Elsewhere: Translingual Kundera - Michelle Woods Studies in the Novel, Volume 48, Number 4, Winter 2016, pp. 427-443 (Article) Published by Johns ...
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Elsewhere: Translingual Kundera
Michelle Woods
Studies in the Novel, Volume 48, Number 4, Winter 2016, pp. 427-443 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2016.0047
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/640018
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Studies in the Novel ISSN 0039-3827 427
Vol. 48 No. 4 (Winter), 2016 Pages 427–443
ELSEWHERE: TRANSLINGUAL KUNDERA
MICHELLE WOODS
While other translingual writers have seemed to blossom into a new, and
often revelatory, aesthetic connected to their embrace of a second language,
Milan Kundera’s novels have become shorter, more circumspect, and less
obviously new in their form and aesthetic as he has moved into a second
language. The urgency of his middle period—with the critically acclaimed
and bestselling novels Kniha smíchu a zapomnění / The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí / The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and
Nesmrtelnost / Immortality—seems to have petered out into small, novella-like
diversions that seem to display an unremarkable encounter with the second
language he has embraced: no obvious shaving of words down to their core
like Beckett, or capacious playfulness like Nabokov. Has the translingual
Kundera been disappointing, or is there more to his embrace of the French
language than meets the eye?
Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, and for the first twenty years
wrote his novels in Czech knowing that the vast majority of his readers would
only read him, because of Czechoslovak censorship of his work, in translation;
translation, he wrote, was everything. According to one of his translators,
Peter Kussi, his awareness of a non-Czech readership made him self-conscious
about his Czech language. Kundera worried that he was overly clarifying his
language, “that he washed out his [Czech] tongue to be absolutely crystal clear”
(Kussi 1999). Yet Kussi also pointed out that Kundera’s Czech was already
“clear, formal, what you might call normal Czech,” unlike the great Czech
stylists he admired such as Vladislav Vančura, Bohumil Hrabal, even (in his
use of street Czech) Jaroslav Hašek—a clarity possibly connected to Kundera’s
love of classic French literature (Kussi 1999). That love is apparent; from his
first prose piece, “Já, truchlivý bůh” (1958), Kundera has kept returning, for
instance, to Rostand’s Cyrano in order to underline a central trope in his own
work of misunderstanding and our tragicomic belief in language and symbols
to overcome it.
Copyright © 2016 by the Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of North Texas.428 / WOODS
Have Kundera’s French novels been misunderstood, too? Or, more pre-
cisely, have Kundera’s linguistic aesthetics been misunderstood paradoxically
because of the apparent clarity, or straightforwardness, of his prose? French
critics, such as François Ricard, have characterized Kundera’s language as be-
ing solely instrumental: “simple,” “classic,” and only “entirely dedicated to
the meaning it must transmit” (Ricard 165). In attributing a “classic” prose
style to Kundera’s work, critics like Ricard imply that Kundera was always, in
spirit, a French writer; his translingualism is normalized into a certain tradition
of French prose. After Kundera’s work received one of the ultimate French
literary accolades by being published as a two-volume Pléiade edition in 2011,
Mohammed Aissaoui marveled at the “stylistic unity” of Kundera’s Czech and
French work. Aissaoui noted that “Kundera’s translated French has the same
traits of economy, precision and clarity as the French written directly by him”
because “Kundera’s natural diction, in Czech and in French, has always been
in harmony with our classic prose.”
In this article, however, I want to suggest that Kundera’s French novels
are in fact linguistically and thematically disruptive (in terms of French
norms in language, national culture, and tradition). As a Czech writer in
exile, intimately attuned to discrepancies in language and its untranslatability,
Kundera became interested in what language does and how it works
(and does not work). While retranslating the French translations of his
Czech novels, he became cognizant of the trajectory of his aesthetics, and
particularly how he used language. He articulates this discovery in his first
French essays, published as L’art du roman (1986) and Les testaments trahis
(1993), arguing that great writers have their own “style personnel de l’auteur”
/ “author’s personal style” that transgresses the norms of their own language
whether or not their personal style is obviously disruptive (Testaments trahis
134; Testaments 110). For Kundera, moving from one language to another
often lays bare those transgressions, and it is in those transgressions that the
originality of a given work lies. Translingual writers, working in between
languages, are particularly self-aware of how language works, what it does in
their writing, as opposed to simply what it is (i.e., an adopted language); they
“represent an exaggerated instance of what the Russian formalists maintained
is the distinctive quality of all imaginative literature: ostranenie, ‘making it
strange’” (Kellman 29).
Aissaoui is right to speak of the “stylistic unity” of Kundera’s work in
Czech and French. However, I want to suggest that Kundera’s use of language
in French (as in Czech) is a considered, personal, and transgressive one,
specifically in his use of repetition, unusual syntax, and euphony. His personal
style, rather than being “classic” (and thus normalized), is at times deliberately
inelegant and in pointed conversation with the idea of classical prose and the
misunderstandings of French classicism in a modern world. His linguistic
aesthetics consistently estrange French and Frenchness, producing a kind ofKUNDERA / 429
“elsewhere.” Writing about another Czech émigré to France, the translingual
writer Věra Linhartová, Kundera raises the question of what language she
belongs to, whether French or Czech; neither, he writes: “Elle est ailleurs”
/ “She is elsewhere” (Rencontre 125, Encounter 104). Kundera’s assertion
that Linhartová writes from her own “elsewhere” suggests a view on his own
translingualism: that authors write in their own particular form of language,
their own aesthetic that should, in some way, change the language they are
writing into. The language of another translingual author, Patrick Chamoiseau,
Kundera notes (this time in Czech), “je francouzština, i když proměněná;
nikoli kreolizovaná (žadný Martiničan tak nemluví), ale chamoisizovaná”/ “is
French, if altered; not so much creolized (no Martiniquan speaks like that) but
Chamoiseau-ized” (Solibo 198, my translation). Let us look at how Kundera
Kundera-izes French.
Slow Tomorrow
Kundera writes his “dictionnaire personnel” / “personal dictionary” for the
“mots-clés” / “key words,” “mots-problèmes” / “problem words,” and “mots-
amours” / “words you love” as an essay, “Soixante-treize mots,” collected in
L’art du roman (published in shorter form in English as “Sixty-Three Words”)
and intended as a guide to reading the language and linguistic aesthetics of
his novels (L’art 146, Art 122). Under the entry “Répétitions,” he notes that
repetition lends real beauty to Vivant Denon’s novella Point de lendemain /
No Tomorrow (L’art 174, Art 147). Denon utilizes repetition to set a tone, a
melody, and a thematic stance on memory and distance:
J’aimais éperdument la Comtesse de…; j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu;
elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J’étais ingénu, je la regrettai;
j’avais vingt ans, elle me pardonna: et comme j’avais vingt ans, que j’étais
ingénu, toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l’amant le mieux
aimé, partant le plus heureux des hommes…. (L’art 174)
I was madly in love with the Countess of – ; I was twenty, and I was naïve;
she cuckolded me, I protested, she deserted me. I was naïve, I longed for her;
I was twenty, she forgave me; and because I was twenty, was naïve, was still
cuckolded but no longer deserted, I thought myself the best-beloved of her
lovers, and thus the happiest man alive…. (Art 147)
We hear the beautiful insistence of his memory, returning again and again to his
youth and inexperience, “j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu,” and the melody
of the repeated to and fro of memory and individuality, the movement between
“je” and “elle” that shows his perspective beyond youthful subjectivity.
Despite being hurt by the Comtesse, he learns from Madame de T.’s slow,
night-long seduction that courtship and love can be a momentary unselfish
gift (even as he serves as a decoy for Madame de T.’s real lover, yet still has
a beautiful night with her, which in its slowness imprints itself forever on his430 / WOODS
memory). The oscillating clauses also suggest the slow movement of a carriage
and are redolent of the seduction that takes place, a give and take that the
older man realizes opened up the young man’s awareness to the actions and
needs—however apparently deceitful—of his lover. As Kundera notes, there is
“l’amour fou” / “mad love” here; but Madame de T. “est la reine de la raison”
/ “is the queen of reason” (Lenteur 41, Slowness 31). She carefully structures
their night together at her husband’s château so that the young man will learn
about reason and love, and so that he will remember the night. In that one
night, Kundera argues, she provides:
…une petite architecture merveilleuse, comme une forme. Imprimer la forme
à une durée, c’est l’exigence de la beauté mais aussi celle de la mémoire. Car
ce qui est informe est insaisissable, immémorisable. Concevoir leur rencontre
comme une forme fut tout particulièrement précieux pour eux vu que leur nuit
devait rester sans lendemain et ne pourrait se répéter que dans le souvenir.
Il y a un lien secret entre la lenteur et la mémoire, entre la vitesse et l’oubli.
(Lenteur 44)
…a marvelous little architecture, of a form. Imposing form on a period of
time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. For what is formless
cannot be grasped, or committed to memory. Conceiving their encounter as
a form was especially precious for them, since their night was to have no
tomorrow and could be repeated only through recollection.
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and
forgetting. (Slowness 34)
The artfulness of form allows the retention of momentary beauty by people and
by writers. The more the Countess slows the night down, the more it imprints
itself on the young man’s memory. Kundera comments on her use of form to
create memory by using form himself, notably in the repetition of the words
“forme” and “mémoire.” She knows their love affair will only last the night,
as we might only read a novel once, but she imposes her architecture and form
so that it will “be repeated only through recollection” as Kundera’s use of
repetition might stay and repeat in ours. Kundera is fascinated by form: the
beauty of Denon’s first sentence, the architecture of Madame de T.’s seduction,
and the idea of form itself. The repetition of a term, he writes in “A Sentence,”
can have “the quality of a key notion, a concept. If the author develops a
lengthy line of thought from this word, repeating the word is necessary from
the semantic and logical viewpoint” (Testaments Betrayed 112).1 He notes how
we accept this in philosophical rhetoric but observes that it is true of novelistic
rhetoric also. Repetition allows us to weigh and consider a key term, while
also affecting us melodically. Kundera’s repetition of “forme” and “mémoire”
is not elegant, it is not of the eighteenth-century rhetoric that Kundera admires,
but it is borne of it. He provides a contemporary version of and commentary on
what lies at the heart of the beauty of that rhetoric.KUNDERA / 431
That the modern world is in thrall to speed rather than slowness is not
a particularly original argument, but the connection of form and language
with memory and forgetting uses and interrogates the past as represented by
Denon’s novella: “le degré de la lenteur,” Kundera writes, “est directement
proportionnel à l’intensité de la mémoire; le degré de la vitesse est directement
proportionnel à l’intensité de l’oubli” (Lenteur 45).2 Kundera’s chiastic
sentence sound references Denon’s opening sentence, but also the theme of
Denon’s novella, while also referencing the key themes in Kundera’s own
(Czech language) work of memory and forgetting. He is re-membering his
own work and Denon’s.
La lenteur opens with speed: the protagonist, a young twenty-year-old
called Vincent, speeds past “Milan” and “Véra” on a motorcycle. Véra is
surprised he is not afraid of dying, but Milan replies that Vincent is so caught
up in the present that he has no sense of either the past or his future (and his
mortality):
…il s’accroche à un fragment de temps coupé et du passé et de l’avenir; il
est arraché à la continuité du temps; il est en dehors du temps; autrement dit,
il est dans un état d’extase; dans cet état, il ne sait rien de son âge, rien de sa
femme, rien de ses enfants, rien de ses soucis et, partant, il n’a pas peur, car
la source de la peur et dans l’avenir, et qui est libéré de l’avenir n’a rien à
craindre. (Lenteur 10)
…he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future;
he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words
he is in a state of ecstasy. In that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his
children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in
the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. (Slowness 3-4)
Kundera is in direct conversation here with Denon’s opening sentence: instead
of the carriage we have a motorbike and so the syntax changes. With each
clause we can hear the accelerator being pressed as he shoots forward, in his
mind liberated from the future (and death). The repetition shows how Vincent is
caught up only in himself (“il…il…il”), as opposed to the beautiful oscillating
movement of Denon’s “je…elle,” and he is caught up in the present (“il est…il
est”) with none of the mature perspective of Denon’s protagonist thinking back
to the age that Vincent now inhabits (“j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu”).
Vincent thinks he is liberated from the future because he knows nothing: “rien
de…rien de…rien de …rien de…n’a rien à craindre”; you can hear the engine
and the engine of Vincent’s misguided ecstasy (Linda Asher, in her English
translation, creates euphony with the “h” alliteration and, in the last sentence,
the “f” alliteration). Taken on face value, this is not beautiful prose; what the
language does is gorgeous.
Vincent himself is a repetition, another character in Kundera’s oeuvre em-
blematic of what Kundera calls the “lyric age”: the age of youth, inexperience,432 / WOODS
and innocent self-conscious stupidity that can turn dangerous (as with Jaromil
the poet and protagonist of Život je jinde / Life is Elsewhere). In Denon’s
novella, the night of love at the château brings the protagonist into the adult
world of experience, of compassionate knowledge and reason. In La lenteur
Vincent speeds to the château to prove himself, to impress others, and, unex-
pectedly, (when laughed at) to an encounter with a young woman, Julie, that
ends in impotence and forgetting. Vincent is in love with ecstasy, de Sade,
and Apollinaire. When he registers Julie’s fairy-like beauty, an image from
Apollinaire’s erotic poem “Les neuf portes de ton corps” comes to him of the
ninth orifice, and he thinks of Julie’s “trou du cul” / “asshole” (Lenteur 91):
Il voudrait lui dire: répète après moi, le trou du cul, le trou du cul, le trou du
cul, mais il n’ose pas. Au lieu de cela, piégé par son eloquence, il s’enlise
de plus en plus dans sa métaphore: “Le trou du cul d’où sort une lumière
blafarde qui remplit les entrailles de l’univers!” Et il tend le bras vers la lune:
“En avant, dans le trou du cul de l’infini!” (Lenteur 100)3
It is a very funny moment; Vincent loves the idea of the eighteenth-century
libertine, but he is too afraid to order Julie to repeat with him the taboo “trou
du cul.” Instead the repeated phrase “ass hole” flutters around young Vincent’s
head, turning him, of course, into one. Thanks to the sheer toe-curling
awfulness, we end up feeling some empathy for Vincent’s wish to be daring
and sympathy for his utter, miserable failure. Kundera achieves a real sleight
of hand in displaying Vincent’s puerile pronouncements, by repeating an ugly
term and yet, at the same time, underscoring its polysemy. The tone becomes
oddly beautiful, humorous and strangely tender.
Haunted House
“Ce château est hanté,” Véra tells Milan in La lenteur, “et je ne veux pas
rester ici une minute de plus” (Lenteur 138).4 The events of her husband’s novel
have invaded her sleep and the château is haunted not only by the characters
but also by the ghosts of French literature; indeed it is stuffed with them: de
Sade, d’Artagnan and Dumas, Denon, Laclos, Apollinaire, Rousseau, Sartre,
Camus. You cannot turn in the château without bumping into a reference to
one of them. Yet, when Vincent does literally bump into Denon’s protagonist,
the Chevalier, at the end of the novel, he fails to recognize him. Vincent has
no interest in listening to the Chevalier’s account of his strange and beautiful
night of love; instead Vincent wants to bombard him with a fake account
of his own night of love (an act that was not consummated). The Chevalier
disengages. He has been shocked, too, to bump into such a strange being with
a strange (motorcycle) helmet and even stranger French. To the ears of the
Chevalier, Vincent speaks “with a strange intonation, as if he were a messenger
come from a foreign kingdom and had learned his French at court without
knowing France” (Slowness 127).5 Kundera could be speaking of himself, aKUNDERA / 433
messenger from a foreign kingdom with an accented French. He also suggests
a fissure in the notion of a French language and a French tradition, seeing it
as a language and a place that has changed across time and that expresses a
different world: the conference hotel rather than the château. It is a world that
does not recognize its own illustrious, if fictional, past.
Instead, Vincent is enamored with the Marquis de Sade and orgies, or
at least the image of them. Julie has not read de Sade and answers almost
monosyllabically as Vincent inelegantly and reductively tells her what happens
in de Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir:
Tu connais ce bouquin?
- Non.
- Il faut le connaître. Je te le prêterai. C’est la conversation au milieu d’une
orgie entre deux hommes et deux femmes.
- Oui, dit-elle.
- Tous les quatre sont nus, en train de faire l’amour, tous ensemble.
- Oui.
- Cela te plairait, n’est-ce pas?
- Je ne sais pas. (Lenteur 90-91)6
Kundera takes a quiet risk here that readers might just assume this conversation
to be Kundera’s hackneyed writing in his adopted language; but he is deliberately
rejecting any lexical and semantic elegance or sophistication in a provocation
to the French themselves. Without knowing their own heritage, or only having
a kitsch awareness of it, the lovers no longer have a language in which to
conduct love. We can see this in the ironic banality of these two young French
lovers (conversing about de Sade’s eighteenth-century conversation of love),
which suggests that they have lost their cultural language of seduction and
love. The structured conversation led by Madame de T. in Denon’s novella that
embedded the memory of one night of love so strongly is entirely missing from
Vincent and Julie’s trite conversation. They kiss in the gardens of the château to
the murmur of the river, without knowing that the river helps to transport them
because of its connection to Denon’s Point de Lendemain. Kundera knows
the slow seduction through language and movement in Denon’s novella, but
Vincent and Julie do not. Nor do they seem aware of Julie’s literary ancestor
from the same century as Denon and de Sade, Rousseau’s Julie who, with
wit and rejoinder, sends her putative lover into exile after their first kiss, thus
deferring and detaining seduction.7
Kundera retells the story of Point de Lendemain and reminds French
readers of the epistolary form of Les liaisons dangereuses and the publication
history of Apollinaire’s poem in a stylistically unadorned French; he is
not trying to copy their elegance or lyricism but to interrogate it from a
contemporary perspective. His strategy makes sense once we reach the end
of the novel: Vincent may not recognize the Chevalier, but the readers do.
Kundera has resurrected classics his French readers may not have read. He is434 / WOODS
perhaps nostalgic for the world of secrecy and discretion in Point de Lendemain
and in Les liaisons dangereuses, as opposed to the politicians and others who
crave the limelight, but there is a more urgent undercurrent here: these novels
of discretion are becoming only totemic texts, half-forgotten in a world only
looking, like Vincent on his motorbike, to the future. “Vincent adore ce siècle,”
Kundera writes, referring to the eighteenth century, “je partage son admiration
mais j’ajoute (sans être vraiment entendu) que la vraie grandeur de cet art
ne consiste pas dans quelconque propaganda de l’hédonisme mais dans son
analyse” (Lenteur 16).8
Kundera’s nostalgia for the world of the eighteenth-century novels, unlike
Vincent’s, is tempered by an acceptance of modernity, shown in the very style
of his novel. Tjiana Miletic astutely argues that La lenteur’s narrative style of
“digression, variation, narration, stopping and recommencing…has so much
in common with the libertine method of seduction” (232). However, Kundera
enacts this slowness through a style of language that consciously rewrites the
elegance and effortless sophistication of Denon and Laclos. Kundera, in a
somewhat cheeky critique, makes some of his use of language deliberately
awkward and banal in direct contradistinction to the valorization of elegant
eighteenth-century French prose. Vincent meets his mentor Pontevin at the
Café Gascon; the name suggests an identification by Kundera with the Gascon
as a comedic character in French literature, in Dumas’s work and elsewhere,
known for his odd ungrammatical, accented French, les gasconismes.
Speaking in Tongues
Kundera turns to another Gascon, Cyrano de Bergerac, in two of his
French novels: L’identité (1997) and La fête de l’insignifiance (2014). In some
ways, it is a return to this iconic eighteenth-century character, as Kundera’s
very first piece of prose, the short story “Já, truchlivý bůh” / “I, the Mournful
God” (1958), is a retelling of the Cyrano story. The title of Kundera’s second
French novel, L’identité, signals Kundera’s interest in how identity is masked
even to those we love the most, with the protagonist, Jean-Marc, taking on
Cyrano’s identity to show his love for his partner. Masked identity is a telling
interest for a translingual writer, writing under an assumed language, but it also
flags the disconnect between how we see ourselves and how others see us (a
preoccupation of much of Kundera’s fiction).
To cheer his lover up, Jean-Marc writes her pseudonymous letters signed
“CdB”: “Je vous suis comme un espion, vous êtes belle, très belle” / “I
follow you around like a spy—you are beautiful, very beautiful,” Jean-Marc
writes, having decided to correspond “disguised as a stranger” (L’identité
121, Identity 88). He decides to do so because of a misunderstanding; he sees
his lover, Chantal, blush, and she tells him that men no longer look at her.
However, the remark is not at the heart of the two physical reasons for the
blush—a hot flash and the unwanted attention and putative attack by two menKUNDERA / 435
in a cafe. Chantal, an advertising executive, has to wear two faces, she says,
one commercial and one her own, bifurcating her identity (as Ludvík has to
do in Kundera’s first novel, Žert / The Joke [1967], under Communism). Yet
even the notion of a personal identity is in question, as Chantal cannot admit
to herself that she is menopausal, and that her physical identity is changing.
Jean-Marc, the person who most clearly knows her, thus also consistently
misinterprets her blushes. For him, her blush is the lodestone of their
relationship, and it is Kundera’s return to this motif that provides the original
reading of identity and the relationship between language, misunderstanding,
and love.
In complete contrast to Cyrano, Jean-Marc’s language of seduction is
banal and inexpressive. He decides to take on the CdB moniker to liberate
his eloquence (L’identité 122, Identity 89), but the irony is that he cannot
convey Cyrano’s level of articulacy. For him, her blush “brillait comme un
rubis d’ineffable prix” (L’identité 121), which he has inscribed “au tout début
du livre d’or de leur amour” (L’identité 119); the priceless ruby and the golden
book of their love are hackneyed poetic metaphors, deliberately empty and
clichéd. However, Kundera also turns Jean-Marc’s banality into a strangely
beautiful and pulsing prose, once again through the use of repetition (which is
potentially inelegant). For instance, Jean-Marc’s memory of seeing Chantal for
the first time sustains a real honesty of emotion, at least through his own desire
for her (in the repetition of various words: “rouge”; “elle”; “fut”; “sur” and the
emphatic “de lui et pour lui”):
…elle rougit. Elle fut rouge non seulement sur ses joues, mais sur son cou,
et encore plus bas, sur tout son décolleté, elle fut magnifiquement rouge aux
yeux de tous, rouge à cause de lui et pour lui. Cette rougeur fut sa declaration
d’amour, cette rougeur décida de tout. (L’identité 120)9
However, when Jean-Marc sees Chantal blush later in the novel (in reality,
because of a hot flash), he completely misreads it through the semiotics of their
love. Throughout L’identité, Kundera repeats the verb and adjective “rougir”
and “rouge”: it is the heart of Chantal’s identity but it reflects an identity
that is constantly in flux; Chantal blushes sometimes because she thinks she
has discovered who “CdB” is; sometimes because she is having a hot flash;
sometimes because she feels ashamed. Jean-Marc insistently romanticizes the
flush and thus misinterprets Chantal’s identity. In one of his Cyrano letters,
he overly romanticizes her blush and again we see an entropic, even kitsch
attempt at eloquence:
je jette sur votre corps nu un manteaux cousu de flames. Je voile votre corps
blanc d’un manteaux carmin de cardinal. Et, ainsi drapée, je vous envoie dans
une chambre rouge, sur un lit rouge, ma cardinale rouge, bellissime cardinale!
(L’identité 93)10436 / WOODS
He wants to control this identity (“je jette”; “je voile”; “je vous envoie”), but
Chantal knows what the hot flashes augur, and that change is a fundamental
one to her female identity, yet “she has always refused to call it by its real
name” even though she no longer has any doubts as to what it means, and for
that very reason she will not, she cannot, speak of it (Identity 23).11 Whereas
Jean-Marc consistently misreads her body’s signifier, she is all too certain that
menopause brings her mortality (and non-identity) closer: “Le feu crématoire
me présente sa carte de visite” / “The crematory fire is leaving me its visiting
card” (L’identité 73, Identity 52) she thinks as she struggles up the stairs,
sweating.
Reviewing L’identité for Libération, Antoine de Gaudemar suggested
that the incongruity of that last sentence, alongside the clichéd metaphors of
Chantal and Jean-Marc, showed Kundera’s limitations as a translingual author,
wondering if the “half-atonal” language showed a writer “who still feels
stifled in his new language.” De Gaudemar suggested that such bare language
was good enough for nonfiction but that it made Kundera’s novels almost
unrecognizable from their Czech language predecessors. He lamented what
he saw as the loss of Kundera’s humor and playfulness in his French language
novels, which he saw as being “as barren as a crossword puzzle.” “Where are
you, Milan Kundera?” he concludes. “Dans quelle crise d’identité?” / “Is it
some kind of identity crisis?” For Kundera, though, language is implicitly tied
into the inevitable misunderstanding of identity, our own and others’. Kundera
is being both playful and deadly serious; the metaphors that the lovers, Jean-
Marc and Chantal, use define their misunderstandings and our own attempts at
articulacy that are inevitably flawed and mortal.
In Kundera’s most recent novel, La fête de l’insignifiance (2014), one of
the protagonists, Charles, “interprets” for his friend Caliban, who wants to
seduce a Portuguese maid; Caliban (a Frenchman pretending to be Pakistani)
has invented a nonsense language and yet still connects to her, as they both are
seen as outside the French sphere in quite expressly colonial terms. Kundera’s
combination of Cyrano with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and specifically the
figure of Caliban, questions and interrogates Frenchness, francocentrism,
and language in Kundera’s particular style (and referencing his own, Czech
language, work).
Caliban and his friend Charles make a living as caterers; Charles
introduces him to Madame D’Ardelo who has hired them, apologizing because
Caliban “ne connaît pas un seul mot de français” / “doesn’t speak a word of
French” (Fête 70, Festival 53). It is a game for the two of them, with Charles
as the Cyrano figure translating for a “Pakistani,” an inherently ridiculous
appropriated identity, since Caliban is white and French. Caliban had willfully
othered himself on stage in The Tempest (and thus gained his nickname), his
“peau couverte d’une pomade brune, une perruque noire sur la tête” / “skin
smeared with brown makeup, a black wig on his head” (Fête 67, Festival 51).KUNDERA / 437
However, at this party, even without the blackface, Caliban is made aware
of French indifference to any kind of other, especially a linguistic other. The
guests at the party have no interest in his identity because of class (he is just a
waiter) and because they assume him to be somehow foreign: they “showed no
interest in him” and because of his “incomprehensible language” they “did not
listen to him” (Festival 53).
Caliban has in fact—and just for fun, to make the job more interesting and
to have an audience (he is an underworked actor)—invented his own language
with its own phonetics, grammar, and euphony: it is performance art at these
bourgeois parties (Fête 69, Festival 52). The guests’ lack of interest shows
a linguistic and aural ethnocentrism that Kundera identifies and satirizes.
There is also perhaps some self-reflection, too, as Kundera considers his own
translingual art and translingual aesthetics: he has been accepted by using
French (via translation or writing directly in French) but the way in which
he uses French in his own aesthetic style (with its own sound and stylistic
grammar) echoes Caliban’s invented language. “Choisir un pays natal, rien
n’est plus facile,” Caliban thinks. “Mais inventer sa langue, voilà qui est
difficile” / “Choosing a homeland—nothing easier. But inventing its language,
that is difficult” (Fête 68, Festival 52).
Caliban is not the only “other” at the party; Madame d’Ardelo’s daughter
aggressively others their Portuguese maid (who is left unnamed, reflecting how
she is identified within the family) by insulting the maid’s lipstick that makes
her look like “some African bird! A parrot from Bourenbouboubou!” (Festival
55). The Portuguese maid does not speak French well (or at all) and the French
daughter’s negative exoticization of her mouth suggests again the trope of
linguistic ethnocentrism. Caliban and the maid are both white Europeans (like
Kundera himself), but their respective tongues (invented and real) that are
not French result in negative racialized othering and in a strange concomitant
invisibility and inaudibility to the French guests at the party. The maid and the
waiter find succor in each other as they try to communicate in languages other
than French, “in two languages neither understood,” which “brought them
close” (Festival 54).
The Grand Return
In Kundera’s third French novel, L’ignorance (2003), two Czech exiles,
Josef and Irena, return to Prague, but both are sure that their homes are
respectively in Denmark and France. Postcommunist Prague is no longer the
Prague of their youth (the 1960s) and thus they cannot truly return home; there
is no “Grand Retour” / “Great Return” (L’ignorance 10, Ignorance 5). At the
end of the novel, Josef, leaving Prague, looks down from the plane and sees
through the porthole, “au fond du ciel, une clôture basse en bois et, devant une
maison en brique, un sapin svelte tel un bras levé” / “far off in the sky, a low
wooden fence and a brick house with a slender fir tree like a lifted arm before438 / WOODS
it” (L’ignorance 181, Ignorance 195). It seems a farewell to Prague; the beauty
in Josef’s observation is not only in the image but also in the euphony of the
metaphor, in the play between the plosive “b” alliteration and the melancholy
sibilance. Just before this end, Josef had been thinking of his return to Prague
after many years of exile in Denmark, and of how the Czech language seemed
to have changed, to have become monotonous, flat, “an unknown language”
(Ignorance 195).
Listening to Czech being spoken in his hometown, earlier in the novel, he
thinks:
C’était la musique d’une langue inconnue. Que s’était-il passé avec le tchèque
pendant ces deux pauvres décennies? Était-ce l’accent qui avait changé?
Apparemment. Jadis fermement posé sur la première syllable, il s’était
affaibli; l’intonation en était comme désossée. La mélodie paraissait plus
monotone qu’autrefois, traînante. Et le timbre! Il était devenu nasal, ce qui
donnait à la parole quelque chose de désagréablement blasé. Probablement,
au cours des siècles, la musique de toutes les langues se transforme-t-elle
imperceptiblement, mais celui qui revient après une longue absence en est
déconcerté: penché au-dessus de son assiette, Josef écoutait une langue
inconnue dont il comprenait chaque mot. (L’ignorance 55-56)
It was the music of some unknown language. What had happened to Czech
during those two sorry decades? Was it the stresses that had changed?
Apparently. Hitherto set firmly on the first syllable, they had grown weaker;
the intonation seemed boneless. The melody sounded more monotone than
before—drawling. And the timbre! It had turned nasal, which gave the
speech an unpleasantly blasé quality. Over the centuries the music of any
language probably does change imperceptibly, but to a person returning after
an absence it can be disconcerting: bent over his plate, Josef was listening to
an unknown language whose every word he understood. (Ignorance 54-55)
Josef’s hyperawareness of sound is matched by Kundera’s use of euphony in
describing Josef’s alienation to it (for example, the bass note of “était” in the
past tense or as an auxiliary verb for the pluperfect, and the use of alliteration
or consonance, so we can hear Josef’s frustration and a monotonous sound).
We can hear in his own words how he hews (in Kundera’s French) to the old
rhythm of Czech.
Only twice in the novel does Josef feel in tune with the Czech language.
First, when, after an awkward beginning, he converses with an old friend,
N. (a Communist who stayed), and, secondly, when he is in bed with Irena
(another returned exile whom he knew slightly in the 1960s). In both cases,
Josef finds his joy in speaking Czech “unexpected” and implicitly tied to a
sense of connection: to the common experience of Czechness of a certain time.
When he meets N. it is the first time since his return that Josef feels
happy speaking Czech; it is “an unexpected joy” (Ignorance 157). Speaking
Czech with N. is like “flying” (Ignorance 158), and in complete distinction toKUNDERA / 439
the weight he still feels speaking Danish, when he is constantly self-conscious
about word choice and accent. As Kundera portrays him speaking Czech, the
sound of Kundera’s language softens (from hard consonants when he thinks
of Danish to sibilance when he’s aware of his happiness speaking Czech).
The fluency of their conversation is portrayed in the syntactical rhythm, with
Kundera’s use of adverbs, litany, and an emphatic use of “c” consonance:
“leur conversation démarra, librement, agréablement, une causerie entre deux
vieux copains: souvenirs épars, nouvelles d’amis communs, commentaires
marrants, paradoxes, blagues” / “their conversation took off, freely and
agreeably, a chat between two old pals: a few scattered memories, news of
mutual friends, funny comments, and paradoxes and jokes” (L’ignorance 146,
Ignorance 157).
Irena remembers Josef from an encounter in Prague in the 1960s; he does
not. They meet by chance at the airport and although Josef has no memory
of her, he agrees to see her, suspecting it will turn into an erotic encounter.
In some sense, he profoundly recognizes her: not only have they experienced
exile, but they are also experiencing the same alienation upon their return
to the Czech Republic, and the same lack of interest from other Czechs in
their life abroad. Their real communion comes at a moment when Irena utters
an obscene sentence in Czech—one that is not in the French text, or even
translated into French. Yet, we are told that it is a translation by Irena, who
is, by profession, a translator from Russian to French of Josef’s joke about
Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, who has waited patiently for Odysseus to return.
Both admit to having thought about The Odyssey; like both of them, Odysseus
had not seen Ithaca for twenty years. Irena wonders if Penelope was really
faithful.
This is the second time that Josef feels at one with the Czech language,
because only obscene language has “power over him in his native language (in
the language of Ithaca)” (Ignorance 178).12 Because of this culturally specific
language (left unspecified and unwritten in the French text) Josef and Irena have
come to an “entente totale”/ “total accord” (L’ignorance 166, Ignorance 179)
that they have not discovered elsewhere in their old homeland, and it is through
an illicit, or taboo, form of language. However, in two successive paragraphs,
both of which start with the phrase “Leur entente est totale…” / “Their accord
is total” (L’ignorance 166-67, Ignorance 179), Kundera casts doubt on the
very statement. In the first paragraph, he shows what these obscenities mean
for Irena: an erotic life she has missed out on (L’ignorance 166-67, Ignorance
179); in the second, what they mean for Josef: that his erotic life has ended
(L’ignorance 167, Ignorance 179). While Irena and Josef find what they think
is full understanding in their mother tongue, the reader realizes that the words
open up and close down different worlds for each of them: there is, finally,
no full understanding even in the deepest roots (according to Kundera) of the
mother tongue.440 / WOODS
For Josef, the homeland is not a grand, patriotic idea, the Ithaca of
Western literature, or a particular mother tongue, to which he must make some
“Grand Retour” (10); rather, it is the home we find with one another: dyadic
and discretely different, perhaps finalized only in death. On Kundera’s mind
is Calypso: “Je pense souvent à elle” / “I often think about her” he writes,
wondering why she had to be left behind (L’ignorance 15, Ignorance 9).
Josef’s Calypso is his dead, Danish wife, the woman who, even in death,
keeps him in Denmark. The fir tree, which seemed to represent a farewell to
Prague at the end of the book, is in fact a recurrent motif, and representative
of Josef’s house in Denmark. It is a wave of welcome, of home. As he cannot
keep tangible memories of his wife alive, Josef tends to their house, loves it
more: “the low wooden fence with its little gate; the garden; the fir tree in front
of the dark-red brick house”; the two facing armchairs; the window with a pot
of flowers and “a lamp…they would leave that lamp on while they were out
so they could see it from afar as they came down the street back to the house”
(Ignorance 130-31). The sentimentality of this vision (underlined by the soft
“l” consonance in French)13 is undercut by the profound sadness of Josef’s true
vision of home being, at its heart, a “cohabitation avec la morte” / a life “with
the dead woman,” his late wife (L’ignorance 122, Ignorance 130).
Une Grande Bêtise Pour Ton Plaisir
Kundera is at home in the novel as a form and outlook in the world;
he insistently returns to this idea in his essays written in French. The native
language of that homeland is his poetics. We see him learning his own language,
developing it, evolving it through his Czech and French novels. Reviewers
tend to see a dilution of subject and form in the French language novels: their
slightness, the sense they are not as weighty as his Czech novels. Yet, there is
a real depth to them if you speak his language: the recurring linguistic style,
themes, motifs, words, and specific Kunderian terms through the Czech and
French novels.
The other important factor in Kundera’s use of language is humor, the
element of his work that Kundera feels is most misunderstood. In his first
French novel, La lenteur, “Milan” is admonished by his wife, “Véra”: “Tu m’as
souvent dit vouloir écrire un jour un roman où aucun mot ne serait sérieux. Une
Grande Bêtise Pour Ton Plaisir” (93).14 Kundera is giving a signpost to his
readers, having shrugged off the Cold War that reductively framed the reading
of his Czech work. Writing after the fall of Communism and in French, he is
taking pleasure in playfulness. The question is whether anyone is interested: “I
just want to warn you: be careful,” Véra says:
Te rappelles-tu ce que te disait ta maman? J’entends sa voix comme si c’était
hier: Milanku, cesse de faire des plaisanteries. Personne ne te comprendra. Tu
offenseras tout le monde et tout le monde finira par te détester. Te rappelles-
tu?KUNDERA / 441
- Oui, dis-je.
- Je te préviens. Le sérieux te protégeait. Le manque de sérieux te laissera
nu devant les loups. Et tu sais qu’ils t’attendent, les loups. (La lenteur 93-94)
“You remember what your mother used to tell you? I can hear her voice as if
it were yesterday: ‘Milanku, stop making jokes. No one will understand you.
You will offend everyone, and everyone will end up hating you.’ Remember?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I’m warning you. Seriousness kept you safe. The lack of seriousness will
leave you naked to the wolves. And you know they’re waiting for you, the
wolves are.” (Slowness 78)
Kundera’s funny self-characterization, called by the diminutive “Milanku” and
only able to squeak “Oui” to his wife reminding him of his mother’s warning
not to tell jokes, is written in his particular style (the repetition, the chiastic
sentence structure, and the euphony: here, the sonorous sibilance as Véra
remembers Kundera’s mother’s voice). What stands out in the last example,
of course, is Kundera’s name, his first name in its Czech diminutive form,
“Milanku.” It seems a stubborn trace of the mother tongue that Véra and Milan
are speaking with each other at the point at which she remembers his mother’s
voice: “Even though I speak only Czech with my wife,” Kundera said in an
interview, “I am surrounded by French books, I react to the French world, to
French sentences” (Sedláček 14). Milanku’s funny inarticulacy in this French
world, these French sentences (“Oui”), is rendered in the midst of this other
voice, a mischievous and utterly serious Kunderization of language that asserts
and doubts all at once.
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT NEW PALTZ
NOTES
1
“le caractère d’une notion-clé, d’un concept. Si l’auteur, à partir de ce mot, développe une
longue réflexion, la répétition du même mot est nécessaire du point de vue sémantique et logique”
(Testaments trahis 136).
2
“the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed
is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting” (Slowness 34-35).
3
“He would like to tell her: ‘Say it with me: ass hole, ass hole, ass hole,’ but he does not dare.
Instead, ensnared by his own eloquence, he gets more and more tangled up in his metaphor: ‘The
ass hole giving off a lurid light that floods the guts of the universe!’ And he stretches an arm to the
moon: ‘Onward, into the ass hole of infinity!’” (Slowness 83-84).
4
“This château is haunted, and I don’t want to stay here another minute” (Slowness 118).
5
“avec une intonation inconnue, comme s’il était un messager venu d’un royaume étranger et qui
aurait appris le français à la cour sans connaître la France” (Lenteur 149).
6
“You know that book?”
“No.”
“You should read it. I’ll lend it to you. It’s a conversation between two men and two women in
the middle of an orgy.”442 / WOODS
“Yes,” she says.
“All four of them are naked, making love, all together.”
“Yes.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she says. (Slowness 75)
7
Early in the novel, Kundera stops the narrative to tell his readers that he considers another
eighteenth-century French novel of seduction, Les liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de
Laclos, “l’un des plus grands romans de tous les temps” / “one of the greatest novels of all time”
(Lenteur 16, Slowness 9), largely because of its epistolary form. The epistolary novel offers a
variety of perspectives, reflecting Kundera’s pursuance of the variation form in his novels. In La
lenteur, the politician, Berck, has to face an old lover, Immaculata, whom he has no interest in
meeting. Berck hankered after her when he was young and wrote her endless love letters (Lenteur
48, Slowness 37). She tells everyone of their love, and the unbearably pompous Berck cannot get
rid of Immaculata and her memories of him, however much he tries. The privacy and sensibility
of Laclos’s world has become a modern public panopticon, an “immense coquille sonore” only
hinted at in Laclos’s novel (Lenteur 17). There are resonating echoes also of Kundera’s own work
here: Immaculata wants to be part of the world of the elect, a notion Kundera explored in Život
je jinde / Life is Elsewhere and Nesmrtelnost / Immortality; in Kniha smíchu a zapomnění / The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the dissident Mirek, caught in the panopticon of the communist
regime, attempts to airbrush a similar lover, Zdena.
8
“Vincent adores that century…I share his admiration, but I add (without being really heard)
that the true greatness of that art consists not in some propaganda or other for hedonism but in its
analysis” (Slowness 9).
9
“…she flushed. She was red not only on her cheeks, but on her neck, and lower still, down to the
low neckline of her dress, she turned magnificently red for all to see, red because of him and for
him. That flush was her declaration of love, that flush decided everything” (Identity 88).
10
“I fling a mantle stitched of flame over your naked body. I swathe your white body in a cardinal’s
crimson mantle. And then I put you, draped like that, into a red room on a red bed, my red cardinal,
most gorgeous cardinal!” (Identity 66-67).
11
“…elle le connaît depuis un certain temps déjà; elle a toujours refusé de lui donner son vrai nom
mais, cette fois-ci, elle ne doute plus de ce qu’il signifie et, pour cette raison même, elle ne veut,
elle ne peut en parler” (L’identité 36).
12
In Kundera’s dictionary-essay on words central to his fiction (and aimed at his translators and
readers), “Soixante-treize mots,” one of the entries is “Obscénité” / “Obscenity”: “Le mot obscène,
prononcé avec un accent, devient comique….Obscénité: la racine la plus profonde qui nous
rattache à notre patrie” / “An obscenity pronounced with an accent becomes comical….Obscenity:
the root that attaches us most deeply to our homeland” (L’art 170, Art 145).
13
“la clôture basse en bois avec une petite porte; le jardin; le sapin devant la maison en brique rouge
foncé…une lampe; cette lampe, ils laissaient allumée pendant leur absence pour l’apercevoir de
loin, dans la rue, lors de leur retour à la maison” (L’ignorance 123).
14
“You’ve often told me you wanted to write a novel someday with not a single serious word in it.
A Big Piece of Nonsense for Your Own Pleasure” (Slowness 7).
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