Critical Essays on Milan Kundera [1 ed.] 0783884648, 9780783884646

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Critical Essays on MILAN KUNDERA

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CRITICAL ESSAYS

ON WORLD LITERATURE Robert Leeker, General Editor McGill University, Montreal

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Critical Essays on "'7' MILAN KUNDERA ♦

edited by

PETER PETRO

G. K. Hall & Co. New York

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Copyright© 1999 by G. K. Hall & Co. All rights reserved. No pan of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in . any form or by any means, eleccronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. G. K. Hall & Co. 1633 Broadway New York, NY 10019 Libra,:y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critical essays on Milan Kundera / edited by Peter Petro. p . cm. - (Critical essays on world literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. Romanized record. ISBN 0-7838-8464-8 (alk. paper) 1. Kundera, Milan--Criticism and interpretation. I. Petro, Peter. II. Series. PG5039.21.U6Z63 1999 891.8'685409-tc21 98-52728 CIP This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z3948-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents ♦

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Publisher's Note Introduction

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1

PETER PETRO

REVIEWS

A Review of Life Is Elsewhere and

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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MARIA NEMCOVA. BANERJEE

Overlapping Delusions

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ELIZABETH POCHODA

Czech Angels (Review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]

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JOHN UPDIKE

Four Characters under Two Tyrannies:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being E.

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L. DOCTOROW

INTERVIEWS

Milan Kundera Interview

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ALAIN FINKJELKRAUT

Journey into the Maze: An Interview with Milan Kundera FRANCINE DU Pl.Essix GRAY

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Conversations with Milan Kundera

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JORDAN ELGRABLY

Conversation with Milan Kundera on the Art of the Novel

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CHRISTIAN SALMON

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CONTENTS

OPEN LETTERS

Between East and West: A Letter to Milan Kundera

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ROBERT BOYERS

An Open Letter to Milan Kundera

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NORM.AN PODHORETZ

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

Kunderian Paradoxes

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MILAN )UNGMANN

"Narrative symposium" in Milan Kundera's Thejoke

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LUBOMtR DOLEZEL

Milan Kundera, and the Idea of the Author in Modern Criticism

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DAVID LODGE

Genre and Paradigm in Milan Kundera's

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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HERBERT EAGLE

Kundera's Quartet (On The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

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GUY SCA.RPETTA

Satan's Point of View: Towards a Reading of Life Is Elsewhere FRANCOIS RICA.RD

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The Ambiguities of Milan Kundera

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ROGER KIMBALL

Milan Kundera's Central Europe

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lADISLAV MATEJKA

Seeing through the Opposition: Kundera, Deconstruction, and Feminism: Immortality

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JOHN O 'BRIEN

A Body of One's Own: The Body as Sanctum of Individual Integrity in Kundera's

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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MARJORIE E. RHINE

Kundera's Sacred Cows and Betes Noires

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MARKETA GOETZ-STANKIEWICZ

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CONTENTS

The Art of Bufoonery: The Czech Joke Commedia dell'arte Style in Kundera's French Novel Slowness

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KAREN VON KUNES

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Nostalgia con Brio: Kundera's Slowness MARIA NtMCOVA. BANERJEE

285 287

Selected Bibliography Index

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Publisher's Note ♦

Producing a volume that contains both newly commissioned and reprinted material presents the publisher with the challenge of balancing the desire to achieve stylistic consistency with the need to preserve the integrity of works first published elsewhere. In the Critical Essays series, essays commissioned especially for a particular volume are edited to be consistent with G. K. Hall's house style; reprinted essays appear in the style in which they were first published, with only typographical errors corrected. Consequently, shifts in style from one essay to another are the result of our efforts to be faithful to each text as it was originally published.

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Introduction PETER PETRO

When Czech writer Milan Kundera (b. 1929), achieved recognition and became a part of the North American cultural consciousness in the eighties, he was already very well known in his native land and in the rest of Europe, particularly in France, his new homeland. Thus the Czech writer and recently also a French writer (his last two novels are written in French) was already a mature author when most of his novels appeared in English translations. The discovery of Kundera in North America follows his discovery in France, and, of course, in Czechoslovakia. A poet, a playwright, a short-story writer, a novelist, a political thinker, a literary and cultural critic, and a quintessential intellectual in the grand European school: these descriptions provide a set of markers characterizing the successive stages of the literary history of Milan Kundera. An author considered worthy of the Nobel Prize and accepted widely throughout the world as a major presence in world literature, Kundera is nevertheless firmly grounded in the tradition of Central European literature, with its experimental, skeptical, and relativizing mode of writing, as his championship of such authors as Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz suggests. Great Western European classic authors, such as Cervantes, Rabelais, Diderot, and Sterne, are often evoked by Kundera as those who exhibit the exemplary power to rejuvenate the flagging modern novel. He is also well connected to the literary traditions of Czech literature, having written a dissertation about an early-twentieth-century inventive and experimental novelist, Vladislav Vancura, a contemporary of Karel Capek and Jaroslav Hasek, both of whom are simply too powerful and influential themselves to be ignored by any writer. However, Kundera's formidable range transcends any narrow or purely literary framework, no matter how careful we may be in formulating it, and he demonstrates his interest in the areas of film, music, art, and history-particularly intellectual history-as well. His fascinating musicological treatise 1

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concerning Moravian folk music was deemed too esoteric for the first English edition of his triumphant novel The Joke. This novel, first published in 1967 in Czechoslovakia, caused a sensation and established Kundera as a preemi'nent Czech novelist, adding to his renown as a poet, playwright, and brilliant short-story writer. Kundera also authored a screenplay for a film adaptation of The Joke, directed by J aromil J ires. Kundera makes numerous references to his beloved Janacek and Mahler (both of whom, like Kundera, are natives of Moravia, one of the constituent lands of the Czech Republic), as well as co Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Beethoven among ochers. Today, of course, very little of Kundera would be deemed a priori uninteresting. The reviews of his work by noted novelises, the many fascinating interviews in which he expresses and defends his views, the critical articles of scholars discussing various facets of his oeuvre all contribute co the growing awareness of Kundera as a literary phenomenon; his considerable accomplishments have been recognized throughout the world in che form of many literary accolades and presci. . g1ous prizes. The publications dealing with Kundera, including various articles, monographs, and collections of essays, are so numerous chat a separate bibliographical volume has been published. 1 Various approaches to Kundera and his work can be sampled in Aron Aji's Milan Knndera and the Art of Fiction, 2 a volume with a judicious mix of international and North American voices, scholarly essays, and friendly memoirs dealing with the many faceted personality of the novelist. At the same time, many scholars and critics felt that, in addition co these, reviews, interviews, and specially commissioned essays by noted specialists in Czech literature should be collected in order to further elucidate both Kundera's past works (carefully managed by the outspoken author) and chose chat were published after the appearance of the Aji collec. t1on. Reviews in particular tend to highlight first reactions to a new author and are useful in providing diachronic evidence of Kundera's reception. However, the reviews in chis volume are of different kind. They are by specialises (Maria Nemcova Banerjee, Elizabeth Pochoda) with a thorough knowledge of Czech literature and by noted authors (John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, for example) whose judgments imply knowledge of the North American literary market, its fluctuating fashions, and its reception of foreign writers. Their contribution of brilliant and discriminating critical interpretation and sensitivity to the text, despite some stereotypical notions chat the work of an "Eastern European" and a "dissident" writer evokes in well-established professional writers is invaluable. Paul Theroux3 (unfortunately unavailable for this volume) recognizes Kundera's magnificence as a shore-story writer but ventures chat Kundera's humor is impossible co appreciate elsewhere, thus joining chose who deny che universal quality of Kundera's writing and who place him in the category of dissident writer whose interest for the Western reader lies in che clever debunking of an oppressive system. Written in 1974,

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Theroux's review, "Small Novel, Large Stories," prefers Laughable Loves to Life Is Elsewhere, calling the latter a small achievement when compared to the former. And yet, Life Is Elsewhere won the prestigious 197 3 Prix Medicis in France for best foreign novel. In 197 5, Kundera moved to France where he felt completely at home and much appreciated. In her review, Maria Nemcova Banerjee shows us that Life Is Elsewhere, underestimated by Theroux, is a novelistic masterpiece, and she agrees with the French critic Claude Roy, who saw Kundera's novel as demolishing two powerful idees refues: the idea-myth of Revolution and that of Poetry. For Theroux, the novel is about lyricism, which a poet risks betraying in a society with strict rules. He finds it "semi-successful" though "funny." Elizabeth Pochoda's comments on the The Farewell Party, situating it within a context of Czech dissident prose, give proper due to Kundera's sophistication and find that the novel's superficial connection to the eighteenth-century comedies of manners, with their farcical plotting, hides a serious charge revealed in a chilling denouement. Kundera is adept at frustrating the reader's expectations. The review takes Kundera seriously as a novelist who is playing with the genre and thus one who can be discussed apart from his political significance. This sort of playfulness is appreciated by John Updike in his review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a novel that Nemcova Banerjee finds less interesting than Life Is Elsewhere. Nevertheless, Updike is unwilling to grant to Kundera the right to create a sui generis form: he finds the work "more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel." Updike's review represents a correction of the superficial reading by Theroux. Updike realizes he is dealing with a serious author, a writer who is no longer merely "funny." In fact, he is no longer funny, as he is suddenly perceived as a philosophizing author and therefore a serious writer. Yet Updike still has some misgivings: "The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements"; that is, no matter how hard Kundera tries, he is not yet one of us. He is perceived as essentially alien, one who "makes us uncomfortable." It does seem that Updike realizes that Kundera should not be stereotyped, but neither is he to be admitted to the club yet. In 1980, about the time the review was written Kundera was perfectly at home in France, where he was adored and taken seriously indeed. How should we account for this disparity in his European reception in general versus his reception in the United States? Perhaps the political explanation might be connected to the trauma of Vietnam. The more outspoken anti-Communist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also more popular in Europe than in the United States and enjoyed tremendous influence in France among intellectuals, while being ignored or rebuffed by American intellectuals. Kundera made sure nobody would confuse him with Solzhenitsyn and desperately tried to distance himself from the "dissident" pigeonhole, with some measure of success. This still did not prevent Updike from seeing him as essentially motivated by a dissident cause and

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thus as a political writer repeating the old and no longer acceptable lessons of Churchill and Truman. Four years later, in 1984, E. L. Doctorow's review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being finally signals a change. Doctorow takes Kundera's novel seriously as an attempt to write an original, innovative work. Although Doctorow uses the somewhat ambiguous terms "conceptualist fiction" and "generic brand, no frills fiction," he concedes the novel is written by an author with a "first-rate mind." And while he contrasts Kundera unfavorably to Kafka, the pairing is a handsome compliment. Finally, Doctorow recognizes Kundera's right not to be written off as a dissident author from Eastern Europe but to be taken seriously as an innovative novelist. The interviews in this volume are the product of Kundera's fame and the attendant curiosity about an outstanding author's opinions. The interviewers probe Kundera's opinions and ideas on a variety of topics generated by his provocative ideological, philosophical, and profoundly ambiguous prose. The interview with Alain Finkielkraut deals mostly with the issue of Kundera as a political thinker who insists on redefining the political terminology that reflects the reductionist mode of polarization (East versus West) without considering the dimension of culture. For Kundera it is very important to show that while both the Czechs and the Russians were Communist as far as the system operating in their countries was concerned, there was a great cultural difference between them: [T]hat visceral horror [felt by the Czechs during the Soviet invasion of 1968) did not come from the fact that Dubcek's reforms were finished, but from that infinite void that could be sensed behind the faces of the Russian soldiers, from that strangeness of a civilization that thinks differently, has a different destiny, lives in a different historical time-a civilization that came to swallow us up into its own eternity. Political regimes are ephemeral, but the frontiers of civilizations are traced by centuries.4

Joseph Brodsky's5 argument over Kundera's concept of Central Europe championed already in this interview testifies to the controversial statement of this problem. It may not now seem such a novel departure to say that political boundaries are ephemeral while cultural boundaries abide. Yet it was a fresh departure, a view that transcended politics and brought about a more sophisticated approach to the Central European issue. At the same time, Kundera did open himself to charges of ethnocentrism and of having an almost xenophobic attitude towards the Russians, feelings that were deeply resented by Brodsky, a Russian poet. Francine du Plessix Gray's interview, 'Journey into the Maze," is inspired by the appearance of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. This novel explores the role modern technology plays in "forgetting": "the greatest evil confronting us daily is the forgetting of past values, it's in great part the cause of that dehumanization whose beginnings Kafka perceived." When confronted

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by du Plessix Gray with the idea that this makes him a conservative, Kundera accepts it, with the condition that the terms are redefined: those who "acquiesce to the banal status quo of the present are the reactionaries," while those who preserve the past are the "radicals." When pressed to comment on the • important role eroticism plays in his prose, Kundera declares himself a "dissatisfied hedonist" threatened by the possibility of the "end of all eroticism." He also admits to "a great deal of sadism" in his stories, as the sadistic impulse is a "very strong one" for him. Jordan Elgrably's "Conversations with Milan Kundera," one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching Kundera interviews, starts with the author's criticism of Roland Barches's homogenizing statement "Tout est ecriture." On the contrary, Kundera subscribes to a limiting concept of literature, one in which the author suppresses more than he or she publishes: crossing out becomes a creative act. Kundera contends that what surprises the reader is when an author "11T111eils that which we are not in a position to see in our daily lives." He further defines the novel as "the art which strives to discover and grasp the ambiguity of things and the ambiguity of the world." Kundera also pays homage to Polish literature, particularly to writers like Witold Gombrowicz and Czeslaw Mi.losz, stressing that they, much more than Solzhenitsyn (whom he respects and admires), inspired him while still in Czechoslovakia. Finally, the interview with Christian Salmon, "Conversation with Milan Kundera on ihe Art of the Novel" (1987), begins with Kundera's audacious statement "My novels are not psychological." His consideration of the history of the novelistic genre leads him to comment on Joyce, who attempted to analyze "the present moment," and Proust, for whom "man's interior universe comprises a miracle." Kundera adds that it was Kafka who provided a new orientation with his question, "What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses carry no weight?" For Kundera, the novelist is "neither historian.nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence." He is to be taken seriously. There is no doubt that the articles and essays in this volume take Kundera seriously. They represent a mixture that ranges between brief though informative articles and substantial close readings of the text. The measure of seriousness is demonstrated by the kinds of questions and concerns one finds among the critics. Milan Jungmann's bitter criticism of Kundera as an author of novels "for export only" provides a balance to the Kundera interviews by emphasizing the difficulties, complexities, and controversial aspects of Kundera's work, including what J ungmann rather unkindly calls Kundera's "creative schizophrenia." There is a difference between Kundera as seen by Western critics and Kundera as seen by Czech critics. Whether these Czech critics reside in Bohemia (and Jungmann's essay belongs to this category, having been written in the underground in Prague during the Soviet occupation) or in exile,

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they have a vantage point inaccessible to the non-Czech reader, providing additional information that rounds out the image of Kundera. While readers are invited to form their own judgment about these and other questions, it is this writer's belief that in his many public pronouncements (only a few representative interviews were selected concerning this very outspoken and media-savvy author) Kundera does not intend to distort his past but rather to dissociate himself from it. The difference is important: he is not dissembling but exercising his right to change his mind, as well as the product of his mind. He feels that artists should be free to exercise complete control over their literary work, even down to the details of its form when published, including the .controversial issue of the translation and the freed om to overrule the translator when necessary. The artist, of course, should be free to choose the genre in which he or she works (as Kundera has done, moving from poetry to drama to short fiction to long fiction to essays) and free to change his or her worldview that underpins such literary labor. Accordingly, writers should be allowed to revise their work at any point in their lives. One cannot revise one's life, to be sure, but one should be free to depart from a previously held belief, ideology, writing style, or genre, as Kundera has done when he rejected his past as a poet or as a believer_ in Marxism. He is quite passionate on this point, as he has shown in his magisterial collection of essays

Testaments Betrayed ( 1995 ). Lubomfr Dolezel's article is a fine example of the Prague critical tradition and quite indispensable in properly analyzing the narrative devices Kundera uses. (One of them that Dolezel discusses is the "narrative symposium," ., mentioning Karel Capek's Horduba/ as a predecessor to The Joke. This device is one that Kundera successfully used previously in Laughable Loves and in the novels, creating a "multiperspective novel" full of multiple meanings and interpretations as the characters and situations occur in a multiperspective universe that renders as relative any single controlling myth or ideology in an otherwise ideological novel. David Lodge uses his discovery of Kundera and his type of "post-structuralist" narrative to question some critical approaches to the idea of the author, such as enunciated by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. First of all, Kundera likes to enter the text as a persona, and even when he does not, as in The Joke, he is still very strongly present there, as Lodge shows, as the "implied author." Similarly, the author invests himself in the narrative of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, inspired no doubt by the playful entry into their narratives by the eighteenth-century authors whose freedom and experimenting Kundera customarily praises. Herbert Eagle's article also discusses The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; however, he does so from the point of view of genre. For Eagle, this work is an example of a polygeneric novel, with the dominant genre (one used to organize and situate all the others) being the essay. This can be seen as Kundera's attempt to challenge the canonical nineteenth-century novel, with its "invisi-

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ble" narrator and "illusionism," and "objectivity," seen as a product of "rational positivism." Guy Scarpetta, like David Lodge, sees that Kundera's work does not fit the poststructuralist strictures, and thus Kundera is an author for whom the how is as important as the what of his work. Taking as his point of departure The Unbearable Lightnes1 ofBeing, Scarpetta, in a brilliantly observed set of topics that include "composition," "architectonics," and "dissidence," deals with both the formal aspect of the novel, organized with compositional principles imported from music, and its ideological question. He stresses that until Kundera, nobody explained the "essential dimension of Communism" as Kundera did when he applied for example, kitsch to it as an esthetic category. He praises Kundera for "the ability to claim the function of knowledge or of truth for the novel" without hiding the artifice, as it is not its contrary, for the truth is the effect of such artifice. Francois Ricard's reading of Life /1 E/1ewhere as Kundera's most demanding work to date concerns the radical character of this work, namely, its subversive quality. This subversiveness connects it to Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk, a work whose own savage subversiveness is often overlooked in favor of extolling the comedic or narrative qualities it certainly exhibits. This radical subversiveness is not something a reader can easily accept, and Ricard believes that readers resist such a reading as it demands a nihilistic stance. Ricard's contribution is a warning against viewing Kundera as a comforting, "feel good" author. The essential ambiguity of Kundera suggested by Ricard is further explored by Roger Kimball. Kimball notes that after the appearance of The Unbearable Lightne11 of Being Kundera seems to have been canonized, as the work represents a "patent of literary immortality." The source of such popularity in the West might derive from the ambiguous attitude Kundera adopts "toward the political dimension" of his work. Thus, when Kundera speaks of "totalitarian kitsch" the effect is "to trivialize totalitarianism by assimilating it to a category that has its home in aesthetics" ; and when Kundera tells Philip Roth that intimacy is threatened in the West as much as it is in the East, this lack of discrimination is seen as "absurd" by Kimball, since the "former might consign one to the front page of a noxious tabloid; the latter abandons one to the cellars of the secret police." Kundera's protestations are therefore seen as "predictable ambiguities of a writer struggling to maintain a predefined image of himself as ideologically correct." Further insight into the public, political persona of Kundera is revealed in Ladislav Matejka's article dealing with Kundera's public pronouncements on the issue of Central Europe. This is a topic that might be particularly helpful in understanding the approach that Kundera has taken on a number of political issues. First, the notion of Central Europe forces one to deal with a "new" term derived from cultural history rather than the previously used geopolitical term Eaitern Europe. The question of identity is crucial, as it

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enabled Kundera to distance himself from the Russian cultural sphere, avoiding terms like Swiet, which might elicit a knee-jerk response depending on one's political loyalties. In a key 1967 speech before a congress of Czech and Slovak writers, Kundera spoke of a European spirit, culture, and standard based on Greco-Roman antiquity and Christianity that he feared were endangered by ideological dogmatism. Following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Kundera grew increasingly fatalistic, as he saw small nations being swallowed by the Soviets, by whom he feared they would be assimilated and "Russianized." This idea, expressed in an article by Kundera, brought about a debate with Vaclav Havel, who thought the Czechs should resist. Kundera's response suggested such advice might be dangerously exhibitionistic, as there was no chance for success. This in essence was the debate that history resolved in favor of Havel but not before an effective change of opinion about Central Europe took place in the minds of people of influence. This happened largely through the efforts of intellectuals like Kundera, who tirelessly championed the new concept of Central Europe and the common Western European heritage against the Soviet Union, demonized by Kundera as "uniform, standardizing, centralizing," ready to absorb the smaller countries it occupied into "a single Russian people." In their attempt to come closer to Kundera's ideas that underlie his depiction of sexuality and the female body in particular, critics inadvertently deal with the difficulty of encountering an original approach that does not necessarily share the prevailing assumptions of the dominant code of North American sexual politics or of the canon of political correctness. Like any intellectual brought up on "socialist realism" Kundera must feel a natural aversion to the latter idea. However, Marjorie Rhine's essay points out the unambiguous role of the body in Kundera's work as a sacred territory and a starting point of dissent from those who would deny any freedom, including the freedom to one's body: hence Kundera's eroticism serves an allegorical purpose as much as it harks back to Rabelais or serves as a paean to sexual liberation free of puritanism. Kundera is certainly read differently in France (and in French Canada) than in the United States, where homegrown, traditional puritanism seems to have transformed into a particularly morbid form of fem1n1sm. John O'Brien tries to salvage Kundera from the attacks from that quarter. O'Brien offers a Bakhtinian kind of defense that suggests a polyphonic quality in Kundera's work. Formally speaking, such polyphony is most obviously presented in The Joke but remains as his artistic method throughout his fictional oeuvre. O'Brien's analysis of Immortality explores the reasons for the harsh criticism the novel received for its treatment of women and sets out to correct what he finds to be largely careless readings or misreadings of the novel. O'Brien believes that it is precisely Immortality where Kundera "most consistently and openly criticizes reductionist representations of women."

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Rhine contrasts the profound and many faceted significance that the body has for Kundera with the "caricature-like soft-core sexploitation of the film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Her article shows how nakedness is used to introduce totalitarian control and general dehumanization in the novel, a context that is far removed from salacious eroticism. Sanctity of the body becomes synonymous with the sanctity of the being wherein the duality of body and soul is resolved. Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz tackles the difficult volume of nine of Kundera's essays written originally in French and published as Testaments Betrayed. While giving due recognition to Kundera's masterful command over the ever widening spectrum of his cultural interests, Goetz-Stankiewicz isolates those issues that motivate Kundera's sustained criticism, his betes noires as well as his sacred cows. The corrosive acid of Kundera's relativizing poetics that dissolves all certainties and is so familiar to the reader of his fiction is absent in his essay writing where, Goetz-Stankiewicz asserts, a rigorous teacher and even an absolutist might be found: "[H)is sacred cows are all gleaming white, his betes noires have no redeeming speck of brightness." Karen von Kunes discusses Kundera's most recent novel, Slowness, written in French as "a play rather than a novel," more precisely as "an erotic farce a la commedia de//'arte." In this novel, von Kunes believes, Kundera the French writer is "sarcastically saying good-bye to Kundera, the Czech writer," as there is not much left for him to do but join the buffoonery and laugh. Maria Nemcova Banerjee's substantial exploration in "Nostalgia con Brio: Kundera's Slowness" places Kundera's French novel in the context of eighteenth-century French literature, notably Vivant Denon's novella Point de lendemain. Slowness is a "novel of precise articulation, where thought assumes a musical form and aphorisms strut out disguised as mathematical equations." It is also a farce where "each character plays the fool and the lover by turns," where "the solitary figure of a sad clown stands out as the one misfit." While the novel is an homage, it "is not an imitation but a creative variation on the work of a loved master." It is also a kind of fictional answer to the question of exile, no longer a necessity after the events of 1989: "Kundera responds to this twist of fortune by encoding its burden of double estrangement in the medium of grotesque farce." Nemcova Banerjee captures Kundera's essential playfulness operating on several levels of the novel; Kundera accomplishes this without abandoning the satirical dimension, resulting in a self-limiting but no less effective farce. Kundera's political stance continues to fascinate his critics. Both the liberals and the conservatives, however anachronistic or malleable these labels may be at this point in history, seem to have made certain demands on Kundera, following the disappointment of their expectations. As reflected in the two open letters by Robert Boyers and Norman Podhoretz reprinted here, Kundera, as a political thinker, disappoints both. He positions himself, somewhat uncomfortably, not merely "between the chairs" but rather in a position

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that questions the very chairs themselves. Thus, his work satirizes the absurd blandishments of leftism with its narrow-mindedness (seldom appreciated by the Western Left) and ridicules its frightful kitsch (never noticed by the Western Left until Kundera ridiculed it: the demos, the clenched fists, the drapeau rouge, the incantations, and the stupifying hagiography issuing from the ersatz religiosity of the ideology). However, Kundera also refuses to embrace the standard anti-Communism expected of a dissident intellectual from Eastern Europe. Then again, Kundera also rejected the concept of an Eastern Europe long before countries of this region rejoined their Western neighbors, seeing it, as Ladislav Matejka showed, as an integral part of Western Europe. Rohen Boyers in his letter is aware that Kundera, fearful of reductive criticism, rejects an exclusively political reading of his novels but asks nevertheless, "But why shouldn't politics be the key to a consideration of important secrets?" He also asks, "Why do you not consider how readily the dissident writer trades upon his image, his virtue, how shamelessly he panders in his books to the public's appetite for 'values' and 'correct' ideas?" Boyers may be frustrated with Kundera's ambiguity: the conditions in the West are more to the Czech writer's liking, yet Kundera insists "that they are awful and that to accept them is in effect to make a shabby compromise. To accept what passes for progressive in the West is in fact to miss what is most disgraceful in the culture of the Sovietized East." Norman Podhoretz, in his "Open Letter to Milan Kundera," warns the author that he has been kidnapped by those critics and media types who want to soft-pedal his anti-Communism and treat him as they did Orwell, namely, ignoring the message Orwell's and Kundera's work communicates about the nature of the Communist system: "Now the same power is trying to do the same thing to you. But of course this is an even more brazen operation. Orwell's grave has been robbed; you are being kidnapped." What to make of a writer who does not seem to fit the categories conventionally assigned to writers of his kind? Or is he sui generis? This editor thinks so and also believes this to be the reason that gender politics, as understood by Kundera, are for some readers at least a problematic area. However, there is no doubt that Kundera as "an explorer of existence" has contributed substantially to the contemporary elaboration of that abiding concern of the novel that, as he mentioned to Christian Salmon, concerns "the enigma of self"

Notes l. Glen Brand, Milan Klindera: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988) . . 2. Aron Aji, Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992).

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3. Paul Theroux, "Small Novel, Large Stories," New York Times Book Rt11iew, 28 July 1974, 7. 4. Milan Kundera, interview by Alain Finkielkraut, in Cross CNrrtnts 20 ( 1982): 15 -29. See also "Milan Kundera Interview" in this volume. 5. Joseph Brodsky, "Why Milan Kundera Is Wrong about Dostoevsky," New l1>rk Times Book Rt11iew, 17 February 1985, 31, 33-34. On the same controversy see also Peter Perro, ''Apropos Dostoevsky: Brodsky, Kundera and the Definition of Europe," in Literature and Politics in Central Europe: Studies in Honour of Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, ed. Leslie Miller er al (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House Publishers, 1993), 76-90.

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REVIEWS

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A Review of Life Is Elsewhere and

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting MARIA

NEMCOVA BANERJEE

Although completed in Czechoslovakia in 1970, Milan Kundera's second novel had not appeared in its original Czech until this edition in Josef Skvorecky's emigre press. It has, however, been translated quite widely and in 197 3 won the Prix Medicis for the best foreign novel in France that year. The broad recognition which Kundera enjoys outside his country rests in large part on his association with the Prague Spring of 1968 and the events which led up to it, notably che Fourth Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers (1967), where he delivered a major address. Since 1975 Kundera has lived in France, where he teaches at a provincial university. Kundera's essential message of disillusionment about his country's socialise experience falls on ready ears in some of che most sophisticated audiences in Western Europe. It evokes a shudder of recognition in European intellectuals because it is the experience of a true insider, a man whose social sensibility was bred in the international Lefc's historical hopes, and because it is expressed in a mode of irony which reveals a mind finely tempered in che crucible of Western skepticism. For his countrymen, who know Kundera as a brilliantly versatile verbal artist, a writer of novels, stories; essays, plays and film scripts as well as of poems, the bite of his skepticism has che sting of a particularly Czech anxiety, a submerged death wish in che culture, which has plagued it since it was first overpowered by Germanic forces in the seventeenth century. In the present subjugation by the Soviet Union there lurks a long-term threat co the Czech language itself, whose will co life was the force which carried the nation to its quasi-miraculous political rebirth in the twentieth century. The fear chat the Czech language might lose its memory of itself by melting into the Russian linguistic sea is voiced by the Czech historian Milan Hubl in Prague in the year 1971, in a dialogue with the author-narrator which Kundera introduces into his lacesc novel, Le livre du rire et de l'oubli [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting], published in 1978 by Gallimard, in the translation of Fran~ois Kerel. The work is a polyphonic treatment of the From World Literature Today 54, 1 (W incer 1980): 131 - 32.

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theme of loss of memory. It also seems to be an act of exorcism aimed at lifting the weight of the power of oblivion which Kundera sees holding his country enthralled in the normalization era of Gustav Husak, the seventh President of the Czechoslovak Republic, "the President of forgetting." For all its topical interest and occasional imaginative brilliance, this latest work does not seem to me to match the cogency and the tour-de-force quality of writing in Zivot je jinde (translated as Life Is Elsewhere), which I consider to be Kundera's novelistic masterpiece. This high appraisal is shared by Claude Roy, whose observations on the novel, shortened and translated into Czech from the article 'Jeu de massacres sur grandes figures" (Nouvel Observateur, November 1973), are here used by way of introduction. Roy sees Kundera as a writer of world stature, a master of the genre of philosophical farce in the great tradition of the French philosophes, launching a spirited assault on the two major idles rerues of our time-the idea-myth of Revolution and that of Poetry. He points out, with pleasurable malice aimed at his French audience, that as a literary artist Kundera is not ashamed of working within a genre which owes its origins to the bourgeois vaudeville. This is true of some of the bawdy bedroom passages which abound in the novel. One might also say that in chronicling the making of a successful communist poet out of J aromil, the precocious mother's boy of a Prague middleclass family, Kundera is taking off from another, more respectable genre of the bourgeois era in literature, the Bildungsroman. Jaromil's life story, with his premature success as an official poet counter-pointed by a dubious quest for sexual manhood, is told with the cruel detachment of the satirist. It is a cynical post-Freudian revision of the nineteenth-century theme of the education of the artist and also a bitter political lampoon. Kundera likes to remind us-and himself-that the regime whose political and human bankruptcy he and his fellow writers helped expose in the late sixties had entered history in 1948 not only on the stealthy feet of the secret police but also to the praise of some of the country's most illustrious lyric poets and not only of Jaromil's • generation. On the most serious level of its discourse, Life Is Elsewhere examines the peculiar modern relationship between poetry and revolutionary power, finding it to be inherently incestuous. The poet Jaromil, fleeing from direct contact with everyday reality, cultivates in his secret self-enclosure the compensatory power of word magic. His solitary ecstasy induced by words which are armed by rhyme and rhythm is for him a substitute for the coveted intoxication felt by the revolutionary leader on a platform, as he receives wave after wave of choric responses from the feet and voices massed below him on the public square. Others before Kundera have commented on the affinities that exist between th~ psychic explosion which translates into poetry and the psychological forces which fuel revolutions. Kundera, however, is unique among insiders in passing so harsh a verdict on both powers. He finds them unclean at the source because born of resentment and fear of impotence.

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Jaromil's destiny as a holy monster was conceived in an offended womb. He was the dream child of a mother who nurtured him to be her revenge against the healthy maleness of a husband who had rejected her. In naming him Jaromil-an echo of the feminine name Jarmila, the heroine of Mac:ha's Maj, the greatest romantic poem in the language-she symbolically combined the act of castration with the act of consecrating her son to Apollo. Thus fatally crippled for the battle of life, Jaromil remains forever leashed away from reality by the umbilical cord of his mother's possessiveness. For him, real life will always be elsewhere, and from his lyric enclosure he will adore and envy the booted policeman as the splendidly brutal embodiment of maleness. Kundera's plot develops this insight with savage irony. At the climax of the novel's action, Jaromil completes his f1rst erotic triumph (over a plain working-class girl) by denouncing his lover's brother to the secret police after he learns, in a moment of intimacy, that the brother plans to escape to the West. Ascending the steps to the headquarters of the Prague political police, Jaromil feels himself to be a man at last. From that point on the narrator treats him as a grotesque puppet, hurling satirical barbs over his head. In the comically improbable ending Jaromil dies ignominiously from ordinary pneumonia, in his mother's arms at last. Xaver, the predatory male alter ego which he had created in his surrealistic fantasies, addresses him as a woman in the ultimate dream sequence. In passing judgment on Jaromil, Kundera seems to want to indict the entire modern tradition of romantic poets of the "cursed" succession. In quoting from Jaromil's verses he also cites himsel£ No matter how contemptible Jaromil's career may be, Kundera places him before us, stripped to his hideous underpants, as the true heir of the Lermontovs and the Rirnbauds. Since Kundera also indicates in the text that the title of the novel is taken from the graffiti scribbled by striking students on the walls of Nanterre and the Sorbonne in May 1968, in that revolution-festival when imagination claimed the right to power, it is clear what other connections he wants us to make. Oaude Roy is right in drawing attention to the daring of Kundera's iconoclasm. He may also be right in saying that "the poet Jaromil lives not only in Prague."

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Overlapping Delusions ELIZABETH POCHODA

In The Guinea Pigs Vaculik's narrator records his observations of the pigs in a journal which he hides beneath their cage. The reference here to the search and seizure of writers' work in Czechoslovakia is direct and yet oddly farcical too. Western readers will be surprised to find that observation and surveillance are not the tragic material they may expect them to be. Refined in the laboratory of social oppression, both Vacultk and Kundera's knowledge of personal freedom leads inexorably to the comic perception of victims of surveillance who are also, in their private ways, master practitioners of the art. So sophisticated is Kundera's rendering of this perception that one would have to look at 18th-century comedies of manners to find comedy and gulling on the scale of that in his new novel, The Farewell Party. Here in the festive atmosphere of a health spa and fertility clinic the characters take apparent holiday from the pressures of daily life, and once again love, or more accurately sex, is the swing on which they try to move past their destiny just as it is also the swing which returns them to it. Like the plot of any rich comedy, that of The Farewell Party is difficult to summarize with its various subplots, counterplots and the numerous meetings between the two. Since personal destiny is again Kundera's concern, the multiple coincidences of plot and subplot are for him a natural metier. The mechanism of this particular comedy is touched off when Ruzena, a poor and obscure nurse at the spa, phones Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter living in the capital, to tell him that she is pregnant, the consequence of his one evening's visit to the spa. As far as Ruzena is concerned her life, like those of Kundera's young men in Laughable Loves, is empty of opportunity. Her apartment, her occupation and even her future husband are as good as assigned to her from the moment of her birth. The highly doubtful accusation that Klima is the father of her child is her effort to annex for herself the apparent freedoms of Klima, who occupies an envied position in her society. But this is a comedy where what does not exist cannot be appropriated, and Klima's freedom, his philandering, and his celebrity, conceal a secret-he is the emotional prisoner of his jealous wife. It is her watchfulness which obliges him to have Reprinted with permission from the 2 October 1976 issue of Tht Nation. © 1976.

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spells of infidelity only in order to maintain the illusion that he has escaped his destiny as a devoted husband. He is not prepared for paternity or marital strife as the consequences of such freedom, and in the interest of evading such possibilities he is willing, in a mildly comic way, to deceive and oppress Ruzena as much as is necessary. She in turn is a victim equipped with equally powerful weapons of her own. Ruzena and Klima play out their comedy of mutual deception and oppression while in the background infertile matrons splash in the spa waters hoping to improve their chances of conception. The two themes of unwanted paternity and desired pregnancy are not plot lines at ironic odds with each other, but parallel illustrations of the unforeseen and uncontrollable which govern all the lives in this comedy, especially those who strive to supplant destiny with sexual machinations of their own. Nearly everyone is in the business of exerting some fantastic means of control over fate. Jakub, a victim of the Stalinist purge, carries a suicide pill made by Dr. Skreta, to insure that he is lord and master of his own life and death. Dr. Skreta makes his contribution to universal brotherhood by secretly injecting childless women with sperm from his own private sperm bank. Olga, a young girl and ward of J akub, sets out to seduce her protector and turn him from father into lover simply so that she can feel, for once, the triumph of her will over circumstance. Three young men in a cafe try to transform a chance encounter with Klima's beautiful wife and Ruzena into an orgy. And finally, a secret society of old men attempts to purify the streets and the whole society by catching dogs in butterfly nets and putting them away. The juxtaposition of so many overlapping delusions is not simply mindless repetition but a comic device for innovating on the themes of helplessness and control. Of course something must always go wrong when sex and love are made to bear the whole burden of personal freedom. And when we are led to wonder why these small personal maneuvers return people to the circumstances they wished to escape, the novel seems to reply that it is because as individuals they operate on too small a scale. Everyone has his plot, but there is always another and larger plot which gathers up and transforms the designs of individuals: Klima's brush with danger leaves him temporarily impotent with his wife;Jakub's pride in his own benevolence is destroyed first by eroticism, then later by his own willingness to take a life; Mrs. Klima's love wanes when events fail to confirm her husband's infidelity; the three young men in the cafe find that the sensual promise of an afternoon slips mysteriously through their fingers. And so on throughout the plot until Skreta, the bestower of life, is also discovered to be the unwitting agent of Ruzena's death and the termination of all her particular designs of destiny. At this point in our experience of the narrative we begin to see its comedy differently. Just as the highly serious material of surveillance can turn farcical when its consequences are scaled down to the doings of guinea pigs and

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unfaithful husbands, so the farcical matters of paternity suit and fertility clinic can eventually turn back again toward tragedy, or at least toward something approaching it. That these trivial doings should be the matters upon which lives and dignity hang is, when the laughing is done, no laughing matter. What has always disturbed the people in Kundera's fiction is the idea of their missed opportunities, and doubly so since the opportunities they do manage to find are never quite equal to the demands made on them. In this case the opportunities at hand turn hollow and farcical, becoming in the end agents of a larger pathos. Thus Skreta's desire to bring an end to the political and cultural dissension of his country culminates in his managing to make numerous big-nosed, short-sighted children who are without knowing it half brothers and half sisters. And when for a moment Jakub perceives that there might be a world of beauty and grace outside the "bitter drama of life in his country" which he has always lived, the occasion of his epiphany is a glimpse of Mrs. Klima, a woman whom we know to be enchained by a small and bitter drama of her own. Similarly, Ruzena's hopes are fastened on the trumpeter Klima whose music, "sincere, gay, carefree," belies every condition of his life and character. Farce continues to diminish people before our eyes until we begin to realize that their only having opportunity for farce in their lives suggests something darker about the surrounding culture. The analogies to Restoration comedy which seem so apt at first break down as we see the wider implications of farce. Among other things, the fmal scene in a comedy of manners brings each person's foolishness or ignorance home to him, but in The Farewell Party this moment of illumination does not take place. If there are, and it is not clear that there are, specific lessons to be learned here they will be of no help in the future, for these people are consigned to a life of farce. The brotherhood of man is left in the hands of nearsighted offspring who will always be unaware of their mission, and in this new twist to comedy even those people who learn of their mistakes are still somehow not brought to their senses. The most extreme consequence of a man's actions, in this case murder, is to him weightless, even trivial. Here is a more trenchant display of destiny at work than tragedy generally allows, for these people do not die of their fate, they are discovered to be perpetually living with it. Looked at in this light, it is hard to imagine anything more chilling than Kundera's apparent lightheartedness.

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Czech Angels {Review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) JOHN UPDIKE

This book, as it bluntly calls itself, is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit chat invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness chat locks us out. The strangeness of, say, Donald Barthelme or Barry Hannah derives from developments in a culture that, even if we do not live in Manhattan or come from Mississippi, is American and therefore instinctively recognizable. These authors ring willful changes and inversions upon forms with which we, coo, have become bored, and the lines they startle us with turn out co be hitherto undiscerned lines in our own face. Bue the mirror does not so readily give back validation with chis playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech fascinated by sex and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history. Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among chat society of Czechs- "che more dynamic, che more intelligent, the better half"-who cheered the accession of the Communises co power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the rude oppressions of the new regime: "And suddenly chose young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lose all resemblance co the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So chose young, intelligent radicals started shouting co their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down." Kundera, the son of a famous pianist, workedthe book jacket cells us as a laborer and jazz musician under the Communist regime, and "ultimately chose co devote himself to literature and film. In the Sixties he was named professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, where his students, notably Milos Forman, were the creators of the Czech New Wave in films." When the gallant Czech attempt From Hugging the Shore by John Updike. Copyright © 1983 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

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at "Socialism with a human face" under Alexander Dubcek was crushed by the Russian invasion of August 21, 1968, Kundera was erased from his country's official cultural life. By 1975 even his underground existence within his native country had become intolerable and he emigrated to France. In 1979 the Czech government, responding to the publication in France of Le Livre du rire et de /'oubli, revoked his Czech citizenship. So Kundera is an Adam driven from Eden again and again-first, from the Socialist idyll of his youthful imagining, then from the national attempt to reclaim that idyll in the brief "Prague Spring" of 1968, and then from the Russian-dominated land itself, and lastly from the bare rolls of citizenship. Such a profound and jagged fall makes the life histories of most American writers look as stolid as the progress of a tomato plant, and it is small wonder that Kundera is able to merge personal and political significances as readily as a Camus. For instance, the theme of forgetting is effortlessly ubiquitous. On the official level, erasure achieves comic effects. The comrade named Clementis who solicitously placed his own cap upon Klement Gottwald's head on the cold day of party annunciation in 1948 was hanged four years later, and airbrushed out of all propaganda photographs, so that ''All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head." The President whom the Russians installed after Dubcek, Gustav Husak, "is known as the president offorgetting." Official forgetting is echoed by the personal struggle of the subjects of so revisable a government to recover lost letters, or to remember details that give life continuity. The expatriate native of Prague called Tamina, in the central and perhaps best of these seven disparate though linked chapters, recites to herself all the pet names by which her dead husband ever had addressed her. Less and less able to remember his face, she resorts to a desperate exercise: ... she developed her own special technique of calling him to mind. Whenever she sat across from a man, she would use his head as a kind of sculptor's armature. She would concentrate all her attention on him and remodel his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, adding freckles and warts, scaling down the ears, and coloring the eyes blue. But all her efforts only went to show that her husband's image had disappeared for good.

As another holdout, Mirek, puts it, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion." He needs to recover some lost letters for quite another reason than Tamina, who wishes to revive the memory of a love; Mirek wants to destroy the letters that he, when a party enthusiast, wrote his mistress of those na"ive days, Zdena. She has remained loyal to their youthful orthodoxy, even to supporting che Russian invasion of 1968. But he quite misses the point of her fidelity to the Party-that it is fidelity to him and their old love: "What seemed to be political fanaticism was only an excuse, a parable, a manifesto of fidelity, a coded plaint of unrequited love." Throughout these stories of life under Communism, motives are frequently

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quite mistaken, and emotions of extreme inappropriateness arise. Every life is lobotomized by the severances of tyranny. Of course, there is comedy here. Laughable Loves, coming from a Communist state (published in 1969), seemed perhaps even funnier and sexier than it was, like jokes in a courtroom. But the theme of laughter, as developed by Kundera in these later stories, is elaborated to the point where it can no longer be felt as laughter. He is deft and paradoxical but too heavyhearted to be a funny writer; nor can he bring to his heavy-heartedness that touch of traditional religious resignation which converts depression to the cosmic humor of Kafka, or Bruno Schulz, or the early Malamud, or Gogol. Kundera in comparison is a child of the Enlightenment, and what mysteries exist for him occur on the plane of the psychological and the sexual. There is more analysis of laughter-specified as "a wobbly, breathy sound in the upper reaches of the vocal register"-than laughter itself. A certain mechanical liveliness, as of French farce, attends the scenes of group sex: in "Mother," the hero's visiting elderly mother unwittingly blunders back into the living room, where her son is about to commence entertaining his wife and another scantily clad woman at once; in "The Border," a zealous orgy hostess vigilantly enforces multiple contacts upon couples threatening to find happiness in a corner by themselves. Sex is sad for Kundera, at bottom, and laughter is cruel. His book's final image is of a group of doctrinaire, self-congratulatory nudists on the (presumably French) beach, "their naked genitals staring dully, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand." The proclaimed personal freedoms of the West are no liberation for him. The hero of this final episode, named Jan, has earlier reflected that the Jews had gone to the gas chambers in naked groups, and that "nudity is a shroud." And while still a child, Jan had studied a picture of a naked woman and had "dreamed of a creature with a body offering ten or twenty erotic regions"; hence, "when he was still very much a virgin, he knew what it meant to be bored with the female body." The keenest moment of sexual desire, for a male, in this Book of Laughter and Forgetting occurs when Kundera's autobiographical hero, without the guise of another name, is closeted with a young woman who has jeopardized her own career as editor by giving him some secret assignments, now discovered. She is composed in manner but keeps going to the bathroom: And now suddenly the butcher knife of fear had slit her open. She was as open to me as the carcass of a heifer slit down the middle and hanging on a hook. There we were, sitting side by side on a couch in a borrowed apartment, the gurgling of the water filling the empty toilet tank in the background, and suddenly I felt a violent desire to make love to her. Or to be more exact, a violent desire to rape her. To throw myself on her and take possession of her with all her intolerably exciting contradictions, her impeccable outfits, her rebellious insides, her reason and her fear, her pride and her misery.

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Against the memory of such surges of violation and exposure, which the pressures of the Communist world make possible, the public nudity of the West of course must seem tame. As to the women of Kundera's world, sex is best when it is soulless. Undergoing the charade of triadic sex, the sensitive, jealous Marketa imagines that her husband is headless: "The minute she severed the head from his body, she felt the new and intoxicating touch of freedom. The anonymity of their bodies was sudden paradise, paradise regained." And Tamina, in the second story called "The Angels," sexually beset by a band of children, "rejoiced in her body, because for the first time in her life her body had taken pleasure in the absence of the soul, which imagining nothing and remembering nothing, had quietly left the room." In short, pleasure demands suicide of a sort. "Or to put it another way, sexuality freed from its diabolical ties with love had become a joy of angelic simplicity." The angels in Milan Kundera's complex universe of disjunction are malevolent. These children end by tormenting Tamina and goading her to the death by drowning she had, earlier, sought in vain. In the first story called "The Angels," they dance in the streets of Prague to celebrate some political murders; they dance in circles until they rise into the sky. The angels are the unfallen from the Communist faith; Kundera once danced in their circle, and remembers their bliss. Angels are the heralds of "uncontested meaning on earth"; once fallen from their circle, one never stops falling, "deeper," Kundera tells us, "away from my country and into the void of a world resounding with the terrifying laughter of the angels that covers my every word with its din." Kundera's prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communist idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself-the most interesting political question of the century-why a plausible and necessary redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom. Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare? Kundera describes the terrors and humiliations of the intellectual under totalitarianism with crystalline authority, yet for all he tells us these barbarities are rooted in the sky, in whims beyond accounting. He keeps plowing his earthly material back into the metaphors of laughter and forgetting, of angels and children. Tamina, he states, is the book's "main character and main audience, and all the others are variations on her story and come together in her life as in a mirror." Yet in her final appearance she seems allegorized into nothing, and the episode almost whimsical. As in the case of Nabokov, a private history of fracture and outrage is rendered kaleidoscopic by the twists of a haughty artistic will-without, however, Nabokov's conviction that art, the reality we extract from reality, is sufficiently redeeming. The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our

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more subtle enslavements; and we, it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy personal cost, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us thirty-five years ago. Survival tactics vary. Solzhenitsyn in Vermont builds a little iron curtain of his own and continues to thunder as if he were still imprisoned in Russia. Joseph Brodsky, the most aloof and metaphysical of dissidents in his Leningrad years, is becoming, amazingly, an American poet. Kundera-who moved, after all, only a few hundred kilometers west, and who unlike many expatriates had enjoyed considerable artistic success and prestige in his own country-seems, five years out, in a middling position. He is crossing that border he describes, to the side that men dread, "where the language of their tortured nation would sound as meaningless as the twittering of birds." A meaning once omnipresent is gone. A habit of vision developed in one context is being broken in another. The sexual descriptions, both tender and shrewd, that had an effect of subversive comment within the Czech context have a somewhat jaded, hollow ring out of it. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a work of social realism and protest coexists with a brittleness, an angelic mockery that, amid much melancholy remembrance and shrewd psychology, makes UJ, the respectful Western readers, uncomfortable.

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Four Characters under Two Tyrannies:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being E. L. DOCTOROW

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am bored by narrative," Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1929, thus suggesting how the novel has been kept alive in our century by novelists' assaults on its conventions. Writers have chosen to write novels without plots or characters or the illusion of time passing. They have disdained to represent real life, as the painters did a half century before them. They have compacted their given languages, or invented their own, or revised the idea of composition entirely by assembling their books as collages. Appearing noticeably in the United States 15 or 20 years ago was the disclaimed fiction in which the author deliberately broke the mimetic spell of his text and insisted that the reader should not take his story to heart or believe in the existence of his characters. Disclaiming had the theoretical advantage of breaking through to some approximation of the chaos and loss of structure in life. The subject of these fictions became the impossibility of maintaining them, and the author by his candor became the only character the reader could believe in. John Barth is one writer who comes to mind as having explored the possibilities of this strategy, and the distinguished Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his new book, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," continues to find it useful. "And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel," Mr. Kundera says of one of the characters, who is described standing at a window and staring across a courtyard at a blank wall. "This is the image from which he was born .. . . Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility . . . the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them ... . But enough. Let us return to Tomas." The question may reasonably be asked if this convention too isn't ready for assault. May it not be too late to return to Tomas? Do we have to be told where he comes from any more than we have to be told where babies come •

New ¼rk Ti"1es Book Review. 29 April 1989, I, 45-46. Repri nted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc. Copyright© 1984 E. L. Doctorow.

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from? There is a particular hazard to the author who intrudes on his text: He had better be as interesting as the characters he competes with and the story he subverts or we may find him self-indulgent or, worse, coy, like those animated cartoons where a hand draws a little animal and colors it in and pushes it along to its adventure down the road. Even now, in our age, there is a sanctity to the story. Because it is supremely valuable to us as valuable as science or religion-we feel all violence done to it must finally be in its service. Virginia Woolfs experiment in avoiding narrative, "Mrs. Dalloway," discovered another way to construct it or, perhaps, another place in which it could occur. The idea has always been to make it beat with life's beating hean. Let us return to Tomas. Mr. Kundera has made him a successful surgeon. In Prague, in the spring of 1968, when Alexander Dubcek is trying to make the Czech Communist Government more human, Tomas writes a letter to a newspaper to add his voice to a public debate. Thereafter, the Russians invade Prague, Dubcek is replaced, public debate ceases, and Tomas is asked by the authorities to sign a statement retracting the sentiments of his letter. But he knows that once he does, if he ever again speaks out the Government will publish his retraction and his name among his fellow Czechs will be ruined. So he refuses and for his intransigence is then asked co sign a letter avowing his love for the Soviet Union, a possibility so unthinkable that he quits medicine and becomes a window washer. He hopes that now that he is down at the bottom he will no longer matter co the authorities and they will let him alone. What he discovers is that he no longer matters co anyone. When he was supposed by his hospital colleagues co be thinking of signing the retraction in order to keep his job they turned up their noses at him. Now that he's been declassed for maintaining his integrity, he's become an untouchable. The first thing to note about chis character's fate is that it is a gloss on Orwell: To destroy Tomas, Mr. Kundera is saying, the powerfully inertial police apparatus doesn't have co expend the energy required co torture him . It need only send around an affable plainclothesman with a letter co be signed. Once the policeman appears, no matter how Tomas responds his life is ruined. The second thing to note is the idea of the exhaustion of meaningful choice. Tomas is one of four main characters born frankly of images in Mr. Kundera's mind . All of chem co one extent or anothe'r enact the paradox of choices that are not choices, of courses of action that are indistinguishable in consequence from their opposite. He shows us Sabina, a painter, as she is deciding whether or not to keep her current lover, Franz, a university professor. Franz is physically strong. If he used his strength on her and ordered her about, Sabina knows she wouldn't put up with him for five minutes . But he is gentle, and because she believes physical love must be violent she finds Franz dull. Eicher way, whatever Franz does, she will have to leave him.

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Mr. Kundera says Sabina lives by betrayal, abandoning family, lovers and, finally, country, in a way that condemns her to what he calls a "lightness of being," by which he means a life so lacking in commitment or fidelity or moral responsibility to anyone else as to be unattached to the real earth. By contrast, his fourth character, Tereza, the loyal wife of Tomas, suffers an unflagging love for her philandering husband that finally is responsible for his ruin, because it's her unwillingness to live in exile that brings him back to his fate in Czechoslovakia after he has set himself up nicely in a Swiss hospital. Thus, Tereza, the exact opposite of Sabina in commitment and fidelity and rootedness to the real earth, sinks under an unbearable moral burden, weight and lightness, in the Kunderian physics, adding up to the same thing. So there is a pattern in the subservience of his characters to Mr. Kundera's will. They all exemplify the central act of his imagination, which is to conceive of a paradox and express it elegantly. The paradox he is most fond of is the essential identity of opposites, and he plays with it over and over again, with minor characters as well as major ones and with little essays and one-line observations. For instance, he shows us a dissident Czech emigre in Paris in the act of reproaching his fellow emigres for their lack of anti-Communist fervor, and he finds in him the same bullying quality of mind as in the former head of state, Antonin Novotny, who ruled Czechoslovakia for 14 years. The elegance lies in the image Mr. Kundera uses to make the observation that both the emigre and the former ruler point their index fingers at whomever they address. In fact, people of this sort, Mr. Kundera tells us, have index fingers longer than their middle fingers. Whether personal or political, all attitudes, stands, positions in the Kunderian vision come up short. He will kill off three of his quartet and allow the fourth to disappear from the book, presumably from a lightness of being; but his true story, the one to which he gives honest service, is the operation of his own mind as it formulates and finds images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime. The paradox of the essential identity of opposites describes an intractable world in which human beings are deprived of a proper context for their humanity. The author who ostentatiously intrudes in his characters' lives and tells them how to behave mimiQS, of course, the government that interferes deeply in its citizens' lives and tells them how to behave. Tomas and Sabina and Franz and Tereza were invented to live under two tyrannies, the tyranny of contemporary Czechoslovakia and the tyranny of Mr. Kundera's despair. Readers of the author's celebrated novel "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" will recognize here his structural use of leitmotif, the repertoire of phrases and fancies among which he circulates and recirculates. They will find the same ironic tone and brilliance of annotation of the fearful emptiness of Eastern European life under Communist management. Here too is the author's familiarity with music, his preoccupation with Don Juanism, his almost voyeuristic attention to the female body and its clothes. And the

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pointed, surreal image: Park benches from the city of Prague, colored red, yellow and blue, floating inexplicably on the Vlcava River. Like Gabriel Garcfa Marquez, Mr. Kundera knows how to get ahead of his story and circle back co it and run it through again with a different emphasis. But the prose is sparer here, and the Garcia Marquez levitations are not events now, but ideas. There is less clutter in the prose, less of the stuff of life, as if the author had decided co send the myriad furnishings of novels, its particulars, down the Vltava, after the benches. This is a kind of conceptualist fiction, a genericbrand, no-frills fiction, at lease in Michael Henry Heim's translation. Mr. Kundera is not inclined co dwell on the feel of human experience except as it prepares us for his thought. And what is his thought? Asking chis question leads co the novel on its own terms. Mr. Kundera is a good psychologist of the rutting male. His idea of love as che occupation by another person of one's own poetic memory is a sweet one. He adds co the meaning of the word kitsch by describing it, first, as an esthecic ideal chat denies the existence of excrement and, second, as the inevitable adjunct of political power. "Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch," he says. "Everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life ... every display of individualism ... every doubt ... all irony." Thus, "the gulag is a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse." It is a not unattractive philosophical bent chat sends Mr. Kundera into his speculative exercises. He has a first-race mind and, like Bernard Shaw, the capacity co argue both sides of a question and make each side seem reasonable in its turn. But every now and then a wryly argued proposition seems flawed, a weakness for literary idea rather than a strength of choughc-chac a concentration camp, for instance, is defined first and foremost by the complete absence of privacy; it might be argued chat slave labor and starvation and mass graves are ics primary characteristics. Or che idea, coming from Sabina's walk through New York City, chat its beauty, unlike chat of European cities, is unintentional, or "beauty by mistake, the final phase in the history of beauty." New York may indeed be unintentionally beautiful, but we are younger than Europe, and, whatever holocaust is in sight, beauty by mistake might just as easily be che first phase in che history of beauty as che lase.

One recurrent theme in the book is chat the ideal of social perfection is what inevitably causes the troubles of mankind, chat the desire for utopia is the basis of the world's ills, there being no revolution and therefore no totalitarianism without it. This idea has currency among expatriate Eastern European intellectuals, and perhaps their bitter experience entitles chem co it. Bue the history of revolutions begins, more likely, in the desire co eat or co breathe than in the thought chat man must be perfected. And a revolutionary document like the American Constitution is filled with instructions and standards

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for civilized life under equitable law; and it is truly utopian, but its ideals are our saving grace and drive us to our best selves, not our worst. It is not exactly self-indulgence or coyness that threaten "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." The mind Mr. Kundera puts on display is truly formidable, and the subject of its concern is substantively alarming. But, given this subject, why are we forced to wonder, as we read, where his crisis of faith locates itself, in the world or in his art? The depiction of a universe in which all human choice wallows in irresolution, in which, as Yeats wrote, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," sometimes sets off the technique of this novel as an act of ego in excess of the sincere demands of despair. Mr. Kundera's master, the prophet Kafka, we can't help remembering, wrote a conceptualist no-frills fiction in which, however, he never appeared. All this said, the work of reconceiving and redesigning the novel continues through the individual struggles of novelists all over the world, like an instinct of our breed. What is fine and valiant in Mr. Kundera is the enormous struggle not to be characterized as a writer by his exile and by his nation's disenfranchisement, even though they are the conditions his nose is rubbed in by Czechoslovak history. He works with cunning and wit and elegiac sadness to express "the trap the world has become," and this means he wants to reconceive not only narrative but the language and history of politicized life if he is to accord his experience the dimensions of its tragedy. This is in direct contrast to the problem of the American writer who must remember not to write of life as if it had no political content whatsoever. We can hope, with Milan Kundera, not to enact one of his elegant paradoxes in our separate choices and discover that either one leads to the same exhausted end.

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Milan Kundera Interview ALAIN FINKIELKRAUT

Alain Finkielkraut: To the best of my knowledge, you are the only Eastern European writer in the emigration to the West who objects to the term "dissident." Why? Milan Kundera: I am allergic to today's political terminology and I don't make use of it. A.F.: But it certainly seems that public opinion, which for a long time remained cold toward critics of the East, has been warmed up so to speak by the word "dissident." In France, one even has the impression that the success of dissidence is primarily due to the name it has been given. The word is as popular today as militant and guerilla were in the past. M.K.: Yes, words act more through their magic than through their rational content. Before the election, I saw the debates on French television: the Left sang the praises of Socialism and defended its desire co set up a collective system. The Right sec everyone on guard against collectivism, and was careful not co attack the untouchable word Socialism. Actually, these two words mean the same thing and the politicians were behaving like magicians: they hid behind the sacred word and cried to label the other word evil. For-you are right about this-words are important: every historical event begins with a struggle centered on naming. The South Vietnamese who fought against the Americans were called patriots. The Afghans who opposed the Russian invasion were called rebels. As far as naming is concerned, one finds a world-wide consensus about the future of an event, and chis is how the Afghans came to be forsaken in advance: it is nearly a foregone conclusion chat the patriots will one day regain control of their country while the rebels will lose their rebellion. A.F.: It is the magical nature of political vocabulary which offends you then? M.K.: Political thought is capable of rendering only a very small part of reality. And given its present vocabulary, it is not even able co understand the political events themselves. Russia and Hungary are two Communist countries. But one wants co dominate the world, while the ocher is dominated. The regime of one is supported by the population, the ocher is almost unaniTranslated by Susan Huston. Cross Currents 20 (1982): 15-29. Reprinted by permission

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mously contested. Political thought, clouded by the idea of political system, credits this substantial difference with no more than parenthetical significance. It sees nothing of what goes on behind the scenes in political systems: not the concrete life of the individual, the destinies of nations, not the cultural transformations, nor the great collisions of civilizations-Moslem, Russian, Chinese, Western, etc.-which have different visions of man and the world, of time and of death. A.F.: You are surely thinking of what is happening in Iran. I agree that our usual analyses-poverty, exploitation, the class struggle-cannot explain very much. M.K.: Certainly not. But one can look back to Europe for an example. I could point to the popular sentiment of the Czechs on the first day of the Russian invasion in 1968 for instance: that visceral horror did not come from the fact that Dubcek's reforms were finished, but from that infinite void that could be sensed behind the faces of the Russian soldiers, from that strangeness of a civilization that thinks differently, feels differently, has a different destiny, lives in a different historical time-a civilization that came to swallow us up into its own eternity. Political regimes are ephemeral, but the frontiers of civilizations are traced by centuries. A.F.: But wasn't the fate of Czechoslovakia sealed twenty years earlier, in 1948, when the pro-Soviet regime was set up? M.K.: Certainly. But little by little, our life force itself, the originality of the country, the traditions of its millennial history-a western historybegan to break down the system that had been imported from Russia, to transform it inwardly. A.F.: And it culminated twenty years later in the famous reformism of Dubcek. M.K.: Politicians played a secondary role in this process. The best one might say about the most attractive among them is that they were sincerely though awkwardly attentive to the popular movement. The greatness of the era of the '60's and the Prague Spring does not lie in the politics of the times (which were incompetent and destroyed everything in the end), but with the culture. Culture in the broadest sense of the term: not only the arts and sciences, but the overall behavior of the people, its tradition of tolerance, of humor and of freedom. This culture attacked the imported political structure in order to fill it with its own contents, to invest it with another meaning. The social organizations (unions, professional organizations, the writers' union, etc.), originally set up to communicate the will of the party, liberated themselves and constituted a very original democratic system which functioned without planification. These years marked an extraordinary flowering of Czech culture. The West, which is no longer capable of conceiving of this culture as anything other than an appendage to the political system, never understood what happened in Czechoslovakia before 1968. It never under-

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stood the massacre of Czech culture that was the most incredible consequence of the Russian invasion in 1968 either. A.F.: In any case, a liquidation of the rebel culture, a disciplining of the opposition has been referred to. You do not agree with this analysis then? M.K.: No. It wasn't the culture of the opposition that was killed; it was culture in general. Everything that was important, authentic and of value had to be destroyed. A half million Czechs were put out of jobs. About two hundred writers, including the very best, were not only prevented from publishing, but their books were taken away from all public libraries and their names were erased from history books. One hundred forty-five Czech historians were removed from their posts. Instead of forty literary and cultural journals, there was only one. The great Czech cinema disappeared. Political and cultural history was rewritten: there are no traces of Franz Kafka left, nor ofT. G. Masaryk, who in 1918 founded the Czechoslovakian Republicthere is nothing left that Russian totalitarianism would find hard to swallow. If we consider the '60's as the period of the progressive westernization of a Socialism imported from the East, then the Russian invasion of '68 marked the definitive moment of cultural colonization of a western country. All that has characterized the West since the time of the Renaissance (yes, that Renaissance that Solzhenitsyn disliked so}--tolerance, a methodical doubt, a plurality of thought, the personal nature of art (and of man too, of course}-all this is destined to disappear there. And all this brain-washing, far from being simply a provisional measure, is part of a long-lived, patient and coherent strategy designed to move a country into the sphere of another civilization. A.F.: Right now, it is as if the West believed it was born with the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism, consumer society-Westerners always describe themselves in terms of political economics. For you, the West is not reducible to this definition then? M.K.: My country is not capitalist, nor do I think it wants to become so again. And yet, it is an old Western European country and it wishes to retain this identity. The West constitutes a common history, a common culture. But the cultural dimension has dropped out of the contemporary vision of the world. In the ridiculous theater of allegory that today's political thinking represents, it is the West that plays the role of the colonialist. That is why the idea of a colonized West does not enter into the current system of symbols, and why this idea is poorly grasped today and refused. Not only is my country a colonized form of Western Europe, but it is even a colonized West that has in turn never colonized anyone else. A.F.: Colonized West: these are two words which I have in fact never seen joined. We have grown so accustomed to equating the West with Power, the West with Imperialism, that the concept of a colonized West is almost unthinkable for us.

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M.K.: The big western countries identify themselves too easily with the values belonging to the entire West, and they also attribute their own sins too easily to the entire West. But the West is also made up of little nations who have no reason to feel guilty for the crimes of the larger countries and who have the right to defend their western culture without remorse. In 1956, just a few minutes before his office was destroyed by artillery, the director of the Hungarian news agency sent a desperate telex message out to the world telling about the Russian offensive that had begun that morning. The communication ended with these words: ''We will die for Hungary and for Europe." No one grasped this pronouncement less well than Europe itself. In the non-occupied West, it is not understood that Europe is capable of standing for values that one can still die for. A.F.: You have written somewhere that the Prague Spring was a "popular revolt of the moderates." Yet among intellectuals, for whom moderation- as a synonym for inertia or middle-of-the-road-is above all a bourgeois vinue, this idea cannot help but cause a scandal. M.K.: After awhile, the European Left accepted the Prague Spring and listed it along with its other positive symbols. In order to do this, it was invested with a lyrical aura borrowed from Paris' May. This was a very generous offer, but it covered over the originality of the event. What we saw in Paris was a fascinating burst of revolutionary lyricism, still being nourished by the beauty of the images and slogans of the Surrealists. The Prague Spring on the other hand was the explosion of a post-revolutionary skepticism. In the course of this movement, which was not just the spark of a springtime, but of the entire period of the '60's, the rigid power structures were taken apart, the lyrical demagogy of the idealogues was ridiculed, all that was hard was softened, all that was too heavy was lightened. This is why the popular climate in Prague during the '60's was so very much more tolerant, antidoctrinaire, ironic, gay and libertarian than what I find today in the West, which is humorless, serious, susceptible to all the formal temptations and all the lyrical demagogy. A.F.: Everyone in the West will be asking you if this was a movement of the Left or the Right. M.K.: The division between Left and Right does not make a great deal of sense when you are confronted with a totalitarianism that is the negation of pluralism---0f the pluralism of the Left as well as of the Right, that is. This is why the Marxists and the anti-Marxists, the Christians and atheists worked together so well in the popular resistance to events in Czechoslovakia. It often seems to me that the Czechoslovakian situation represents a magnification of the situation in the West in general: the Left fights the Right, the Right. fights the Left, but it is in fact their commonly-shared civilization, founded on tolerance and open dialogue, which will be mortally endangered in the world of tomorrow.

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What I experienced in Prague represented for me an enormous demystification of the symbols that dominate our century and a rejection of the vocabulary that kept us under its spell. A.F.: Does this apply only to you? Not to us? M.K.: You are included too, certainly. But you do not rid yourselves of these things so easily. I have the experience of Stalin behind me and this shocked me into understanding that ideological language is a mystification. The linguistic revolt, the suspicion about words has come from this. I would never say "Afghan rebels." I know all of these language tricks far too well. I don't even like to say "the Soviets." What are the Soviets? A nation? A religion? A race? And what do they have in common with the Soviets who are not in their own country? It is a cover-word to make us forget about the nations that have been Russified, name and all. Every evil comes from the moment when a false word is accepted. Capitulation begins there. One can make compromises with people, but never with words! A.F.: The demystification you speak of was especially connected to Marx, wasn't it? M.K.: More with the spirit that results from the everyday language of Marxism: the total reduction ofthe world to its political signification alone. Interestingly, the so-called Right participates in this Marxist heritage as much as the so-called Left does. One month after the Russian invasion of 1968, I came to Paris where The Joke had just appeared. I had lunch with a well-known intellectual whom I admired very sincerely because of the violent and brilliant articles he had written about the occupation of my country. He was a bit astonished to learn that I would be ready to return to my country in a few days. He found this courageous of me, and after thinking for a few seconds, asked me a strange question: ''Are there forests in Czechoslovakia?" I said: "Yes, there are." He said: "Well then you can live in the forests. During the German Occupation, our Maquis lived in the forests too." I don't know how well you can appreciate the absurdiry of his thought. At the time, Dubcek was still in power, though his power was precarious, and we wanted to stay and support him. We didn't want to run into the forests. But above all, the thought that in a small, overpopulated Czechoslovakia, occupied by the army and the Russian police, a resistance movement could have been formed in the forests revealed such ignorance that it seemed incredible to me coming from a man who gave me political lessons about what was happening in our homeland and about the importance of those events. Actually, there are a great many articles on the Prague Spring, but they lack historical, sociological and cultural knowledge-they lack all knowledge of reality. One of the lyric illusions of our time is that political discussion leads directly to the heart of the real. This is not true. Political thought such as it is today is the new ivory tower.

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A.F.: But this ivory tower is also a tower of power. M.K.: And that's where the problem lies. The real problems of this planet (problems of food, population, nature, overwhelming technology, problems of cultures and the dialogue between them) remain untouched, while the pseudo-problems (of ideology and doctrine), manufactured in the tower, are taking over the world. As a result, we have the impression of being at the mercy of a false history based on false problems, while the true history remains by the wayside, forgotten and unrealized. A.F.: But to look at the distance between us now and the '60's, can we continue to criticize politics as if it were still the primary principle of existence? What seems to be the catalytic principle now is not Marx's "change the world"-it's the more timely and prosaic "right to" principle. For several years, it's been as if the cult of policies had been replaced by manifestations with more precise objectives: the right to abortion, to refuse the construction of nuclear planes, the right to better working conditions, the right co allow foreign students to study in France, etc. M.K.: In France, perhaps. But even in France, if there is a demonstration today to have the "right co," there is just as much pathos as if the demonstration were for large changes. What remains of Marxism , and what will remain for a long time, is not the rational thought of Marx, but the system of symbols which acts unconsciously like archetypes and which is not easily gotten rid 0£ There is a well-known term: class struggle. It points co a social fact and at the same time sanctifies the verb "co struggle." We can forget the class struggle more easily than we can forget our admiration of struggle itse1£ Struggle has become a value, so much so chat it is through fighting that people want to accomplish their lives: women struggle, high school students struggle, we all struggle for self-realization, we struggle with blisters that come from sitting through boring meetings, we have replaced dialogue with ideological struggle, etc .... The lyric aura surrounding the word struggle adds an irrational and impotent form of aggression to attitudes that are relatively rational. In Prague, members of Chapter 77, who have been heavily persecuted, try in vain to persuade the government to talk with chem. Western intellectuals refuse to speak with their democratically-elected government, because they are fighting. A.F.: What you are saying makes me think of a youth's remark at Sartre's funeral. It was reported with a great deal of fervor by a journalist: "We've hardly read his books. But we know his work must be continued; we must hold on to hope and fight." Fight what? Nothing: just fight. Nothing counts aside from this urgency: not even reading the immense works of the person being honored counts. M.K.: Marxism was the grandiose attempt to explain the world in terms of total rationality. Having failed, it picked up a lyre and descended into the irrational, just as Orpheus did. It has become a symbolic system, a kind of poetry, of beauty.

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A single stanza of this poetry has hypnotized our entire era: the idea that the human era is divided into two parts prehistory (the realm of necessity where man is at the mercy of unknown laws) and true history beginning with the proletarian revolution (when man finally becomes master of his destiny). Throughout half a century, we have lived under the spell of this very beautiful, very attractive idea: the entire artistic avant-garde, with its dream of complete liberation from tradition, was born in the light of this great image of Marx. But the little tricks that history plays are nasty: at the time of their prehistory, man and the nations enjoyed a certain possibility of mastering their destiny. On the other hand, from a time coinciding more or less with the October Revolution, we entered the age of determinism and of total dependence. Man learns that he is master of neither nature nor his civilization, of neither history nor himself. But if man is not the master, where then is the master? The happy atheism of the past is replaced by the melancholic atheism of . our own time. A.F.: You have mentioned the word "lyric" several times in a negative context. And this seems to me to be the heart of your own very original contribution to the critique of totalitarianism. Traditionally, criticism has developed along two lines: criticism of the totalitarian practices carried out in the name of the true principles of Communism; criticism of the Communist philosophy itself seen as totalitarian monster. Trotsky or Solzhenitsyn. But you say: there is also a poetry of totalitarianism. In your novel La Vie eJI aiiieurs (Life Is Elsewhere), you speak of Stalinism as if it were an era where "the poet reigned along with the executioner." If the New Philosophers find the roots of the Gulag in Fichte and Hegel, you yourself find them in poetry. Isn't that so? M.K.: No civilization and no ideology has a monopoly on totalitarianism. Its roots are anthropological. Each of us has had the experience of totalitarian practice within the social microcosms (the family, the army); each of us knows the totalitarian temptation. The dream of a community where everyone is moved by one and the same desire, one and the same faith, where no one keeps a secret from anyone else, is an archetype that is found in all religions and in each one of us. Andre Breton sang the praises of the house of glass where all that is private is public. Franz Kafka created the world where K. loses all that is intimate; he is even followed and scrutinized in his bed. The abolition of the private realm is paradise for Breton; it looks more like hell in Kafka's world. But we are dealing here with two faces of a single archetype, which is paradisiacal and hellish at the same time. What I hold against the critique of totalitarianism is its simplistic Manicheanism. Totalitarianism is seen solely as the embodiment of evil. This critique leaves all the "poetry" that is linked to this evil and constantly engenders it intact. The Gulag is condemned and a new house of glass is

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sought elsewhere. Bue when it is located, there will still be people who do not want to live there and consequently a new little camp for chem co one side. Totalitarianism is not a Gulag; it is an idyllic house of glass, with the Gulag put co one side. Totalitarianism is the fruit of Manicheanism, and the preachers of Manicheanism are angels, not devils. That is why I am distrustful of the pure ones who criticize the diabolic side of totalitarianism and forget about its angelic side. Since the Romantic era and particularly since the time of Surrealism, the idea of poetry has become a sacred, inviolable value. No human attitude lacks a substantial dose of ambiguity. Jaromil, the hero of Life Is Elsewhere, denounces his girl friend co the police, not as a devil, but as an angel. His is the most authentic form of lyric exaltation: he has the impression of going beyond himself, of identifying himself with something that is greater than he is. Paul Eluard publicly and solemnly approved the death sentence of his friend Zavis Kalandra, the Czech Surrealist. He did chis with all the pathos of an archangel of poetry. A.F.: But wasn't it the party chat was speaking in him rather than poetry? M.K.: Eluard's murderous proclamation is linked co all the poetry he wrote at chis time-poetry exalting peace, the future, and the angelic nature of the society's house of glass. The totalitarianism of the '50's was not just oppression alone. le was not by means of its execution poses chat it attracted the masses, the young, the intelligentsia. It was by its smile. We tend co forget chis today; we are ashamed of chis. We no longer say: the bloody totalitarianism of the '50's had a poetry chat we succumbed co. If we blame it on the Gulag, we feel pardoned. If we speak of the poetry of totalitarianism, we remain implicated in the scandal. A.F.: Was the verdict of Eluard known in Czechoslovakia at the time? M.K.: Zavis Kalandra was hung in 1950. A few days before, Eluard approved his execution. It was then chat I met Konstantin Biebl, the great Czech poet of Surrealist inspiration, for the first time. It was he who told me, with a horrified look in his eyes, about Eluard's declaration. One year lacer, Biebl could no longer put up with the burden of Scalinism and he threw himself out a window. In 1952, I published my first volume of poetry, In Memory of Konstantin Biehl, and there my long dispute about the angels and the pure ones began. In 1978, I returned co the story of Eluard and Kalandra in my novel Le Livre du rire et de /'oub/i (The Book of Laughter and Forgetfa/ne.ss}. My citizenship was taken away because of chis book. The circle was completed. A.F.: Konstantin Biebl must have been a different kind of poetic ideal for you, an anci-Eluard. M.K.: Biebl was also a Communist and at the time he wrote poetry chat had about the same orientation as Eluard's. Bue the horrifying and direct experiences of someone coming from Prague (experiences chat Eluard could

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not have had) woke him up and crushed him. Understand me well now: if I speak of this episode now, it is not to blacken the name of Eluard, but to understand more fully the lyrical dimension of man. It isn't the story itself that is of interest to a novelist; it is the human condition unmasked in the course of an historic situation. A.F.: You have showed how lyrical enthusiasm is an integral part of the totalitarian sickness. But you seem to contradict yourself in Farewell Party, since it is Jakub, the sceptic, the wise one, the one who has survived all, the man who is disgusted by the aggression of the world, who commits a strange murder. M.K.: Jakub is a sceptic; he knows that those who are persecuted become the persecutors and that it is easy to imagine this role reversal; lyric gestures do not move him; he has seen too much and lived through too much to be able to love people. It's a matter of just a split second when his reason falters, when his unconscious disgust and hatred of people wells up: an innocent young girl dies. A.F.: It seems to me that intellectuals today are leaning more toward J akub than toward J aromil. They total up all their disillusionments, and announce that they will not be caught off guard again. Jakub didn't consider himself a hero, but these sceptics have added the same love of system to their new incredulity as they did to their former religion. M.K.: There are some people who raise their fists, take everything seriously, and open themselves to the idea of sacrificing the life of another in the name of the sacred cause. And there are others who, observing their agitation, see only senseless pantomime in it. This is what Jakub does. Remember that he experiences the unbearable weightlessness of all things, including murder. You can see how it is that the two extremes (lyricism and scepticism, the angelic and the diabolical, seriousness and non-seriousness) in certain circumstances become accomplices of death. There is no path that man can choose which will allow him to avoid this complicity for sure. A.F.: But it seems to me that the "melancholic atheism" ofJakub is very close to you on a personal level. Laughable Loves, which you wrote when you were still in Prague, bathes in this kind of melancholy-one in fact that seems rather joyous to me. Your characters take nothing seriously and live through some beautiful adventures, as if they owed their scepticism to the richness or the gayness of their erotic lives. M.K.: The erotic climate in Prague is certainly more intense than here. There, eroticism has become the only arena for freedom and self-realization. Politics, with its interminably futile aura of seriousness, has acted like a vaccine. The habit of taking seriousness seriously has been undone, and beneath the cover of official mortality, a hedonism and a wise light-heartedness reign. I know you are going to smile at this, but when I left Czechoslovakia, I had the impression that I was leaving an erotic paradise that I would never find again. Here, eroticism is much more conventional and prudish, the family

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more sacred, despite the appearance of much-proclaimed liberated mores. This liberalization is hardly hedonistic at all. le is ideological. It is demonstrative, a verbal tic. The more one claims pleasure as a motto, as a plan, as a concept, the less one finds it in life. A.F.: What you are saying makes me chink of Jakub again. Doesn't he leave his country, just as you did, with feelings of both regret and relief? M.K.: I finished the novel at a time when I hadn't the slightest thought of leaving Czechoslovakia, and Jakub is not a self-portrait. Bue it is true chat his skepticism is closer to me on a personal level than the faith of his rival, Bercleff And even so, in che course of my work on the text, Jakub became continually more problematic, and Bercleff more likeable. I wrote chis novel counter co myself, so co speak. Moreover, I believe chat chis is how one writes novels. If the novel is successful, it muse necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. The novel either outdoes its author or it is worthless. When Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina, he wanted co condemn chis adulterous woman. Fortunately, the wisdom of the novel greatly surpassed its author's. A.F.: You speak of the wisdom of che novel. This means chat the novel, for you, is more than one genre among many, doesn't it? M.K.: The novelistic exercise consists in creating characters. Therefore, it is a confrontation between different value systems, between different visions of the world; ic is a reconstruction of che substantial relativity of the human world, of chat rich, enigmatic and marvelous relativity which is constantly being negated by the ideological spirit and its single form of truth. A.F.: You feel chat che novel cannot be in service co a form of truth chat goes beyond it, chat is more important than it then? M.K.: I have never come across chis truth. A.F.: I might bring co mind for you Andre Gide's line: "I chink chat chis is a time when such important events are developing chat one is almost ashamed co devote oneself co literature." M.K.: This is che well-known complex suffered by people in che arcs when confronted by policies. A.F.: You do noc suffer from this complex? M.K.: How could I? My books are banned from che Elbe all che way co the Pacific Ocean. Nothing frees you of chis kind of complex better than persecution. I would like co paraphrase Gide: if such important events are developing, there is nothing more urgent than co prolong the life of literature and ics complete independence. Otherwise, one will be crushed by che machine of political and ideological simplification- a machine which runs terribly rapidly in times of such great events. A.F.: Bue aren't your books themselves crushed by chis machine when they are simplified through incerprecacion?

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M.K.: Of course. In the West, my first novel, The Joke, was clearly understood to be a denunciation of Stalinism. I have too much respect for the novel to use it as an illustration of such a truism. But literary criticism is almost non-existent these days, and novels are at the mercy of the journalists and the minor ideologues of the day-at the mercy of these workers of reduc. tton. A.F.: Is it entirely political reduction you are speaking of? M.K.: Man is reduced to his social function; the work of art is reduced to its meaning; the history of humankind is reduced to a series of events, which are in turn reduced to a preconceived interpretation. This institutional reduction which neither the East nor the West escapes from, finds its companion piece in the reduction that becomes a pan of the human condition; the greatest love ends up being reduced to a skeleton of puny memories; a miracle of the concrete realm vanishes behind an abstract resume. Life is constantly chipped away by these reductive forces, and the work of the novelist is a Don Quixote-like effort to defend man from reduction, to recreate the small imaginary world that has the freshness of an unexpected question. A.F.: For you, the novel is a question that is addressed to the world. You do not wish to answer the question. But who will answer instead of you? M.K.: Idiots. They are always ready to answer. Idiocy is the total inability to frame a question; it's the total ability to answer all. A.F.: But the texts that you write are related to both the novel and the essay. An essay, however, even if it strives toward subtlety and nuance, can never avoid dogmatism or assertion. Doesn't that contradict the primary task of the novel, which is, as you have said, to express the substantial relativity of the world? Why have you wanted to combine these two kinds of writing, which are a bit like water and oil, and how do you go about reconciling the unreconcilable? M.K.: The desire to incorporate reflections of great intellectual significance in the novel is as old as the novel itself. You find it in Cervantes, you find it in Robert Musil or Thomas Mann: the thoughts of their characters are often excellent essays. But this method presupposes characters of an exceptional intellectual level. Hermann Broch, who concentrated instead on the irrational forces that guide people's behavior as if by remote control, could not follow the same path. His intellectual ambition manifested itself differently: in the third part of The Sleepwalkers (one of the novels that I admire most), he included an essay on the degradation ofvalues, written in difficult and theoretical language. It is a magnificent essay, but I am not sure that it is an integral part of the rest of the text; as you were saying, it constitutes a dogmatic component of the novel, representing the truth of the author. Personally, I think that intellectual reflection (essay) can be an organic part of the novel if it remains respectful of the substantial relativity of the novelistic world--or to put it another way, if it replaces dogmatism with irony, if it plays the role of buffoon rather than sage, if the reader never knows for sure

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what is being said seriously and what is not, whether the remarks are hypothetical or thetical, if they resemble more closely the aphorisms of Lichtenberg or the reflections of Jaspers. A.F.: This seems to be the case in your latest book. But what about the musicological passages in The joke? C.Ouldn't we speak of thesis in regard to them? M.K.: These pages represent neither the truth of the author, nor the resume of the book, but they do tell the paradoxical story of folk music in the context of Utopian Socialism. Ideas, ideologies, concepts, utopias have stories which are hardly less grotesque, odd, bizarre, and romanesque than the stories of men. This is why I could hardly imagine a novel without a scientific or philosophic component. A.F.: In the course of our conversation, you have mentioned Hermann Broch and Robert Musil. I know how much you love Bartok, Gombrowicz, and ltalo Svevo. I could add Jaroslav Hasek or Milos Forman, your student in Prague, to the list. There are several things you all have in common, particularly the same allergic reaction to the hero. And you all come from the same part of Europe. Does this constitute a specific tradition for you? M.K.: Gustav Mahler wrote a farewell song to a world that was disappearing. Musil, in The Man without Qualities, speaks of a society that, without knowing it, has no future. Hermann Broch understood contemporary history in terms of a breakdown of values. Kafka conceived of the world as an infinite bureaucratic labyrinth, in which man is hopelessly lost. Jaroslav Hasek's brave soldier Svejk imitates the ceremonies of the surrounding world with such zeal that he transforms them into an enormous joke. In this activity, which could hardly be less heroic, Hasek finds a last trace of freedom. It is from Central Europe that a lucid form of scepticism has arisen in the midst of our era of illusions. It is a scepticism that is attributable to the experience of an extremely concentrated history: we have seen the collapse of a great empire in the course of our century, the awakening of nations, democracy, fascism, we have seen the Nazi occupation, the glimmer of Socialism, massive deportations, the Stalinist reign of terror and its downfall, and finally, we have seen the most essential thing of all-the death throes of the West within our own countries and before our own eyes. This is why I am always shocked by the perfidious vocabulary that has transformed Central Europe into the East. Central Europe represents the destiny of the West, in concentrated form. A.F.: It also represents the cradle of all the great cultural experiments of modern times: psychoanalysis, structuralism (born in Prague), the twelvetone system, Bartok, Kafka, Witkiewicz' theater of the absurd.. . . M.K.: Yet Central Europe no longer exists. The three wise men of Yalta split it in two and condemned it to death. They didn't give a damn about whether it was a question of a great culture or not. A.F.: A great culture ... and you feeling like one of its last survivors? M.K.: Yes.

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Journey into the Maze: An Interview with Milan Kundera FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY

Francine du Plessix Gray: Milan, your last work, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is probably the most passionately admired European novel to appear in the United States in several years. And its central theme is expressed in the title's last word- "Forgetting." You seem to imply that one of the most tragic features of our times--on both sides of the Iron Curtainis our tendency towards personal and cultural amnesia. Is this cycle of forgetting a result of political forces, or technological ones? Milan Kundera: Definitely technological. I see it as a human condition whose causes are deeper and more complex than those of any communist or capitalist ideology, and which depend to a great extent on the conditions of the post-industrial age. Television, the media, technology in general are the major instruments of forgetting. One must remember that the technological age represents an extremely advanced stage of our civilization. Our civilization is very, very old, and this mass of time passed is becoming a problem for us. How can we retain the past, remember it, understand it all? Yet the greatest evil confronting us daily is the forgetting of past values; it's in great part the cause of that dehumanization whose beginnings Kafka perceived. When people begin to forget their past they begin to lose the best part of themselves. Paradoxically, in the mass of information that the technological age brings, memory is lost at ever greater rapidity. We're bombarded by too much banal information that totally fails ever to remind us of our past . . FG: I find it striking that in the tragedy of amnesia you describe in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting women are the only preservers of memory. Tamina is obsessed by the need to retrieve her husband's lost letters, to remember all the pet names her husband called her, because "the past is growing paler and paler." The same theme dominates the book's second chapter, where the young protagonist's mother keeps insisting that the pears ripening on the fruit trees in the summer of 1968 were more important than the tanks invading Czechoslovakia that year. Don't those letters and those Translated from rhe French by Susan M. Srour. Copyright © I 98 2 by Francine du Plessix Gray. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for rhe au thor. Originally appeared in Vogue.

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pear trees stand for a matriarchal memory, a tribal memory, a principle of fertility and procreation that are more important than tanks? Do these metaphors express a view of womanhood you' re conJciously aware of? MK: I must confess that I was not aware of all that while I was writing the book. I was not consciously making women guardians of memory in my theater of forgetting. But now that you put it that way I quite agree that it waJ my meaning-women are the guardians of a memory you might call subhistorical, the memory of things that fall outside the major events of recorded history but are of infinitely greater importance than those official events we' re taught in books and classrooms. FG: One of the most striking early assertions in your last book is that "the struggle of man against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting." Could it be that women have held onto memory because until recently we were the ones who were without power, and we only had memory to give meaning to our lives? MK: Absolutely so. Yet again, you're forcing me to reread my own text; nothing was as consciously articulated as all that while I was writing the book. FG: Those readers who love you the most in the United States call your work profoundly pessimistic and conservative. And, in view of the tremendous importance you attach to retaining our memory of the past, your wariness of technology, your distrust of the future, one might indeed call you an extremely conservative writer. Do you accept that label? MK: Yes, but only on the condition that we redefine the term "conservative." If you consider the etymology of the word it means "to preserve things, to preserve values." So in our times this conservative position that seeks to preJerve, to save in the face of accelerating amnesia is in fact very nonconformist. Therefore it is the absolute opposite of the word "conservative" as it is used in politics, where it always refers to someone who is highly conformist. Conformity in our time is the forgetting of the past. One might even say that those who acquiesce to the banal status quo of the present are the reactionaries, while those who oppose the deterioration of life by preserving the memory of the past might be the radicals. FG: Okay. Let me persevere with the radical-conservative paradoxes of your work. I find your view of sexuality as conservative as your emphasis on the primacy of pear trees over tanks. There is an almost obsessive fixation on the sex act in your last two books; rarely has a writer been so metaphysically obsessed with sexuality since Sade, yet the sex is generally sad, tragic, cynical, empty, leading only to misunderstandings and an increased sense of the absurd. Would you agree that both these books are variations on the absurdity of the sex act? MK: Hmmmm. I'm not sure .... FG: Take Jan, in the final episode of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, who at the age of thirteen already "knew what it meant to be bored with the female body." Or Tamina's determination to remain untouched by men after

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her husband's death in order to better preserve his memory. Or your marvelously derisive descriptions of the group sex which thrives with equal cynicism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. All that gives me a highly accurate and moral picture of sexuality in our time, but a very puritanical one .. . . MK: Ah there, there I must stop you. Your observation is well-founded but it's something of a shock when you use the term puritanical. In reality I am not a dissatisfied puritan but rather a dissatisfied hedonist. I'm a hedonist who is dissatisfied with contemporary approaches to eroticism. One of the central motifs of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I suppose, is the nostalgia for a lost eroticism .... FG: Are you talking about our loss of taboos? MK: Of course. True eroticism can only exist when there is a certain tension between that which is taboo and the possibility of going against that taboo. And that's one of the gravest errors of the present movement towards sexual liberation. We're surrounded by false liberators who think they're taking a stand against puritan morality, when in fact they're destroying eroticism. J use think of the taboo lifted from nudity. The real catastrophe there is for the hedonist, not for the puritan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting raises the tragic possibility of the end of all eroticism, and I think this end is possibly very near. FG: Somewhat as in your book's final image, when you write about the French nudists on the beach, "their genitals staring dully, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand." MK: Precisely. FG: I noticed that one of the few happy moments in your book occurs when a woman-Edwige-says to her lover that the sex act has very little importance except as a confirmation of friendship. And her lover is blissfully relieved to hear her say it. And one of the few redemptive moments in the novel occurs in its last chapter, when Jan goes to see his dying friend, Passer. Are you saying that our culture is putting undue stress on the importance of a sexuality that has gone scale through de-eroticization and overlooking the importance of friendship in our lives? MK: Yes ... now that you say it, Jan's act of friendship at the book's end gives a balance to the entire story, makes that ending possible .. .. without it all would be coo harsh. FG: You keep being taken aback by the assumptions I draw from your book. So you may be shocked again when I tell you how profoundly pessimistic your work strikes me, disturbingly pessimistic. One feels that you've left one sort of hell-that of authoritarian socialism-to enter the inferno of Western permissiveness, a terrain almost as devastating to human relationships as the authoritarianism you've left behind. You give us no hope. You give us No Exit. MK: I didn't think I was gloomier than ocher writers. I certainly have very few illusions about the world we live in.

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FG: What interests me is that the ocher dissidents who've crossed co us from the Iron Curtain-I'm chinking of Joseph Brodsky for instance find such a paradise in the Free West that they keep defending it against all criticism. Whereas you seem as critical of the culture of the Free West, with its nudist permissiveness, its hedonism, the chic nonsense of its French structuralist theories, as you were of the Socialism you left behind .... MK: Perhaps. I must attack snobbism everywhere. FG: Moreover the ocher great pessimistic writers of the centuryKafka, Bruno Schulz, Beckett express an almost religious resignation co the world's absurdity which is metamorphosed into a kind of cosmic humor. And another great pessimist exile, Nabokov, at least offers us a philosophy of redemption through art. You don't even give us that. Do you really think the situation is so hopeless? MK: These are very delicate questions. When one starts explaining certain issues too clearly they're suddenly rendered simplistic; such oversimplification can destroy a book. You see, I don't like literature chat is "philosophical" in the sense that the philosophy precedes the work, which is the case in the novels of Camus or Sartre or even Malraux. You always have the feeling that their philosophy preceded their work .... FG: That their the.re precedes their roman? MK: Exactly. They scare with a thesis, a very clear vision of the world, and go on to describe it. I don't much like chat sort of literature because I always feel these writers are discovering nothing that they didn't know already. I've always felt that Camus didn't say much in The Stranger which he hadn't already said previously in The Myth of Sisyphus. All the writers I've mentioned are men who have a clearly defined philosophical system. That's not at all true of me. Although I read philosophy and much enjoy asking myself philosophical questions, I can't say that I have a fixed and exact system of opinion or a distinct and certain vision of the world. I only have a host of questions co ask about it. So I may be very pessimistic, but I prefer to remain ambiguous about it. Furthermore I'm always a little surprised by what I write, since it's not only my opinions but also my more subconscious thoughts that determine my work. So I stand a chance of always being surprised by my own text, no? I can even be surprised by my own pessimism and ask myself why, right? FG: You' re hinting at the possibility that the difference between mediocre art and great art might be that in the best art the artist surprises himself MK: Yes. Tha.c·s exactly right. The essence of the good novelist is co surprise himself. FG: And you prefer to remain equally ambiguous in your political views. You' re equally wary of expressing your ideas within any established framework of ideology.

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MK: Quite so. Ideologically I'm an agnostic, a skeptic. And perhaps unlike Brodsky or Solzhenitsyn, as you suggest, I'm neither prosocialist or antisocialist, I'm equally skeptical of Marxist and anti-Marxist vocabularies. FG: Yet your early training as a young Marxist keeps feeding you the metaphors about good and evil chat abound in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, metaphors which ironically are also drawn from religious imagery, such as the "angels" which recur in your novel. Were you raised in a Catholic or a Protestant family? MK: I came from a family of atheists who were not in any way allergic co religion. Lee's say they were not true atheists, but more simply agnostics. Paradoxically, because of chat, and because I saw religious belief persecuted in my country, I've always felt a considerable interest in religion and theology, and even a great fondness for it, without myself being able co believe. You might almost call it the love of a non-believer for religion. And what I've read of theology would fall into the Catholic rather than the Protestant cradicion--Sc. Augustine, Sc. Thomas, and further back than chat. FG: Could you explain the paradoxical metaphors in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in which the so-called angels stand for the forces of evil? MK: I'm always struggling against our culture's overly simplistic view of good and evil. I believe there's a considerable conspiracy between the two. Much evil begins as great faith in the good. In the case of communist ideology, for example, I consider it an "angelic" ideology which promised universal good, universal morality, the solution co all of mankind's problems ... in its early revolutionary state it was an ideology chat saw itself as highly poetic, it produced a society with a great deal of charm ... then all of a sudden the song of the so-called angels became diabolical. . . . To anyone who knows the events of the last few decades in Czechoslovakia, don't you chink I've made myself clear? FG: Perhaps coo clear for your comfort. Could you talk about ocher important early influences on your writing, besides the communise ideology chat pervaded your youth and your reading of theology? MK: Well one of the reasons why I feel so comfortable in France is chat my initiation into art, when I was very, very young-say twelve, fifteen years old--came solely through French modern art. The first great influence on my development was my encounter with Surrealism, the French brand of it. Lacer I was very strongly drawn co French novelises writing before the nineteenth century, whose approach co the novel was entirely different from chat of Balzac and his successors. Their idea of the novel seemed much freer to me than the nineteenth-century variety. I'm chinking of Rabelais, with his enormous vitality and wealth of form. And in particular ofDideroc'sjacquer lefata/iste, a littleknown book which is one of the greatest works in the novel genre. It's much influenced by Sterne's Tristram Shandy but I thinkjacquer le fata/iste is better than Tristram Shandy; for once, it's the pastiche that outshines the original.

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FG: What sore of work schedule do you set for yourself as a writer? Do you sic down co write at a fixed time every day? MK: My schedule is highly irregular because my life is highly irregular. I work every day, but that doesn't mean I write every day. There are long periods of time when I don't write at all. I try co avoid the stereotype of the artist who works constantly. Writing can gee co be nothing more than a bad habit. The sore of writer who chinks he's obliged to write always manages co come up with something, and it can on occasion be very bad. I feel chat a writer should not write many books, chat you should limit them in number co what a reader who likes your work could reasonably be expected co read- all of which means that I've perhaps already written too many. FG: And when you're working, do you write it out by hand, or do you type? MK: I either type or dictate-to my wife, Vera. She types it out, and very fast. A whole shore story might be dictated in a day, everything, like a first impulse, so that I have an image, an idea of the whole. Later I work out the details, very slowly. That pare cakes a very long time, but first I have co have a very quick view of the whole. FG: Milan, you didn't write your first novel until the age of thirty-eight. Do you think it's better co wait a while before writing a first novel? There are so many precocious writers, particularly in the United States, who publish their first novel at twenty-two or twenty-three. Is there something to be said for beginning one's career as a novelist a little lacer in life? MK: I think so. In my opinion, the novelist stage of life begins at thircyfive. That's my personal theory, which could, of course, be disproved by writers who know how to produce good novels even earlier. One muse be fully adult to write a novel, because it requires a considerable experience of life. The novel is the art of synthesis; one must be familiar with a lot and know a lot. That's the first reason. The second is that writing a novel requires acertain attitude with regard co the world which also comes only with adulthood. It's an attitude of irony, of stepping back a bit from oneself, a certain nonegocencrism, a great curiosity regarding ochers-all of which is really not che position characteristic of a young man, who is instead always much more involved with himself, and much more lyrical, wanting co express himself I think those characteristics correspond co a certain biological age. But all this is an entirely personal theory. FG: So yours is a fairly traditional view of the novel. It should be a philosophical work which creates a world of its own and which requires a great scope of knowledge and philosophical notions as well as emotional . maturity. MK: Yes. FG: Do you have any conception, any image of your ideal reader? MK: N·o. None at all. Bue mine is quite a peculiar situation. In Prague, in the final years before the '68 invasion, I had quite a few well-defined, visu-

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alizable readers. I lost them rapidly and completely; I was suddenly without any public at all, since my existence was no longer officially recognized. Then, suddenly, I acquired a new group of readers, this time foreign. But while my public changed completely, nothing changed in my writing. Ultimately, I believe that not knowing who my readers are gave me a sort of freedom, because a writer tends subconsciously to write with those people in mind, and, subconsciously, they censor you. Devoted readers, too, can be censors. Without realizing it, you the writer are already considering public response, in particular, negative response. You start to cheat. You consider yourself as rewarded for what you have said. At the point when I lost my Czech readers, my reaction was, oddly enough, "Whew!"-one of relief. I didn't consider it to be a disaster. After that, my public came from numerous other countries; it became an entity so abstract, so vague that I couldn't even try to predict reaction or taste. Then, suddenly, I understood . . . a writer's true public must be kept completely abstract. The writer must always write for everyone, always; he wants to be understood anywhere at any time. Sartre's litterature engageethe idea of influencing a concrete, specific public-is absolutely foreign to me. It ultimately reduces literature to journalism. FG: But you can't deny that you're aware of having a new public, a large international one. MK: Yes. I am no longer in the virgin position of the writer who has no readers. I was rendered virgin by the events of '68 in Prague and remained that way until our arrival in France. During that time, I literally lived without any public whatsoever. That has all changed now that I once again know who my readers are, now that I am confronted with their concrete reactions. FG: Most contemporary novelists who're branded as experimental postmodernists, as you and ltalo Calvino are, seem to believe that the power of literature comes in great part from its power of mystification. They want to confound. They give evidence of an almost sadistic eroticism. They cast themselves into the role of sadistic lover towards their loving readers. Do you play that role? MK: No. Although I do think that the sadistic impulse is a very strong one for me too. It figures in my stories, where there may be a great deal of sadism. But I don't think it enters into my relationship with the reader. On the contrary, I prefer to be clear rather than to confound. Important issues are complicated enough. The ideas one wants to express are already so complex that one must be twice as clear to give them life. One always risks making simple things too complicated. I don't like that. I prefer instead to make clear those things which are highly complex, while retaining their full complexity. That's why I'm always a little suspicious of the contemporary writers who seek to be complicated. I suspect them of being fundamentally simplistic. FG: Milan, notwithstanding your enormous debt to French culture, and the warmth with which you've been received by a nation noted for its hostility to foreigners, there is much in your last book that is a stinging parody of

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contemporary French life, such as your pastiche of French semeiological theories in the chapter on Ionesco's RhinoceroJ. And you've described France in a recent interview [with Philip Roth, The New l'ork TimeJ Book Review] as a country "which suffers from the lack of great historic events," a country which "revels in radical ideologic postures which are the lyrical, neurotic expectations of some great deed of its own which ... will never come." Is there a streak of the perpetual satirist, parodist in you that will make you deride any culture you live in? MK: I never think of moving away from France. I'm happy here. I've been very warmly welcomed from a personal, human point of view-spectacularly so in fact. And always when I speak ill of France-because the temptation in me to criticize any culture is very, very strong-immediately afterwards I say to myself, just a minute, you're very happy here.

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Conversations with Milan Kundera JORDAN ELCRABLY

I.

WRITING

Jordan Elgrably: In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, you speak of graphomania, wherein "everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without." Graphomania is an obsession with writing books. Do you disagree, then, that writing can only be liberating and healthy, even as private therapy, as a form of self-expression? Milan Kundera: Writing is a form of therapy, yes. One writes to liberate something in oneself. However, this has nothing to do with an aesthetic value. If we confuse this sort of writing-which is entirely sympathetic and legitimate, and has its mnemonic and therapeutic functions with writing which requires a certain aesthetic, what we consider literature, we fall into graphomania. This is why I've found Roland Barthes' sentence, "Tout est ecriture," very dangerous. He suggested there is an inherent aesthetic value in everything we write. I do not believe in the principle. J.E.: You've said that the composition of the novel must be elliptic, and that one must be free "of the automatism of novel technique." Elsewhere you insisted that "the novel doesn't answer questions: it offers possibilities." Would you elaborate? M.K.: What is this "automatism of novel technique"? Let's make a comparison with music. Take for example the form of a fugue. Certain rules exist according to which we unify two or three voices into a polyphonic composition. At the conservatory, in composition class, you are taught these rules. What is more, you have a tradition of thousands of fugues already written. Thus, you might assign me a little motif as scholarly homework, and I would then write a fugue semi-automatically. This automatism of technique is the constant danger of all musical composition. But the same danger threatens all the arts, and most especially the novel. Look at the immense world production of novels! Novels are virtually beginning to write themselves; it is not the authors but the "automatism and convention of novel technique" which

©Copyright: Elgrably/Kundera. These conversations were conducted in Paris in August 1984 and April 1985. They appeared in Salmagundi 73 (Winter 1987): 3- 24 .

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writes them. An author, a true author, must therefore be constantly vigilant against this enormous weight. J.E.: Hence your wish to write a novel in the most elliptic manner possible. Does this mean that you suppress a large number of passages as you proceed at your work table? Are erasures and changes your defense system against this automatism of prose writing? M.K.: Well, it's a fact that I do eliminate a practically incredible number of pages and individual passages. To cross out what one has written is a highly creative act. I'm often shocked when Kafka's commentators (the first among them being Max Brod) quote sentences which Kafka, in his novels, had crossed through. They quote them in the same breath as writing Kafka meant for publication. Here you have a clear example of "tout est ecriture" in practice. According to Kafka's commentators, he always wrote with equal value. Now, to leave out a sentence, to understand that it's no good, that it is neither precise nor original, or that it is repetitive-this is an act of exertion which, to my mind, often demands a greater intellectual effort than to write. J.E.: You quote Hermann Broch as having said the novelist's only obligation is the quest for knowledge. Doesn't this somehow suggest that a work of art may, rather than providing aesthetic pleasure, have a quality which is void of certain beauty? M.K.: But what is aesthetic pleasure? For myself, it is the surprise I experience before something which hasn't already been said, demonstrated, seen. Why is it that Madame Bovary never fails to enchant us? Because even today this novel surprises us. It unveils that which we are not in a position to see in our daily lives. We have all met a Madame Bovary in one situation or another, and yet failed to recognize her. Flaubert unmasked the mechanism of sentimentality, of illusions; he showed us the cruelty and the aggressiveness of lyrical sentimentality. This is what I consider the knowledge of the novel. The author unveils a realm of reality that has not yet been revealed. This unveiling causes surprise and the surprise aesthetic pleasure or, in other words, a sensation of beauty. On the other hand, there exists yet another beauty: beauty outside knowledge. One describes what has already been described a thousand times over in a light and lovely manner. The beaury of "a thousand times already told" is what I deem "kitsch." And this form of description is one which the true artist should deeply abhor. And, of course, "kitsch-beauty" is the sort of beauty which has begun to invade our modern world. J.E.: On the one hand you say the novel must be able to demonstrate in a fresh approach a cenain knowledge of life. On the other you argue "the novel doesn't answer questions." But doesn't this unveiling of knowledge in novel form imply that the writer is putting forth answers? M.K.: Everyone likes to pass judgment. Even before really getting to know someone, one has already decided whether he is good or bad, even before one hears out an opinion one is generally either a panisan or an adver-

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sary. This passion for passing moral judgment, this sluggishness to get to know and understand others defines, alas, man's nature. It is the malediction of man. Now, the novel, at least as I imagine it, counters this human tendency. Above all, the novel strives to comprehend. Emma Bovary is monstrous? Yes. She's touching? Yes. In ocher words, she is ambiguous. Try to grasp the word ambiguity. If, in everyday life, I should say to you "everything you say seems ambiguous to me," it would be a reproach. Meaning you either do not want or do not know how to speak your mind succinctly. It isn't very flattering to be ambiguous, is it? And yet in the art of the novel to be ambiguous is not a weakness. The art of the novel is founded on, indeed, masters the use of, ambiguity. We could even go so far as to define che novel as the art which strives to discover and grasp the ambiguity of things and the ambiguity of the world. This explains why one must never confuse a confession with a novel! A confession shouldn't be ambiguous, it should clearly and honestly say what is on the confessor's mind. The novel is not a confession. Rather, it speaks to us of its characters and the world they inhabit. The novel's objective is to assimilate an understanding of chis kaleidoscope of characters. Each one has his own truth and each has a different view of the world. Every character has his individual conception of self and that conception differs tragically (or comically) with what he is in reality. You see, all of a sudden we find ourselves in the universe of ambiguity. Well, the novelist wants to take hold of this ambiguity and say co his reader: do not simplify the world! If you want to understand it you muse grasp it in all its complexity, in its essential ambiguity! J.E.: According co Nadine Gordimer, there are "natural" writers, those who begin writing when quite young, and socially-reactive writers, who are inspired to create out of a sense of indignation and outrage. Is your writing indicative of either of these designations, or did you come to it in another way! M.K.: I certainly do not belong in the second category. I emphasize this because my case might seem to be one of someone who began to write in order to protest against something. I belong in the first category of writers, but with a certain reservation. I mean to say that with me this artistic temptation was at first very dispersed. At one time I wanted to work in music, and following that I painted for a time. Then I taught cinema and literature for a while. I was groping around in the arts, trying to find my bearings. Finally, when I was 30 years old, I began to concentrate on prose. And this was when I felt I'd found myself. As far as being swept up by a necessity to react co society, this was not my impulse, not the impulse which made me settle on literature. Let me put it differently: there was not this question of writing against or writing to protest, but the objective reality which I saw around me was so fascinating and enigmatic chat suddenly I was drawn co prose and let everything else fall by the wayside. However, even when I took up prose I continued working with the same aesthetic ambitions I'd acquired early on.

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J.E.: Witold Gombrowicz wrote and then burned his first two novels, before publishing a collection of short stories and finally a novel (Ferdydurke). Once you did set out to write fiction, what was your particular evolution? M.K.: Well, I began with the short stories eventually collected in Laughable Loves. So that volume, which was originally ten stories rather than seven, was my first accomplished prose. I began as a composer does, designing and numbering his opuses; certain stories were not included in the series. My writing took flight with the first story for Laughable Loves. This was my Opus 1. Everything I'd written prior to it can be considered prehistory. J.E.: I was wondering to what extent American culture and literature influenced you. Josef Skvorecky, author of C()WardJ, admits the major influence which American literature and jazz has had on his writing, and in his view, on much post-war Czech fiction. M.K.: Skvorecky is an author who was oriented towards America. It is a bizarre thing, but small nations are very cosmopolitan. You might say they are condemned to be cosmopolitan, because either you' re a poor provincial who is aware of very little outside of your immediate environment, other than this small Polish, Danish or Czech literature, or you must be universal and know all literature. One of the paradoxical advantages of the small nations and languages is that they live with all of world literature, whereas an American is predominantly familiar with American literature, and a Frenchman with French literature. Despite this common horizon which Czechs share, there are predilections. Skvorecky is one of those who were fascinated by American literature due to, I believe, jazz itself. He was a jazz musician as a young man and therefore from an early age an Americanise. He has done marvelously good translations of William Faulkner. So Skvorecky's personal originality, for a Czech, is that he is a connoisseur of American literature. I, on the other hand, was always very attracted by French culture and literature. From an early age I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cocteau, Bataille, Ionesco and admired French surrealism. J.E.: Do you agree with Gombrowicz when he argues that, "The writer is not a professional. In order to write, one requires personality and a certain superior degree of spirituality"? M.K.: A professional? Yes and no. A writer is not a professional in that he must refuse routine. While a professional's knowledge of his metier enables him to go on with his work, should there ever come a time when the writer has nothing further co say, he muse be silent. Whatever professionalism • or knowledge of the craft he may possess won't help him. On che ocher hand, to write does demand a mastery of the craft; it has its technical facets much as does musical composition, which one must study for four years before writing a score or an orchestration. You cannot just sit down and write music. The sort of .b ackground which is entailed in music, however, is not readily visible in literature. There is no conservatory for literature. Anyway, writing is a metier and it is extremely difficult.

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II. EXILE

J.E.: In an essay published in Varia (Christian Bourgois, 1978), Gombrowicz remarked: "I feel that any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre." Could you compare the sense of exile between Gombrowicz and Kundera? M.K.: He may have wished to point out that the particularly strong individualism of the writer inevitably makes of him an exile in a metaphorical sense, that by his very nature he can never be a spokesman for any sort of collectivity, and rather is opposed to the collectivity. The writer is always the black sheep. In his case this was especially obvious as Poles have always taken literature to be something which must serve the nation. The great tradition among major Polish writers was that they were national spokesmen. Gombrowicz opposed and vehemently ridiculed this role. He insisted that we must make literature completely autonomous, embodying the idea as someone who, in Argentina, far from his own country, reflected the essential situation of the writer who is perpetually in exile. J.E.: The difference between yourself and Gombrowicz being that he left Poland for South America and had no desire to return, which in fact he never did, whereas you are much more attached to Czechoslovakia and the fate of that country. M.K.: To the contrary, Gombrowicz was actually quite attached to Poland! Imagine, he left at the age of 35 and throughout his life he wrote only in Polish, and if you read his journals and letters, you will find that the majority of his friends and adversaries were indeed Poles. Clearly he interacted with and reacted far more strongly to Polish intellectuals than to others. Every one of his novels is situated in Poland or between Poles. I believe he was more attached to Poland than I am to Czechoslovakia. J.E.: All of your novels and stories take place in Czechoslovakia. You've been away ten years now: would you consider writing fiction where the action would take place outside of your homeland? M.K.: This is something really quite mysterious. Gombrowicz left Poland when he was 3 5. That is to say, he lived the most adventurous years of life in Argentina. In spite of his rather violent relationship to Poland, he could not write about anything else but Poland. It is very interesting to see just how rooted we are in the first half of our lives. We are fatally rooted in the first half of life, even if life's second half is filled with intense and moving experiences. Not only is there the question of experience (Gombrowicz did indeed have many important experiences in Argentina), but of obsessions, of traumatisms which are inextricably tied to the first half of life-which includes childhood, adolescence and adulthood. To answer your question: No, I don't believe I could situate a novel (should I go on to write another one) in France, for example. But the "how to situate the novel geographically" is one of my major aesthetic dilemmas and is something I am trying to resolve. Already

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Life Is Elsewhere (the novel I wrote in Prague in 1969) is not situated exclusively in Prague. True, the protagonist is a native of Prague who never leaves the city. However, the novel's decor is larger than the decor of my protagonist's story. In effect, although the character cannot be in several places at once, the spirit of the narrator experiences absolute freedom of movement. I tried to develop all of the resultant consequences. Thus, my novel not only deals with events which took place in Prague, but with those in Paris during May '68; it not only deals with Jaromil (the protagonist) but also with Rimbaud, Keats and Victor Hugo. To phrase it technically: the decor of the novel is enlarged by the narrator's digressions throughout Europe. Jaromil's decor is Prague, the novel's decor is Europe. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I took this principle much further. This was a novel I wrote in France. Approximately two-thirds of events related occur in Prague, while the remaining third occur in the Occident. Yet even the stories which unfurl in Prague are seen not from that city but from the vantage point of someone situated in France; they are bathed in reflections inspired by a life in France. Take, for example, two parts of this novel, each entitled The Angels: The first part (third in the novel) occurs simultaneously in (1) Prague, (2) in a Mediterranean town, (3) the mythical space of a fable, (4) in che abstract realm of a critical reflection (an analysis of a feminist book). The lacer part (sixth in the novel) occurs simultaneously in ( 1) Prague-an account of the death of my father and of political events in that city--(2) a city in Western Europe, (3) on a mythical island where Tamina shall end her days. This was my experimentation with the geographical decor of the novel. I consider such experimentation co be extremely important to me and I would like to go on co develop it in a future novel. J.E.: Gombrowicz, then, lived in a metaphorical exile, while you have (prompted by che political stalemate of Czechoslovakia) taken up residence in France and claimed all of Europe as your territory. Can you envisage going home to Prague and living in relative freedom? M.K.: Allow me not co reply. Whenever I have wanted to make a prediction, a political prognosis, I've been mistaken. My sole certitude: in the realm of political forecasts there will inevitably occur the opposite of what I foresee. J.E.: And what do you foresee? M.K.: I'm very pessimistic. I don't believe I'll ever be able to return co Czechoslovakia. It will never be possible. J .E.: Do you maintain close contact with ocher Czechs, friends? M.K.: Of course, I do have Czech friends who go back many years. Bue 90% of my relationships are with the French. I came to this country when I was 46. Ac that age, you no longer have time co waste, your time and energy are limited, you· muse choose: either you live looking over your shoulder, there where you are not, in your former country, with your old friends, or you make che effort co profit from the catastrophe, starting over ac zero, begin-

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ning a new life right where you are. Without hesitation I chose the second solution. This is why I do not feel like an emigre. I live here, in France, and I am happy, very happy here. You asked me if I thought I might one day return to Czechoslovakia and I replied no, the situation will never allow it. But that is only half the truth, for even if I could go back I would never wish to! One emigration suffices for a lifetime. I'm an emigre from Prague to Paris. I'll never have the strength to emigrate from Paris to Prague.

III. POLITICS AND CULTURE

J.E.: I'd like to enter into a specific discussion of what you have called the politicization of culture. When you say in your essay "The Tragedy of Central Europe" (New l'ork Review of Books, April 26, 1984): "I think I only know that culture has bowed out," are you not negating the important work being achieved by today's major writers, artists, thinkers and composers? I am thinking of people as various as Garcia Marquez, Stockhausen, Fellini, or Grass. Their work can be said to transcend international boundaries and cultural limitations by forming, through art, a semblance of order out of life's chaos. M.K.: You know, it would not surprise me if a number of the people you mention were co agree with me. I too am writing and creating, and I do not wish to underestimate the value of what I do. Has culture bowed out? I did not mean co say that there are no longer any artists, but that their voices have become less and less audible. We hear them less; the role they play in life has diminished. In other words, che weight of literature, of culture, is less great. J.E.: You also argue there are no more world cultural figures. M.K.: My hypothesis is that in Europe, with the beginning of the Modern Era, let us say beginning with Cervantes and Descartes, once religion no longer played its role of unification, it was suddenly culture and cultural values personified by cultural works which filled the place left vacant by religion, and which defined Europe as a spiritual entity. I think we can safely say that this predominant role of culture is coming to an end. J.E.: But what is culture giving way to? M.K.: I don't know! I am not a prophet; I content myself co confirm a hypothesis. I may be wrong, and if I am, so much the better. I'd be the first to rejoice if what I've surmised is not true. The future is a question mark. J.E.: Why do dead writers and thinkers, such as Thomas Mann, Camus or Sartre seem to you to have been world cultural figures, while people like Boll, Bellow, Gordimer or perhaps even V. S. Naipaul (each of whom can be considered "engage") do not merit che same consideration? What defines their quality? M.K.: It isn't a question of their quality; they may be of an even greater quality. Something else is involved. A small anecdote: While I was teaching

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in Rennes, I disliked giving exams, as I felt it was ridiculous to test what my students might have learned. Therefore, rather than giving the usual exams, I amused myself by doing a survey. I asked questions which had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of the course. Who is your favorite contemporary painter? And I took it further: Composer? Philosopher? Out of the 40 students in the course, I established that the crushing majority, 38 or 39 of them, not only did not admire a single contemporary French painter, they knew of none. These were literature students, mind you. They knew no contemporary composers, and could be said to know only those philosophers to be seen on television. This is totally fantastic! 20 years ago, even if you asked a tailor or a merchant or your local grocer the same question, he would have replied, why certainly I know Picasso, I know Matisse. There was a time, too, when Picasso was considered a difficult painter; he wasn't a painter for the people, and yet we saw ourselves in Picasso, even if we didn't always agree with him or understand him. He was here, he was present. Contemporary painting is no longer present, or omnipresent. J.E.: Perhaps history is caking a respite. After all, Sartre hasn't been dead very long, nor has Heidegger for that matter. The history of philosophy may be in hiatus. I would like to take this question of the decline of culture just a little further and then we'll move on to something else. We could theorize that if culture was bowing out as you suspect it co be, your novels (for example) would not be bought up in thousands upon thousands of copies, nor translated into some fifteen languages. Why are Turks, Greeks, Japanese, Israelis reading Milan Kundera? Or do you think publicity alone is responsible for selling your books? Do not people read you precisely because they are looking for cultural richness and diversity? M.K.: The success of a book is not very significant. There are hundreds of very poor books which are a hundred times more successful than my own. These bestsellers all function as current events. That is to say, they are quickly consumed (in very large quantity) and quickly forgotten in order to make way for another current event. The question then is the following: are my books read as works of arc (destined to endure, co uphold the continuity of cultural evolution) or as current events (meant to be quickly forgotten)? In our modern world, in this world of mass media, can a work of art exist as a work of arc? The ocher day, I suddenly heard a few measures of a Brahms symphony, one of my favorites. I looked up and saw, on the television screen, chat this music was publicizing a perfume. Now, one can argue: voila, see how classical music is alive and well today! Thanks co modern advertising even the simplest people can rejoice at the music of Brahms! But does a fragment of Brahms in an advertisement demonstrate the eternal life of the composer, or his death? This said, everything depends on the answer to the question: what proves our success? There isn't any simple answer. Are we read in the same way that people listen co three measures of Brahms accompanying a television ad? In a world totally invaded by the stupidities of the mass media, one

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looks for a counterweight, something to defend oneself against the diminishing importance of culture. Paradoxically, media poisoning may render art and literature more attractive. I don't know. J.E.: You have often expressed disappointment, even scorn, for the media, particularly where understanding your fiction is concerned .... Does it seem to you that western intellectuals have been all too ready to read your books as attacks on the Soviet hegemony? M.K.: Of course, my books were received, at first, in the most cliched way imaginable, and in the most schematic way. My work was seen largely as a literature of opposition to the Soviet regime. This was a purely journalistic interpretation. What is journalistic thinking but rapid thinking and thinking in cliches? Initially the media reception proved to be a curse, but I think that today I am read more or less as I should be. J.E.: You know that, in the United States anyway, you are considered a dissident, a compeer of Solzhenitsyn's, and yet you have tried to make it clear that you are not taking a dissident's stance in your fiction. We are curious about your relationship to him. Was Solzhenitsyn required to disabuse Czech intellectuals of the final vestiges of loyalty to the communist future? M.K.: Let me avoid any misunderstanding. I do have an enormous admiration for Solzhenitsyn, for his courage, for his virulent criticism of Russian communism. He and no one else succeeded in upsetting and shocking (in the best sense of the word) the Occidental consciousness. But, for me personally, he played no part at all. Czechoslovakia lived its own experience with Stalinism, with the opium of communism. It lived them quite differently than did Russia and suffered its own intellectual consequences. Outside influences? Yes, of course. But it was above all and before all else Poland which played an avant-garde role in the antitotalitarian intellectual resistance. Right · at the outset of the 1950s! I recall how much I admired at that time the Polish philosopher Kolakowski, or the dramatist Mrozek, or Kazimierz Brandys! Czeslaw Milosz had already written his pertinent and definitive analysis of Russian communism imported to Poland (and to all of Central Europe) in 1953! The Captive Mind is a fundamental work. And another Pole, Gustav Herling, wrote an extraordinaty testimony on the gulag around 1950. At the time, thanks to pro-Soviet elements of the western intelligentsia, the book remained unknown. Forgotten. So then, to sum up, if anyone represented an example for me to follow, an intellectual stimulus, it must have been my Polish colleagues. I owe them much. And if I may recommend something, it is this: Study Poland! After 1945, Poland became the real center of Europe. By this I mean that it became the crux of the European drama between East and West, between democracy and totalitarianism, between tolerance and intolerance. J.E.: Jorge Semprun wonders how Czech intellectuals could have refused so long to acknowledge the facts of political life, and he traces their "recovery" to the publication of Solzhenitsyn's works.

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M.K.: False, utterly false. The]oke, which is read as an utterly free, dissident, even anticommunist novel, was something I began to write in 1961 ! Milos Forman's films and those of other Czech film-makers were created during the same period, and with what freedom of spirit! Take Skvorecky, whom we mentioned earlier. His first novel, Cowards, was written in 1948 and published in 1956. It was a work of considerable freedom of thinking, of criticism and, of course, without any influence by Solzhenitsyn! Or consider, yet again, the work of Bohumil Hrabal, written in the 50s, which could only be published much later. Aesthetically, intellectually, his is a universe which has absolutely nothing in common with Solzhenitsyn, a universe of extraordinary liberty! J.E.: Earlier you claimed yourself a pessimist, and elsewhere you professed your conviction that there is no reason to hope for renewed liberalization in Central Europe. And yet, hasn't Poland seen thaws in its political climate? Isn't Ease Germany breaking from the Soviet yoke and seriously moving towards more cooperation, perhaps even eventual reunification, with the RFA and the West? M.K.: Such an enormous question. J.E.: Let me scale it down, then, by returning co your own situation. What contact have you had with che Czech government since chey revoked your citizenship after che publication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in 1979? M.K.: None whatsoever. One day I received a brief letter informing me chat my citizenship had been taken away. The letter itself was written in a virtually illiterate manner, spelling mistakes and all! Quite an admirable document, for its barbaric quality. Their decision was explained in one sentence, citing che cause as che publication of an excerpt of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in the Nouvel Observateur. However, lee us not be led to believe chat I lose my Czech citizenship solely because of such an excerpt. One has co review their overall strategy, and chat can only be guessed at. But I believe their tactic after '68 was essentially co eliminate the influence which the intellectuals and Czech culture had over the nation. It would be fair co assume chat, according co their analyses, the entire Prague Spring, the entire liberalization, was che product of culture and its representatives. Politicians who were opponents of the Soviet Union and who had been making noisy proclamations were, in many instances, more or less pardoned. Bue culture was never amnestied! The Russians understood only coo well that even a man like Alexander Dubcek, a political figure, was che victim of Czech culture, of Czech cultural influence. Intellectuals may not wield political power per se, but they do have a large repercussive influence. This explains why, after che Soviet invasion, writers, playwrights, historians and philosophers were swept off the scene. They were deprived of the right co exercise their professions. They were hard put co find a means to make a living, and so were forced co emigrate. And, once they left the country, all bridges were burnt behind

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them. This is why the regime wanted to take my citizenship from me; they were waiting for the first pretext. If your citizenship is revoked it means that, according to the law, Czechs must not have anything to do with you. Suddenly, all contact with Czech nationals becomes illegal. You no longer exist for them. J.E.: Do you know if your books are circulating in samizdat? M.K.: Joseph Skvorecky directs a Czech publishing operation in Toronto and he publishes my work, so possibly it finds a clandestine route into the country. I don't know.

IV. TRANSLATION J.E.: You write in Czech and then give your manuscripts to your publisher here, Gallimard. I was wondering if anyone first reads over your work in the original? M.K.: Well, it's difficult. When I was still in Prague, I would leave a manuscript to get cold for several months, and during this period my friends read my work. I found it extremely helpful to know their opinions and reactions. You see where you've been successful and where you've lacked clarity. You need these "test" readers. Now, however, because my novels are written in Czech and my friends are French, I'm alone with my manuscripts. J.E.: And your translators? M.K.: Ah, this is one of the saddest chapters in my experience. Translation is my nightmare. I am apparently one of the rare writers who reads and rereads, checks over and corrects his translations in my case in French, English, German, even Italian. I know, therefore, better than most of my colleagues, what translation means. I've lived horrors because of it. I spent nearly six months retranslating The joke in French. The translator-all of this dates back 16 years, while I was still in Prague--did not translate my book. He rewrote it! He found my style too simple! Into my manuscript he inserted hundreds (yes!) of embellishing metaphors; he used synonyms where I repeat the same word; he wanted to create a "beautiful style"! When, 10 years later, I uncovered this massacre, I was obliged to correct almost every single sentence and to prepare an entire new translation! The case of the first English translation was even worse. The editor eliminated a great number of reflective passages; for instance, all the passages devoted to music. By rearranging the order of the chapters he went further, imposing another composition on the novel. Today The Joke is reprinted in a reliable and accurate translation. J.E.: Are your manuscripts somehow too difficult to translate? M.K.: I've always thought my texts were quite simple to translate. They are extremely limpid, written in language which is rather classical, clear and without any slang. But because they are so simple, they demand, in transla-

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tion, an absolute semantic exactitude! Now, more and more, translators have become rewriters. I spent three months with the manuscripts of the American translation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and what irksome months they were! My rule of style is: the sentence should be of maximal simplicity and originality. The rule observed by my poor translators: the sentence should appear rich (so that the translator may exhibit his linguistic faculty, his vinuosity) and as banal as possible (because originality could appear as awkwardness on the translator's part; he could be told: "that isn't said in English," but what I write isn't said in Czech, either!). This way your writing is made to seem flat, it is rendered banal, even vulgar. The same applies to your thought. And yet for a translation to be good it takes so little: to be faithful, to want to be faithful. Strangely enough, the best translators of my work are those in small countries: Holland, Denmark, Portugal. They consult with me, overwhelm me with questions, worry about every detail. Perhaps it is that in these small countries they remain just a little less cynical, and are, still, in love with Ii terature.

V.

LIFE IN FRANCE

J.E.: You have written a play in French, Jacques et son maitre, an homage to Denis Diderot, as well as several essays. When did you begin to feel comfortable using the language? M.K.: Oh, in the last three or four years. When writing an article I now write directly in French. Naturally, it is never perfect and I do have to be corrected, but this is something for which I have a great passion. Having to hurtle the obstacles of another language fascinates me; it represents an activity I approach with almost sportive cheer. One day I suddenly realized it amused me much more to write in French than in Czech! Writing in French is linked to the discovery of an entire territory unknown to me. J.E.: Might you one day attempt to write fiction in French? M.K.: Well, you've hit on something which took me by surprise: I found that reflection and narration in a language are two totally different enterprises. It's as if each function were governed by a separate area in the brain. I am quite capable of thinking in French; today I even prefer it to Czech. If, for instance, I am to write an essay and must choose I'll choose French. In public interviews, when given the choice between speaking in my mother tongue or my adopted one, I select the latter. And yet I do not know how to tell a single funny story in French. When an anecdote should come out sounding laughable it is clumsy and awkward instead. So, as I was saying, to develop a thought and to relate a story are two different skills. I know that I would like to write my next novel in French, but I doubt I'd be capable of it. If I now had to describe in French just how you are sitting, how the pen is poised in your mouth, I couldn't do it: my description would be terribly maladroit.

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J.E.: And yet you do lecture in French ... Now that the success of your novels has granted you freedom from financial worry, why do you go on teaching in Paris universities? M.K.: Out of principle, I do not want to depend on literature for money. If you rely solely on literature the dependency can deform you. The moment you depend on your writing for your livelihood you are obliged to give birth to a success, and subsequently you feel you are risking something. It just isn't a good situation; it might make me overly anxious. I want to feel utterly free with the writing of fiction, and to feel free means to be able to risk incomprehension, failure, even hostility to your work. From this point of view, I think it is a good thing that you teach and that you are employed; from there you are completely free to work and are not anxious about your . income. J.E.: And the question of time: does teaching leave you the free time you require? M.K.: Of course, some of your time is taken up, but I wonder, really, whether that time can be considered lost. I don't think so. What I'm teaching is extremely open. I'm not a slave in any way. Each year you are obliged to talk about something else, and if you are called upon to lecture on new material, you yourself have to study new material and you have to think. This necessity to think and to study is ultimately a good thing. Furthermore, you are always in contact with at least a few interesting people. I find it very dangerous for a writer to be estranged from the world he inhabits. J.E.: Kundera as professor is relating information and ideas to his students, but how much is he receiving in return? M.K.: I receive quite a bit because I do make friends, and I do meet people whom I might not otherwise have had the possibility of meeting. I don't think you can cut yourself off from new encounters with others. The danger of solitude, that cloistered environment another kind of writer might live in, is alien to me. The world is the writer's laboratory. If I wasn't at the university, I would certainly choose another employment, even if temporary-I might even choose, and this is the summit of blasphemy, to work with a journal, and thus not to lose touch with life. J.E.: Writing and writing alone, then, is not living, in your view? Here you are essentially at odds with Kafka, who felt that what wasn't literature wasn't worthwhile. M.K.: Yes, but let's not forget that he was employed as an insurance agent. I mean that he had a much larger contact with the world at large than we've been led to believe. He wasn't just a bureaucrat locked up in his office; Kafka met people every day, simple people, people with problems. Even bureaucracy is a part of life. Kafka wasn't at all isolated from society. J.E.: You've noted that, "in Kafka, those who find their place in society do so by renouncing their solitude and, in the long run, their personalities." We know that a sense of privacy has been of paramount importance to you. I

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was wondering whether this need first made itself felt before or after the 1968 Soviet invasion of your country? M.K.: Oh, long before '68. Privacy has been my obsession. I might exaggerate by saying that I am in a sense "sculpted" for discretion. J.E.: In a recent interview you remarked that it was hard for you to lose the public you had been accustomed to until you were in your 40s. Did you then, do you now, write with a particular kind of reader in mind? M.K.: I commented that it was hard to lose that public, because, paradoxically, it wasn't hard. It is a paradox which really surprises me. Difficult to explain. But, I felt relieved; I felt strangely relieved because I knew even as I wrote Life Is Elsewhere and The Farewell Party that I was no longer being published and that I had been erased from public view. For the seven years I was out of work there was no question of getting anything published. In other words, I was a corpse, someone who no longer existed. But I was happy! J.E.: How did you gee by without gainful employment? M.K.: Fortunately, I had some revenue tucked away in the bank, money which was left over from sales of The joke. Vera and I lived as though on some sore of grant-very modestly indeed. Bue then, you don't need much. Vera gave English lessons on the sly, and now and then I would take on some small job under the names of others. I wrote a play and a radio script this way and was paid accordingly. It was really quite funny co be writing under someone else's name; an enjoyable mystification. I must say chat for the first few years of this period, we really amused ourselves. On the side I wrote these two novels, with the certitude chat the Czech public would not read chem. I muse cell you how this fascinated me, because there is, in a small country, a certain pressure by the public which is disagreeable. They fatigue you and, ac times, you may even become a little afraid of chem. You are vulnerable; you know in advance when the public is going to detest you for something you might say or do. None of chis has anything to do with policies. I'm referring merely co public likes and dislikes. Imagine Czechoslovakia as a village where you're known co practically all and sundry. le is extremely discomfiting! Everything you do may be the subject of gossip and slander. Thus, you find yourself unconsciously making compromises for your public. You may think you are being encouraged, but in reality the pressure of your public shapes you, and you feel that you may not be willing to write all chat you might like co. As I was saying, I wrote Life Is Elsewhere and The Farewell Party in coral liberty, convinced that no Czech would ever read them. At the time I hadn't considered they might be published by Skvorecky's Czech press in Toronto. They were written under the illusion chat they weren't for the Czech public but for one unknown. J.E.: In writing The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, you knew you had already attracted a world audience. Did this knowledge affect you in any way?

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M.K.: Such an audience is so much more abstract. When I wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I was still living and teaching in Rennes. The French public still did not know who I was. I feel it is essential to maintain a certain anonymity, which is why I am averse to an author exhibiting himself on television. There is a cenain danger in talking about oneself. Public curiosity is never limited to the novel in question. An actor can court the public's voyeurism, but not a writer.

VI.

WOMEN

J.E.: I've remarked that throughout much of your work, women are often of only average education and intelligence, whereas men are frequently intellectuals and professionals. Is this incidental or deliberate? M.K.: Certainly this has something to do with my subconscious. But I don't entirely agree with the observation. There are several female characters who are clearly intellectuals. Sabina, for example, in The Unbearable LightnesJ

of Being. J.E.: Sabina is intelligent, yes, but is she really an intellectual? I find her more of a sensual intellect, something I associate with a painter. M.K.: I don't know whether or not a painter is an intellectual, but in any case Sabina is a woman endowed with a strong mind. I might even go so far as to suggest that her thinking is the most lucid in che novel, perhaps, as well, the coldest and most cruel. The other characters do not think as clearly as she does. In The Farewell Party, Olga is an intellectual, and then too you have the female doctor in Laughable LoveJ, whose thinking is the most cynical and lucid. So your observation is not entirely true. le is true, however, that others also may see these things you speak of. Recently I asked myself, quite suddenly, Lord, where on earth did you gee the character of Lucie from, this Lucie in The joke? Here in France everyone assumes that when you've wriccen a novel you've written your autobiography. I know when I'd published my most recent novel, people were saying to Vera, "You were a photographer?" Just so it was supposed that Lucie in The Joke was taken from real life. Well, where did I find her? The answer is that of all the women I have known in my life, Lucie represents the only type which I have not encountered. Never, in reality, have I known a truly simple woman. I had known a number of women who were mediocre, women like Helena in The Joke (her I knew by heart). But because Lucie was precisely che kind of woman I'd never known, something drew me to wane co discover her. Lucie is a woman who is ac once simple and enigmatic, and enigmatic because she is so simple. Normally you would consider that which is complex to be enigmatic, yec Lucie is so simple that I did not understand her. A positive simplicity, a simplicity adored, Lucie

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was a kind of counterbalance to my own visceral cynicism; she was an experience beyond my own experiences. Here is the most imaginative and inventive part of The joke. Lucie is true poetry; she is not Wahrheit but Dicht11ng. J.E.: If it is largely true that women characters in your novels are not usually portrayed as intellectuals, there is yet a kind of equilibrium owing to the fact that men are far more severely criticized than women. Tomas in Unbearabk I.ightneJs is endlessly tom between his predilections and his fears, his desire for freedom and his love for Tereza. While the narrator juxtaposes lightness and weight, Tomas is a prisoner of his own morality; no one excuses him, least of all himse1£ M.K.: Perhaps. J.E.: I was wondering if you agree with Georges Bataille when he says eroticism is in a sense laughable? M.K.: I don't know. J.E.: The sexual act in your novels and stories represents a major preoccupation along with laughter and the lightness of being. M.K.: Dear Jordan, there are questions which I like to answer, and there are others that I neither wish nor know how to respond to. Both the rational and the irrational participate in writing. The rational, this is the aesthetic of the novel, the way in which the aesthetic is situated in the history of literature, and so on. Well, here are questions I speak of with ease. But then, there is the true content of the novel: the characters, the obsessions, the eroticism ... Voila, you have things which I know how to deal with only in and by way of the novel. I don't know how to tell you why the women in my novels are the way they are. Neither would I venture to explain why it is that the act of love-making plays such a great role in my work. Here is the realm of the unconscious, of the irrational, a realm quite intimate to me. There is a limit beyond which the novelist can theorize no further on his own novels and whence he must know how to keep his silence. We have reached that limit.

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Conversation with Milan Kundera on the Art of the Novel CHRISTIAN SALMON

Christian Salmon: I'd like co devote chis conversation co the eschecic of your novels. Bue where shall we begin? Milan Kundera: With chis assertion: My novels are not psychological. More precisely, chey lie outside the eschecic of the novel normally termed psychological. C.S.: Bue aren't all novels necessarily psychological? That is, concerned with che enigma of che psyche? M.K.: Lee us be more precise: All novels, of every age, are concerned with che enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is che self? How can the self be grasped? le is one of chose fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based. By che various responses co chat question, if you wanted, you could distinguish different tendencies, and perhaps different periods, in che history of the novel. The psychological approach wasn't even known co the first European storytellers. Boccaccio simply cells us about actions and adventures. Still, behind all chose amusing tales, we can make out a certain conviction: it is through action chat man seeps forth from the repetitive universe of the everyday where each person resembles every ocher person; it is through action chat he distinguishes himself from ochers and becomes an individual. Dance said as much: "In any ace, the primary intention of him who aces is co reveal his own image." Ac the outset, action is thus seen as the self-portrait of him who acts. Four centuries after Boccaccio, Diderot is more skeptical: his Jacques le Facalisce seduces his friend's girl, he gees happily drunk, his father wallops him, a regiment passes by, out of spice he signs up, in his first battle he gees a bullet in che knee, and he limps till che day of his death. He thought he was starting an amorous adventure, and instead he was setting forth coward his infirmity. He could never recognize himself in his action. Between the ace and himself, a fissure opens. Man hopes co reveal his own image through his ace, but chat image bears no resemblance co him. The paradoxical nature of action is one of the novel's great discoverTranslated from the French original by Linda Asher. Salmagundi 73 (Winter 1987): 119- 35.

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ies. But if the self is not to be grasped through action, then where and how are we to grasp it? So, then, the time came when the novel, in its quest for the self, was forced to turn away from the visible world of action and examine instead the invisible interior life. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Richardson discovers the form of the epistolary novel in which the characters confess their thoughts and their feelings. C.S.: The birth of the psychological novel? M.K.: The term is, of course, inexact and approximate. Let's avoid it and use a paraphrase: Richardson set the novel on its way to the exploration of man's interior life. We know his great successors: the Goethe of Werther, Constant, then Stendhal and the other writers of his century. The apogee of that evolution is to be found, it seems to me, in Proust and in Joyce. Joyce analyzes something still more ungraspable than Proust's "lost time": the present moment. There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it escapes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, hearing, smell register (knowingly or not) a horde of events, and through our heads there passes a parade of sensations and ideas. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant. Now, Joyce's great microscope manages to stop, to seize that fleeting instant and make us see it. But the quest for the self ends, yet again, in a paradox: the more powerful the lens of the microscope observing the self, the more the self and its uniqueness escape us; beneath the great Joycean lens that breaks the soul down into atoms, we are all alike. But if the self and its uniqueness cannot be grasped in man's interior life, then where and how can we grasp it? C.S.: Can it be grasped? M.K.: Certainly not. The quest for the self has always ended, and always will end, in a paradoxical dissatisfaction. I don't say defeat. For the novel cannot breach the limits of its own possibilities, and bringing those limits to light is already an immense discovery, an immense triumph of cognition. Nonetheless, after having reached the depths involved in the detailed exploration of the selfs interior life, the great novelists began-consciously or unconsciously-to seek a new orientation. We often hear of the holy trinity of the modern novel: Proust, Joyce, Kafka. Yet in my own personal history of the novel, it is Kafka who provided this new orientation: a post-Proustian orientation. His way of conceiving the self is totally unexpected. What is it that defines K. as a unique being? By neither his physical appearance (we know nothing about that), nor his biography (we don't know it), nor his name (he has none), nor his memories, his predilections, his complexes. By his behavior? His field of action is lamentably limited. By his thoughts? Yes, Kafka unceasingly traces K.'s reflections, but these are bent exclusively on the current situation: What should be done then and there, in the immediate circumstances? Go to the interrogation or dodge it? Obey the summons of the priest or not? All of K.'s interior life is absorbed by the situation he finds him-

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self trapped in, and nothing that might refer beyond that situation (K.'s memories, his metaphysical reflections, his notions about other people) is revealed to us. For Proust, a man's interior universe comprises a miracle, an infinity that never ceases to amaze us. But that is not Kafka's amazement. He does not ask himself what the internal motivations are that determine man's behavior. He asks a question that is radically different: What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so ovetpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight? Indeed, how could it have changed K .'s destiny and attitude if he had had, say, homosexual inclinations or an unhappy love affair behind him? In no way. C.S.: That's what you say in The Unbearable Lightness of Being; "The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." But what does that mean, trap? M.K.: That life is a trap--well, that we've always known. We are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die. On the other hand, the wideness of the world used to provide a constant possibility of escape. A soldier could desert from the army and start another life in a neighboring country. Suddenly, in our century, the world is closing around us. The decisive event in that transformation of the world into a trap was surely the 1914 war, called (and for the first time in history) a world war. Wrongly "world." It involved only Europe, and not all of Europe at that. But the adjective "world" expresses all the more eloquently the sense of horror before the fact that, henceforward, nothing that occurs on the planet will be a merely local matter, that all catastrophes concern the entire world, and that consequently we are more and more determined by external conditions, by situations no one can escape, and which, more and more, make us resemble one another. But understand me: If I locate my own work outside the so-called psychological novel, that does not mean that I wish to deprive my characters of an interior life. It means only that there are other enigmas, other questions that my novels pursue primarily. Nor does it mean that I oppose those novels fascinated by psychology. The change in the situation since Proust, in fact, makes me nostalgic. Along with Proust, an enormous beauty is moving slowly out of our reach-forever and irretrievably. Gombrowicz had an idea, as comical as it is ingenious: The weight of our self, he said, has to do with the size of the population on the planet. Thus Democritus represented a four hundred millionth of humanity; Brahms a billionth; Gombrowicz himself, a two billionth. According to that calculation, the weight of the Proustian infinitude- the weight of a self, of a selfs interior life- becomes lighter and lighter. And in that race toward lightness, we have crossed a fateful boundary. C.S.: "The unbearable lightness" of the self is your obsession, beginning with your earliest writings. I'm thinking of Laughable Loves- for example, the story "Edward and God. " After his first night of love with the young Alice, Edward is seized by a bizarre discomfort, one that is decisive for him: he looks

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at his girl and thinks "that her convictions were in fact only something extraneous to her fate, and her fate only something extraneous to her body. He saw her as an accidental conjunction of a body, thoughts, and a life's course; an inorganic conjunction, arbitrary and unstable." And again in another story, "The Hitchhiking Game," in the final paragraphs of the tale, the girl is so upset by her uncertain hold on her identity that she sobs, "I am me, I am me, I am me. . . ." M.K.: In The Unbearable lightness of Being, Tereza is looking at herself in the mirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimeter longer per day. How long would it take for her face to become unrecognizable? And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza still be Tereza? Where does the self begin and end? You see: No wonderment at the immeasurable infinity of the soul; rather, wonderment at the uncertain nature of the self and of its identity. C.S.: There is a complete absence of interior monologue in your novels. M.K.: Joyce set a microphone within Bloom's head. Thanks to the fantastic espionage of interior monologue, we have learned an enormous amount about what we are. But, myself, I cannot use that microphone. C.S.: In Ulysses, interior monologue pervades the entire novel; it is the ground of its construction, the dominant process. Could we say that, in your work, philosophical meditation plays that role? M.K.: I find the word "philosophical" inappropriate. Philosophy develops its thought in an abstract realm, without characters, without situations. C.S.: You begin The Unbearable lightness of Being by reflecting on Nietzsche's eternal return. What's that but a philosophical idea developed abstractly, without characters, without situations? M.K.: Not at all! That reflection introduces directly, from the very first line of the novel, the fundamental situation of a character-Tomas; it sets out his problem: the lightness of existence in a world where there is no eternal return. You see, we've finally come back to our question: What lies beyond the so-called psychological novel? Or put another way: What is the nonpsychological means to apprehend the self? To apprehend the self in my novels means to grasp the essence of its existential problem. To grasp its existential code. As I was writing The Unbearable lightness of Being, I realized that the code of this or that character is made up of certain key words. For Tereza: body, soul, vertigo, weakness, idyll, Paradise. For Tomas: lightness, weight. In the part called "Words Misunderstood," I examine the existential codes of Franz and of Sabina by analyzing a number of words: woman, fidelity, betrayal, music, darkness, light, parades, beauty, country, cemetery, strength. Each of these words has a different meaning in the other person's existential code. Certainly, the existential code is not examined in abstracto; it reveals itself progressively in the action, in the situations. Take Life Is Elsewhere, the third part: the hero, the bashful Jaromil, is still a virgin. One day, he is out walking with a girl who suddenly lays her head on his shoulder. He is overcome with happi-

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ness and even physically excited. I pause over that mini-event and note: "The pinnacle of happiness J aromil had experienced up to this point in his life was having a girl's head on his shoulder." And from that I try to grasp J aromil' s erotic nature: "A girl's head meant more to him than a girl's body." Which does not mean, I make clear, that he was indifferent to the body, but "he didn't long for the nudity of a girlish body; he longed for a girlish face illuminated by the nudity of her body. He didn't long to possess a girl's body; he longed to possess the face of a girl who would yield her body to him as proof of her love." I try to give a name to that attitude. I choose the word "tenderness." And I examine the word: just what is tenderness? I arrive at successive answers: "Tenderness comes into being at the moment when life propels a man to the threshold of adulthood. He anxiously realizes all the advantages of childhood which he had not appreciated as a child." And then: "Tenderness is the fear instilled by adulthood." And then a further definition: Tenderness is the creation of "a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that we would treat others as children." You see, I don't show you what happens · inside Jaromil's head; rather, I show what happens inside my own. I observe my Jaromil for a long while, and I try, step by step, to get to the heart of his attitude, in order to understand it, name it, grasp it. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza lives with Tomas, but her love requires a mobilization of all her strength, and suddenly she can't go on, she wants to retreat "down below," to where she came from. And I ask myself: What goes on with her? And this is the answer I find: She is overcome by vertigo. But what is vertigo? I look for a definition and I say: "A heady, insuperable longing to fall." But immediately I correct myself, I sharpen the definition: "Vertigo (is) the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down." Vertigo is one of the keys to understanding Tereza. It's not the key to understanding you or me. And yet both of us know that sort of vertigo at least as a possibility for us, one of the possibilities of existence. I had to invent Tereza, an "experimental ego," to understand that possibility, to understand vertigo. But it isn't merely particular situations that are thus investigated; the whole novel is nothing but one long investigation. Meditative investigation (investigative meditation) is the basis on which all my novels are constructed. Look at Life Is Elsewhere. The original title of that novel was The Lyrical Age. I changed it at the last minute under pressure from friends who found it insipid and forbidding. I was foolish to give in to them. Actually, I think it's a very good thing to name a novel for its main category. The Joke. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Even Laughable Loves. That title should not be taken in the sense of "amusing love stories." The idea of love is always associated with seriousness. But the category laughable love is that of love stripped of seriousness. A critical notion for modern man. But to

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return to Life Is Elsewhere: That novel rests on certain questions: What is the lyrical attitude? How is youth a lyrical age? What is the meaning of the triad lyricism-revolution-youth? And what is it to be a poet? I remember having begun that novel with, as my working hypothesis, the definition I set down in my notebook: "The poet is a young man whose mother leads him to display himself to a world he cannot enter." You see, that definition is neither sociological, nor esthetic, nor psychological. C.S.: It's phenomenological. M.K.: The adjective isn't bad, but I forbid myself to use it. I'm too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists. What superb "phenomenological descriptions" in Proust, who never knew a phenomenologist! C.S.: Let's summarize so far: There are several means for grasping the self. First, through action. Next, through interior life. As for yourself, you declare: the self is determined by the essence of its existential problem. This view has a number of consequences for your work. For example, your insistence on understanding the essence of situations seems to render useless to your mind all descriptive techniques. You say almost nothing about the physical appearance of your characters. And since the investigation of psychological motives interests you less than the analysis of situations, you are also very parsimonious about your characters' past. Doesn't the overly abstract nature of your narration risk making your characters less lifelike? M.K.: Try asking that same question of Kafka or Musil. In fact, it was asked of Musil. Even some highly cultivated minds complained that he was not a true novelist. Walter Benjamin admired his intelligence but not his art. Edouard Roditi found his characters lifeless and suggested he take Proust as his model: how alive and real Madame Verdurin is, he says, compared with Diotima! Indeed, two centuries of psychological realism have created some nearly inviolable standards: (1) A writer must give the maximum amount of information about a character: about his physical appearance, his way of speaking and behaving; (2) he must let the reader know a character's past, because that is where all the motives for his present behavior are located; and (3) the character must have complete independence; that is to say, the author with his own considerations must disappear so as not to disturb the reader, who wants to give himself over to illusion and take fiction for reality. Now, Musil broke that old contract between the novel and the reader. And so did other writers along with him. What do we know about the physical appearance of Esch, Broch's greatest character? Nothing. Except that he has big teeth. What do we know about K.'s childhood, or Schweik's? And neither Musil, nor Broch, nor Gombrowicz were at all uncomfortable about being present as minds in their novels. A character is not a simulation of a living

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being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental ego. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being. And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive? Understand me, I don't mean to scorn the reader and his desire, as naive as it is legitimate, to be carried away by the novel's imaginary world and to confuse it occasionally with reality. But I don't see that the technique of psychological realism is indispensable for that. I first read The Castle when I was fourteen years old. At that same period I admired an ice hockey player who lived near us. I imagined K. as looking like him. I still see him that way today. What I mean is that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's. Is Tomas dark or fair? Was his father rich or poor? Choose for yourselfl C.S.: But you don't always follow that rule: in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas has virtually no past, but Tereza is presented not merely with her own childhood but her mother's as well! M.K.: In the novel, you will find this sentence: "Her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement." If I talk about the mother, then, it's not in order to set down data on Tereza, but because the mother is her main theme, because Tereza is the "continuation of her mother" and suffers from it. We also know that she has small breasts with aureolae that are "very large, very dark circles around her nipples," as if they were "painted by a primitivist of pornography for the poor"; that information is absolutely necessary because her body is another of Tereza's main themes. By contrast, where Tomas, her husband, is concerned, I tell nothing about his childhood, nothing about his father, his mother, his family. And his body, as well as his face, remain completely unknown to us because the essence of his existential problem is rooted in other themes. That lack of information does not make him the less "living." Because making a character "alive" means getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which, in turn, means: getting to the bottom of the situations, the motifs, even the words that shape him. Nothing more. C.S.: Your conception of the novel, then, could be defined as a poetic meditation on existence. Yet your novels have not always been understood in that way. They contain many political events that have provoked sociological, historical, or ideological interpretations. How do you reconcile your interest in social history with your conviction that a novel examines primarily the enigma of existence? M.K.: Heidegger characterizes existence by an extremely well-known formulation: in-der-Welt-sein, being-in-the-world. Man does not relate to the world as subject to object, as eye to painting; not even as actor to stage set. Man and the world are bound like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and, as the world changes, existence (in-der-Weltsein) changes as well. Since Balzac, the world of our being has a historical nature and characters' lives unfold in a realm of time marked by dates. The

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novel can never rid itself of that legacy from Balzac. Even Gombrowicz, who invents fantastical, improbable stories, who violates all the rules of verisimilitude, cannot escape it. His novels take place in a time that has a date and is thoroughly historical. But two things should not be confused: there is on the one hand the novel that examines the historical dimlnsion ofhuman existence, and on the other the novel that is the illustration of a historical situation, the description of a society at a given moment, a novelized historiography. You're familiar with all those novels about the French Revolution, about Marie Antoinette, or about the year 1914, about collectivization in the USSR(for or against it), or about the year 1984; all those are popularizations that translate non-novelistic knowledge into the language of the novel. Well, I'll never tire of repeating with Broch: the novel's single raison d'etre is to say what only the novel can say. C.S.: But what specifically can the novel say about history? Or, what is your way of treating history? M.K.: Here are some of my own principles. First: All historical circumstances I treat with the greatest economy. I behave toward history like the set designer who constructs an abstract set out of the few items indispensable to the action. Second principle: Of the historical circumstances, I keep only those that create a revelatory existential situation for my characters. Example: In The Joke, Ludvik sees all his friends and colleagues raise their hands to vote, with complete ease, his exclusion from the university and thus to topple his life. He is certain that they would, if necessary, have voted with the same ease to hang him. Whence his definition of man: a being capable in any situation of consigning his neighbor to death. Ludvik's fundamental anthropological experience thus has historical roots, but the description of the history itself (the role of the Party, the political bases of terror, the organization of social institutions, etc.) does not interest me and you will not find it in the novel. Third principle: Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often ignored by historiography. Example: In the years that followed the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the reign of terror against the public was preceded by officially organized massacres of dogs. An episode totally forgotten and without importance for a historian, for a political scientist, but of the utmost anthropological significance! By this one episode alone I suggested the historical climate of The Farewell Party. Another example: At the crucial point of Life Is Elsewhere, history intervenes, in the form of an inelegant and shabby pair of undershorts; there were no others to be had at the time; faced with the loveliest erotic occasion of his life, Jaromil, for fear of looking ridiculous in his shorts, dares not undress and takes flight instead. Inelegance! Another historical circumstance forgotten and yet how important for the person obliged to live under a Communist regime.

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But it is the fourth principle that goes furthest: Not only must historical circumstance create a new existential situation for a character in a novel, but history itself must be understood and analyzed as an existential situation. Example: In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Alexander Dubcek-after being arrested by the Russian Army, kidnapped, jailed, threatened, forced to negotiate with Brezhnev-returns to Prague. He speaks over the radio, but he cannot speak, he loses his breath, in mid-sentence he makes long, awful pauses. What this historical episode reveals for me (an episode, by the way, completely forgotten because, two hours later, the radio technicians were made to cut the painful pauses out of his speech) is weakness. Weakness as a very general category of existence: "Any man confronted with superior strength is weak, even if he has an athletic body like Dubcek's." Tereza cannot bear the spectacle of that weakness, which repells and humiliates her, and she prefers to emigrate. But faced with Tomas's infidelities, she is like Dubcek faced with Brezhnev: disabled and weak. And you know already what vertigo is: intoxication with one's own weakness, the insuperable desire to fall. Tereza abruptly understands that "she belonged among the weak, in the camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and that she had to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle of sentences. " And, intoxicated with weakness, she leaves Tomas and returns to Prague, back to the "city of the weak." Here the historical situation is not a background, a stage set before which human situations unfold; it is itself a human situation, a growing existential situation. Similarly, the Prague Spring in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is not described in its politico-historico-social aspect but as a fundamental existential situation: man (a generation of men) acts (makes a revolution), but his action slips out of his control, ceases to obey him (the revolution rages, kills, destroys); he thereupon does his utmost to recapture and subdue that disobedient act (a new generation starts an opposition, reformist movement), but in vain. Once out of our hands, the act can never be recaptured. C.S.: Which recalls the situation of Jacques le Fataliste that you discussed at the beginning. M.K.: But this time, it's a matter of a collective, historical situation. C.S.: To understand your novels, is it important to know the history of Czechoslovakia? M.K.: No. Whatever needs to be known of it the novel itself tells. C.S.: Reading novels doesn't presume a historical knowledge? M.K.: We have the history of Europe. From the year 1000 up to our time, that has been a single common experience. We are part of that and our every action, individual or national, only reveals its crucial significance when set in that context. I can understand Don Quixote without knowing the history of Spain. I cannot understand it without some idea, however general, of Europe's historical experience--of its age of chivalry, for instance, of courtly love, of the shift from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era.

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C.S.: In Life Is Elsewhere, each phase of Jaromil's life is seen against fragments from the biographies of Rimbaud, Keats, Lermontov, and so on. The May First Parade in Prague is confounded with the May 1968 student demonstrations in Paris. Thus you create for your hero a httge scene that encompasses the whole of Europe. Still, your novel takes place in Prague. It ends with the Communist putsch in 1948. M.K.: For me, it is the novel of the European revolution as such, in condensed form. C.S.: European revolution-that putsch? And imported, what's more, from Moscow? M.K.: However inauthentic it was, that putsch was experienced as a revolution. With all its rhetoric, its illusions, reflexes, actions, crimes, I see it today as a parody condensation of the European revolutionary tradition. As the continuation and grotesque fulfillment of the era of European revolutions. Just as the hero of that book, Jaromil-the "continuation" of Victor Hugo and Rimbaud-is the grotesque fulfillment of European poetry. Jaroslav, in The joke, continues the age-old history of popular art at a time when that art is vanishing. Doctor Havel, in Laughable Loves, is a Don Juan at a time when Don Juanism is no longer possible. Franz, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is the lase melancholy echo of che Grand March of the European left. And Tereza in her obscure village in Bohemia is withdrawing not only from all the public life of her country but also "from the road along which mankind, 'the master and proprietor of nature,' marches onward." All these characters fulfill not only their personal histories but also the suprapersonal history of che European experience. C.S.: Which means chat your novels cake place in the last act of the Modern Era, which you call the "period of terminal paradoxes." M.K.: If you like. Bue let's avoid any misunderstanding. When I wrote Havel's story in Laughable Loves, I had no intention of describing a Don Juan in a time when che adventure of Don Juanism was ending. I was writing a story I found comical. That's all. All these reflections on terminal paradoxes, et cetera, did not precede my novels, but proceeded from them. It was while I was writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being that-inspired by my characters, all of whom are in some fashion withdrawing from the world- I thought of the fate of Descartes' famous formulation: man as "master and proprietor of nature." Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this "master and proprietor" is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of history (it has escaped his grip), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and if man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void, without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being. C.S.: Still, isn't it an egocentric mirage to see the present time as the special moment, the most imponant moment of all-that is, the moment of

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the end? How many times already has Europe believed it was living through its end, its apocalypse! M.K.: Among all those terminal paradoxes, there is also the one of the end itself. When a phenomenon proclaims, far in advance, its imminent disappearance, many of us know and perhaps even regret it. But when the agony draws to a close, we are already looking elsewhere. The death becomes invisible. It's some time now since the river, the nightingale, the paths through the fields have disappeared from man's mind. When nature disappears from the planet tomorrow, who will notice? Where are the successors of Octavio Paz, of Rene Char? Where are the great poets now? Have they vanished, or is it only that their voices have grown inaudible? In any case, our Europe, formerly unthinkable without its poets, is immensely changed. But if man has lost the need for poetry, will he notice when it disappears? The end is not an apocalyptic explosion. There may be nothing so quiet as the end. C.S.: Granted. But if one thing is ending, we might suppose that something else is beginning. M.K.: Certainly. C.S.: But what is it that's beginning? That doesn't show in your novels. Whence the doubt: are you seeing only half of our historical situation? M.K.: It's possible, but that isn't so very grave. Indeed, it's important to understand what a novel is. A historian tells you about events that have taken place. By contrast, Raskolnikov's crime never saw the light of day. A novel examines not life but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of exiJtence by discovering this or chat human possibility. But again, to exist means: "being-in-theworld." Both the character and his world must be understood as poJJibi/ities. In Kafka, all that is clear: the Kafkan world is like no known reality, it is an extreme and unrealized poJJibi/ity of the human world. It's true that this possibility shows faintly from behind our own real world and seems to prefigure our future. That's why they speak of Kafka's prophetic dimension. But even if his novels had nothing prophetic about them, they would not lose their value, because they grasp one possibility of existence (a possibility for man and for his world) and thereby make us see what we are, of what we are capable. C.S.: But your own novels are located in a world that is thoroughly real! M.K.: Remember Broch's The S/eepwalkerJ, a trilogy that encompasses thirty years of European history. For Broch, that history is clearly defined as a perpetual diJintegration ofvalues. The characters are locked into this process as in a cage and must find a way of living that suits the progressive disappearance of common values. Broch was, of course, convinced of the correctness of his historical judgment-that is, convinced that the possibility of the world he was describing was a possibility come true. But let's try to imagine chat he was mistaken and that parallel to this process of disintegration another process was at work, a positive development that Broch was unable to see.

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Would that make any difference to the value of The Sleepwalkers? No. Because the process of disintegration of values is an indisputable possibility of the human world. To understand man flung into the vortex of that process, to understand his gestures, his attitudes that's all that matters. Broch discovered an unknown new territory of existence. Territory of existence means possibility of existence. Whether or not that possibility becomes a reality is secondary. C.S.: The period of terminal paradoxes where your novels are located must be considered, then, not as reality but as possibility? M.K.: A possibility for Europe. A possible vision of Europe. A possible situation for man. C.S.: But if you are trying to grasp a possibility rather than a reality, why take seriously the image you offer of Prague, for example, and of the events that occurred there? M.K.: If the writer considers a historical situation as a fresh and revealing possibility of the human world, he will want to describe it as it is. Still, fidelity to historical reality is a secondary matter as regards the value of the novel. The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence.

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Between East and West: A Letter to Milan Kundera ROBERT BOYERS

Dear Milan Kundera, Though we haven't met, I find myself thinking of you more and more as I consider what I have and have not done in my book on the political novel. No doubt it is presumptuous for me to suppose that I know you. Though you do often speak of yourself in your fiction, I believe you when you say that "the novel is not the author's confession." 1 I understand also that the statements you make in published interviews are not always reliable, that they are intended frequently to correct what you take to be gross misreadings of your work, and sometimes overstate an argument so as to make contrary views seem untenable. Still, there are the obsessions you display so persistently in the novels, and the situations you rehearse with every conviction that there is always more to say about them. These obsessions and the situations out of which they emerge make me feel that I know you, for what is a writer if he is not the obsessions and circumstances that constitute his experience? And what is a writer like Milan Kundera, apparently as much "an inveterate skeptic" as some of his characters, if he cannot make us feel uneasy about the conclusions we reach and the principles we think we serve? I had thought, in structuring my book, to devote a standard chapter to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but found myself putting that chapter off as long as I could. There are enough "gaps, discontinuities, unanswered questions" 2 in that book to daunt even the most confident critic. But it was not chiefly as a practical critic that I hesitated to tackle your book. I came increasingly to wonder whether it was appropriate to treat it as a political novel at all. One or two of the novel's seven "stories" after all have very little to do with politics as such, and even the stories with an obvious political dimension seem to resist a straightforward political analysis. The more I thought about what I would say in a chapter devoted to your book, the less confident I was that I could do justice to its ambivalence about the sort of book it wanted to be. From Atrocity and Amnt1ia: The Political NOt1tl Since 1945 by Robert Boyers. Copyright © 1985 by Robert Boyers. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Then, in the spring of 1984, the English translation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being appeared. It seemed to me so of a piece with your previous novels that it must have grown out of the impulses and concerns that inspired them. It was also so distinctly not a political novel that the misgivings I'd entertained about treating your earlier works as such were exacerbated. On top of this, in several long interviews that marked the publication of the new book you raised questions that are bound to create a crisis of conscience in someone who has invested a great deal in ideas you resist. You are offended, you say, by political interpretations of your work. Why? Such readings are "bad" readings, since they inevitably ignore "everything you think is important in the book you've written."3 If The joke is read as an indictment of a Communist regime, then it will not be read as a love story. If The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is read as a lament over the political destruction of the Czech nation, then it will not be read as a study of memory and desire. So you contend. Dissident literature as such invites ideological interpretations, and so it is necessary for the writer who respects what you've called the "radical autonomy" of the novel to repudiate the "dissident" label journalists affnc to his books. The dissident writer, you suggest, knows all too well what he means to say, and his novel is for him largely a means to an end rather than an end in itself. For you, the novel has its own truth to tell; it is committed to a truth that is always and only "to be discovered. "4 Political novels are by definition committed to another kind of truth. They fall prey to a "stupidity [that] . . . comes from having an answer for everything," whereas for you "the wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."S I would like to think that what I have written in this book might persuade you that the qualities you most admire in fiction are often to be found in works content to be political novels. It is tempting, of course, to assert that it little matters whether your books are referred to as "dissident" or "political" or "metaphysical," that they are what they are, just as Anna Karenina will remain a great novel whether it is described as a love story or a novel of manners . But I have argued that successful novels know what they are, and that though ambitious works may set in motion various incompatible discourses, they do achieve a provisional unity that allows us to summarize their "project" in a plausible way. The term political novel may be a fiction, but it is a fiction intended to school or direct readings of particular texts. Obviously, no one who cares about literature will assume that a book is properly described as a political novel simply because it encompasses the Czech experience since 1948. But it must also be said that once a book has seemed to invite consideration as a political novel, its reader will not be easily persuaded to abandon that designation. There are dangers in treating an autonomous work as if it belonged to a tradition or a category. The concept of genre often serves to domesticate a book, to make it seem more like other books than it is. And yet

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I am determined to make you feel that the advantages in this case outweigh the dangers. Those who have no love for the books they read, who are determined to make them confirm only what they already think, will betray literature no matter what assumptions they carry with them. But those who read novels with the view that "the part of the forest immediately before us is a screen, as it were, behind which the rest of it lies hidden and aloof" 6 will not be overly tempted to abuse the classification in terms of which they conduct their inquiry. In your latest book you speak about "the secret the novel asks about," and there is no doubt that politics is not often regarded as a domain of significant mystery. But why shouldn't politics be the key to a consideration of important secrets? Is it inevitable that persons who address themselves to ideological issues will have only ideological solutions to propose? Isn't it legitimate co suggest chat a political novel at its best can do many different things? As I put these questions co you, I summon co mind lines and images from your books, and I anticipate your responses. Of course, you will say, novels can do many things. And, of course, a book chat describes characters caught up in crying political circumstances may very well gesture at important matters chat are not reducible co ideological imperatives. Bue how do these questions answer co my objections? Why do you not consider how readily the dissident writer trades upon his image, his virtue, how shamelessly he panders in his books co the public's appetite for "values" and "correct" ideas? The political novel, you will say, insofar as it is aptly named, is bound co lend itself co journalistic purposes, co the affirmation of positions and the drawing of neat distinctions. Ultimately, it is not important chat you agree to my calling The joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting political novels. I believe chat they are great books and chat they know what they are, whatever you may wish co say about your intentions in writing chem. The question of genre or classification becomes critical only when a book does not know what it is after and which expectations it has aroused in a reader. My criticism of The Heart of the Matter, earlier in this book, dwells on this fatal uncertainty in Greene's novel, and I have elsewhere made a comparable criticism of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet as a book chat "refuses co work through the problems it posits at the level on which they are originally conceived. "7 Your books, which set themselves so many competing objectives yet seem always to know how one objective is related to another, know also how to avoid the pretense that a metaphysical observation is an adequate elaboration of a political problem. Without aiming at definitive resolutions, you make us feel that you appreciate the difference between one sore of question and another. Why, then, do I insist on pressing the difference between us? Clearly, I want to argue chat even so ambivalent a work as The Book of Laughter and For-

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getting can most usefully be discussed as a political novel. I want to contend, respectfully but firmly, that you cannot be serious when you describe The joke as a love story, that there you are interested less in how characters fall in love than in the forces that shape their imaginations. I accept that there is nothing in your work to suggest that private relations are any less important to you than public issues, but it is no slander to contend that a given novel has a job of work to do that necessarily prioritizes these concerns rather than those. Early in The joke, Helena Zemanek recalls that she and her future husband had argued about why they married. "We married out of Party discipline," Pavel had said; what is more, the "new man" created by the party had successfully "abolished the distinction between public and private life." It may be easy to dismiss Pavel as an infatuate opportunist, but what are we to do with Helena's acknowledgment that she has always been what she calls a loyal "Party bloodhound"? She insists that she and her husband married for love, but what can this mean to a person who considers lies told to party inquisitors the equivalent of lies told to a loved one? When, many years after her marriage, she moves that a man be expelled from the party for "having deliberately deceived and misled it," she concludes that she acted "for love": "love of love, love of their house and home, love of their children," and so on. For Helena, we may say, there is no distinction between public and private. When she enters into an extramarital affair with Ludvik Jahn, she may feel that she is engaging in a private indulgence, but the novel knows better than to pretend that a public dimension is absent from Helena's relations with her lover. It would indeed be a slander to suggest that you invite us to approve of Helena and therefore to associate your views with hers. In fact, your views are not really at issue here at all. What is at issue is the vision of society that is opened up by your novel. In The Joke public and private are no longer distinct in the way that we should like them to be. We don't have to argue that Czechoslovakia in your novels is a full-blown totalitarian society to conclude that it has in common with other such societies the tendency to abolish the distinction that Pavel is so pleased to have transcended. 8 This is a political fact which affects every aspect of every life in the society you consider. You say that The Joke is a love story. Why not say instead that even the possibilities of love and its expression are shaped by the intrusive standards of a social order that makes everyone's business a matter of public concern? Some things, you will agree, are more important to say than others. This is not a matter of views. Why argue about views, after all, when no one who reads The Jokeincluding the Prague commissars who eventually "took (it] for a pamphlet against socialism and banned it"9--can fail to see that it deplores the corruption of spirit endemic in the "new" society? Does this amount to a "view" of socialism or an attack on the Czech nation? Probably an irrelevant question in this instance. To show, as you do, vividly and authoritatively, that a deplorable state of affairs exists is to do something much more important than mounting a political offensive on behalf of a particular objective.

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Often, in writing this book, I have discovered that politics in a given novel is used to organize a narrative, but that it is not what the narrative is about. With The joke 1 am tempted to say something quite the contrary, namely, that love and its distortions organize the narrative but are finally incidental to the issues that matter. The novel is narrated by an alternating succession of figures deployed over the course of seven parts or chapters. That much is certain. It is also clear that the main character is Ludvik, who speaks more than the others and frequently occupies their thoughts. Ought we to say that Ludvik's activity in the novel is reducible to his relations with women? He does spend considerable time thinking about sex and love, and it is convenient to organize our sense of the novel around the progression of affairs he conducts, first with Marketa, then with Lucie, and finally with Helena. But these relations in themselves do not interest us as much as they interest Ludvik. And even Ludvik, so often in the throes of sexual longing, is moved by more than a desire to conquer targets. As a student, Ludvik is attracted to Marketa. She is an attractive piece of female flesh, but in no other way is she interesting-to Ludvik or to usexcept insofar as she may be said to represent in a pathetically innocent way the spirit of the age in which she lives. Marketa is gullible. She believes what she is told and has no resistance to lies. Her only enemy is cynicism, the subversive spirit that eats away at the heart of every enthusiasm and every loyalty. In Marketa, Ludvik notes, we see a reflection of the "oddity" of the new Czech Communist regime. The dark sobriety, the "gravity" etched on the situation, "took the form of a smile, not a frown . .. anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class." This is a stunning observation and utterly consistent with the portrait of Czech society you have elsewhere given us. But I want here simply to point out that Marketa is present in the novel only to set Ludvik's fate in motion and to allow you to make those observations about Czech society in 1948. Of course, you give us a glimpse of Ludvik fantasizing about Marketa's carnal charms, but no more than is minimally required by the situation you evoke. We are not disappointed by your forgetting Marketa once the consequences of Ludvik's prank-his "joke" -are recorded and absorbed. We know throughout that you are after bigger game than Marketa. Ludvik's relations with the other women are played out over a great many more pages, and there is no doubt that these characters are more interesting to us as individuals. It is even possible to imagine a novel that would accomplish a great deal by dwelling on the private lives of such persons. For a while it seemed that you intended little else in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where you are obviously fascinated by the relationship of Tomas and Tereza. But in The Joke you are assiduous to establish the political and cultural significance of characters and relationships before you allow intimacies to develop. Why be interested in Lucie? Precisely because, as Ludvik observes, she represents "a life outside the issues of cosmopolitanism and international-

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ism, vigilance and the class struggle." Entrammeled in politics, his life destroyed by what he took to be a harmless adolescent prank, Ludvik is attracted to Lucie as to something that "knew nothing of the major problems of our times," and so offers to her admirer the prospect of a life outside of history and society. He is quite prepared to live with problems that are "trivial and eternal," but not any longer with the wretched corruptions produced by the political order of the day. Is this a journalist's view of Lucie? I must remind you that The joke furnishes all the "evidence" one would need to argue that Lucie is interesting precisely as a corrective, albeit a temporary and patently inadequate one, to the politics of her time. I know it is misleading to suggest that there is nothing more to Lucie than that. But the novel demands that we think of her novelistically, that is, in terms of her function in forwarding the design of the novel. It was your decision, after all, to move steadily, often abruptly, from tender passages describing Ludvik's feelings for Lucie to others that return us to your characteristic cultural-political obsessions. Are we mistaken to suppose that Ludvik's relations with Lucie are made more poignant and convincing than they would otherwise be by your steady insertion (or reassertion) of the political perspective? At one point Ludvik is reciting poetry to Lucie; on the very next page he is discussing his failure to love in terms of the scar left by his expulsion from the party. Specifically, he tells us that the image of that lecture hall with a hundred people raising their hands [unanimously voting to expel him), giving the order to destroy my life, comes back to me again and again .... Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project chem back into that time, that place, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test.

A terrifying thought, to be sure, and one to which Ludvik is surely entitled given what he has been through. We note, though, that Ludvik has never had to think of Lucie as one who might have raised her hand against him. In fact, a Lucie might very well be taught to do what is expected of her in a degradation ceremonial, but she is attractive to Ludvik (and, in a more provisional way, to us) because of her relative "innocence." She seems more an eternal victim, a child of the earth, than a potential agent of historical forces on the move. To see Lucie in this way is to see how The Joke is aware not only of what it is, but of what kind of a world it seeks to study. It knows, and wants us to know, chat the experience at issue in the novel involves a relentless politicization of everything, and that a Lucie can be interesting only because she seems to exist outside that procedure. She can be a temporary objective only for a character too caught up in the characteristic experience of his time to understand that there is no way out of it. Lucie's simplicity, so the novel would have

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us see, is not an answer to the destruction of Czech culture. Its attractiveness is itself a measure of the monstrous deformations that have taken place in a society on the way to making all signs of simplicity and private suffering into fetching anachronisms. Lucie's seeming to exist outside "the major problems of our times" only brings home to us how pervasive are the problems which are not less real for the fact that they have been translated into edifying exemplars by the commissars of the new order. None of this can be surprising to you, I think, and none of it is intended to discount or overlook the strictly human dimension of the characters you develop. I don't have to reduce Lucie to the politics of your novel to make my point. I don't have to say that Ludvik's seduction of Helena is of no interest in itself to argue that it~ principal interest is in what it represents. It shows us a man who doesn't know how to fight politically and a woman who is "merely" a woman in spite of the political pabulum she has been fed. Does this translate characters into political counters or symbolic objects in a pamphleteering operation? Not at all. It simply recognizes that characters in a novel like The joke cannot be what they would be in another kind of book. More than one commentator has speculated-this you've no doubt heard before-that you would be a very different kind of writer if you did not come from Czechoslovakia. This I consider a ludicrous speculation. What would Milan Kundera be if he had been born in Brooklyn, New York, or Newark, New Jersey, and had decided to write "love stories"? Would he be a Norman Mailer, a James Purdy, or a Philip Roth? It is as useless to wonder in this way as to speculate on the intrinsic value or interest of characters outside the domain of the novels in which they exist. The student who recently informed me that you were more interested in sex than in politics overlooked the fact that a major writer is usually interested in various things. The Czech experience may so color a novel of sex, I told my student, that it will turn out to have almost nothing in common with ostensibly comparable works by American or British authors. This was not an easy paradox to explain to my student, but it ca.nnot be an issue I need to debate with you. The more difficult issue, I believe, has to do with your politics, or, more properly, with the politics of your novel. I can demonstrate well enough that politics plays an important part in your vision of the Czech experience. But what, I ask myself, do you want? What political goals underlie your critique of the existing order? If I agree not to pose my questions in this way, if I accept your view that the novels are not focused critiques of the existing order and that as a novelist you have no concrete political objectives, I may still ask what authentically political vision underlies your fiction. You do, of course, criticize various manifestations of the existing order in Eastern Europe, and it is always legitimate to ask on behalf of what values a critique is mounted. If I conclude that you criticize on behalf of humanity, or life, or a vague idea of freedom, I may as a consequence have to conclude that you do not think politically. Would that be an awful thing for me to say about you? It might

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be, if I felt that you presumed to engage political issues without being able to think about them politically. But since I take you to be an astute political thinker and take your novels to be politically sophisticated in the best sense, I have to believe that there is a politics in your fiction that I can take hold of and evaluate. 10 To say that a novelist thinks politically is to say that he has a plausible sense of what does and does not belong to the domain of politics; it is to say that he does not confuse political objectives with other kinds of objectives; and it is to say that he understands how changes are brought to pass in the public realm. In The Joke, we may say, you dramatize change by showing how various characters register what has happened to persons like themselves in the period between 1948 and 1965. You indicate what are and are not political objectives by distinguishing, for example, between a love of tradition that might conceivably inform a resistance to the Czech Communist regime and a love of tradition that is aesthetically primitive and vulgarly sentimental. What emerges is nothing like an optimistic projection of the future based on the unforeseen changes that did take place in the first decades of Communist rule. The best that can be said about the situation you evoke is that people trapped within it do often manage to grow in spite of it. Not surprisingly, that growth frequently is made possible by their having to confront political realities, the political facts of life they had once thought to deny. In the same way, characters who fail to grow are often unable to acknowledge the way that politics is implicated in aspects of their lives they take to be strictly personal and under no one's control but their own. Your ability to make us understand growth, change, and failure in these terms is what makes you a political novelist. But I have still to formulate what I take to be the political goals underlying your fiction. The Joke, of course, is limited in its purview to the Czech scene, though already one sees signs of the broader critique you were later to mount in novels like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. That broader critique would encompass not only the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but the hollowness of cultural alternatives offered by the West. In The Joke, or so it seems to me, you long for various changes in Czech social and cultural life that would require at the very least a major political upheaval. But you do not allow yourself in the novel to address the necessity for that upheaval or to consider what your objectives amount to without a focused political perspective. It may be that you did not think it necessary to spell out the political requirements on the grounds that Czech society clearly was not ready to move into a revolutionary stage. Or it may be that you took the political requirements to be so implicit in everything you presented as to be lost on no one. Either way, you did surely decide that readers would pick up the signs and determine for themselves what were the salient political objectives. The danger in that procedure, obviously, is that we will misread the signs. The great advantage is that we will be provoked to think politically without sup-

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che novel's expression of how easy ic is co promote a routine cynicism chat can become almost as programmatic as the naive enthusiasms ic means co ridicule. Bueche irony in your novels always has a difficult job co perform. Why? Because, for all your bitterness, you continue co accach us, however ambivalently, co things, persons, ideas, and traditions chat are obviously in need of our love. Even Ludvik, who behaves so badly, comes through co us as one who has reason co be bitter and whose bitterness is in some respects an exemplary response co the Czech reality. Even Kostka, so obviously deluded about himself and che conditions co which he has adjusted, is in his way right co oppose Ludvik's bitterness and foolishly heroic in his efforts to chink the best of che Czech experiment. Opposed co the dominating irony of che novel is che steady attempt co introduce another note. This note is neither optimistic nor sentimental. It is an expression of the conviction chat things do change and that people sometimes learn from their individual and collective errors. Is chis coo vague? Ac one point in Pare Three of The joke, Ludvik determines co "fight for my right 'not co be an enemy' " of the people, not co chink of himself as defined by chose who had raised their hands against him. Then he confronts a kindly, mild-mannered Slovak corporal in charge of a work detail co which Ludvik had been assigned. The utterly maccer-of-fact way in which chis corporal regards Ludvik as the enemy, in no respect different from che "imperialist" enemies of che socialise scace, convinces Ludvik that "che bonds tying me co the Party and the Comrades had been irrevocably broken." Why? Because che Slovak corporal had no particular animus cowards Ludvik; his antipathy was categorical and could not be dislodged by any persuasive argument Ludvik might have made. There is no satiric irony here, no attempt co ridicule che corporal or mock the futility of Ludvik's desire co clear his good name with the Comrades. Things are as they are and there is nothing and no one co blame. Even "che system" doesn't seem so much ac issue here as it does elsewhere, for what would "che system" at chis level be were ic not for che dumb complicity of corporals and ocher functionaries? Bue how can one seriously blame functionaries who believe they are doing their duty and behave with no sadistic ill will coward outcasts in their power? The sadists among che NCOs Ludvik had been able co deal with; sadists, after all, are ... sadists. Only che mild-mannered corporal convinces him chat the situation is quietly awful beyond repair. This modest passage in che novel marks a point of recognition for Ludvik, and in a sense it enables us co see more clearly what had been at stake for him and what his future course muse be. le signifies what is co be che face of a man who henceforth muse live without hope of vindication or accommodation. Having understood chat che Slovak corporal cannot but regard him as he does, he sees now chat co survive ac all he muse sec himself goals chat have nothing co do with rejoining che community as a citizen in good standing. Irony henceforth can serve only co reenforce his sense of alienation. He is

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fated, as it were, to identifying with his own despair, to regarding the gap between his own goals and the goals of the community as a sign not of his superiority, but of his hopeless disaffection and insignificance. Is there a political insight embedded in this? There is the obvious suggestion that the system spoils and degrades everything it touches. There is the further suggestion, elaborated throughout the novel, that if there is to be resistance, it will come not from those who have a purpose, but from those who have given up hope of living in the bosom of the community. These insights are related, in the sense that the system is shown to breed attitudes that make all serious thought of collective resistance impossible. Ludvik's alienation is spiritually not much more edifying than the behavior of those he detests. 11 We tend-most of us, at any race-to regard cynicism and the refusal to believe in anything as signs of intellectual distinction. Ludvik is thus attractive to us as a superior fellow who feels a little nauseous when he hears the rhetoric of May Day parades. But in allowing ourselves to find him attractive we are likely to overlook his inability to see much value in anything or to perceive the political character of his own cynicism. His friend Kostka tells him, "The general scorn you have for your fellow man is terrifying and sinful." This is not in itself a political insight, but it does lead to one. For it is clear in your novel that the failure co see any hope in the customary behavior of ordinary persons is a refusal of political purpose and, ultimately, of political thinking. Do you see what I am getting at? Your book engages political issues in a sustained and serious way. More important, it enables us to see why political action is not possible for persons so entirely cynical that they cannot imagine a basis on which to revolt. This is an important political insight. I have said elsewhere in my book that the capacity to imagine alternatives, co project a hypothetically nurturant political culture, is in general essential to successful political novels. What form these projections will take is not possible co dictate or predict. The joke does imagine alternatives in the way I propose. There is, I think, an ideal embodied in the novel. It is not an ideal any of your characters can realize in the space of their lives. The political facts prevent them from making the leap from the hypothetical to the actual. But the novel thinks politically by putting us in mind of the gap between projection and fulfillment, between cynicism as corruption of spirit and irony as a mode of corrective dispassion. The key to your vision in this novel, to your policies generally, is your handling of the past and of memory. This will come as no surprise. The struggle to remain human, you have insisted again and again, is the struggle to remember. What makes Ludvik more chan a cynic, though he cannot escape his bitterness and sense of futility, is his refusal to forget what was done to him, his insistence on evaluating the present in light of the past. Attached, as he says, to "something that no longer was," he is forever separated from those who live in a perpetual present. "My only real home," he acknowledges, "was

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this descent, this searching eager fall" wherein the lost soul reaches for that which is valuable precisely because it has been abandoned. Ludvik may not know what to do with the fragments of the past he retrieves from oblivion, but he knows that to live "as a man should live, facing forward," is not for him. His determination, his "searching eager fall," never assumes the dimensions of a political quest, but it has the character of a political gesture in a culture that is dedicated to the pursuit of forgetting. You will perhaps object that I unduly politicize what has little to do with politics as such. Jaroslav, after all, is the character most committed to the past, whose staging of ancient folk rituals and retrieval of Moravian folk song is so central to the idea of the past in your novel. And what, you will ask, does this infatuation with the past do for Jaroslav's political acumen? How does his knowledge of Czech history, his appreciation of "the folk song or rite" as "a tunnel beneath history ... that keeps alive much of what wars, revolutions and brutal civilizations have long since destroyed aboveground"-how do these accomplishments inform his transactions with present reality? Is it your object to suggest that a reverence for the past has no political component, that it is a value in itself and exists apart from anything that I might wish to make of it? I cannot accept that this is your intention. Jaroslav's addiction to the past does not, it is true, empower him to take arms against the commissars who regard culture only as a potentially useful means of controlling the population. Ludvik's inability to face forward does not lead him to urge others to break ranks. You are not in Thejoke concerned with political revolution or even with modes of "constructive" dissent. You are evoking a milieu in which constructive dissent has nowhere to go, no constituency to work with, in which Ludvik's contempt for everyone around him is, however corrosive and self-defeating, entirely justifiable. I insist nonetheless that the attempt to hold on to the past has more than sentimental value, and that your novel assigns to it a political value that we cannot ignore. Consider Jaroslav's remembrance of his own marriage ceremony as the type of a ceremonial dominated by "age-old tradition." Is this a fuzzy-headed, nostalgic recollection? Not if it leads the character, as it does, to reflect that "modern man cheats," which is to say, that he supposes things mean only what he decides at any given moment he wants them to mean. Traditional man, by remembering what things have meant in the past, understands that he cannot have things his way, that a bond is a bond, a lie a lie, and a betrayal wretched no matter what is said in its defense. Can Jaroslav be a traditional man? This, the novel suggests, is not possible. Jaroslav sees too much of the reality around him to behave as if the world had not changed and a rite were designed to effect what it did in the past. In a world committed to controlling every aspect of human development, the rite too becomes a managed affair with a political goal, 12 and Jaroslav's clinging to the spirit of the primitive rite becomes an anachronism. Jaroslav becomes an eccentric because he pretends that things can be even a little what they were, though he knows that

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the past is gone and even his own son is unwilling to go along with his father's touching pretense. The political aspect of remembrance has nothing to do with an implicit injunction to act. It asks only that what has not proven useful to the commissars be loved, protected, promoted. Ludvik feels warmly toward Jaroslav and his ritual enactments as soon as he observes the indifference with which his old friend is regarded by the public that has learned all too well to face forward. At the end of the novel he carries the stricken Jaroslav "through the din of the drunken adolescents" who have dropped the "thin thread" of history and succumbed to "the ocean of what has been forgotten." The gesture portends no oppositional confrontation, but it does securely place the two men on "the other side." Whatever hope there is in the novel must lie with them. This would be a feeble conclusion if nothing more were involved than the determination of two alienated persons to play folk songs and show contempt for the programmed louts around them . Both know that "the magic circle of music" can never be secure against the predators intent on forcing their way in. But the idea of memory in The Joke goes well beyond the folklorist's addiction to "sources." And it goes beyond the wish of a disillusioned skeptic like Ludvik and an ineffectual dreamer like J aroslav to find solace in retreat. Can memory serve as a basis for an exploratory projection of a hypothetical political culture? The ancient Moravian culture from which folk songs emerged obviously was not a vital culture. Neither is Ludvik's memory of the hands that went up against him the key to a more acceptable .culture. The search for a model cannot proceed in either of these directions. Memory is the key not to the recovery of a time past that modern men and women can bring up to date, but to a habit of thought that alone prepares them for living in a decent world. I hope you will agree that your novel teaches us to appreciate the virtue of memory by showing us what is detestable and shallow in the practice of forgetting. To remember and study the past, to preserve it as a living presence within oneself, may not enable anyone to resist what is done in the name of the future, but it is the only hope for those who find the future intolerable. 13 Late in The joke you introduce a Miss Broz. An attractive young woman, a student, she is depicted as an exemplar of a specious health in the brave new society struggling to break free of inherited constraints and misgivings. Her lover Zemanek, who is of co':lrse Ludvik's bite noir, is proud of her as one who knows nothing of the sour memories he and Ludvik share. To her, as she asserts, all the old words and categories are "alien"; she is "neither dogmatist nor revisionist nor sectarian nor deviationist." She is frankly interested in her~elf, in her own "development," and even the word egotist has no particular capacity to wound someone so content to be what she is. What makes her so attractive to Zemanek, and, in a sense, promising to us, is her utter lack of fanaticism. As Zemanek says, "We wanted to save the world and with our messianic vision nearly destroyed it." Miss Broz is too "healthy" to want to

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save the world, and probably too cautious to risk destroying it. She represents a stage of development in Eastern Europe that some have called "totalitarianism with a human face," though clearly you don't for a moment believe in this idea. Why aren't you more ready to believe in the idea? Why can't you make Miss Broz more appealing? Zemanek is permitted to articulate the main thrust of your objection. "On entrance exams," he says, "when we ask them about the purges, they don't know what we're talking about. Stalin is just a name to them. And most of them have no idea there were political trials in Prague." 14 Free of the "overpoliticized thought" that colors every one of Ludvik's experiences, she is unwilling to be bothered by what she takes to be trifles. She is on her way to becoming the generic human being for whom even the immediate past is remote, for whom reality is what lies just ahead. Blissfully unconcerned about her own past or the past she shares with the Czech people, her goal is to travel and venture and feel, not as a person with something to lose, but as one who carries all value within herself. She is our contemporary version of the Luftmensch who has never had to overcome anything, born to know that whatever came before was not for her. To people of her own generation she is nature itself. To those, like Zemanek, whose former "views" were but a means of getting ahead, she is a model of liberation, the "end of ideology" incarnate. For those like Ludvik and, one supposes, like Milan Kundera, she is the death of culture and a clear indication that political struggle is likely to be hopeless. To live as if the past were not worth remembering is to be without a sense of oneself as belonging to something particular on behalf of which one might summon the will to struggle. The American writer Philip Rieff, who has understood this better than any of his countrymen, has seen in people like your Miss Broz the triumphant barbarians of the new order, triumphant most especially in the West, but also in the more "advanced" reaches of the Communist satellite cultures. The new "freedom," he writes, entails the liveliness with which a human can seep aside, as if no particular act represented the responsible I in the middle of his head ... eternally young and unsettled, we teachers ourselves engage in the most acrobatic hopping from one order to another.... To be radically contemporaneous, co be sprung loose from every particular culture, is co achieve a conclusive, unanswerable failure of historical memory.

Finally, Rieff explains, "we moderns shall arrive at barbarism," which is "a playing at being 'Man' or 'Human'; barbarism means the universality of those educated out of membership in the binding particularities of their culture." 15 Is this not what your novels have enabled us to see so clearly? Is this notthis barbarism-more than the intrusion of Soviet power into Czech society, at once the source and the symptom of your conviction that Czech culture is rapidly disappearing?

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There is ever so much more I should like to say here about The joke, but this seems a good place to turn to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. For one thing, I have arrived, finally, at what I take to be the heart of your fiction, the issue that dominates your imagination. This issue-the past, forgetting, the new barbarism- is the primary link between The Joke and the later work. It is everywhere present in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But in that brilliant work you refuse to give us a political novel. You refuse, that is, to make of politics more than a background against which the characters enact their fates and allow you to pose metaphysical questions. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by contrast, is a political novel by virtue of its insisting that cultural disorder and political corruption are intimately related phenomena. As in The Joke, you are interested in how things come to pass and in how far it is useful to consider political causes as adequate to explain events. I have argued time and again in my book that political novels put us in touch with an absent cause that the novels cannot themselves designate in so many words. This would seem particularly evident in your novels. Though The j oke limits its coverage to the Czech setting, its concern with cultural barbarism, as we have seen, inevitably calls to mind comparable developments in the West.* The Book of Laughter and Forgetting more explicitly develops the comparison between East and West, suggesting that the obvious political differences may finally not be so important as the grotesque cultural manifestations discernible in both camps. We may be tempted, in other words, to regard the politics in your novels as a sufficient explanatory cause, but obviously they are not . This we can understand simply by asking ourselves what purges and party shibboleths have to do with the new forgetting at which the emergent generations are apparently so adept. We can explain Miss Broz by stating that she has good reason to forget the shabby record of her predecessors. Miss Broz, like the liberated Western types in The Book, did not decide to disburden herself. She is weightless because she has no capacity to feel how terrible are the words "It could just as well be otherwise." 16 How she came not to have this capacity the novel cannot (and must not) let us feel we know. We suspect that the cause lies in the political history of her country, but the novel complicates our reading by refusing to embody the ostensive cause in a fully satisfactory way. The Book seems to me your most wonderful work, for two related reasons. It invokes Necessity as a system of social relations and political constraints without suggesting that the system is all there is to reality. It is also a deeply playful meditation on what it means to be in reality and, at the same time, to imagine ways of escape. The pathos of escapism is caught along with the vitality of the will to project and dream . Cause itself is presented as a fab•There is no coincidence in the fact that your Miss Broz is described in term.s of her sexual freedom, her love of jazz music, and other q ualities that surely call to mind her liberated Western counterparts.

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rication subject as much to whim as to unalterable circumstance. The freedom of the novel to be whatever it wishes is celebrated and challenged, supported and undercut. A tissue of contradictions, The Book is yet always aiming at a coherence and thematic unity it knows it needs and cannot have. Its greatness is in its effort to encompass more than it can hold. If I argue that it is a political novel, I do so because of its structure and because of what I take to be the central issues. It opens with a reference to the Czech propaganda section's airbrushing "out of history" a Communist leader once in favor but later "charged with treason and hanged." True, The Book does not spend much time rehearsing the details of such procedures, but it comes back to them again and again and indicates how they are implicated in the daily lives of ordinary people. It even goes so far as to suggest that an individual who erases from his mind a woman he had loved "is as much a rewriter of history" as the party propagandists. I am a bit uncomfortable with that suggestion, but it is, after all, yours. You also suggest that the wildest desires-to rape, to engulf, to laugh without object or restraint-are distinctly related to, though not caused by, the combined political and cultural circumstance in which people live. This is not a matter of my selecting for emphasis occasional statements that someone else might justifiably discount. The political thrust of your novel is indicated by the way in which you make everything come back co even if it does not devolve on-the political. What is the political content of The Book? Obviously, it is a novel about your country and about those who feel that it is slipping away from them as it ceases to be an autonomous cultural entity. The frame of reference is the period between 1948 and the late 1970s, a period in which many changes occurred in the country's relations with the Soviet Union, but in which there appeared very little promise of any kind. You do not go over the various developments as if you considered them individually significant or as if you were bent on writing a topical work. You note particular moments simply to dramatize the effects of alien power on persons accustomed to "drowsing" in its "sweet, strong embrace." No one is blamed. All are complicit in "forgetting," which is to say, in living as if a monstrous violation were not taking place. Those who refuse to go along with the public crimes are most often too weak to do anything but bear witness to their disaffection and speak about their endless fall. Those who fight to regain their country are forced also to fight against the idea that their country is an illusion and that they are in the fight simply so as not to stand utterly alone. Politics in The Book is in one sense what it has always been, namely, "the struggle of man [or men] against power"; but that struggle is for you "the struggle of memory against forgetting." No character in your novel seems to believe that the Soviets can be gotten out of Czechoslovakia. What is worse, you suggest, even if the Soviets were to be ousted, much that was valuable in Czech culture would be very hard to recover. One hundred and forty-five historians were dismissed from Czech universities in 1969 by Husak, "the President offorgetting"; monuments

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have been torn down by one regime after another, street names changed with stunning rapidity as ideological fashions change. Everywhere in your country there is an effort to "lobotomize," to "invent a new history" and "manufacture a new culture." Politics in such a situation can be nothing more than the effort to remember what is being destroyed. The Soviet state is not the dominant issue so long as the Czech people are largely complicitous in the destruction. Soviet tanks are real, but so also are the adjustments in attitude and identity that allow people to feel that life is life no matter what the cultural or political dispensation under which they live. Your political outlook, which has in it a large quantity of old-fashioned grief, pessimism, and resignation, is best summarized in your treatment of the word litost. This you cite as "a Czech word with no exact translation into any other language," and I must say that the various definitions you provide are sometimes contradictory and confusing. Nevertheless, we do have a decent grasp of what litost signifies. "It designates a feeling"; one cannot "understand the human soul without it"; it is "characteristic of immaturity"; it manifests itself in the person who "revenges himself by destroying himself," who chooses "the worst of defeats" by "rejecting compromise" when even compromise is more than it is reasonable to expect. Most important, in spite of the various personal and literary applications to which you subject the word in the chapter devoted to the idea, "the history of the Czechs-a history of never-ending revolts against stronger enemies ... causing the downfall of its own people-is the history of litost." To see things in this way is, of course, to remember only defeat and futility, and politics is then little more than the collective instinct to reenact an "immature" fantasy of hopeless revolt. An activist would complain that in the novels you do not get close enough to those who revolted, that you assimilate them too readily to "the history of litost. " 17 Your perspective, he would say, is too grimly colored by your intense disappointment over the failure of the 1968 Prague spring. To read back from that experience is to suppose that the history of a small nation over centuries can be reduced to a simple pattern. What is more, your attempt to draw every aspect of private life as tainted by litost, or by the effort to deny litost, reflects an unhealthy absorption in a political experience that ought not to loom so large in your mind. Perhaps you would not wish to answer such charges. Or perhaps you would be content to say, flatly, that a writer has his obsessions and that it is no criticism of a novel to cite them. You do not ask to be judged for the validity of your political views; you ask to be understood, not to be followed. Were you to say some such thing, you would not, of course, close the issue, but you would quite properly place it where it belongs. Litost does not purport to say once and for all everything there is to say on the subject of Czech history and politics. It is a trope, an idea, a word that empowers a multitude of narrative variations by promising to them a coherence that is neither specious nor wholly persuasive.

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If we say that /itost casts a spell-not a pall--over The Book, we say only that The Book knows from the first that its variously tormented figures really have nowhere to turn. You do not tell us that the failure of the 1968 Prague spring is the single causal factor shaping your reading of previous and subsequent events. You do not say that the political domain is at the center of every human failure. But the novel does indicate quite plainly that politics is more than the "fashionable issues" that "concerned" intellectuals and journalists discuss. Political events obviously figure in the fate of your country, but it is necessary to move beyond the elementary opposition between good and evil, open and closed, free and unfree, to see what is at stake in the political struggle to remember. We do not have to declare the distinction between freedom and oppression to be of no consequence to accept that the opposition may serve to obscure as much as it reveals. This is where your combined critique of East and West has most to offer us. We have seen that /itost seems to you an appropriate perspective from which to understand the Czech experience. But a sense of futility also colors your observations on the West. This may best be understood, I think, by considering what you do with the word progressive. In your country the word has come to signify all that is consistent with the official dogma or party line. It contains the implicit demand that worthy citizens think positively, that they overlook what is unsavory or apparently regressive in the public life of their culture-this in the interests of that better future to which every Communist society is by definition committed. In the West, by contrast, progressive signifies a commitment to procedural rights and substantive standards that cannot be realized in a Leninist order based on a morality of unabashed opportunism. No one can for a moment believe that for you there is no important difference between the one definition and the other. Yet you do not wish us to see the difference as an elementary opposition or to imagine that the quality of life in the contemporary West is necessarily superior in every way. You despair of us. Our progressivism seems to you empty, dishonest, a poor response to the alternative dispensation available in your country. You talk, or so it seems to me, with "the voice of litost." You know that conditions in the West are much closer to what you want, yet you insist that they are awful and that to accept them is in effect to make a shabby compromise. To accept what passes for progressive in the West is in fact to miss what is most disgraceful in the culture of the Sovietized East. In Chapter Six of your book you bring your beloved Tamina (the Tamina who is "main character and main audience," whose story is the "theme" on which all the others are "variations") to the island of children. It is "a place where things weigh nothing at all," where nakedness, like the sense of immodesty or remorse, "had lost all meaning." There she is rubbed and fondled anq raped and assaulted, all by way of an invitation to leave behind everything she has been and known, to join the children in an "innocence" without past or consequence. Several reviewers spoke of this phantasmal

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episode as a conclusive assault on the terror of an authoritarian society, but it is not that at all. Tamina allows herself to be taken to the island from a Western country. The thought of returning to the West is apparently as distasteful to her as returning to Prague. She allows herself to drown because, though she has "a great desire for life," she can summon no "idea about the world she wanted to live in." To Tamina, forgetting on the island of children is not an abrupt break with the life she has known before. For all its apparitional strangeness, its polymorphous perversity, life on the island is continuous with life in Prague and in the Western countries, where "mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy." Tamina cannot say what she feels, but, then, you make it clear that she belongs to you, is your character alone, and that she feels in her way what you feel in yours. What is so terrible about the movement toward infancy? It is a movement toward an ideal of paradise in which all forget what they are, what they've been, and in which conflicts and distinctions are suspended or abolished. So you detest the dream of paradise and you detest the "progressive" thought that abolishes primary conflicts and distinctions as if there were really nothing over which enlightened persons had need to differ. You say that "the basic event" of your novel is "the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children," but you go on to speculate that "perhaps our entire technological age does this." 18 Does it not seem to you that your novels focus more upon what you call "the angels" (who are "so exalted by the afflatus of ideological togetherness that they rise into the air")l9 than on the overt horrors we associate with the Gulag universe? But, then, as you say, "it is extremely easy to condemn gulags,"20 and not so easy to tell people that their pleasures are shallow, their thought the conditioned exposition of "correct" views, their feelings reducible to kitsch. And what is kitsch? It is the form that the dream of paradise takes in an age of mass culture. It is virtue as the demand for progressive views that mask confusion, lust, emptiness. It is "the absolute denial of shit," the expression of a desire to reach "an agreement with being as such." 21 What you call "totalitarian kitsch" is of course possible only in a fully controlled sociery, where there are no competing influences to limit one another. But you leave no doubt that kitsch is the ideal to which all "advanced" societies are tending. Tamina's sojourn on the island of children is not itself an example of kitsch; it is an apotheosis of the dream of paradise that is ordinarily promoted in our actual societies-East and West-through the cultivation of kitsch. You avoid kitsch by revealing to us the shit, the conflict, the terror masked by the dream of paradise. Is this a political matter? By now, perhaps, an all too familiar question. Let me return, if only briefly, to your definition of kitsch as the denial of shit, or the desire to reach an agreement with being as such. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being you leave us in no doubt about your intentions, which are inscribed unmistakably in the pages of the novel. There you wish no longer to

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entertain political possibilities. Collective activity inevitably entails parades, slogans, and the belief that one is right. So you suggest. To oppose totalitarianism is to ask questions and to refuse to become a model of anything, not even of dissidence. 22 " 'My enemy is kitsch, not Communism,' "the character Sabina says, and she would seem in this novel to speak for you. In The Book, however, one finds no such statement. There the desire to reach "an agreement with being as such" is more explicitly identified as a blissful or witless capitulation to the established reality, which is more often than not figured in political terms. The "angels" who dance in a ring "encircling all the socialist countries and all the Communist parties of the world" sing of "joy and brotherhood" as a way of forgetting what is theirs to know: that decent people are jailed and executed for voicing unacceptable ideas, that failure and doubt are themselves forbidden in the best of all possible worlds. Quite as important for our purposes, the angels in your novel also include the "liberated" French and Americans who in the name of feminism or some other advanced ideology promote a progressivism as mindless as that celebrated by the Communist faithful. Again, it is the agreement with being that you make us think about, with its "ecstatic laughter" that banishes memory and promotes an idea of desire as certain satisfaction without thought of loss or discrimination. Would you object to my saying that The Book fears the angels-as a product and manifestation of kitsch-because no serious political opposition can be generated by people so exalted? The prerequisite to a meaningful resistance (a resistance to all establishments and ideologies) is the capacity of the subject populations to think about their historical situation and about the options that are available. Persons inclined to dance in a ring or to congratulate themselves on their progressive views may participate in demonstrations or even on occasion be persuaded to bear arms, but they will not be political actors in a sense acceptable to you. They will not be horrified by the violation of humane motive implicit in the commodification of collective desire that is kitsch. They will not have any possibility, in other words, of making a significantly better world, no matter how successful their "revolutions" may be. The consequence of this vision is surely an unwillingness to attach oneself to political movements or parties. And how should one attach, when even the best are likely to be carried away with enthusiasm for what is transparently specious? The working class, a class on its way to becoming permanently anesthetized by the pleasure-providing apparatus of the modern state, is of course not an answer to anything. The intellectuals and their fellow travelers offer nothing better, enwombed as they are in the cliches of the progressive order promoted by the media and too often legitimized by a professoriate eager not to be left behind. Is it fair to say that no politics worth the effort can be created by people who believe they have been given life simply to enjoy it? If. this is so, then a primary function of the modern political novel must be to show us why, as everything becomes politicized under the auspices

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of a pervasive kitsch, the possibilities of significant political thought narrow. This I take to be fundamental to the intention of your work. May I conclude by citing an extraordinary passage in The Book? It occurs at the very end, in the chapter called "The Border," which takes place in a period-our period-when "the beaches of Western Europe were crowded every summer with women who wore no tops," when everyone is a "liberal" with "good progressive ideas" and the best idea of all "is the one which is provocative enough so its supporters can feel proud of being different, but popular enough so the risk of isolation is precluded by cheering crowds confident of victory." At one point in this remarkable chapter your character Jan is taken to a nude beach, where he studies the varieties of shapes on display and notes that "all of them together were equally bizarre and meaningless." More strangely, he is "overwhelmed by a strange feeling of affliction, and from the haze of that affliction came an even stronger thought: that the Jews had filed into Hitler's gas chambers naked and en masse." Jan can't quite "understand why that image kept coming back to him or what it was trying to tell him," but we take it to be critical to the shape of your narrative. For what would justify the attention you lavish on nudity and bra burning, on liberationist fetishism, in the concluding chapter of your book if the chapter were not informed by the larger vision? That vision has to do with the massification of the individual under the auspices of the modern bureaucratic state, East and West. That your novel should conclude with an examination of a Western society suggests that no satisfactory solutions are to be found in the West. Those who prattle confidently about their freedom from 'Judeo-Christian thought" seem in your works the victims of a repressive desublimation as unpromising as the reeducation programs organized by the commissars in the name of socialist brotherhood. The image of Jews filing into gas chambers is a bit lurid and exaggerated in this context, but it does surely serve to underline the gravity of the cultural circumstance you depict. A function of this circumstance is the despair of politics that grows steadily in your work. How, you seem to ask, are serious political objectives to be formulated by persons for whom politics is at best a means of selfexpression and a cultureless (rather than a cultured) society the final goal? To be serious about politics is after all to believe that there is such a thing as legitimate authority, which owes its legitimacy to binding truths on which it can take its stand. Philip Rieff reminds us that "serious attacks on authority must breed new authority," not the sense that authority itself is corrupt and that all discriminations and interdictions serve only the interests of those in power. In the West, as in the Sovietized societies of Eastern Europe, "we shall be dominated by anti-creeds and think ourselves free." 23 Politics- this I take you to suggest-cannot be serious or effective if it is nothing more than a mobilization of anti-credal, promiscuously "open," deconstructive enthusiasms. Neither can it hope to succeed as a call to reason or order. To enlist the

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participation of capable persons, politics must be made to do more than empty the contents and demythologize the forms of existing institutions. It must help us to imagine binding alternative institutions. This in the present state of things you do not consider a possibility. The Book is thus a grimly bracing testimony to the disaffection of the political imagination from the assumptions that make political action a plausible response to present discontents. Because you have little faith in the men and women created by mass society, you have no faith in the institutions such persons might create to promote their diversity and their capacity to think for themselves. Is this "reading" too simple? Does it betray too great an emphasis on politics? If so, I hope that you will let me know. Yours very truly, Robert Boyers

Notes l. The words are spoken by the authorial narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (N. Y: Harper and Row, 1984), p . 221. 2. David Lodge handles some of the unanswered questions very tactfully in his piece, "From Don Juan To Tristan," TLS, May 25, 1984, p. 567. 3. "An Interview with Milan Kundera" (interviewer: Ian McEwan), Granta 11, 1984, p. 25. 4. Milan Kundera, "Somewhere Behind," Gran/a 11, 1984, p. 91 . 5. Milan Kundera, "Afterword: A Talk with The Author," in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (N.Y: Penguin, 1981), p. 237 . 6. Jose Ortega y Gassett, Meditations on Quixote (N.Y: WW Norton & Co., 1961), p. 60. 7. Robert Boyers, "Nature and Social Reality in Bellow's Sammie,;" in R. Boyers, Excursiom (Pt. Washington, N.Y: Kennikat Press, 1977), p. 34. 8. Robert Nisbet, "I 984 and the Conservative Imagination," in 1984 Revisited, Irving Howe, ed. (N.Y: Harper and Row, 1983), associates totalitarianism "in the first instance" with "the rage to politicize" and "the expansion of the state's sovereign authority to all areas of society." This is by now a familiar and persuasive view. See Nisbet, esp. pp. 188-198. 9. Milan Kundera, Author's Preface to The joke (N.Y: Penguin, 1982), p. xvi. 10. For a model critique of a would-be political novel that fails to think politically and know its own limitations, see Isaac Deutscher's essay on Dr. Zhivago entitled "Pasternak and the Revolution," in Ironies of History (N.Y: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 248-266. 11. The spiritual status of cynicism, even of contempt for the created universe-including man-has been argued for many centuries. Pascal argued, after all, that we should love only God, "that self-hatred is the true and unique virtue," and went on from this to devalue also the virtuous works of humans as inevitably competing with any proper conception of true good. In this sense it might be argued that Ludvik's contempt for others and for himself is an attitude eminently worthy of respect, though of course it would then have in it nothing that might be called a political virtue. Politics, for Pascal and others like him, "can only be evil," and though a novel like The Joke may lead us to attribute to you some such view, finally I think this would be a mistake. See, for an elaboration of Pascal's view, Erich Auerbach, "On The Political Theory of Pascal," in Auerbach, Scenes from The Drama of European Literature (N.Y: Meridian Books, 1959; reprint ed. 1984 by University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis). See esp. pp. 110- 114.

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12. The debasement of ritual and its conversion to agitprop is beautifully evoked in Part Five of The Joke, when Ludvik happens upon a ceremony called "a welcoming of new citizens to life" and is told that attendance is used "as a touchstone for evaluating people's sense of citizenship." It is a mistake to suppose that such ceremonial requirements were initiated by the Communist commissars. They have in fact been a part of other "totalitarian democracies" from the time of the French Revolution. J. L. TaJmon has written most persuasively of these ceremonial procedures and all they imply, particularly the fact that in such societies "no one would be automatically born into the National Community," but would have to join "a confraternity of faith." Talmon notes the requirements for ceremonially inscribing the names of the faithful "citizens" on a register and taking their public declarations of commitment, quite in the way that Ludvik witnesses in your book. See Talmon, The Origim of Totalitarian Democracy (N.Y : Frederick A. Praeger, 1960), p. 234. 13. Hans Morgenthau, a thinker always associated with political "realism," often nonetheless found it necessary to caution against collective action as an antidote to doubt or a sense of futility. Frequently, he contended, one must register "the absurdity of action" and accept one's "destiny, which is to think and feel." In this sense, the act of remembering in your novels ought not to be viewed as an evasion of action or even as preliminary to acts of resistance. In Morgenthau's words, "It is a distortion of the hierarchy of human values to assign to political action, especially in its collective form, the highest rank." I hope that nothing I have said in this book will lead you to conclude that I am guilty of this distortion. See Morgenthau, "Thought and Action," Social Research 38, 4, Winter 1971; reprinted in 51, 1, Spring 1984. Quotations from p. 160. 14. I have no need to explain to you what happened in your country in the course of its history, but there is a book I should mention that does very well cover the period that figures in your novels. Have you seen A. French's Czech Writers and Politics, 1945-1969 (East European Monographs, Boulder; distributed by Columbia University Press in N.Y, 1982)? It is an orderly and lucid account of the various purges and conflicts to which your works insistently refer. 15. May I recommend to you the writings of Philip Rieff, particularly The Triumph ofthe Therapeutic (N.Y: Harper and Row, 1966) and Fellow Teachers (N.Y: Harper and Row, 1973)? The quotations included here are taken from a first periodical version of "Fellow Teachers," which appeared in Salmagundi, 20, Summer- Fall 1972, reprinted in The Salmagundi Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 30. 16. You will, of course, recognize chis resonant formulation from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p . 35. 17. Even those who regard themselves as dissidents would seem in the main to describe their resistance in terms that encourage skepticism. The opposition in Czechoslovakia is "unified," we are often told, but only "on the things they do not want, on sort of a negation of the system they now live in." The opposition doesn't know what it wants or how to attain what it wants, and though "cultural genocide" is occurring, attempts at resistance increasingly assume "the same counter-cultural, extra-political character {that} the Western counterculture did in the 1960s." See Jan Kavan, "Dissidence in Czechoslovakia: An Interview," Partisan Review XLIX, 1, 1982, pp. 124 and 125. 18. Milan Kundera, .Afterword, The Book of l.Aughter and Forge11ing, p. 235. 19. Lodge, op. cit., p. 567. 20. Kundera, ".Afterword," p. 234. 21. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, pp. 248 and 249. 22. The Hungarian novelist George Konrad has written that "chose who desire co be discerning rather than virtuous in Eastern Europe today ought to make sure chat, having wriggled out of the web of state socialist romanticism, they do not fabricate a new kind of dissident romanticism whose major flaw is that it enjoys no clear autonomy vis a vis Western culture." See Konrad, "Face and Mask," Dissent, Summer 1979, p. 299. 23. Rieff, op. cit., pp. 25 and 27.

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An Open Letter to Milan Kundera NORMAN PODHORETZ

Dear Milan Kundera: Several years ago, a copy of the bound galleys of your novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, came into my office for review. As a magazine editor I get so many books every week in that form that unless I have a special reason I rarely do more than glance at their titles. In the case of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I had no such special reason. By 1980 your name should have been more familiar to me, but in fact I had only a vague impression of you as an East European dissident*-so vague that, I am now ashamed to confess, I could not have said for certain which country you came from: Hungary? Yugoslavia? Czechoslovakia? Perhaps even Poland? Nor was I particularly curious about you either as an individual or as a member of the class of "East" European dissident writers. This was not because I was or am unsympathetic to dissidents in Communist regimes or those living in exile in the West . On the contrary, as a passionate antiCommunist, I am all too sympathetic- at least for their own good as writers. "How many books about the horrors of life under Communism am I supposed to read? How many ought I to read?" asks William F. Buckley, Jr., another member of the radically diminished fraternity of unregenerate antiCommunists in the American intellectual world. Like Buckley, I felt that there were a good many people who still needed to learn about "the horrors of life under Communism," but that I was not one of them. Pleased though I was to see books by dissidents from behind the Iron Curtain published and disseminated, I resisted reading any more of them myself. What then induced me to begin reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? I have no idea. Knowing your work as well as I do now, I can almost visualize myself as a character in a Kundera novel, standing in front of the cabinet in my office where review copies of new books are kept, suddenly being seized by one of them while you, the author, break into the picture to *Since then you have taught me that the term East Europe is wrong because the countries in question belong to the West and that we should speak instead of Central Europe. But in 1980 I did not yet understand this. Reprinted from

COMMENTARY ,

October 1984, by permission; all rights reserved.

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search speculatively for the cause. But whatever answer you might come up with, I have none. I simply do not know why I should have been drawn against so much resistance to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. What I do know is that once I had begun reading it, I was transfixed. Twenty-five years ago, as a young literary critic, I was sent an advance copy of a book of poems called Life Studies. It was by Robert Lowell, a poet already famous and much honored in America, but whose earlier work had generally left me cold. I therefore opened Life Studies with no great expectation of pleasure, but what I found there was more than pleasure. Reading it, I told Lowell in a note thanking him for the book, made me remember, as no other new volume of verse had for a long time, why I had become interested in poetry in the first place. That is exactly what The Book of Laughter and Forgetting did for my old love of the novel-a love grown cold and stale and dutiful. During my years as a literary critic, I specialized in contemporary fiction, and one of the reasons I eventually gave up on the regular practice of criticism was that the novels I was reading seemed to me less and less worth writing about. They might be more or less interesting, more or less amusing, but mostly they told me more about their authors, and less about life or the world, than I wanted or needed co know. Once upon a time the novel (as its English name suggests) had been a bringer of news; or (to put it in the terms you yourself use in your essay "The Novel and Europe") its mission had been to "uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence." But novel after novel was now "only confirming what had already been said." That is how you characterize the "hundreds and thousands of novels published in huge editions and widely read in Communist Russia." But "confirming what had already been said" was precisely what most of the novels written and published in the democratic West, including many honored for boldness and originality, were also doing. This was the situation twenty years ago, and it is perhaps even worse today. I do not, of course, mean that our novelists follow an official "party line," either directly or in some broader sense. What I do mean is that the most esteemed novels of our age in the West often seem to have as their main purpose the reinforcement of the by now endlessly reiterated idea that literary people are superior in every way to the businessmen, the politicians, the workers among whom they live-chat they are more intelligent, more sensitive, and morally finer than everyone else. You write, in the same essay from which I have just quoted, that "Every novel says co the reader: 'Things are not as simple as you think.' " This may be true of the best, the greatest, of novels. But it is not true of most contemporary American novels. Most contemporary American novels invite the reader to join with the author in a luxuriously complacent celebration of themselves and of the stock prejudices and bigotries of the "advanced" literary culture against the middle-class world around chem. Flaubert could

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declare that he was Madame Bovary; the contemporary American novelist, faced with a modern-day equivalent of such a character, announces: How wonderful it is to have nothing whatever in common with this dull and infe• r1or person. In your essay on the novel you too bring up Flaubert, and you credit him with discovering "the terra previously incognita of the everyday." But what "hitherto unknown segment of existence" did you discover in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? In my opinion, the answer has co be: the distinctive things Communism does co the life-most notably the spiritual or cultural life-of a society. Before reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I thought that a novel set in Communist Czechoslovakia could "only confirm what had already been said" and what I, as a convinced anti-Communist, had already taken in. William Buckley quite reasonably asks: "How is it possible for the thousandth expose of life under Communism co be original?" Bue what you proved in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (and, I have since discovered, in some of your earlier novels like The Joke as well) is that it is possible to be original even in going over the most frequently trodden ground. You cite with approval "Hermann Broch's obstinately repeated point that the only raison d'etre of a novel is co discover what can only be discovered by a novel," and your own novels are a splendid demonstration of that point. ·-If I were still a practicing literary critic, I would be obligated at this juncture to show how The Book of Laughter and Forgetting achieves this marvelous result. To tell you the truth, though, even if I were not so rusty, I would have a hard time doing so. This is not an easy book to describe, let alone to analyze. Indeed, if I had not read it before the reviews came out, I would have been put off, and misled, by the terms in which they praised it. Not that these terms were all inaccurate. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting assuredly is, in the words of one reviewer, "part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography"; and I also agree with the same reviewer when he adds that "the whole is genius." Yet what compelled me most when I first opened The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was not its form or its aesthetic character but its intellectual force, the astonishing intelligence controlling and suffusing every line. The only ocher contemporary novelist I could think of with chat kind of intellectual force, chat degree of intelligence, was Saul Bellow. Like Bellow, you moved with easy freedom and complete authority through the world of ideas, and like him too you were often playful in the way you handled them . Bue in the end Bellow seemed always to be writing only about himself, composing endless and finally claustrophobic variations on the theme of Saul Bellow's sensibility. You too were a composer of variations; in fact, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting itself you made so bold as to inform us chat "This entire book is a novel in the form of variations." Yet even though you yourself, as Milan Kundera, kept making personal appearances in the course of which you talked about your life or, again speaking frankly in your own name,

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delivered yourself of brilliant little essays about the history of Czechoslovakia, or of music, or of literature, you, Milan Kundera, were not the subject of this novel, or the "theme" of these variations. The theme was totalitarianism: what it is, what it does, where it comes from. But this was a novel, however free and easy in its formal syncretism, whose mission was "to discover what can only be discovered by a novel," and consequently all its terms were specified. Totalitarianism thus meant Communism, and more specifically Soviet Communism, and still more specifically Communism as imposed on Czechoslovakia, first in 1948 by a coup and then, twenty years later in 1968, by the power of Soviet tanks. Nowadays it is generally held that Communism is born out of hunger and oppression, and in conspicuously failing to "confirm" that idea, you were to that extent being original. But to anyone familiar with the literature, what you had to say about Communism was not in itself new: that it arises out of the utopian fantasy of a return to Paradise; that it can brook no challenge to its certainties; that it cannot and will not tolerate pluralism either in the form of the independent individual or in the form of the unique national culture. All these things had been said before-by Orwell, Koestler, Camus, and most recently Solzhenitsyn. Indeed, according to Solzhenitsyn, Communism has done to Russia itself exactly what you tell us it has done to Czechoslovakia and all the other peoples and nations that have been absorbed into the Soviet empire. From the point of view of those nations it is traditional Russian imperialism that has crushed the life out of them, but in Solzhenitsyn's eyes Russia itself is as much the victim of Communism as the countries of Central Europe. In another of your essays, "The Tragedy of Central Europe," you lean toward the perspective of the enslaved countries in fncing the blame on Russia rather than Communism, and you also agree with the great Polish dissident Leszek Kolakowski when he criticizes Solzhenitsyn's "tendency to idealize czarism." Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is anti-Communist before it is anti-Russian. It begins not with Stalin but with the Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald and the coup that brought Communism to power in Czechoslovakia, and you make it clear throughout that the utopian fantasies in whose service Czechoslovakia is gradually murdered as a nation come from within. It is only when the nation begins to awake and tries to save itself from the slow suicide it has been committing that the Soviet tanks are sent in. Yet even though in one sense The Book of Laughter and Forgetting said nothing new about Communism, in another sense it "discovered" Communism as surely as Flaubert "discovered" everyday life (about which, after all, Madame Bovary said nothing new, either). As I have already indicated, I find it very hard to understand how you were able to make the familiar seem unfamiliar and then to familiarize it anew with such great freshness and immediacy. Perhaps the answer lies in the unfamiliar form you created, in which a

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number of apparently unrelated stories written in different literary genres, ranging from the conventionally realistic to the surrealistic, are strung together only by the author's direct intervention and a common theme which, however, is not even clearly visible in every case. What, for example, connects Karel of Part II, who makes love simultaneously to his wife and his mistress as his aged mother sleeps in the next room, with Mirek of Part I, a disillusioned ex-Communist who gets six years in prison for trying to keep a careful record of events after the invasion of Czechoslovakia? Then there is the section about the student who rushes off to spend an evening getting drunk with a group of famous poets while a married woman he has been lusting after waits impatiently for him in his room. Why is the fairly straight comic realism of that section immediately followed by the grim Kafkaesque parable of the young woman who finds herself living in a world populated exclusively by little children ("angels") who at first worship and then finally torment her to death? Whatever explanations subsequent analysis might yield, the fact is that those "brutal juxtapositions" make so powerful an effect on a first reading that they justify themselves before they are fully understood; and here too (at least so far as I personally was concerned) you prevailed against resistance. Nowadays my taste in fiction runs strongly to the realistic, and the enthusiasm I once felt for the experimental has waned as experimental writing has itself become both conventional and purposeless. But just as you have "discovered" Communism for the novel, so you have resurrected formal experimentation. The point of such experimentation was not originally to drive the novel out of the world it had been exploring for so long through the techniques and devices of realism; the point was to extend those techniques to previously unexplored regions of the inner life. What you say of Bart6k, that he "knew how to discover the last original possibility in music based on the tonal principle," could be said of what Joyce, Kafka, and Proust were doing in relation to the fictional principle of verisimilitude. It can also, I believe, be said of you. But since you yourself compare The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to a piece of music, it seems appropriate to admit that in reading it I was not so much reminded of other modern novelists as of the tonal modernist composers who, no matter how dissonant and difficult they may be (some of Bart6k's own string quartets are a good case in point), are still intelligible to the ear in a way that the atonal and serial composers are not, no matter how often one listens to their works. Bart6k, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and your beloved Janacek all found new and striking means by which to make the familiar world of sound seem new-to bring it, as we say, back to life. And this, it seemed to me, was what you were doing to a familiar world of experience in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. A few weeks after I had finished reading it, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in the United States, and to my amazement the review-

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ers were just as enthusiastic about it as I had been. If you are wondering why this should have amazed me, I will tell you frankly that I would not have expected the American literary world to applaud so outspokenly anti-Communist a book. In France, where you have been living since 1975, anti-Communism may lately have come into fashion among intellectuals, but here in the United States it has for some years been anathema to literary peopleand to most other people who think of themselves as liberals or as "sophisticated" or both. Very few of these people are actually sympathetic to Communism, but even fewer of them take it seriously as a threat or even as a reality. They are convinced that no one in the Soviet Union, let alone the satellite countries, believes in Communism any longer, if they ever did; and as for the Third World, the Marxist-Leninists there are not really Communists (even to call them Communists is taken as a sign of political primitivism) but nationalists making use of a convenient rhetoric. Hence to be an anti-Communist is to be guilty of hating and fearing an illusion-or rather, the ghost of something that may once have existed but that has long since passed away. In the view of most American literary people, however, anti-Communists are not merely suffering from paranoid delusions; they are also dangerous in that they tend to exaggerate the dimensions of the Soviet threat. Here again, just as very few of these people are pro-Communist, hardly a single one can be found who is openly or straightforwardly pro-Soviet. Once there were many defenders of and apologists for the Soviet Union in the American literary world, but that was a long time ago. In recent years it has been almost impossible to find a writer or a critic who will argue that the Soviet Union is building a workers' paradise, or who will declare that Soviet domination of the countries of Central Europe is a good thing. On the other hand, it is now the standard view that in its conflict with the West, or rather the United States, the Soviet Union is more sinned against than sinning. Everything the Soviets do (even the invasion of Afghanistan) is defensive or a reaction to an American provocation; and anything that cannot be explained away in these terms (the attempted assassination of the Pope, the cheating on arms-control agreements, the use of poison gas) is denied. The idea that seems self-evident to you (and to me), namely, that the Soviets are out to dominate the world, is regarded as too patently ridiculous even to be debated; it is dismissed either with a patronizing smile or with a show of incredulous indignation. One is permitted to criticize the Soviet Union as a "tyranny," but to see it as a threat is both to be paranoid and to feed Soviet paranoia, thereby increasing the risk of an all-out nuclear war. Given this frame of mind, most reviewers might have been expected to bridle at the anti-Communism of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. But none of them did. Why? Possibly some or even all of them were so impressed with your novel as a work of art that they were willing to forgive or overlook its anti-Communism. Perhaps. But in any event- and this is a factor I should have anticipated but did not- as a Czech who has suffered and is now in

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exile, you have a license to be anti-Soviet and even anti-Communist. All Soviet or Central European dissidents are granted chat license. By sympathizing with and celebrating dissident or refugee anists and intellectuals from the Communise world, literary people here can demonstrate (to themselves as much as co others) chat their hatred of oppression extends to the Left no less than to che Right and that their love of literature also transcends political and ideological differences. If you ask me what objection I or anyone else could conceivably have to such a lofty attitude, I will ask you in turn co reflect on the price chat you yourself are paying for being treated in chis way. In a piece about the reaction in France co your latest novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Edmund White writes: "When faced with a figure such as Kundera, French leftists, eager co atone for former Soviet sympathies, begin to echo the unregenerate anti-Communism of Gaulliscs." The opposite has been true of the American reaction to your work. Here it has either become yet another occasion for sneering at "unregenerate anti-Communism" or else it has been described in the most disingenuously abstract terms available. You are writing about memory and laughter, about being and nonbeing, about love and sex, about angels and devils, about home and exile--abouc anything, in short, but the face of Czechoslovakia under Communism and what that fate means, or should mean, to chose of us living in the free world. Thus one of your leftist admirers in America assures us that "Kundera refuses co settle into a complacency where answers come easy; no cold-war scold he. He subjects the 'free world's' contradictions to equally fierce scrutiny; che issues he confronts-the bearing of time, choice, and beingtranscend time and place." Neither, according to another of your admirers who also puts derisive quotation marks around the phrase free world, do you detect any fundamental difference between the fate of literature under conditions of artistic freedom and what happens co it under Communise totalitarianism: "His need to experiment with form is surely connected co his personal vendetta against the puerilities of 'socialist realism' and its 'free world' counterpans. " What is being done co you here, I have come co see, bears a macabre resemblance co what has been done posthumously to George Orwell. In Orwell's own lifetime, no one had any doubt that the species of totalitarianism he was warning against in Nineteen Eighty-Four was Communism. Yet as we have all discovered from che endless discussions of that book occasioned by the coming of the real 1984, it is now interpreted and taught more as a warning against the United States than the Soviet Union. If the word Orwellian means turning things into their opposites ("war is peace," etc.), then Orwell himself has been Orwellianized-noc by an all-powerful state in control of all means of expression and publication, but by what Orwell himself called che "new aristocracy" of publicists and professors. This new ariscoc-

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racy so dominates the centers in which opinion is shaped that it is able to distort the truth, especially about the past, to a degree that Orwell thought could never be reached so long as freedom of speech existed. Like Orwell before you, you are obsessed with the theme of memory, and you believe with one of your characters "that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." The power you have in mind is the political power of the totalitarian state, but what the case of Orwell so ironically and paradoxically and poignantly demonstrates is that in the democratic West the power against which memory must struggle is the cultural power of the "new aristocracy." This power, with no help whatever from the state (and indeed operating in opposition co the state), has taken the real Orwell, to whom nothing was more fundamental than the distinction between the free world and the Communist world, and sent him down the memory hole, while giving us in his place an Orwell who was neutral as between the United States and the Soviet Union and who saw no important differences between life in a Communist society and life in the democratic West. Now that same power is crying to do the same thing co you. But of course this is an even more brazen operation. Orwell's grave has been robbed; you are being kidnapped. When I first thought of writing co you about this, I assumed that you would be appalled to learn how in America your work was falling into the hands of people who were using it for political purposes that you would surely consider pernicious. But now I am appalled to learn chat you have been cooperating with your own kidnappers. "If I write a love story, and there are three lines about Stalin in that story," you tell the New York Times Book Review, "people will talk about the three lines and forget the rest, or read the rest for its political implications or as a metaphor for politics." But in America, once again, the opposite more nearly obtains: you write a book about Czechoslovakia under Communism containing three lines about love and everyone talks about those three lines and says that Czechoslovakia under Communism is a metaphor for life in the "free world" (in quotation marks of course). Or you write a novel, The Unbearable LightneJJ of Being, containing a brief episode in which an anti-Communist Czech emigre in Paris is seen by one of the characters as no different in kind from the Communists back in Prague (both being equally dogmatic), and virtually every reviewer gleefully cites it by way of suggesting that in your eyes Communism and anti-Communism are equivalent evils. I think I can understand why a writer in exile from a Communist society should wish to turn his back on politics altogether, particularly where his own work is concerned. It is, after all, the essence of totalitarianism to politicize everything, most emphatically including the arts, and what better protest could there be against this distinctive species of tyranny than to insist on the

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reality and finally the superior importance of the nonpolitical in life? You are, for example, obviously fascinated by erotic experience in its own right and for its own sake, and that is why you write about it so much. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that sex also plays such a large role in your novels because under Communism it became the only area of privacy that remained relatively intact when everything else had become politicized. (Surely too you make fun of orgies and nude beaches because they represent an effort to turn sex into a servant of the utopian fantasies that Communism has failed to satisfy.) But even greater than your passion for sex is your love of Western civilization, and especially its literature and its music. If I read you correctly, nothing that Communism has done, none of the crimes it has committed, not even the Gulags it has created, seems to you worse than the war it has waged against Western culture. To you it is a war that goes beyond the stifling of free expression or the effort by the state to prescribe the very forms in which artists are permitted to work. It is total war. It involves the complete cultural annihilation by the Soviet Union of the countries of Central Europe, and this in turn-so you believe- represents the amputation of a vital part of Western civilization. You make a powerful case in "The Tragedy of Central Europe" for the proposition that the countries of that area are "the cultural home" of the West. From this it follows that in acquiescing since Yalta in their absorption into the alien civilization of the East (alien because "Russian Communism vigorously reawakened Russia's old anti-Western obsessions and turned it brutally against Europe"), the West has shown that it no longer believes in the worth of its own civilization. The unity of the West was once based on religion; then religion "bowed out, giving way to culture, which became the expression of the supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, identified itself as European." The tragedy of Central Europe has revealed that 'Just as God long ago gave way to culture, culture in turn is giving way." To what ? You do not say because you do not know. "I chink I know only chat culture has bowed out" in the West. You do not explicitly add here that you for one are refusing co bow out, but you do tell us elsewhere chat your supreme commitment is co the heritage of the European novel. You further give us co understand chat as a novelist you mean to keep faith with your Central European heritage in particular-a heritage embodied in a "disabused view of history" and "the 'nonserious spirit' that mocks grandeur and glory." Summing it all up, you once responded to someone who had praised your first book as an indictment of Stalinism with the irritable remark: "Spare me your Stalinism. The Joke is a love story.... [It) is merely a novel." Your love of culture, then, gives you a double incentive to deny the political dimension of your work. You wish to protect it from the "mindless-

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ness of politicization," and at the same time to be antipolitical is a way of not forgetting the murdered spirit of Czechoslovakia and the other countries of Central Europe which have now "disappeared from the map." Even though I do not share your generally sour attitude toward religion, to all this I say: Yes, yes, and again yes. But I ask you, I implore you, to consider that by cooperating with those who have kidnapped your work, you are "bowing out" yourself. The testimony of the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, whether they languish in prison or now live in the West, has played an immense role in forcing the intellectuals of Europe and America to think about the political values at stake in the conflict between East and West. Now you have come along and forced us all to begin thinking again (or perhaps for the first time) about the cultural dimension of this struggle. This has been the distinctive contribution, and the glory, of your work. Why then should you wish to encourage the agents of the very cultural abdication you deplore and mourn and lament? Why should you, of all writers, wish to be coopted by people who think there is no moral or political-or cultural~ifference between West and East worth talking about, let alone fighting over? Why should you allow yourself to provide cover for people who think that Western civilization should not and cannot be defended? You will perhaps answer in the words with which your essay on the novel concludes: "I am attached to nothing apart from the European novel," and that the "wisdom of the novel" requires skepticism as opposed to dogmatic certainty, the refusal to take sides, the raising of questions rather than the finding of answers. But let me remind you of what you also know-that the novel is devoted to exploring the concrete and the particular. Those on the American Left who have taken you up have been able to do so only by ignoring the novelistic essence of your work, its concreteness and its particularity: by robbing it (to adapt the guiding metaphor of your latest novel) of weight, by cutting it loose from the earth and letting it float high into a realm of comfortable abstractions in which all moral and political distinctions become invisible, and everything merges into "the unbearable lightness of being." In the novel to which you give that phrase as a title, you profess uncertainty as to whether one should choose weight or lightness, but that novel itself, like your writing in general, belies the uncertainty. In your work you have chosen weight, which is to say the burdens of memory and the celebration of a "world of concrete living." Even your flirtation with the irresponsibilities of lightness paradoxically adds to that weight, deriving as it does from the heavy burden you have accepted of keeping the mocking and irreverent spirit of your culturally devastated homeland alive: a spirit that darkens the lightness of the laughter you so value and that throws the shadow of the gallows over the jokes you love to make. You have declared in an interview that you want all of us in the West to understand what happened at Yalta, that it is necessary for "a Frenchman or

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an American ... to know, to reason, to comprehend what is happening to, say, people in Czechoslovakia ... so that his naivete won't become his tragedy." It is for the sake of that necessary understanding that I beg you to stop giving aid and encouragement to the cultural powers who are using some of your own words to prevent your work from helping to alert a demoralized West to the dangers it faces from a self-imposed Yalta of its own.

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ARTICLES AND ESSAYS ♦

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Kunderian Paradoxes MILAN JUNGMANN

Milan Kundera entered literature as a poet believing in Marx's vision of the man of a new era and new society who would rid himself of his alienation and thus undergo great inner development. He considered his opponents not disclaimers but distorters of socialism, gloomy priests who locked themselves into Marxism as into a cold castle. For him the test of the New Man was whether his life was not divided into a sphere of struggle and a sphere of love-the public and the private-and whether he was able to merge both these areas, one augmenting the other, and vice versa. Where this interrelation of the intimate and the social was disrupted, life lost its authenticity. And Io and behold! Kvetoslav Chvatik describes Kundera's Nesnesite/na /ehkost byti (The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)) as "a novel about love, in which love becomes the mirror of the age," in which "the theme of love becomes ... a question that asks about the value of the society in which people live their loves." 1 As though we had before us a problem arch vaulting from the first verses to the most recent novel, there is always at stake the wholeness of man, rendered authentic by his relating love and society, intimacy and history. Yee meanwhile a radical change has taken place in the weltanschauung buttressing this arch. The original ideological faith is gone and has been replaced by total skepticism; the collective dream about the Great March has collapsed, and all that is left co lonely man is to become reconciled to his helpless squirming in the crap of the world. His only consolation are expeditions in search of "life's deepest domain," sexuality, and his only chance for meaningful survival is incessantly to weigh and examine his own sicuacion and constantly pose existential questions to which there are no definite answers. Defeated, he acknowledges defeat but does not resign. He is able co look at it from the bird's-eye view of hedonist and skeptic grown wise, knowing that those who consider themselves winners are only living in a happy illusion. And illusion he rejects categorically, for it was illusion chat caused his predicament in the first place.

Translated by Milan Pomichalek and Anna Mozga. Taken from Good-Bye. San,izdat: Tt1•e111y Wars of Czechoslwak Undn-ground Writing, ed. Marketa G oecz-Scankewicz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 153-59. Copyright©

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In the article "Chopinovo piano" [Chopin's piano] Milan Kundera evaluates his past literary activity: "I painted, dabbled in films and in the theater, wrote poetry, but nothing seemed to satisfy me. I finally found myself when I set to writing my first novel, The Joke." And further: "I was thirty-eight and unknown. . . . Czech intellectuals and Czech culture in general underwent atrocious persecutions. Since I was blacklisted as one of the instigators of the counterrevolution, my books were banned and my name removed even from the telephone book. And all because of The Joke. "2 When in The Unbearable Lightness of Being we read of the physician Tomas being destroyed existentially by the post-August regime on account of a single article in a cultural weekly, we take this as effective artistic condensation symbolizing the nonsensical extermination campaign of the ranting and raving Party machine; in the context of the novel it thus truthfully depicts the social atmosphere in whi_ch responsible politicians were governed not by rational thought but by a spirit of vengeance and t,anic. In the author's confession, however, we necessarily perceive such condensation (" all because of The Joke") as a simplifying distortion that comes close to deceiving the reader. Was Kundera really "unknown"? Was his role as an outcast of Czech culture brought about only by the novel Zert (The Joke)? Our world-renowned novelist has never been a freewheeling improviser; he formulates very guardedly, even anxiously, weighing every word. Thus, when he chose the formulations cited he knew what he was aiming at: he turned his biography into kitsch for uninitiated foreign readers; he succumbed to the mentality of exiles unable to explain to foreigners the complexity of the Czechoslovak development, its turns and reversals, and the seductiveness of hopes that the degenerated project of socialism might be reformed. Later, Kundera has expressed this situation in the character of the emigree Sabina (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), who is horrified when in the catalogue for her exhibition she reads what the organizers have made of her life. She realizes then the futility of trying to communicate the truth about her past; she realizes that for foreigners she will always have to play the role of a martyr who suffered under the knout of Communist power. And now, in an incomprehensible sort of psychological blindness, her demiurge, who knows all about her and has "invented" this convincing lot for her, presents himself in the very same way-kitschy, that is. He has been seduced by the desire to dazzle the reader with his transformation of a complex phenomenon into a simple formula. In his awareness the warning signal flashes: Attention, triviality! Yet something stronger, a kind of narrator's instinct longing co capture the reader, forces him to disregard it and become involved in the mass production of martyr virtue: V

I learned about fanaticism, dogmatism and political trials through bitter experience; I learned what it meant to be intoxicated by power, be repudiated by power, I feel guilty in the face of power and revolt against it. Expelled from

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university, I lived the life of the working class. Later I played dance gigs with a group of musicians in the taverns of a mining region.3

In an interview with Philip Roth he issues himself similar personal credentials: Then they expelled me from university. I lived among the workers. I played trumpet in a jazz band in the small-town cabarets. Then I wrote poetty. I painted. All of it was just nonsense. My first work worth talking about is a short story written when I was thirty, the first story in the book Laughable Loves. That's when my life as a writer began. Half of my life I spent as a relatively unknown Czech intellectual.4

Those who knew Kundera in the fifties and sixties have difficulty in recognizing him in this self-depiction. The self-portrait is retouched so much that Kundera's true likeness is completely obliterated. Everything essential to rendering his profile as the leading intellectual during the last decades of Czech history is concealed. This split consciousness, which, on the one hand, is well aware of sentimental kitschiness and, on the other, succumbs to the pressure of a public incapable of perceiving certain realities any other way but trivialized, transpires not only in Kundera's publicity appearances. As I will try to show later, the novels he wrote in emigration are strongly marked by the same strange creative schizophrenia. Or_iginally, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was apparently meant to portray the tragic nature of a love destroyed by a regime of unfreedom, yet the end result is a pastoral tale about a couple that seems so at home in the small Czech world that, to a reader unfamiliar with the model, it must appear as an idyllic tale about a country where even the persecuted live happily and contentedly, troubled at most by their part• ner•s erotoman1a. Typical for Kundera, as for no other writer of his generation, is the immense popularity and general recognition he enjoyed from the moment he began writing. His very debut, Clovek zahrada Jira (The Human Being, A Spacious Garden (1953]), gave rise to a passionate polemic, and his third collection of poetry, Monology, swept across the landscape of contemporary literature like a whirlwind, eliciting comments even from people otherwise not greatly interested in poetry. Reading these trite verses today, one wonders what exactly was so provocative about them and why, in particular, they created the magical impression of great artistic achievement. All they really do is testify to the dismal quality of Czech poetry at that time, which had decided to acquire the adjective socialist with such vehemence that it ceased to be poetry. By the end of the fifties Kundera's name had become a household word, even overshadowing older and more significant writers. He was one of the · intellectually most prominent and penetrating creative figures who at chat time brought new life into Czech culture by critically relating to historical V

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continuities, and by expressing the hopeless sterility of dogmatism, the necessity of breaking its shackles and giving a new quality to both literature and criticism. He proclaimed nothing less than the need for an educated and freethinking public within the tradition of a mature ethical culture, which in the given situation was something we can fully appreciate only from the distance of today. Among writers, he was the best-known spokesman of a wave undermining the borders between socialist and world culture; no significant congress or conference of the Czechoslovak Writers Union could do without his speech, and his articles were anticipated for their immense impact on public opinion. With a confident gesture his "Essay on Inheritance Disputes" helped clear the atmosphere for an adequate mode of poetic expression. The study The Art ofthe Novel (1960) was greeted everywhere with unrestrained enthusiasm, owing to its conceptual and stylistic brilliance; its erudition overshadowed the works of literary scholars with any number of academic degrees co their names. When in 1962 the boldly experimental Ocomar Krejca* announced the premiere of the play Majitele klic~ (The OwnerJ of the KeyJ) on one of che National Theater's stages, expectations about Kundera were met again: the play was greatly acclaimed and again prompted an incense polemic. Symptomatic of the time was the public's precise understanding of the magnificent sarcasm in the dialogue of the former army officer Kruta in which Kundera first vented his aversion co "the longing for order as the longing for death" with Kruta's demand co "stay in line," to adapt and not ask unnecessary questions. This was an exact reflection of current disputes of "disobedient" intellectuals with the order-loving Party leadership-which by then were common knowledge. Even to the play's critics it was obvious chat chis was an extraordinary achievement in Czech cheater, an effective artistic argument against the pettiness and unimaginativeness that was (and still is) suffocating both public and private life. Why exactly is Kundera today trying co distance himself so pronouncedly from his literary past before the novel Thejoke? Why does he belittle his role in Czech pre-August culture? Why does he claim co have been "unknown" when everyone even slightly acquainted with Czech public life in the sixties knows chat the opposite is true? His present distorted self-portrait and couched-up oeuvre, after all, are the result not just of omission but of incen. c1on. le is my belief chat the secret of chis paradox does not lie very deep: In keeping with his philosophy of kitsch ("For none of us is a superman able co completely escape kitsch. No maccer how we may despise it, kitsch belongs co che human predicament"), 5 Kundera rejects everything that made him a col*Outstanding Czech theater director and head of the Prague N ational Theater from 1956 to 1961. Kundera ded icated his play Majitele Klicll to him.

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laborator in the creation of socialist culture, in anything that might show him captured by avant-garde ideas about socialism as an empire of freedom and new humanity. He condemns even his own arguments with those who distorted that vision. He would like to sever forcibly the ties with a past in which his consciousness was dominated by the splendid vision of the "Great March," and longs to acquire the reputation of a writer who, the moment he matured both as a human being and an artist, stood outside socialist culture. He wants to push into oblivion everything he wrote in its context, everything that indicated his attempt through criticism to find the buried paths leading out of the mess made of Marx's original ideas. His collections of poetry, as well as Majitele klic/J and The Art of the Novel, are quite unequivocally part of this attempt; Smllne /Jsky (Laughable Loves) and The Joke are so less clearly. Today Kundera would simply like to present himself as an author who opened his eyes at the decisive moment and unambiguously and without tactics distanced himself from the regime. Such eye opening, however, was not an instantaneous affair with any of us, and when it comes to a work of art, it is all but impossible to draw an abrupt line dividing one stage from the other. Besides, there are constantly at play not only conscious but subconscious forces, resentments and undigested experiences, a familiarity with facts without a real grasp of their consequences. On balance, the errors of the past cannot be denied but they can be overcome with work testifying to a deeper knowledge and a more thorough awareness of continuities all of which can be said of Kundera's oeuvre without misgivings. For him it is The Joke or possibly the stories from Laughable Lbves that reflect the process of eye opening. In these prose pieces Kundera gains a necessary distance from the textual material but not yet from the reality itself. With Laughable Loves he took a break from the drudgery of Majitele klic/J, for he longed to escape, to "feel free," to "enjoy" himself. He realized that literary playfulness helped him stand above the subject matter but still not step out of the world bounded by the project of socialism. Even the topic of self-deception and the stolen joke did not yet allow him to see that its absurdity was not just the temporary distortion of ideals. After all, as lace as 1968, in the well-known article "Cesky udel" ("The Czech Lot") he presents himself as a man of the socialist world and, in reply to a polemic by Vaclav Havel, reproaches the latter with arguments typical of one who had never embraced socialism.6 Nevertheless, the distance to his material did enable Kundera to saturate The Joke with a penetrating skepticism and the peculiar nostalgic mood of the disillusionment of a joke gone flat-which functions as a larger metaphor of a disillusionment much more consequential and inclusive.7 There radiates from its conclusion, however, a sort of growing wisdom, a realization that, albeit bitter, is purifying: past history could play cruel jokes on us only because we were in the grip of a strange irrationality, because we were unable to ask the searching questions. V

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MILAN JUNGMANN

In The Joke Kundera still has not quite found his characteristic narrative mode. Here we have an alternation of individual characters' monologues, illuminating events from various points of view. It is only in his later novels that Kundera shrewdly assigns himself the ancient role of omniscient narrator, explaining the plot, scenes, character gestures, and so on in the skeptical manner of Anatole France. Yet the character of the protagonist is sketched quite accurately as early as The Joke: this is the man whose only interest is the pursuit of women, a pursuit relentless and desperate because of its denial of love as the indispensable emotional tie of an erotic relationship. Knowing that the normalized regime would not publish them, Kundera wrote his next two novels for the desk drawer. During that time, he says, he felt most free: he needed to consider neither domestic censorship nor a foreign reader who might conceivably express interest-but whom he did not know, just as he did not know what pressures would be exerted on him by the latter's demands. That is why he withdrew into himself, cleansing as it were the landscape of his soul, subjecting to radical criticism everything that had heretofore made up the basic components of his "simple faith." Abridged by the translators

Notes l. Kvetoslav Chvatfk, "Romany Milana Kundery a krize lidske existence v modernfm svete," Promlny, 22, no. 2 (1985): 64-65. 2. Milan Kundera, "Chopinovo piano" (Chopin's piano), Reporter, no. 1 (1985). {Quotations from the English translation by Michael Henry Heim, in the New W>rk Times, 24 Oct. 1982.-TRANS.] 3. Ibid. 4. "In Defense of Intimacy," Milan Kundera interviewed by Philip Roth, London Times Magazine, 20 May 1984, 49-51. 5. See also the section "Kitsch" in Kundera's The Art of the NOtJel, trans. from French by Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 135- 36. 6. The polemic is republished as "Cesky udel" and "Cesky udel?" in Vaclav Havel, 0 /idskou identitu (Vaclav Havel, on human identity), ed. Vilem Precan and Alexander Tomsky (London: Edice Rozmluvy, 1984), 187-200. 7. Kundera has somewhere pointed out that the novel was with the censors for half a year. Yet the hitch was the military chiefs, who tenaciously tried to hide what was common knowledge, namely, that there existed so-called black barons {special military service units composed of social or political undesirables, forbidden to carry weapons and recognizable by their black epaulettes- TRANS.], of whom the hero of The Joke was one. The irony is that che publication was pushed through ac che appropriate places by a Dr. V Rzounek, who was chen highly subservient to the "progressivists" and who today is highly unlikely to acknowledge chis commendable ace for the sake of Czech literature. y

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''Narrative symposium'' in Milan Kundera's Thejoke LUBOMfR DOLEZEL

In the history of fiction, a system of narrative modes has been created, offering alternative ways of presenting narrated events. Moreover, whenever a "personalized" narrator is implied by the narrative mode (such is the case, primarily, with the /ch-form narratives and the subjective Er-form), the narrated events can be presented in various subjective perspectives ("points of view"). Let us call the combination of a narrative mode with a particular perspective narrative form. Narrative forms can be employed in two different ways: Either the whole text of a short story or a novel is homogeneous, i.e. it is narrated in one and the same narrative form; or the text is heterogeneous, i.e. different portions of the text are presented in different narrative modes and/or perspectives. A heterogeneous text consists of formally differentiated narrative seg-

ments. The transition from one narrative segment to another can be motivated by the story-telling situation depicted in the context. The story-telling situation is a set of motifs expressing the temporal, spatial and other circumstances of the act of narrating; it can be, but need not be, a part of the narrator's situation. 1 Motivated shifts are typical for such narrative forms as short story within a novel, 2 the novel with a frame, the epistolary novel, most short story cycles and fictional diaries, etc. For modern prose fiction, however, unmotivated shifts of narrative segments are quite typical. Narrative modes and narrative perspectives alternate without any depiction of the story-telling situation. This free, unmotivated manipulation of various narrative modes and perspectives is made possible by the historical development of modern fiction which has led to the complete conventionalization of all narrative modes. A multiperspective novel, a novel of shifting "points of view," is the result of the alternation of narrative forms. Instead of a stable and constant perspective associated with one organizing agent, the multiperspective novel presents the narrated events from various angles, in an objective as well as subjective rendering, from the "outside," and from the "inside," through the minds of various characters. Narrated events in this narrative structure are projected into a Na"atitJt Modls in Czech Li1era1ure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 112 - 25.

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multidimensional universe and thus acquire multiple meanings and interpre. tat1ons. Some critics thought of the multiperspective technique as a manifestation of a crisis in the modern novel; it has been blamed for the destruction of the consistent semantic attitude and of the fixed system of values associated with the homogeneous narrative. Shifts and alterations of narrative forms, however, are well known in the history of fiction; they were quite common in romantic fiction. 3 Later on, a preference for the homogeneous narrative became established in the realistic schools of fiction. At the same time, however, as the subjective Er-form developed, the technique of shifting perspectives in the framework of the Er-form was tried out and became commonplace in twentieth-century fiction. In the light of these historical facts, the technique of shifting narrative forms can be regarded as a well-established device of fiction. It arises from a consistent and most effective deployment of the fundamental structural opposition in fiction, that between the narrator and the narrated events; it is, to use the terminology of the Prague school, the systematic actualization ("foregrounding") of the narrator. Generally speaking, the multiperspective technique may be used in either of two opposite ways: 1. The same (or rather, approximately the same) set of narrated events is repeated two or more times in two or more different narrative forms. We get, as it were, a cycle of narratives different in their narrative mode and/or perspective, but equivalent, approximately, in their content (theme). Let us call this variant of the multiperspective technique the cyclic structure. A general characterization of the technique was given by Jan Mukarovsky in his description of the narrative pattern of Karel Capek's Hordubal: "We see the course of events in three different illuminations: now, as it was observed by Hordubal himself, a taciturn and passive man (we are, as it were, transferred into his place, we do not perceive the facts themselves, but Hordubal's thoughts about the facts); now, as it is seen and judged by policemen investigating the murder and, ultimately, how it appears in the light of the trial. " 4 2. Different sets of narrated events are rendered in different narrative modes and/or perspectives. In other words, the action of the short story or novel is narrated only once, but various segments of the action are expressed in various narrative forms. Let us call this variant of the multiperspective technique the linear structure. Marie Pujmanova's short novel The Premonition (Pfedtucha, 1942) is an example of this structure. Here, segments of action, presented from different perspectives in the subjective Er-form, are arranged in chronological order. In the novel Follow the Green Light (Jdi za zelenym svetlem, 1956) by Edvard Valenta, linear structure is associated with a specific organization of the fictional time: the "contemporary" action is narrated in the Er-form, whereas the "pre-history" is rendered in the /ch-form . Chapters of the Er-form and intermezzi of the /ch-form alternate in a regular rhythm, V

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both arranged chronologically. Thus, the time of che Er-form action and the time of the /ch-form action gradually merge. This general account of the multiperspective technique should provide a suitable framework for discussing a very interesting and highly original use of the technique in Milan Kundera's novel TheJoke (i.ert, 1967). 5 A follower of the tradition of the multiperspective novel in modern Czech fiction, Kundera made a substantial contribution co the development of its devices and func. t1ons. The story of The Joke is conveyed by four /ch-narrators. The chief narrator, Ludvik Jahn, is the main protagonist of the novel. Three secondary narrators, Helena, Jaroslav, and Kostka, all have (or had) a close relationship to Ludvfk: Helena as his "victim," Jaroslav as his old classmate, Kostka as his friend and ideological antagonist. Although the stories of all secondary narrators are outlined in the novel, che action of The Joke centres on the story of Ludvik. Coming from a small town in southern Moravia, he becomes a political activist during his university days in Prague (in the early 1950s). However, a political joke he makes casually is taken seriously; his former comrade Zemanek is instrumental in Ludvfk's expulsion from the party and from the university. Consequently, Ludvfk is drafted into a penal battalion to serve in the mines of Ostrava; he even spends several years in prison. In Ostrava, he experiences a tragic love affair with Lucie. Later, he is "rehabilitated," but never gives up his plan for revenge on Zemanek. He hopes to carry out this revenge by seducing Zemanek's wife, Helena, during a visit co his Moravian hometown. However, this revenge turns into an absurd joke: Ludvfk learns that Zemanek himself wants to gee rid of Helena. Ludvik's story is rendered in seven chapters, with a strict distribution of narrators: odd chapters (the first, the third and the fifth) are assigned to Ludvfk, even chapters to the other participants of the narrative symposium (the second, co Helena; the fourth, to Jaroslav; the sixth, to Kostka). The final, seventh chapter is divided into shorter narrative segments rendered alternatively by three narrators, active participants in the final Moravian episode (Ludvik, Helena, Jaroslav). Ludvik again is assigned the odd segments (from one to nineteen), Helena and Jaroslav share the even segments (Helena: four, fourteen, sixteen; J aroslav: all the ochers). 6 The fundamental problem of the narrative structure of The Joke consists in the selection of the narrators. Why were these characters and not any of the others entrusted with the function of narrating? The selection of narrators was not fortuitous but determined, I believe, by the structure and type of Kundera's novel. Typologically, The Joke can be designated an ideological n()Vel (novel of ideas), i.e. a novel dominated in its structure by the plane of ideas. 7 The narrators of The Joke are representatives of various systems of "false" ideologies-myths; their narrative monologues are authentic accounts of the social

conditions and of the individual directions ofthe destruction ofmyths. 8

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The typological character of Kundera's novel determines the selection of narrators not only in a positive but also in a negative sense, i.e. by eliminating certain potential candidates. Two important agents in Ludvfk's story-his "enemy" Zemanek and his love Lucie-are not assigned the function of narrator. Their contributions to the narrative symposium are not required because they have nothing to say about the destruction of myths. Zemanek is an opportunist who simply exchanges an old myth for a new one (the myth of the new generation); he adjusts his ideology comfortably to changes of ideological fashion and, therefore, is unable to live and to report the tragedy of a myth being destroyed. Lucie's story, on the contrary, is tragic, but her tragedy is not ideological; it is a personal, intimate tragedy of "defilement." Lucie's absence from the narrative symposium can be related also to a factor of the plot structure of the novel. In the plot construction of The Joke, Lucie assumes the role of "mystery." She is the "goddess of escape" (Ludvik), both by her name, and by her role in Ludvfk's personal tragedy. She is a romantic character with a mysterious past and ambiguous motivations. It is obvious that Lucie's own narration, her self-revelation, would destroy the atmosphere of romantic mystery surrounding her personality and actions.9 Therefore, Lucie's aspect of the story is not rendered directly, but through the mediation of Kostka who is, as will be shown later, a rather "unreliable" narrator; in this mediation, the romantic savour of Lucie's fate and of her motivations is not dispersed, but rather reinforced. In order to describe the narrative structure of The Joke in more detail, let us now turn to the investigation of the performances of the particular narrators, to the organization and style of their narrative monologues. It seems to me that the specific features of the particular narrative monologues reflect various stages of the myth-destroying process which the narrators have reached. Specifically, the structure and texture of the narrative monologue depends on the balance of two functions of narrator, namely the representational and the interpretative function. We assume that the balance of representation and interpretation, different in the particular narrative monologues of TheJoke, reflects the narrator's stage in the myth-destroying process. In Helena's narrative, interpretation dominates over representation. The destruction of Helena's myth occurs solely under external pressures; she herself is incapable of a critical rejection of her myth and its phraseology. Helena's myth remains naive from the beginning to the end. Her faked "suicide" is a grotesque symbol of the perseverance of a naive myth. Helena's naivete is also reflected in the style of her narrative. This style is very close to what is called "stream-of-consciousness style," an uncontrolled, unorganized, spontaneous flow of freely associated motifs, trite phrases and expressions: 1. We gave hundreds of performances and shows, sang Soviet songs, our new songs and, of course, folk-songs, we liked singing them best, I fell so much in .

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love with Moravian songs that, though I am from Pilsen, I used to think of myself as Moravian and they became the theme of my life .... And afterwards we sat in a little inn at Zbraslav, ate bread and sausage, everything was so plain and ordinary, the grumpy inn-keeper, the stained tablecloth, and yet it was a lovely adventure.

Koscka's evangelical myth is just the opposite of Helena's naive ideology. In his narrative performance, however, Kostka is very close to Helena. Interpretation clearly dominates over representation in his narrative. Destruction .of Koscka's refractory myth is not completed; it is carried only co the stage of unsolvable dilemmas. Kostka continues co use the terms and phraseology of his impaired myth co interpret his own story as well as the stories of the ocher protagonists. Because of the dominance of interpretation over representation in Koscka's narrative, Kostka seems co be the lease reliable narrator of the symposium. This unreliability is especially revealed in his rendering of Lucie's story. In order co satisfy an a priori interpretation, Lucie's affair with Ludvik muse be presented as another case of "defilement"; Kostka himself then can assume the prescribed role of Lucie's saviour. The phraseology of Koscka's evangelical myth comprises the fundamental, distinctive stratum of his narrative style. Quotations and paraphrases of New Testament locutions figure as the most conspicuous device in chat stratum. Moreover, Koscka's narrative style is saturated with a recurrent rhetoric, addressed co his ever-present ideological antagonist Ludvik: 2. You once stated that socialism grew from the stem of European rationalism and skepticism, a seem which was non-religious and anti-religious, and chat it is otherwise unthinkable. Do you seriously maintain chat it is impossible co build a socialist society without faith in the supremacy of matter? Do you really chink that men who believe in God are incapable of nationalizing factories?

Again it is typical of Koscka's rhetoric chat it is aimed in the wrong direction and becomes grotesque. Quite in the spirit of che great grotesque battles of the novelistic tradition, Koscka's impaired myth falls upon Ludvik's myth which, in the meantime, Ludvik himself has already repudiated. Whereas in Koscka's narrative the subjective interpretation adjusts the introduced motifs co its own ends, Jaroslav's monologue is built on a parallelism of representation and interpretation. le presents narrated events on two parallel and disjointed levels, chat of folkloriscic myth and chat of "everyday life." Jaroslav's archaic myth interprets the motifs of his narrative in the terms, symbolism and phraseology of folk poetry. At che same time, however, the narrator himself is aware of the inadequacy of such an interpretation; Jaroslav comes co regard his myth as "dreaming" and "fantasy." Nevertheless, he still is not ready co give up trying "co live in cwo worlds at the same time."

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For others, however, Jaroslav's folkloristic interpretations are almost ridiculous; they c"reate shadows of the narrated events which the participants of these events refuse to accept as authentic. Eroslav's narrative monologue is very special in that it gives a systematic, one might almost say, scientific account of his myth and its transformations. This component of the interpretative function (interpretation of the interpretation) explains the density of professional language drawn from history and musical theory in Jaroslav's narrative style: 3. The Czech language retreated from the towns to the countryside and became the exclusive property of the illiterate. Among them, however, it never ceased creating its own culture-a humble culture, completely hidden from the eyes of Europe. A culture of songs, fairy-tales, ancient rites and customs, proverbs and sayings.

Jaroslav's expert treatise on Moravian folklore 10 represents one extreme pole of the stylistic variety of The Joke, the other one being represented by the loose and spontaneous style of Helena's monologue. Jaroslav's myth is substantiated in terms of rational arguments. On the other hand, its destruction is brought about in the most extreme and cruel manner. In the last chapter of the novel (not only in Jaroslav's but also in Ludvik's rendering), the folkloristic myth is totally defiled. Surprisingly, however, in the moment of deepest humiliation, it experiences a glorious, although short-lived resurrection. The "abandoned" folkloristic myth flashes for awhile "with an irresistible ultimate beauty" and in this beauty it becomes for Ludvik the symbol of his home, finally re-discovered. This harmonic chord seems for awhile to be the conclusion of Ludvik's cacophonous life story. But it is not allowed to peter out; it is interrupted suddenly by Jaroslav's fall. In a narrative structure which is based on the destruction of myths, the resurrection of a myth cannot be used as the denouement. It is Ludvik who offers the most important contribution to the narrative symposium of The Joke. His monologue dominates the narrative structure of the novel not only because it introduces the most important episodes of the action, but also because it presents the most profound and most conscious destruction of a myth. Mythological interpretation is replaced by critical analysis; a perfect harmony between the narrator's representational "responsibility" and his interpretative function is thus achieved. This state of harmony is facilitated by two essential features of Ludvik's story. First, in no other story is the destruction of myth so closely connected with personal tragedy. Second, Ludvfk's character shows from the very beginning both a Lust zum Fabulieren and an inclination to self-analysis, to critical evaluation of ohe's own deeds and words. Ludvik.excels in the merciless "tearing away of veils." It is, therefore, not surprising that Ludvik is assigned the role of destroying not only his own myth but also of contributing substantially to the

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destruction of other characters' myths. Describing his first meeting with Helena, Ludvfk reports his deep aversion to her hackneyed and time-serving phraseology. Ludvik exposes the hypocrisy of Jaroslav's actualization of folklore in his brief description ofJ aroslav's wedding. For Kostka, "God's mason," he reserves a slight irony. He treats the anti-myth of the younger generation ' with much more biting irony. In this connection, I would like to mention specifically Ludvfk's depiction of the ceremony of "the welcoming of new citizens into life" (chapter v). Here we find a meticulous application of the device of "making strange," 11 an application which in its consistency and sophistication is unique in Czech literature. "Tearing away of veils" is accomplished here solely by a literary device, by the depiction of the scene from a special angle, from the viewpoint of a stranger who does not understand what is going on. This angle renders all actions, words and emotions void, meaningless and disconnected. Only ~after this absurd depiction is the "meaning" of the ceremony revealed (in Ludvfk's conversation with the official who performed the ceremony). Ludvfk's passion for the "tearing away of veils" is reflected in his narrative style through relentless enumeration of dreary or ugly details which, appearing sometimes in parentheses, distort every picture: 4. We left the hospital and soon arrived at a new housing project whose buildings loomed crookedly one after another from the unlevelled dusty site (grassless, unpaved, streetless) and made a drab setting at the edge of the town where it bordered the empty spaces of far-stretching fields. We entered a door, climbed the narrow stairway (the elevator was not working) and did not stop until the third floor.

It would be a great mistake, however, to call Ludvfk's narrative style "naturalistic." A more detailed investigation of his monologue would reveal a complex, multilayered texture, where detailed descriptiveness with a bias for ugly details represents only one extreme pole; it is balanced by uninhibited poetic language expressed in rhythmical syntax and in symbolic imagery: 5. From that evening on, everything changed in me ; I was once again inhabited; I ceased being that deplorable vacancy where languor, reproaches, complaints lay flung about (like rubbish in a looted room); suddenly, the room of my heart had been tidied up and someone was living there. The clock that had hung on its wall for months with motionless hands all at once began to tick.

The opposite poles of everyday speech and subtle poetic language, which have been described in Karel Capek's style, clearly emerge in Ludvfk's narrative monologue. Moreover, this monologue is a good illustration of the stylistic complexity and versatility which is characteristic of many /ch-narrators in contemporary Czech fiction. Besides the type of /ch-narrator whose style is based on a certain homogeneous speech level, modern fiction presents numer-

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ous examples of versatile !ch-narrators who are characterized by speech-level shifts and semantic contrasts. This stylistic versacilicy seems co be an appropriate expression of che complex experiences and of the constantly changing accicudes associated with the literary image of modern man. 12 Up co now we have concentrated on the study of correlations between the narrative and the ideological scruccure of The Joke. The study of these correlations revealed chat che form of narrative symposium used in the novel is not mere fashionable whimsy; rather it is a device by which is realized multiple destruction and self-destruction of myths which are, one might say, che real protagonists of chis ideological novel. However, the correlations just described represent only one of che functions of che narrative symposium of The Joke; ocher functions can be revealed when studying correlations between the narrative structure and the structure offictional time. The second pare of this essay is devoted to the study of this important aspect of Kundera's novel. The basic feature of fictional time in The Joke is quite typical for modern fiction: the proper chronology of events is done away with and replaced by achronological confrontations and clashes of narrated events occurring on different time-planes, in different time-periods. The action of The Joke is concentrated in two time-periods. The first period, Ludvfk's expulsion from the university and his military service in che mines of Oscrava, will be called the Ostrava episode; the second, Ludvfk's visit co his hometown in southern Moravia (with the aim of executing his long prepared "revenge"), will be called the Moravian episode. Two secondary time-periods alternate with the periods of the main action: the prehistory, comprising the sequence of events of Ludvik's childhood and studies in Prague preceding che Ostrava episode, and the intermezzo, i.e. che sequence of events of che time-period between che Oscrava and che Moravian episodes. In a schematic outline, che chronology of the action in The Joke can be represented as follows:

prehistory

OSTRAVA EPISODE

intermezzo

MORAVIAN EPISODE

The chronological action is transformed into che achronological scruccure of che plot by adopting che time of the Moravian episode as the narrated present; all che ocher time-periods of the action are then aucomacically transposed into the narrated past. This temporal perspective is materialized by making the time of all che narrative acts (performances) identical (synchronous) with the cime of che Moravian episode. All narrators contributing co che narrative symposium deliver their narratives ac che cime che events of che Moravian episode occur. In ocher words, che time of narrating is identical with che narrated time of che Moravian episode. By this arrangement, che unexpected, grotesque denouement of che Moravian episode can be presented as an immediate experience, captured in ics status nascenti; at che same time, a solid distance from the narrated events of che mythical past is established.

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The Moravian episode takes up three days, reconstructable as a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The time of particular narrative acts is indicated by explicit references which date the acts to the established framework of narrated time. On the basis of these references, we can date each narrative performance:

Friday:

Ludvfk's narrative (chapter I); Helena's narrative (chapter II); Ludvfk's narrative (chapter III); Jaroslav's narrative (chapter IV) Saturday: Ludvik's narrative (chapter V) Sunday: Kostka's narrative (chapter VI); Ludvfk's, Helena's and Jaroslav's narratives (chapter VII) 13 It is quite obvious that the temporal distance between the time of narrating and the narrated time of the Moravian episode is negligible (or even nil in chapter VII). The temporal proximity of all narrative performances allows for a homomorphic organization of the narrated time in all the narratives (with the exception of chapter VII which represents a special component both in the narrative and in the temporal structure of the novel). All narratives begin in the narrated present (i.e. in the time of the Moravian episode) and then return, using the device of flashback or reminiscence, to various periods of the narrated past. After having travelled a more or less complicated loop into the past, the narratives return to the present again. There is no need here to follow in detail the time-pattern of the particular narratives and to describe tlle shifts from one time-period to another. Let us just note that, with a few exceptions, che narratives do not overlap. Among the exceptions, the most important is the double exposition of the climax of the Ostrava episode (the catastrophe of Ludvfk's love for Lucie); two parallel depictions of this scene are offered, first in Ludvfk's detailed account, the second time in Kostka's mediating of Lucie's account. 14 Besides this overlapping, there are several instances where two of the narrative monologues intersect; this occurs, usually, in scenes of minor importance (from the viewpoint of the development of the action), as, for example, in the scene of Jaroslav's wedding (intersection ofJaroslav's and Ludvfk's narratives). The interpretation of the overlapping and the intersections is crucial for our decision about the overall pattern of Kundera's multiperspective novel. In my opinion, these double exposures are not of such importance as to give us two parallel depictions of the action from two different points of view. Therefore, I do not hesitate to call the overall pattern of The joke a linear structure. Moreover, the occasional overlapping and intersections possess, in my opinion, a different function in The Joke, a function which can be described on the level of the narrative structure: they show the limits of credibility, the "reliability" of particular narrators. 15 In keeping with the dominance of the ideo-

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logical plane in the novel's structure, the degree of the narrator's reliability is in direct proportion to the degree of the destruction of his myth. Thus Ludvik emerges as the most reliable narrator and, therefore, his representation is used to suggest the degree of unreliability of the other narrators. This holds true especially about Kostka who explicitly reveals his unreliability by the way he renders the "overlapping" scene of the Ostrava episode. From this particular aspect, the intricate correlations among the ideological, narrative and temporal structure of The joke emerge quite distinctly. In the framework of these correlations, another important feature of the narrative symposium can also be explained, namely the assignment of particular segments of the action to particular narrators. Ludvik, who is the main hero of the myth-destroying process, is also the chief participant in the narrative symposium. His principal role is based not only on quantitative facts (see note 6), but particularly on qualitative aspects: he is assigned the rendering of the crucial events of the two main time-periods of the action (the Ostrava and the Moravian episodes). The contributions of the other narrators to the rendering of Ludvik's life story are comparatively minor. Helena tells about her first meetings with Ludvik (events of the intermezzo). Jaroslav describes some events of the prehistory (Ludvik's childhood and student years) and some rather fragmentary events of the intermezzo. Kostka recounts a meeting with Ludvik in the period of the prehistory and one in the time of the intermezzo. His main contribution consists, as already mentioned, in his mediating of Lucie's account of the Ostrava episode; the relevance of this mediation for the reconstruction of Ludvik's story is, however, undermined by Kostka's narrative unreliability. On the whole, if we limit ourselves to Ludvik's story, the linear character of the time-structure of The joke seems to be violated only occasionally. There is no need to go into an investigation of the time-structure of other protagonists' stories, as they are rendered in their own or in Ludvfk's narratives. Except for a few momentary intersections, the narratives are arranged in a linear structure. Our analysis of the time-structure of The Joke would be incomplete, however, if we did not deal with the special status of the last, the seventh, chapter. From the viewpoint of the action, this chapter is distinguished by the fact that it treats events of one time-period only, those of the Moravian episode. Moreover, the narrated events are arranged chronologically. This simplicity of the time-structure is counterbalanced by the extraordinary complexity of the narrative structure. As already pointed out, the action of chapter VII is rendered by three narrators in turn, Ludvik, J aroslav and Helena. Narrative segments of this symposium are very different in length, from two short paragraphs to thirteen pages (in the Czech original). The narrative segments of chapter VII form a continuous, linear time-structure, without overlapping and without significant gaps.

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Various interpretations of this special time and narrative structure of the last chapter of The Joke will certainly be offered. In my opinion, the function of this structure is purely rhythmical: an irregular, but generally rapid pattern of alternating narrative monologues is played off against the slow progress and the monotonous repetition of the leitmotif of the chapter-the ancient folkloristic ritual of the "Ride of the Kings." These contrasting progressions create a complex rhythmic pattern which provides an appropriate background for the grotesque culmination of Ludvik's story. Our investigation into the problems of the narrator in Kundera's novel The Joke has led us to the core of the novel's artistic structure. It has revealed the ingenious network which mutually links all the principal structural components: the idea, the characters, the action, the time, the narrative form. Study of the narrator cuts across the traditional categories of form and content and gives us a rare opportunity to view the literary structure in its entirety. At the same time, we can observe how the structural network leans in a specific direction by the impact of the dominant structural component, the plane of ideas. In a period governed by collective ideologies, Kundera uses the type of the ideological novel and the form of a collective narrative symposium to ensure the best balance between the aesthetic message and the immanent structure of his novel. Following the narrative symposium of The Joke, we travel the peripatetic road leading from the dehumanized mythological past through the tumultuous present of myth-destruction toward a distant, but well-defined ideal of humanity.

NoteJ 1. Todorov's brilliant analysis revealed a complete fusion of the story-telling and the narrator's situations in the Tho11sand and One Nights (T. Todorov, "Les hommes-recits," Appendix to Grammaire du Decamiron, The Hague-Paris, 1969). 2. Cf. R. Wellek, A. Warren, The ThefJrJ of Literature, 2nd edition, New York, 1956, p. 211 . 3. See, for example, the narrative scruccure of M.J. Lermoncov's The Hero of Our Time. J. Mersereau (Mikhail Lermontov, Carbondale, Ill., 1962, pp. 75 - 80) described che alcernation of narrators in Lermoncov's novel and pointed out that it served an essential function- a gradual "approximation" of che characterization of che main hero (Pecorin). 4. J. Mukarovsky, Kapitoly z teski poetiky, Prague, 1948, vol. II, p. 338. T. Todorov described che cyclic scruccure in the epistolary novel: "Les romans par leccres du XVIIIe siecle ucilisaienc courammenc cecce technique . .. qui consisce a raconter la meme hiscoire plusieurs fois mais vue par des personnages differencs." ("Les categories du recic litteraire," CommunicationI, VIII (1966], p. 143.) 5. The second edition of the novel was published in Prague in 1968. An English cranslacion (with serious omissions) was published in New York in 1969. (Our quotations refer co che first Czech edition.) 6 . An interesting count was made by M. Blahynka: If we take che length of Helena's narrative monologue as a unit, chen Koscka's narrative measures approximately cwo units,

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Jaroslav's-three units, Ludvi'k's-cwelve units (M. Blahynka, "M. Kundera prozaik" [M. Kundera as Prosaist], P/amen, no. 1 [1967], p. 50). 7. The term "ideological novel" was used by Engel'gardt to describe Dostoyevsky's novels. The dominant component of the structure of Dostoyevsky's novels is, according to Engel'gardt, "a central idea," determining the peculiar traits of his characters (B.M. Engel'gardt, "Ideologileskij roman Dostojevskogo" [Dostoyevsky's Ideological Novel] in A.S. Dolinin [ed.], Dostojevskij. Statji i materialy, Leningrad, 1925, vol. II, p. 86). It is interesting to note that M. Bachtin connected Dostoyevsky's ideological novel with the tradition of the "Menippean satire" (Problemy poetiki Dostojevskogo [Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics], Moscow, 1963, pp. 150-62). In Northrop Frye's typology, the "ideological novel" is called anatomy. In anatomy, "the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than of characters" (Anatomy of Criticism, 8th ed., New York, 1969, p. 310). Independent ofBachtin, Frye also pointed to the importance of the "Menippean satire" for the prehistory of this narrative type. 8. Cf. the following statement by M. Pohorsky: "The exposing of the false consciousness of all four narrators is the essential principle of Kundera's novel." (M. Pohorsky, "Komika Kunderova Zertu" [The Comic Aspects of Kundera's The joke], Ceska literatura, XVII [1969], p. 340.) 9. It is true that Lucie's mystery could be preserved even in her self-revelation; however, this could be achieved only at the cost of a rather cheap narrative trick; cf. Barthes's criticism of two novels of Agatha Christie which "ne maintient l'enigme qu'en trichant sur la personne de la narration" ('Introduction a !'analyse structurale des recits', Communicatiom, VIII [1966], p. 20). l 0. In the English cranslacion, the most substantial part of this treatise is, unfortunately, omitted. 11. A classic characterization of the device of "making strange" (ostranenije) in Tolstoy's fiction was given by V. Sklovskij in his O teorii prozy (On the Theory of Prose), Moscow, 1925 (see esp. the essay "lskusstvo kak prijem" [Art as Device], English translation in L. Lemon, M. J. Reis [eds.}, Rllssian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln, Nebr., 1965). 12. Another example of the versatile /ch-narrator in contemporary Czech literature (a shore novel by A. Lustig) was described in L. Dolezel, J . Kuchaf (eds.), Knlzka o jazyce a stylu soudcbe leske literatury (A Book on the Language and Style of Contemporary Czech Literature), Prague, 1961, p. 23. J. Skvorecky's The Cowards (Zbabllci, 1958) is an excellent prototype of this narrative style in contemporary Czech fiction. 13. The complexity of the time-structure in The Joke gave rise, apparently, to a minor mistake in dating, occurring at the beginning of Kostka's narrative. Kostka gives the date of his first meeting with Ludvik as "yesterday," i.e. on Saturday; as a matter of fact, the meeting occurred "the day before yesterday" (on Friday). This is confirmed by the correct dating of a telephone conversation with Ludvik, following the first meeting ("the day before yesterday"), as well as by the dating of the second meeting ("yesterday"). The dating of the first meeting is also unequivocally given in Ludvik's narrative in chapter I. 14. In this connection we could, perhaps, explain why Koscka's narrative is daced Sunday. In my opinion, there are two reasons for this arrangement: first, Kostka's absence from the Sunday narrative symposium (in chapcer VII); second, and more importantly, che face chat by this arrangement a dramatic confrontation of the denouement of the Ostrava episode wich che denouement of Ludvik's affair with Helena was made possible: Ludvik learns the reasons for his failure with Lucie immediately after che grotesque failure of his accempt ac "revenge." 15. This was already briefly suggested by Pohorsky (p. 339): "The voices of che particular narrators proceed in such a way chat they meet ac certain points and chus cesc each ocher, correct, evaluate or discredit each other." Our statement about che linearity of che timescruccure in The joke is in disagreement with Blahynka's assertion that "almost everything is narrated twice (by Ludvik and by one of the others)." (Blahynka, p. 52.)

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Milan Kundera, and the Idea of the Author in Modern Criticism DAVID LODGE

Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1929, the son of a famous pianist. He joined the Communist Party in 1947, at the age of 18, one of a whole generation of idealistic and progressive young Czechs who welcomed the Communist takeover of their country in 1948. Two years later, however, he was expelled from the Party for, as he put it subsequently, saying "something I would better have left unsaid." 1 After working for some years as a labourer and jazz musician, Kundera was reinstated in the thaw that followed the 20th Party Congress in Moscow and Khrushchev's historic denunciation of Stalinism. He then became a teacher at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, where his students were the creators of the Czech New Wave in film. Kundera himself became a leader of the movement for greater intellectual and artistic freedom in his country. His first novel, The Joke, in which the spiritual and political history of post-war Czechoslovakia is reflected in a complex and ironic tale of love and sexual intrigue, was completed in 1965 and (delayed by state censors) published in 1967. It immediately became a bestseller, and a cult book of the Prague Spring of 1968, that brief moment when it seemed as if Czechoslovakia might achieve real independence from Soviet Russia under Dubcek's liberal government. That fragile dream was shattered by the invasion of Russian tanks. Once more Kundera became persona non grata. He was expelled from the Party, deprived of his academic post, and had his writings proscribed. Meanwhile The Joke was translated into twenty languages, to general critical acclaim. The French translation carried a foreword by Louis Aragon which described it as "one of the greatest novels of the century." If The Joke made less impact in England, that was perhaps partly because the translation was a bad one, the text having been mutilated and rearranged without Kundera's knowledge. In 1975, after persistent persecution by the state, Kundera left Czechoslovakia and settled, with his wife, in France, where he still lives. His reputation continued to grow in Europe and America with the publication in From After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 154- 67.

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translation of two prize-winning novels, Life Is Elsewhere ( 197 3) and The Farewell Party (1976), and a collection of short stories, Laughable Loves (1974); it reached new heights with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. This work, originally published in Czech in 1978, was translated and published in America in 1980, and in 1982 finally reached Britain, where many critics named it as their "Book of the Year." In 1983 Faber published a new, authorized translation of The Joke, which also achieved enthusiastic reviews, among them one by myself in the Sunday Times which prompted an invitation to write this article for the Critical Quarterly. In the early 1960s, when the Critical Quarterly and I were young, and Milan Kundera was writing The joke and wondering, no doubt, whether he would be allowed to publish it, it's very unlikely that I would have been asked, or, if asked, agreed, to write a critical article about a Czech novelist. The defiant, 1Like-Ic-Here provincialism of the Movement, the jealous guarding of the English Great Tradition by Leavis and his disciples, and the New Criticism's focus on stylistic nuance in literary texts, all militated against taking a professional interest in foreign writing. I was never under the spell of Leavis, but I was a literary child of the 1950s, and, as a critic, I was committed to the kind of close reading chat, it seemed, could only be performed on and in one's mother tongue. In Language of Fiction (1966) I argued chat meaning was as inseparable from verbal form in the novel as che New Criticism had shown it co be in lyric poetry; and that although prose fiction was more translatable than verse, since in it sound and rhythm were less important, nevertheless there was bound to be such a degree of alteration and loss of meaning in the translation of a novel chat the critic could never "possess" it with the necessary confidence. I no longer hold chis position with the puritanical rigour expressed in the first pare of Language of Fiction. Exposure co the Continental European structuralist tradition of poetics and criticism has shown me that literary narrative operates several codes of communication simultaneously, and in most of them (for instance, enigma, sequence, irony, perspective) effects are readily transferable from one natural language co another (and even from one medium co another). A flashback is a flashback in any language; so is a shift in point of view, a peripeceia, or an "open" ending. This does nor entail any downgrading of language in the novel. Kundera himself claims that coral commitment co the novel as verbal arc for which I tried to provide a theoretical justification in Language of Fiction. "Ever since Madame Bovary" he observes in the preface to the new edition of The joke, "the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry, and the novelist (any novelist worthy of the name) endows every word of his prose with the uniqueness of the word in a poem." 2 This does not mean that translation is impossible-if it did then a novelist like Kundera, writing in a minority language whose native speakers are forbidden access to his books, might as well

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shoot himself. Consider this characteristic comment, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, on the application of the word "intellectual" in Czechoslovakia in the Stalinist period: "All Communists hanged at the time by other Communists had that curse bestowed upon them."3 The rhetorical force of this sentence derives chiefly from the repetition of the word "Communists" as both subject and object of the verb "to hang"; substitute "dissidents" for the first mention, and the sense of outrage at the lunatic cruelty of the purges is considerably weakened. Another rhetorical device in the sentence is the ironic description of the epithet "intellectual" as a "curse." Such tropes and figures are translatable between most lndo-European languages. The problem of translation, then, is no longer a disincentive to addressing oneself to the critical consideration of a Czech novelist; and the conscious insularity of British literary culture in the 1950s has long since lost whatever justification it may once have had in encouraging a new wave of writers. But in the meantime, a new critical anxiety has arisen to threaten the project. To write on the fiction of "Milan Kundera" is almost inevitably to accord that name the unity and substance of an historic individual, whose biography I briefly summarized at the outset: Milan Kundera, the author. But the liveliest and most innovative discourses of contemporary criticism, loosely describable as "post-structuralist," have thrown the idea of the author very much into . question. Roland Barthes announced the "Death of the Author" with characteristic Nietzschean relish back in 1968, at about the same time that Russian tanks were rolling into Czechoslovakia: The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand aucomacically on a single line divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is co say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence co his work as father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scripcor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no ocher time than chat of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. ... We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.4

This proclamation, startling in 1968, is now a commonplace of academic criticism in the fashionable "deconstructionist" mode, but has had little or no effect on the actual practice of writing outside the academy, which remains obstinately author-centred. Books are still identified and classified according to author. The value attributed to books brings kudos, prizes and royalties to their authors, who are the object of considerable public interest. Poststructuralist theorises, some of whom have been known to collaborate in this

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process, would no doubt explain it by saying that the institution of literature is still in thrall to bourgeois ideology. Michel Foucault, one of the most formidable of these theorists, prefers to speak of the author as a "function" rather than as an origin of discourse: the era of bourgeois capitalism required the idea of the author as one who individualistically produced, owned and authenticated the literary text, but it was not always so, and it need not be so in the future.5 It is, of course, undeniable that the modern "author" is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The further we peer back into history, the more anonymous and collective the production of stories, lyrics and drama appears. And Foucault is quite right to say that, looking in the opposite direction, "We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author." 6 Whether one would wish to live in it is, however, another matter. George Orwell imagined such a culture in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The idea of the author which Barches and Foucault seek to discredit is the product of humanism and the Enlightenment as well as of capitalism. Collective, anonymous art belongs historically to eras when slavery and serfdom were deemed ethically acceptable. Copyright is only one of many "rights"-freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religious worship-which the bourgeois ideology of liberal humanism has claimed for the individual human being. Only those who take such freedoms for granted in their daily lives could perhaps contemplate with satisfaction the obsolescence of the idea which sustains and justifies them. Of course, the post-structuralist critique of the bourgeois or liberal humanist concept of individual man does not represent itself as totalitarian, but as utopian. "Discourses, whatever their status, form or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity," says Foucault in the passage cited above: No longer the tiresome repetitions, Who is the real author? Have we proof of his authenticity and originality? What has he revealed of his profound self in his language? New questions will be heard: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where does it come from, how is it circulated, who controls it? What placements are determined for possible subjects? 7

It is however, difficult to understand how an anonymous discourse could ask of itself, who controls it. Certainly in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where only anonymous discourse is allowed to circulate, none of Foucault's questions is permitted, the second set no more than rhe first. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting begins with an Orwellian story about the Czech Communist politician Clemenris, who stood on a balcony beside his leader Gottwald on a cold day in February 1948, and in comradely spirit lent his fur hat co Gottwald, as they received the plaudits of the crowd at the

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inauguration of the Czech Communist State. Photographs of the occasion were widely circulated. Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head.8

When The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published, the government of Czechoslovakia deprived Milan Kundera of his citizenship in absentia. That a government should be stung into taking such revenge on an individual author is perhaps a good reason for wanting to defend the idea of authorship. If The Book of Laughter and Forgetting had been an anonymous discourse, like the anti-government jokes that circulate in all totalitarian states, the politicians would have found it easier to ignore. One reason why the post-structuralist critique of the idea of the author has been so warmly welcomed in some quarters of academe is that it is presented as a liberation, a critical utopia. "The Death of the Author, the Absolute Subject of literature, means the liberation of the text from the authority of a presence behind it which gives it meaning," says Catherine Belsey, enthusiastically paraphrasing Barthes. "Released from the constraints of a single and univocal reading, the text becomes available for production, plural, contradictory, capable of change. "9 Behind this argument is a quite false antithesis between two models of interpretation, one of which we are told we must choose: either (A) the text contains a single meaning which the author intended and which it is the duty of the critic to establish, or (B) the text is a system capable of generating an infinite number of meanings when activated by the reader. A historicist version of this antithesis, expounded by Barthes in the essay already cited, states that the classic text pretended it conformed co model A, and thus succeeded in placing certain limits on the reader's freedom to interpret, but the authentically modern text aspires to an infinite plurality of meaning as required by model B. No one who is seriously engaged in the practice of writing fiction and familiar with modern critical theory (I speak personally, but also, I venture to chink, for Kundera) could accept either of these positions as starkly stated here. Works of literature- in our era of civilization, at least-do not come into being by accident. They are intentional acts, produced by individual writers employing shared codes of signification according to a certain design, weighing and measuring the interrelation of part to part and parts to the developing whole, projecting the work against the anticipated response of a hypothetical reader. Without such control and design there would be no rea-

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son to write one sentence rather than another, or to arrange one's sentences in any particular order. There would be no ground, either, on which to object to censorship or to the kind of mutilation of an author's text by his publishers which Kundera suffered in respect of the first English edition of The Joke. To that extent, the model of composition which Barthes seeks to discredit--of the author nourishing his book as a father his child-is truer to experience (including, I would wager, Barthes's own experience) than the one he offers in its place. But once the child leaves home-the book is published-a different situation obtains. It is of the nature of texts, especially fictional ones, that they have gaps and indeterminacies which may be filled in by different readers in different ways, and it is of the nature of codes that, once brought into play, they may generate patterns of significance which were not consciously intended by the author who activated them, and which do not require his "authorization" to be accepted as valid interpretations of the text. The serious modern writer is, therefore, likely to be just as suspicious of position A, above, as of position B. He (or she) knows that the proponents of A are all too eager to discard the "implied author" 1O of a text in pursuit of the "real author," and to ask the latter what he "meant" by his text instead of taking the trouble to read it attentively. The writer therefore finds ways of evading such questions, or confusing such questioners, by masks, disguises, obliquities and ambiguities, by hiding secret meanings in his text-secret, sometimes, even from himself. 11 Milan Kundera seems to be a case in point. He was at the very outset of his literary career a victim of the intentional fallacy (a fallacy that is committed by imputing and inferring intentions on the basis of extra-textual evidence). 12 Here is a writer with a history of courageous resistance to the dominant ideology of a Communist state, finally forced into exile as the price of his intellectual independence. Must he not be labelled a "dissident" writer? Since his books refer to the injustices and bad faith of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, must this not be what his fiction is about? That is precisely how The Joke has been received in the West. Kundera records, in the preface to the new edition, that, "When, in 1980, during a television panel discussion devoted co my works, someone called The Joke 'a major indictment of Scalinism,' I was quick co interject, 'Spare me your Scalinism, please. The Joke is a love story.'" This interjection is itself a statement of authorial intention, which we are not bound co accept. It is, indeed, a consciously simplistic description of The Joke, designed co head off a differently reductive reading of che cexc. Bue it does point us in the right direction. Kundera's work is ultimately more concerned with love-and death-than with politics; but it has been his fate co live in a country where life is willy-nilly conditioned by politics co an extent chat has no equivalent in western democracies, so chat these themes present themselves co his imagination inevitably and inextricably entangled with recent political history. Bue, as Kundera himself put it, repudiating the label of "dissident writer":

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If you cannot view the art chat comes to you from Prague, Budapest or Warsaw in any ocher way than by means of this wretched political code, you murder it, no less brutally than the work of the Stalinist dogmatists. And you are quite unable co hear its true voice. The importance of this arc does not lie in the fact chat it pillories this or that political regime, but chat, on the strength of social and human experience of a kind people here in the West cannot even imagine, it offers new testimony about mankind. 13

As if to elude being read exclusively in the "political code," Kundera concentrated subsequently on erotic comedy, often black comedy, in such works as The Farewell Party and Laughable U)tles. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting he returned to the explicit treatment of political material and dealt very directly with the effect of politics on his own life-but in a book so original, idiosyncratic and surprising in form that it offers the strongest possible resistance co a "single, univocal reading." Whereas in TheJoke Kundera displayed, at the first attempt, his mastery of the modernist novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a masterpiece of pose-modernist fiction, as I shall now attempt to show by comparing the forms of these books, by general consent Kundera's two most important productions. The modernise novel is generally characterized by a radical rearrangement of che spatio-temporal continuity of the narrative line-what the Russian formalists called the deformation of the fabula in the sjuzet. The fabula is the story in the most objective, chronological form in which we can conceive it; the sjuzet is the representation of chat story in an aesthetically motivated discourse, with all the gaps, elisions, rearrangements, repetitions and emphases which invest the story with meaning. The Joke is an exemplary case. A summary of the fabula of The Joke would begin in 1948 with the enthusiasm of the young Ludvik and his home-town friend Jaroslav for the Communist takeover of their country; then describe how Ludvik was expelled from his university because of a silly political joke and the treachery of his contemporary, Zemanek. It would narrate Ludvik's wearisome penal military service, his ill-starred love-affair with the waif-like Lucie, and his rehabilitation after the posc-1956 thaw, while Zemanek cannily exploited the changing ideological climate and J aroslav cried co forget the ennui of a safe Party job in a passion for folklore. It would explain how one day Ludvik was interviewed by a radio journalist called Helena, and on realizing that she was the wife of Zemanek, determined to gee his revenge on the latter by seducing her. Eventually our summary would reach the climax of the story, some time in the mid-1960s, when Ludvik returns to his home town for his assignation with Helena, who is reporting a folk ritual called the Ride of the Kings, in which Jaroslav's son is caking a leading part. Ludvik's revenge misfires when Helena cells him that she is estranged from her husband, while she is so shattered by the discovery of Ludvik's real indifference chat she cakes an overdose-fortunately (but humiliatingly) mistaking laxatives for sleeping pills. Jaroslav dis-

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covers that his son has tricked him over the Ride of the Kings, and suffers a heart attack. Such a summary (drastically condensed here) would give some idea of the narrative content of The joke, but, however detailed, would convey very little sense of what it is like to read the novel, in which the same information comes to the reader in an entirely different order and in an entirely different mode of discourse. The novel opens, not with Ludvik's youth, but with his arrival as a middleaged man in his home town to prepare for his assignation with Helena. The "base time" of the narrative starts then and covers three days in the mid1960s, leading up to the Ride of the Kings, Helena's suicide attempt and Jaroslav's heart attack. Everything else the entire life histories of the characters before those few days-is retrospective narrative, or "analepsis" to use Gerard Genette's term. 14 Furthermore, both the three-day action in the provincial town, and all the analepses, are mediated to the reader not by a reliable, impersonal authorial narrator, such as I pretended to be just now in summarizing the /abu/a-identifying and distinguishing between the characters, filling in the gaps in their knowledge, putting the reader in a privileged position of knowing more than any one of them knew-but through the interwoven monologues of four of these characters: Ludvik, Helena, Jaroslav and Ludvik's friend, Kostka. These monologues do not pretend, like those of Stephen, Bloom and Molly in Joyce's Ulysses, to record thoughts and sensations as they occur, but are rather what Dorrit Cohn calls "memory monologues," 15 like those of the characters in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. They are cast in the past tense, and are linguistically coo well-formed co imitate the "scream of consciousness" in Joycean fashion; on the ocher hand, they are not naturalized as journal or diary entries, or as oral anecdote or deposition. They are interior monologues, though they do have something of the quality of confession. The characters seem co be telling their stories, the story of the last few hours, and the story of their entire lives, to some absent Other, or to themselves, to their own consciences, in an effort co understand, justify or judge their own actions. One important consequence of this method of narration is that it throws the reader, at the outset, into much the same doubt, confusion and uncertainty about the import of the tale as the characters experience in negotiating their lives. At first we seem to be presented with several life histories which have little or nothing to connect them. Only gradually, in a series of "recognitions," do we perceive just how many connections there are-that, for instance, the woman Ludvik is planning to seduce is the wife of the man who masterminded his expulsion from the Party and the University many years ag