'You begin to liquidate a people, by taking away its memory.'

Of ‘Milan’s plenty’!

Milan Kundera is a writer who has the charm to make you empathise with his profound and impactful thoughts and reflections to life, with such eloquent ease!

After reading through some of his delightfully gripping reads, one cannot but fall for the marvellous ways in which most of our thoughts on life and literature, sync to a tee with this legend’s and his oeuvre’s as well! 

And there are vistas from Milan's myriad musings, that throw up a shocker to us all, on a diverse range of subjects, especially when he dabbles with gusto on the labyrinthine lanes of memory(ies), history(ies) and forgetting(s)!

And it’s like, whenever there’s a wonderful observation that he so wittily puts forth, you feel like nodding your head to it, by default, albeit in absentia, all glued, blued and wooed to this legend’s luminous lines!

He’s just turning 90, and lives life in all its lustre, with such immense zeal and zest for all things bright and beautiful, that he always dons the ‘incognito’ mode and quietly goes ‘off radar’ for days and months in a row! 

What a sweet attitude to celebrating a sense of the joi de vivre! 

A guy, with such a heideggerian streak to him on the aspects of looking upon life as one grand celebration, - incognito mode - far from the madding crowd and their ignoble strife - far away from the clutters, far away from the congestions that always try to have a grapplehold on us all - free beings, chirpy beings, ethereal beings - that we by default are!

In this little post, I just wanted to take some little time to get into the life and works of this wonderful writer, who’s got such a passion and a zest, a zeal and a joy for life!

His first book, titled The Joke, written in 1967, was based on a real life incident that had happened almost 17 years ago, when he along with his friend Jan were expelled from the Communist Party for having ‘worked against the interests of the party’! 

Through this novel, Milan underlines the danger and the doom of living in a humourless world!

It indeed is damning to live without the ‘dominant rasa’ of humour, which has the charm and the charisma, the appeal and the allure to make life and all its burdens light, ain’t it!

To Milan Kundera, thence, humour is so much an integral part to one’s life, a key ingredient that gives added flavor, added aroma and added spice to our lovely lives on this ‘dwelling’ of ours! So much for the power of humour in our lives!

One reason why he’s so wary of being part of a society that lacks a sense of humour! I’m reminded of Woody’s lines – ‘It takes a worried man to sing a worried song’!

In the novel, Jahn reminisces on that one joke that had turned his life by 360 degree-sweep way back in the early 1950s. 

Jahn, a vibrant, scholarly and popular student, while in an impish, bratty, playful mood, writes down a postcard to one of his classmates, - a girl – during their routine summer holiday time! 

On the postcard he writes, “Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” However, his friends and party members of the Communist regime who did not have a fine sense for humour, as he did, couldn’t appreciate the lightness n the jollity behind the whole thing! They straightaway expelled him from their party and from his college as well!

Well, then, to put it on a lighter vein, his writing career began with ‘a joke’!

From a joke, he takes us on to ‘laughter,’ with his impactful read of sorts – Laughter and Forgetting!

This read would make a perfect launchpad for anyone who cogitates on plunging full throttle into his readscape as such!  

The Author’s Notes, serve much to assuage our feelings on the impactfulness of the translated version of this delightful read on his avid readers of all hues!

Milan Kundera writes, and I quote –

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was written in Czech between 1976 and 1978. Between 1985 and 1987, I revised the French translations of all my novels (and stories) so deeply and completely that I was able to include, in the subsequent new editions, a note affirming that the French versions of these works "are equal in authenticity to the Czech texts." 

My intervention in these French versions did not result in variants of my original texts. I was led to it only by a wish for accuracy. The French translations have become, so to speak, more faithful to the Czech originals than the originals themselves.

Two years ago, when Aaron Asher and I reread the English language version of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we agreed on the need for a new transla­tion. 

I suggested translating from the authentic French edition and urged Aaron to take it on himself. Following his work very closely, I had the pleasure of seeing my text emerge in his translation as from a miraculous bath. At last I recognized my book. I thank Aaron for that with all my heart.

- Paris, December 1995

After these reassuring lines on the translation, from the author himself, the road to the read is just a breeze!

The novel has got seven parts to it, and I would give some highlights to the first part alone!

Kundera’s obsession with history and memory is strikingly obvious in this very first part to the novel! 

It reiterates the importance of memory, as he feels that it is only through ‘memory’ that people stand to get a better or a more authentic view of themselves!

In this regard, I would so like to quote from Astrid Erll’s poignant take on memory and memory studies, that’s been such a profound, impacting take, in the burgeoning field of ‘memory studies’ or what AE herself would call, ‘memory industry’ today!

I quote from Astrid – (again a blessed translation, and how it helps!)

Astrid Erll

Memories are not objective images of past perceptions, even less of a past reality. They are subjective, highly selective reconstructions, dependent on the situation in which they are recalled. 

Re-membering is an act of assembling available data that takes place in the present. Versions of the past change with every recall, in accordance with the changed present situation. 

Individual and collective memories are never a mirror image of the past, but rather an expressive indication of the needs and interests of the person or group doing the remembering in the present. 

As a result, memory studies directs its interest not toward the shape of the remembered pasts, but rather toward the particular presents of the remembering!

Remembering and forgetting are two sides – or different processes – of the same coin, that is, memory. Forgetting is the very condition for remembering. 

Total recall, after all, the complete memory of every single event in the past, would amount to total forgetting, for the individual as well as for the group or society. 

Friedrich Nietzsche had emphasized this as long ago as his 1874 critique of historicism, On the Use and Abuse of History. Forgetting is necessary for memory to operate economically, for it to be able to recognize patterns.

It is true that memories are small islands in a sea of forgetting. In processing our experience of reality, forgetting is the rule and remembering the exception. 

I’ve never seen a better take ever on the concept of memory and memory studies! Hail Erll and her tribe!

And I’ve appended Astrid Erll here on purpose, to see how she syncs to a tee, with Milan’s read here, in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting!

[The above excerpts are from: Memory in Culture by Astrid Erll & Translated by Sara B. Young]

So much for the power of memory over our lives!

Well, in the opening part to this novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we have a citizen of the nation, by name Mirek, who is being followed by the government, or rather hounded by the government!

I quote from Milan’s book –

It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

With this he is trying to justify what his friends call carelessness: meticulously keeping a diary, preserving his correspondence, compiling the minutes of all the meetings where they discuss the situation and ponder what to do. He says to them: 

We're not doing anything that violates the constitution. To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.

A week before, at work with his crew on the roof of a building under construction, he looked down and was overcome by vertigo. 

He lost his balance, and his fall was broken by a badly joined beam that came loose; then they had to extricate him from under it. 

At first sight, the injury seemed serious, but a little later, when it turned out to be only an ordinary fracture of the forearm, he was pleased by the prospect of some weeks of vacation and the opportunity finally to take care of things he had never found the time for.

He ended up agreeing with his more prudent friends. The constitution did indeed guarantee free­dom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security. One never knew when the state would start screaming that this word or that was an attempt on its security. So he decided to put his compromising papers in a safe place.

But first he wanted to settle the Zdena business. He had phoned her in the town where she lived, but was unable to reach her. That cost him four days. He got through to her only yesterday. She had agreed to see him this afternoon.

Mirek's seventeen-year-old son protested: Mirek would be unable to drive with his arm in a cast. And he did have trouble driving. Powerless and useless in its sling, the injured arm swayed on his chest. To shift gears, Mirek had to let go of the steering wheel.

In the rearview mirror, he noticed a car persistently staying behind him. He had never doubted he was being followed, but up to now they had behaved with model discretion. Today a radical change had taken place: they wanted him to know they were there.

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

Well, the novel has seven stories to it, and each are so gripping in their descriptions, all the way! The pages, as they say, turn themselves in to us, so spontaneously, that there needs no nudging from your index finger on them anytime! Power to Milan!

Now, taking y’all over to Part Six, titled, The Angels

It’s sure throws a shocker on the reader, to see the history of memory in totalitarian regimes go through a concoction of lies, deception and deceit all along, best explained through the story of Tamina! Indeed, of more special merit is the case of Tamina’s, who the narrator foregrounds as an indispensable frame of reference throughout the novel! 

“It is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina is absent, it is a novel for Tamina!” So trueeey! Once you read through Tamina’s tryst with her past, you get to understand the way memory is erased off a person, and how! So gripping and riveting a read, by all means!

Milan’s lines tug at your heartstrings for ends on! Please do read the book, and I’m sure you’ll understand the whole politics that goes behind the memory-history combo through the ages, especially in totalitarian regimes! 

Just snippets, for y’all, and I quote –

Gottwald, Clementis, and all the others were unaware even that Kafka had existed, but Kafka had been aware of their ignorance. 

In his novel, Prague is a city without memory. The city has even forgotten its name. No one there remembers or recalls anything, and Josef K. even seems not to know anything about his own life previously. 

No song can be heard there to evoke for us the moment of its birth and link the present to the past.

If Franz Kafka is the prophet of a world without memory, Gustav Husak is its builder. 

After T. G. Masaryk, who was called the Liberator President (every last one of his monuments has been destroyed), after Benes, Gottwald, Zapotocky, Novotny, and Svoboda, he is the seventh president of my country, and he is called the President of Forgetting.

The Russians put him in power in 1969. Not since 1621 has the Czech people experienced such a devastation of culture and intellectuals. 

Everyone everywhere thinks that Husak was merely persecuting his political enemies. But the struggle against the political opposition was instead the perfect opportunity for the Russians to undertake, with their lieutenant as inter­mediary, something much more basic.

I consider it very significant from this standpoint that Husak drove one hundred forty-five Czech historians from the universities and research institutes. (It's said that for each historian, as mysteriously as in a fairy tale, a new Lenin monument sprang up somewhere in Bohemia.) 

One day in 1971, one of those historians, Milan Hubl, wearing his extraordinarily thick-lensed eyeglasses, came to visit me in my studio apartment on Bartolomejska Street. We looked out the window at the towers of Hradcany Castle and were sad.

"You begin to liquidate a people," Hiibl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster."

"And the language?"

"Why bother taking it away? It will become a mere folklore and sooner or later die a natural death."

Was that just hyperbole dictated by excessive gloom?

Or is it true that the people will be unable to survive crossing the desert of organized forgetting?

None of us knows what is going to happen.

In his next important novel, titled, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan continues on this concept of memory, alluding to the hugey burdensome ‘‘heaviness’’ brought about by memory, while harping on the unending feel of ‘‘lightness’’ that is brought about by forgetting!

Well, next on his publication is his most important nonfiction read titled, The Art of the Novel. This book puts forth his theories on the novel, that have helped shaped generations of readers and writers!

Some delightful, perceptive quotes for us all from this lovely non-fiction text of Milan’s!

“We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. 

We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.”

“All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”

“[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.”

“The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.”

Man is a child wandering lost - to cite Baudelaire’s poem again—in the "forests of symbols."

“The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.”

Milan is a melange and a medley! an awesome assemblage and an amazing assortment of sorts, whose oeuvre can never ever be pigeonholed into one single mode of reasoning!

Of such mettle is ‘Milan’s plenty’!

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