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Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Milan Kundera
Critical essays analyze Milan Kundera's psychological themes found frequently throughout his novels, including sexuality, love, and emotions.
- GenresNonfiction
172 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2002
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,708 books2,094 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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March 11, 2024
Notes and quotes from each article:
From Harold Bloom's Introduction (a sort of general opinion on Kundera):
"Kundera acknowledges Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot as specific ancestors, and I suppose he might add Hermann Broch, as well as the inevitable Kafka, and Robert Musil. With such precursors, he is dwarfed. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is formulaic, over-determined, and in places unbearably light. [...] I end, as I began, in some doubt as to Kundera’s lasting eminence."
From ROBERT C. PORTER's article, talking about the structure and directions in Kundera's short stories:
"This rearrangement would seem to strengthen the thesis (deception) in volume one, the antithesis (self-deception) in volume two and the synthesis in volume three."
From PEARL K. BELL's article talking about the progression of Kundera's style:
"In the five novels of Milan Kundera which have so far been published in the United States, we can trace the path of the dissident writer: from protest, to comedy and satire, to surrealist compression.
From PETER KUSSI's article, talking about the technique of multiple narrators:
"But whereas Capek the relativist showed that each man has his own truth, Kundera the skeptic shows that each man has his own falsehood."
Talking about the themes of deception and self-deception in Kundera's writings and the two major types of protagonists he created:
"In fact, self-deception is such a striking element in Kundera’s stories and novels that his protagonists could really be divided into two moral types: those who are satisfied to remain self-deluded and those struggling for a measure of self-awareness. [...] One form of self-deception to which Kundera’s protagonists are prone may be called bad faith, a moral syndrome reminiscent of the mauvaise foi first diagnosed in the modern consciousness by Jean-Paul Sartre. This bad faith is consciously induced self-deception whereby people pretend to themselves to be unaware of certain realities in order to postpone the need for making decisions."
From JOHN BAYLEY's article, talking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being and describing what is Lightness and Weight:
"Lightness of being is associated with the author’s voice, with the cinema and sex, with irresponsibility and definition, with politics. Weight or heaviness of being, on the other hand, is associated with love and fidelity, suffering, chance, fictio, form and content (‘The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness’), death. The story has weight, though it is lightly told.[...] Tomas stands for lightness, Teresa for weight."
From MARK STURDIVANT article explaining the concept of sexuality in Kundera's stories:
"Kundera views sexuality and eroticism as “the deepest region of life” [...] sexuality becomes a vehicle for expressing a variety of interwoven threads of commentary upon human characteristics, and for ultimately casting a pall of hopelessness and meaninglessness over mankind’s fundamental existence."
Also he points to the fact that the laughter in Kundera's work is "the laughter of hopeless despair. [...] a means of removing his[own] burden of knowledge and subsequent sorrow."
From ROGER KIMBAL's article, talking about politics in Kundera's writings. He says that Kundera is for liberal values such as individuality and private life. He says that Kundera criticized communist regimes for undermining these values but also democracies in the west that did the same and this brought him many friends on the Left. However, he continues saying that Kundera then toned-down his criticize on the West. Thus, Kundera's stance is that "the novel appears as a sanctuary where the precious essence of European individualism is held safe as in a treasure chest" amidst "an environment hostile to private life and the integrity of the individual." And from this ideas he concludes that it is no surprise that the main theme of Kundera's works is "the fate of the individual in modern society, especially in modern Communist society."
On another note, he has some good points regarding Kundera's writing techniques: "short chapters [...] episodic narrative [...] montage of images, story lines, and characterizations. [...] model of a musical variation. [...] The narrative is constantly interrupted as Kundera steps back to impart a bit of philosophy, autobiography, or psychological conjecture."
Furthermore, about the way Kundera intertwines themes of sex and loneliness in his stories, Roger calls this "intimacy in distress" and then continues by explaining that "in Kundera’s novels sex is generally a rather chilly, dehumanizing event, an exercise that offers precious little refuge."
Lastly, it is explained that Kundera is against sentimentality and does not approve of sentimentality being placed at the same level with truth. Also, related to this, the concept of kitsch as understood by Kundera is explained as "a species of bad art but to the deliberate sentimentalization of reality", basically saying that kitsch is the attitude of humans deluding themselves in order not to see the true nature of reality which is (most probably) based on meaninglessness (due to death, of course).
From TERRY EAGLETON article:
"Nothing in Eastern Europe can happen by accident. The logical extreme of this attitude is paranoia, a condition in which reality becomes so pervasively, oppressively meaningful that its slightest fragments operate as minatory signs in some utterly coherent text. Once the political state extends its empire over the whole of civil society, social reality becomes so densely systematized and rigorously coded that one is always being caught out in a kind of pathological ‘over reading,’ a compulsive semiosis which eradicates all contingency." [Total control of people's lives results in everything having a meaning or purpose or significance which leads to a form of maddness. And this leads to actually not knowing what is the exact meaning of those things that actually are supposed to mean something. What is meant vs what is not meant. This is a mechanism of writing for Kundera -> "an awareness of this possible subtext, a daily hermeneutics of suspicion"]
Talking about Kafka:
"The most celebrated of all modern Czech writers, Franz Kafka, suspends his readers between narrative and sub-text, the bald appearance of events and the ceaselessly elusive truth of which they might just be dimly allegorical. Such truth is never totalisable, shifting its ground each time one approaches
it; there is, perhaps, a metanarrative which rigorously determines the slightest detail of quotidian life but which is always elsewhere. If this is an allegory of the disappeared God, it is also one of the post-capitalist state, a paradoxical condition in which everything is at once compulsively legible, locking smoothly into some univocal story, and yet where history is awash with secrets, whispered treacheries, tell-tale traces."
Talking about the structure of Kundera's novels:
" Each of Kundera’s stories has a ‘sense’ to it, and interacts with the others; but it must be allowed to exist in its own narrative space free from meta narrational closure, absolved from the authoritarianism of the ‘closed book.’" + "Kundera conveys the rather more shocking sense of unconcern, a writer who has, so to speak, just not been told that you shouldn’t hold up the narrative with metaphysical speculations about angels
and devils, and who would not understand what you were talking about if you were to tell him so."
Terry Eagleton talks about the combination of "angelic" (the idealism, the meaningful and serious part) and the "demonic" (the totalitarianism, the kitsch, the nihilism, the repetition, the meaningless and mockery part) as elements in Kundera's writing with the important observation that Kundera's text is not settling for any of these parts. [= "Metaphysical truth was born of playfulness." + "Kundera must
therefore write lightly as well as lucidly." + "the borderline between too much meaning and too little, the portentous solemnity of the ideological and the bland dissociation of the cynic."]
"Totalitarian kitsch is that discourse which banishes all doubt and irony, but it is not a grim-faced, life-denying speech: on the contrary, it is all smiles and cheers, beaming and euphoric, marching merrily onwards to the future shouting ‘Long live life!’ The Gulag, as Kundera comments, is the septic tank used by kitsch to dispose of its refuse."
From ITALO CALVINO's article:
About Kundera's way of writing - "His manner of storytelling progresses by successive waves (most of the action develops within the first thirty pages; the conclusion is already announced halfway through; every story is completed and illuminated layer by layer) and by means of digressions and remarks that transform the private problem into a universal problem and, thereby, one that is ours.But this overall development, rather than increasing the seriousness of the situation, functions as an ironic filter lightening its pathos."
"...the lightness of living for him [Kundera] resides in the fact that things only happen once, fleetingly, and it is therefore as if they had not happened. + Lightness of living, for Kundera, is that which is opposed to irrevocability, to exclusive univocity... + despite his professing the ideal of the lightness of living [...] he [Tomas] has always suspected that truth lies in the opposing idea, in weight, in necessity."
Kundera's words: "he has always suspected that truth lies in the opposing idea, in weight, in necessity."
From ELLEN PIFER's article:
About "graphomania" she says that graphomania,the obsession with writing books, is caused by isolation induced by an advanced state of “social atomization,” however, this graphomania "paradoxically reinforces and perpetuates the sense of “general isolation” that is symptomatic of the disease". + "Diagnosing within his own book the disease of book-writing, Kundera does more than parody the conditions under which his texts are generated and produced."
She says that this graphomania is surrounding yourself with your books in order to avoid the voices from without, what Kundera calls "wall of mirrors", was for modernists the victory of imagination of a single's character over the collective "chaos of history and the ruins of time" while for us, now, is is showing us the "limitations of language and of the literary enterprise as a whole." Therefore, "in his own fiction Kundera strives to create a kind of writing that, unlike the graphomaniac’s, forces open a window to the world of referents beyond language and its system of signs." She states that it is a debate on how "any work of narrative fiction or history can reflect actual events taking place in a world beyond language" but in Kundera's novels are dealing with this reflection of the world beyond language.
Kundera inserts biographical elements in the narration and by doing this he "abandons the covert operations of an omniscient creator for the overt strategies of a selfconscious narrator," thus breaking the "wall of mirrors." In "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" he identifies his novel's character tragedy (fiction) with his own tragedy (individual reality) and with the tragedy of the country (collective reality). And the identification with the country's tragedy is seen as breaking the "wall of mirrors."
"Interspersing the fictional histories of his characters with passages devoted to philosophical speculation, historical commentary, and even quotations from other published and unpublished texts, Kundera makes contrast or difference both a structural and a thematic principle. The overall effect of this counterpoint is to dispel the intensity of any single, or single-voiced, narration. By disrupting the seamless effects of narration, Kundera wakens his readers from the “spell” cast by art and confronts them with the burden of history." [= meaning is created by difference and words show this difference. such words create narratives (history) and identity is thus created. but all meaning/difference/identity is lost if the memory that stores all these loses its functions.]
"To erase the memory of an admittedly troubled and imperfect history leads not to a brave new world, however, but to the loss of human differentiation and identity. Mass murder, mass extinction, Kundera suggests, is simply the dark fulfillment of mankind’s oblivious dream of utopia." + Kundera's concept of “collective lyrical delirium.”
From JAMES S. HANS's article:
Talking about real-life coincidences and fictive coincidences: "More importantly, Kundera establishes the fundamental premise of the novel by asserting: “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Instead of creating our lives out of a series of rational considerations about what we should be doing that would be based on various considerations for the future, here we are told that instead we compose our lives according to the laws of beauty. And we do this without realizing it. First and foremost, Kundera has shifted the control of our lives away from any self-aware context and moved it to another location that does its work without any necessary reflection on our part." [= we make decision not based on reason but based on beauty, namely we find meaning in coincidences and symbols and decide our future based on those, many times unintentionally.]
"Kundera suggests through these characters’ lives that our existence is fundamentally aesthetic in nature, even if we fail to recognize this, even if we assume that we are always in rational control of the direction of our lives. Again, he emphasizes that “the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress,” when beauty would be the last thing one would likely think about. [...] Our lives are first and foremost constructed on aesthetic principles, and the patterns we develop reflect laws that go beyond any subjective response to the world." [= what we think is fiction and what is reality is questioned here. reality provides moments so outlandish that in a novel they would be regarded as bad fiction and in fiction some moments are considered for sure just fiction when in reality those things are quite probable to happen.]
"Kitsch “excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence,” which means that it is an aesthetic based on unreal depictions of the way things are in order to establish a vision in which the world seems at least potentially a pleasing place to us. [...] So our world is based on the Bible and on Genesis, on the declaration of the world as essentially good, yet we don’t really find it to be so and thus establish an aesthetic of denial rather than acceptance."
The main idea: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being, then, establishes two kinds of aesthetic, the traditional one of kitsch, that aesthetic which begins by removing from our purview everything we find unpalatable about the world, and that aesthetic which is based on the attempt to say Yes to life even in its most difficult problems. Both conceptions of beauty are finally based on the essential relationship between beauty and shame, but the one begins by repressing that knowledge while the other embraces it as a necessary aspect of the overall whole. The one creates fictions that are deliberately “unreal,” artifacts that are constructed in order to keep us from seeing what is real, and the other creates fictions that, while “artificial,” nevertheless approach both the real and a categorical agreement with being."
From MICHAEL CARROLL's article, about the strict order Kundera intended for the stories in Laughable Loves:
"As Ingram points out, the stories of a cycle are connected in such a way that the “reader’s experience of each is modified by his experience of others.”"
"Furthermore, the reader’s initial recognition of cyclicity informs an act of protension: the reader will be inclined to expect more of the same, and the ensuing narrative units will be read with the suspicion that recurrent themes, character types, and tropes may be lurking therein. Iser calls this the “the consistency building habit which underlies all comprehension.” Thus, the observation of a thematic connection between the second and the first stories leads inexorably to other connections, leads to the filling of conceptual “gaps.” The reader has begun to intuit the genre"
Explaining the concept of "“ retrospective patterning,”" which means that "meaning generally emerges in retrospect."
From JOHN O’BRIEN's article, regarding the presence of the real author in the text ("the intrusive author"). O'Brien's position "challenges the critical assumptions of “The Death of the Author”":
"The voice of the intrusive author, according to Straus, is an intentional narrative device employed to make the text in-deconstructible, closed to interpretations that stray from the author’s intended agenda."
"However, in direct opposition to Straus’s idea that Kundera uses the author-figure to make his novels resistant to anything but interpretation firmly located in history, it is much more arguable that these intrusions add a sense of play by admitting that characters are not real, questioning motivations, digressing, telling stories, and so on."
"History is important, but only inasmuch as it facilitates insights into self-consciously imagined characters. Therefore, Kundera’s vision of the literary possibilities coincides with Barthes’s understanding that the text should enjoy a displacement from social responsibility, play instead of commitment, and eventually (ideally) the bliss of complete hedonistic detachment. Kundera’s works share the emphasis of text over context and do so unapologetically at the expense of meaning."
"True, much apparently autobiographical matter is presented, but these events are treated, as are the historical ones, as points for questions."
From TOM WILHELMUS's article:
"Repetition, recurrence, the myth of eternal return show the weight of history and create the awareness that life has significance and depth."
"...the quixotic unreliability of history is as liberating as it is a source of despair."
"History, recurrence, creates weight and depth and perspective. Painful as such knowledge may be, it provides us with identity and community, two things we will always need. Nonetheless, like Ludvik, we might prefer a version of history which is more humane, essentially private, contingent, semi-official, made up on the run. Perhaps that is what Eastern Europe is learning now, though it is a view of things which, like Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return, may essentially
From Harold Bloom's Introduction (a sort of general opinion on Kundera):
"Kundera acknowledges Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot as specific ancestors, and I suppose he might add Hermann Broch, as well as the inevitable Kafka, and Robert Musil. With such precursors, he is dwarfed. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is formulaic, over-determined, and in places unbearably light. [...] I end, as I began, in some doubt as to Kundera’s lasting eminence."
From ROBERT C. PORTER's article, talking about the structure and directions in Kundera's short stories:
"This rearrangement would seem to strengthen the thesis (deception) in volume one, the antithesis (self-deception) in volume two and the synthesis in volume three."
From PEARL K. BELL's article talking about the progression of Kundera's style:
"In the five novels of Milan Kundera which have so far been published in the United States, we can trace the path of the dissident writer: from protest, to comedy and satire, to surrealist compression.
From PETER KUSSI's article, talking about the technique of multiple narrators:
"But whereas Capek the relativist showed that each man has his own truth, Kundera the skeptic shows that each man has his own falsehood."
Talking about the themes of deception and self-deception in Kundera's writings and the two major types of protagonists he created:
"In fact, self-deception is such a striking element in Kundera’s stories and novels that his protagonists could really be divided into two moral types: those who are satisfied to remain self-deluded and those struggling for a measure of self-awareness. [...] One form of self-deception to which Kundera’s protagonists are prone may be called bad faith, a moral syndrome reminiscent of the mauvaise foi first diagnosed in the modern consciousness by Jean-Paul Sartre. This bad faith is consciously induced self-deception whereby people pretend to themselves to be unaware of certain realities in order to postpone the need for making decisions."
From JOHN BAYLEY's article, talking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being and describing what is Lightness and Weight:
"Lightness of being is associated with the author’s voice, with the cinema and sex, with irresponsibility and definition, with politics. Weight or heaviness of being, on the other hand, is associated with love and fidelity, suffering, chance, fictio, form and content (‘The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness’), death. The story has weight, though it is lightly told.[...] Tomas stands for lightness, Teresa for weight."
From MARK STURDIVANT article explaining the concept of sexuality in Kundera's stories:
"Kundera views sexuality and eroticism as “the deepest region of life” [...] sexuality becomes a vehicle for expressing a variety of interwoven threads of commentary upon human characteristics, and for ultimately casting a pall of hopelessness and meaninglessness over mankind’s fundamental existence."
Also he points to the fact that the laughter in Kundera's work is "the laughter of hopeless despair. [...] a means of removing his[own] burden of knowledge and subsequent sorrow."
From ROGER KIMBAL's article, talking about politics in Kundera's writings. He says that Kundera is for liberal values such as individuality and private life. He says that Kundera criticized communist regimes for undermining these values but also democracies in the west that did the same and this brought him many friends on the Left. However, he continues saying that Kundera then toned-down his criticize on the West. Thus, Kundera's stance is that "the novel appears as a sanctuary where the precious essence of European individualism is held safe as in a treasure chest" amidst "an environment hostile to private life and the integrity of the individual." And from this ideas he concludes that it is no surprise that the main theme of Kundera's works is "the fate of the individual in modern society, especially in modern Communist society."
On another note, he has some good points regarding Kundera's writing techniques: "short chapters [...] episodic narrative [...] montage of images, story lines, and characterizations. [...] model of a musical variation. [...] The narrative is constantly interrupted as Kundera steps back to impart a bit of philosophy, autobiography, or psychological conjecture."
Furthermore, about the way Kundera intertwines themes of sex and loneliness in his stories, Roger calls this "intimacy in distress" and then continues by explaining that "in Kundera’s novels sex is generally a rather chilly, dehumanizing event, an exercise that offers precious little refuge."
Lastly, it is explained that Kundera is against sentimentality and does not approve of sentimentality being placed at the same level with truth. Also, related to this, the concept of kitsch as understood by Kundera is explained as "a species of bad art but to the deliberate sentimentalization of reality", basically saying that kitsch is the attitude of humans deluding themselves in order not to see the true nature of reality which is (most probably) based on meaninglessness (due to death, of course).
From TERRY EAGLETON article:
"Nothing in Eastern Europe can happen by accident. The logical extreme of this attitude is paranoia, a condition in which reality becomes so pervasively, oppressively meaningful that its slightest fragments operate as minatory signs in some utterly coherent text. Once the political state extends its empire over the whole of civil society, social reality becomes so densely systematized and rigorously coded that one is always being caught out in a kind of pathological ‘over reading,’ a compulsive semiosis which eradicates all contingency." [Total control of people's lives results in everything having a meaning or purpose or significance which leads to a form of maddness. And this leads to actually not knowing what is the exact meaning of those things that actually are supposed to mean something. What is meant vs what is not meant. This is a mechanism of writing for Kundera -> "an awareness of this possible subtext, a daily hermeneutics of suspicion"]
Talking about Kafka:
"The most celebrated of all modern Czech writers, Franz Kafka, suspends his readers between narrative and sub-text, the bald appearance of events and the ceaselessly elusive truth of which they might just be dimly allegorical. Such truth is never totalisable, shifting its ground each time one approaches
it; there is, perhaps, a metanarrative which rigorously determines the slightest detail of quotidian life but which is always elsewhere. If this is an allegory of the disappeared God, it is also one of the post-capitalist state, a paradoxical condition in which everything is at once compulsively legible, locking smoothly into some univocal story, and yet where history is awash with secrets, whispered treacheries, tell-tale traces."
Talking about the structure of Kundera's novels:
" Each of Kundera’s stories has a ‘sense’ to it, and interacts with the others; but it must be allowed to exist in its own narrative space free from meta narrational closure, absolved from the authoritarianism of the ‘closed book.’" + "Kundera conveys the rather more shocking sense of unconcern, a writer who has, so to speak, just not been told that you shouldn’t hold up the narrative with metaphysical speculations about angels
and devils, and who would not understand what you were talking about if you were to tell him so."
Terry Eagleton talks about the combination of "angelic" (the idealism, the meaningful and serious part) and the "demonic" (the totalitarianism, the kitsch, the nihilism, the repetition, the meaningless and mockery part) as elements in Kundera's writing with the important observation that Kundera's text is not settling for any of these parts. [= "Metaphysical truth was born of playfulness." + "Kundera must
therefore write lightly as well as lucidly." + "the borderline between too much meaning and too little, the portentous solemnity of the ideological and the bland dissociation of the cynic."]
"Totalitarian kitsch is that discourse which banishes all doubt and irony, but it is not a grim-faced, life-denying speech: on the contrary, it is all smiles and cheers, beaming and euphoric, marching merrily onwards to the future shouting ‘Long live life!’ The Gulag, as Kundera comments, is the septic tank used by kitsch to dispose of its refuse."
From ITALO CALVINO's article:
About Kundera's way of writing - "His manner of storytelling progresses by successive waves (most of the action develops within the first thirty pages; the conclusion is already announced halfway through; every story is completed and illuminated layer by layer) and by means of digressions and remarks that transform the private problem into a universal problem and, thereby, one that is ours.But this overall development, rather than increasing the seriousness of the situation, functions as an ironic filter lightening its pathos."
"...the lightness of living for him [Kundera] resides in the fact that things only happen once, fleetingly, and it is therefore as if they had not happened. + Lightness of living, for Kundera, is that which is opposed to irrevocability, to exclusive univocity... + despite his professing the ideal of the lightness of living [...] he [Tomas] has always suspected that truth lies in the opposing idea, in weight, in necessity."
Kundera's words: "he has always suspected that truth lies in the opposing idea, in weight, in necessity."
From ELLEN PIFER's article:
About "graphomania" she says that graphomania,the obsession with writing books, is caused by isolation induced by an advanced state of “social atomization,” however, this graphomania "paradoxically reinforces and perpetuates the sense of “general isolation” that is symptomatic of the disease". + "Diagnosing within his own book the disease of book-writing, Kundera does more than parody the conditions under which his texts are generated and produced."
She says that this graphomania is surrounding yourself with your books in order to avoid the voices from without, what Kundera calls "wall of mirrors", was for modernists the victory of imagination of a single's character over the collective "chaos of history and the ruins of time" while for us, now, is is showing us the "limitations of language and of the literary enterprise as a whole." Therefore, "in his own fiction Kundera strives to create a kind of writing that, unlike the graphomaniac’s, forces open a window to the world of referents beyond language and its system of signs." She states that it is a debate on how "any work of narrative fiction or history can reflect actual events taking place in a world beyond language" but in Kundera's novels are dealing with this reflection of the world beyond language.
Kundera inserts biographical elements in the narration and by doing this he "abandons the covert operations of an omniscient creator for the overt strategies of a selfconscious narrator," thus breaking the "wall of mirrors." In "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" he identifies his novel's character tragedy (fiction) with his own tragedy (individual reality) and with the tragedy of the country (collective reality). And the identification with the country's tragedy is seen as breaking the "wall of mirrors."
"Interspersing the fictional histories of his characters with passages devoted to philosophical speculation, historical commentary, and even quotations from other published and unpublished texts, Kundera makes contrast or difference both a structural and a thematic principle. The overall effect of this counterpoint is to dispel the intensity of any single, or single-voiced, narration. By disrupting the seamless effects of narration, Kundera wakens his readers from the “spell” cast by art and confronts them with the burden of history." [= meaning is created by difference and words show this difference. such words create narratives (history) and identity is thus created. but all meaning/difference/identity is lost if the memory that stores all these loses its functions.]
"To erase the memory of an admittedly troubled and imperfect history leads not to a brave new world, however, but to the loss of human differentiation and identity. Mass murder, mass extinction, Kundera suggests, is simply the dark fulfillment of mankind’s oblivious dream of utopia." + Kundera's concept of “collective lyrical delirium.”
From JAMES S. HANS's article:
Talking about real-life coincidences and fictive coincidences: "More importantly, Kundera establishes the fundamental premise of the novel by asserting: “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Instead of creating our lives out of a series of rational considerations about what we should be doing that would be based on various considerations for the future, here we are told that instead we compose our lives according to the laws of beauty. And we do this without realizing it. First and foremost, Kundera has shifted the control of our lives away from any self-aware context and moved it to another location that does its work without any necessary reflection on our part." [= we make decision not based on reason but based on beauty, namely we find meaning in coincidences and symbols and decide our future based on those, many times unintentionally.]
"Kundera suggests through these characters’ lives that our existence is fundamentally aesthetic in nature, even if we fail to recognize this, even if we assume that we are always in rational control of the direction of our lives. Again, he emphasizes that “the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress,” when beauty would be the last thing one would likely think about. [...] Our lives are first and foremost constructed on aesthetic principles, and the patterns we develop reflect laws that go beyond any subjective response to the world." [= what we think is fiction and what is reality is questioned here. reality provides moments so outlandish that in a novel they would be regarded as bad fiction and in fiction some moments are considered for sure just fiction when in reality those things are quite probable to happen.]
"Kitsch “excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence,” which means that it is an aesthetic based on unreal depictions of the way things are in order to establish a vision in which the world seems at least potentially a pleasing place to us. [...] So our world is based on the Bible and on Genesis, on the declaration of the world as essentially good, yet we don’t really find it to be so and thus establish an aesthetic of denial rather than acceptance."
The main idea: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being, then, establishes two kinds of aesthetic, the traditional one of kitsch, that aesthetic which begins by removing from our purview everything we find unpalatable about the world, and that aesthetic which is based on the attempt to say Yes to life even in its most difficult problems. Both conceptions of beauty are finally based on the essential relationship between beauty and shame, but the one begins by repressing that knowledge while the other embraces it as a necessary aspect of the overall whole. The one creates fictions that are deliberately “unreal,” artifacts that are constructed in order to keep us from seeing what is real, and the other creates fictions that, while “artificial,” nevertheless approach both the real and a categorical agreement with being."
From MICHAEL CARROLL's article, about the strict order Kundera intended for the stories in Laughable Loves:
"As Ingram points out, the stories of a cycle are connected in such a way that the “reader’s experience of each is modified by his experience of others.”"
"Furthermore, the reader’s initial recognition of cyclicity informs an act of protension: the reader will be inclined to expect more of the same, and the ensuing narrative units will be read with the suspicion that recurrent themes, character types, and tropes may be lurking therein. Iser calls this the “the consistency building habit which underlies all comprehension.” Thus, the observation of a thematic connection between the second and the first stories leads inexorably to other connections, leads to the filling of conceptual “gaps.” The reader has begun to intuit the genre"
Explaining the concept of "“ retrospective patterning,”" which means that "meaning generally emerges in retrospect."
From JOHN O’BRIEN's article, regarding the presence of the real author in the text ("the intrusive author"). O'Brien's position "challenges the critical assumptions of “The Death of the Author”":
"The voice of the intrusive author, according to Straus, is an intentional narrative device employed to make the text in-deconstructible, closed to interpretations that stray from the author’s intended agenda."
"However, in direct opposition to Straus’s idea that Kundera uses the author-figure to make his novels resistant to anything but interpretation firmly located in history, it is much more arguable that these intrusions add a sense of play by admitting that characters are not real, questioning motivations, digressing, telling stories, and so on."
"History is important, but only inasmuch as it facilitates insights into self-consciously imagined characters. Therefore, Kundera’s vision of the literary possibilities coincides with Barthes’s understanding that the text should enjoy a displacement from social responsibility, play instead of commitment, and eventually (ideally) the bliss of complete hedonistic detachment. Kundera’s works share the emphasis of text over context and do so unapologetically at the expense of meaning."
"True, much apparently autobiographical matter is presented, but these events are treated, as are the historical ones, as points for questions."
From TOM WILHELMUS's article:
"Repetition, recurrence, the myth of eternal return show the weight of history and create the awareness that life has significance and depth."
"...the quixotic unreliability of history is as liberating as it is a source of despair."
"History, recurrence, creates weight and depth and perspective. Painful as such knowledge may be, it provides us with identity and community, two things we will always need. Nonetheless, like Ludvik, we might prefer a version of history which is more humane, essentially private, contingent, semi-official, made up on the run. Perhaps that is what Eastern Europe is learning now, though it is a view of things which, like Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return, may essentially
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December 28, 2025
I expected more than from Harold Bloom…
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