The nature of characters in Milan Kundera’s novels has intrigued critics. If we closely read Kundera’s exposition of his own work in the 1986 essay, The Art of the Novel, we get a clear idea of how he imagines his characters. Kundera, who died on July 11 aged 94, barely offered his readers clues about the characters in his novels. For instance, we learn that the character Agnes in his 1988 novel Immortality was born in Kundera’s mind when a wave of nostalgia hit him as he saw an old woman wave at her swimming instructor. The gesture reminded Kundera of a 20-year-old girl. “It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body,” he wrote in Immortality.
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), Kundera imagines Tamina with a golden ring in her mouth that she holds tightly in her mouth as an emblem of silence. Kundera conceived the character of Jaromil, the poet in Life is Elsewhere (1973), out of concern for the moral debasement of the figure of the European poet who sold his soul and his sense of judgement to the tyranny of revolutionary politics.
Describing how the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard, denounced a fellow poet and friend from Prague, Záviš Kalandra, who was given capital punishment for his allegedly anti-communist views, Kundera writes in the postscript of the novel: “I saw before me a world of shaken values and gradually, over many years, the figure of Jaromil, his mother and his loves took shape in my mind.”
In Immortality (1988), Kundera draws with arrows in the book, how the equation between body and soul are different for Agnes and her sister, Laura. About Tereza, the character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Kundera explains in his interview with the French writer Christian Salmon in The Art: “Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimetre longer each day. How much time would it take for her face to become unrecognizable?”
Characters are born in Kundera from gestures whose sources often appear from elsewhere. Kundera’s gaze is often close to voyeuristic. But the tone is distant, often comic, depending on what aspect of being or life he is interrogating.
Kundera wrote in The Art, “The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.” Kundera’s characters are born of metaphor and symbolism. They represent a certain idea that Kundera associates with their life.
His novels too were conceived from a philosophical preoccupation. Unbearable Lightness (1984) was born of critically reflecting on Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return and its variations via Parmenides’ duality of burden (negative) versus lightness (positive). Kundera called his novels meditative interrogation/interrogative meditation in The Art. If Tereza represented the body/soul duality among other aspects in Laughter and Forgetting, Tomáš represented the lightness/weight duality. Life is Elsewhere was an exploration of the lyrical age. The phenomenological approach is evident in Kundera’s imagining of his novels and characters. When Salmon named Kundera’s method as “phenomenological”, Kundera agreed, only to add that he doesn’t use the term to dissuade academic scholars from reading his work as a derivative of philosophy.
Kundera took two of Heidegger’s key propositions seriously: One, that the essence of the human lies in (asking) the question and two, that modernity heralded “the forgetting of being”. Kundera’s literary project of fiction is to remind Europe what it is forgetting. It is fair to ask: What do Kundera’s novels contribute to this counter-project against the machine of forgetting that modernity (through its technology, its cacophony, and its totalitarian apparatuses of power) has unleashed upon us?
His characters, faintly drawn from the confluence of idea and image, are reminders of tendencies that speak in people caught in a game where meanings are unstable, and difficult to make sense of. Every character is trying to solve a puzzle of being. The reader finds herself distributed, torn among various characters.
Even though Kundera, in his own admission, does attempt a unity of theme in the novel, his characters seldom display a sense of unity. They are products of a time when guilt, insincerity/duplicity, and excess, are not merely individual but have a collective dimension. Totalitarian systems provoke people to go against themselves, and render them empty from within as they float in the monstrous meaninglessness of being. Each character in Kundera is an existential tendency within us. As tendencies, they are also warnings and invitations to contemplate upon. There are variants of a Jaromil, a Tomáš, a Tereza, or an Agnes in us. It is fascinating to speak to, and engage with these characters as historical possibilities outside their political and existential context. What ties us together is the modern condition.
The metaphoric, suggestive, central characters in Kundera’s novels can be contrasted with the others: the man from the secret police visiting Tomáš to interrogate him, the people in the newspaper who eagerly want to see Tomáš humiliate himself, the “angels” who hold hands and take part in the grand dance of political propaganda. These are real, historical characters that have no names, no distinctive personality traits. They suffer no contradictions, or dwell in the paradoxes of being in the world. These are the monsters of history.
Kundera does two distinct things: He draws a moral compass that separates (totalitarian) power from its victims. But he does not turn the victims into figures of morality. Rather, the victims are conflicted, erring, cornered beings, who desperately, often untrustworthily, even dominatingly seek pleasure and solace in private relationships. Kundera is looking for questions, not redemptions
