The Festival of InsignificanceBy Milan KunderaTranslated by Linda AsherHarper, 2015This June, 86-year-old Milan Kundera released his first novel in 13 years, The Festival of Insignificance. It’s a slight book (only 115 pages) that continues themes and tendencies developed over the course of its author’s career: Kundera’s famous “disagreement with being” lurks above the text, and his method of characterization engenders its usual successes and failures. But it also wanders into somewhat un-Kundera-esque territory: what he calls the “good mood.”Festival doesn’t offer much by way of story, which isn’t surprising considering Kundera’s interests primarily lie in theme and situation. The plot is so irrelevant, in fact, that I’ll skip summarizing it altogether — suffice it to say that it concerns four male best friends. As a result of Kundera’s (entirely deliberate) style of characterization, these four friends are so thinly sketched and interchangeable that I had to note down their names and main characteristics on the back pages just to keep track of them. They are: Alain, an unwanted son who fantasizes the words and deeds of his absent mother; Ramon, who hates waiting in lines and expounds on the book’s main theme, insignificance; Charles, who writes about marionettes and whose own mother is dying; Caliban, who creates his own language, Pakistani. Then there is D’Ardelo, the negative character of the novel, a narcissist who lies about his health, and finally, jester Stalin among his humorless underlings. Kundera finds the richest soil for his philosophical discourse in the abandoned Alain, the blithe Caliban, and the stiff D’Ardelo, all of whom provide the most thought-provoking variations on the novel’s interconnected existential questions: how seriously should we take ourselves and the world around us?; What is the nature of guilt?; and How do we attain a “good mood”?
Kundera the MisanthropeThe answer to these questions points back to Kundera’s theory of kitsch, presented in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Kundera broadens the concept of kitsch from the merely aesthetic to the ethical, finding its general expression in any “categorical agreement with being.” Kitsch is the delusion that “we are created in an acceptable manner”; it is the denial of shit, that is to say, the denial of fundamental flaws in our nature. The anti-kitsch Kundera, who can neither ignore nor condone human deficiencies, feels a “categorical disagreement with being” (read: a sophisticated term for misanthropy). His fiction’s implied mission is the rooting out and exposing of kitsch wherever it lies in the human heart.Taking his cue from existentialists such as Heidegger and Sartre, Kundera often refers to life as an inescapable “trap.” His characters follow suit.
Festival’s Charles describes being alive as synonymous with being “indicted and convicted,” while Alain considers that his mother attempted abortion because she felt it “horrible” to send a human being into the world who didn’t ask to be born. The imaginary mother of his fantasies also tells him that she desires not just the end of human history, but the “total disappearance of mankind together with its future and its past, with its beginning and its end, along with the whole span of its existence, with all its memory.” This is not the age-old wish for apocalypse, or simply humanity’s annihilation, but for its complete deletion.Indeed, several of Kundera’s favorite characters reject solidarity with their own species. Agnes of
Immortality (1990) experiences
the feeling that she had nothing in common with those two-legged creatures with a head on their shoulders and a mouth on their face. There was a time when she was interested in their politics, their science, their inventions, when she considered herself a small part of their great adventure, until one day the feeling was born in her that she did not belong among them […] that none of it was her concern.
She dreams of a stranger from another planet, telling her that she will live her next life as an alien, escaping the human condition. She is relieved to escape Earth, the most “horrible” place in the universe. And in Unbearable Lightness, one of Kundera’s most tender — and happiest! — creations is the dog Karenin, who experiences joy and love in a manner unavailable to us self-aware creatures expelled from Eden. For Kundera, paths to happiness lie above or below, in the alien or in the animal, but not in humanhood.It’s not an uncommon idea, Kundera’s assertion that “The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.” We are indeed creatures who suffer, and may imagine that other lifeforms are not aware of and do not experience suffering in the same way (William James, for instance, referred to the sick soul’s “envy of the placid beast” -- the wish to trade agony-inducing sentience for a simpler animal consciousness). We may view our bodily existence as imposed, and regret that there is not an alternate, nonhuman way of being. But Kundera, so sympathetic to these tendencies, is completely unsympathetic to characters or mindsets that would find any redeeming qualities in humanity (remember, loving humanity is kitsch). His novels show that there is no good way to live, other than to disagree with being, to bemoan our existence, to feel guilt for having been born human. His misanthropy is so pervasive that rereading all of his work in succession leaves one with a general depressive malaise. Festival will attempt to teach us about acquiring a “good mood,” but we have to remember that it will be the “good mood” of a fundamentally “unacceptable” creature.
Kundera’s CharactersAnother context for answering
Festival’s existential questions is Kundera’s treatment of character. As already mentioned, the characters of
Festival are rather thin. But this isn’t quite a mistake on their author’s part. Kundera has said that his novels are not psychological: “They lie outside the aesthetic of the novel normally termed psychological.” There are, for instance, no interior monologues, and little information about the characters’ manner of behaving or of their past. Psychological realism does not interest Kundera because, as he often reminds the reader “a character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self.” Rather than working in the manner of a realist novelist, creating illusions of three-dimensional beings, he focuses on grasping a character’s “existential problem,” which means exploring certain situations, motifs, even words. In practice, this means that the characters are rarely memorable, and sometimes indistinguishable, which explains why it’s difficult to keep track of Festival’s four friends.For an extreme example of Kundera’s theory at work, look at
Immortality, which includes a series of nameless women, referred to only by letters A through G (“girl B,” “woman C,” and so on). Of course, these are completely minor characters whose only purpose is marking developments in a man’s life; they are certainly not meant to be the main personages of the novel. Nevertheless, in the A — G labeling, we can find the kernel of Kundera’s conception of characters in general. They are not people, but rather stand-ins for ideas, and so do not really need names. Kundera calls his method “meditative interrogation,” in which he muses on this or that possibility for human existence — characters in situations are opportunities to do so.Can we flaw Kundera for creating what E. M. Forster termed “flat” characters? Given his intention to avoid the illusions of psychological realism, and his brilliance in endowing his creations with thought-provoking “existential codes,” I don’t think so. Though far from “round,” his characters do possess scrupulously defined psychological traits. The difference is that, rather than belonging to fully formed beings, these traits (for all purposes adhering to figures labeled A, B, C, etc) are set loose to interact with each other under certain conditions.
Two Kinds of CharactersIn
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera writes:
I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.
It’s here that I have to disagree with him. This is an author far from “equally fond of” and “equally horrified by” all of his characters, but one who clearly prefers some existential possibilities to others. There are two type of Kundera characters: those who “get it” and those who don’t — those who possess dispositions he approves of and those born merely out of his contempt. The personality traits in these two categories repeat again and again throughout his novels, so that a reader familiar with his oeuvre can immediately spot a “good” or “bad” character. Though Kundera often stresses the difference between philosophy and literature, insisting that literature is the realm of play, of inquiry, of hypothesis, in which themes are examined from multiple angles, he contradicts himself by putting certain perspectives into the mouths of “good” and “bad” characters. That is when inquiry turns into thesis.This is not to say that Kundera doesn’t have any ambivalent characters — his early novels, such as the The Joke, are much more ambivalent than his middle or late works — but the breakdown of certain perspectives into a good/bad dichotomy occurs far too often to be ignored. How do we know which characters he likes? At times, his affection is explicit. Of his heroine Tamina in Unbearable Lightness, he says “I am more attached to her than to any other” and of a group of poets, “I am very fond of them all.” He says of Vincent in Slowness, “I like him,” but comments when he takes a certain course of thought, “I dislike following Vincent along that path.” Similarly, he writes that he “love[s]” Festival’s four friends, even playfully gifting them a book “for them all to enjoy.” There are five main characters in Festival, four of whom he loves, leading us to the conclusion that the fifth, D’Ardelo, lies outside of that charmed circle. Ramon, one of the “loved,” delivers his verdict: “D’Ardelo belonged to the sort of people he did not like.”Because character's’ personality traits repeat so frequently, and because Kundera’s judgment is rendered all but explicit, I offer a list of attributes common to both categories:
| Good character |
Bad character |
| 1. Quiet |
Talkers |
| 2. No modern music |
Modern music |
| 3. Dislike or are otherwise at odds with modernity in general. |
Embrace the “modern” |
| 4. Private |
Collapse private/public |
| 5. Clothed |
Naked |
| 6. Abstain from the “Grand March” |
Serious |
| 7. Misanthropic; disagree with “being” |
Love “life” |
The dichotomy of quiet versus loud recurs so often and in such similar words, that I’m tempted to say it’s the most recognizable aspect of Kundera’s worldview. Novel after novel, scene after scene, finds characters who suffer from the noise of civilization, particularly from the clamor of children and the babble of cocktail parties. A “good” character, like Immortality’s Agnes, covers her ears from the “assault of noise” on the street, while “bad” characters prattle endlessly and turn up the music. Kundera’s most detested characters enjoy contemporary electric guitar, which, according to his one of his favorites, Sabina, is really just “noise masked as music.”And “bad” characters don’t just enjoy modern music, they also embrace the “modern” in general. They eschew the past or have no past, like the children on Tamina’s island, while Tamina herself, a “good” character, is entirely past-oriented. Because of their noisy clamor and their lack of memories, children are often villains in Kundera’s work, as are characters who appreciate them: Festival’s D’Ardelo smiles when he hears children laughing.Another recurring motif is André Breton’s ideal of a glass house “into which everyone can look and there are no secrets.” This abolition of privacy, a staple of totalitarian societies, horrifies Kundera, and he disapproves of any character who would reject the division between public and private spheres, especially those who would exhibit their love life and their bodies. The implications extend to any desire for public attention whatever, which the vilified D’Ardelo’s exhibits in throwing himself a dinner party.Then there are the characters who take life too seriously. D’Ardelo, a serious character in love with grand ideas, while awaiting a doctor’s diagnosis spends several pages romanticizing his own death. Upon learning that his health is fine after all, he runs into Ramon, and lies that he has cancer. He finds tragedy beautiful rather than insignificant, and he loves exhibiting it before others. Furthermore, negative characters yearn to join the Grand March of history, to change the world, an ambition that their author, having seen the tragic outcomes of utopian dreams, has no sympathy for.Finally, and as previously noted, Kundera doesn’t like the human condition, and his favorite characters don’t, either. Festival’s beloved Ramon refuses to wait in line for a Chagall exhibit he’s been looking forward to; he refers to the line as “disgusting,” its weekly augmentation proving that “the planet is more and more heavily populated,” and concludes that “he would never have the stomach to willingly become part of that endless queue.” Negative characters, meanwhile, love life, irritating their author for whom nothing is more kitsch than “Life with a capital L.” A favorite, Vincent of Slowness, says of such characters that “they delight in the human condition just as it is imposed on them [...] Whereas he, even though he knows there is no way out, proclaims his disagreement with that world.”
GuiltKundera’s disagreement with being, his entrenched misanthropy, carries implications for his characters’ sense of guilt, one of
Festival’s major existential problems.An attentive admirer of Kafka, Kundera has frequently explored this feeling in his fiction, particularly in its unwarranted, imposed, and internalized manifestations. In
The Art of the Novel, Kundera speaks about Kafka’s model of guilt, in which the logic of the “offense seeking punishment” is reversed, and it is the “punishment that seeks the offense.” Kundera himself made great use of this reversal in his first novel The Joke, which deals with the Stalinesque trial of a man for whom an accusation results in reversed — that is, internalized — guilt.Kundera says that it is “from his family, from the relationship between the child and the deified power of the parents, that Kafka drew his knowledge of the technique of culpabilization.” It seems that Kundera has long wanted to write his own version of Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” where a father, accusing his innocent son, prevails upon him to condemn and drown himself. To that end, Kundera created Tereza of
Unbearable Lightness, who commits the “offense” of being an unwanted child. Tereza’s mother never tells her of the unwanted pregnancy, but she reminds her constantly of motherhood’s great sacrifices. Tereza is forever guilty before the deified parent, for “If a mother was sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress. Unwanted children provide for Kundera a secular version of original sin.With
Festival, Kundera carries this concept to its final conclusion. Alain knows that his mother didn’t want him, but he will never know why. As a result, he’s an incorrigible apologizer. Because he feels that he has intruded upon his mother’s life, and because, as a “loved” character, he’s gentle by nature, he is “condemned, by an implacable logic, to apologize throughout the whole of his life.” In a “pedestrian collision” scene out of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Alain and a girl bump into one another in the street. Though mutually responsible for the collision, the girl calls him an “idiot” and an “asshole,” whereas Alain apologizes. Later, angry at himself for his “stupid reflex to beg pardon,” to “find every opportunity to feel guilty,” he delivers the best passage in the novel:
Feeling guilty or not feeling guilty — I think that’s the whole issue. Life is a struggle of all against all. It’s a known fact. But how does the struggle work in a society that’s more or less civilized? People can’t just attack each other the minute they see them. So instead they try to cast the shame of culpability on the other. The one who manages to to make the other guilty will win. The one who confesses his crime will lose.
Accidental jostling in the street isn’t anyone’s fault, “yet some people always — immediately, spontaneously — consider themselves the jostlers, thus in the wrong. And others always — immediately, spontaneously — consider themselves the jostled ones, therefore in the right, quick to accuse the other and get him punished.” Because Alain and Charles are Kundera’s “loved” characters, they both fall into the former category — they apologize, rather than accuse. Charles goes so far as to say that in his ideal world, everybody would apologize, “everybody, without exception, pointlessly, excessively, for nothing at all, […] they’d load themselves down with apologies.” It’s a beautiful utopia, in which everyone would be a Kafka protagonist and no one a Kafka villain.While under the Communism of The Joke, the power struggle over guilt was waged by an evil state against the individual, Festival is interested in a fundamental guilt ideally accepted by all. Alain’s apology for jostling is really the apology for being present, for being alive. An “intruder” into the world, he feels he doesn’t deserve his own existence. While Tereza’s guilt is only before the deified parent (no matter how absurd the parent’s reasoning for disappointment), Alain’s extends to the entire world. His condition is a logical implication of Kundera’s misanthropy. The original sin is being. It is by virtue of being human that you are guilty. And by “agreeing with being,” you are doubly guilty (not only guilty, but an unlikeable character, to boot).
Happiness and InsignificanceOne of
Festival’s greatest concerns is the secret of attaining a “good mood” (Part Four of the novel is in fact titled “They Are All in Search of a Good Mood”). It’s an unlikely topic for an author who so thoroughly distrusts most forms of happiness: the laughter of angels, the euphoria of the Grand March, the joy of crying while watching children run around in the grass (ULB). If we take to heart Kundera’s philosophy of kitsch, we might ask, along with Agnes of
Immortality, “How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you share neither their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?” But the “good mood” Kundera speaks of in Festival is far from humanitarian; it’s actually Hegelian. Ramon summarizes Hegel’s essay on the comical: “true humor is inconceivable without an infinite good mood […] Only from the heights of an infinite good mood can you observe below you the eternal stupidity of men and laugh over it." But are we to limit happiness only to this Hegelian description?
In fact, Kundera has already tackled happiness, but always obliquely, in earlier novels. As the 18th-century Chevalier walks to his chaise in
Slowness, Kundera writes, “No tomorrow. No audience. I beg you, friend, be happy. I have the vague sense that on your capacity to be happy hangs our only hope.” Though it isn’t entirely clear, the Chevalier’s happiness in this scene seems to hang on his capacity to find happiness in momentary pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure. But since the Chevalier has sworn his sexual partner never to reveal their affair, what seems to appeal to Kundera here is the capacity to derive happiness from purely private moments, ones completely divorced from image and exhibitionism.
Festival’s D’Ardelo finds himself “happy and lighthearted” at the end of the novel when Ramon pretends to believe D’Ardelo is having an affair with a beautiful woman; he loves seeing a glorious reflection of himself in his friend’s eyes “as in a mirror.” This, of course, is the wrong kind of happiness in a Kundera novel.Poor D’Ardelo. He could have never gained his author’s approval. He loves himself too much, and he’s too serious, too “attached to the gravity of all truths.” He is not pleased with Ramon’s mouthpiece-for-the-author speech about “the value of insignificance”:
Insignificance is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in atrocities, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it […] in all its obviousness, all its innocence, in all its beauty […] inhale this insignificance that’s all around us, it is the key to wisdom, it is the key to a good mood.
Ramon is picking up on a thread of thinking Kundera already began in Identity, where he had a character expound on happiness as follows: “As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. […] our only freedom is choosing between bitterness and pleasure. Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.” To find happiness in significance is to be existentially mistaken, because nothing is significant.Indeed, Kundera’s approved version of happiness should never be conflated with the kind Communists felt in The Joke: a “solemn and ascetic joy, […] Joy with a capital J.” If you cried tears of joy over The Supreme Court’s decision on Marriage Equality, if you felt that humanity had progressed in some important way, then you are guilty of the wrong kind of happiness. And if you fought for the change, if you were emotionally invested, you’re likely guilty of worse: “We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”Given Kundera’s misanthropy, his fundamental “disagreement with being,” can we trust his version of happiness? And his “tips” in its regard? Whether he likes it or not, Kundera’s novelistic universes are heavy — they burden the reader, while simultaneously maligning him for taking the text “too seriously.” As such, his injunctions to a “good mood” feel disingenuous — his prescribed method not an authentic human possibility. There is much to be learned from Kundera, just perhaps not this.___Y. Greyman is a freelance writer living in New York, working on a PhD in literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaching composition at Brooklyn College.
