Before Haruki Murakami, there was Milan Kundera, the original exotic novelist who was as hip as he was deep, as serious as he was raunchy.
On the face of it, it seems improbable that an experimental Czech novel about Communist-era Prague, published originally in French and translated into English in the mid-eighties, would acquire a cult following among the youth of a Third World country who spoke neither French nor Czech and were not native speakers of English. But it did.
For a certain generation of modestly privileged Indians who came of age in the nineties, Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a mandatory read — one after which you were not the same person again. Not for a few days at least. For those few days of post-traumatic Kundera syndrome, you were continually on the verge of starting a witty metaphysical exchange with an attractive member of the opposite sex, knowing full well that it was only a prelude to detached, existential sex in which bowler hats and walking sticks would play a prominent role.
But India is not Bohemia, and you quickly learnt to stop confusing Sabina with Shibani and Kundera with reality. Yet, you kept going back to him — enticed by the glamorous concoction of readability and bafflement, narrative and Nietzsche, philosophy and eroticism.
One testament of his popularity was the move by the savviest of Indian publishers, Rupa, to bring out cheap editions of Kundera’s novels. Throughout the 1990s, it mass published Kundera under the ‘Rupa paperback’ imprint, with much the same energy and smarts it would bring to the dissemination of one Mr. Bhagat’s offerings some years later.
Kundera’s appeal If one part of Kundera’s appeal was the way he made whimsical philandering seem like a noble intellectual pursuit, another was his preference for contemplation over characterisation, and predicaments over plot. He didn’t tell stories so much as share his characters’ problems — privately, one-on-one with the reader. This opened up an authorial intimacy that could not but prove attractive for a certain class of misunderstood, emotionally vulnerable youngsters on the cusp of adulthood, who were also seeking a sympathetic articulation of their own apparently causeless discontent — one that might seem like a luxury in a poor country where questions of survival took precedence over those of existence.
But that was then. India was not yet liberalised. Student politics still meant something. I remember college students in Chennai taking to the streets because bus fares were hiked by ten paise. Today, a large number of college students commute by two-wheeler. Rebellion has given way to a mad scramble to conform, and individuality is expressed via banal consumerist excursions sealed with a selfie.
Understandably, Kundera doesn’t evoke much excitement even among the literary-minded youth of today — not as much as, say, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was his contemporary. Indeed, being seen with a Kundera novel could invite puzzled looks. Isn’t he so 20th century? Didn’t he go out of fashion when the Berlin Wall fell? Who cares about Stalin anymore? Or about communism? Or existentialism? Surely, his thematic obsessions are about as relevant today as the fuel efficiency of an Ambassador car?
Relevance apart, there is also the matter of political correctness. Gone are the days when a mainstream literary author could open his novel with a meditation on female body parts. But Kundera isn’t about to fade into irrelevance — or, for that matter, into feminism.
The Festival of Insignificance
At the age of 86, he has come out with a new novel — his first in 15 years. Thematically, The Festival of Insignificance , which came out sometime last year, reprises the motifs of his earlier work — jokes, Stalin, freedom and tyranny, sex and mortality, laughter and truth. The ‘insignificance’ of the title is one of a piece with the ‘lightness’ and ‘forgetting’ in the titles of his other key works.
The novel opens with one of the four central characters, Alain, musing that, unlike in the past, Parisian girls these days dressed to draw the male gaze not to their breasts or buttocks or thighs but to the “naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short.”
Typically, for Kundera, this insignificant — and many would say, sexist — observation on the putative erotic preferences of a generation serves as an entry point for broader political comment on the 21st century. In Alain’s words, “Unlike the thighs, the buttocks, or the breasts, the navel says nothing about the woman bearing it; it speaks of something which is not that woman …. In our millennium we are going to live under the sign of the navel.” In thus invoking the navel as a metaphor for the erasure of (erotic) individuality, Kundera packs into a single image what could well be expanded into a book-length tract on consumerism, mass media, and humanity’s penchant for forgetting recent history.
Among his fiction, it is The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that offers the clearest rendering of Kundera’s moral vision, which had less to do with sex than with Stalin, or what Stalin embodied in human terms. This novel came out in 1980 — when the Iron Curtain was still impregnable, and a large swathe of humanity lived under the shadow of Stalinist tyranny.
Published less than four decades later, and barely 25 years after the Soviet bloc collapsed, The Festival of Insignificance is a reminder that while one kind of tyranny may have crumbled, humanity’s appetite for tyrants hasn’t abated. Kundera’s message (if we can call it that) is as valid today as it was in Communist Czechoslovakia — that humanity’s love for tyrants is bound up with its lust for significance.
The Festival of Insignificance ends with a memorable sequence set in Paris’ Luxembourg Gardens, where Stalin makes a grand entry. When the Parisians see him, they fail to recognise him as the monster responsible for the death of millions of innocents. Instead they are won over by his “country charm, his virile goodness, his folkloric look”. The crowds greet him with cheers and smiles. Of course, Stalin being welcomed in today’s France is as fantastical as Hitler being welcomed in today’s India. Or is it?
Kundera’s notion of totalitarian kitsch, which was a subtext in every one of his novels, is the defining element of social media culture today. The Unbearable Lightness of Being maximally networked while minimally connected, of communicating under perpetual algorithmic surveillance, of seeking virality without becoming a virus oneself — all of these characterise what we may call the human(oid) condition in the 21st century.
Kundera’s 1970s formulation of the human predicament is as pertinent as ever for a moral understanding of political choice today: while individuality is always a source of inefficiency, uncertainty and conflict (between individuals, and between the individual and society), the price of frictionless harmony where everyone conforms (either to the wisdom of the majority or the will of the Great Leader) is tyranny and a loss of the moral freedom that makes us human.
Given that humankind’s immunity against tyranny is often not what it ought to be, oppression is common. But then, as another character in The Festival …, Ramon, puts it, “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”
It might not be a bad idea, therefore, to add to our literature festivals and arts festivals and music festivals, a festival of not taking stuff seriously. Perhaps we can ‘crowdsource’ a festival of insignificance, where everything that’s mighty significant would be made mud. That’s the kind of joke Kundera would want us to take seriously.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
