Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Can the man who thus speaks then write, in order to oppose one ideology, novels of the opposite ideology? Borges says of the Koran that it is an Arab book because no camels are ever mentioned in it. Elizabeth Pochoda has noted that the longevity of political oppression in Czechoslovakia is witnessed in the novels of Kundera because it is never mentioned.

The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn’t deserve a novel, says Kundera. What he finds interesting is the similarity between totalitarianism and “the immemorial and fascinating dream of a harmonious society where private life and public life form but one unity and all are united around one will and one faith. It is not accidental that the most favored genre in the culminating period of Stalinism was the idyll.”

The word has been spoken and no one expected it. The word is a scandal. It is comfortable to protect oneself behind the grotesque definition of art offered by Stalin: “Socialist content and national form.” It is very amusing and very bitter (the bitter joke is really a structure of the narrative universe of Kundera) to translate this definition into pragmatic terms, as a Prague critic explained it to Philip Roth: socialist realism consists in writing the praise of the government and the party in such a way that even the government and the party will understand it.

The scandal, the unsuspected truth, is what we hear through the voice of Milan Kundera: totalitarianism is an idyll.

Idyll

Idyll is the name of the terrible, constant, and decomposed wind that blows through the pages of Milan Kundera’s books. It is the first thing we must understand. Warm breath of nostalgia, stormy glare of hope: the frozen eye of two movements, one leading us to reconquer the harmonious past of the origin, the other promising the perfect beatitude of the future. They confuse themselves in one movement, one history. Only historical action would offer us, simultaneously, the nostalgia of what we were and the hope of what we shall be. The rub, Kundera tells us, is that between these two movements in the idyllic process of becoming one, history will not let us simply be ourselves in the present. The commerce of history consists in “selling people a future in exchange for a past.”

In the famous conference at the University of Jena in 1789, Schiller demanded the future now. In the very year of the French Revolution, the poet refused a promise constantly deferred, so that it would always be a lie without any possible confirmation, thus always a truth, always a promise at the expense of the wholeness of the present. The Enlightenment consummated the secularization of Judeo-Christian millenarianism and for the first time placed the Golden Age not only on earth but in the future. From the most ancient soothsayer to Don Quixote, from Ovid to Erasmus — all of them seated around the same bonfire of goatherds — the time of paradise was in the past. But starting with Condorcet, the idyll only has one time: the future. On its promises the industrial world of the West is built.

The great contribution of Marx and Engels is the recognition that man lives not by the future alone. The luminous future of humanity — a humanity severed by the Enlightenment from all bonds with the past, defined by its philosophers as barbarous and irrational — consists for communism also in restoring the original idyll, the harmonious paradise of communal property, the Eden degraded by private property. Few utopias are more seductive in this sense than that described by Engels in his prologue to The Dialectics of Nature.

Capitalism and communism share the vision of the world as a vehicle toward a goal that is deemed identical to happiness. But if capitalism proceeds by way of atomization, convinced that the best way to dominate is to isolate, to pulverize, to augment the necessities and satisfactions — both of them equally artificial — of individuals who need more and feel happier as their isolation grows, communism proceeds by way of total integration.

When capitalism tried to save itself with totalitarian methods, it mobilized the masses, dressed them in boots and uniforms, and put swastikas on their arms. The infernal paraphernalia of fascism violated the operative premises of modern capitalism, whose godfathers, one in action, the other in theory, were Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes. It is difficult to fight a system that always criticizes itself and reforms itself with greater concreteness than is immediately possible for even the most severe of its adversaries. But this same system will lack the seductive force of a doctrine that makes the idyll explicit, that promises not only the restoration of the lost Arcadia but also the construction of the Arcadia-to-come. Totalitarian dreams have nourished the imagination of several generations of young people: diabolically, when the idyll had its heaven in the Wagnerian Valhalla and the operatic legions of the new Scipio, in the spirit, of Pound, Céline, and Drieu La Rochelle; angelically, when it could inspire the faith of Romain Rolland and André Malraux, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and André Gide.

The characters in Kundera rotate around this dilemma: to be or not to be in the system of the total idyll — the idyll for all, with no exceptions, with no cracks, an idyll precisely because it no longer admits anything or anybody who could doubt the right of all to happiness in an ubiquitous Arcadia, paradise of the origin and paradise of the future. Not only an idyll, as Kundera underlines in one of his stories, but an idyll for all:

All human beings, since the beginning of time, aspire to the idyll, aspire to this garden where the nightingales sing, this realm of harmony where the world no longer rises alienated against man, and man is alienated against all other men, but where man and men are, on the contrary, made of the same material and where the fire which brightens the sky is the same which brightens the souls. There each individual is a note in a sublime fugue by Bach and whoever would not have it so becomes a black dot, devoid of sense, worthy only of being crushed under the nail like a flea.

Like a flea. Milan Kundera, the other K of Czechoslovakia, has no need for allegory in order to provoke the estrangement and the sense of discomfort with which Franz Kafka flooded, in luminous shadows, the world that already existed without knowing it. Now, the world of Kafka knows it exists. Kundera’s characters have no need of awakening transformed into insects, because the history of Central Europe took care to demonstrate that a man need not be an insect in order to be treated as such. Worse: the characters of Milan K live in a world where all the hypotheses of the metamorphosis of Franz K stand unshaken, with one exception: Gregor Samsa, the cockroach, no longer thinks he knows; now he knows he thinks.

He has a human form, he is called Jaromil and he is a poet.

The Holy Child of Prague

During the Second World War, Jaromil’s father lost his life because he believed in a concrete absolute; he died to protect a woman, save her from being denounced, tortured, and murdered. That woman was the lover of Jaromil’s father. The poet’s mother, who feels an equally absolute repugnance toward physical animality as her husband felt toward moral animality, betrays him, not because she is sensuous, but because she is innocent.

When the father dies, the mother comes out of the kingdom of the dead with her son in her arms. She will wait for him outside his school with a great umbrella. She will portray the beauty of sadness in order to invite her son to become with her that untouchable couple: mother and son, frustrated lovers, absolute protection in exchange for absolute renunciation.

This is precisely what Jaromil is going to demand, first of love, then of the revolution, finally of death: absolute surrender in exchange for absolute protection. It is a futile sentiment, that which the serf offered his lord. Jaromil believes it to be a poetic sentiment, the poetic sentiment, which permits him to position himself not “outside the limits of his experience but well above it.”