The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
The curtain has just fallen on the last act in the life of the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Kundera was undeniably one of the last great novelists of the XXe century ; he was also an excellent essayist. He has written some of the best contemporary novels, those which know how to capture and reveal the spirit of an era; in doing so, he allowed our knowledge of the world to progress, which was, in his own words, “the only moral of the novel” (The art of the novel, p. 16).
That said, one sometimes has the feeling — and I write this without the slightest cynicism — that people die in time; that in a certain sense, the time has come for them to die; not—not at all—because one would have wished them dead, but rather because they become so alienated from the world around them that it seems better for them that they take their leave sooner rather than later.
We are indeed obliged to recognize that the man who, in his novels and essays, had highlighted the ambiguity of reality and the doubt that goes with it, irony, the laughable aspects of life, everything he called the “lightness of being”, must have been somewhat disconcerted by the incredible spirit of seriousness which marked the last decade of its existence.
So what did he think of this return—completely opposed to what he considered to be the “spirit of the novel”—of “a world where good and evil” are again “clearly discernible” and in which desire “to judge before understanding” now manifests itself at every moment (ibid., p. 17)? How did he consider this surge of good conscience under which all critical hindsight these days succumbs, he who defined kitsch as “the need to look at oneself in the mirror of the embellishing lie and to recognize oneself in it with emotional satisfaction” (ibid. ., p. 160)? “In the kingdom of kitsch, he added, the dictatorship of the heart is exercised” and where “the heart has spoken, it is not proper for reason to raise objections” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 361).
How did he apprehend this new environment where a slightly salacious joke or the pronunciation of a simple word can bring you the same setbacks as those faced, in communist Czechoslovakia, by Ludvik Jahn, the hero of his novel Joke (1967)? One of the fundamental questions posed by the art of the novel being, according to him, “What is the identity of an individual? » (The curtain, p. 142), how did he take this time when everyone is called upon to label themselves and define their identity administratively? And while he had often shown himself to be shocked by the infidelities of some of his translators, did he accept with philosophy and fatalism or did it shock him that the novels of Mark Twain or Agatha Christie were rewritten for remove disturbing words?
As these questions suggest, we have already been living for some time in a post-Kunderian era, of which the novelist had moreover had a premonition on many occasions. We have come to this day that he apprehended “where Panurge does not [fait] laugh more” (The betrayed wills, p. 9), where this Rabelaisian character appears only as an abject being, a character who must be erased, guilty of an unforgivable misogyny and, moreover, odiously speciesist, since he dares, out of pure desire for revenge and amusement, drown a whole herd of poor sheep who did nothing to him. The moment has also arrived when art is expected to return to being “docile, at the service of collective life […] and helps the individual to merge, in peace and joy, with the uniformity of being” (The curtain, p. 197).
These few remarks allow us to measure how much Milan Kundera will be missed and how much our understanding of the world will also suffer from his death. He had above all, in his novels, this ability to handle humor and irony in such a way as to reveal the underside of and to oppose this “kingdom of kitsch”, which is also ours now, where “everything must be taken seriously” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 363).
At the same time, the novelist was well placed to know, he who had lived through Nazism, Stalinism, the Nazi occupation of his country during the Second World War, then its placing under Soviet supervision, that the pen cannot much against the sword – at least when the one who wields the latter does not hesitate to use it. Literature no more stops history in motion than it is able to prevent earthquakes or tidal waves. But she can still scribble a few words on the margins of official speeches and thus tarnish, to her extent, the image that they offer of reality. It is his virtue; it is its usefulness.
Let us therefore hope that after him other authors will be able to take up the pen and in turn illustrate this “spirit of the novel” by capturing to the quick, and if possible with the intelligence and talent that characterized Kundera, the shortcomings and above all the ridiculous of our present. If this is not the case in the immediate future, at least we have his work. When he raises his nose from his book and casts a glance at the world around him, the reader of Jokeof book of laughter and oblivionof The Unbearable Lightness of Beingof The art of the novelof Curtain, etc., can hardly, in order to consider this one, not put on the new spectacles that, thanks to his reading, he has just acquired. His look is likely to become more amused, more incisive.