Milan Kundera: Struggle of memory against forgetting

Shelley Walia

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

— Milan Kundera

Living in the company of his books, it never struck me that a day would come when he would not be there. With Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ on his bedside, Milan Kundera passed away a few days ago, leaving behind a literary vacuum hard to be filled. For me, his life of an exile symbolised the asphyxia of politics and the freedom of love, the deeply felt pain of the action-packed history of Czechoslovakia and the displeasure with the communist party which compelled him to seek emigration to France.

I first began to read this intellectual heavyweight and a pure literary virtuoso in the late Eighties when I saw the film version of his book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, which depicted the Prague Spring and its stormy demise leading to Czechs, weary of autocracy’s grip, withdrawing into private lives or relocating to the West. It left me feeling profoundly exhilarated and dejected. Kundera’s command of detail, his ability to turn ideas upside down and inside out, and his comic ability are always ready to astonish and shock.

His writings help shape our resistance against ignorance, hatred and forgetting. He stands up against fascism and its inherent drive towards creating the worst irrational sentiments of bitterness, nationalism, lust for power and fear, qualities that are antithetical to values inherent in art. The strategy, apparently, is to cut us off from the wisdom contained in poetry and literature, philosophy and theology, the arts and history.

A versatile writer, Kundera’s work coalesces erotic comedy with politics and philosophy, bringing the culture and politics of Central Europe to the attention of a worldwide readership. His wide-ranging reflections appear in ‘The Art of the Novel’ and in ‘Testaments Betrayed’, where he acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche, Kafka and particularly the Viennese novelist Hermann Broch, whom he followed in trying to “discover that which the novel can discover”, including “the truth of uncertainty”.

Taking the novel as the “supreme intellectual synthesis”, a “novelistic knowledge” that Broch calls it, Kundera defined this concept of ‘polyhistory” as “that which brings together every device and every form of knowledge in order to shed light on existence”. For Broch and for him, it is a “novelistic counterpoint” that unites “philosophy, narrative, and dream into a single music”. Remember, Kundera was a musician before he became a writer.

Kundera elaborated his theory of fiction in the Paris Review (1983): “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of the frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”

Who else could have so whimsically philosophised on the very idea of “burden” in his book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’: “The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment.” On the wild passion in human relationship, he writes, “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” Once again, for instance in his novel ‘Identity’, we cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality, observing the cool wit with a blend of sympathy and cynicism, irony and affability, that is unmatched in the whole range of European literature. Kundera is indeed sad and funny at the same time, mocking the reader with provocative enigmas.

Moving in and out of the communist party, Kundera wrote his two books of poems — ‘The Last May’ and ‘Monologues’ — mercilessly lampooning revolutionary romanticism. At the publication of ‘Life is Elsewhere’ (1969), he was thrown out of job, especially because of his refusal to admit his mistakes in supporting the liberal experiment in Czechoslovakia in 1967-68. His books were banned and he was allowed to migrate to France.

After the 1989 Velvet Revolution that silently toppled Czechoslovakia’s communist regime and steered the path to a pro-western democracy, Kundera unobtrusively began to make visits to his homeland. In 2019, he regained his citizenship. Surely, somewhere in his heart, he had longed all his life to belong once more to his land.

Milan Kundera unambiguously ranked among the greatest novelists of post-war Europe. He never gave up his commitment to aesthetics as a powerful means of emancipatory politics that lives on with a force of horror and deep sympathy, which spontaneously results in opposing the threat to creative expression and the proliferation of right-wing anti-democratic forces. He succeeded probably more than any other political novelists in defending the role of fiction in an age when “political demagoguery has managed to ‘sentimentalise’ the will to power”.

For Kundera, “socialism with a human face” had clashed with the hunger for power and this became the artistic tension in his novels, upholding the human spirit with the very act of survival through imagination in times of political turmoil. The poet and the revolutionary fuse in the consciousness of Kundera. Only in his Czechoslovakia, he often argued, could a literary consciousness flourish amidst its turbulent history and thereby show the path to “socialism free from oppression”.

The struggle “of memory against forgetting” would persist till the end of his life. Kundera, indeed, lived a real life story of political disasters, of mass incarcerations and, of course, the noxious makings of insatiability, betrayal and national glory, that enabled him to turn his loss into a space of literary prowess that teaches other poets of resistance like Aga Shahid Ali, who in his poem ‘Farewell’, writes: “My memory is again in the way of your history/ Your memory keeps getting into the way of my history.”