Humour and pleasure are the great inventions of the modern spirit. In the recent A Future of Criticism , Catherine Belsey examines the much-overlooked idea of pleasure in the reading of fiction. She is of the view that, though we regard fiction as a study of the reality, to consider it as such would give fiction the complexion of a mere social document. The difference, according to her, lies in the fictional/imaginative dimension of the text, a hankering after the unknown that would contribute to become the very difference from what is considered to be the real. Modernism has refused, in the words of Milan Kundera, “any obligation to give the reader the illusion of reality.”
Kundera’s world of fiction blends the imaginative and real, yet completely avoids realism. The non-serious, far-fetched, hilarious and the trivial become integral to his world of fiction. He stands up unwaveringly against the building of a system, especially that which springs from one’s ideas, doggedly resorting to Nietzsche’s command that we should never “corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us”.
In his new novel, The Festival of Insignificance , Kundera circles and digresses, continually surprising the reader with unexpected connections. The excitement of reading Kundera comes from his unpredictability; through his incursions dwelling, for example, on the seductive power of the woman’s navel compared to “the center of female seductive power in the thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts” or the slapstick narrative of Stalin’s story of ‘The Twenty Four Partridges’ which he unendingly tells his subordinates leading to the hilarious situation of Mikhail Kalinin wetting his pants. This becomes a parable on shame and humour that becomes a basic instinct in each one of us that urges us to demarcate our personal lives from the public. The uncontrollable desire to empty one’s bladder is the stripping away of the most private moments of humiliating obedience to Stalin. Kundera then — through the words of Charles who is planning to do a play on Stalin —asks: “Is there any heroism that’s more prosaic, more humane? To hell with the so-called great men whose names adorn our streets. They all become famous through their ambitions, their vanity, their lies, their cruelty.” But Kalinin is the sole example of an ordeal each one of us has experienced “that brings misery to no one but himself.” Stalin rewards Kalinin by naming Konigsberg, Kant’s famous city, as Kaliningrad in honour of the man who has listened to his story faithfully.
Like Rabelais’s fiction, Kundera’s novel has an astounding richness; it has all the features of novel writing: the plausible and the implausible, allegory and satire, ordinary men and anecdotes and, over and above all, digressions of pure verbal virtuosity. Such digressions, though disquieting, are original re-readings of history and culture, of human response to the approaching death, of how the wit and elegant subtlety of a man like D’Ardelo — one of the four heroes in the novel — stands vanquished before Quaquelique — a man of few words demanding no intelligent response or ready wit — in winning a woman’s favours.
These are insignificant occupations of life, yet momentous. “Insignificance,” says Ramon, “is the essence of existence.” In these seemingly small things lies the festive visible in the lives of the four friends — Ramon, Alain, Charles and Caliban — who engage in philosophical discussions on death, life, on the ‘enigma of the navel’ with its reference to seduction in the context of the current trend of exposing the midriff to the public that supports low jeans, or the mother who looks at Alain’s navel as a boy and dwells on her contemplated abortion that never took place. Though trivial, the lyrical and the philosophical underpin the novel that many may sneer at but discover, nonetheless, a delightful read. Critics, who may look for political or spiritual leanings in the novel, will pitifully dissipate their time and effort in digging out an ideology than grasping the reality of ‘festivity’ that lies at the heart of insignificance and despair.
The novel’s very lightness becomes an innovative philosophy of life as opposed to the ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ of Kundera’s younger days. To counter the approaching finality of his life, Kundera finds an antidote in the trivial and the unstructured. The worst in life becomes a joke, cancer turns into a carnival, and Stalinist repression becomes a moment of celebration. Ideology undergoes a metamorphosis from the younger Kundera to the Parisian 80-year-old engaged joyfully in the ridiculous and the absurd inherent in a life of abandonment.
The Festival of Insignificance;Milan Kundera, Faber; £14.99.
