Milan Kundera: The Other K from Prague

WHEN I THINK of Milan Kundera, I’m taken back to those images from his early pages. I am not alone. Whoever have been there before, lingering in those snapshots captured by a novelist with the smirk of a mischievous philosopher, could have guessed where they come from. In the opening sentences of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, there is the communist leader Klement Gottwald, standing on the balcony of a baroque palace in Prague on a cold, snowy February in 1948, flanked by his comrades, overlooking the Old Town square, “a fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a mil­lennium.” Vladimir Clementis, who’s standing closer to the leader, “bursting with solicitude”, takes off his fur hat and puts it on Gottwald’s head. The picture of the leader in a fur hat speaking to people from a Prague balcony, popularised by the propaganda department, marks the beginning of Bohemia’s communist history. “Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”

The other image comes from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. After a brief meditation on “eternal return”, a concept that concentrated the mind of Nietzsche and sets the theme of this novel—“If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?”—Tomas, a surgeon, is introduced to the reader. He is “standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.” He is seeking answers on his lover, “recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life. She was neither mistress nor wife. She was a child whom he had taken from a bulrush basket that had been daubed with pitch and sent to the riverbank of his bed.”

The fur hat that outlived its original wearer is a reminder as well as a relic in the novel that made its author an enemy of the state. Communism fed the imagination of those who defied the lie, vindicating what Borges said, “censorship is the mother of metaphor”. The outcasts of ideology, in Russia and in the vassal states of Central Europe, wrote some of the finest novels of the last century, all metaphor-rich. For Kundera, once a card-holding pianist in Prague, commu­nism, blocking all the light he needed to read the ebony-black joke unfolding around him, would become a great erasure. Clementis’ hat is a reminder: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I myself may have quoted this line a hundred times, but nothing else reminds us with such aphoristic elegance of totalitarianism’s war on memory, the persistence of which is more organic and intimate than history. We turn the pages of early Kundera and realise why memory is art’s alternative to history. Clementis’ hat is a relic too: Long before the purge, the struggles of ideology exuded a false sense of fraternity.

Kundera’s problem with communism was a matter of aesthetics rather than ethics. The evil fascinated him, made him laugh, filled him with not fear but revulsion. He devotes a few pages in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the idea of kitsch, originally a German word with a metaphysical ring to it: “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes every­thing from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of totali­tarianism, and for Kundera, nothing else brings it out with such clarity as the May Day Parade. “The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not ‘Long live Communism!’ but ‘Long live life!’ The power and cunning of Communist poli­tics lay in the fact that it appropriated this slogan. For it was this idiotic tautology (‘Long live life!’) which attracted people indifferent to the theses of Communism to the Communist parade.” Kundera resisted the temptations of totalitarianism with the power of laughter and memory, and in 1975, left the then Czechoslovakia for France, and, eventually, would start writing in French. When the streets of Prague played out the second Spring fourteen years later, Kundera was not there among the amateur revolutionaries, all novelists and playwrights and singers, to lead the velvet resistance against communism. He was elsewhere and seen by some dissi­dents as the one who had abandoned the struggle. That was a misreading. He never abandoned the conversation with power, and his struggle with its grotesqueries. His resistance was spelt out in words that retained their terrifying honesty under the veneer of narrative lightness.

Then it is a literary crime to read Kundera as merely a dissident writer from Eastern Europe. The political and the historical are for him the state of “being in the world”. Even as he rebels against the clichés of communism, we can’t miss the subtlety with which he avoids one of fiction’s familiar territories: the inner world. The psychological is not what he deploys to bring a character to life. There is an overwhelm­ing physicality about the Kundera world. Tomas, a surgeon-turned-window cleaner in the Prague after the crushed Spring, first appears in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as a sensualist at an existential crossroads. At one level, Tomas is a character floating, from window to window, in an erotic comedy of errors where passion is regulated, politics is an in­fringer, and history is a tireless adjective. In the three novels that form the foundation of the Kundera oeuvre—The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality—the sensuous and the cerebral make a perfect partnership. Eroticism is the religion that keeps the faith alive for many Kundera characters, as if, when you are fortunate enough to escape com­munism’s “auto-culpabilisation machine” in which punishment seeks a suitable crime, hedonism is an unintended alternative.

Kundera’s own alternatives lay in the infinite possibilities of the art of the novel itself, and I can’t think of another novelist who was as obsessive about his art and its ancestry. In two book-length essays, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, he reflects on the art that defines him from the perspective of multiple identities: as a writer trapped in history; as a writer from a place culturally stolen by a monolith; and as a writer con­stantly listening to the whispers of the great dead (Rabelais, Cervantes, Kafka, Goethe, Hemingway, Hašek …). He was a great believer in the sovereignty of his art, and any Kundera novel—most of them structured in seven parts like a musical composi­tion—can be read as a self-referential essay on the art of the novel. From Immortality: “Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything… into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of every­thing that preceded is concentrated.” What propels the pages of Kundera—home to fiction’s most enduring aphorisms—is the drama of being in the “theatre of memory”, where forgetting is equal to death.

TWO WEEKS AGO, I wrote in these pages about his new little book, A Kidnapped West, which is a collection of his two influential earlier essays on being a writer from a small nation and the cultural legacy of Central Europe—“not a state but a fate”—punished by both history and geography. It was the publisher’s invitation to reread Kundera in the wake of another small nation’s tragedy. Still Kundera never invested in prophecies, and in 21st-century Prague, where tourism follows the footprints of Kafka and Havel, Kundera has not been much of a buzz, and the bust of Gottwald I saw in the Museum of Communism in Prague three years ago was not accessorised by the fur cap of Clementis. Prophets claim the future; writers marvel at the recurrence of the present. Kundera was not in the business of prophecies, like the other writer from Prague whom he has written about repeatedly. The best on Prague’s original K was said by the other K who fled the city. Kundera never forgave Max Brod, the father of “Kafkology”, for turning Kafka into a saint. Prague may now reclaim Kundera, adding him to the pantheon. That will be homecoming as a posthumous irony.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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