Milan Kundera’s last joke His genius has become a victim of history

Kundera never saw himself as a political man, as a moralist, a liberal, a conservative, or as an author of texts whose highest destiny was to become movie scripts. He was, quite simply, a novelist. For him, the novel was the highest form of aesthetic endeavour, a kind of anti-scripture representing the sensibility of the individual, containing “an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group”. The faith he placed in the novel as a compass that can be used to negotiate life’s big questions can seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet if you don’t believe that, why bother to write one?

In choosing to write his later books in French, Kundera pulled off the near-miraculous feat of being expressive in a second or third language at a world-class level, putting him in the company of Vladimir Nabokov. The French returned the favour, honouring Kundera, protecting his privacy, and appreciating his uncompromising defence of the individual aesthetic at a point in history when other Western literary cultures had ceased to take novels quite so seriously. “We already had novels with a thesis,” wrote his friend and admirer, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. “We had so-called ‘committed’ novels in which at least one character served as spokesman for the convictions of the author. Kundera’s response was that a conviction is not novelistic, that it cannot shed the awkwardness (or worse, the vulgarity) of concepts rendered in images unless it is immediately relativized, broken, put on hold.”

It is both fitting and also a bit frightening that Kundera’s breakthrough novel, The Joke, published in 1967 in Czech, may be his most accessible — and might have a hard time getting published today in London or New York. The novel tells the story of a Prague university student named Ludvik, whose life is destroyed by a single, ill-timed joke poking fun at the progressive politics of a pretty female classmate who ignored him. When Ludvik returns to school after vacation, he is summoned before the school’s humourless ideological commissars who insist that his words were offensive. When none of his fellow students dares to speak up on his behalf, he is expelled from school.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. And with decades of communist cancel culture under his belt, Kundera can tell us what happens next. Injured and embittered, Ludvik is exiled from the class of successful young urbanites and spends the subsequent decades of his life nursing a furious grudge against those who wronged him, and plotting his revenge.

Harbouring a special contempt for a state official named Zemanek, who actively pushed for Ludvik’s expulsion from university, he returns to Prague and strikes up an affair with Zemanek’s wife. But their tryst fails to yield the compensation that Ludvik hoped for. Instead, it ends with an affable encounter with Zemanek, who appears to have no recollection of their shared history. Ludvik concludes that holding on to bitterness towards the past is futile, and that he must reconcile himself to the idea that he will never right the wrongs he has suffered.

The idea that the act of forgetting binds together both perpetrators and victims in the common pursuit of survival is at once deeply humanistic and at the same time deeply unsatisfying to moralists who prefer heroes who win out and villains who receive a timely come-uppance. But such endings made little sense to people in places such as Czechoslovakia, for whom learning to live with injustice and defeat was a geographical requirement. Kundera followed The Joke with Life is Elsewhere, a brilliant though largely overlooked satirical novel that posited a different type of forgetting through the story of a poet named Jaromil, who escapes his surroundings by devoting himself to poetry.

The twinned necessities and dangers of memory and forgetting would occupy Kundera for the rest of his life. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1977, was a recognisable masterwork of dissident literature, addressing the forced forgetting of the communist state through seven interlocking stories that brought together historical-political and personal narratives of forgetting in a modernist style with touches of magical realism. What made the book really sing, however, was the combination of these hallmarks of serious world lit with hot, entirely un-Soviet sex scenes, including a long-term ménage à trois and a concluding orgy, which announced the primacy of individual desire over politics in a way that shocked Puritans of both the Right and the Left.

Kundera deepened his exploration of forgetting to Tolstoyan depths in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Published in 1984 in French and set during the 1968 Prague Spring, a philandering surgeon named Tomas is stuck in a love triangle with his wife, Tereza, a dissident photojournalist, and his favourite mistress, a painter named Sabina. Tereza is heavy; Sabina is light, finding release in sex and in the act of betrayal. Sickened by the tightening political noose, the dangers facing Tereza, and the meaningless of his existence, Tomas escapes with her and their dog Karenin to Zurich. When the homesick Tereza leaves Tomas and returns to Prague with Karenin, Tomas is heartbroken, and follows them back home, where they are blacklisted. Moving to the countryside, Tomas abandons both his work and his womanising, and finds love with Tereza. In a touching scene that prefigures the novel’s end, Karenin develops cancer and dies on the operating table, while smiling at her owners’ attempts to save her life.

What was perhaps most shocking to sophisticated readers after the postmodernist playfulness of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was Kundera’s determination in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to tell a Tolstoyan-existentialist love story without reference to either God or politics. In fact, our lives do have meaning, Kundera insisted, if we choose to make it so. For some, Kundera’s erotic philosophy was compelling. For others, it was a retrograde abandonment of both art and life. Clearly, Kundera himself was compelled by both Tereza and Sabina, which is what gave the novel its force.

There are readers and critics who acclaimed Kundera’s Nineties novels, beginning with Immortality, ostensibly the conclusion of a trilogy composed of his prior two novels, and Slowness, as masterworks. I am not among them. I find them bloated, pompous and self-indulgent. In some sense, I understand Kundera’s genius to have itself become a victim of history. Once the Eastern Bloc crumbled, the author unavoidably lost touch with the driving necessity of making human sense out of the cruel illogic of totalitarian systems of control, which had been replaced by an everlasting peace made out of bourgeois liberal individualism and oodles of Nutella.

Alas. The paradise that staunched Kundera’s art has proved to be as illusory as the acts of remembering and forgetting can be in his fiction. Luckily, we have Kundera’s masterworks as guides to the new-old world in which the people of the West increasingly find themselves embracing the unfreedoms of the East, in what is surely one of history’s greatest jokes — a joke that Kundera the novelist would have greeted with liberating irony.