Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a reflection on Milan Kundera’s death this week. A whole generation of celebrated writers seem to be dying out at almost exactly the same time, and if I took Martin Amis’ death with wry detachment and Cormac McCarthy’s with a flinty-eyed acceptance of morbidity, I really was very sad to hear about Kundera.
Best,
Sam
K IS FOR KUNDERA
Eager to prove that, while he may not be the “brightest bloke in the world,” he’s “certainly not the dimmest,” Rob Fleming, the main character in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity offers a piece of irrefutable evidence. “I have read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and understood them, I think (it was about girls, right?),” he says.
There’s something about that that captures a whole era’s attitude towards literature. It was like, at a stroke On The Road had been replaced by The Unbearable Lightness of Being — and that novel, more than any other of its generation, provided a certain type of louche male with a to-go kit combining detached promiscuity, philosophical hedonism, political non-conformity.
One of the oddities of The Unbearable Lightness of Being — like On The Road, like Steppenwolf, like The Myth of Sisyphus — was that it seemed to be consumable only at a particular phase of one’s life. From about age 15 to 25 it was cooler than anything — creating however-many young libertines, wreaking whatever-amount of campus havoc — and then there was a moment when the spell wore off. I remember this distinctly for myself — being at a low point around age 26, having trouble reading anything, turning to The Unbearable Lightness of Being to get my bearings back, and suddenly thinking that there was something callow about it, particularly the abridged Nietzscheanism.
But, fortunately, the taste for Kundera does come back, and in another low moment — this time during the pandemic — I found that the best possible source of consolation were audiobooks of Kundera’s essays. It turned out that, more than anybody else, Kundera was the right dignified-yet-unpretentious priest of what
calls “the Milan Kundera-ish House of Classical Liberalism.”In essay after essay, Kundera insisted on an intellectual and emotional remove from the slick, totalizing impulses of the contemporary era and sketched out a system of values that, even more so than principles of philosophical liberalism or pluralism, was based on the spirit of the novel.
For Kundera, the stakes here could not have been greater. Since the age of Descartes, he believed, “philosophy and science had forgotten about man’s being,” creating more and more deterministic, absolutist marches towards ‘progress.’ Against that — constantly outgunned and outmanned — was the subtle, slippery, playful novelistic tradition (the ‘spirit of Cervantes’).
Here is how Kundera summarized his own intellectual journey:
Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. It will pass judgment on us, of course. And without any competence. But if the future is not. Value for me, then to what am I attached? To God? Country? The people? The individual? My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.
Kundera is of course particularly associated with resistance to Communism, but, like Solzhenitsyn, his pronouncements late in life tended to indict Western materialism just as much as his old Marxist-Leninist nemesis.
In Encounter, here is how he describes the culture of the last half-century:
Art had already lost its appeal, and the professors and connoisseurs were no longer interested in either paintings or books, only in the people who had them; in their lives. In the age of the prosecutors what does a life mean? A long succession of events whose deceptive surface is meant to hide sin.
He believed that, not only was the novel at ‘risk of dying,’ but that it had long ago already died: “Its death occurs quietly, unnoticed, and no one is outraged,” he wrote in ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes.’ To even his sympathetic readers, Kundera was simply getting old — he was “more than a little grumpy about the clatter and clutter of modern Western society,” The New York Times wrote in its obituary — but Kundera was absolutely serious: late 20th century Western culture struck him as “a cemetery of missed opportunities, of unheard appeals” — there was somehow a lack of interest in personal dignity and moral seriousness, of an appetite for complexity.
That seems to be the right way to understand his vanishingly-slim later novels. He was trying to restore a tradition to itself, and doing so with the absolute economy of means — with a few wistful notes, as if from some long-forgotten instrument, as if trying to remind everyone that it was part of the universal birthright to inquire after the highest things, to think about philosophy and poetry, and to do with both cosmic intensity and with the divine spirit of play.
For Kundera, the novelistic spirit didn’t just confine itself to the novel — it was a whole way of thinking and of living. He followed Hermann Broch in calling for a “new art of the specifically novelistic essay,” and he seemed determined to confound publishers and reviewers by refusing to abide by familiar genre distinctions, by stripping some of his later novels bare of any ‘fictional’ armature and turning them into philosophical ruminations.
That long string of willfully-slender work has tended to make readers forget just how abundant Kundera’s novelistic gifts really were. My Substack friend
says that he found The Unbearable Lightness of Being to be “fairly dry and abstract, a philosopher’s novel, without enough of the sensuous, concrete life that I had come to expect in the best fiction.” But, to me, that misses what Kundera was really doing in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and in his major novels, the extraordinary lightness and breadth that he brought to fiction, the way that he was able to get very different disciplines to talk to each other and, with the greatest possible delicacy, to create something like a comprehensive worldview within a novelistic form.“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form,” Kundera told The Paris Review — and it’s very characteristic of him that, in contrast to ever-coy fellow novelists who always insisted that their work came from some mystical realm of inspiration, Kundera was willing to analyze his novels in completely logical, structural terms: in the Paris Review interview, he even performed a mathematical dissection of the length of his chapters and how they contributed to the novels’ overall ‘architecture.’
He was explicit about what he was looking to do artistically, claiming that “first of all, my novels are not psychological….to apprehend the self in my novels means to grasp the essence of its existential code.”
The dazzling success of that approach can be felt most acutely in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As Kundera points out, he barely spent any time at all on, for instance, a physical description of Tomas. He crafted his characters across the lines of their “existential problems” — the ideas or gestures that defined them. And the result was, absolutely, “sensuous, concrete life”— the ineffable sadness of Sabina repeating her gesture with the bowler hat throughout her life, each time denuded of some of its initial force, playing it out in near-middle age for her uncomprehending professor lover Franz as opposed to for her true love Tomas.
Here is how Kundera describes it in The Unbearable Lightness:
The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina’s life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed.
The knock on Kundera always was that he was ‘light’ — some kind of a market-friendly pastiche of the Central European masters (Broch and Musil) whom he so admired. But it was exactly in that lightness and intellectual sleight-of-hand by which Kundera achieved his most impressive effects. He was not at all averse to difficulty in fiction — in The Art of the Novel, he declared that “the novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity” and that “a novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral” — but he believed (and proved) that complexity and difficulty could be achieved not only through the familiar escalating tension of psychological drama but through the interplay of leitmotifs, the way that, for instance, the hat could on one occasion (involving Tomas and Sabina) serve as the height of sensuality and on another (in the breakdown of Sabina and Franz’s dynamic) reflect incomprehension — their “failure to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through the words they exchanged.”
That pursuit of a particular aesthetic and worldview — the ‘novelistic’ sensibility; the technique of the ‘existential code,’ the belief that, as he writes in The Unbearable Lightness, “the lives of human beings are composed like music” — is Kundera’s real legacy, far more than the endless debates about Tomas’ dating life. But, with Tomas’ libertinism, Kundera chose to make a genuine moral stand. In the context of The Unbearable Lightness, Tomas’ promiscuity is, actually, rooted in a principle. He’s married and has a child, but in his wife’s machinations during a custody dispute he senses a spirit of coercion and chooses to separate himself not just from his ex-wife and child but from his parents who have taken his wife’s side. “Thus in practically no time he managed to rid himself of wife, son, mother, and father,” Kundera writes. According to most ethical standards, that puts Tomas into an indefensible position, but as Sabina (“the woman who understood him best”) phrases it, “The reason I like you is you’re the complete opposite of kitsch. In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster.”
Within the context of the battle between social conformity and individuality, between Communist historicism and the spirit of dissent, Tomas’ libertinism places him, somewhat inadvertently, on the side of freedom and moral fortitude.
Meditating on the eternal political dispute between capitalism and Communism, Sabina finds that there is nothing to choose between — society reveals itself ultimately to be “a more basic, pervasive evil, and the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical slogans in unison.” Tomas himself, over the course of the novel, is unable to resist the allure of conformity and kitsch. But — as Sabina better than anyone observes — there is a locus of resistance, which, in Tomas’ case, comes through as obstinate, eccentric independence. Elsewhere in Kundera’s writing, he identifies that non-conformity with the languorous 18th century in contrast to the mechanistic, totalizing 19th; with the refusenik, malingering spirit of Czechoslovakia as opposed to the Romantic grandiosity of Germany or Russia; with the eternal verities of human frailty rather than the ideologies of ‘progress.’ But, most vividly, most memorably, it came through in Tomas’ bachelor existence; the belief (shared even more fully by Sabina) that the moral categories that matter are not ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘selfish’ and ‘community-minded’ but individual freedom against the ever-conformist, every-confining spirit of kitsch.
Sweet post! I think you make a lot of observations a lot of Kundera commenters miss out on, without neglecting those ones. (After all, we are writing for the Anglosphere) And I second the importance of his essays: if Unbearable Lightness doesn't make you a fan, his essays will. (Though as I'll tell everybody in this young, post-Kundera age, don't only read Unbearable Lightness: read his early stuff too)
The reason I classify Kundera as a dissident novelist even though very few in the former Eastern bloc would agree with me (though not always for rational reasons) is partly because of the role of The Joke as the Prague Spring novel alongside Ludvik Vaculik's The Axe: The Joke is a dissident novel whether Kundera intended it to be or not; but because in his intro to Jacques and His Master (a short but essential essay to add to the reading list) he describes himself as "a hedonist caught between political extremes." Though not to my knowledge autobiographical Tomas reflects that reality very well in Unbearable Lightness. He reasserts a part of himself that no political extreme - including those of the West, which he began exploring in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - can take away from him. (Let us remember that stripping one of their citizenship as the Communists did to Kundera is a very extreme act of disowning in the modern world: I don't think Americans can understand what that's like since it has almost never happened) With that in mind - since, as you said, he didn't only criticize Communism - I wonder if that's why Kundera attracts so many haters and uncharitable reviewers in the West. It's something I've wondered, seeing some of the more critical reactions. (Including the one you mentioned at Inner Life from your friend) On one hand, so many people read Unbearable Lightness; presumably, they like it or it has a big impact on them, the way you recollect so wonderfully here. So why then this struggle? (Though I'm a seasoned fan, I did not have this experience with him so I do not understand it) The best literature should of course question people's worldview, but this struggle has a different flavor to it.
I think that Kundera's 'hedonism' is equally indigestible to the West as it was to the Communists; even more so, given the promiscuous character of the post-1969 'normalization' period. Kundera's novels are very relatable, but they do not willingly lend themselves to any narrative, if at all. Even a pro-hedonism advocate in the West will do so in a moralistic way, where it's not just about giving a free pass but accepting that hedonistic behavior with the totality of one's heart: we see that with gay culture, for instance, which used to be a seam in the fabric of the hedonistic margins. The West today expects - in the sinister Marcusian framework of "tolerance" - that we not only tolerate gayness, but formulate a 100% positive moral opinion about a formerly hedonistic practice without question, and to express "repressive intolerance," to use Marcuse's term, against those who even slightly disagree. In this sense, the West (or America at least) inhabits a matrix of Marcusian logic.
While it's true, as you mention, that Kundera's stance is not as amoral as some may think - in my view, morality is as inescapable as eating, drinking and shitting but it does have shades of grey the way food has flavor - Tomas has nothing to do with that Western moralism either. And also doesn't give a rats ass about it; like you said, Tomas simply has a practical routine to his love life that is as far removed from that "I've got lots of bitches" attitude we celebrate in the West as can be. It is both completely accessible yet insufferably (to Americans) foreign; I remember how struck I was by it when I first read Unbearable Lightness. And because they can't handle or process that, haters instead come up with narratives about him being a misogynist because in doing so, the haters transmogrify what they don't understand about Kundera into safe, tame concepts that make sense, even if that characterization is cracked up. (This domestication of "otherness" is an accepted psychological phenomenon in translation studies; a good example is Stanislaw Lem whose artistry is incredibly multifaceted, and yet the Anglosphere can only define him as a science fiction author because it is the only cross-cultural overlap Anglo-America has with which to process Lem's artistry in a comprehensible manner)
Anyway, Kundera's passing is a great loss. I think you did a splendid job at reflecting upon his legacy. While Unbearable Lightness is great, I do hope those revisiting Kundera will give his other works more attention. He's not just a one-hit wonder.
Thanks for this wonderful essay that defends the lightness in Kundera's novels.