To Forget History. Johannes Lichtman on Milan Kundera
IT WAS MY LOVE of Milan Kundera, and my desire to defend him
against Harold Bloom, that brought me to Prague. As part of a growing critical
dismissal of Kundera that began in the early ’90s, Bloom had categorized
Kundera as an increasingly irrelevant author of period pieces. “‘The Prague
Moment’ has gone by,” Bloom wrote in a short essay on Kundera. “Young people no
longer go off to the Czech capital with Kundera in their back-packs.”
But here I was, still youngish, standing outside Kinský
Palace with Kundera in my backpack. Ha! Unfortunately, I wasn’t clear on how I hoped to defend
Kundera, beyond just being somewhere with a backpack. I knew that I thought
Kundera’s declining status unfair. I knew that he’d suffered backlash since he
switched from writing in Czech to writing in French and shifted his focus from
Czech culture to French culture. I knew that after the fall of the Iron
Curtain, a swell of Czech anti-Kundera criticism had made its way west — some
of it justified, some of it sheer character assassination. And I knew that many
of the issues that muddied Kundera’s critical reception could be summed up in
one short section from his fiction — a scene that took place
where I now stood.
¤
Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Beyond
that, summarizing his biography is a little tricky. Even when he was giving
interviews (he pretty much swore them off in the mid-1980s), his public
comments, like his writing, were a tightly braided knot of fact and fiction.
His past is shrouded and much of what is known is contested, and there is, as
yet, no published biography of Kundera to settle several pressing questions.
Unsurprisingly, he has antipathy for the biographer’s art. As Kundera put it in The
Art of the Novel (1986):
The novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its
bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. From which it follows
that a novelist’s biographers unmake what the novelist made, and remake what he
unmade. Their labor, from the standpoint of art utterly negative, can
illuminate neither the value nor the meaning of a novel.
Kundera has criticized scholars for elevating private
writing to the level of novels — “I refuse to put the Letters to Felice on
the same level as The Castle” — and declared that none of his
letters or journals will be published after his death. The value with which he
endows privacy is not strange given the time he spent hounded by a regime that
aimed to collapse the private into the public.
In 1949, shortly after moving to Prague, a young Kundera
sent a letter to a friend in which he made a joke about a government official.
The letter was intercepted by the secret police and resulted in Kundera’s
expulsion from the Party. The incident became the inspiration for his first
novel The Joke (1967), in which a young man sends a playfully
pro-Trotsky postcard to his girlfriend, who forwards it to the police and
brings about the young man’s expulsion from the Party. Kundera was eventually
readmitted to the Party, but after the Soviet invasion of ’68, he was expelled
for a second time, this time for good, and removed from his position teaching
film and literature. He emigrated from Czechoslovakia to France in 1975 and has
lived there since.
Kundera’s muted delivery juxtaposes the heavy with the light
in a conversational style that’s often wonderfully at odds with the bigness of
his ideas. His chapters are short, his movement discursive, and his philosophy
occasionally pompous, but mostly playful. By examining the same theme with
different stories (as in, for example, The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, 1979) or telling the same story from different perspectives (as
in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984), Kundera bases the
architecture of his books on musical concepts of variation (in which the
composer repeatedly returns to the same bars, with a slightly different
approach each time) and polyphony (in which several melodies play off each
other simultaneously).
Yet early translations of his works tended to lose what made
them most interesting. Foreign publishers wanted to market Kundera’s biography
rather than his style, and he has never quite been able to shed the early
portrayal of himself as a dissident writer of protest novels..
