Slave to one's dogmas
On reading Milan Kundera's novel, Immortality
Note: Kundera is a well-known novelist and a lot has been written about him. To go into how he broke the traditional form of the novel and all that would be redundant. Scores of scholarly articles are just a google search away. I can only write about how I felt. Hope you enjoy reading what I have to say about this novel, and on literature in general.
I first heard about Milan Kundera from a friend back in my college days. I was a part of the literary club and this probably made him think that I was an avid reader, which I was not. Well, not in the traditional sense. I held some strong opinions about literature. I preferred poetry over everything else, especially novels. The suspense of what happens next in a narrative never appealed to me. I was more interested (still am, sans the dogma) the meditative and reflective quality of poetry, even in novels. Getting lost in a piece of text still remains the peak literary experience for me. Back then I believed that only poetry could achieve it. I might have been blabbering something on these lines when this friend asked, rather stated as a truism, that I must be a big fan of Milan Kundera. Not just had I not heard this name before, I stupidly assumed that this was an Indian name. How could I have not heard of an Indian writer writing in English - he could not have recommended a Hindi book - when I had an affliction to go gaga about how good they were (I meant mostly poets)? I googled and found that Kundera wasn’t Indian. He was some exotic European writer who wrote novels. I ignored him and moved on.
A few years later, while looking for humorous books, I stumbled upon ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. I made the mistake of buying the audiobook. If you are not familiar with Kundera’s work, listening to his novels can be a bit disorienting. There is no obvious narrative thread running through the chapters and it becomes difficult to keep a track of it in audio. Reading them is a completely different experience. I recently finished reading his book ‘Immortality’ and fell in love with this writer.
Why did I pick up this novel? We can get into the philosophical question of why does anyone pick up any novel, or even why does anyone do anything. But we won’t go there. I think there are specific, often illogical, reasons why we do what we do. I picked this novel because of the blurb, that said -
It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that. - Nicholas Lezard, GQ MAGAZINE.
You bet Mr.Lezard. None of the novels I had read had made me any of the two. So, it was worth the shot.
Intimacy
The work that appeals to me generally has a sense of intimacy about it. One has to feel that the narrator is always present as a guide and letting you experience the world he is presenting to you. This novel invokes this intimacy brilliantly.
One of the hacky ways to do this would be by addressing the reader directly, invoking a ‘you’. Something similar to breaking the fourth wall in movies. If not done well, it becomes jarring after a point. Instead of being an interesting storyteller, the narrator becomes that pesky friend who keeps telling the same joke again and again.
Kundera’s direct address to the reader in this novel never sounds out of place. It seems necessary. Just when the reader starts feeling out of sorts, he brings her back to the novel by invoking the intimate ‘you’, the one that isn’t weatherbeaten with excessive use.
When I say intimacy, I am only partly talking about this invocation of ‘you’. Mr. Kundera himself is a character in the novel, making sporadic appearances - reading a piece of news or meeting his professor friend. He makes us experience, first-hand, how he relates his experiences with what happens to the characters. There is a transparent wall between the real and the fictional. As a result of this, one gets to know the characters all too well. One is reading a story, or multiple stories, and the novel never lets one forget about its essential elements. Things are happening actively either inside the head of the characters or outside it. The intimacy is achieved not by some literary pyrotechnics - newfangled form or meta gesture - but through the very basics of storytelling - getting the reader interested in the lives of the characters. One pines to know what is going to happen to the characters, and Kundera manages to douse this curiosity through digressions, meditations, and reflections. Of course he tells us what happens, but not with the urgency of a whodunit.
Episodes
This novel is written in episodes. Such a redundant thing to say. The novel also defines what an episode is, somewhere in the last fifty odd pages. Kundera quotes Aristotle’s definition who calls it the worst possible type of event from the point of view of poetry -
It is not an unavoidable consequence of preceding action, not the cause of what is to follow; it is outside the causal chain of events which is the story.
Kundera defies this assertion of episodes being of no use by telling multiple compelling stories in this novel only through episodes. He also addresses the flaw in this argument directly -
...no episode is a priori condemned forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure.
In this novel we experience first hand the process of these episodes becoming significant, not just in terms of what happens to the characters, but also in terms of the ideas they lead to - the chain of thoughts they kick-start. It so happens that a minor episode, over the course of a few hundred words, morphs into a piece of wisdom without sounding like forced philosophising.
Fatigue
The piece of wisdom that appealed to me the most and stayed with me is the idea of fatigue. Kundera is describing the poet Goethe, who is a character in this book. Goethe, reluctant to let others write his biography or portrait, has given permission to someone to write it. This is when the idea of fatigue is invoked -
This second part of life, when a person cannot tear his eyes away from death, is followed by still another period. The shortest and most mysterious, about which little is known and little is said. Strength is ebbing, and a person is seized by disarming fatigue. Fatigue: a silent bridge leading from the shore of life to the shore of death.
What he is saying about the life of a person can also be extended to the life of anything - relationships, things, cities etc. I believe that fatigue, or lack of it, is one of the most significant drivers of what people do and what they don’t. It is so for me at least. Yet, there isn’t much about it that I come across in literature. It is a sweeping statement and while I am typing this, a sher of Jaun Eliya comes to mind which I will leave as it is -
Ae shakhs teri justju se
Bezaar nahi hun thak gaya hun
Novelistic sentences
It is a novel after all. The pieces of wisdom hit home only if this book is read as one. If not for novelistic sentences, that propel an action or bring a scene alive, the book would reek of bland philosophical sermons.
Consider this long sentence where he is describing the physical attributes of a person completely unimportant in the story. The acuteness of observation is quite palpable -
The man at the next table slouched in his chair, his glance fixed on the street and his mouth wide open. It was a yawn without beginning or end, a yawn as endless as a Wagner melody: at times his mouth began to close but never entirely; it just kept opening wide again and again, while his eyes, fixed on the street, kept opening and closing counter to the rhythm of his mouth.
Like all great novels, this one too points with remarkable precision to an attribute of a character that makes further description redundant. Like in this sentence -
No matter where she went, her self fluttered behind her like a flag.
He does this with places too -
Long rows of marble busts of famous Italians, standing on pedestals, lined the avenues of trees. Their faces, frozen in terminal grimaces, were exposed like resumes of their lives.
This book is also full of flights of fancy, where a simple metaphor brings an image alive and one is left wondering if it came spontaneously to the writer. I am not sure about Kundera but in general it’s almost never spontaneous. Here is such an image -
He is jolted out of his thoughts by his daughter’s laughter: in a TV commercial, a naked baby, hardly a year old, gets up from its pot, dragging behind it a strip of white toilet-paper like a gorgeous bride.
Sentences like these trick the reader into thinking that what’s happening on the page is not a mere farce. Novels are made up of episodes that might or might not be overtly significant. These episodes come alive with sentences like these. There are few better ways to make a reader deeply involved in a narrative that is not linear.
I am certain that I am going to read more of Kundera’s work. There is also a sense of missed opportunity, that is so often a result of one’s stupidity. If I had read Kundera a few years ago, I might have become a different person today. Not necessarily better, but different. This is the only consolation one has for missing out on something, as time is a limited resource and one is indeed a slave to one’s dogmas, literary or otherwise, until one comes across a promise difficult to ignore. Like I did with the blurb on this book. Whether the promise is fulfilled or not, is not for me to decide.
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Nice one Rahul. Astute observations.
I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being only last year, my first Milan Kundera book. I could sense its brilliance but it left me cold. Right book at the right time and all that. Your essay (and those gorgeous novelistic sentences!) tells me I should return to his works again sometime.