Milan Kundera leaves behind a powerful literary legacy laced with cynicism

Novels born out of uncertainties

Kundera thought that novels – the cornerstone of European modernity and enlightenment – are born out of possibilities and uncertainties, contrasts and differences, but the modern world insists on destroying possibility, uncertainty, and fluctuation.

As for the world of post-modernity or "fluid modernity", Kundera believed it is a product of "insignificance," the concept to which he dedicated his last novel "The Festival of Insignificance" in 2014, ending a long writing career.

Insignificance, in that sense, may be explained by the death of the novel, with the earliest signs of this death emerging with George Orwell's "1984".

"Kundera admits to the lucidity and correctness of Orwell's foresight, which is marked by intellectual analysis," Waddah Shararah, an Arab author, wrote in his interpretation of Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" in his book, "The Expression of Images".

"But there is no room to feed into this analysis or respond to it; and as such, it stifles any (non-intellectual) echo. As if, in its attempt to criticise the totalitarian world that systematises poetry, rage, and love, Orwell's novel fell into the very same trap of the world it is trying to criticise," he adds.

Gloomy joy

In "The Farewell Waltz", the delight of human beings in life – their life – has a melancholy aura.

The spa in which the story takes place serves as a gloomy background for the joy that the characters of the novel are seeking: parenthood, liberty and freedom, marriage and affairs, reproductive instinct, love and sexual attraction, hatred, and other psychological, social, and existential foundations upon which emotional connections are built among humans.

In Kundera's view, the constant human endeavour to acquire, connect, and procreate reflects a complex that goes against human ideals or sanctities like persistence, loyalty, honesty, and others.

This view is probably rooted in the great influence that Nietzsche's writings had on Kundera, as evident in most of his novels.

In Kundera's vision, images like a breastfeeding mother, a child's smile, or two lovers running in a field suggest irony and mockery.

Jakub's character in "The Farewell Waltz" believes that the more an individual wants to procreate, the more foolish they are; the best people are those who have no more than one descendant.

Jakub had lived 45 years with an empty passenger seat. He up and left his country without looking back, alone with no luggage nor bitterness in his heart. All he had was a false sense of youthful vitality.

Like Jakub, Sabina in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", who decides to emigrate to America, wishes to be cremated when she dies and have her ashes thrown into the ocean, leaving no trace of her existence after she leaves this world.

Such liberation from the burden of human existence, from its roots and past, is what allows a person who leaves their country to see the world as beautiful and charming, to talk freely and without filters to everyone they meet before they leave because their words will have no consequences.

Such words uttered from freedom are light and easy – unlike the words coming from the strong roots and suffocating connections that man is liberated from when they leave the place. As for those tied down by these heavy connections, only death can free them of the burdens and pains of existence.

Jakub leaves his country with no ties to the world save for his body – a temporary, transient, momentary tie.

Today, we are far away from that Kundera philosophy. Our souls are still too intertwined with our natural and blood ties, which we cannot even ponder the possibility of breaking. Per the common perception, unchaining ourselves from these ties would make us nothing but rogue traitors.

Kundera's harsh, cynical pessimism drove him to cast doubt even over the ties that link mothers and fathers to their children in one of his philosophical ramblings.

Perhaps, he believed that humans should have been born from eggs that come from unknown sources, so they can be saved from the sacred primary original ties.

Satire of revolutionary lyricism

Charged rhetoric and lyricism have long been a pillar of our contemporary Arab literary and political culture, in word and deed. This electric lyricism is what pumps life and spirit into new political or cultural projects.

Moroccan researcher Mohamed Aber al-Jabri (1935-2010) noted in his book "Contemporary Arab Discourse" that all contemporary political rhetoric in the Arab world is based on evoking "emotional possibilities" aimed at addressing a "semi-imaginary public awareness."

Egyptian researcher Nagui Naguib also noted in "The Book of Sorrows" that Arab Renaissance literature is fraught with "the sorrows of the young rural citizen," who lives a kind of "eternal adolescence" in the city, never reaching the maturity that allows him to establish a distance between dreams, fantasies and "mental possibilities."

How is this relevant to Kundera?

Kundera made the source of all lyricism, be it in poetry, behaviours, or political rhetoric, the main character in "Life is Elsewhere", in an attempt to bring to light the "rotten" speech or lyricism that surrounds us.

His protagonist Jaromil is the product of an unhappy relationship between his parents in a totalitarian Communist world, which puts lyricism at the heart of his childhood.

Even as an adolescent, Jaromil remains attracted to the motherly love that chases him everywhere he goes. If he tries to outrun it, he cannot outrun the feelings of betrayal engendered by his attempts to break free from his mother's love.

At the centre of Jaromil's lyricism is the divorce between body and soul – the key of all lyrical poetry and revolutionary projects, which aims at changing the world.

Ever since his party commissioned him to report on university exams, Jaromil cannot but hear the echoes of revolutionary chants, just as a forest of mirrors reflects his image as he writes revolution poetry. His mother, his poetry, and the revolution hover over his head like pairs of divine eyes watching over him. Without them, he is nothing.

Meanwhile, the revolution wants teenagers to believe that "dreams are reality, and the truth is nothing but a dream." But maturity is the only way to be liberated from this belief.

If one is not liberated, they join the police or become an informant, just like Jaromil, who denounces his lover's brother who plans to flee the "socialist paradise" in Czechoslovakia to the country of the "capitalist evil" in the West.

As such, he betrays Jaromil's dreams, who had long imagined his epitaph reading: "He wished to die in the flames of the revolution."

"Life is Elsewhere" is a satire of the poetic lyricism that stains revolutions and revolutionary innocence that utilise the eternal "decay of adolescence".

Kundera's other novels do not stray far from this direction with their ridicule of political, revolutionary, and cultural idols. Not even the greatest intellectuals and poets, from Lorca to Éluard, are spared Kundera's cynicism.

Writing into his old age

Kundera was 86 when he published his last and relatively short novel, "The Festival of Insignificance", in 2014, which he had begun to write at the turn of the millennium. After the superb "Immortality in 1988", Kundera's novels, like "Ignorance and Identity", became shorter.

In 2007, Kundera published his essay, "The Curtain", which reflected on the art of the novel – the same topic to which he had dedicated his previous book, "The Art of the Novel".

In both "The Festival of Insignificance" and "The Art of the Novel", Kundera shares his observations on time, memory, and oblivion in old age.

Kundera was one of the novelists most "committed" to raising big existential questions through philosophical novels in the second half of the 20th century.

Eventually, this led him to ponder existence from the perspective of old age. Thus came to life "The Festival of Insignificance", which discusses life, existence, and memory in the eyes of the elderly.

In "The Curtain", Kundera says "constant oblivion gives our actions a ghostly, non-realistic, vague character."

He wonders: "What did we have for lunch yesterday? What was the story my friend told me? What did I think about three seconds ago?" The answer: "All of that is forgotten."

The novel, on the other hand, as a utopian world that does not know oblivion, is but an ill-fortified defence against oblivion, he writes.

"By the time I turn the page, I will have forgotten what I just read, only keeping a brief summary in mind. (...) One day, years later, I will be overtaken by a desire to talk with a friend about that novel."

"At that moment, we will both be certain that each of our memories has only kept a few excerpts and constructed a different book for each of us."

This is how life fades in our bodies and memory as time goes by and we accumulate memories and years, he says.

In "The Festival of Insignificance", Alain is waiting in front of a museum near Paris' Luxembourg Garden to visit a Marc Chagall exhibition. He knows he would not be able to stand in the long and slow queue, so he "watches people with faces paralysed from boredom," eventually opting to stroll in the park, where "the human race is smaller in number and freer."

D'Ardelo happens to be there, repeating under his breath that in three weeks' time, he will be simultaneously celebrating the distant anniversary of his birth and the imminent possibility of his death, as he awaits his cancer diagnosis results. In his signature nihilistic irony, Kundera describes D'Ardelo's anticipated anniversary as a "double celebration."

D'Ardelo's tests come back negative for cancer, and before his birthday party, he meets with friends and they discuss time, life, and age.

One of his friends says: "In life, people meet, gossip, discuss, and fight, unaware that they are talking from afar," from the distance of age differences between them: "Everyone speaks from a standpoint that lies in a different position in time." So each of them rambles as he fancies... "and then they die."

Another friend continues: "The dead remain for a few years (present as a memory) with those whom they knew," then "their death becomes old news; no one remembers them anymore and they disappear into nothingness." The famous ones, who are "a rare few", remain in memory, but they become "puppets", stripped of any true testimony or real memory.

Life in the absence of two wills

Finally, Alan (and Kundera behind him) – who was not able throughout his life to cut the umbilical cord with his mother who found herself forced to bring him to life – hears his mother plead with him: "It always seemed terrifying to me to send someone into the world without them asking for it."

But what is even more terrifying is that "no one exists by their own will," and this is the "truth of all truths", but everyone stopped seeing and hearing it because there is no point in thinking about it.

All those illusions about human rights are nothing but "a farce". They are mere nonsense since existence itself is not founded on a primary original right: the will to be born. And if a man does not enjoy that primary original right, how can he choose anything essential and authentic in his life?

The "knights of human rights" prohibit people from ending their lives of their own will. What human beings do in that timespan between the absence of these two wills – the will to be born and the will to die – is nothing but "killing the time they do not know what to do with."

The late Lebanese poet Bassam Hajjar describes this time as seemingly "never-ending", which is why the poet Abbas Beydoun suggests swallowing it "in large doses" until "that cup is empty."

As for Kundera, he proposes that humans engage in the "love of insignificance" in that timeframe, as it is the essence of existence and present "always and everywhere: in atrocities, in bloody battles, and in the worst (individual) calamities."

The author of "The Joke" built his novelistic world around sarcasm, absurdity, humour, fun, and bitter irony, and at the end of his book, he adds insignificance to that world as the key to wisdom and fun.