https://kellychang2713.blogspot.com/2024/11/how-did-kundera-handle-history-in-his.html
C.S.: But what specifically can the novel say about history? Or, what is your way of treating history?
M.K.: Here are some of my own principles.
First: All historical circumstances I treat with the greatest economy. I behave toward history like the stage designer who constructs an abstract set out of the few items indispensable to the action.
Second principle: Of the historical circumstances, I keep only those that create a revelatory existential situation for my characters. Example: In The Joke, Ludvik sees all his friends and colleagues raise their hands to vote, with utter ease, his exclusion from the university and thus to topple his life. He is certain that they would, if necessary, have voted with the same ease to hang him. Whence his definition of man: a being capable in any situation of consigning his neighbor to death. Ludvik's fundamental anthropological experience thus has historical roots, but the description of the history itself (the role of the Party, the political bases of terror, the organization of social institutions, etc.) does not interest me, and you will not find it in the novel.
Third principle: Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography. Example: In the years that followed the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the reign of terror against the public was preceded by officially organized massacres of dogs. An episode totally forgotten and without importance for a historian, for a political scientist, but of the utmost anthropological significance! By this one episode alone I suggested the historical climate of The Farewell Party. Another example: At the crucial point of Life Is Elsewhere, History intervenes in the form of an inelegant and shabby pair of undershorts; there were no others to be had at the time; faced with the loveliest erotic occasion of his life, Jaromil, for fear of looking ridiculous in his shorts, dares not undress and takes flight instead. Inelegance! Another historical circumstance forgotten, and yet how important for the person obliged to live under a Communist regime. But it is the fourth principle that goes furthest: Not only must historical circumstance create a new existential situation for a character in a novel, but History itself must be understood and analyzed as an existential situation. Example: In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Alexander Dubcek—after being arrested by the Russian army, kidnapped, jailed, threatened, forced to negotiate with Brezhnev—returns to Prague. He speaks over the radio, but he cannot speak, he gasps for breath, in mid-sentence he makes long, awful pauses. What this historical episode reveals for me (an episode, by the way, completely forgotten because, two hours later, the radio technicians were made to cut the painful pauses out of his speech) is weakness. Weakness as a very general category of existence: 'Any man confronted with superior strength is weak, even if he has an athletic body like Dubcek's." Tereza cannot bear the spectacle of that weakness, which repels and humiliates her, and she chooses to emigrate. But in the face of Tomas' infidelities, she is like Dubcek faced with Brezhnev: defenseless and weak. And you know already what vertigo is: intoxication with one's own weakness, the insuperable desire to fall. Tereza abruptly understands that "she belonged among the weak, in the camp Third principle: Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography. Example: In the years that followed the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the reign of terror against the public was preceded by officially organized massacres of dogs. An episode totally forgotten and without importance for a historian, for a political scientist, but of the utmost anthropological significance! By this one episode alone I suggested the historical climate of The Farewell Party. Another example: At the crucial point of Life Is Elsewhere, History intervenes in the form of an inelegant and shabby pair of undershorts; there were no others to be had at the time; faced with the loveliest erotic occasion of his life, Jaromil, for fear of looking ridiculous in his shorts, dares not undress and takes flight instead. Inelegance! Another historical circumstance forgotten, and yet how important for the person obliged to live under a Communist regime.
But it is the fourth principle that goes furthest: Not only must historical circumstance create a new existential situation for a character in a novel, but History itself must be understood and analyzed as an existential situation. Example: In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Alexander Dubcek—after being arrested by the Russian army, kidnapped, jailed, threatened, forced to negotiate with Brezhnev—returns to Prague. He speaks over the radio, but he cannot speak, he gasps for breath, in mid-sentence he makes long, awful pauses. What this historical episode reveals for me (an episode, by the way, completely forgotten because, two hours later, the radio technicians were made to cut the painful pauses out of his speech) is weakness. Weakness as a very general category of existence: 'Any man confronted with superior strength is weak, even if he has an athletic body like Dubcek's." Tereza cannot bear the spectacle of that weakness, which repels and humiliates her, and she chooses to emigrate. But in the face of Tomas' infidelities, she is like Dubcek faced with Brezhnev: defenseless and weak. And you know already what vertigo is: intoxication with one's own weakness, the insuperable desire to fall. Tereza abruptly understands that "she belonged among the weak, in the camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and that she had to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle of sentences." And, intoxicated with weakness, she leaves Tomas and returns to Prague, back to the "city of the weak." Here the historical situation is not a background, a stage set before which human situations unfold; it is itself a human situation, a growing existential situation. Similarly, the Prague Spring in The Book of Laugh ter and Forgetting is not described in its politico-historico-social aspect but as a fundamental existential situation: man (a generation of men) acts (makes a revolution), but his action slips out of his control, ceases to obey him (the revolution rages, kills, destroys); he thereupon does his utmost to recapture and subdue that disobedient act (a new generation starts an opposition, reformist movement), but in vain. Once out of our hands, the act can never be recaptured. (The Art of the Novel, kindle location 338/1529)
