AMUKH, also a disclaimer: It does not reflect well upon a reviewer to discount his credentials in the beginning itself. But a student is more likely than anyone else to get away with it. So anyways, here it goes. This is a great book to read, one to sip slowly and savor the taste but perhaps not an ideal book to review. This would be true for many other works of Kundera as well but definitely in lesser degrees than this one. As the book proceeded so did my perplexities and by the time I finished the book I found myself to be in doubt about my adequacy to review it. But then I guess I’ll never be sure until I try.
One obvious temptation that I might succumb to is to flash clichéd one liners. But then when Kundera expresses something extremely complex in one beautiful line, its very difficult to resist trying to pay tribute to him in a similar fashion.
Since this is supposed to be book review and not an essay or a research paper, so I’ve tried to stay true to the book and not tried to fish out one particular theme and discuss it in the framework of the course structure. So while there are a few references to Walter Benjamin’s Storyteller and Soshana Felman’s The Storyteller’s Silence, themes which do not form part of the course have also been dealt with. Also, since I do not have the training to critically comment on the writing style, no such attempt has been made.
‘The book of Laughter and Forgetting’ is a multi layered book. It is divided into seven parts. Each with different characters (though Tamina appears in two of them) and each dealing with a particular theme (though sometimes overlapping and some of them repeated). “It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels”
LOST LETTERS
If life for the dead resides in remembrance by the living of their story and justice for the dead resides in the remembrance of the injustice done to them (Soshana Felman: 15), then punishment for the dead resides in their forgetting. After Clementis is charged with treason and hanged, the propaganda section makes him vanish from history and from photographs.
To have memory is to have lived. No wonder then that most tourists on a holiday spend their time in capturing the scenes on their camera for recall in future than enjoy it in that moment with their naked eye. After all, if you can’t remember it, it never happened, right? May be this is the reason why Mirek wants to keep a record of his ‘potentially’ subversive political activities. For him this remembrance is an act of defiance and hence he says, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.
Kundera laments the transitory nature of public memory in which one catastrophe is soon replaced by another bigger and more ‘magnificent’ one, so that in the end “everyone has completely forgotten everything”. This also means that history is no longer the slow unfolding of events against the common background of which, the lives of individuals may be followed. Instead, it has become “an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over familiar banality of private life”.
This does not sound very different from the complaint of Walter Benjamin in Storyteller that (individual) experience has fallen in value while (un-noteworthy) news and dissemination of information keeps on growing in volume. Of course, since the value of the information does not survive the moment in which it was new and therefore no on would remember anything.
“Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record…”**
Distortion of memory; both public and private is a central idea in this first part of the book. So the Czech who cheered when the Russians drove out the Germans only to find themselves fighting the latter’s grip on their country are rebelling “against their own youth”. After they are crushed and the Russian tanks roll into Prague, the Communist propaganda erases the images of their struggle “from the country’s memory, like mistakes in a schoolchild’s homework.”
One way in which the establishment dealt with subversion was by destroying the past of people. By making a person like Mirek disown his words, actions and beliefs, they would leave him without a past, a man condemned to become a shadow.
Mirek of course is not a passive observer to the alteration of his memories. He is actively engaged in modifying memories of his youth just as a novelist might rework his novel by rewriting its beginning. He wants to get back the love letters that he wrote to his ugly girlfriend so that she can be erased from the pages of his life. She is a reminder to him of his weakness, of his own hated youth which he desperately wants to destroy.
Again, he would not run away from his imminent persecution. Not only because he feels responsible for the grandeur of his destiny which is leading to a glorious destruction of his life but also because by going to prison he is refusing to let him be erased from the public memory. He is going to leave his body as a stain on the sparkling unblemished history that the Russians are building. He is going to cement his place in history. And in this way he shall have his revenge.
MAMA
Mama is aware of the failure of her memory. It conjures up her past in patterns which she knows to be false but instead of acknowledging this before her son and his wife she instead imagines a story which would make sure that she rises in their eyes by sharing with them her glorious youth as she sees it now.
For Karel, the resemblance between his mistress Eva and Mrs Nora of whom he has an erotic childhood memory provides a leap from childhood to manhood. A leap across time and space.
THE ANGELS
If the first two parts of the book deal primarily with the tricks and turns of memory, then this part is dedicated to the eloquence of laughter. Kundera offers that laughter much like pain pins down the person to the present moment. A person bursting out in ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire; he cannot think or care about anything beyond his laughter; beyond that moment.
In Kundera’s world angels represent coherence and rational meaning, while absurdity and confusion are under the dominion of devils. So laughter would seem to be devilish act because it denotes the absurdity of things, things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning. Laughter is the ultimate destroyer of meaning.
LOST LETTERS
Kundera returns to the idea of old memories preserved once again in lost letters. But unlike the first part where the motive is to get rid of the uncomfortable past, here Tamina desperately wants to hold on to her past, the memories of life with her dead husband which are contained in her diaries. For her past is the reference point for present and without that present is a “nothingness moving slowly towards death”. Lacking a proper photo of her husband, she tries to revive his image through her memories. However, even the strongest of emotions or memories become faded over the years. Then again there are times when one’s refusal to let go of the past starts distorting it. Tamina loved her husband too much to admit that she could forget his face, that “what she considered unforgettable could ever be forgotten”. In My Name is Red, Black is shocked by the revelation that for a dozen years he had been recalling the face of Shekhure, his beloved different than it actually looked. Tamina is equally horrified by her memorys betraying her.
Tamina (a human being) and Goethe (a writer) stand on the opposite ends of the spectrum. While a writer craves for an audience to display his thoughts, writings and memories, for Tamina the mere thought of others reading her diaries is paralyzing. For her if the exclusivity of her memories is lost, she would become a stranger to her own memories.
LITOST
Litost is a state of torment created by a sudden sight of one’s own misery. A young budding poet after breaking up with his girlfriend has a fling with a butcher’s wife. She is a small town woman of ordinary looks but the student poet is convinced by the others that it is exactly that ordinariness, the delightful mediocrity of soul which makes a woman lively and real. However, she refuses to yield to his persistent efforts at coitus. It is only too late that the student comes to know that the only thing holding her back was the fear of getting pregnant and not the immensity of their love as the student had imagined in his grand romantic fantasies. When this realization is dawned upon him, he is thrown back into the depths of litost.
THE ANGELS
Violence on memory and through memory which was hinted at in the first part is dealt with in some detail in the sixth part of the book. After the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, they started a systematic campaign not just to alter the history and the ‘archives’ but through these also something basic, something far more important: memory. “You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begin to forget what it is and what it was.” And of course the rest of the world would forget the people who have forgotten themselves, even faster.
When Soshana Felman hails history as being “above and beyond official narratives, a haunting claim that the dead have on the living”, she seems to be forgetting that history is merely an ephemeral account of ephemeral changes and it can be as easily appropriated by the victors as the philosophies of justice.
Benjamin would of course suggest that history of the oppressed can be traced from the “tradition of the oppressed and the silence of the official history (the victor’s history) with respect to the tradition of the oppressed” but if Suyodhan can be branded as Duryodhan (the evil one) for eternity by the Pandavas then the hope of redemption of historical accounts is not all that promising.
In A Hundred Years of Solitude, when Macondo is affected by the plague of insomnia and memory loss, Aureliano discovers that to ensure that people do not forget the names of things and their use, they should put up inscriptions on all the things, describing them but he did not foresee the situation when people would forget the meaning of those words. “Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forget the values of the written letters.” This is perhaps the reason why Kundera (actually he quotes one Hubl here) says that it is not required for the Russians to take away the language, because when people have lost their memory, the words also lose their meaning and a language of meaningless words would “become folklore and sooner or later die a natural death”.
Something exactly opposite of this happens to Kundera’s father in the last years of his life. The words slip away from him, so that every attempt to define his thoughts results in the same sentence: “that’s strange”. The result is the astonishment of knowing everything and not being able to say anything. Kundera compares this to the silence of the silence of the Czech historians who have been forbidden not to remember by the Russians. Indeed, this is also the silence of the Storyteller who returns mute from the First World War and has no words to share his experience.
What haunts Tamina is not the desire of remembering but the remorse of forgetting. The reason why she cannot let go of the past and move on is because she cannot accept and cannot forgive herself for forgetting her dead husband.
However when she is taken to the island of children everything that she considered significant and serious, her body and her sexuality is rendered trivial and laughable. On this island sensuality becomes absurd, innocence becomes absurd and vocabulary decomposes. And finally in this kingdom of absurdity Tamina can stop looking back and feel lightness. She is free.
THE BORDER
This is where Kundera ties up the loose ends in the book. Border is of course, the geographical division between countries; between one’s home and the alien. It is also the border between life and death; between attainable and that which is beyond reach. It is also the border between coherence and absurdity; between love and laughter.
Jan is about to leave Prague and take up a position in US. His other friends have done so in the past and they still keep fighting for the freedom of their homeland. But all of them also know that after crossing the physical border, the bond tying them to their country is just illusory. It would be quite easy for them to stumble across the border where they stopped caring about their people and it was merely an enduring habit that prevented them from doing so.
The woman Jan loved most told him that she held on to life by thread. She was not suicidal but merely reiterating the fact of the fragility of human life. Life and death are separated by a border of few millimeters. Even a very little push would suffice to find one on the other side of the border, on the side where everything- love, faith, beliefs, history, memory- has no meaning. Simply because everything is unattainable.
There are three kinds of women in a man’s life. First are those of realized affairs and passing amours; the attained. Second are the women we wanted to have but who eluded us; the unattained. Third are the women (the girl Jan meets on the train, the girl i’ve loved the most) we like and are liked by but we would never have because in relation to them we are on the other side of the border; the unattainable.
Laughter as the ultimate destroyer of meaning was first encountered in the third part of the book. Its source is traced here. When things are repeated they lose a fraction of their meaning. And after a maximum acceptable dose of repetitions, they are eventually rendered meaningless and cross over the border by evoking laughter. Laughter denotes meaninglessness. Therefore, laughter is the enemy of love; of poetry, it is the enemy of erotic; of arousal, it is the enemy of grief; of mourning. It is a barrier between man and the world. It tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude.
UPARANT, mostly a Postscript: After the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Milan Kundera lost his position as a professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies and all his books were removed from public libraries. He settled in France in 1975. In 1979, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” was first published in response to which the Czech government revoked his citizenship. I guess some people can neither laugh nor forget!
* Translated from French by Aaron Asher, first Published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited in 1996.
**Memento, 2000 (Director: Christopher Nolan)
0 comments:
Post a Comment