Milan Kundera was born in Brno in 1929, the son of a famous concert pianist. He joined the Czech Communist party in 1947, was expelled in 1950, reinstated in 1956 and expelled once more in 1970. He was a professor at the Prague National Film School until 1969 when he lost his post in the ‘normalization’ following the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. During the next few years the authorities made his life increasingly difficult. In 1975 the University of Rennes offered him a professorship, and since that time Kundera has made his home in France with his wife, Vera.
His first novel, The Joke (Faber), appeared in 1967 and was an immediate success and a major event of the ‘Prague Spring’. The novel charts the calamitous life that unfolds for a young student who sends his Stalinist girlfriend a playful postcard: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’ The French critic Aragon called it ‘one of the greatest novels of the century.’ Kundera’s fine collection of stories, Laughable Loves, also belongs to this period. It was published by Knopf and was included in the excellent series edited by Philip Roth and published by Penguin called ‘Writers from the Other Europe’.
During ‘normalization’, Kundera’s work was banned from bookshops and libraries throughout Czechoslovakia, and since that time he has had to write for the translator. Before leaving for France he wrote two more novels, The Farewell Party (John Murray) and Life is Elsewhere. The latter won the Prix Medicis in France for the best foreign novel of 1973. It is not available in this country. Throughout the seventies Kundera’s work was translated extensively. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Faber), his first novel written in exile, showed Kundera at his best. The wide range of his philosophical and political concerns and the dramas and melodramas of private life (Kundera’s ‘anthropology’) found a new synthesis and succinctness within a more daring, or playful, structure.
His new novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was well received in France earlier this year. Like the previous novel, it moves between comic or wistful accounts of the private lives of his characters and wry, paradoxical and sometimes anguished musings on their fates – and on all fates. The French have adopted Kundera as one of their own and he has been besieged by interviewers and profile writers. This may have contributed to his views on journalism here, and to the weariness he clearly felt at having to repeat his views. The worst is still ahead of him, however. In this country and more particularly in the United States, there are plans for a major publishing ‘event’; Kundera will have to do a great deal of explaining if he is to avoid the label of ‘dissident writer’ which he dislikes so much.
The new novel is consistent with the earlier work in its preoccupation with the perils of systematizing human experience into dogma, especially political dogma. That Kundera can devise sexual comedies around these perils is one of his attractions. He cannot leave the Great Questions alone; but the reader is never repelled by cold abstraction. His passionate inquiries remain rooted in and nourished by the lives of his characters whom he treats with an almost parental tenderness. The abuses of power, the political control of the past, the lure of utopias, the nature of history and of existence itself – Kundera’s metaphysics – are conjured with the lightest and deftest of touches out of tortuous love affairs and fickle lovers, consuming jealousies, compulsive sexual conquest, the niceties of sexual manners, the limitless comedy of arousal. His treatment of sex borders on the obsessive, and yet his achievement has been to bring both private life and political life into one comic framework and to demonstrate how both take their forms from the same source of human inadequacies. A totalitarian government – that ‘realm of uncontested meaning’ – generates its own abundant absurdities, its own dark comedy, and Kundera has been both a gleeful and pained debunker of a bureaucracy that does not dare permit its citizens to read their countryman, Kafka.
The interview was conducted in French in an apartment near Montparnasse where Kundera lives with his wife. We began by talking about his exile.
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McEwan: Let’s talk about exile first of all. Your books are banned in Czechoslovakia and your immediate public is now French. Is it a great loss to be cut off from your native readership?
Kundera: From a general point of view, yes, it is very hard suddenly to lose the public I’d been used to until my forties. But personally it didn’t feel all that unpleasant. My books were banned at the time of the Russian invasion, but I continued to live in Prague afterwards. I was fortunate in already having a contract with the French publisher Gallimard so I knew that what I was writing would be published. This alleviated the situation, made it far less cruel. But I wasn’t the only one who was banned. It was really almost all of my generation, and some of my colleagues found themselves without any publisher at all. The idea of a French public, though, or the public of any country other than my own, was something abstract, something unknown. Paradoxically, this turned out to be liberating. Your immediate public has its demands, its tastes; it exerts an influence on you without your being aware of it. The public annoys you too, especially in a small country, because all of a sudden it knows you. So in the two novels I wrote after being banned I felt very free. I was free from censorship because I was no longer being published in my own country, and there was no longer pressure from the public.
McEwan: Did you feel uprooted when you left?
Kundera: What does uprooted mean?
McEwan: Well, was the decision to leave a difficult one, or was it clear cut?
Kundera: It was a slow process. Back in ’68, the people who wanted to emigrate did so at once. At that time I was one of the people who didn’t want to leave, precisely because I thought that a writer couldn’t live anywhere else except in his homeland. I remained in Czechoslovakia for seven years after the occupation. At first everything that happened was very interesting, even if sad. For a writer, especially, it was a fascinating experience to live through. But slowly it became, not just very sad, but sterile, too. And gradually it got to be enough. Even at a practical level, it wasn’t possible to stay any longer. I’d had it. I’d lost my job at the university. I lost my salary. I couldn’t publish any more. So there was no longer any way I could earn my living….I had saved a bit of money so we lasted out for a while. My wife began teaching English, but, as she didn’t have permission to teach, she had to do it in secret. My awareness that I could emigrate came – I can remember it very well – in 1973. I had been awarded the Medicis Prize for Life is Elsewhere, and, to my surprise, the authorities gave me back my previously confiscated passport and let me go to Paris to collect the prize. We realized then that the regime was not against writers leaving, that in fact it was tacitly encouraging them. I began to think then of emigrating. A little later I was invited to teach at the University at Rennes for two years. During this time things were getting worse in Czechoslovakia, and being in France was a kind of recuperation. And I was struck by the fact that I wasn’t nostalgic or homesick in the way I thought I would be. I am very happy here.
McEwan: Exile then is not a form of ‘unbearable lightness’.
Kundera: Lightness, yes, perhaps, but more bearable than unbearble.
McEwan: Since you’ve been living in the West, have you found yourself enlisted in the Cold War? Have people been tempted to manipulate you or your work for their own political purposes?
Kundera: To be completely frank I’ve never felt that. But what I did feel, especially when I first arrived was that my work was regarded in a simplistic and political way. I had the sense that people read me as a political document; everybody, whether they were on the right or the left. I was angry, and felt offended. I don’t think there was any deliberate intention to manipulate me, to make me part of the Cold War. But I do think that modern society encourages journalistic thinking. That’s what dominates. Journalistic thinking is fast thinking. It doesn’t permit real thought, and its vision of the world is naturally very simplified. If you come from Prague or Warsaw, then automatically you are classed by journalistic non-thought as a political writer. It is not literary critics but journalists who interpret your work. And so in that sense, at first, I did suffer from their interpretations and I had to defend myself against them. And I think I succeeded. Now they seem to understand, more or less.
McEwan: Why exactly are you offended by a political reading of your work?
Kundera: Because it is a bad reading. Everything you think is important in the book you’ve written is ignored. Such a reading sees only one aspect: the denunciation of a Communist regime. That doesn’t mean I like Communist regimes; I detest them. But I detest them as a citizen: as a writer I don’t say what I say in order to denounce a regime. Flaubert detested bourgeois society. But if you read Madame Bovary as mainly a denunciation of the bourgeoisie, it would be a terrible misunderstanding of the book.
McEwan: In The Unbearable Lightness of Being your character, Tereza, takes photos of Russian tanks and soldiers in the streets of Prague at the time of the invasion. Her pictures will be published abroad. Suddenly she feels strong, fulfilled; she has a purpose. Is there a sense in which you became strong too, at that time? That your subject matter was crystallized for you at the time of the occupation?
Kundera: This is Tereza’s affair, not mine. I didn’t feel at all strong then. It is a question of private and public life. When public life becomes very intense for Tereza it frees her from her private concerns. It is a paradoxical situation: you suddenly find yourself caught up in dramatic events, threatened with death, surrounded by tragedy, and you feel very good. Why? Because you have forgotten your private sadness.
McEwan: In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting you describe two kinds of laughter. The laughter of the devil celebrates the meaninglessness of everything, while the angels’ laugh, which has something of a false ring about it, rejoices in how rationally organized and well-conceived everything on earth is. I suppose you would think of Czechoslovakia as being of the devil’s party. The Czechs laugh like devils, the Russians like angels.
Kundera: Absolutely, yes.
McEwan: To belong to a small country has a profound effect on the way you see the world, then?
Kundera: It is very different. Consider, for instance, the national anthem. The Czech anthem begins with a simple question: ‘Where is my homeland?’ The homeland is understood as a question. As an eternal uncertainty. Or consider the Polish national anthem, which begins with the words: ‘Poland has not yet.’ And now compare this with the national anthem of the Soviet Union: ‘The indissoluble union of three republics, has been joined for ever by the Great Russia.’ Or the British ‘Victorious, happy and glorious….’ These are the words of a great country’s anthem – glory, glorious, victorious, grandeur, pride, immortality – yes, immortality, because great nations think of themselves as immortal. You see, if you’re English, you never question the immortality of your nation because you are English. Your Englishness will never be put in doubt. You may question England’s politics, but not its existence.
McEwan: Well, once we were very big. Now we are rather small.
Kundera: Not all that small, though.
McEwan: We ask ourselves who we are, and what our position in the world is. We have an image of ourselves that was formed in another time.
Kundera: Yes, but you never ask yourselves what will happen when England does not exist any more. It can be asked, but it is terribly abstract. But it is a question that is constantly being asked in these small countries: what will happen when Poland no longer exists? Thirty million people live in Poland, so it is not such a small country. But the feeling is nevertheless true. I remember the opening phrase in a letter between Witold Gombrowicz and Czeslaw Milosz. Gombrowicz wrote, ‘In a hundred years – if our country still exists….’ No English, American, German or French person could ever write such a phrase.
This feeling of the frailty of existence – this sense of mortality – is linked with a vision of history. Large nations think they are making history. And if you make history you take yourself seriously; you even begin to worship yourself. People say, for instance, history will judge us. But how will it judge us? It will judge us badly. It will judge us…
McEwan: Severely?
Kundera: No, not severely, I wouldn’t say severely. It will judge us without any authority to do so. Why think that it will judge us justly? The judgement of history is bound to be unjust, perhaps even stupid. To say that history will judge us – which is commonplace enough, everybody says it – means you automatically understand history as rational – with the right to judge, with the right to truth. It is the understanding you find among large nations who, making history, always see it as wise and positive.
If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history. History is something hostile, something you must defend yourself against. You feel, spontaneously, that history is unjust, often stupid, and you can’t take it seriously. Hence our special humour: a humour capable of seeing history as grotesque.
McEwan: You have written a great deal about what happens when people come to believe in utopias, when they think they have made a paradise on earth. You see them dancing in a closed circle, their hearts overflowing with an intense feeling of innocence. They are like children. Or they are on a Great March, fists raised, chanting the same syllables in unison. And yet your characters who break away from the circle are deeply cynical – sometimes attractively so. But all the same, their lives are made to seem sterile. Between this cynicism and this mindless circle-dancing you don’t seem to offer us much.
Kundera: I’m not a priest. I can’t tell people what to believe.
McEwan: You were in paradise yourself once. You danced in a circle after 1948, didn’t you, when the Communists first came into power in Czechoslovakia? When did you leave the dance? Was it another very slow process or was it decisive?
Kundera: The further away I get from it, the more I have the impression it was a swift process. But that is certainly the optical illusion of somebody who is already very far removed from it: it could not have been very swift.
McEwan: I was interested to find in the last section of your new novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a very different attitude to paradise. Your heroine Tereza has retreated to the countryside with her husband Tomas and their dog Karenin. You write: ‘Comparing Adam and Karenin leads me to the thought that in Paradise man was not yet man. Or to be more precise, man had not yet been cast out on man’s path. Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line.’ And just a little later you reflect on the danger of treating animals as soulless machines: ‘By doing so man cuts the thread binding him to Paradise and has nothing left to hold or comfort him on his flight through the emptiness of time.’ So this is a paradise worth hanging on to. What relationship does it have to that other, mindless paradise you describe so scornfully elsewhere?
Kundera: Tereza longs for paradise. It’s a longing, ultimately, not to be man.
McEwan: But the man who dances in your circle, lost in mindless enthusiasm – hasn’t he also ceased to be a man?
Kundera: Fanatical people don’t cease to be human. Fanaticism is human. Fascism is human. Communism is human. Murder is human. Evil is human. This is why Tereza longs for a state in which man is not man. The paradise of political utopia is based on the belief in man. This is why it ends in massacres. Tereza’s paradise isn’t based on the belief in man.
McEwan: Towards the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, you elaborate on the idea of kitsch. By kitsch, then, you mean more than just bad taste?
Kundera: Oh yes, far more. I use the word, which was first used in Munich in the nineteenth century, in its original sense. Germany and Central Europe were both Romantic in the nineteenth century – more Romantic than realist. And they really produced kitsch in enormous quantities. The nineteenth century is the first century without a style. All kinds of styles were imitated, especially in architecture: renaissance, baroque, gothic, everything all at once. Hermann Broch wrote a very fine essay called ‘Comments on Kitsch’ in which he asks this: wasn’t the nineteenth century really the century not of Romanticism but of kitsch? By which he means a kind of absolute artistic opportunism capable of drawing on anything in order to move people emotionally. It was eclecticism with one imperative: that it must please. The great Romantics were, according to Broch, exceptions in a sea of kitsch. Broch sees Wagner as kitsch, for example, and Tchaikovsky.
McEwan: You have written: ‘Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’ According to you the function of kitsch is to conceal death. Does this mean there is no conceivable politics without kitsch?
Kundera: In my view, politics – in the sense of political parties, elections, modern politics – is unthinkable without kitsch. It is inevitable. The function of the successful politician is to please. He is meant to please the largest number of people humanly possible, and to please so many you must rely on the cliché they want to hear.
McEwan: Do the Russians want to please?
Kundera: It’s true they don’t need to. They have power without being obliged to please people to keep it. Brezhnev didn’t need to please anybody. But the party slogans, party demagogy, and all that: that’s intended to please. That’s kitsch on a grand scale.
McEwan: Ortega y Gasset said that tears and laughter are aesthetically false.
Kundera: Yes, I don’t know that quotation, but that’s right. I had a letter the other day from a Swedish reader who said: ‘But do you realize that, in fact, to accept you, we cover up what disturbs us and turn you into kitsch? When The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published, the reviewers talked only about the character, Tamina. It is an interesting part of the book. It’s no worse than the rest. But it also has an emotional, “kitschifiable” motif – the relationship between a woman and her dead husband whom she still loves. Nobody mentioned the last part of your book which has this anti-social, anti-human quality. And the reason they didn’t mention it was to kitschify you.’
McEwan: Let’s pass on to other things. Do you think the key to all human relations is to be found in sexual relationships? Is what happens between a man and a woman a mirror for all human relationships?
Kundera: I don’t know. It is certainly a very revealing situation, but I wouldn’t like to say that everything stops there.
McEwan: Your starting point always seems to be a marriage, an affair…. There seems to be an obsession with constant love-making.
Kundera: Yes, but it either reveals the essence of a situation or it has no place in the novel. When my characters make love, they grasp, suddenly, the truth of their life or their relationship. For example, in The Farewell Party: Jakob and Olga have always been secure in their relationship. All at once they sleep together, and their relationship becomes unbearable. It becomes unbearable because this feeling of pity suddenly materializes during the sexual act and it becomes something absolutely horrible: pity is an impossible foundation for love. In The Joke, when Ludwik makes love to Helena, we suddenly see that his sexuality is based on vengeance. The whole book is based on this single act of intercourse. When Sabina makes love with Franz, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, she suddenly becomes aware that he is like a puppy feeding from her breasts, sucking. She sees him as an animal – a small animal who has come to depend on her – and this aspect of him suddenly disgusts her. At a glance, she sees the truth of their relationship.
McEwan: The identity of your characters is revealed through their sexuality….
Kundera: Take Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Her problem is her identity, the relationship of body and soul; her soul doesn’t feel comfortable in her body. It is expressed most clearly in a scene when she is making love with the engineer. She suddenly feels that her soul is completely remote during the act, watching her body making love. She becomes excited by this detachment; you see her problem, the theme on which her character is based, suddenly emerge during that act of love. In that sense, these erotic scenes serve to illuminate characters and situations.
McEwan: You write very well about the desire to be a victim. Being a victim, according to you, is not simply something which happens to someone, it is also something that someone, the victim, dreams.
Kundera: For example?
McEwan: Many of your characters are consumed by sexual jealousy. They inhabit their jealousy; they seem to love it, or need it. They are victims, of course, but they cultivate their own particular hell.
Kundera: That’s an interesting idea, but to be honest I’ve never thought about it that way. I’ve got nothing much to add; you’re right.
McEwan: You write a lot about the obsession with sexual conquest. Do you think there is any connection between that and political conquest, the conquest of one country by another?
Kundera: I don’t know.
McEwan: For example, sometimes the fate of your characters is very much caught up with the fate of their country. Tamina in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is strongly identified with Czechoslovakia. She is in exile, she is cut off from her own past. Can one talk of countries as victims? Some of your most victimized characters make strong identifications with the oppressors. Ruzena in The Farewell Party, for example, is a pathetic figure in some ways, but she sides with the mad old men who go round killing people’s dogs, and she is on the side of the fat women at the swimming pool who revel in their nakedness and ugliness. There is a collusion between the oppressors and oppressed, an intimacy that is almost sexual.
Kundera: It is true. You’re absolutely right; I was not completely conscious of it. But it is true.
McEwan: It would be better for me to say some things that weren’t true: you could deny them eloquently…. Novels and films where the private and the political can be resolved inside one situation are always attractive.
Kundera: The same things that happen at the level of high politics happen in private life. George Orwell has written of a world in which the Political Power rewrites history: decides what the truth is, what is to be remembered, what forgotten. As a novelist, though, I have different interests. I am much more interested in the fact that each of us, consciously or unconsciously, rewrites our own history. We are constantly rewriting our own biographies, constantly bringing our own sense – the sense we want – to events. We are selecting and shaping – picking out the things that reassure and flatter us, while deleting anything that might possibly detract. To rewrite history, then – to rewrite history even in Orwell’s sense – is not an inhuman activity. On the contrary, it is very human. People always see the political and the personal as different worlds, as if each had its own logic, its own rules. But the very horrors that take place on the big stage of politics resemble, strangely but insistently, the small horrors of our private life.
McEwan: You once said you thought it was the task of the novel to expose ‘anthropological scandals’. What did you mean by that?
Kundera: I was talking about the situation in totalitarian states. I said that for a writer everything that was going on there was not a political scandal, but an anthropological one. That is, I didn’t look at it in terms of what a political regime could do, but in terms of this question: what is man capable of?
McEwan: But why scandal?
Kundera: A scandal is what shocks us; everybody talks about the shocking ways of this bureaucracy, this Communist system, that has given birth to the gulags, political trials, and Stalinist purges. They describe it all as a political scandal. But people forget the obvious fact that a political system can do no more than the men in it: if man wasn’t capable of killing, no political system could engender a war. A system exists around the limits of what human beings can do. Nobody, for example, can spit four metres into the air, even if the system demands it. You can’t do more than half a metre. Or piss that far: even if Stalin orders it, you can’t do it. But you can kill. So the anthropological question – the question of what man is capable of – is always there behind the political one.
McEwan: I have the impression you believe the novel is capable of granting us a very special understanding of the world, of permitting insights that no other form of enquiry could equal.
Kundera: Yes, I believe that the novel can say something that can’t be said any other way. But just what this specific thing is, it is very difficult to say. You could put it negatively. You could say, for example, that the novel’s purpose is not to describe society, because there are certainly better ways of doing that. Nor does it exist to describe history, because that can be done by historiography. Novelists are not here to denounce Stalinism because Solzhenitsyn can do that in his proclamations. But the novel is the only way to describe, to show, to analyse, to peel away human existence in all its aspects. I don’t see any intellectual activity which could do what the novel accomplishes. Not even existential philosophy. Because the novel has an inbuilt scepticism in relation to all systems of thought. Novels naturally begin by assuming that it is essentially impossible to fit human life into any kind of system. That is why the questions you put to me a moment ago were not easy for me to answer. The questions of paradise, or power, or the relation of power to existence or to eroticism. I examine these questions only as they are expressed in the relations between different fictional characters, and that means that, in the novel, you are always aware of several possible answers to every question. The novel doesn’t answer questions: it offers possibilities.
McEwan: A distinctive feature of your fiction is the presence of the author as a kind of chorus, questioning and commenting on the behaviour and motives of his characters. This voice seems to emerge in The Joke and its presence has been very strong in the last two novels. Are the techniques of the traditional novel, with its invisible author, insufficient for your purposes?
Kundera: Well, there are three things to say here. First, I’d already used that technique in an earlier book. You’ll find this narrator in Life is Elsewhere. You’ll find it too in my short stories. But it is true that recently I’ve used this voice more and more. Second, you ask if this kind of narration supersedes the traditional novel, which doesn’t need any commentary. But it was really only in the nineteenth century that the narrator disappeared completely. He was always there in eighteenth century novels. He is there in Rabelais, in Cervantes, in Sterne. My third point: I said earlier that for me the value of the novel is in the way it can examine the essence of a situation. It doesn’t just represent situations – jealousy, say, or tenderness, or the taste for power – it arrests them, comes to a halt by them, looks closely at them, ponders them, interrogates them, asks questions of them, understands them as enigmas. Once you start to understand them as enigmas then you have to start thinking about them. Take jealousy, for example. It is so commonplace as to make any explanation seem unnecessary. But if you begin to pause and think about it, it is different. It’s unbearable to see a woman you love making love to another man. Suddenly the commonplace becomes difficult, troubling, enigmatic. I’d even say it is the novelist’s ambition to represent the enigmatic, precisely because so much in everyday life has become commonplace and trivialized. I need to hear in the novel the voice that is thinking, but not the voice of a philosopher. What does that mean? You asked me questions about my novels which already contained a great deal of knowledge, even though formulated as questions. That’s very much like the novelist’s method, which is to go further and further, right to the heart of the problem, without ever offering an answer.
McEwan: You go to great lengths to avoid giving your characters a ‘psychology’ – in fact your work seems quite opposed to the psychological novel. You often stop to remind us that your characters are pure artifice. And yet, paradoxically, you manage to make them seem very real. I think this is because your intrusive narrator talks about your characters in much the same way as perceptive people might talk about a close friend. Your interventions are a form of higher gossip. And that makes us think these characters really exist.
Kundera: Yes, that’s right. I don’t claim to know everything about the character. I can’t, just as I can’t claim to know everything about a friend. I am really writing on the level of hypothesis. It is the same with friends. Even if you are talking of your best friend – and you say everything that can be said – your observation remains a hypothesis.
McEwan: Was it your admiration for Kafka that caused you to write that the novel investigates life in the trap the world has become?
Kundera: Ah yes, the novel of today examines the trap the world has become. The history of the novel is a mirror of man’s history, but something happened when Kafka arrived…something which is still not properly recognized. Usually Modernism in the novel is represented by the trinity of Joyce, Proust and Kafka. Whereas it has always seemed to me that Proust and Joyce are the fulfillment, the completion of a long process of evolution that goes back to Flaubert. Something quite different begins with Kafka and possibly with Broch and Musil. Until Kafka, the monster that man fought against was the monster inside him – what determined his inner life, his past, his childhood, his complexes. In Kafka, for the first time, the monster comes from the outside: the world is perceived as the trap. In Kafka, man is being determined from outside himself: the power of The Castle, from the power of the invisible tribunal of The Trial. In my books, it is history which traps the European man. What are the possibilities in a world that has become our trap? What choices do we have? What forms of life are there? Now it makes no difference, ultimately, if K. has an Oedipus complex or a father-fixation: it won’t change his fate in the least. But it would change the fate of a Proust character completely. The world of Proust or Flaubert was open. History was invisible. It was something that couldn’t be grasped, even. For us, history is concrete, palpable. It is war. It is a political regime. It is the end of Europe. It is absolutely graspable – grasping – and we’re in it: caught. Hence, the trap.
McEwan: You have a phrase about solitude being violated in Kafka’s characters.
Kundera: Yes. You’re surrounded by a community – that was Kafka’s nightmare – in which your solitude is utterly violated, massacred: it ceases to exist. Everybody can see you; you’re never alone. Kafka is still interpreted in the terms of the generation that preceded him. It’s like talking about Beethoven in terms of Haydn. Kafka is still seen through the romantic cliché of solitude: that man is threatened by solitude, that solitude is purely negative, that the tragedy of the intellectual is that he has lost his roots among the people. And Kafka himself is thus the author suffering from solitude, looking for community, for brotherhood, wanting to find his place in the world – even though it was precisely this very cliché which Kafka turned upside down. Kafka’s world is in fact totally different. The Land Surveyor in The Castle is bored and fed up with the world around him. It’s not brotherhood he’s looking for; it’s a job. But instead he’s pestered by everybody. He is watched. He sleeps in the same bed as his assistants and can’t sleep with Frida because they are always there, with him. In Kafka, those who find their place in society do so by renouncing their solitude and, in the long run, their personalities.
What, ultimately, does brotherhood mean? Kafka turns the notion on its head. It becomes something hateful, terrible, and threatening. Kafka challenges one of the most accepted notions about society. And this is precisely the task of all novelists: to challenge, constantly, the principal notions on which our very existence is based.
Photograph © Wikimedia
