I finished Kundera’s book. In my own view, it was offered in a spirit of Litost to the supporters of “Progress”, of “Rationality”, and of Meaning as expressed by the Party, and the rape of Czechoslavakia.
Temina is who the book is about. He says that. And she drowns, under the watchful and uncaring eyes of the “angels”, who are the embodiment of officially expressed sadism and emotional disconnection.
Angels represent, he says, meaning. Demons, loss of meaning. And laughter was invented by the demons in a spirit of mockery.
And we are subjected to an orgy conducted in a spirit of seriousness, of “meaningfulness”, which is disrupted by, in this context, demonic laughter. A funeral, likewise. A group of nudists, likewise, with Kundera ending his novel pining for a return to innocence, and basic human emotion undetermined by manias of any sort.
This is only my view, but in opinion Kundera was mocking the very people who praised him, most of whom, looking at the reviews, can be assumed to have been Leftists. And he wrote in a spirit of bitterness and anger. He was angry he lost his father, angry his country had lost the capacity for transcendent, meaningful music, and angry that petty sophists and superficial liars had so conquered it that vindictive and psychotic children were its future, and its past gone, erased, vanished, disappeared like Temina under the water, to be replaced by pop stars, by the then equivalent of Beyonce and J.Lo. No: Lady Gaga, who indeed plays the same role today.
One of the continual surprises in studying the intellectual history of the past century is how often intellectuals are surprised when their “revolutions” go to shit. Another is how often seemingly decent human beings excuse the inexcusable, as for example in the case of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was a modest supporter of Fidel Castro, and his rape of Cuba.
One of the characteristic features of Leftists–Progressives, as he calls them–is their lack of self reflection. As he says, his Progressive “heroes” want to be out front, but not too far, and not in such a way that they can’t count on praise when some new denigration of social norms has been normalized. One sees this very pattern today in America. We haven’t quite gotten fully to efforts to normalize pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia, but they must be on the way. There is a list that must be traversed. It has a psychotic logic.
But what they can’t see is when they are themselves mocked. As he noted, Edwige always heard what she wanted to hear, not what he actually said or meant. And that suited him fine. He ends the novel in a group of naked people having an allegedly serious conversation about something close to nothing. It is almost Seinfeldian. He is, in my view, mocking them, and if he has little to say to most journalists, as I read, it is because he hates them.
As I say, this novel, which kills its heroine in an unpleasant, even horrific way, was in my view a big Fuck You both to the nation whose leaders betrayed everything good, and to the whole “Angelic” project outright, which of course I have often argued is in fact demonic. I would in fact quibble with his own distinction, but won’t do so here.
I read he believed in all this–“we have to commit mass murder and gross injustice so that we can celebrate human happiness”–in his youth, and may even have informed on someone who subsequently spent many years in jail. But I feel sure he was far beyond regret when he wrote all this.
Angels float, do they not? What was apparently unbearable for him was floating like that, in that way, with those people, unconnected in any human way, so sure of themselves, so dismissive of the weight of history, of place, of what came before.
Floating was done in circles, in happy places, with happy people, not as a result of detaching from Earth in a mob.
Edit: Put another way, he signed on for dancing in circles as a means to flight, and his possibilities for angelic membership were reduced to playing games with demonic children. Perhaps I am reading into this–I suppose we all insert our own stories into those of others, as he suggests, even while they are telling them–but I feel his frustrated idealism, and his longing to be having silly discussions with drunk poets. That was something real; or in any event, it is something for which he seems nostalgic, as happens often with expatriates. I likely speak for many in saying I myself feel like an expatriate in my own country.
He comments on how one of the Ministers fired 143 or so Professors of History. It seems to me we don’t need to fire ANY in this country. They stopped doing their work honestly decades ago. And what they produce is predigested for our shrieking young, who are destined in most cases to never grow up, to never individuate, and to demand to be told what to do across their lives. It certainly has already started. I am an exile in time and place, an anachronism, a vestige of a time which was worse in some ways, but improvable. Where we are headed, further progress will be impossible, and severe, large scale retrogression is certainly what is planned.
I don’t know why I do this to myself, or to you. I can’t stop it. But silence is hard for me too. I circle around, I suppose, for fresh sets of wounds, but administered in different places, making the whole thing tolerable.