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Literary Review
The return of the native
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Interspersed with philosophical and contemplative musings, Ignorance is not a novel in the strict sense of the term, says M.S. NAGARAJAN.
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It is folly to be wise where ignorance is bliss.
IN his interview with Philip Roth, Milan Kundera (b.1929) declares that it is a great boon to live in a number of countries. One can understand the world if seen from several sides. That explains Kundera's ravenous interest in the country he was born in, Czechoslovakia, the country that has witnessed a great deal of political turmoil and uncertainty in recent times, and the country he has chosen to make his home, France. Hardly anyone has won more awards then he; yet the biggest of them all, the Nobel Prize, keeps eluding him. What Gabriel Garcia Marquez is to Latin America, Milan Kundera is Czechoslovakia. He belongs to the proud lineage of philosophical writers whose patron saint is his countryman Franz Kafka. For that matter, no Czech writing worth its name can escape Kafka's influence.
Ignorance (translated from French by Linda Asher) is subtitled "a novel", which Kundera defines as a "poetic meditation on existence". It is not a novel in the strict sense of the term. One can detect the presence of the author and autobiographical characteristics in the narration; one does notice historical events in full details with dates; one comes across shortish essay-like features; and, more than these, one encounters philosophic musings and meditations on human foibles. The plot revolves around two characters, Irene, a widow in her forties, with two grown up daughters who had left home having chosen their lives and Josef, a widower. Both are natives of Czech and had fled the country during the Communist regime there. Irene sought refuge in France and Josef, the veterinarian, in Denmark. Both, drawn by an incessant nostalgic urge to return to their country, happen to meet at the airport in Paris. They stay in Prague, Czech for a short period but decide to get back to their respective countries in which they had sought asylum — sadder, if not wiser. In 53 short sections, the narration goes back and forth, traversing space and time, with the political turmoil that beleaguered Czechoslovakia for well over 40 years serving as the backdrop.
When Irene's friend Sylvie suggests to her that it will be a great return to Czech, she has glorious visions like "Odysseus sighting his island after years of wandering; the return, the return, the great magic of the return." Irene and her husband Martin emigrate to France in 1969 when the Communist regime (which disintegrated after 20 years in 1989) was at its height. Her mother, full of vitality and energy, visits her daughter for five days. In the two decades of their separation, so many things had happened in their lives. Now they have no common ground at all. "Daughter and mother faced off like two beings outside time, like two timeless essences." When Odysseus gets back to Ithaca, he gets disillusioned. "But once he was back, he was amazed to realise that his life, the very essence of it, its centre, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost, and could retrieve only by telling about it" (p.34). When Irene throws a party celebrating her return home, none seems to be interested in listening to her and her life abroad though all of them drink (not French wine but Czech beer) and feel merry about her homecoming. The great return she had envisioned fades far away, leaving her forlorn. The smokescreen of illusion gets lifted.
Josef pays a visit to his elder brother who lives in their ancestral home, which had been nationalised during the Communist regime but later returned to him, he being the rightful owner. He sees hanging on the wall in a room the painting he desired most to possess, the painting of a working-class suburb done in accordance with the then prevailing ideology of social realism. The conversation centres around all that had happened during his absence of 20 years. Josef had a feeling that "he was coming back into the world as might a dead man emerging from his tomb after twenty years." As in the case of Irene, meeting between people after many years show that they are not linked by the same recollections, the same experiences. The recollections simply do not intersect. They fail to click, they do not connect. The longing and the sorrow, the desire and the affliction caused by the loss!
The book abounds in lyrical outbursts of exuberant ruminations. To cite a few:
The more vast the amount of time we have left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious, and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections. It is important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia: that it is most powerful in early youth, when the volume of life gone by is quite small. (p.77.)
The long reflection on nostalgia with its etymology and meaning in the different European languages continues through the voyages of Odysseus reaching its climax thus: "Homer glorified nostalgia with a laurel wreath and thereby laid out a moral hierarchy of emotions. Penelope stands at the summit, very high above Calypso." (p.9.)
Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. (p.123.)
If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, `regardless whether we want to hear it,' it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestered, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying. (p.146.)
The reason people are quitting Communism today is not that their thinking has changed or undergone a shock, but that Communism no longer provides a way to look nonconformist or obey or punish the wicked or be useful or march forward with youth or have a big family around you. The Communist creed no longer answers any need. It has become so unusable that everyone drops it easily, never even noticing. (p.154.)
During their sojourn in Czechoslovakia, the hotel at Prague in which Josef is lodged serves as the rendezvous for him and Irene. They meet there one afternoon as per their prior appointment. Swelling passion and wild impulse lead inevitably to a physically fulfilling sexual encounter. As in other novels, the denouement is an erotic scene of sensual, carnal love. The lingering suggestion, however, is that they are free even as their country Czech is free from fetters after the fall of totalitarianism. Freed from inhibitions and encumbrances, they can choose their lives, do what they will. From the porthole of the plane by which Josef leaves for Denmark, he sees "far off in the sky, a low wooden fence and a brick house with a slender fir tree like a lifted arm before it." (p.195.)
Mixing memory and desire, Ignorance brings together the private and the public worlds. Public events do cast a shadow on private lives. Characters are not sufficiently concretised and not sufficiently kept apart. Omniscient and dramatised<243>
<15,0m,,0>narration, interspersed with contemplative essays make it a successful work of fiction, if not a memorable one.
Ignorance, Milan Kundera, Faber and Faber, 2002, p.195, Rs. 880.
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