The Kundera Joke
In Kundera’s novel Slowness, there is a scene in which Kundera the writer wakes up his wife through the power of his imagination (the wife is dreaming what he is imagining, part of which happens to be macabre). They have a little conversation in which Kundera reveals that he is at work on a new novel. His wife has some advice for him. She says something akin to: Stay away from jokes; it is your seriousness that has made you successful. It might be good advice, but it is not sufficient advice. She doesn’t touch upon how Kundera’s seriousness can itself become a joke.
Milan Kundera, the Czech (and later, French) novelist, peaked in the eighties and began fading in output by the late nineties. His best novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, Identity, and Slowness, were all written in this period*. This fading is not to suggest that his work hasn’t persisted, or that he is not a favorite with serious readers (although Indian success may be partly attributed to his Indian-sounding name, which often has him placed next to a Rushdie or a Naipaul in the Indian Fiction shelf of some grossly impudent bookstores). However, if one were to divide contemporary novels (novels that have come out in the last fifty years) in two arbitrary categories called the Pre-Internet novel and the Post-Internet novel, all of Kundera’s novels will fit the former category. This classification comes at a price for novelists who practically stopped producing after the internet began to acquire the grip it holds over contemporary life, and particularly for those novelists whose pre-internet concerns were almost exclusively about the meaning of modernity, the politics of a bipolar world, the degradations that technology has brought into our lives, the effects of new media such as satellite television, the flux in sexuality and sexual mores etc. Kundera could probably qualify as the flag-bearer of this particular group that I talk of, and, needless to say, his work’s persistence is because these concerns still hold a sway over large chunks of the reading populace.
My claim, however, is that Kundera’s relevance to post-internet generations is being rapidly lost. This is not because of any fault of his, and doesn’t by itself turn his good novels into bad ones. It is, in fact, a ridiculous and tragic outcome.
Take, for example, his concerns regarding sexuality in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (TULOB@). Tomas, for lack of a better word, is a philanderer; his girlfriend Teresa is a one-man woman. The novel repeatedly posits their love not as one love but as two different loves: Tomas’ love for Teresa is different from Teresa’s love for Tomas. When she is confronted with proofs of Tomas’ infidelity, Teresa’s suffers, her plight is torturous for the reader, and her single act of sexual deviance feels both like a tightening of the screw and liberation of sorts. Teresa is burdened from the weight of existence; Tomas suffers from an unbearable lightness. Teresa seems to want a single beautiful love story that will keep repeating itself eternally, while for Tomas the credo is the maximization of sexual pleasure, and his struggle seems to be to force love’s recurrences within this one life. The problem for both is the same — You Only Live Once.
Although Indian success may be partly attributed to his Indian-sounding name, which often has him placed next to a Rushdie or a Naipaul in the Indian Fiction shelf of some grossly impudent bookstores.
But in our generation (or our times, take your pick), You Only Live Once has been transformed from being a metaphysical problem to being a yuppie solution — it’s called YOLO, fuck yeah. Modernity’s struggle with mortality and morality has been subverted into a diktat of hedonism. The cult of ‘seeing’ the world, check-listing, having a maximum number of experiences in youth (including sexual experiences) is already widespread, and alluring because it masks itself as a counter-cultural thing while being essential to the economy that the millenials are building for themselves and future generations. A ‘cool’ young reader going through TULOB today may find Teresa stuck up in a weird sort of chastity and Tomas stuck up in a guilt-loop regarding his escapades. What has happened is that culture, a usually slow-burning beast, has moved quite rapidly to keep pace with the fast social changes that technology — primarily the internet — has introduced in our lives. There are new paradoxes now: meeting a new girl who could be your girlfriend is a problem, but so is getting rid of the ex whose image hounds you on Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus. The concerns of modernity, Kundera’s concerns, are turning irrelevant. The moral precipice where Kundera stands and deliberates in TULOB has been so widely visited, so easily and so repeatedly jumped over, that it has become kitsch. In an age where most students in the West travel a lot, have at least a score of sexual partners over multiple continents, have been both the betrayers and the betrayed over the course of multiple relationships and even accept open relationships in certain cases, just who can possibly care about the weird sexual equation between Teresa and Tomas?
Take also the case of Slowness, a novel which, among other things, postulates on how the camera and the television have altered existence, how we all feel that we are somehow responsible for turning our gestures and responses into something watchable, and how therefore, in a strange paradox, we are beset with the feeling that real life, that authentic stream of events and feelings, is passing us by. Kundera’s treatment of this inflection of post-modernity, of this ubiquitous gaze and its awareness, is bang on and is a delight to read for anyone whoever once felt the power of a still or moving camera.
But then enters Facebook, and in a byte-blast of trillions of posts by billions of users, makes a grand joke of what Kundera proposed as a serious, even existential, issue. Yes, most people using Facebook do fear that real life passes them by every time they log in, but their response at times is to post about that very feeling. Like YOLO, there is now a name for this as well: the Fear of Missing Out: FOMO. Another example of a valid Kundera concern turning into kitsch item.
One can imagine Kundera cringing at the simple elegance of it all: If FOMO is the problem, think YOLO. Do stuff.
The more nuanced among us know that YOLO and FOMO will be passé one day, but it is the collateral damage that this might do is which scares this writer. A novel in which the contemporary characters in Slowness are all Facebook users and concerned about that very usage will be so much more satisfying to the current reader because of the verisimilitude and the added dimensions to the original reality-is-passing-me-by debate. It is possible that technology might have made Kundera irrelevant; for it is not difficult to see him superseded on the very questions he posed by a far lesser novelist. And it is possible that Kundera’s work is reborn echt counter-cultural classics we have really been waiting for, apropos YOLO and FOMO. The second possibility is what this writer hopes for.
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*The latest work, The Festival of Insignificance, has still not come out in English, though the title suggests that Kundera might have made my entire mini-thesis here insignificant.
@Turning it into TULOB is a gesture that shows how FOMO and YOLO make me act