IGNORANCE
By Milan Kundera
Several years ago the historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote a book about his
return to East Germany after the fall of Communism. It was called The File,
and took its title from the file the East German state police kept on him while
he was doing research there. At the core of the book was an inquiry into how
memory makes us what we are, and how it may be only another kind of imagination.
Who was the real Timothy Garton Ash? The figure codenamed "Romeo" he
read about in his files, or the person he remembered himself to be? What common
identity do they share?
Garton Ash’s return to post-Communist Berlin is cast in the language of
Graham Greene and John LeCarre, but he might have borrowed from the work of
Milan Kundera. Now living in Paris and writing in French, Kundera, an expatriate
Czech, has long been exploring themes of exile and memory similar to those
encountered by Garton Ash. There is even a moment in Ignorance when
Josef, one of the main characters, is confronted with his own "file":
a diary he kept as a young man. The experience of reading it years later is
shocking: "How can two such alien, such opposite beings have the same
handwriting? What common essence is it that makes a single person of him and
this little snot?"
Kundera has a habit of worrying over words - how they mean different things
to different people, how dependent they are upon context, and how etymologies
reveal underlying relations between words and feelings. This time around his
attention is focused not so much on ignorance, his title, as memory and
nostalgia. In one of his familiar exploratory asides he relates nostalgia to the
pain of ignorance, but the connection isn’t developed. Instead, the pain of
nostalgia, the suffering of Odysseus, "caused by an unappeased yearning to
return," is another variation on the unbearable lightness of being: the
sense of having lost the connection to one’s own past.
The two main characters in the book are both Czech émigrés returning to
their homeland after a twenty-year exile. As if often the case with Kundera,
their experience is one of disjunction. They can’t relate to any of the old
places, the people they knew who stayed behind, or even each other. The
"law of masochistic memory" has allowed them to "slough off
whatever they dislike, and feel lighter, freer." To avoid the pain of
nostalgia they play at falling in love, since love and sex are like the drugs of
the Lotos-eaters, the pure glorification of the moment. Everything else can be
ignored. And yet the fact remains that our lives are largely constituted of what
is left over, of the parts that are sloughed off.
There isn’t much more to Ignorance than this. The story and
characters - often disposable items for Kundera - provide only a slight thread
from which to hang his ruminations on memory, history, identity and loss. It is
all professionally done, and Kundera’s paradoxes are always worth mulling
over, but the book remains little more than a brief essay on themes he has
handled before.
Notes:
Review first published November 30, 2002.
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