Milan Kundera died this week. He was a Czech writer who was prominent back in the Cold War and seems to have been slotted permanently into that increasingly antiquated niche. He's most famous for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but my favorite of his works is The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
It begins with a meditation on a photograph of a party apparatchik as he is slowly erased from history. That's certainly a Cold War image, but it hides a deeper concern. Kundera was deeply concerned with the relationship between culture, history, memory and identity. He believed nations, especially small ones, needed to preserve their culture and language. The identity of a people and a civilization is reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind, and that is culture.
But, as with everything Kundera wrote about, there are ambiguities. Kundera was also deeply hostile to the idea of cultures being confined by national boundaries. The nations of central Europe, under the Soviet Union, had to preserve not only their own cultures but also their attachment to the rest of Europe. He saw in the idea of Europe “an immense loneliness… the void in the European space from which culture was slowly withdrawing”.
But for all his insistence on the need to preserve the distinctiveness of central European nations, Kundera was skeptical of the very idea of a “home” or a “homeland”. “I wonder if our notion of home isn’t, in the end, an illusion, a myth,” he suggested in an interview. “I wonder if we are not victims of that myth. I wonder if our ideas of having roots – d’être enraciné – is simply a fiction we cling to.”
There is a long tradition of viewing Europe as a singular cultural entity, as a way of denying “Europeanness” to certain peoples, whether Jews or Slavs in the past, or Muslims today. Many on the right today deploy the idea of a single, homogenous Europe, to condemn immigration as eroding the whiteness of the continent, and as robbing Europeans of their “homeland”. That attitude has also permeated the right in the US.
This vision of Europe is, though, a world away from Kundera’s. “My own ideal of Europe,” he wrote, was that of “maximum diversity in minimum space”.
What Kundera is wrestling with in all this is the issue that continually confronts us today: that of trying to make sense of the relationship between the local and the global, between the particular and the universal, between finding refuge in inward-looking identities frequently rooted in intolerance and exclusion and embracing a cosmopolitanism that often celebrates the erosion of community and democracy. Kundera warns against being fixated by one side of that relationship to the neglect of the other.
"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything"
"I learned the value of humour during the time of Stalinist terror … A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humour."
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