in this dance, but was then expelled from the circle and left in a constant state of falling; nonetheless he watches the dancing “with envy and yearning” (93). Tamina encounters the same phenomenon on the children’s island. The children do not bully her out of malice, but they treat her without empathy and use her as their toy because she does not belong to their world. They want to hurt anyone beyond the border of their own world only “in order to exalt their own world and its law” (255). The angels’ laughter simplifies the world in a naïve way, yet this naïveté is not harmless but indeed dangerous.

The Devil’s laughter denies, where the angels’ laughter approves. In Kundera’s view, the art of human existence involves maintaining an equilibrium between denial and approval. If nothing has inherent value and anything may be the target of mocking laughter, life loses its meaningfulness, while in the opposite case the weight of things turns them into an unbearable burden. Human existence requires an equilibrium between the power of the angels and that of the devils, so that one is neither crushed by the weight of existence under the reign of the angels, nor does life become completely meaningless under that of the devils (86).

A deeper insight into Kundera’s view of laughter can be gained, I argue, by comparing it to that of Nietzsche. For Kundera, as for many other authors of the late twentieth century, Nietzsche is the foremost philosopher of modernity (for some Nietzsche is the philosopher of postmodernity before the postmodern era). Kundera’s metaphor for the mode of existence of modern humankind—the death of God—is taken from Nietzsche. Human beings are left alone in the midst of existing things and encounter a world without sensible order. As Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science, “The total character of the world . . . is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called” (109). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra teaches that “Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning . . . a buffoon can be fatal to it” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 49), and Kundera entirely agrees with this, as demonstrated, for example, in The Joke and Farewell Waltz. Humankind poses questions and sets out on a quest, yet the individual has to learn that no absolute truths are available to him or her. The person who believes himself or herself to be in possession of absolute truth is wrong. In Zarathustra’s words, “Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 79), where “inflexible” (ein Unbedingter [Also sprach Zarathustra 66]) refers to a person in search of absolute truth. Along with their common conviction concerning the relativity of all knowledge, Kundera speaks, as I have discussed, of Nietzsche’s “experimental” method of thinking as a model for his own, where thoughts are expressed directly as they come to mind without being developed as part of a comprehensive system of ideas (Testaments 147–48, 172–74). This means, I would add, that thoughts appear in a text like variations on themes in a thematic composition.

A further aspect of Nietzsche’s method of thinking to which Kundera is also attracted but which he never mentions is the metaphorical and, more generally, poetic or imaginative. Kundera emphasizes the novelist’s metaphorical thinking in connection with his Central European Pleiades, for whom existential or phenomenological metaphors are essential devices in the novelistic exploration of the possibilities of human existence (see The Art 140, Testaments 103–05, The Curtain 70). Yet another important source for his own use of metaphors is, I suggest, Nietzsche, who often tackles philosophical problems with a metaphor, as indicated, for example, by the titles of his works Daybreak and The Twilight of Idols. The “death of God” is a metaphor on which Kundera has seized with pleasure. Thinking philosophically in metaphors was an innovation of Nietzsche’s that brought his works close to poetry. Kundera’s novelistic thinking comes close to Nietzsche in that he thinks of the existential problems of his characters in terms of metaphors such as lightness and weight. Moreover, especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche elucidates abstract ideas not only through metaphors but also through scenes in the life of the protagonist. Philosophizing takes a narrative form, and philosophical content is presented through imagined characters and events, just as in a literary work of art. In short, what has been praised or censured as “poetry” in Zarathustra, namely, its metaphorical language and its representation of philosophical thought in the form of persons and scenes, shows a striking resemblance to Kundera’s manner of dealing with themes.

Although Nietzsche’s and Kundera’s metaphors appear strikingly similar, they are not identical in content. A “dancer” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a positive figure, while in Kundera’s works dancing carries different, mostly negative meanings. The dancers of the ring dance belong to the sphere of “totalitarian kitsch” and are dangerous to those whom they exclude from their circle. In Farewell Waltz, the naked, fat elderly women in the pool perform a “necrophiliac ring dance around the transience of youth” (148), where the dance has a mocking character. In the concluding chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Tomas and Tereza amuse themselves in the restaurant of the nearby town, the couples’ dance bears the conventional meaning of erotic togetherness and content, while in other contexts in the novel dancing seems to attract especially those who desire to merge with music and with their dancing partner. In Slowness, a dancer is someone who performs in front of an audience (17–20).

Furthermore, while in Zarathustra the Devil is the symbol of weight, for Kundera the Devil symbolizes the denial of heaviness through laughter, and lightness appears in Nietzsche’s work not as unbearable but as something desirable. The idea of the heaviness of life and of laughter as easing this weight, however, is common to both Nietzsche and Kundera. Laughter is not a manifestation of exhilaration, but by diminishing the heavy burden of existence it is apt to make life more bearable. Nietzsche’s mountain climber “laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary” (68; the pun in the German original, “der lacht über alle Trauer-Spiele und Trauer-Ernste” [Also sprach Zarathustra 49] is not mediated in the translation). Furthermore, unlike Kundera’s laughter, Nietzsche’s has an undertone of Dionysian rapture and dancing that challenges Schopenhauerian pessimism. Schopenhauer asks, “Does existence have any meaning at all?” (The Gay Science 219) but his pessimism over a world that has become “stupid, blind, crazed, and questionable” (The Gay Science 221) is defied by Zarathustra’s Dionysian and rapturous approval of existence. In contrast, Kundera’s laughter of the Devil lacks this Dionysian character and is, rather, a laughter of disillusionment. Kundera’s devilish laughter is thus closer to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, arising from the meaninglessness of life, than to Nietzsche’s enthusiastic, Dionysian approval of life. The angels’ laughter, as an expression of their rejoicing over existence, is ostensibly more akin to the Dionysian rapture, yet it is based on a false confidence in the goodness of the world order, which of course is alien to Nietzsche’s view of the Dionysian. Zarathustra’s dancing is an approval of existence despite its dreadfulness. For Nietzsche, this dance is infinitely far from the eulogies of those who celebrate existence without reservation and whom Zarathustra calls “the all-contented” (The Gay Science 212). Towards the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra “the Ass Festival” is celebrated, in which people worship the ass as their god. By braying its heehaw (which Nietzsche spells in German as “Ja!” [“Yes!”]), the ass praises the world as its own creation and this appraisal is echoed by its worshippers (321–22). We can draw a parallel between the ass and its worshippers and Kundera’s angels and ring dancers, who express their uncritical approval of existence.

Kundera’s two kinds of laughter thus represent two contrary attitudes toward existence, which are also of different value. The angels’ all-approving laughter is a sign either of an ideological attitude or of childish naïveté, whereas mocking laughter expresses the attitude of a rational human being toward things that “cannot be loved.” Life as a whole cannot be loved, maintains Kundera. Zarathustra assures us that we love life not because we are used to life but because we are used to love (68). So many particular things feign to be better than they really are, that is, feign lovability; therefore there is plenty to laugh at. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the member of the party committee who secretly orders a horoscope for himself is ridiculous, but so is Mirek’s airbrushing of a past love and the big-nosed Zdena’s stubborn fidelity. Trying to avoid ridicule can itself appear ridiculous indeed, as does Jaromil’s death resulting from his fear of being laughed at. Part 5 in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “Litost,” dealing with the student and the butcher’s wife, refers to a character’s specific feeling at the sight of his own ridiculousness. According to Kundera, the Czech word lítost refers to “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery” (The Book of Laughter 167; see also Life Is Elsewhere 48–49). For Kundera, this state of mind is typical of youth, when misery derives from youthful immaturity. Lítost is a sense of wretchedness and self-pity and leads neither to relieving laughter nor to beneficent self-reflection. According to Kundera, lítost does not occur in the lives of individuals alone but also in the history of nations. The Spartans, in their belligerent history, made irrational, self-destructive decisions out of lítost and Czech history, too, is full of lítost, crushed as it was by a stronger enemy time and again (206–07).

In the first essayistic passage in part 3, “The Angels,” Kundera comments on “Saint Annie Leclerc’s” description of the laughter of delight: “Unquestionably, such laughter is ‘beyond joking, mockery, ridicule.’ The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing about anything in particular, their laughter has no object, it is the expression of being rejoicing in being. Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world’s present moment and wishes to know only that” (80–81). The laughter of unconditional approval, from which everything but the momentary present is excluded, is a praise of nothingness. It is a primordial state of being, prior to the opening of the perspectives of temporality, of past and future, and thus of comparisons and distinctions, which alone create meaningfulness.

Indeed, another important theme in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, although not articulated as a key word, is “beginning.” It was not only for the Romantics that childhood was the most poetic age. Nietzsche, too, valued childhood as a new beginning in human existence: “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 55). In contrast, for Kundera, the child’s “yes” to life is not sacred but equal to the wisdom of the ass. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the beginning is not explored only as the primal state of human existence; in the context of music, the primordial state of culture is pondered on as well. On his deathbed, the father—who has almost entirely lost his ability to speak—says something about “the stupidity of music.” The author-narrator is puzzled as to what his father, a passionate lover of music, might mean by his words, and comes to the conclusion that he must have been referring to a primordial state of music before the beginning of its history: “That primeval state of music (music without thought) mirrors the human being’s inherent stupidity. It required an immense effort of heart and mind for music to rise above that essential stupidity, and it is that splendid arc over centuries of European history which has been extinguished like a skyrocket at the peak of its trajectory” (248).

Kundera, like Nietzsche, sees meaning as a human, cultural product, brought about in the first place through artistic creation. Nietzsche’s early work, The Birth of Tragedy, is as a whole a testimony to his conviction of the crucial role of the arts in the creation of culture. This is confirmed in the philosopher’s unpublished notebooks: “Art and nothing but art! Art is the great enabler of life, she is the great temptress alluring us to live, the great stimulator of life. . . . Art as the redeemer of the one who has knowledge—who perceives the appalling and questionable nature of existence, who insists on conceiving—of the one with tragic knowledge” (Nachgelassene 521). Here we encounter once again the view that the essence of art is a combination of knowledge and beauty, a view which Kundera shares with Broch and Musil. Moreover, Kundera’s conviction that what is essential in human history is not political history but the history of the arts accords with Nietzsche. But Kundera also maintains that in the contemporary world art can no longer fulfill its creative cultural function. The final phase in the history of music—here representing the arts in general—has now been reached and this state is similar to its beginning. This is a state in which Schönberg, as the epitome of where the development of music in the course of its history has led, is forgotten, but popular music conceived of as music preceding its historical development lives on eternally: “Stereotyped harmonies, banal melodies, and rhythms all the more insistent the more monotonous they are—that is what remains of music, that is music’s eternity” (The Book of Laughter 247). With the throb of the guitar the existence expresses its rejoicing: “‘I’m here!’ There is no more boisterous, no more unanimous agreement than the agreement with being” (The Book of Laughter 247). Again, the similarity to Nietzsche’s feast of the ass is striking.

Kundera traces the “stupidity” of music in its primordial state back to “the human being’s inherent stupidity” (The Book of Laughter 248). Meanings cannot be discovered either in the arts or in a human life in their undifferentiated primordial state; they emerge only through a process of differentiation. The meaningless eternity of existence—the endless repetition of the mere functions of life, “seeing, hearing, eating, drinking, urinating, defecating”—is unbearable. For Kundera, there is no escape from the unbearable state of meaninglessness through a Dionysian ecstasy. With his absolutely negative attitude toward ecstasy—represented for him by rock music, in which the borders of the self, between now and then, and ultimately all distinctions, are obliterated in a state of rapture (see Testaments 82–88, 233)—Kundera is the exact opposite of Nietzsche’s dancing Zarathustra; he is an advocate of distinctions, of rational analysis and critique.

According to Kundera, the history of music consists of subsequent discoveries revealing unexpected possibilities in the basic material. A corresponding temporal dimension is also present in the individual’s search for meaning in his or her life: the individual striving for authenticity tries to grasp the meaning in the present, but that the present is related to the past is a prerequisite of all distinctions. Yet history as a continuous process of differentiation has in Kundera’s view now come to an end—however difficult it may be to conceive of the end of history or just of the history of music or that of a particular nation (see The Book of Laughter 246). Rather than producing something new, the culture of our age—whether music, painting, or the novel—produces only constantly changing repetitions of the old. This may be laughable, until it is no longer even that, but merely meaningless. Laughter appears here in its final form, as an exhausted, dying laughter. Jan ponders what will happen when things that have undergone endless repetition have lost not only their meaning but at last also their ridiculousness: “Jan imagines that the Greek gods at first passionately participated in the adventures of humans. Then they settled in on Olympus to look down and have a good laugh. And by now they have been asleep for a long time” (295–96). When the constant repetition of the old no longer provokes even mocking laughter, we are in a state beyond all meaningfulness.