Milan Kundera, cultural arrogance and sexual tyranny

Author(s): MICHAEL COOKE

Source: Critical Survey , 1992, Vol. 4, No. 1, Jane Austen and Romanticism (1992), pp.
79-84
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41555628

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Milan Kundera, cultural arrogance and sexual tyranny

MICHAEL COOKE

Much has been written about the death of the novel in Czechoslovakia. Antonín J.
Liehm overstates the problem somewhat when he says that what we see (or have
seen) in post-1960s Prague amounts to 'nothing but a total vacuum, a cultural
desert'.1 Carlos Fuentes is probably nearer the mark, and indeed closer to Kundera,
when he says that under totalitarianism, 'the novel, supposedly in agony, has so much
life that it must be murdered. "The exquisite corpse" must be forbidden because, it
seems, it is a dangerous corpse.'2 All this talk of death is clearly hyperbole, but it does
at least give some indication of the crisis in Czech literature since the Second World
War. Although the novel proved itself to be less than moribund in the 1960s, there is
little doubt that, thanks in part to government interference, the novel was in some
trouble in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Kundera has repeatedly
stated his unfailing dedication to the 'dangerous corpse' of the novel, and moreover
that it is this 'legacy of Cervantes',3 from Don Quixote onwards, that is integral and
vital to an idea of Europe and 'Europeanness'. In Kundera's words, 'the precious
essence of the European spirit is being held safe as in a treasure chest inside the
history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel'.4 There are, however, some serious
flaws in his thesis.
In his essay 'The Tragedy of Central Europe',5 Kundera argues for the cultural
significance of Czechoslovakia in the modern era. His country, 'culturally in the West
and politically in the East' has produced an artistic heritage that has reached 'the
summits of Euro-culture', perhaps not least in the 1960s. We might accept then that
the crushing of the Prague Spring and the subsequent 'normalisation' were, for
Czechoslovakia, 'tragic'. But in a preface to an English edition of Žert (The Joke),
Kundera goes further, to claim that the Warsaw Pact intervention effectively
represented 'nothing less than a shift in the borders between two civilisations'.6 In
another essay, 'An Introduction to a Variation',7 Kundera expounds most fully his
theory of two civilisations and the essential conflict between them. After a brief
synopsis of what he calls 'the elevation of sentiment to the rank of a value' from St
Augustine to contemporary 'political demagoguery', he states that
from the Renaissance on, this Western sensibility has been balanced by a complementary
spirit: that of reason and doubt, of play and the relativity of human affairs. It was then that the
West truly came into its own . . . Russia's history differs from the history of the West precisely
in its lack of a Renaissance, and of the spirit that resulted.

Where the modern Western tradition, as Kundera perceives it, is founded on what he

© C.Q. & S. 1992

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80 Critical Survey volume 4, number 1

calls the wisdom of uncertainty, on playfulness, objective questioning and rational-

ism, Russian culture is steeped in traits which are fundamentally irrational. The
author's aversion to Dostoevsky, for example, is, he says, due to 'the climate of his
novels, a universe where everything turns into feeling; in other words where feelings
are promoted to the rank of value and truth'. And he suggests it was this culture that
was in evidence in the Soviet occupation in 1968.
Kundera's preference for Diderot over Dostoevsky reflects a feeling that is not
uncommon amongst central European intellectuals: that of being culturally under the
gravitational influence of Paris and politically under that of Moscow.8 It is a clash of
sensibilities that is manifest in Kundera's works. As early as his play The Owners of
the Keys , 1962, he is examining a conflict between certainty, as it were, in the justice
of the Cause, the resistance to the Germans, and the 'weakness' of doubt that plagues
the protagonist, Jiří Nečas, for whom (inverting Gorky's maxim) 'man' no longer
sounds proud, and to whom the responsibilities of family present a counterbalance to
those of political activism. The theme is developed in The Joke, 1967, in which the
irony of Ludvik's postcard illustrates the dissenting, questioning function of scepti-
cism (read 'the West'), challenging the ascetic joy of Marketa's received and
imported ideas ('the East'):
Optimism is the opium of the people!
A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!
Long live Trotsky!- Ludvík.

Unfortunately for him, the spirit of the age, and the literal seriousness of a regime
built on an unquestionable idyll, are against him. The joke backfires, and Ludvík is
expelled from the university and confined to a prison camp. A self-confessed 'inveter-
ate sceptic', Ludvík finds himself out of step with a new era and an alien culture.
But how justified is Kundera in his claim that his protagonist and others like him are
victims of an alien culture? An alien political ideology perhaps; but an alien culture?
Historically, tolerance has hardly shown itself to be a cornerstone of Czech (or indeed
European) culture; and it can be argued that censorship of literature is something
more of a historical normality than we should like to suppose.9
The cultural arrogance of Kundera's theory of conflicting civilisations was
repugnant to at least one Russian, Joseph Brodsky, who responded fiercely to 'An
Introduction to a Variation' with an essay entitled 'Why Milan Kundera is Wrong
About Dostoyevsky', published the following month in the same journal.10 Brodsky is
right to question Kundera's notion of a Western rationalism and an Eastern emotion-
alism (or 'lyricism'), and to identify it as a false dichotomy. Communism was, after
all, a product of a Western sensibility, founded not on 'feeling' or 'sentiment', but on
logic and historical rationalism. And Kundera admits as much:

Marxism was the grandiose attempt to explain the world in terms of total rationality. Having
failed it picked up a lyre and descended into the irrational, just as Orpheus did. It has become
a symbolic system, a kind of poetry, of beauty.11

The author would argue that it is the result of this failure and descent that is in close

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 Milan Kundera, cultural arrogance and sexual tyranny 81

affinity with the Russian sensibility, that a Russian Communist is attracted to the
poetic, the lyrical, or the 'smile'.
He is, however, oversimplifying a complex issue. In Koestler's Darkness at Noon,
Rubashov is seduced precisely by the rationaUty of Communist thought and the
'Grammatical Fiction', while the impulse of liberal humanism is described entirely in
terms of the emotional:

I plead guilty to having followed sentimental impulses, and in so doing, to have been led into
contradiction with historical necessity.12

Similarly, Czeslaw Milosz has written of his decision to break with Eastern-bloc
Communism, proceeding 'not from the functioning of the reasoning mind, but from a
revolt of the stomach'.13 Just as the Western tradition cannot be described purely in
terms of the rational, neither should we accept that Russian culture is somehow
'lacking' in a questioning spirit. The impetus of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s
was based on nothing if not an independence of thought, and it was a purely political
intervention that put a stop to it. Even Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov was motivated by a
'what if . . .?', by a questioning of the corrupt mentality of an Establishment, as
epitomised by the old woman money-lender.
Kundera is wrong to suggest that a military occupation represents a disaster for
civilisation as we know it. Certainly its consequences were serious enough, but did
they justify the somewhat hysterical assertions that we have come to associate with
Kundera, such as the one we find at the end of his 'Variation' essay:

Faced with the eternity of the Russian night, I had experienced in Prague the violent end of
Western culture such as it was conceived at the dawn of the modern age ... In a small Western
country I had experienced the end of the West. That was the grand farewell.

What exactly does Kundera mean by 'the end of the West'? Certainly it is fashionable
to talk about the crisis in contemporary Western culture. Consumerism and techno-
logical progress- or 'advanced capitalism'- are widely held to have had an adverse
effect on culture, so that postmodern Europe represents 'a dream world of artificial
stimuli', in which 'our experience is no longer whole'.14 Or, to quote Neil Smith, 'The
enlightenment is dead, Marxism is dead, the working class movement is dead . . . and
the author does not feel very well either.'15 Could this be what Kundera is referring
to? Could the death of the novel in Czechoslovakia have been a premonition of the
fate of Western culture as a whole? In the event, Soviet influence has diminished, and
it is now Western society and its trappings that are marching East. But even if this
were not the case, it seems that Kundera's alleged connection between Sovietisation
and the crisis of postmodernism in Western Europe, loosely defined together as 'the
spirit of the age', is tenuous to say the least.
I am not suggesting that Kundera should or could have foreseen recent events in
Eastern and central Europe. He might, however, have looked to the not-too-distant
past for clues as to the cultural significance of 1968. Perhaps the Prague Spring was no
more a revolt against cultural 'alienness' than the revolt against Austro-Hungarian
dominance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before 1918, T. G.

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82 Critical Survey volume 4, number 1

Masaryk remarked on the 'incongruity' between the cultural level of the central
European states and their political status as dependencies of politically reactionary
states.16 Perhaps both can be seen as assertions, not of cultural subscriptions to one
camp or another, but rather of cultural independence. And in such a light, Kundera
might find himself a victim of what Brodsky calls a 'mental coziness', and what he
himself calls kitsch- that of the cultural abyss between East and West.
A common feature of the Socialist Realist novels of the 1950s is the replacement of
familial responsibility (often seen as outmoded and bourgeois) with a new responsi-
bility to the collective. Indeed it is an idea that is present in some of Kundera's own
early poetry. In Poslední máj (The Last May), Communist Czech national hero, Fučík,
subjugates all in favour of the struggle; while in 'Maminky' (Mummies), filial loyalty
and love are wholly transferable, and transferred, to the Party. There is, however, a
certain ambiguity, as I have mentioned, by the time we come to The Owners of the
Keys. Much of the controversy surrounding this play was due to the representation of a
man caught between two identifiable responsibilities. Jiří's dilemma, between Věra
and the resistance movement on the one hand, and Alena and the family on the other, is
an existential problem that Kundera employs to demonstrate human uncertainty,
something which the author came to regard as a high virtue.
It is perhaps a little odd, then, that the family does not play a more prominent role
in Kundera's work as a whole. In Life is Elsewhere, the author is openly critical of the
attitude of the young revolutionary poet, Jaromil, whose mother and girlfriend are of
secondary importance in comparison with the building of socialism. But rarely, if
ever, does the reader find a viable alternative in the family. Perhaps the nearest
Kundera's novels come to presenting even a satisfactory sexual relationship is that of
Tomáš and Tereza, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, whose responsibility to
each other is represented not by children, but by a dog. And not only does Karenin
die, but there is a sense that the relationship itself is ultimately destructive, as Tomáš,
having given up Prague and womanising in favour of rural monogamy, seems to lose
his essence (an essence of 'lightness') completely. Tereza's dream, in which her
husband is shot and transformed into a rabbit in her arms, signifies a final submission
on the part of Tomáš.
Sexuality for Kundera, far from being a private realm of freedom, is more often a
microcosm of power struggle, nearly always involving the domination of one person
over another, of strength over weakness. In The Joke, Ludvik's quest for Helena is an
expression of his desire for revenge on Zemánek, but his tyranny (of sexuality) shows
itself to be as brutal as any regime's; the reader finds himself increasingly unwilling to
accept that Ludvik's obsessive violation of women (of Lucie as well as of Helena)
does not run deeper than a purely external or indirect motivation:

I stopped insisting and began fondling. I kissed her (Lucie) (for what seemed like an age),
pressed her to me (deceitfully, guilefully), and tried as surreptitiously as possible to work her
into a reclining position . . . Her resistance aroused no pity in me whatsoever.

With Zemánek's wife, Ludvík confesses that 'In that moment she was the Helena of
my dreams, utterly defenseless and at my mercy.'

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 Milan Kundera, cultural arrogance and sexual tyranny 83

Kundera's argument is that public and private life cannot be completely dismissed
as separate entities, since the same motivations and desires govern both- or in his
own words, 'politics unmasks the metaphysics of private life, private life unmasks the
metaphysics of politics'.17 The author's mistrust of political activism is matched by a
mistrust of what might have been a counterweight, personal relations.
It is possible that this stems from Kundera's early adherence to socialist values and
a Nietzschean suspicion of family and love as diversions from 'the task', now trans-
ferred to the task of the intellectual, the novelist, the cultural spokesman. More
likely, it is symptomatic of an apotheosis of individualism, with love, as a collectivism
in its most basic form, being perceived as a threat to individual freedom. In short,
resistance to love (if it is that) may be resistance to assimilation.18 Perhaps there is
something of both. Kundera's obsessive concern for 'intellectualism' and individual-
ism seems almost to necessitate a deep-rooted suspicion of love, just as his concern for
Western rationalism seems to go hand in hand with a contempt for Eastern emotional-
ism (as he conceives of it).
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we find a revealing comment in relation to
this problem:
Love is a constant interrogation. In fact I don't know a better definition of love.
(Which means that no-one loves us better than the secret police, my friend Hiibl would
object. Absolutely. Since every apex has its nadir, love has the prying eye of the police.)

And if we go back to his 'Introduction to a Variation' essay, there is an equally

reveaUng anecdote about 1968, concerning a moment when Kundera was asked by a
Russian officer, 'What do you think? What are your sentiments?':
The question was not sinister or ironic, . . . rather the officer seemed to reach for some
rapprochement. He said, 'All this is a big misunderstanding. But it will work out. You know
we love the Czechs. We love you!'
Understand me. That officer did not disagree with the invasion. Not at all. They all spoke as
he did: their attitude was founded not on the sadistic pleasure of the rapist, but on another
archetype: the wounded lover. 'Why don't the Czechs (whom we love so much) want to live
with us and in the same way as us? What a shame we had to use tanks to teach them about
love!'

It is clear that Kundera identifies the idea of love, of emotion, of sentiment in general,
with the 'alien culture' that allegedly threatens Western civilisation. The author's
recognition that love can be an invasion and a humiliation is valid. The trouble with
his novels is that, in them, love has only the prying eye of the police. It is a nadir that
seems to be missing an apex, and that finally is a limitation.

1 Antonín J. Liehm, 'Some Observations on Czech Culture and Politics in the 1960s', in Czech Literature Since
1956 : A Symposium , William E. Harkins and Paul I. Trensky (eds.) (New York: Bohémica, 1980).
Carlos Fuentes, 'The Other K.' in TriQuarterly , No. 51, Spring 1981, New York.
3 Milan Kundera, 'The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes', in The Art of the Novel (London: Faber, 1988).
4 Milan Kundera, 'Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe', in The Art of the Novel (London: Faber, 1988).
5 Milan Kundera. 'The Traeedv of Central Eurooe'. in New York Review of Books. 26 Ànril 19Я4.
6 Milan Kundera, author's Preface to The Joke (London: Penguin, 1984).

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84 Critical Survey volume 4, number 1

7 Milan Kundera, 'An Introduction to a Variation', in New York»Times Book Review , 6 January 1985.
8 See Czestaw Milosz, 'Looking for a Center , in Cross Currents , 1, ed. Ladislav Matějka and Benjamin Stolz,
Michigan Slavic Materials, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1982.
9 Geoffrey A. Hosking, 'Introduction', Perspectives on Literature and Society in Eastern and Western Europe , ed.
Geoffrey A. Hosking and George F. Cushing (London: Macmillan, 1989).
10 Joseph Brodsky, 'Why Milan Kundera is Wrong About Dostoyevsky', in New York Times Book Review , 17
February 1985.
11 'Milan Kundera Interview', conducted by Alain Finkielkraut, in Cross Currents , 1, ed. Ladislav Matějka and
Benjamin Stolz, Michigan Slavic Materials, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1982.
12 Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940; London: Penguin, 1964), p. 153.
13 Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1953).
14 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971).
15 Neil Smith, quoted in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernitv (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
16 T. G. Masaryk, cited in Roman Szporluk, 'Defining Central Europe': Power, Politics and Culture', in Cross
Currents y 1, ed. Ladislav Matějka and Benjamin Stolz, Michigan Slavic Materials, Ann Arbor, University of Michi-
gan, 1982.
17 Milan Kundera, in 'Afterword: A Talk With The Author by Philip Roth', in The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting (London: Penguin, 1988).
18 See R. B. Pynsent, 'Assimilation, Childhood and Death', in Slavonic and East European Review , vol. 59, no. 3,
July 1981.

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