'The struggle of Man against Power as the struggle of Memory against Forgetting!'

Thanks to Dr. Kunhammad’s [HoD, English, Kannur University] delightful recommend from Zizek: The Sublime Object of Ideology!

Moreover, he also calls him, ‘The Philosopher of the Counter-intuitive Insight!’ How true!

Thought of presenting a similar read on a similar vein, from Milan Kundera.

Well, by a stroke of sweet coincidence, both Slavoj Zizek and Milan Kundera come from the same part of Europe, both experienced the impact of communism, and both have a spontaneous penchant for comedy.

The convergences stop right there. From here on, divergences galore! But that’s not gonna be my take on this post!

It’s on Kundera’s wonder-read of sorts, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting!

It’s such a wonderful take on totalitarianism, tyranny, establishmentarianism, struggle of memory – individual, collective, national, personal memories, how history is constructed et al et al et al!!!

So here goes the review from Michael D Sollars for y’all –

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

By MILAN KUNDERA (1978)

Set in postwar Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges of World War II, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is “a novel in the form of variations” that explores how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal, memories.

Milan Kundera traces the interrelated lives of a handful of characters who are each trying to recover or banish poignant memories.

Much of the novel is based on Kundera’s own knowledge of totalitarianism; following the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kundera lost his teaching post at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, saw his books removed from the shelves of public libraries, and was banned from publishing in his homeland.

Divided into seven parts, the first section of the novel follows Mirek, a once-celebrated researcher who has been forced to leave his job and is surrounded by undercover agents.

The character observes that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Yet throughout the novel, Kundera demonstrates that historical revision occurs not only at a national level but in private, everyday life as well.

Kundera alternates between presenting characters’ interior monologues and the narrator’s reflections on philosophical and theoretical questions that arise, including:

What constitutes history? Where do memories adhere and how are they recovered?

Laughter and Forgetting, like Kundera’s later novels, investigates dichotomies such as weight and lightness; public and private; mind and body; and boundless love and litost (a Czech word meaning “a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self”) to uncover the origins of these oppositions.

For example, the narrator posits that there are two kinds of laughter—angelic and demonic—and that, taken to their extreme, the former produces fanaticism, while the latter results in skepticism.

He argues that individuals must maintain “equilibrium of power” between the two forms of laughter, since one would collapse under either the burden of uncontested meaning or the burden of meaningless buoyancy.

Throughout the novel, Kundera explores how history is constructed and how modernity has altered our perception of time.

The narrator argues that whereas in the past, history served as a more or less static backdrop against which our personal lives unfolded, in the 20th century, history progresses rapidly, so that our private lives appear banal and plodding in contrast to the novelty of historical events.

Kundera challenges the reader’s assumptions about history, memory, love, and sex at every turn, placing distinctive characters in extraordinary situations in order to test and elucidate his theories.

Above all else, Laughter and Forgetting examines the political and philosophical consequences of pushing human impulses to their furthest extremes; or, to put it another way, it explores the basic emotional origins of radical politics.