Kundera and Modernity

Chapter Seven: The Dangers of Forgetting and Laughter

134 Chapter Seven The Dangers of Forgetting and Laughter Kundera wrote that at the beginning of the 1970s he thought he ended his career as a novelist with Farewell Waltz (Testaments 165). After emigrating to France he took up writing again with the intention of creating a continuation to Laughable Loves. Instead of a collection of short stories, with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting something "entirely different" (Testaments 165) was born: a "polyphonic" novel. Yet there is a thematic continuity, in that the theme of laughable love is tackled once again in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Love is an issue in all the story lines and in several of them it appears in a ridiculous light. The themes of love and laughter, however, appear in this novel in a new manner, intertwined in a complex thematic web. In a thematic synopsis of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in Testaments Betrayed, Kundera makes the novel appear as a successor to The Joke in having history as its main theme. According to his account, part 1 "introduces the theme of man and history in its basic version: man collides with history and it crushes him"; part 2, "Mama," contrasts historic events with small, perennial, quotidian ones; part 6 deals with the death of the heroine, thereby seemingly forming "the tragic conclusion of the novel"; and the last, part 7, touches upon the experience of the loss of meaning of the greatest events in history (166–67). Added to this theme of history, as a commentary on it, is the theme of two kinds of laughter (167). Yet this synopsis is a one-sided account of the thematic content of the novel. As a whole, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is neither in its composition nor in its themes a new version of either Laughable Loves or The Joke. There is compositional as well as thematic continuity, but there are also important differences. Not only does The Book of Laughter and Forgetting represent a decisive step toward a new kind of thematic composition, but the enrichment of the themes is considerable as well, and in dealing with these themes the universal existential aspect is even more pronounced than in previous works. Where in Farewell Waltz Kundera suggests that authentic meanings can only be discovered in the present moment of experience, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting can be read as an elaboration of this thesis, making it appear a more complex The Dangers of Forgetting and Laughter 135 matter. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting shows that what is experienced as meaningful in the present moment is, despite its apparent immediateness, closely connected with remembering. However, remembering can also falsify the experience ; this occurs especially in sentimental recollection. Laughter is similarly ambivalent in that it can either deny or corroborate the meaningfulness of what is present. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is not merely a thematic composition of the themes named in the title or even of the two themes and their opposite poles, seriousness and remembering. Variations on remembering and forgetting, on laughter and seriousness are regarded as parts of the process of sense giving in either a sentimental or an authentic form, this process being mostly connected with the theme of love. The novel in its entirety can then be conceived of as a study of the "architheme" of sense giving. The first part of the novel, "Lost Letters," deals with the question of selective memory—that is, deliberate forgetting—in three different variations. The novel begins with a recollection of a historic scene which was later retouched by those in power. Kundera writes that when the proclamation of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia by the communist leader Klement Gottwald took place in February 1948 on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague, Gottwald stood side by side with foreign secretary Vladimir Clementis, who had lent him his fur cap. Some years later, Clementis was accused of treason and hanged and was airbrushed from the historic photograph of the memorable moment on the balcony. According to Kundera, all that remained of Clementis in the photo was his fur cap on Gottwald's head. The anecdote exemplifies the sensitivity to the past of those holding political power. Functioning as a legitimization of the present, the past—in this case the crucial moment of the founding of the new order of the state—is allowed to contain only elements which are acceptable from the perspective of...