[ad_1]
A few weeks ago, I happened to be surfing Milan Kunderahis last book, Hijacked West: A Central European Tragedy, was published this year. In a way, this is the last proper book for him to publish. It brings to light the one consistent theme of his eventful, politically slick and gloriously creative literary life: the constant sense of disenchantment and disillusionment. Creative and wonderful Kundera, The unbearable lightness of being (1984) was one of the most effective critiques of communism because it focused on both its suppression and the sheer sense of meaninglessness it created. But the existential meaning of the novel is more ambiguous in at least two ways. The main character, Thomas, turns away from politics, paradoxically, through a political act of refusing to cooperate with the regime, and ends up searching for meaning in a life of private passion. But the novel also leaves it ambiguous whether it is better to die under the “sign of weight,” where the search for meaning is still possible, or under a sense of “lightness,” where one literally lives in the moment, as it were. ; Even the future is a burden to be avoided. It turned out that the world of communism was a witch-house of meaning and rotten ideals. But the literary achievement of “Unbearable Lightness”…was to convey a very weighty claim, in the lightest way possible. his works (life elsewhere1973; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting1978; immortality1988) is often described as a “black comedy”. But somehow they were more radical, because you weren’t sure on whose account the joke was.
But, in retrospect, it was revealed that his work was not just an indictment of communism but of existence. It was impressively frustrating. Unlike many talented critics of communism, he refused to accept easy and shallow liberalism. Much of his literary strength derives from one of his great fears: the erasure of the Czech national memory (and that of small nations), the carpet bombing of culture and the rewriting of history that communism represented. However, he distanced himself from Czech culture, even forbidding the translation of his works into that language and refusing to pay homage to another hero of the 1960s – Vaclav Havel – as if it were his binding duty to pronounce that culture dead. He had started life as a communist, and he could see the dream of paradise that lay behind him. But, as he once said, in an interview with Philip Roth, “Once the dream of Heaven begins to turn into reality, but here and there arise people who stand in its way, and therefore the rulers of Heaven must build a gulag” next to Eden. In time, this gulag gets bigger and more perfect, while the neighboring paradise gets smaller and poorer.” But in contrast, almost every ideal—modernity, nationhood, progressive humanism, consumer culture, even culture—seems to suggest comes with the lure of the gulag. his own.
Therefore, it is a great irony that such a great writer who was considered a political novelist in the deeper sense of the term, like his character Thomas, ends up seeking refuge outside the realm of ordinary politics. The strength of his politics comes from the clarity with which he sees the moral irrationality of acting in the world, especially in the name of an action with collective meaning. There is almost paranoid skepticism about our ability to make a world of shared meaning. It is almost as if any action is already in the grip of delirium. I think he was basically paranoid about power, corrupting that thing called culture and the moral sense. As he put it, “true human good, in all its purity and freedom, can only come to the fore when its recipient has no power.” He said this in the context of man’s treatment of animals, for him, the true catastrophe of civilization, where humanity fails the test of treating those at its mercy with kindness. But you can see the public thought running through his anxieties about politics. What you make of Kundera depends on whether you see this as advice to despair than a cautionary tale.
Kundera is, on one level, a writer for the present because he speaks on two levels. His original fame rested on diagnosing the totalitarian condition as a form of disease—that endangers the very possibility of human meaning that erases all sense of self. However, until the threat of executioner has been lifted, what we are creating is a meaningless wasteland. It becomes the voice of both the great and barbaric threat to freedom, but also the voice of the void that freedom creates. He is clairvoyant precisely because he offers no consolation. Perhaps the only refuge from this emptiness was gaiety, which his writings gave him in great measure.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a contributing editor to The Indian Express
[ad_2]
