The End of Modernity, the End of the Novel?
In 1989, communist rule ceased to exist in Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Berlin Wall was torn down and the following year the two German states were reunited. In 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart and what remained reassumed its old name of Russia. At the beginning of 1993 Czechoslovakia split into two independent states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Cold War ended along with the end of Soviet rule in Central and East Europe, itself a consequence of World War II. Kundera’s career as a novelist had started just when the Soviet empire came over Prague, foreshadowing, as he thought, the death of Europe. How did he react to this unexpected turn of events? Did the Czech Velvet Revolution of 1989 and other developments in Central and East European countries indicate for him the beginning of a new European adventure? I think not. His views, as expressed in his works after 1989, remain essentially the same. The idea of the trap of History, a vein that runs through all of his novelistic work ever since The Joke, was supplemented in Immortality by the anthropological trap, in which humankind finds itself caught from the very beginning and which thwarts an autonomous and authentic mode of existence. Tantamount to a declaration that the adventures of modern humanity have ended, this is Kundera’s final message, his testament. The events which reshaped the political map of Europe have not moved him to reconsider his views of History and the possibilities available to the individual. I argue that already prior to these developments Kundera came to hold the conviction that humankind’s existence has to be examined outside of History and thus his thinking was not affected by these most recent historical upheavals.
Since Immortality, Kundera has written three short novels: Slowness (1994), Identity (1998), and Ignorance (2000). In these novels themes familiar from his previous works are resumed and developed in new variations. Among the most important insights presented in these novels, I would say, are new perspectives upon the temporality of human existence. As a whole, Kundera’s outlook has become even gloomier, more resigned, and more cynical than in his previous works, betraying a tedium of life and an aversion toward his fellow humans. Decay and mortality, as essential aspects of human existence along with death, are all pervasive, particularly in Identity and Ignorance. In this chapter, I discuss these novels and I then return, as a form of conclusion, to Kundera’s understanding of the existence of modern humanity and of the novel. Finally, I offer a tentative answer to the question of how Kundera might be viewed as a European novelist and thinker, as indeed he himself wishes to be viewed and understood.
The temporality of human existence and death
Compared to Kundera’s previous novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance are simple in their structure and their succinctness is paralleled by a new brevity of sentence structure (see Scarpetta xi; Woods, Translating 121). The title word in each novel is an abstract noun, which again might be expected to identify the main theme of the novel or at least one of them. However, “slowness,” “identity,” and “ignorance”—unlike, for example, “lightness” or “forgetting”—are not names for the existential problem of a character. Slowness, according to Kundera, is a prerequisite of hedonism, one possible way of being in the world, but whether it exists or not is more a matter of an era than something characterizing an individual’s life. In Kundera’s view, identity is not a possibility of human existence either, but rather the main issue with which the novel has been preoccupied throughout its history. In Identity, the fragility of the individual’s identity is explored once again, with a new emphasis on the temporal dimension of life. In Ignorance, the title refers to two different things, both of which are considered necessary components of human life. On the one hand, “ignorance” refers to people’s reluctance to know about one another, for instance, what an emigrant has experienced during the decades he has lived outside his home country (e.g., 109–10). In general, people do not bother listening to their partner in a conversation, but prefer talking themselves. On the other hand, “ignorance” refers to the fact that the individual is forced to make the most important decisions of his or her life in youth, when still ignorant as to their possible repercussions, in fact before even knowing anything about life in general (163–64). Thus, ignorance pertains to two themes with which we are familiar from Kundera’s previous novels, namely, graphomania or the demanding of the “ear” of others, discussed especially in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and inexperience as an unavoidable dimension of human existence, one of the themes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In Ignorance, the theme of ignorance is developed especially in connection with émigré(e)s who are weighing the possibility of return, and more generally in the context of the temporal dimension of an individual’s life.
The emphasis on the temporal dimension of life in Kundera’s late novels does not mean that he now returns to the biographical mode of narration; his manner of writing is as elliptical and thematic as in his previous works. What it does mean is that things are now different according to their position in the total time span of human life. It also means that his characters themselves become aware of the temporal dimension of their experiences, as was already the case in the Rubens part in Immortality. Moreover, the individuals in his novels come increasingly to represent the common human destiny. Aging, forgetting and the selectivity of memory, being trapped in a body, and mortality are no longer examined as the existential problems of particular individuals, but appear more directly as inescapable aspects of human existence.
As I discuss in chapter 5, in Slowness, three stories are intermingled. The first deals with a visit by the author and his wife to a French château converted into a hotel, the second comprises certain incidents in the entomologists’ conference in the author’s story, which he is just conceiving and which he places at the same hotel, and the third is the eighteenth-century novella by Vivant Denon about a chevalier’s night of love, which the author also imagines as having taken place at the same château. The novella, entitled No Tomorrow, tells of a young chevalier who, guided by the more experienced lady of the house, undergoes a one-night amorous adventure of extraordinary beauty. Looking back at the events of the night the following morning, the young chevalier is convinced that the most important thing is to retain the beauty of the encounter in his recollection, paying no heed to how he appears in the eyes of those few who know about the rendezvous and its embarrassing aspects—that the chevalier was used to cover up the actual lover of the lady. In contrast, the modern counterpart of the chevalier, the young entomologist Vincent, is unable to fully devote himself to an amorous adventure, because for him what is more important is how he appears in the eyes of others. In the end, Vincent’s wish for an erotic adventure—or possibly even a relationship—does not come true: he only makes it as far as the pretended movements of sexual intercourse with the girl at the swimming pool under the eyes of a Czech entomologist, who is astonished by the habits of Westerners. At dawn Vincent flees on his motorcycle trying to forget what has happened. The motorcycle here represents noise and haste, which remove everything from sight but the empty present moment.
In Slowness, the seeking of pleasure as a way of life, that is, hedonism, appears as a possibility no longer available to contemporary individuals. This is so because today we prefer appearance to reality: as already stated by professor Avenarius in Immortality, everyone would prefer boasting publicly about a relationship with a beautiful woman to actually possessing her in secrecy. In Slowness, another cause of the impossibility of hedonism is given in the hurried tempo of the contemporary world. This haste means that we are interested only in “orgasms,” moments of ecstasy without duration; we have lost our sense of the beautiful form of an experience, such as a beautiful night of love as a whole. Conceiving the beautiful form of an experience takes time, but only an experience which has a form can be recollected: “Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory” (34). Thus, giving beautiful form to an amorous night is precious, because it preserves for us a delightful recollection.
The main tone in Slowness is regret for the vanishing of the possibility of hedonism, as expressed in the author’s anticlimactic series of questions: “Can the ideal of hedonism be realized? Does that hope exist? Or at least some feeble gleam of that hope?” (121). Apart from hedonism, laughter in its most extreme form, where it turns to desperation—that is, ridicule of the world in its entirety—is also resumed as a theme in Slowness. The author’s wife warns him not to write a novel “with not a single serious word in it,” because “seriousness kept you safe. The lack of seriousness will leave you naked to the wolves” (78). We know from Avenarius in Immortality that when one cannot take anything in the world seriously, this means the most profound melancholy or an “abyss” (see Biron 11). Now a new aspect is added to the issue by the warning concerning readers’ reactions: they would attack “like wolves” an author representing the world as a whole as something that cannot be taken seriously. The change in Kundera’s relationship with his readers is striking. Instead of inviting readers to join him in his adventures in discovering new truths, his “final truth” not only makes any further search futile for himself, but is even expected to render his readers hostile to him.
In Identity another matter of fundamental significance for Kundera’s modern humankind, namely our individual identity, is questioned once again. Jean-Marc feels that his beloved is in danger of losing her identity in his eyes; this would mean the end of their love, which alone makes his existence meaningful. Chantal is compelled to take on a false identity in her work at an advertising agency, because she cannot identify with her employer’s goals and worldview. At work she is another person, someone different from the one whom he loves, and Jean-Marc notices that “between the moment he meets her again [in her office] and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go” (34). Moreover, Jean-Marc is shocked when he realizes that at a distance he has confused an old woman with his beloved. He asks what would happen if one day he were incapable of distinguishing Chantal from others: then the only bond connecting him with humankind would be severed, and things would completely lose their meaning for him (81). Jean-Marc’s fear of not recognizing his beloved indicates that in Identity love is no longer conceived of as an exploration of the infinity of the thoughts and experiences of the beloved, which would prevent the beloved from disappearing among others. When identity is sought on the basis of a momentary perception, it becomes frail.
Chantal is passionately attached to the present, where her love resides, and does not want to think about the past—including a previous marriage—or the future. She is upset by her dreams, which annihilate the difference between her past and the valuable, cherished present (6). Here “present” does not of course refer to a passing moment, but to a relatively stable state of affairs from which the past is excluded. As in the case of Tomas and Tereza, love is here set within the temporal frame of an individual’s life, and is valued as the most important part of it. Previous experiences, however, form part of the setting for the present state of affairs. Chantal feels that the death of her son has on the one hand made her free not to care about the world, which she dislikes (55); on the other hand, her love for Jean-Marc can be absolute only in the absence of her son (38–39). Thus, the preconditions for her present love lie in the past. At the end of the novel, Chantal experiences a kind of loss of her past, and with it her personal identity. She remembers her youthful dream of sharing herself with men like the fragrance of a rose. She muses about love being like a prison or a cloister, which isolates the individual from others by prohibiting him or her from yielding sexually to whomever she or he wants to (130). She travels to London accompanied by her coworkers, with Jan-Marc following her in the same train. Soon she finds herself in a house where she is stripped of her clothes and deprived of her name and her past. As a substitute, “life” is offered, understood (as in Rubens’s case in Immortality) as the mere present moment, a moment of sexual excitement. She reacts with a cry of horror that awakens her from a nightmare in her own bed. The author ends the novel with a question: from what point onward were the events of the narrative merely part of a dream, and whose dream was it? The dream, which Chantal has already accused of annihilating the difference between past and present, now no longer means a free display of her identity, but on the contrary may turn into a nightmare of losing her identity.
Consequently, neither love nor dream functions any longer as a guarantee of identity. The fundamental necessity of personal identity is indicated by the fact that Chantal reacts to the idea of a mere present, cut off from her identity and from all her past experience, with a scream of horror. But identity is not threatened only by the loss of the past; it is threatened by the future as well. Already in Kundera’s earlier works, especially in Immortality, the fact of corporeality constitutes a threat to human identity. In Identity, the aging of the body is for the first time presented as both an experience and a devastating fact; in the earlier novels, elderly women (as well as fat ones) appeared as grotesque, while for men aging (or corpulence, as in professor Avenarius) was no issue at all. Even before Chantal’s identity is threatened by aging—the novel starts with the menopausal symptoms from which she suffers—Jean-Marc had dropped his medical studies because “he was incapable of looking squarely at death; shortly thereafter he acknowledged that the truth was even worse: he was incapable of looking squarely at a body: its inescapable, un-responding imperfection; the decomposition clock that governs its functioning; its blood, its guts, its pain” (62–63). In a body, there is very little space for the soul (98); after all, does a human being have any alternative other than living the basic life which is tied to the body? We are condemned to the functions of digestion and procreation, doomed to eat, defecate and copulate, as long as our machinery allows it. Where, then, is the freedom of an individual? Chantal’s boss at the advertising agency declares that it is the advertiser’s task to beautify the inescapable life functions deriving from our corporeality: toilet paper, diapers, detergents, food have to appear inviting (132–33). Our freedom comprises only the choice between feeling happy or feeling desolate in submitting to what is unavoidable (134). The boss’s words mean that in the contemporary world real beauty has been replaced by a fake beauty, produced by profit-seeking marketing experts. The Nietzschean idea of an aesthetic justification of life is here resumed, in grotesque, commercialized, and—through Kundera’s irony—carnivalized form.
A life consisting of mere bodily functions—eating, drinking, copulating, defecating—generates boredom as its general feeling. If life is nothing but the repetition of meaningless functions of an organism, it is natural to think that humans are bored. Jean-Marc’s ponderings bring a historical dimension to the matter. He thinks that life in the modern world has become a “great common struggle against boredom” (16), because “the old occupations, at least most of them, where unthinkable without a passionate involvement: the peasants in love with their land; my grandfather, the magician of beautiful tables” (75), whereas nowadays people work for the money alone (Chantal being an example of this). Thus the common lot of human beings is now that life appears to them, as to Ludvik in the penal battalion, as a mere passing of time. For Jean-Marc, this boredom of life is expressed in the unarticulated, endlessly prolonged “ahhh” sound coming from the mouth of a dying person (74–75, 152).
Life without meaningfulness comes close to death, or even makes death appear more attractive than life. Jean-Marc realizes that he has always been fascinated by poems dealing with death; he recites Baudelaire’s verses, in which the Earth is judged to be tedious and death, as the ship’s captain, is asked to set off (28). For Chantal, in our modern world, “life” appears as the suspicious “king of words,” surrounded by other great words such as “adventure,” “future,” and “hope” (28–29). For Chantal herself “future” is not a great word because she wants to live in the present and not think about the future in which she discerns only aging and death. She also acknowledges that she no longer cares about adventures: an adventure is a means of “embracing the world” and she “no longer wanted to embrace the world” (39).
In a scene at the beginning of the novel, where Jean-Marc visits a fatally ill former friend of his, the author remarks that the thought of death has made all other subjects of conversation meaningless (9). This can be extended to the whole of the novel. Where for Tomas and Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, man’s mortality became visible as an inescapable aspect of human existence only through aging, for Jean-Marc the thought of death has been part of his love to Chantal from the very beginning (18)—probably simply because she is four years his senior. For Chantal, her blushing—originally a sign of erotic embarrassment, but now one of the menopausal symptoms—brings to mind a burning corpse (52). Before her own death comes to end everything, the death of her son has already put an end to her interest in the world. The last pages of the novel, where Chantal awakens from her nightmare in the arms of her beloved, only partly hide the fact that the possibilities of a meaningful life have one after the other been questioned and that the horizon of death has grown greater than that of life.
While love, the only thing that can still give life beauty and meaning, is presented as frail and constantly threatened by biological necessities and by the social constraints of life, friendship—which is highly valued both by Kundera himself and by many of his male characters—is in his three late novels set up as an illusion only. In Slowness, the possibilities of friendship in the contemporary world appear meager. Vincent and his friend Pontevin, like Jakub and Dr. Skreta in Farewell Waltz, view friendship as the only sacred value. Despite this, Pontevin does not hesitate to ridicule his friend in order to impress a beautiful woman (22–23). This is consistent with a world ruled by imagology. In Identity, this pessimism is carried to its cynical end. Jean-Marc dreams of a friendship which is placed above everything else, greater than truth, ideology, religion or nation—a friendship which Kundera elsewhere proclaims to be “perhaps the only virtue, perhaps the only one left” (“Umbrella” 45)—but he is afraid that this may have disappeared from the contemporary world. Chantal comments on this that the idea of such a friendship has never been anything but men’s romanticism; women have never acknowledged it (44). Jean-Marc proposes a more “realistic” idea of friendship in the contemporary world: a friend functions as a witness of our past, whom we need to preserve our identity (11, 43). Chantal’s suggestion is even more modest: a friend is not someone who dares to defend you when everyone else is accusing you; a friend is one who does not join the accusers but remains silent (46–47). In Ignorance, friendship is no longer an issue. No interest in one’s life is expected even from those called friends: “people aren’t interested in one another, it’s normal” (168).
While Slowness and Identity are set in France, in Ignorance the main characters are Czechs who after the upheavals of 1989 are considering returning to their native country. At the beginning of the novel, the author-narrator expresses his surprise that the “Russian night,” which was supposed to last forever, actually lasted only about twenty years. He contents himself with saying that back then—since about 1969—the occupation was thought of by everyone as the final destiny of the Czech nation and he does not go into whether this conception of the history and fate of the nation underwent any considerable changes during the following two decades (in an interview from the mid-1980s, Havel declares that the situation is now clearly different from that of the early 1970s: people are socially and culturally more active, creativity is more visible, freedom is greater [see Havel, Disturbing 181–86]). Although the assumption about the death of Europe in Czechoslovakia in 1968 turned out to be false, Kundera did not start reinterpreting historical events, because he had already lost interest in history. The assertion by the cynical Leroy in Identity is not refuted by Kundera: “Man is not capable of changing the world and will never change it. That is the fundamental conclusion of my experience as a revolutionary. A conclusion that is, incidentally, tacitly accepted by everybody” (127). Following the tendency already present in Immortality, in the three short novels, particularly in Ignorance, Kundera continues to explore the biological and social constraints which make human existence desolate. We can even say that rather than the death of Europe, which is a historical event, Kundera is now interested in the death of individuals and in death as the inescapable truth about human life in general.
The polar counter theme expressed in the title, namely, knowledge, is never mentioned in Ignorance, although this is the “theme word” of novelistic literature as a whole, since for Kundera the ethos of the novel lies precisely in the enrichment of knowledge. Ignorance no longer examines the infinity of human existence, but sets out from the fact of death, which invalidates all existence and all questioning. Around the central theme of death other themes familiar from Kundera’s previous novels are assembled, such as the dream, remembering and forgetting, love, the body, and the temporality of existence. What is left of History is seen from the perspective of individual experience and dissolves in the general, suprahistorical conditions of life. Kundera poses the question of what it is that unites the experiences of the émigré(e)s, and replies that émigré(e)s share similar dreams (15–16). We can compare this to people who have lived through certain dramatic historical events, and who identify various phases of their lives in terms of these events. From Kundera’s point of view, the fact that the collective memory has come to determine even the contents of dreams means that a domain of individual freedom that still existed even in Kafka’s world is now lost.
Memory and the temporality of human existence are explored in Ignorance in close connection to aging and death. Kundera previously considered that the soul, in contrast to the body, does not have an age; now he thinks of age as part of one’s existence (120–21). Life is short: human life would be something different if the individual could live, let us say, 160 years instead of the average 80. Kundera also explores the different time perspectives of youth and advanced age. He gives an example to illustrate how a young person discovers temporality as a dimension of existence. A young girl notices similarities between the first kiss with her present boyfriend and her previous one, and feels that the recollection of the past moment gives the present one an additional beauty (80). Time is for her no longer “the present moving forward and devouring the future . . . it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past . . . In the house of her life there are windows . . . opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced; from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows” (77–78). And Kundera adds that when she is older, she will see in repetition only the tedious monotony of events: with age, the “epic” or “musical” repetition in variations gives way to the mute repetition of the same (80–81).
In Kundera’s first two novels, time and temporality are explored above all from the point of view of the “lyrical” experience of time typical of youth and sentimental persons, and in his middle novels, from Farewell Waltz to Immortality, as part of the existence of an “ageless” adult. Now, in Ignorance, he has proceeded to scrutinize the experience of time in old age or at its threshold, where it may be difficult to find anything, even in the past, that can support life and endow it with meaningfulness. For Irena, the years after the death of her husband, when she managed on her own with her two small daughters, were significant; for Josef it was his marriage. Both of them, however, feel that their relatives and former friends in their native country are not interested in hearing what they have experienced during the twenty years of their absence. The émigré(e)s are welcomed back home—on condition that they leave behind what they have experienced in exile, and take up again where they left off twenty years ago.
In addition to the frustration arising from others’ denial of a person’s past, the individual cannot even trust his or her own memory to retain the past. This is because the human memory is unreliable and the bond it creates with the past fragile. Memory generally retains no more than a millionth or possibly a hundred-millionth part of one’s experience (123). In addition, memory arbitrarily selects things to be recollected; thus the past can never be reconstructed as it really was (124). What is more, Josef realizes that all he remembers from his youth are situations that make him displeased with himself (74); his memory “did nothing but slander him” (75). It is thus no wonder that two individuals never have the same recollections of a shared experience (126). We even forget the reasons for the most important decisions of our life. Josef thought that he had once chosen to become a veterinarian, instead of a medical doctor like his father, out of rebellion: he had provocatively told his relatives that he liked cows better than humans (65). Now an old friend of his recollects that he had said that his choice was based on his love for animals. Josef is amazed: he cannot himself say whether he acted out of love or of rebellion (152). Moreover, reading his diary from his school years, he is astonished by the discontinuity between his past and his present self. He wonders where the common essence lies between his self of the past—whom he now dislikes—and that of the present (83).
Love—for Kundera probably the most important of the possibilities of an authentic, meaningful life—is in Ignorance reflected on through the temporality of human existence and takes the form of either a past love or lost possibilities of love. Irena, who after twenty years in France is considering the possibility of return, in Prague meets Josef, who had emigrated to Denmark, and hopes that he will be a new love for her. From the beginning the encounter is asymmetrical in that Irena has preserved in her memory their previous meeting, decades ago, as a lost chance for love, whereas Josef has no recollection of this event at all. Josef does not want to start a new relationship, although he sees this as his last opportunity, because he wants to go on living with his deceased wife. He feels compassion for the dead one who is so weak: a dead person cannot defend herself, she cannot remind anybody of her likes and dislikes or demand attention from anyone. Josef feels that he has to protect his late wife by cherishing his reminiscences of her, and this is possible only by continuing to live in what had been their shared home. Were he now to move to Prague, where nothing sustains the memory of his wife, he would lose her entirely. He has struggled to have her buried nearby, and he now feels satisfaction when he thinks of their common future in the grave they will share (117). The love for a deceased person thus surpasses that for living ones. Death has occupied the place of life, remembrance of the past has become more vital than anything that happens in the present, and the corpse of the beloved more important than any living body. Here love exists, but it no longer reconciles one with life. The longing for an idyll makes its last, both morbid and kitschy appearance in Kundera’s novelistic work with Josef dreaming of his life in their idyllic home, where he will devote the rest of his life to cherishing the memory of his wife, preserving everything in the house exactly as it was during her lifetime.
For Irena, who seeks Josef’s love, and for Milada, who had sought it decades earlier, love does not offer an opportunity for a meaningful life. Irena feels that from now on she will remain forever outside the realm of love, which means that she will forever remain non-existent and without significance for anyone. This exclusion from the realm of love became Milada’s destiny already when she was a schoolgirl. When Josef threatened to leave her, she wanted to show him the infinity of her love by letting herself freeze to death; instead, one of her earlobes merely froze and had to be amputated. This bodily defect was enough to cut her off from love for good (Milada is one of those who wish we could exist without a body). In Ignorance, happy love no longer occurs toward anyone except the dead.
Death, aging, the decay of the body, and living in a body in general, the unreliability of recollection and the frailty of the bond that connects us with our own past through memory, and the lack of interest individuals show toward each other are depicted in Kundera’s last novels as experiences undergone by the characters, but not as existential themes characterizing individuals. On the contrary, several of his figures bear the same or similar themes or experience the human condition similarly. This arises from the general determinants of human existence, which nobody can escape. Instead of discovering new possibilities of being in a new historical situation, the author now looks at the possibilities of human existence from a perspective that narrows them down and eventually leads man into a cul-de-sac. In his last novels Kundera has himself given up his love for adventure, which earlier had derived from the infinite plurality of life and ends up with a pessimistic or even misanthropic view of life.
How Kundera’s modernity narrows
Kundera requires of the modern individual an experimental mode of being in the world and he constructs his novels correspondingly on a constant variation of themes. The question is, then, whether sufficient weight for living can be found outside any metaphysical systems and outside History. Kundera unmasks sentimental, basically false solutions in ever new variations and searches for authentic ones. For him, authentic possibilities are found merely within the realm of privacy: in erotic pleasure, beauty, and (nonsentimental) love; yet these prove to be unreliable or poorly functioning options. Starting with Immortality, Kundera’s works emphasize the inescapable biological constraints of human life, such as corporeality and death, which restrict the individual’s possibilities even more than History. Kundera’s pessimism has eventually expanded to comprehend the anthropological possibilities of humankind outside of History as well.
The “Project of Modernity” that began during the Enlightenment and Romanticism regarded History as an opportunity for man to build for himself a better future. The communist movement, in which Kundera participated before his career as a novelist, was one phase or part of this project, a phase ending in failure. According to Kundera, the “lyrical attitude” as a whole, that is, the desire to change the world so as to correspond to our ideas, is false because it does not take into account the complexity of reality. The failure of the communist experiment in Czechoslovakia, however, is also regarded as resulting from the powerlessness of a small nation to affect the course of History, or even its own history. In an interview, Kundera says that “this feeling of the frailty of existence—this sense of mortality—is linked with a vision of history. Large nations think they are making history. And if you make history you take yourself seriously . . . If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history. History is something hostile, something you must defend yourself against. You feel, spontaneously, that history is unjust, often stupid, and you can’t take it seriously. Hence our special humour: a humour capable of seeing history as grotesque” (McEwan 27). Here Kundera gives the impression that his pessimistic view of history derives from his experience as a member of a small nation, nevertheless, he does not come to different, less pessimistic conclusions concerning history after living in France. In his interview with Kundera, Fritz Raddatz says of Kundera’s view of history that he seems to agree with Gombrowicz: the only means to resist the history of “our time”—referring to the period of the Cold War—is to reject history in its entirety (99).
This rejection of History, however, does not make Kundera a postmodern thinker. Like the postmodernists, Kundera discards all “Grand Narratives” which represent the course of History as a comprehensive, rational whole. From this starting point, however, he proceeds in the opposite direction. He believes that it is necessary to keep the individual human being apart from History, whereas for the post-modernists the individual human being typically “dissolves” into the multiplicity of historical events, in which he cannot perceive any inner logic (see, e.g., Saariluoma [Steinby], Der postindividualistische). Contrary to the postmodernists for whom talking about the essence of humanity or about humankind’s existential problems no longer makes any sense, Kundera retreats, work by work, further back to anthropology as the basic discipline dealing with human beings. In a way, he is returning to the eighteenth century of Sterne or Diderot, when the human mode of existence was not yet considered to be unavoidably historical. Kundera’s view of the anthropological possibilities of man, however, eventually turns out to be the diametrical opposite of the optimistic view of the Enlightenment.
Despite his emphasis on anthropology, Kundera remains caught up in History—although per negationem, in the sense of deploring the unavailability of History as an organizing principle for one’s actions. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera writes that since leaving the ring dance of the builders of a paradise, he has fallen like a stone and has never stopped falling (92, 95). The state of an individual who along with History has lost a solid basis of action has a parallel in the state of a community which is suddenly bereft of its capacity to determine the course of its own history. In Ignorance, Kundera comments on the desolate situation in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 occupation: “it was not the pain of their current life but the vacuity of the future that sucked dry their energies, stifled their courage, and made [the period] so craven, so wretched” (13). Indeed, the absence of a History which promises a better future, to be achieved by the efforts of individuals and communities, is constantly felt in his books. Even his mature skeptics, such as the man in his forties in Life Is Elsewhere or Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who are adjusted to life outside History, define themselves in terms of what they lack, a faith in History or in any general, ideological truths. The possibilities of existence left to be examined are those that remain when the steering of History has proved to be an unrealizable alternative.
Kundera’s view that one can step into a private life outside History appears problematic from the point of view of contemporary ideas about history and the human being’s relation to it. Keeping the collective, the historical, and the public strictly apart from the private, as Kundera desires, is not tenable from the point of view of the humanities and social sciences of our time, since for these fields of scholarship humankind is historically and socially determined in every aspect, including experiences of pleasure, beauty, and love. Kundera does not support his view of the private life with any outline of the history of privacy, except for suggesting that privacy was better protected before the times of totalitarianism and imagology. We know, however, that the distinction between the private and public spheres is a fairly recent phenomenon; the middle ages did not recognize the privacy of bodily functions, sleep, or sexuality (see Elias). The separation of the private from the public sphere in the modern sense was actually achieved only at the end of the eighteenth century, and the process leading up to this is connected with the development of the modern individual identity. The sphere of privacy was then conceived as the realm of the realization of the authentic, innermost self, whereas in the public sphere action is functional and follows social roles (see Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur; Schmidt). Kundera is therefore right in connecting the modern individual with an emphasis on privacy, but he overlooks the social process whereby this sphere came into being; in other words, in stressing the autonomy of the Cartesian individual he ignores the fact that privacy, too, is a social phenomenon.
Kundera sees it as a lack of autonomy if the individual is dependent in their identity and activity on others or on being tied to a body. Here he is more Cartesian than Herder, Goethe, Husserl, or Heidegger in thinking that humankind cannot be a social or a biological being without losing its autonomy. For Herder, Goethe, or Wilhelm von Humboldt the identity of an individual has its natural basis, but its development takes place in coexistence with other people, in a common world mediated through common action and communication in speech (see, e.g., Jannidis; Nisbet). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a variety of approaches—including psychoanalytical and feminist theories, poststructuralist theories such as those of Foucault and his followers, and theories foregrounding the linguistic and social construction of reality (see Berger and Luckmann; Frank, Raulet, Van Reijen; Kienzle and Pape; Žima)—consider the formation of the individual to be a social process. Intersubjectivity is considered to precede individual subjectivity; the individual self becomes possible only through participation in culturally determined action and in cultural systems of meaning. Thomas Luckmann puts this succinctly: “The personal identity of an individual does not develop from ‘inside out’ but from ‘outside in’” (Luckmann 299; see also Frank, “Einleitung”). A human being does not experience his or her self immediately; she or he is capable of directly experiencing only the surrounding world. We learn to understand ourselves only when we grasp others as expressing their inner experiences in their words and acts and take notice of how others experience us (Luckmann 299).
While one side of the coin is our fundamental dependence on others in determining what we are, the other side is that communication and participation in common action presupposes that we all as participants make our own decisions and are responsible for our words and actions, and in that sense are autonomous subjects. The various “liberation movements” that aim at equality, regardless, for instance, of race, sex or nationality, do not deny the fundamentally social nature of human beings, but merely strive to do away with impediments to the equal realization of our subjectivity. This concept of liberation, in which the liberated subject remains dependent on his or her community, contradicts Kundera’s negative concept of freedom. If, as Kundera believes, we really have to be free of any determining whatsoever, even of our own inner imperatives, it indeed becomes inconceivable from where life might gain the necessary weight. In fact, freedom from any determination and dependence equals total indifference and incidentality.
The isolation of a human being from others is manifested by the manner in which Kundera’s characters encounter one another. Encounters do not take place in the context of a common action in a shared universe of meanings—this for Kundera would mean being sentimentally imbued with the mass spirit; rather, the individual weighs and classifies the other according to what she or he sees in the other person. The other belongs to the “outer” world in relation to oneself: the other appears as an object of our perception, and can be used to sustain ourselves and to give pleasure. Thus, it is evident that in his understanding of an encounter between two human beings, that is, something that should constitute a subject-subject encounter, Kundera clings to the Cartesian model of subject-object opposition, which Heidegger in Being and Time takes as the starting point of his criticism of Western metaphysics. Heidegger argues that man actually does not encounter the world—things and other human beings—by perceiving them as objects, but that man’s being in the world means being involved in a common world of utensils and activities and sharing a common understanding of the world (see Being and Time). For Kundera, in contrast, the boundary between ourselves and others is seen in strictly Cartesian terms. The world of authentic meanings is for him a private universe of meanings, given to the individual in the living present of experience or created by himself or herself in dreams and private metaphors, a universe from which any collective symbols or collective models of interpretation are excluded. The boundary between two such private worlds of meanings can be crossed in a positive sense, that is to say without threatening our autonomy, only in love which entails a willingness to become familiar with another person’s private universe of meanings and to feel with him or her (compassion).
Kundera endeavors to examine the unique identity of an individual by analytical methods, but actually his method undermines the supposition of any such identity. He divides an individual into separate parts, for example face and gestures, and then claims that no individuality can be found in any of these parts. This method indeed very closely resembles the analytic, or resolution-composition, method of Galilean natural science, redefined in Descartes’s thinking as the method of philosophy, in which a complex matter is analyzed by dividing it into its elementary components (see Discourse on Method). The individuality of a person, however, is not an analytic concept but a synthetic one. It does not imply that the components of a person, or at least some of them, are unique only to him or her: on the contrary, individuality is something that is perceived in the whole of the person and simultaneously in everything he or she is and does. Kundera ignores this insight into the nature of individuality, which stems from the end of the eighteenth century, the period of the “discovery” of human individuality in the modern sense of the word. Goethe’s novels, for example, show that he had reflected profoundly on the nature of individuality and on the question of how it can be recognized. The actions of a person are seen as parts of complex situations, they are compared with the actions of other persons and with other actions by the same person, and out of this information a complex, dynamic picture of the person is built up—dynamic because it changes constantly with each new piece of information (see Saariluoma [Steinby], Erzählstruktur). For example, an attractive wave of the hand, when seen as a part of a complex situation and compared with the actions of the same person in other situations and the actions of other persons in similar situations, might very well express much more than the same gesture considered purely in the abstract, isolated from any context. Only through grasping the whole, paying attention to all its aspects and to their overall combined effect, can the individuality of a deed or a person be recognized. It is clear why Kundera’s thinking, which is oriented toward dissection and analysis rather than synthesis, cannot grasp individuality. We can say that here Kundera’s method, derived from the Enlightenment tradition, comes into conflict with his commitment to the Romantic idea of individuality as the supreme value. In Immortality, Kundera finally recognizes that the individual essence or Grund, “ground,” of a person can only be expressed by a metaphor (373); he has discarded the analytical method and taken recourse to a truly Romantic means of grasping the individuality of a person.
For Kundera, however, the most important thing to discover in a person is not his or her individuality but the general possibility of human existence that he or she embodies or represents. Rather than out of interest in the characters’ unique personalities, individuality is important for Kundera as a principle and as the basis of autonomous action. This individuality and this autonomy are in Kundera’s view more than ever threatened in the contemporary world. Even if one might think—as I do myself—that the cul-de-sac into which Kundera leads the modern individual derives in part from untenable notions of the individual’s relationship with his or her own body and with other individuals, what remains relevant is Kundera’s acute analysis of the contemporary world and its impact on our self-understanding. Imagology the way Kundera uses it and commercialization are in fact trends in the contemporary world which profoundly affect our identity, our actions, and our relationships with others. It is here, along with his perception of the consequences of “falling out of History” characteristic of the experience of contemporary Europe-ans—in less sharp terms, the lack of a guiding historical perspective—rather than in his highly sinister view of the fate of human beings bound to a body that I consider Kundera’s analysis of the possibilities left for humankind in the contemporary world to be of great value.
Kundera originally placed the history of the novel in opposition to the history of political systems and nation states, the latter being hostile to humankind, a trap in which his liberty is restricted. The history of the novel is for Kundera a revenge on history itself, it “is neither predetermined nor identical with the idea of progress; it is entirely human, made by men, by some men” (Testaments 15). The constraints of History are challenged by the history of the arts as a realm of freedom of exploration and experimentation. We can even say that once it has turned out to be impossible to realize a meaningful life through pleasure, beauty, and love, the only domain in which the authentic existence of man is still possible is the novel, or more generally the arts. Paradoxically, Kundera seems to suggest that freedom, authenticity, and beauty are now possible only in the arts (in novels) that examine the lack of freedom, authenticity, and beauty in our contemporary world. But even this realm of freedom, according to Kundera, is vanishing: it too is being suffocated by the contemporary world.
For Kundera, at the heart of modern European culture, literature, and the other arts is the sense of complexity, a willingness to see things in all their multidimensionality, in their infinite plurality and depth. In his opinion, however, our time is hostile to this sense of complexity. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera discusses music as an example. The history of music consists of the discovery of the immense possibilities concealed in the apparently simplest sounds. It is a transformation of the trivial into an intellectual adventure. In our world, however, music, according to Kundera, has regressed to its “primeval state” of “music without thought” (The Book of Laughter 248). Agitprop music which was offered all the time to arouse the enthusiasm of the masses for the effort of building socialism and Western muzak played as background music everywhere have replaced creative music, in which new things are discovered and felt. In a world that ceaselessly proffers the simplest and most trivial kind of music, serious music is drowned out by totally insignificant “sewage-water music” (Ignorance 146, 148–49).
The novel has undergone a similar development. In The Art of the Novel Kundera writes that the totalitarian political system has killed the novel, whose ethos is the free exploration of the possibilities of human existence; but the West, dominated by mass media, does not allow the novel to thrive either. The search for a complex truth is displaced by a general writing and exposing mania, a “graphomania,” under whose reign nothing important is said any more; the sense of the complexity of matters has been supplanted by the inability to distinguish between important and unimportant experience. Kundera’s era of graphomania comes close to Adorno’s notion from half a century earlier, of the era of “biographical trash literature”: “For telling a story means having something special to say, and that is precisely what is prevented by the administered world, by standardization and eternal sameness. . . . the cheap biographical literature [“biographische Schundliteratur”] one finds everywhere is a byproduct of the disintegration of the novel form itself” (“The Position” 31, “Standort” 42). This world of uniformity excludes the novel, about which, according to Kundera, we now ought to speak in the past tense only. The history of the novel has turned into an archive, a set of documents, in which the past of the European spirit is preserved as an object of admiration for future generations (The Art 165).
Kundera is of course not alone complaining: it is a common concern of novelists and other actors in the literary field of our time that the novel, and literature in general, has lost its previous cultural significance. Kundera’s view, that one essential factor causing this is mass media entertainment that has replaced the reading of novels as a leisure activity, is also commonly shared. However, when Kundera seems to suggest that at some time in the past the conditions—both in the art of the novel and in life itself—were more favorable for human freedom than in our own time, we are entitled to ask for further details. Kundera gives no clear answer in his writings to the question of what these conditions, favorable to individuality and to a sense of difference and complexity, actually were, nor does he say precisely where and when the arts were allowed to flourish and the European spirit could freely develop. His description of how Cervantes discovered the individual and the complexity of the world, thus initiating the tradition of the novel, is very sketchy, and the only explanation given for Cervantes’s initiation of the European adventure is the (alleged) disappearance of God from the world. It seems as though Kundera thinks that at first the void created by the disappearance of God left room for human freedom, but that later it was filled with History and other constraints limiting freedom. Moreover, Kundera does not give any hint as to whether he believes that in the “Cervantean” period, which was so favorable to the novel, individuality, autonomy, and a sense of difference flourished not only in the novel but in real life as well.
Although Kundera is skeptical as to our possibility of detecting any internal logic in History, he claims to discern a descending line in the course of History with regard to the realization of human freedom—that is, a line that is exactly the opposite of the view of history propounded by Hegel and Marx, as a process of increasing human freedom. Thus he does not avoid offering a “Grand Narrative” of History any more than Jean-François Lyotard, the great demolisher of the Grand Narratives of History. In Kundera’s vision of the grand course of history, the beginning was a kind of “childhood” of humankind, in which the problematic nature of human existence had not yet become conspicuous. This is the (obviously very long) premodern era, preceding the birth of the novel. Kundera is in fact only interested in the modern era, a time when, unlike the middle ages, religion no longer determines our worldview. In the modern age, “religion yielded its position to culture (to cultural creation), which came to embody the supreme values by which Europeans recognized themselves, defined and identified themselves” (The Art 128). His dating of this “sudden” change remains, as noted previously, inaccurate: in some contexts, the modern age begins for Kundera with Boccaccio in the fourteenth century and in others with Rabelais in the sixteenth or Cervantes in the seventeenth century. In any case, in his picture the modern age is now declining toward its end. The modern age cherished the dream of an autonomous, authentic individual and in our time this dream has faded away. Europe is undergoing the end of the modern age. Individualism and art, constituting the realm of the free development of the European spirit, have reached their end first in totalitarian Central Europe, later also in the West (124, 151). The European spirit no longer exists, except as a longing for its lost core (128–29).
Kundera began his career as a novelist insisting that what is essential in European history is not politics but culture; however, especially in his later novels he is convinced that the contemporary world is bringing European culture, as he understands it, to an end. Kundera disowns “collaboration with our times”: “All those who extol the mass media din, advertising’s imbecilic smile, the neglect of the natural world, indiscretion raised to the status of a virtue—they deserve to be called collaborators with the modern” (The Art 125). While “modern” originally connoted a critical attitude, a “non-conformist revolt against received ideas and kitsch,” now to be modern means “a strenuous effort to be up-to-date, to conform, to conform even more thoroughly than the most conformist of all” (164; see also Raddatz 107). Kundera refuses to participate in this conformist race and insists on adhering to the original, critical ethos of modernity, emphasizing the individual’s ability and duty to judge independently everything that he or she comes across. In contrast to fashionable modernism, Kundera represents what he calls “antimodern modernism” (The Curtain 56). Obviously, this is equivalent to being attached to nothing but to the “depreciated legacy of Cervantes” (The Art 20).
Kundera set out to follow some of the “unheard appeals” of this legacy (The Art 15). Dream or dreamlike narration became an important part of almost all of his novel compositions. He also listened to the “appeal of thought” established by the novels of Musil and Broch, in which the author comments on events in his novel in his own voice and includes essayistic digressions. Furthermore, Kundera aims in his novels at the greatest possible playfulness and lightness, while at the same time maintaining that the novel is a serious examination of human existence. Time or temporality, as the mode of human existence, plays a crucial role in his examination of man’s existence as well. He explores the themes of remembering and forgetting, youth and maturity, history, the present, aging and death. Already before Immortality, in which the perspective of death for the first time predominates and obstructs the search for meaningfulness in human existence, it is evident that resuming the devalued possibilities of the novel does not necessarily lead to an infinity of new paths. Dream, thought, play and time are taken up in Kundera’s works as insufficiently exploited opportunities of the novel, but they turn out to be quite problematic. Dream, which fascinates the author as a domain of free creativity, is no longer that in Ignorance, as collectivity and History intrude even into our dreams. Kundera follows the “appeal of thought” to the point where the thematic level dominates the novel so strongly that a considerable number of readers feel uncomfortable, complaining about the thinness of the characters and the absence of the concrete fictional world. Playfulness and laughter, so characteristic of Kundera’s novels, do not compensate for the increasing gloominess of his vision. Questions of time remain central to Kundera’s novels until the very end, but in his later works death overwhelms the multifaceted experience of the temporal dimension of human existence. Thus, we can say that Kundera not only makes use of the possibilities of dream, thought, play and time in the novel, but also in a way pursues these possibilities to a point beyond which no continuation is possible.
The very “legacy of Cervantes,” conceived as the adventure of encountering the world, to which Kundera acknowledges his commitment despite being skeptical toward everything else, proves problematic. Skepticism and adventure as such are compatible for Kundera; they are both characteristic of the individual searching for autonomy and authenticity. An example is Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who is an adventurer of eroticism. In Kundera’s later works, however, a love for adventure either does not lead to any positive result or disappears entirely. Rubens in Immortality chooses the adventures of eroticism, but ends up in an emptiness of being. Agnes finds that she no longer wishes to participate in humankind’s great adventure; similarly, Chantal in Identity lacks any interest in adventure, because searching for them is “a means of embracing the world,” which she no longer wants to embrace (39). The last short novels indicate that Kundera himself has lost his love for adventure. Human existence no longer appears as an infinite field of exploration; in fact, when life is seen from the harsh perspective of death, there is little really important left to say. Chantal speaks with irony of the “king of words”—“life”—regarded as the greatest, unquestionable value; when “life” loses this position, so do the great words surrounding it, such as “adventure,” “future,” and “hope” (28–29). Hope and the future were treated with irony already at the end of Immortality, when Paul speaks of woman as the only hope left for man, while the reader can see that his wife betrays him. The scene is comparable to the ending of Ignorance, where Josef cherishes the hope of a “happy future” by the side of his deceased wife. Hope and future no longer belong to life but to death.
In his earlier novels and essays, Kundera explains that the novel will die when the world becomes unfavorable to it, but his own novelistic production is a testimony to how the adventure launched by Cervantes fades away once an author loses love for adventure. Human existence is no longer seen as a set of alternative, meaningful ways of being. For Kundera, life and human beings appear boring and uninteresting. In fact, the aging author is interested in scarcely anything but aging and death. Compared to these, the adventure of humankind in History and the adventure of the individual are meaningless. This change in Kundera’s views is expressed in his new, gloomier interpretation of what the Cervantean tradition was all about. In The Curtain from 2007 he writes: “Don Quixote is conquered. And with no grandeur whatever. For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That—that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel” (The Curtain 10): Not an infinite space to be explored in ever new adventures, no inexhaustible plurality of possibilities of human existence to be discovered; what remains for the novelist to enquire into is merely the failure of human existence. Kundera does not mention that the shadow of death makes even this enquiry futile.
Summing up, for Kundera, the contemporary world is a place which has annihilated the modern ideal of an autonomous, authentic individual, an irretrievable loss which he mourns. With his love for the autonomous individual and the “legacy of Cervantes,” the literary expression of this individuality, he cannot as a novelist be regarded as a postmodernist, although some of his stylistic features, resembling postmodernism, have often led to such a label. Traits considered as postmodern include, for instance, the relinquishing of the illusion of reality, his free combination of various fictional and nonfictional lines, and his play between different “ontological levels,” for instance, appearing as himself in a novel which he is just writing. To say, however, that such features indicate Kundera’s postmodernity is a misconception. His play with the conventions of the novel is directed first and foremost against realism, his predecessors in this being the modernist European novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. The basic ideas of postmodernist writing are not compatible with his conception of the novel. For the postmodernists, the meaning of a text cannot be defined with any certainty and the author has no special authority to interpret it; the unity of the work is denied, and the text is conceived of as being compounded of different materials borrowed from various discourses. Rather than conveying originality, a text is regarded as the product of recycling—in other words, repetition has replaced novelty. Furthermore, individual human beings are no longer seen as the subjects behind the action, History no longer exists, nor does the reality that is depicted in a text; in the typical postmodern text, different more or less imagined realities overlap and are transformed into each other without any clear-cut boundaries (see, e.g., Hutcheon; McHale; Saariluoma [Steinby], Der postindividualistische). Kundera is clearly in opposition to each and every one of these tenets of postmodernism. He insists on the idea of a work of art which is a meaningful, carefully composed whole and an original creation by its author (e.g., Testaments 170). The characters in his novels are regarded as acting subjects, and the task of the novel is to explore human existence in its different variations, with special attention to the possibilities of autonomous, authentic modes of existence. Distinguishing between different imagined worlds—for instance, the world of dreams or of ideological truths—and the real world is for Kundera not only possible but of vital importance. His conception of the novel is on all these points in accordance with the modernist novel and in discord with the principles of postmodernism. Nowhere, to my knowledge, does he take an explicit stand on postmodernism either as a literary movement or in the more general sense of a current of contemporary thought—although in one sentence in Encounter he does say that the intellectuals of the Prague Spring were proponents of modern art: “I stress ‘modern’, not ‘postmodern’” (117). Yet one can say without any hesitation that Kundera considers postmodern novelists, as well as all those who take an affirmative stance toward our contemporary world, as collaborators with a world gone mad and as gravediggers of the novel. He himself, unlike Paul in Immortality, does not want to be an ally of his own gravediggers. Kundera considers himself the heir of Kafka, Hašek, Gombrowicz, Musil, and Broch, and he mourns the end of their and his kind of modernism.
Kundera’s claim that the “Russian night” and Western “imagology” have killed the novel certainly appears to many of us as an overstatement and most of us find even less convincing the idea that the novel has now come to an end as a consequence of Kundera’s “discovery” of the total corporeal determination of human action. We may think that these facts and “discoveries” shed light on Kundera’s novels and on his conception of the state of the novel, rather than actually describing the novel of our time and the history of the novel as a whole. However, Kundera’s analysis of the incompatibility with contemporary society and lifestyle of what for him is the essence of the tradition of the modern novel, European culture and modernity is thought provoking and deserves to be taken seriously. And if we want to argue with him about these matters, I am convinced that it would not disturb him. His idea of the novelist, as a thought experimentalist rather than as a presenter of absolute truths, can of course be applied to himself as well. We may doubt whether he has told the whole story as to how the genre of the novel was conceived, how it developed, and eventually perished, or even the truth about his own novels, and we have even better reason to suspect that he has not succeeded in presenting exhaustively the possibilities of human existence in the contemporary world, but we cannot blame him for this. It is enough that in his novels Kundera has kindled lamps which highlight some of the possibilities and some of the problems of the modern individual, as well as certain aspects of the European art of the novel, and in doing so he has both delighted readers and provided them with matter for thought.