Character Analysis
Who Is "I"?
Will the real Milan Kundera please stand up?
As with all novels that have bits of autobiographical details and an intrusive first-person narrator, it's tempting to just assume the narrator is the author, plain and simple. That's not always a bad impulse. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the first-person narrator makes his debut in Part One, when he begins to own his personal experience in Communist Czechoslovakia. It's a bit disorienting at first because we have no other context for that intrusion.
Is it Kundera? Well, at the end of one chapter, he helps us out: "If I were to write a novel about that gifted and radical generation, I would call it In Pursuit of an Errant Act" (I.5.7).
So, we have a witness to the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia who is also a writer. It's a reasonable call to name Kundera as our narrator, right?
Well, not so fast. What do we do with the quite disturbing things that he admits to as first-person narrator? Things like wanting to rape his friend. We're serious: "...I could think of nothing for a long while but the immense desire I had felt to rape my lovely friend. That desire has remained with me, captive like a bird in a sack, a bird that from time to time awakens and flutters its wings" (III.9.4).
It seems like we're dealing with an author with some, ahem, issues. But we have to ask: is it likely that an author who is discreet enough to use fake names for people who are still in Czechoslovakia at the time of publication would confess to an ongoing desire to rape people?
We suppose that's debatable, but here's another thing: did Kundera (the author) actually witness people flying up into the heavens? That's a big nope. He's using artistic license to describe the devastating experience of being a dissident.
So, yes, Kundera is the first-person narrator of this work. But that doesn't make him any less of a fictional character.
Free Falling
Here are some quick and dirty biographical facts that you'll need to understand Kundera's complex relationship with Czechoslovakia:
- He joined the Communist Party in his teens.
- He was expelled from the party in 1950, but he rejoined in 1956.
- He was appointed lecturer in world literature at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 1952.
- He participated in the Prague Spring in 1968. After that, he lost his teaching position and had his books banned.
- He emigrated to France in 1975.
- He lost his Czech citizenship in 1979 in reaction to the publication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
When Kundera talks about the difficulties of his life in Prague after falling from grace, he's not making stuff up; he's lived it. Losing his position at the Academy of Performing Arts and seeing his books removed from libraries in Czechoslovakia are deeply scarring experiences for him. He speaks of this as an unrelenting fall from grace that feels like a literal falling away from society:
...ever since they expelled me from the ring dance, I have not stopped falling, I am still falling, and all they have done now is push me once again to make me fall still farther, still deeper, farther and farther from my country into the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all my words with its jangle. (III.9.5)
It's not by chance that angels are part of Kundera's novel. When we see him falling from one world (of solidarity) into another (of legit emo loneliness), we're meant to think of other beings who took great, miserable, isolating falls. (We're talking about you, Lucifer.) Kundera is literally demonized by his countrymen and left to fend for himself in a society that has set out to erase his existence.
Laughter. Forgetting. And All That Jazz.
Kundera's loss of place in his country's history compels him to think about the action and purpose of memory. In Communist Czechoslovakia, the past is something to be co-opted and used at the whim of the state. If the Communist Party can erase people's memories, figuratively speaking, then it's that much easier to control everyone with propaganda. The result is a culture and people with no identity—complete disorientation.
Kundera's friend, the historian Milan Hübl, explains the state's sinister interest in erasure: "You begin to liquidate a people...by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what is was" (VI.2.4).
While Hübl is basically describing the history of the entire world, it's deeply personal for Kundera. They're destroying his books, his place in history. When he sees his countrymen dancing in the great, celebratory ring dance, Kundera doesn't yearn to be part of the destruction that Hübl speaks of; he wants back in the circle so he can reclaim his rightful place in the life of his country:
I wandered through the streets of Prague, rings of laughing, dancing Czechs swirled around me, and I knew that I did not belong to them but belonged to Kalandra, who had also come loose from the circular trajectory and had fallen, fallen, to end his fall in a condemned man's coffin, but even though I did not belong to them, I nonetheless watched the dancing with envy and yearning, unable to take my eyes off them. (III.6.5)
Kundera learns through this isolation that a place in a circle can't be held open for him—and that he has no place in the past or present of his culture. In that way, he's just like Zavis Kalandra, whose execution is being celebrated in the streets. Whatever is left of Kundera's legacy in Czechoslovakia at the time of his emigration is about as significant as Clementis' little hat perched on Gottwald's head.
Perhaps this explains Kundera's preoccupation with weight and weightlessness. The ring dancers in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting soar into the heavens with very little to hold them back. They are the ones who participate in the new order, who accept the revisions of history without question. The ones who sink and fall, like Kundera (and Tamina and Mirek), bear the weight of all that has been forgotten.