This post is part of the ongoing project, the top 100 books on totalitarianism.
Milan Kundera describes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as "a novel in the form of variations" where "the individual parts follow each other like individual stretches of a journey leading toward a theme, a thought, a single situation, the sense of which fades in the distance". The main character, Tamina, only figures in the story for parts of the book, but Kundera insists that the parts in which Tamina is absent exist for her-- "she is its main character and its main audience". The stories swirl about her, around her, and through her. Rather than attempt to describe Kundera's semi-magical-realist style, I prefer to focus on the way in which this book touches upon totalitarianism.
Philip Roth's series, "Writers From the Other Europe", published by Penguin Books offers the best version of this book, due to a wonderful and worthwhile conversation between Roth and Kundera about writing, communism, and the future at the end. In this interview, Roth asks Kundera to expound upon his characterization of the era of Stalinist terror as the "reign of the hangman and the poet". In his response, Kundera traces the roots of totalitarianism to the idealistic side of the human imagination:
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.
Totalitarianism's seductions are the promises of heaven on earth. Like the prosperity gospel preached by some evangelical Christians, totalitarianism guarantees perfection and happiness in your own backyard. Hordes of hope-filled artists, writers, and intellectuals fell prey to the swan-song of scientific socialism. Kundera describes surrealist Paul Eluard's blind adulation of the hangman that killed his colleagues as he wrote songs decrying gloom, cynicism, and sadness.
Totalitarianism only survives where the murderous instincts of the hangman can be transformed into myths and mystique by the poet. Kundera explains:
People like to say: Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the dream of paradise and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated. It is extremely easy to condemn gulags, but to reject the totalitarian poesy which leads to the gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as ever. Nowadays, people all over the world unequivocally reject the idea of gulags, yet they are still willing to let themselves be hypnotized by totalitarian poesy and to march to new gulags to the tune of the same lyrical song piped by Eluard...
Laughter offers brief respite to humans whose language regales the absurd, while forgetting becomes a political problem as well as a political solution. For history to be rewritten to the drum-beat of the dialectic, forgetting reaches the level of an intellectual commitment, a political position, if you will.
The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children. All totalitarianisms do this. And perhaps our entire technological age does this, with its cult of the future, its cult of youth and childhood, its indifference to the past and mistrust of thought.
Kundera portrays Gustav Husak, Czechoslovakia's seventh president, as"the president of forgetting", the man who led his people away from memory. In 1969, Husak dismissed 145 historians from universities and research institutes. One of these historians, Milan Hubl, dropped by to visit Kundera one day in 1971. Hubl told Havel that "the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory":
Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
This organized, regimented forgetting is one of communism's most haunting legacies. Though Kundera's subject is totalitarianism, he is wary of assertions and prognostications-- "of the words pessimism and optimism". He insists on the right to remain a storyteller as opposed to a prophet. As a novelist, Kundera invents stories, confronts one story with another, and thereby arrives at questions.
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
This seems a bit extreme. Even in totalitarian systems, the novel survives in the underground-- it only loses its public place. On the other hand, in a country ruled by complacency, is the novel's place truly significant as more than a device for self-adulation or self-help? Do we treat novels as we treat the telephone polling companies-- reflexively covering our ears to the questions while answering, "Yes, yes, later, I'm busy"? Do we treat questions only if they are first marked in our Dayplanners? Let me guess-- you don't want to be bothered with the question when you already know the answer.
More = John Updike's lengthy review + A Cuban in London's perspective + A detailed summary of the various parts of the book + The Big Website About Milan Kundera + "Eternal exile of Milan Kundera" + "In Soviet China, novels read you" + "Laws of forgetting"
