Chapter Nine

Lightness and Death

In Immortality, Kundera’s alter ego tells his friend Avenarius that he is writing a book that will be given the title The Unbearable Lightness of Being, referring to the book the reader is reading. Self-reference and playing with fictionality, often regarded as postmodern traits in literature, fit well to Kundera’s novels in which he refrains from creating an illusion of reality. When the friend thinks that a novel bearing this title might already exist, “Kundera” says that he has written it himself, but that the title would be more appropriate for the novel in preparation (267). The remark is pertinent because the themes occurring in Immortality are similar to those found in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and in Kundera’s novels in general: soul and body, sentimental and nonsentimental, weight and weightlessness, contingency and necessity, History, love, eroticism, beauty and ugliness, the “absolutely modern,” and death are examined from the perspective of the architheme of sense giving. However, while The Unbearable Lightness of Being does not actually end with the unbearableness of the lightness of being, but finds a tolerable and even happy mode of living for the individual who is striving for authenticity, in Immortality the outcome is much gloomier: there is no longer any escape in sight from the lightness of being. We might add that the title Identity, too, would suit the novel well and even better than it fits the short novel telling the rather simple story of Jean-Marc and Chantal, because it is the question of identity around which the complex thematic texture of the novel is organized. In spite of its playfulness, this grave, even pessimistic work is to be read as in a way Kundera’s testament, his conclusive statement about questions of sense giving and the existence of an autonomous human being. The title Immortality is typical of Kundera in that it names an important theme, but conceals the fact that its opposites, death and mortality, are even more essential themes in the novel. Indeed, Immortality is not merely a novel about the difficulties of determining one’s identity and about ending with the lightness of being, but is in particular a novel about being mortal.

The body, self, and being for others

Immortality is a polyphonic thematic composition consisting of seven parts, each named according to a theme word or a metaphor expressing an important theme. In part 1, “The Face,” the problem of individual identity is tackled once again, combined with questions of bodily existence and how an individual appears to others. The protagonist in this part is the “heroine” of the novel, Agnes, and the other characters are her sister Laura, her husband Paul, a lawyer, and their teenage daughter Brigitte. Part 2, “Immortality,” deals with Goethe’s relationship with Bettina Brentano. Part 3, “Fighting,” is again about Agnes and Laura. Its main event is Laura’s love affair with Paul’s colleague Bernard and the breaking up of their relationship, but at a deeper level it deals with Laura’s continuous competition with her older sister and her struggle to get the attention of others. Part 4, “Homo sentimentalis,” again takes up the case of Goethe and Bettina. Part 5, “Chance,” brings Agnes’s story to an end: she dies in a car accident. This part continues Kundera’s exploration of the themes of necessity and coincidence, meaningfulness and its absence, love and beauty, identity, temporality, lightness, and death. Part 6, “The Dial,” presents a separate story line about the erotic life of a man called Rubens. The last part, “The Celebration,” forms a short and light coda to the novel: the author, sitting beside a swimming pool, celebrates the completion of the novel together with his friend Avenarius and meets Paul and Laura, who now are a married couple. In Immortality, Kundera is again more interested in certain themes which appear in his characters’ lives than in those lives as a whole and again he feels free to construct the novel as a thematic composition without considering chronology or avoiding repetition if it is useful in his composition.

In symmetry with the ending, the novel begins with a scene at a swimming pool, where the author receives the idea of the heroine of the novel from a gesture by an elderly woman. This gesture, a wave of the hand he sees as extraordinarily attractive and exclusively feminine, is in the author’s opinion incompatible with the body that performs it. The gesture is actually only appropriate for a young woman. The author contemplates the fact that we are rarely aware of our age; most of the time we are ageless to ourselves (4). The body ages, but the “I” is ageless—a discrepancy which is a variation on the dualism of soul and body, now viewed from the perspective of temporality.

The woman’s gesture induces the author to reflect upon the connection between a gesture and an individual (Kundera does not seem to be aware about recent research on gestures in social psychology and cultural history; see, e.g., Bremmer and Roodenburg; Kendon). Although a gesture is taken to be an expression of a person’s individuality, actually the opposite is the case: “Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures” (7–8). Instead of the gesture having revealed something about this particular woman, for instance, her beauty, the woman has revealed to the spectators the beauty of a gesture: “A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations” (8). Here Kundera considers the language of gestures in a similar way as the structuralists considered spoken and written language. According to the theory of structuralism, language is not the creation of the speaker or an expression of his or her unique thoughts and feelings; rather, the speaker says what it is possible to say in the language. In a sense, the speaker is a means through which the language manifests itself (see, e.g., Benveniste). This mode of thinking was applied to other systems of representation and action as well. Claude Lévi-Strauss applied it, for instance, to mythology, claiming that it is not the individual who is thinking in myths but instead myths which are thinking in the individual (12). In the structuralist mode of thought, the individual is deprived of sovereignty as an acting and speaking agent. The system has primacy over the individual, in that the individual is not able to choose freely what he or she is or says or does, but is merely a temporary occupant of a site in the system. For Kundera, the language of the body is such a system, where gestures are nothing that individuals have themselves invented. They are patterns of action encoded in the body, which the individuals may or may not use. Kundera’s thinking, however, differs from that of the structuralists in one important respect: for him the disappearance of individuality and its replacement by a function of the system is a fundamental problem, because for him the uniqueness and autonomy of the individual are inalienable values.

Gestures, seemingly free acts of human individuals and expressions of their subjectivity, are for Kundera products of “the Creator’s computer” (12). As such, they are similar to the human body and especially the face, whose identification with the personality was already questioned in Kundera’s earlier novels. In Farewell Waltz, Olga denies that her face reveals her true identity, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being Tereza wonders at what point her face would cease to be hers if her nose was lengthened by a millimeter a day, and in Identity Jean-Marc is afraid that a time may come when he will no longer be able to discern in his beloved Chantal the minuscule distinctive features that make her unique (32–34, 81, 96–97, 126). In the part entitled “The Face” in Immortality, the question is once again brought up about the possibility for an individual to identify with his or her face. Kundera suggests that each individual human being is a combination of some of those variations on basic patterns that are produced by the “creator’s computer.” The human face is assembled from different parts which vary within certain ranges. Variation in the length of a nose, for instance, stays within certain limits. The result is not a unique, individual face but a reproduction of the same prototype, the human face, with random variation within certain limits. The face is unique only in the same sense of singularity that every natural being or technically produced item is unique. The face “reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen” (13), a token by which a human being is distinguished from all others, like one car among all the others from the same production line.

Kundera’s computer metaphor is interesting because it makes clear on the one hand the continuity from the Enlightenment—which modeled nature through the metaphor of the machine (see Wendorff 231–32)—to the present time, on the other hand the difference between the two ages. The clock, with the precision of its mechanism, was the epitome of mechanical causality in nature. It is precisely this aspect that is emphasized in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where Kundera speaks of the “clockwork” of sexual arousal in men (231). Replacing in Immortality the metaphor of a clock by that of a computer indicates that nature is still considered to follow laws of necessity, but that this necessity now appears in the form of probability. Kundera puts this as follows:

In his [God’s] place, there is a program which is ceaselessly running in his absence, without anyone being able to change anything whatever. To load a program into the computer: this does not mean that the future has been planned down to the last detail, that everything is written “up above.” For example, the program did not specify that in 1815 a battle would be fought near Waterloo and that the French would be defeated, but only that man is aggressive by nature, that he is condemned to wage war and that technical progress would make war more and more terrible. Everything else is without importance from the Creator’s point of view and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program, which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance. (Immortality 13)

Our face is given to us accidentally. We enter into the world in a body which is not our choice. But is a human being able to bear this accidentality? What am I, if I refuse to identify with what “the Creator’s computer” has happened to assign to me: “Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we cannot live or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn’t enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence” (14). We regard our body, and especially our face, as an expression of our personality, yet our body is an inevitable and at the same time an accidental product of nature: inevitable insofar as it is naturally produced following the genetic code of the species, accidental in that the species is realized in specimens which vary in detail within a narrow range of accidental differences. Kundera thinks that if human beings are equivalent to their bodies, they are deprived of any autonomy of choice. The only alternative is the dissociation of one’s identity from the body.

Agnes and Laura take opposite stands on the question of how the self is related to one’s face and body. Agnes’s attitude is typical of the person who is striving for authenticity, whereas Laura’s is typical of the sentimentalist. Agnes wants to escape identification with her face. She imagines another planet, of a higher order, on which one has no face but is totally one’s own creation (45–46). For Agnes, the body is not the person himself or herself either; rather, it is a machine which needs constant maintenance. A human being feels ashamed and humiliated by being forced to admit his or her bodily existence, because this means admitting a lack of freedom (275–77, 107–10). In contrast, Laura identifies herself with her body. For her the body is not a machine but has erotic and personal significance: it demands to be accepted and loved, as a manifestation of her self. She feels a constant urge to be bodily present in the lives of those she loves; for example, the white piano she gave Agnes as a present signifies leaving her body in the living room of her admired sister.

Since gestures are not original, a human being who is striving for authenticity cannot identify himself or herself with them. The history of the wave of the hand in Agnes’s and Laura’s story shows how an authentic and a sentimental individual use gestures differently. Agnes had first encountered the wave of the hand when a female colleague taking leave of Agnes’s father turned to him with this gesture. Agnes first uses the gesture to console a young man who, after escorting her home, is too awkward even to ask for a kiss. She abandons it, however, when she notices that Laura, imitating her, uses it in parting from a playmate. Agnes becomes aware of the fact that this gesture is no more a manifestation of herself than any other. She therefore gives up all gestures which might be interpreted as expressions of her individuality, keeping only the most general ones, those which are unambiguously nonindividual, such as nodding and shaking one’s head. Laura takes the opposite course of action: she appropriates a number of gestures as attributes of her self and demands that others recognize her in them.

What are, then, the possibilities for human beings to be an autonomous, authentic individuals, if they cannot be such through their body and its gestures? Where can the true self be found? In The Art of the Novel, Kundera says that throughout its history the novel has been in search of the self, without ever finding it: “The quest for the self has always ended, and always will end, in a paradoxical dissatisfaction” (25). In Kundera’s view this is so because the solution also cannot be simply to separate the soul from the body and let the soul alone determine an individual’s identity. In Immortality, he writes that in Romanticism after Beethoven, “man, betrayed by the world, escapes into his self, into his nostalgia, his dreams, his revolt, and lets himself be deafened by the voices inside him so that he no longer hears the voices outside” (85). Goethe, in contrast, dissociated himself from this tendency, because for him “the cry from inside sounded . . . like an unbearable noise” (85). Listening only to the cry from our inner self does not mean merely an escape from reality: the cry from inside also means presenting ourselves to others. It does not mean retiring into solitude, which for Kundera would signify authenticity, but is a craving for attention: with his cry from the inner self, the sentimentalist bears his soul in front of him like a flag (158, 236).

But what is a “soul” in solitude? Kundera suggests that, like gestures, thoughts are far fewer in number than human beings: “Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self” (225). Kundera ends up with the paradox of the self. The only thing that is authentic, truly our own, is suffering, because everyone has to endure it themselves (225). This is further evidence that for Kundera the criterion for autonomy is sensing or experiencing something ourselves. But suffering does not distinguish human beings from other creatures. Following this principle, even a cat has a “self.” What, then, remains of the object of the individual’s pride, his or her autonomous, unique self?

In his earlier novels, Kundera sought the real self in the individual’s existential experience and in the freedom to choose his or her own actions. These are allowed to the individual even in the tiny space left in the trap of History. But where in the earlier novels the possibilities left for humankind were sought in the private sphere outside of History, in Immortality he seems to be denying the individual any possibility of an authentic, autonomous mode of existence, even in privacy. This is because he now stresses that human beings are bound by biological necessities and natural contingencies, which do not recognize any uniqueness in an individual and which lie beyond our control. Where Tomas and Tereza, even under the harshest circumstances of a totalitarian regime, preserved a modicum of freedom to make choices in their lives, in Immortality, human life is trapped not only by history but also by biology, which deprives the individual of the last trace of freedom. However, individual identity is not threatened or even denied in Immortality by biology alone, but also by the constraints of society, which now appear as interconnected. Kundera still regards the (negative) freedom of not being determined by others to be the goal of a modern individual, but he seems to be more pessimistic than before about our chance to escape it. In his view, the contemporary West resembles recent Central and East European totalitarianism in that it does not allow the individual to determine himself or herself in the freedom of privacy.

In Kundera’s novels, the mere fact of a human being’s bodily existence makes him or her dependent on others. Since an individual exists for others only through being perceived by them—as a body, through gestures or words—he or she cannot escape bodily existence. Tomas speculates that if the male sexual apparatus reacted to the flight of a swallow instead of the female body, everyone would realize the separation of soul and body. But, in fact, this separation does not exist; on the contrary, everyone in Kundera’s novels encounters others through their physical appearance and the messages sent by their bodies and is similarly perceived by others. The basis for social encounters is shaped by biological necessity and natural randomness, which are responsible for the attractiveness or otherwise of the body and face and their changes through aging. In the social machinery, an individual is what he or she is for others. A sentimental person like Laura reacts to this by identifying herself passionately with what she is for others, whereas a person striving for autonomy and authenticity, like Agnes, is aware of the discrepancy between external determination and striving for authenticity, and feels disturbed when she recognizes the difficulty or even impossibility of escaping the former.

Just as Agnes abandons the special wave of the hand when her sister appropriates the gesture, she also gives up wearing dark sunglasses when Laura adopts them as well. When she was young, Agnes wore dark sunglasses because she thought they were elegant and made her look mysterious. Here, we have to take precise notice of the purpose for which Kundera makes her to wear the dark sunglasses. They are part of her self-fashioning, but in a manner which leaves the precise meaning of the gesture or accessory undetermined. We could also say that their meaning is negative because she uses them to emphasize her withdrawal from the gaze of others. Laura takes the dark sunglasses from Agnes when she is in mourning and in her case the meaning of the glasses is clear: they manifest her commitment to a world that causes her pain. By foregrounding her tears, she manifests her sentimental appreciation of feelings and displays her own emotions.

Both Agnes and Laura construct their own identity, which they think is unique, but this occurs in opposite ways. Agnes attempts to get rid of all external determinants, in order in the end to find out what she is in herself, while Laura constructs her identity out of the attributes bestowed upon her: “There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction. Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura’s method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes)” (111). Agnes’s strategy of removing from herself everything she recognizes as inauthentic resembles Tomas’s endeavor in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to disown even inner imperatives in order to ultimately gain his inner freedom. In turn, Laura’s strategy is equivalent to that of Helena’s in The Joke. Ludvik remarks that the special taste for food Helena claims possessing is a means of self-fashioning (180). Agnes feels the glances of others as burdensome and dreams of solitude, with no one looking at her, while Laura who exhibits herself willingly to those around her wants to do everything, loving, mourning, committing suicide as if on stage looked at by her loved ones.

The figure parallel to Laura in the second story line of the polyphonic novel is Bettina Brentano, a variation on the person with a lyrical or kitsch attitude to life from almost two hundred years earlier. Like Laura, Bettina too puts up a performance of herself, but her stage is greater than that Laura’s. She wants to make an appearance in History, whereas Laura is content with having those closest to her as her audience. Bettina and Laura represent the first and the third type, respectively, in the classification of people in The Unbearable Lightness of Being according to whose gaze they crave: “We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. . . . The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. . . . Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. . . . And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present” (262–63). As a means of gaining access to History, Bettina uses her love for Goethe. Kundera analyzes the content of Bettina’s romantic “true love” (wahre Liebe): this is not the love for a particular person but a love of love—the feeling of love is elevated to an absolute value, whereas the object of love is incidental (214–15). Here we recognize the idea of sentimental love as depicted earlier for instance in Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere. Laura’s conception of love is, likewise, sentimental. She is not in the least interested in the person she is in love with—she actually does not know him at all—but is only interested in his love for her and in love as her own feeling (148). Love for her means “wings beating in her breast,” a feeling which makes her do senseless things (203–04). Actually, “absolute love” or romantic “true love” is false love, in that, as we already know, it is an act of sentimental self-embellishment and not at all an encounter with another human being.

Laura represents the private, Bettina the public construction of one’s identity by being for others. Bettina lives in the era of Romanticism, the time when absolute feeling was discovered, a feeling which promises an escape from the world, but which can equally be used, as Bettina’s ingenious invention shows as a means of ensuring herself a permanent presence in the world. Bettina’s maneuver of making herself visible to everyone resembles present-day “imagology” as discussed in Immortality, but the rules of the game have changed considerably during the past two centuries. The present-day rules of publicity are discussed, except by the author himself, by Paul, the third sentimental person in the novel. It is fitting for Laura to be Paul’s spouse in that Paul wants to be the object of “true” love that makes the lover behave in a senseless manner. Paul constructs his identity on the idea of being “absolutely modern.” However, because what is absolutely modern is constantly changing, he seeks help in recognizing it from his young daughter, whom he believes to feel intuitively, as youth does, what is truly new and essential in our time. Following the advice of image consultants, nevertheless, the radio station on which he has broadcasted his brief Sunday morning feature, “Rights and the Law,” decides to cancel the program as hopelessly out of date. Yet he speaks in favor of the imagologists because he sees in them representatives of what at the moment is absolutely modern and therefore he actually is, as his boss remarks, “a brilliant ally of his gravediggers” (159). It is Paul who introduces the concept of imagology and ponders how it subjugates the individuals in our contemporary world. The conditions under which the public construction of the self takes place have changed definitively in the course of the last two centuries. Where Bettina managed to gain a position in History, Paul realizes that he is a helpless victim of the imagological machinery.

Imagology against privacy and history

At the beginning of the novel, Agnes says that discovering our individual identity by identifying ourselves with our face has become impossible in our times, because we are confronted every day with hundreds of faces in newspapers, television, and advertisements. Paul would like to see the constant display of faces as a sign of the individualism of our times, but Agnes is of the opposite opinion, finding that the exposure of masses of faces proves that there has never been any individuality at all: “You suddenly realize that it’s all just one face in many variations and that no such thing as an individual ever existed” (35). Nature repeats the very same, with insignificant variations. Where, then, is individuality to be found?

The contrast between a sentimental construction of the self and the search for an authentic mode of being is maintained in Immortality, but here both are challenged by the new social situation, the reign of imagology. Kundera’s concept of imagology means the hegemony of the image as the main form of cultural consciousness; thus a more suitable name for the phenomenon might perhaps be “imagocracy.” “Image” refers here concretely to a picture or photograph, but also more abstractly to the public image of a person. The supremacy of the image implies that cultural reality has gone through a process of visualization; events and persons are presented to the public through visual images. In an image, a piece of reality is apparently captured in its immediacy, but the revealed “truth” is superficial and even misleading. There is no effort to explore the issue in its complexity, but on the contrary it is seized with the haste that is characteristic of our time. In visual communication anything that is considered worthy of our attention must be transformed into images. Agnes remarks that in the contemporary world, God’s eye that sees everything has been replaced by the camera; consequently, “the eye of one has been replaced by the eyes of all” (33). This does not just concern public figures whose privacy is exposed in photographs on the pages of newspapers. Agnes ponders the fact that no one is safe from the eye of publicity. If we just happen to get involved in a dramatic accident, our face, distorted by pain, might appear in the spotlight of publicity. The right of the photographer to intrude into our suffering means that we are constantly watched by others. No one can escape the gazes of others (Kundera does not relate his notion of imagology to the field of scholarship termed imagology with regard to national stereotypes [see, e.g., Beller and Leerssen; Leerssen]; in some aspects, his concept is parallel to what is called the “iconic turn” and “visual turn,” respectively, including the impact of the image and the visual in contemporary culture [see, e.g., Dikovitskaya; Dorfman; Mirzoeff; Mitchell; Moxey; Sachs-Hombach; Viehoff]).

Kundera’s imagology means the reign of visual images, but also an imposition on our identity, and this results in the ways our public image is constructed and perceived. The communist ideal of living in a glass house, that is to say, transforming the private into the public, has in a sense become the reality in a West ruled by imagology. Kundera observes that for a long time in our history only in a few special cases was a person granted the right to interrogate another person publicly, for instance, a judge investigating a criminal case. In the twentieth century the fascists and the communists appropriated this right and people became aware that anyone could any time be required to answer questions such as “what they did yesterday; what they think deep in their hearts; what they talk about when they get together with A and if they have an intimate relationship with B”—an awareness which turned them into “infantilized wretches” (122). Now, in the era of imagology, morality is founded upon the imperative of answering—which Kundera calls the “Eleventh Command-ment”—with journalists in the role of interrogators. Kundera’s example is the “interrogation” of president Nixon by the media during the Watergate scandal. Kundera remarks that truth elicited by the Eleventh Commandment is not connected with religion or free thought: “it is truth of the lowest ontological storey, a purely positivist factual truth,” which nevertheless “contains the same explosive force as did the truth of Hus or Giordano Bruno,” who because of their heretical views were condemned to be burnt at the stake (124). That journalistic truth concerns “pure facts” means that the evaluation of the actions of the person being interrogated is left to public opinion.

Imagology means the rule of public opinion. Everyone’s ubiquitous exposure to the gazes of the public signifies an unprecedented demand for uniformity. Walking in the street, Agnes covers her ears with her hands to protect herself from the predatory noise and a passer-by slaps his forehead as a sign that he thinks she is insane. Everyone has to adhere to a certain behavioral pattern, in this case to acquiesce to the noise; no deviation from the norm is allowed.

The power of imagology in determining our identity is explored in detail in the cases of two persons whose work takes place in public, namely Paul and his friend Bernard, Laura’s lover. When Paul is compelled to give up his Saturday morning radio program (one is tempted to ask what this says about our time, which wants entertainment only and is no longer interested in “rights and the law”), he is astonished: “Without his realizing it in the slightest, something must have happened to his image. Something must have happened and he didn’t know what it was, and he’d never know” (139–40). Changes in our public image affect our lives, but we are powerless to regulate these changes or even to identify them. Bernard is a young, successful radio reporter whose face is infinitely multiplied on roadside billboards promoting a radio broadcast channel. But when someone unknown to him—who later turns out to be professor Avenarius—knocks on his door and gives him a diploma awarding him the title of “compleat ass,” his image in his own eyes collapses (140). Since he cannot resist telling his colleagues about the incident, in their minds the attribute “compleat ass” is from now on definitely associated with him. He no longer feels sure that his nomination as a “compleat ass” will not some day be published in a newspaper as a social announcement. The accidentality of the event is underlined by the fact that Avenarius had mistaken the radio reporter for his father, the politician, to whom he had actually intended to address the diploma of outstanding stupidity. Despite this, the deed and its effects are irremediable.

Since Paul always wants to comply with what is absolutely modern and that is now the supremacy of the imagologists, he yields to their power, although with regret: “Our self is a mere illusion, ungraspable, indescribable, misty, while the only reality, all too easily graspable and describable, is our image in the eyes of others. And the worst thing about it is that you are not its master. First you try to paint it yourself, then you want at least to influence and control it, but in vain: a single malicious phrase is enough to change you for ever into a depressingly simple caricature” (143). Kundera’s view is that it is difficult for us to find our true selves through introspection, but if our only graspable self is what we are for others and if these “others” are the omnipresent and yet indefinable public sphere which we cannot manipulate or influence, we are at the mercy of chance. Nothing remains of autonomy in the sense of self-determination, which for Kundera is the core of the modern individual and the source of his or her dignity. But the sentimental strategy of constructing the ego by leaning on emotions and ideas greater than ourselves no longer works either, because we have no say in the process of assigning our own attributes. This was the case in a totalitarian system as well, especially if one opposed it. We might be labeled an enemy of the working class without any chance to counter this attribution. Thus, imagology is not a completely new phenomenon. According to Kundera, history does not in general give rise to anything absolutely new. What is new is that a certain possibility of human existence, which occurred earlier sporadically, is now supreme in the society as a whole. A reporter intruding into the life of the person whom they are interviewing displays the same indiscretion and arrogance as Bettina intruding into the life of Goethe. When Bettina asks Goethe impertinently why he drinks secretly, and later publishes this in her correspondence, she strips him of some of his privacy (77).

Ideology favored the lyrical or sentimental attitude in which we identify ourselves with a great idea or with the course of History. Imagology brings an end both to great ideas and to History. Ideology provided us with a system of doctrines, which was a logically constructed whole. Ideology turns into imagology when a system of ideas is reduced to, or replaced by, a few slogans and affecting pictures, such as a smiling worker waving a hammer in his hand. In the end, when ideologies have lost their credibility, no system of doctrines exists behind the images any longer. While the totalitarian system exerted control through ideology, imagology works through opinion polls: a system of official truths is replaced by the measurement of public opinion. Questions such as “is racism good or bad” or “who is the greatest author of all time” have become issues for which answers are sought in opinion polls: “Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed” (128–29).

The rule of public opinion means the totalitarianism of banality. When public opinion is equated with truth, the individual is deprived of the task of searching for truth, which according to Kundera was the task assigned to the modern individual and in particular the core of the ethos of the novelist. Through the figure of Hemingway, Kundera inquires how humankind (i.e., the novelist) has lost his right to explore the phenomena of existence. The public is excited by the latest Hemingway biography, which shows that his work, as Paul puts it, is nothing but a coded form of his life, “and that this life was just as poor and meaningless as all our lives” (377). Thus biographies and studies of writers are not there to elucidate the important things they have discovered or rescued from the “oblivion of being.” On the contrary, they are written with the intention of reducing the writer’s work to the trivialities of his private life. Paul praises imagology because it means an end to the tyranny of the “immortals,” that is, those few culturally creative spirits who were admired for their ability to interpret human existence in their works. Everyone sinks democratically into the same meaninglessness, the surface of which is decorated according to ephemeral fashion dictated by the imagologists.

Although the ideologists’ dream of steering the course of History was futile, according to Kundera they actually influenced history by prompting revolts, revolutions, wars, and reforms. Imagology, in contrast, has no effect whatsoever on history, but in a sense means an end to history. Under the rule of imagology, the word “change” has taken on a new meaning. It no longer refers to a historical change, a new phase in historical development, as in modernity, but only to a constant shift, with no direction or goal (129). Images follow each other in constant alternation like trends in fashion: “Imagologues create systems of ideals and anti-ideals, systems of short duration which are quickly replaced by other systems but which influence our behaviour, our political opinions and aesthetic tastes, the colour of carpets and the selection of books just as in the past we have been ruled by the systems of ideologues” (129–30). Broch’s destruction of the system of values is accomplished here by replacing values with weightless fashion trends, which dictate how we conceive of ourselves and how we relate to our surroundings. Kundera’s thinking can be compared with Jean Baudrillard’s notions as to how the reality in which we live has been transformed into a sphere of signs without reference or with the views of Pierre Bourdieu, whose exploration of social behavior and image building shows how people are influenced by current trends and fashions. With regard to the individual’s possibilities of choice, however, Bourdieu is less pessimistic than Kundera, in believing that the individual is capable of fashioning his or her own public image.

A parallel can be drawn between the transition from ideology to imagology and what Kundera says about the rejuvenation of humankind and its transition to “infantocracy,” although he does not explicitly connect the two. While ideology means an attempt to understand the world in terms of one single idea by young people who lack experience of the world, imagology means remaining in the mode of existence that precedes any attempt at understanding, in the perpetual present of the moment, as on the children’s island in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Discursive statements and concepts require analysis, whereas images are a passive and nonreflective, nonanalytical mode of appropriating the world. Returning to that which is unmediatedly given, prior to any questioning or analysis, is contrary to what for Kundera is valuable in the tradition of European modernity.

Meaninglessness and death

Part 2 of Immortality has the same title as the novel itself, but here again the unmentioned member of the pair of opposites, namely, death or mortality, is the more important one. Just as in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera is not interested in death as an event, but in mortality as an inescapable dimension of human existence, one which we prefer to ignore as long as possible. Again, mortality is examined as an attribute of the individual and of society, history, and culture. The question of death is intertwined with that of sense giving, since death means the annulment of anything valuable in life and is therefore, as Broch wrote, the nonvalue per se (“Evil” 9). A thing which loses its previously given significance undergoes a kind of death. While in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a human being could under certain conditions be saved from the weightlessness of the absence of meaning, in Immortality this is no longer the case. The novel shows that in our contemporary world, autonomy and authenticity are no longer possible modes of being. Love, eroticism, and beauty are not enough to give weight to the existence of an individual and history has ceased to exist. Although play and laughter—an exposing, scornful laughter—are as strongly present in this novel as in Kundera’s earlier works, Immortality is the most pessimistic of Kundera’s novels. It about the loss of meaningfulness and about death.

The part, “Immortality” deals with Bettina’s efforts to slip into History through Goethe. Actually, such attempts may not have been all that infrequent around Goethe—as Hans Blumenberg contends, “people in his [Goethe’s] vicinity were in a peculiar way disposed to step with him into immortality” (Goethe 147)—but the picture Kundera draws of Bettina and her motives is rather caustic. My interest here is not in comparing Kundera’s picture of Bettina Brentano with the conclusions of recent historical research on her (see Bäumer; Frederiksen and Goodman; Messner); in fact, Kundera seems not to be interested in Bettina Brentano as a historical figure, but as the bearer of certain general, transhistorical themes. However, Kundera’s tendency to ignore historical specificity has significant implications for his views of people and their existential problems and his depiction of Bettina Brentano serves as an example of this. Studies of Bettina Brentano have connected her adoration of Goethe and her self-fashioning not only to the Romantic idea of love as an educating force (bildende Kraft), but also to the subordinate position of literarily or artistically gifted women at that time. We can with good reason call this position a trap: women were excluded from higher education and as writers were not taken seriously. What remained for a woman as a means for self-development was to love a man, since binding oneself with feelings of adoration to a person on a higher spiritual level was seen as a means whereby the lover approached the level of the beloved. Moreover, when Bettina chooses to behave in a calculatedly childlike manner—which Kundera regards as a means of gaining permission to behave badly—she is seizing the only option available to women to be acknowledged as creative individuals, since the Romantics praised in the child what they saw as its originality, authenticity, and creativity (see Bäumer 122). Consequently, what Kundera regards as Bettina’s trick to gain attention and possibly even achieve immortality in Goethe’s wake could equally be interpreted as an effort at self-assertion by a literarily gifted woman.

According to Kundera, Bettina used the state of mind the Romantics called “true love” as an entrance ticket into History. What interests Kundera in this maneuver—which includes her publication of her correspondence with Goethe, appropriately stylized under the title Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child (see Arnim)—is her longing for immortality, which Kundera sees as characteristic of the sentimental attitude. This is because a longing for immortality is a form of longing to exist for others, to remain in their memory, an objective Bettina sought on the grand scale of History. Laura, for her part, pursues the same goal on the smaller scale of her personal milieu: “for me that’s the only real life: to live in the thoughts of another. Otherwise I am the living dead” (176).

As in Kundera’s other novels, in Immortality the majority of people are at least to some extent inclined toward sentimentality. This also applies to the “immortals,” represented here by Goethe and Hemingway. In two scenes, these two writers meet in the other world and engage in conversation with each other. In the first meeting, Goethe shows up as a toothless, shabby old man. His appearance is meant to humiliate Bettina, whose love for him now seems ridiculous. Hemingway expresses his frustration with the public, which prefers digging into his life to reading his books. The “Judgement of History” is ridiculous, if it is based on trivialities which are found in everybody’s life. Goethe affirms that this is in fact the case: the “eternal judgement” of History, which dictates how one is remembered, is “a rod in the hand of a narrow-minded teacher” (91). At the second meeting, Goethe makes his appearance in the full blossom of youth. In the meantime, however, he has gained “adulthood,” which is to say, he has freed himself of his interest in his own immortality. He remarks to Hemingway that worrying about one’s immortality is immature. In his opinion this is a characteristic of humans, who are unable to face mortality (240). He himself, Goethe, has at last learnt to accept it: he now intends to retire “to enjoy the delights of total non-existence, which [his] great enemy Novalis used to say has a bluish colour” (241). Being able to dispense with the image one has left behind in the minds of others, and to “die” in this ultimate sense, is the final wisdom that a human being learns.

Already before Agnes dies in a traffic accident she has, like Tomas and Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, encountered the fact of being mortal. Actually, she considers death a noteworthy, even desirable alternative to a life without meaning. In Immortality, being with others does not mean an encounter between subjects in a world of shared meanings, but being the object of the gaze of others. By removing from her physical appearance any visual signs and gestures that others might interpret as expressions of her personality, Agnes escapes from being determined by the gazes of others. She seeks silence and invisibility, just as—she now realizes—her father did shortly before his death. Following the death of his wife, the father tore up all photographs from the past, revealing his antisentimental attitude. In the light of the reflections in Testaments Betrayed on a writer’s right to destroy his or her personal papers and belongings before death, the father’s act appears induced by “the shame of being turned into an object” which outlives the self and lies open to everyone’s eyes (Testaments 262). This is in accordance with the father’s desire to preserve his privacy and with his feeling of distance from others. Agnes makes a thought experiment. In a sinking ship, where everyone has to fight for a place in the lifeboats, her father would abhor the ensuing physical intimacy with others to the extent that he would prefer dying (Immortality 25–26).

Agnes herself feels utterly estranged from humanity: “She once again had the strong, peculiar feeling that was coming over her more and more often: the feeling that she had nothing in common with those two-legged creatures with a head on their shoulders and a mouth in their face. There was a time when she was interested in their politics, their science, their inventions, when she considered herself a small part of their great adventure, until one day the feeling was born in her that she did not belong among them” (43). Agnes has crossed the line beyond which the adventure of humankind—all that has been significant and important either in human history or in the life of an individual—is no longer of any interest to her. She no longer identifies with the ways of the world or with the human condition. This extreme sense of estrangement manifests itself as an estrangement from the physical shape of the human being. It is also mentioned that she gives money to beggars, not because she feels that they too belong to humankind, but because she feels that they are as detached from humankind as she herself is (44).

What causes this extreme alienation from human existence? Kundera does not pose the question in this form, because the question as such already implies that a human being is expected to consent to his or her humanity and to identify with it. From his first novel onward, Kundera scorns those for whom life as such, without any further qualification, is valuable. This mockery continues in Immortality, where Bernard’s father, the politician Bertrand Bertrand, exhibits his love for life by fighting against abortion and euthanasia (116). In Kundera’s view, the fact that Agnes does not identify herself with mankind or with the human condition is not a flaw or a sign of pathological alienation requiring a psychological explanation, but a possibility of human existence realized in the contemporary world. The lack of identification with mankind reappears in Identity in Chantal, when she feels that her little son’s death sets her free from all bonds with mankind; she is now free to dislike the world (55).

Agnes feels that she has ceased to love the world because it has become ugly (Immortality 22–23). Existence thus lacks an aesthetic justification, which, according to Nietzsche, is the only possible justification for it. People no longer even strive for beauty, as evinced for example by the intolerable noise and the acoustic ugliness reigning in the streets. For Agnes, a metaphor for the deliberate ugliness and senselessness of our present world is a motorcycle with its muffler removed (23). She feels that a world in which people no longer even strive for beauty has lost its sense and measure and that the world has reached a border beyond which everything threatens to turn into madness. From Kundera’s point of view, Agnes is right in refusing to be part of the world. Unconditional approval of life means accepting the lack of freedom in the Creator’s machinery, giving up our right to judge and “voluntarily fall[ing] back into the Creator’s web” (286). Human beings can maintain their dignity only by clinging to their right to accept or reject. Is there, then, in a world which has turned ugly, still something that can save humanity from the meaninglessness of existence?

Agnes thinks that “only one thing could wrench her out of it: concrete love towards a concrete person. If she truly loved someone, she could not be indifferent to the fate of other people because her beloved would be dependent on that fate, he would be part of it, and she could no longer feel that mankind’s torments, its wars and holidays, were none of her concern” (44). Agnes could embrace love if she encountered it and thereby come to approve of existence or of some essential part of it, or at least to have an interest in it. But if she never meets love, this chance is nonexistent: “How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people, when you share neither their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them? Agnes is driving low a quiet road in her car and she answers herself: love or the cloister” (286). The “cloister” refers to renunciation of the world. Agnes has already internally renounced humanity; the cloister means taking the final steps needed to leave the world overtly as well. Agnes says to herself that she has arrived at the same point as Stendhal’s hero Fabrice, at the end of The Charterhouse of Parma, who sees the alternatives left to him as either the realization of love or retiring from the world into a monastery. These alternatives may sound romantic, and indeed they are, but not in the sentimental sense that Kundera associates with Romanticism. The love that Fabrice or Agnes are talking about is not the sentimental being in love with love, which is what romantic love means in Kundera’s understanding.

It is evident that Kundera agrees with his heroine that most people never encounter love, since most of those who think that they love someone do not really do so. The test question which Agnes comes up with is whether a person would choose to live his or her next life with or without the beloved one. The question is a modification of Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of the same. Now we are not asked whether we would be willing to live our life over again innumerable times, but whether we would be willing to live with our love repeatedly, over and over again. Agnes realizes that she would answer the question in the negative, which implies that her love for Paul is rather the wish to love than love itself. Thus, she is denied the possibility of oneness with humanity through love. The only alternative left to her is retirement from the world, that is, the cloister. Indeed, she decides to leave her husband and daughter and to move to Switzerland, which for her means nature, mountains, and an absence of people.

Shortly before the fatal car crash, caused by a girl who has likewise “lost the world” (282) and who intended to commit suicide by sitting down on a highway lane in the dark, Agnes travels around in Switzerland, her native country, where she particularly feels the presence of her father. Here she finds a silence that reaches beyond herself: “She lay there [in the grass] for a long time and had the feeling that the stream was flowing into her, washing away all her pain and dirt: washing away her self. A special, unforgettable moment: she was forgetting her self, losing her self, she was without a self; and that was happiness” (287). The experience is evidence, Agnes believes, that “what is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self . . . Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain” (288). In her search for an authentic self and an authentic mode of existence, Agnes ends up paradoxically with an existence without a self, dissolving into the universe and leaving the ego behind. Disavowing the “painful self” as described here is a process of de-individuation, which in this case means merging not with the human community but, more radically, with nature, with the universe (289). The experience is evoked in different versions by the Romantics, for whom de-individuation may be reached in Dionysian ecstasy, in dissolving in the infinity of existence in a mystical experience, or in death (see Frank, Der kommende Gott 275).

Agnes rediscovers the vanished beauty of the world when she discards her self in the silence of death. She has a presentiment of the beauty of nonbeing, which she has discovered in Goethe’s poem “Über allen Gipfeln.” It is a poem she had recited as a child with her father, even trying to march to its rhythm. Only at her father’s deathbed does she understand that it is death that is described in the poem with such captivating beauty. Already in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera speaks of the beauty of nonbeing, which Novalis claims to be sweetly bluish in color (236); in other connections, too, super-terrestrial beauty is described by Kundera as bluish in color, as, for instance, the happiness Ludvik feels in his love for Lucie (The Joke [1969] 75), or, according to Bertlef, the celestial light that a saint radiates in meditating (Farewell Waltz 113). However, since for Kundera, unlike the Romantics, human life is without transcendence, “blue” and “beauty” are not attributes of death itself, but merely attributes of the idea of death in a living person’s mind. The presentiment of the beauty of death arises only in contrast with the experience of life, which appears as gray, meaningless, and ugly. Imagining death as a wonderful, blue peace represents most profoundly, but at the same time with playful irony, the worthlessness of life.

The possibilities of a meaningful life which Kundera examined earlier, for instance, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, namely hedonism, aestheticism, and love, are taken up again in Immortality, but now each one yields a negative result. Hedonism does not sustain, the pursuit of beauty is no longer possible in a world that has grown ugly, and unless one happens to encounter authentic love, love cannot give one’s life meaning either. This loss of all possibilities of meaningful existence for an individual is paralleled by the social or collective loss of meaningfulness, through the disappearance of History.

Hedonism is re-examined in Immortality in the case of the man called Rubens. The theme of eroticism is combined in his story with the theme of the temporality of human existence. For the first time, eroticism is not described as a relatively immutable state of affairs, as in the case of the man in his forties in Life is Elsewhere, Bertlef in Farewell Waltz, Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or any of the other womanizers in Kundera’s novels and short stories. Now eroticism is methodically scrutinized as a life-long project, one which may include quite dramatic changes. Rubens wanted to be a painter, but he failed the entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts. Whether he was insufficiently talented or failed because the world we live in is no longer favorable to the fine arts is a question that the author-narrator raises but leaves unanswered. Rubens himself concludes from his failure that “fate was trying to show him where his life’s centre of gravity really lay: not in public life but in private, not in the pursuit of professional success but in success with women” (313); in other words, he chooses “life” instead of painting. As a consequence of this choice, he is connected by a single thread with the main storyline, since one of his lovers is Agnes (the structure resembles the manner in which the man in his forties is joined with the main story in Life Is Elsewhere). Rubens, however, seems not to have been especially important to her, since he is not even mentioned in the parts concerning Agnes. In the few scenes in Rubens’s story where Agnes makes an appearance, the idea crops up again that the core of eroticism is the erotic excitement that is connected to the sense of shame. Agnes is old-fashioned in the sense that in an erotic situation she is ashamed of her bodily existence. Eventually, what remains alive in Rubens’s memory as beautiful images are precisely a few moments spent with her.

Having gathered ample experience in multitudinous erotic relationships, in his marriage Rubens wants to live through the sentimental idea of love. Yet the attempt fails, and after his divorce Rubens decides that he has to lead his erotic life “beyond the border of love” (33). This decision turns him into a “pure” hedonist: he is now searching for meaningfulness in his erotic relationships, which are “beyond love.” Unlike Tomas, however, he is not interested in the individual differences between women in the act of love, but in different forms of eroticism at a much more general level. This appears in his division of his erotic experiences into five different phases according to the different modes of lovemaking. The period of “athletic muteness” in making physical love is followed by a “period of metaphors,” in which the sexual act and the sexual organs are spoken of in “a gentle diminutive or a poetic paraphrase” (307) and by a “period of obscene truth,” in which direct language is used, as well as a “period of Chinese Whispers,” in which phrases heard from a partner in lovemaking are passed on in the next relationship. This phase leads to the fifth and final period, the “mystical period” of his erotic life, in which Rubens loses the illusion of lovemaking as a moment of absolute intimacy between two individuals and becomes aware of the fact that every one of us actually takes part in the great common stream of erotic images: “An individual does not receive a share of indecent fantasy from a lover by means of Chinese Whispers, but by means of this impersonal (or super-personal or sub-personal) stream. To say that this river that runs through us is impersonal means that it does not belong to us but to him who created us and made it flow within us; in other words, that it belongs to God or even that it is God or one of his incarnations” (310–11). The erotic experience is now characterized as mystical, since it is a kind of merging with God, with something given in the world order independent of the individual (311). But when not only the body but also erotic imagery—which supplies the erotic experience with meaning—is not the creation of an individual, this implies that eroticism as a whole is unable to offer an escape from the Creator’s machinery. Eroticism annihilates the individual, instead of providing life with authentic, individual meanings.

One day Rubens has to face the fact that he no longer knows why he is performing the same movements of lovemaking again and again. What Jan in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting feared has now taken place: the movements have lost their meaning. Repetition has become pure reiteration without the variations that would make it meaningful. Kundera expresses this through the metaphor of Rubens having landed in his erotic life in a terrain “outside the dial’s time,” where nothing remarkable ever happens any more (358). This leads Rubens to look back and ask what was meaningful in all his past erotic experiences and he has to realize that there are only a few beautiful moments he can vividly recall. Memory has sorted the incidents, picking out only some of them as meaningful, and has done so following criteria of which he was unaware at the moment of the experience: “seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that’s what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent” (350). But even these images, two of which involve Agnes, become mutilated when Rubens hears about Agnes’s death. The image of her lying in a coffin or of her corpse being burnt is mingled with the erotic images and conceals them. Rubens, who had thought that in choosing eroticism he had chosen “life,” ends up with the image of death and with the vanishing of the memory of the few meaningful moments which had remained from that life.

While part 6 focuses on the “anthropological” difficulties of hedonism as a way of life, other parts of the novel deal with the difficulties of hedonism arising from conditions in the contemporary world. As mentioned above, in Slowness, a reason for the difficulty of hedonism is found in the haste that is characteristic of the contemporary lifestyle; on the nudist beach in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the disappearance of the feeling of shame was pointed out as the reason for the vanishing of eroticism and this reason is mentioned in Immortality as well (331–32). In addition, imagology appears as an enemy of hedonism. Avenarius says to the author’s alter ego that in our contemporary world appearance takes priority over actual erotic pleasure. Let us assume that men were asked whether they would prefer spending a secret night of lovemaking with Rita Hayworth or alternatively walking arm-in-arm with her publicly. Although most men would say that they prefer the first alternative, the opposite is in fact true: “Because all of them are eager for admiration and not for pleasure. For appearance and not for reality. Reality no longer means anything to anyone” (385). Here, “reality” refers to private experience, which remains hidden from others; however, under the rule of imagology, this has become less important—less “real”—than appearance in the eyes of others.

The aesthetic attitude toward life similarly proves to be a difficult option in our contemporary world. Singling out beautiful things and moments still takes place in Immortality. Instances of the beautiful include, for example, the calm in Agnes’s soul after her father’s death (29) and the gesture of the wave of the hand by the elderly woman (40). The author-narrator writes that death and immortality make a beautiful pair (the word “beautiful” [beau], however, appears only in the French original L’Immortalité [85]), names of trees—“chestnut,” “poplar,” “maple”—are beautiful (80), Bertrand Bertrand’s name is beautiful as a lullaby (99), erotic orgies, the female body, and Beethoven’s music are beautiful, and the cat is given attributes of beauty and “constancy of charm” (111). Collecting beautiful moments, however, is made difficult by the fact that beauty and the aspiration to it are losing ground in the contemporary world. Visual and acoustic ugliness have accumulated to a degree never seen or heard before, and changing attitudes have robbed beauty of its previous position. At the beginning of the novel, Agnes walks in the street and becomes aware of how the sound landscape is ravaged by the noise of cars, motorcycles, and drills workers use repairing the street. Suddenly from somewhere above, “like from the sky,” a Bach piano fugue is heard: “Someone on a top floor had evidently opened a window and turned up the volume all the way, so that Bach’s severe beauty sounded a warning to a world that had gone awry. However, Bach’s fugue was no match for the pneumatic drills and cars” (24–25).

Visual ugliness has become as acceptable, and as ubiquitously present, as acoustic ugliness. Agnes looks at the passers-by and sees “in front of her a woman dressed in baggy trousers barely reaching the knees, as was the fashion that year. The outfit seemed to make her behind even heavier and closer the ground. Her bare, pale calves resembled a pair of rustic pitchers decorated by varicose veins entwined like a ball of tiny blue snakes. Agnes said to herself: that woman could have found a dozen outfits that would have covered her bluish veins and made her behind less monstrous. Why hadn’t she done so? Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are not longer even trying not to look ugly!” (22). In Kundera’s aestheticist thinking it is justified to expect people—despite the opposition between body and soul he suggests—to make an effort at a pleasant appearance. The same holds for the concealment of bodily functions. Looking through the window of a fast-food place, Agnes shudders:

Through the window she saw people sitting at tables, hunched over greasy paper plates. Her eye came to rest on a girl with a very pale complexion and bright red lips. She had just finished her lunch, pushed aside her empty cup of Coca-Cola, leaned her head back, and stuck her index finger deep into her mouth; she kept twisting it inside for a long time, staring at the ceiling. The man at the next table slouched in his chair, his glance fixed on the street and his mouth wide open. It was a yawn without beginning or end, a yawn as endless as a Wagner melody: at times his mouth began to close but never entirely; it just kept opening wide again and again, while his eyes, fixed on the street, kept opening and closing counter to the rhythm of his mouth. Actually, several other people were also yawning, showing teeth, fillings, crowns, dentures, and not one of them covered his mouth with his hand. (21)

Here we see once again Kundera’s detestation of bodily functions. Whenever the body is not “fleetingly redeemed” in the moment of erotic excitement (109), modesty requires to hide bodily functions. Peculiar to Kundera is his disgust at the digestive system and especially at its initial opening, the mouth (about this, see also ch. 8), but the eye too—traditionally considered the window of the soul—is depicted as mechanically staring. In Identity it is described as a mechanical apparatus that opens and shuts and is supplied with a cleansing system (10–11, 90, 98).

Agnes thinks that the past world was more beautiful, quieter, and more modest than the present one. This view is supported by Avenarius’s claim that in the cities beautiful buildings from the past are no longer properly visible because of the congestion of people and cars on the streets. One cannot stop on the crowded sidewalk to look closely at a church. The only thing one can do is to glance at it while passing by, but even in these glances cars are constantly present: “The church of Saint-Germaindes-Prés has disappeared and all the churches in towns have disappeared in the same way, like the moon when it enters an eclipse. The cars that fill the streets have narrowed the pavements, which are crowded with pedestrians. If they want to look at each other, they see cars in the background, if they want to look at the buildings across the street they see cars in the foreground; there isn’t a single angle of view from which cars will not be visible, from the back, in front, on both sides. Their omnipresent noise corrodes every moment of contemplation like an acid. Cars have made the former beauty of cities invisible” (271).

Rubens endorses the idea of the growing ugliness of the present world as well, pondering why in classic art the human face was never depicted laughing. Apollo or Aphrodite never laughed, but in the contemporary media politicians and public figures are constantly smiling or laughing, showing their teeth. This does not promote beauty, since “undoubtedly, a face is beautiful because it reveals the presence of thought, whereas at the moment of laughter man does not think” (361). Although laughter is preceded by a thought that identifies something as comical, it comes after it as a bodily reaction, no longer involving any thought at all. Rubens concludes that “the convulsion of laughter (a state beyond reason and will) has been raised by contemporary people into an ideal image behind which they have decided to conceal themselves” (362). It is noteworthy how Kundera, who praises jeering laughter, at this point goes so far in his dualistic thinking as to accept even comicality only as a thought, not as its bodily counterpart, laughter. Rubens sees Agnes as belonging to the past world, in which beauty did not laugh (361) and Agnes herself thinks that when the world has rejected beauty, the only option left will be to buy a single tiny forget-me-not as a memento of that lost beauty and to stare at its light blue corolla in walking in the streets (23). With the forget-me-not, a variation on the Romantics’ blue flower of longing (see Boden, Irritation 125), Kundera is again alluding to Novalis and the otherworldliness of beauty in the present world.

In a world hostile to hedonism and beauty, the individual who is not saved by love is threatened by the loss of meaningfulness. The ensuing weightlessness resembles death in that nothing meaningful ever happens. The same occurs under the reign of imagology on the level of society: humankind has left History (of world, nations) behind and nothing new ever happens. The only changes that take place are vacillations to and fro; thus, the modern adventure of humanity has come to an end. We have reached a state beyond History, described in The Art of the Novel as follows: “The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being” (41).

Kundera’s thoughts about the end of History remain sketchy. He is of course not the only one to declare the end of History; the idea is common in postmodern thinking (see, e.g., Calinescu; Foucault, “Archeology”; Harvey; Jameson; Saariluoma [Steinby], Der postindividualistische). It is a matter of rejecting the concept of history that arose at the end of the eighteenth century, the optimistic faith in historical progress and in a future that would bring a better world. Kundera’s faith in History, however, collapsed through a process dissimilar to that faced by the theoreticians of postmodernism, since he himself participated in a political movement that endeavored to create a better world but failed. It is of course possible to speculate that poststructuralist and postmodern thought derives from a similar political frustration in the aftermath of the revolutionary movements of 1968 in West Europe as that Kundera witnessed in Czechoslovakia after the 1948 revolution; as we have seen, Kundera himself draws a parallel between these two “revolutions.” It goes without saying, moreover, that Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic interpretation of the “end of history”—History has become futile because the present liberalistic-democratic society satisfies all essential human needs (see, however, Fukuyama’s revision of his argumentation in The End of History in his 2012 article “The Future of History”)—is far from Kundera’s, whose view of contemporary Western society is gloomy. Rather than a paradise, the contemporary world appears to him as a trap which allows individuals little space to shape their existence according to their own will. Ultimately, in the age of imagology, the last shadow of hope of change has vanished and the trap in which the individual is caught closes so tightly that no freedom, and therefore no meaningfulness, is left to him or her at all.

In Testaments Betrayed Kundera writes that “the words ‘the end of history’ have never stirred me to anguish or displeasure” (16). This is to be read as a comment on the horrors following from the efforts to steer the process of History. Yet Kundera adds that “applied to art, that same phrase, ‘the end of history,’ strikes me with terror” (17); however, this is exactly what he thinks has happened in the last few decades. As noted above, already in The Art of the Novel Kundera conceives of the history of the world as having become hostile to the arts. At the end of the essay on Broch, he observes that “in Broch, there is the melancholy awareness of a history drawing to a close in circumstances that are profoundly hostile to the evolution of art and of the novel in particular” (67). Kundera does not comment on this in any way, but in standing at the end of the essay the observation is given special weight and one cannot avoid thinking that the view attributed to Broch concurs with Kundera’s own. In another essay in The Art of the Novel he claims that the history of the novel ended in “Communist Russia,” where novels no longer made any new discoveries (14–15), and in the concluding essay of The Art of the Novel, “Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe,” he seems to be talking about the novel and its history in the past tense only. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the novel was predicted to disappear in an era of general graphomania, where meaningless chatter has superseded the exploration of existence. Imagology—with its focus on influencing public opinion—is likewise in opposition to the novel, which resists all forms of simplification. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the ending of the history of music is depicted as a return to the starting point of banal melody and the simplest rhythm. In part 6 of Immortality, Kundera reflects with Rubens upon a situation in which painting has reached a point beyond its history. Just as Rubens’s erotic experiences first reveal to him interesting and important insights into the phenomenon of eroticism, similarly the history of painting consists of a splendid series of new discoveries. However, where the painters of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century “all knew that they were blazing a trail into the unknown” (320), this, according to Kundera, is not the case with contemporary painting, where no new discoveries are made, but “already discovered discoveries” are rediscovered time and again (321). Kundera concludes by saying that “midnight had struck on the dial of European art” (321) in which nothing new and significant ever happens any longer—just as in Rubens’s erotic life. The end of the history of painting means a shift from repetition in significant variations to repetition without any significant difference. There are still masses of painters, but nothing new and significant is produced any longer (358).

Kundera’s idea of the continued existence of the novel or painting beyond their histories resembles Hegel’s idea of the death of the arts. According to Hegel, art in the contemporary world—that is to say, the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century—is no longer important, since it has lost its former position as the most complete expression of the Absolute, or the totality of existence, which has now been taken over by religion and philosophy. Things being thus, one can now speak of the arts in the proper sense of the word in the past tense only. It is true that new works of art are continuously being produced in abundance, yet they no longer capture the totality but only some separate element (see, e.g.; Hegel I: 10,11, 103). Unlike Hegel and Broch, Kundera has never considered the novel as something striving for totality, but he always emphasizes that the novel is in search of particular truths and even these are conceived of as only provisionally, hypothetically valid; however, he agrees with Hegel and Broch that the novel uncovers things of which we were not aware of. What makes Kundera’s view the death of art more pessimistic than Hegel is that while for Hegel philosophy in modern times assumes a function previously belonging to the arts, Kundera thinks that abstract thinking cannot supplant art, in particular the novel, as a form of exploration of human existence. In accordance with the line of aesthetic thinking from the early Romantics to Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, and Broch, Kundera thinks that the arts can reveal something about humankind’s being in the world that no other form of knowledge, such as the philosophical or the scientific, can uncover. If art has abandoned its task of saving human existence from the “oblivion of being,” as according to Kundera has happened in our contemporary world, there is thus no other institution or human activity to take its place.

Does Kundera, then, not see in our contemporary world any gleam of hope? The last part of Immortality deals with hope and hopelessness in a light tone. The topic announced in the title of the final part, “The Celebration,” may conceal from the reader the novel’s ultimate tone of resignation or at least soften it. In this part, as already noted, Kundera’s alter ego is sitting by the swimming pool with his friend professor Avenarius celebrating the completion of his novel Immortality. Here he also meets Paul and Laura, and the reader has a chance to get a glimpse into their married life. The reader has already encountered Avenarius’s hobby of pricking holes in the tires of cars, which is his way of “fighting Diabolum” (255), that is, anything that is ultimately worthless or unacceptable in human life—even if he knows that this fight is useless. “Kundera” agrees with him: as one can no longer take the world seriously, the only reasonable way to act is to start jesting about the world in its entirety. We might say that Avenarius represents the existential possibility of distancing ourselves from all possibilities available to humanity by refusing to take the world, including ourselves, seriously, seeing it from the point of view of ridicule and play. Instead of talking about Avenarius’s “existential situation,” Kundera argues that the individual’s deepest foundation, as expressed by the German word Grund (“ground,” “base”) which determines his or her deeds and actions, can be expressed only metaphorically. Avenarius’s metaphor is a melancholy child, who for lack of a younger brother plays with the whole of the world (387). Playing with and ridiculing the world in its entirety, however, is difficult because “humour can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable” (372). This is why jesting about the world in its entirety is deeply melancholic: it does not connect the jester with the world but rather separates him from it. Avenarius answers to his friend’s reflections by calling him his younger brother. This is appropriate, since in his jokes Kundera—both the author “Kundera” in Immortality and the real author behind the novels I have been discussing—has the same tone of ultimate desperation. Kundera already commented on this attitude with regard to Eduard in “Eduard and God,” saying that not being able to take the world seriously is an abyss (see Biron 11).

Paul tells his friends about his marriage to Laura. She constantly quarrels with her stepdaughter, and Paul is caught in between the two women, both of whom he loves. Kundera’s alter ego in the novel observes that to alleviate his distress, Paul has started drinking. Laura makes an appearance at the swimming pool and when she, in leaving, uses the attractive gesture described at the beginning of the novel, Paul’s countenance brightens up. He philosophizes about women as the last hope of man: “Either woman will become man’s future or mankind will perish, because only woman is capable of nourishing within her an unsubstantiated hope and inviting us to a doubtful future, which we would have long ceased to believe in were it not for women” (383). He ends with a quotation, both grandiloquent and playful, from Goethe: “Das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan! The eternal feminine draws us on!” (384). The quotation is from the concluding scene in Faust, which Nietzsche travesties in a well-known mock version. It may be that Kundera does not count on his readers’ knowledge of this poem, but I do not doubt that for himself as an admirer of Nietzsche, not only the original work by Goethe but also Nietzsche’s travesty of it are implicit in the end of the novel. In the travestied poem the Chorus mysticus greets Faust’s entrance into heaven after his rescue from the clutches of the devil: “All things corruptible / Are but a parable; / Earth’s insufficiency / Here finds fulfilment; / Here the ineffable / Wins life through love; / Eternal womanhood / Leads us above” (Goethe, Faust II 288). Nietzsche’s poem is the first one in the appendix to The Gay Science called “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei,” and it is entitled “To Goethe”: “The ever-enduring / is merely your parable! / God the all-blurring / your fiction unbearable . . . // World-wheel, the turning one / spawns goals each day: / Fate—sighs the yearning one, / the fool calls it—play. // World-play, the ruling one, / blends truth and tricks:— / The eternally fooling one / blends us—in the mix!” (249). The quotation from Goethe is also carnivalized by Kundera not only because seeking salvation in woman must appear to him—as to the reader familiar with his criticism of the Romantic search for the eternal feminine in every woman—as an extreme form of sentimental attitude, but also because the reader notices that Laura has actually addressed her attractive feminine greeting not to her husband but to Avenarius, who is her secret lover. Thus both hope, represented by Paul, and desperation and melancholy, represented by Avenarius, are ridiculed. This lightens the impression the ending of the novel makes, but it does not really take away anything of the novel’s ultimate pessimism.