Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Instead of writing my dissertation I should have just directed my readers to Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which touches on a lot of the same themes but in a much more eloquent manner.

This novel has everything that literature should have; it is a book about love and memory, a book with angels and demons, and a novel with poetry. Milan Kundera is a Czech writer who left his country to escape from the communist government that was in place until 1989. He currently resides in France. Early on in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of his characters states: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This seems to be the plight of all those who have left something—a land, a lover, a situation. In contrast to this treatise on memory, Kundera points out the sensuality of laughter, referencing Parole de femme to point out: “To oppose male sexual desire, which is devoted to the fleeting moments of erection and thus fatally engaged with violence, annihilation, and extinction, the author exalts, as its antipode female jouissance—gentle, pervasive, and continuing sensual pleasure.”

Kundera goes on to philosophize on poetry and laughter in his chapter on Litost, really a theory on poetry, which he suggests comes to our aid when we cannot escape litost, an untranslatable Czech word that refers to a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. It is usually experienced by youth because older people are more accustomed to the imperfection of mankind and the sight of one’s own misery.

Another tangent from Kundera’s work is his theory on variations. While a symphony is an epic voyage into the infinitude of the exterior, from one thing to the depths of another, the variation leads into the infinitude of the interior world. It is the voyage inward. The infinite of largeness is what Beethoven became obsessed with later in life and the variation became another medium for him to explore this infinitude. The composer only uses the essentials to dig a shaft leading into the interior of the world. This leads to Kundera’s observation: “Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its sun and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach.” We can never get to the perfection we pursue in our work or spirit. And that is what is beautiful.

Kundera’s novel is a book of variations on laughter, love and forgetting. Forgetting Prague, mostly, and all the demons that came with it together with the angels that made it bearable.

I’ll leave you with this thought: “Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyages to find them and make them leave their refuge.” This is my theory on lost subjects/losers, a whole dissertation's worth, in a nutshell.