Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

The destiny of the young boy Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere exhausts itself with one empty note of salvation: the opposing symmetry with his father’s destiny. His father lost his life because he believed in the concrete absolute of saving another person’s life. Jaromil lost his life because he believed in the abstract absolute of informing on one person. Jaromil’s father acted as he did because he felt that the necessity of history was a critical necessity. Jaromil acted as he did because he felt that the necessity of history was a lyrical necessity. The father died, perhaps without illusions, but also without delusions. Deluded, the son gave himself up to a dialectics in which each joke is transcended and devoured by a superior joke.

Kundera the novelist, a reader of Novalis, searches only for that instance of writing which — relative as all narrative is, risky as all poetry is — can augment the reality of the world while it says that nothing should support the total weight of life, neither history nor sex nor politics nor poetry.

The Corner of Destiny

In April 1969, democratic socialism was formally buried in Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring, in effect, died two deaths: the first in August 1968, when the Soviet tanks entered so that the elections within the Communist Party would not take place; the second, when the Dubček government, in a country occupied by the “fraternal” invader, desperately looked for the proletarian solution, since it had not been able to apply the armed solution. The Law on Socialist Enterprise created the factory councils as democratic centers for the political initiative of the working class. It was the last straw: the pretension of giving Moscow lessons in proletarian politics. The U.S.S.R. intervened decisively through its local Quislings, Indra and Bilak, to determine the final fall of Alexander Dubček.

Milan Kundera defines democratic socialism in Czechoslovakia as “an attempt to create a socialism without an omnipotent secret police; with freedom of the spoken and written word; with a public opinion of which notice is taken and on which policy is based; with a modern culture freely developing; and with citizens who have lost their fear.”

Who wants to laugh? Who wants to cry? Today the joke in Czechoslovakia is made by the state. This it learned from its enemies — humor, albeit a macabre humor. Do you wish to write novels? Then top my joke, a perfectly legal joke, sanctioned and executed in name of the idyll. Two gravediggers, sent by the Prague government, arrive with a coffin on their shoulders at the house of one of the signers of “Charter 77,” which demands the implementation in Czechoslovakia of the agreements on Human Rights subscribed to in Helsinki by the Husak regime. The police had informed them that the signer had died. The signer says that he hasn’t died. But when they leave and he shuts the door, he waits a moment and asks himself if, in effect, he has not died.

I am soon going to look for my friend Milan and continue talking with him. His shoulders are more burdened, his spirit more introspective, more absent in the profundity of his dark and clear world, where optimism costs dearly because it is much too cheap and where the novel is situated beyond hope and despair in the human territory of moving destinies and relative truths, which is the land of the authors he and I love and read — Cervantes and Kafka, Mann and Broch, Laurence Sterne. For if in history life is elsewhere because in history a man can feel responsible for his destiny but his destiny can feel irresponsible toward him, in literature man and destiny are mutually responsible because one and the other are not a definition or a sermon on any absolute truth, but, quite the contrary, a constant redefinition of each human being as a problem. This is the sense of the destiny of Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere, of Ludvik in The Joke, of the nurse Ruzena, the trumpeter Klima and Dr. Skreta, who injects his semen into the hysterically sterile women in the most finished and disquieting of Kundera’s novels, The Farewell Party. This is the sense of the elegy in his memorable Book of Laughter and Forgetting: when we forget we die, because death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past.

In opposition to the owners of history, Milan Kundera is willing to give it all up for his own destiny and the destiny of his characters outside the “immaculate idyll” that pretends to give all and gives nothing. The illusion of the future has been the idyll of modern history. Kundera dares to say that the future has already taken place, under our noses, and that it stinks.

And if the future has already taken place, only two attitudes are possible. One is to admit to the farce; the other is to start all over again and rethink the problems of human beings. In this final corner of the comical spirit and the tragic wisdom where the idyll cannot penetrate with its historic and histrionic light, Milan Kundera writes some of the great novels of our time.

His corner is not a jail. A jail, Kundera warns us, is but another space of the idyll, which amuses itself in theatrically illuminating even the most impenetrable penal shadows. It is not a circus either, Power has found the means of wiping the smile off the citizens’ faces and forcing them to laugh legally.

It is the internal utopia, the real space of the untouchable life, the reign of humor where Plutarch understood the character of history better than in the bloodiest of combats or in the most memorable of sieges.

This is a cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.

I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood.

“How realities are to be learned or discovered is perhaps too great a question for you or me to determine, Cratylus; but it is worthwhile to have reached even this conclusion, that they are to be learned and sought for, not from names but much better through themselves than through names…”

“That is clear, Socrates…”

The first of these three quotations is from a famous passage in One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, in which, after a plague of insomnia, the whole village of Macondo is affected by loss of memory, so that Aureliano Buendía devises a saving formula: he marks everything in the village with its name— table, chair, clock, wall, bed, cow, goat, pig, hen.

At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS.

In the second quotation, from Swann’s Way, the Narrator has just accomplished one of the greatest feats of modern fiction: the liberation of time, through the liberation of an instant from time that permits the human person to re-create himself or herself and his or her time. This splendid literary achievement, through which the novel becomes the ideal vehicle for the reintroduction of the human person into time and through time into himself or herself, his or her authenticity, has its fragile but luminescent origin in what is probably a handful of lies: just a few names, Balbec, Guermantes, Venice, Parma, in which the Narrator learns that names forever absorb the image of reality because they are the privileged meeting places of desire; and desire through names can substitute for time itself:

Even in spring, to come in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman Gothic.