The unbearable likeness of being
Three writers who fascinate me for the canvas of their work are Umberto Eco for his sheer scholarliness and the possibilities he introduced into his fiction; Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his magic and, again, the large political canvas; and Milan Kundera for being extremely personal in examining relationships and at the same time compellingly political.
Of the three, Kundera stands out for one aspect — that he continuously breaks the form of a novel, recreates new possibilities both in construction and in the narrative style and continuously plays around with time. No wonder Kundera has had on-going problems with his “creative” translators who have tried to “fix” his texts to fit them into the traditional narrative style and he has had to constantly re-work his translations in collaboration with friendly translators to get his point across!
Kundera faced challenges that possibly no other writer of his calibre and time faced, making his work even more fascinating. He wrote in Czech — a language in which his books were never published. So for the world to read, it had to be an authentic work in a different language! The frustration with translations Kundera has had is well documented. Multiple versions of translations have been available. Possibly no other writer has been retranslated so many times at the insistence of the author himself. But, if we overcome this issue, what does Kundera hold out in our times?
The fascination about Kundera is about how large political events are deeply personal in nature. Usually when these events occur, the implications of a protest, a revolt or a change (for instance, due to the current pandemic) are seen on the larger tectonic shifts they are making. For Kundera, these are also deeply personal and could almost be called trivial. But these trivial events actually set the narrative. That may be why Kundera obsesses with the word “forgetting”. It is not the natural process of forgetting, but ensuring that there is an organised inter-generational process of forgetting by erasing names, expunging records and just making things unavailable (including his own citizenship). The so-called humour and ridiculous events that peppered Kundera’s texts are so dark that it takes multiple readings to understand the layers of what is packed in.
Looking back at the timeline — here was a writer whose first novel (sold in record numbers) was published in 1967 and proscribed a year later. He moved to Paris in 1975 but continued to write in Czech. In 1987, he was asked if he would write in French (by then he was lecturing and giving public interviews in French) and he said “I know that I would like to write my next novel in French, but I doubt I’d be capable of it” (interview in Salmagundi). It was in 1995 that he eventually wrote fiction in French.
All his Czech novels — The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz (the earlier translation was called Farewell Party) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, were all spread on a large canvas, complex and deeply political. His next set of works had not only simpler titles — Immortality (though written in Czech), Identity, Slowness, Ignorance — and were on a introverted canvas — deeply personal and examining the relationships and exploring the possibilities in human interactions and exchanges.
It is only the last novel — The Festival of Insignificance (2013) that brings back vintage Kundera — a large title and a large canvas back to the fore. Was this something to do with the mastery of the language? He says that “to develop a thought and to relate a story are two different skills” (interview in Salmagundi) and therefore his problems with moving to French for his fiction. To forget thinking in Czech and to embrace a new language makes Kundera a character of his own fiction!
As we deal with the current unbelievable tragedy — which almost has the appearance of a farce — we see the deep pathos that is embedded in Kundera’s texts. The deep human tragedy that occurs when large regimes push ideological agendas, and resort to a rerendering of not only history, but also of contemporary narratives, where a joke becomes sedition and where the reason for arrest becomes unbelievably ridiculous. The post-covid happenings of booking journalists for sedition, arrest of students on terror laws, erasing the memories of activists through detention, the interminable lockdown, people moving over a thousand kilometers on foot, people choosing to sleep on railway tracks and the five-day announcement of a relief package is all the stuff of classic Kundera. We would have thought that it was Kundera using his literary licence to make a political point, if it were not for the fact that we are actually living it. So, Kundera’s body of work becomes the best literature to understand our regime.
A post script for Jhumpa Lahiri who decided that all her future writing will be in Italian. Kundera took three decades to make that shift, and it was still not easy. So, it may be better to go back to roots.