by Philip Roth
Roth: A Polish Jew of your generation writing in Polish would have been as strange a creature as that?
Singer: Almost. And if there would be many such people, let's say there would be six goyim who would write in Yiddish, and there would come a seventh one...
Roth: Yes, it's clearer. You make it clearer.
Singer: I once was sitting in the subway with the Yiddish writer S, who had a beard, and at this time, forty years ago, very few people had beards. And he liked women, so he looked over and sitting across from him was a young woman, and he seemed to be highly interested. I sat on the side and I saw it—he didn't see me. Suddenly right near him came in another man also with a beard, and he began to look at the same woman. When S saw another one with a beard, he got up and left. He suddenly realized his own ridiculous situation. And this woman, as soon as this other man came in, she must have thought, What's going on here, already two beards?
Roth: You had no beard.
Singer: No, no. Do I need everything? A bald head and a beard?
Roth: You left Poland in the middle thirties, some years before the Nazi invasion. Schulz remained in Drohobycz and was killed there by the Nazis in 1942. Coming here to talk to you, I was thinking about how you, the Jewish writer from Eastern Europe most nourished by the Jewish world and most bound to it, left that world to come to America, while the other major Jewish writers of your generation—Jews far more assimilated, far more drawn toward the contemporary currents in the larger culture, writers like Schulz in Poland, and Isaac Babel in Russia, and, in Czechoslovakia, Jirí Weil, who wrote some of the most harrowing stories I've read about the Holocaust—were destroyed in one ghastly way or another, either by Nazism or Stalinism. May I ask who or what encouraged you to leave before the horrors began? After all, to be exiled from one's native country and language is something that nearly all writers would dread and probably be most reluctant to accomplish voluntarily. Why did you do it?
Singer: I had all the reasons to leave. First of all, I was very pessimistic. I saw that Hitler was already in power in 1935 and he was threatening Poland with invasion. Nazis like Göring came to Poland to hunt and to vacation. Second, I worked for the Yiddish press, and the Yiddish press was going down all the time—it has been ever since it has existed. And my way of living became very frugal—I could barely exist. And the main thing was that my brother was here; he had come about two years before. So I had all the reasons to run to America.
Roth: And, leaving Poland, did you have fears about losing touch with your material?
Singer: Of course, and the fear became even stronger when I got to this country. I came here and I saw that everybody speaks English. I mean, there was a Hadassah meeting, and so I went and expected to hear Yiddish. But I came in and there was sitting about two hundred women and I heard one word: "delicious, delicious, delicious." I didn't know what it was, but it wasn't Yiddish. I don't know what they gave them there to eat, but two hundred women were sitting and saying, "Delicious." By the way, this was the first English world I learned. Poland looked far away then. When a person who is close to you dies, in the first few weeks after his death he is as far from you, as far as a near person can ever be; only with the years does he become nearer, and then you can almost live with this person. This is what happened to me. Poland, Jewish life in Poland, is nearer to me now than it was then.
Milan Kundera
[1980]
This interview is condensed from two conversations I had with Milan Kundera after reading a translated manuscript of his Book of Laughter and Forgetting—one conversation while he was visiting London for the first time, the other when he was on his first visit to the United States. He took these trips from France; since 1975 he and his wife have been living there as émigrés, in Rennes, where he taught at the university, and now in Paris. During our conversations, Kundera spoke sporadically in French but mostly in Czech, and his wife, Vera, served as his translator and mine. A final Czech text was translated into English by Peter Kussi.
Roth: Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?
Kundera: That depends on what you mean by the word soon.
Roth: Tomorrow or the day after.
Kundera: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.
Roth: So then we have nothing to worry about.
Kundera: On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages, there must be something to it.
Roth: In any event, it seems to me that this concern is the background against which all the stories in your latest book take place, even those that are of a decidedly humorous nature.
Kundera: If someone had told me as a boy, "One day you will see your nation vanish from the world," I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn't possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life. But after the Russian invasion of 1968, every Czech was confronted with the thought that his nation could be quietly erased from Europe, just as over the past five decades forty million Ukrainians have been quietly vanishing from the world without the world paying any heed. Or Lithuanians. Do you know that in the seventeenth century Lithuania was a powerful European nation? Today the Russians keep Lithuanians on their reservation like a half-extinct tribe; they are sealed off from visitors to prevent knowledge about their existence from reaching the outside. I don't know what the future holds for my own nation. It is certain that the Russians will do everything they can to dissolve it gradually into their own civilization. Nobody knows whether they will succeed. But the possibility is there. And the sudden realization that such a possibility exists is enough to change one's whole sense of life. Nowadays I see even Europe as fragile, mortal.
Roth: And yet, are not the fates of Eastern Europe and Western Europe radically different matters?
Kundera: As a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia, with its quite specific history anchored in the Byzantine world. Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, just like Austria, have never been part of Eastern Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the great adventure of Western civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation—a movement that has its cradle precisely in this region. It was there, in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses: psychoanalysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartók's music, Kafka's and Musil's new aesthetics of the novel. The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity. It is the most significant event in the history of the West in our century, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole.
Roth: During the Prague Spring, your novel The Joke and your stories Laughable Loves were published in editions of 150,000. After the Russian invasion you were dismissed from your teaching post at the film academy and all your books were removed from the shelves of public libraries. Seven years later you and your wife tossed a few books and some clothes in the back of your car and drove off to France, where you've become one of the most widely read of foreign authors. How do you feel as an émigré?
Kundera: For a writer, the experience of living in a number of countries is an enormous boon. You can only understand the world if you see it from several sides. My latest book [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting], which came into being in France, unfolds in a special geographic space: those events that take place in Prague are seen through Western European eyes, while what happens in France is seen through the eyes of Prague. It is an encounter of two worlds. On one side, my native country: in the course of a mere half century, it experienced democracy, fascism, revolution, Stalinist terror as well as the disintegration of Stalinism, German and Russian occupation, mass deportations, the death of the West in its own land. It is thus sinking under the weight of history and looks at the world with immense skepticism. On the other side, France: for centuries it was the center
of the world and nowadays it is suffering from the lack of great historic events. This is why it revels in radical ideological postures. It is the lyrical, neurotic expectation of some great deed of its own, which is not coming, however, and will never come.
Roth: Are you living in France as a stranger or do you feel culturally at home?
Kundera: I am enormously fond of French culture and I am greatly indebted to it. Especially to the older literature. Rabelais is dearest to me of all writers. And Diderot. I love his Jacques le fataliste as much as I do Laurence Sterne. Those were the greatest experimenters of all time in the form of the novel. And their experiments were, so to say, amusing, full of happiness and joy, which have by now vanished from French literature and without which everything in art loses its significance. Sterne and Diderot understood the novel as a great game. They discovered the humor of the novelistic form. When I hear learned arguments that the novel has exhausted its possibilities, I have precisely the opposite feeling: in the course of its history the novel missed many of its possibilities. For example, impulses for the development of the novel hidden in Sterne and Diderot have not been picked up by any successors.
Roth: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is not called a novel, and yet in the text you declare: This book is a novel in the form of variations. So then, is it a novel or not?
Kundera: As far as my own quite personal aesthetic judgment goes, it really is a novel, but I have no wish to force this opinion on anyone. There is enormous freedom latent within the novelistic form. It is a mistake to regard a certain stereotyped structure as the inviolable essence of the novel.
Roth: Yet surely there is something that makes a novel a novel and that limits this freedom.
Kundera: A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits. By the term synthetic I have in mind the novelist's desire to grasp his subject from all sides and in the fullest possible completeness. Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historical fact, flight of fantasy—the synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voices of polyphonic music. The unity of a book need not stem from the plot but can be provided by the theme. In my latest book there are two such themes: laughter and forgetting.
Roth: Laughter has always been close to you. Your books provoke laughter through humor or irony. When your characters come to grief it is because they bump against a world that has lost its sense of humor.
Kundera: I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was twenty then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor.
Roth: In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, though, something else is involved. In a little parable you compare the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil. The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning.
Kundera: Yes, man uses the same physiological manifestation—laughter—to express two different metaphysical attitudes. Someone's hat drops on the coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born. Two lovers race through the meadow, holding hands, laughing. Their laughter has nothing to do with jokes or humor; it is the serious laughter of angels expressing their joy of being. Both kinds of laughter belong among life's pleasures, but when it is carried to extremes it also denotes a dual apocalypse: the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world's significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy. And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime. Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.
Roth: What you now call the laughter of angels is a new term for the "lyrical attitude to life" of your previous novels. In one of your books you characterize the era of Stalinist terror as the reign of the hangman and the poet.
Kundera: Totalitarianism is not only hell but also the dream of paradise—the age-old dream of a world where everybody lives in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. André Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.
Roth: In your book, the great French poet Éluard soars over paradise and gulag, singing. Is this bit of history that you mention in the book authentic?
Kundera: After the war, Paul Éluard abandoned surrealism and became the greatest exponent of what I might call the "poesy of totalitarianism." He sang for brotherhood, peace, justice, better tomorrows, he sang for comradeship and against isolation, for joy and against gloom, for innocence and against cynicism. When in 1950 the rulers of paradise sentenced Éluard's Prague friend, the surrealist Závis Kalandra, to death by hanging, Éluard suppressed his personal feelings of friendship for the sake of suprapersonal ideals and publicly declared his approval of his comrade's execution. The hangman killed while the poet sang.
And not just the poet. The whole period of Stalinist terror was a period of collective lyrical delirium. This has by now been completely forgotten, but it is the crux of the matter. People like to say: Revolution is beautiful; it is only the terror arising from it that is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the dream of paradise, and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated. It is extremely easy to condemn gulags, but to reject the totalitarian poesy that leads to the gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as ever. Nowadays, people all over the world unequivocally reject the idea of gulags, yet they are still willing to let themselves be hypnotized by totalitarian poesy and to march to new gulags to the tune of the same lyrical song piped by Éluard when he soared over Prague like the great archangel of the lyre, while the smoke of Kalandra's body rose to the sky from the crematory chimney.
Roth: What is so characteristic of your prose is the constant confrontation of the private and the public. But not in the sense that private stories take place against a political backdrop or that political events encroach on private lives. Rather, you continually show that political events are governed by the same laws as private happenings, so that your prose is a kind of psychoanalysis of politics.
Kundera: The metaphysics of man is the same in the private sphere as in the public one. Take the other theme of the book, forgetting. This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of the self. But what is this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life. This is the problem of my heroine, in desperately trying to preserve the vanishing memories of her beloved dead husband. But forgetting is also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organized forgetting. This is what is currently happening in Bohemia. Contemporary Czech literature, insofar as it has any value at all, has not been printed for twelve years; 200 Czech writers have been proscribed, including the dead Franz Kafka; 145 Czech historians have been dismissed from their posts, history has been rewritten, monuments have been demol
ished. A nation that loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self. And so the political situation has brutally illuminated the ordinary metaphysical problem of forgetting that we face all the time, every day, without paying any attention. Politics unmasks the metaphysics of private life, private life unmasks the metaphysics of politics.
Roth: In the sixth part of your book of variations the main heroine, Tamina, reaches an island where there are only children. In the end they hound her to death. Is this a dream, a fairy tale, an allegory?
Kundera: Nothing is more foreign to me than allegory, a story invented by the author in order to illustrate some thesis. Events, whether realistic or imaginary, must be significant in themselves, and the reader is meant to be naively seduced by their power and poetry. I have always been haunted by this image, and during one period of my life it kept recurring in my dreams: a person finds himself in a world of children, from which he cannot escape. And suddenly childhood, which we all lyricize and adore, reveals itself as pure horror. As a trap. This story is not allegory. But my book is a polyphony in which various stories mutually explain, illumine, complement one another. The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children. All totalitarianisms do this. And perhaps our entire technical age does this, with its cult of the future, its cult of youth and childhood, its indifference to the past and mistrust of thought. In the midst of a relentlessly juvenile society, an adult equipped with memory and irony feels like Tamina on the isle of children.