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Thesis Tim Jones Slowness , Identity and Ignorance : Milan Kundera’s French Variations Tim Jones Thesis submitted 2012 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy: School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia 2 Abstract This thesis explores in detail three academically neglected novels by Milan Kundera: Slowness (1995), Identity (1998) and Ignorance (2002). Originally written in French, the author’s second language, after six novels, a short-story collection and a play originally written in Czech, these texts are often bracketed off from the rest of his writing and seen as something of an inferior addendum. This is despite clear thematic similarities that cross the linguistic divide and that I demonstrate here are of central significance to the author’s entire novelistic project. This exploration not only reveals that these three French novels place in the foreground themes that have rippled in and out of focus across Kundera’s earlier Czech work and so are of central importance to Kundera as a novelist. It also shows that the lateness of the variations on the themes of slowness, identity and ignorance within these three French novels does not hold everything in common with the lateness that Adorno locates in late Beethoven. It is true that like late Beethoven, Kundera’s late variations on these themes demonstrate the manoeuvres of an oeuvre sensing its death across the horizon. But through the specific nature of the late variations on slowness, identity and ignorance, the oeuvre works hard to pull its readers down into the textual spaces of these three late novels with a fresh urgency, rather than truculently push them away, so that Kundera’s audience might be adequately prepared to continue its own voyages once the oeuvre has played its final notes. 3 Contents Introduction: Milan Kundera and Variation Form 4 Part One: Slowness 1. Variations on Slowness 22 2. Slowness 44 Part Two: Identity 3. Variations on Identity 68 4. Identity 91 Part Three: Ignorance 5. Variations on Ignorance 109 6. Ignorance 129 Conclusion 147 Bibliography 155 4 Introduction: Milan Kundera and Variation Form Kundera’s fourth novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , is the first and only novel to acknowledge directly the centrality of variation form to the author’s novelistic aesthetic. For much of its length, the text resembles a series of discrete short-stories, each concerning separate characters who never encounter one another and occurring across reasonably diverse geographic locations. Part Six, however, reintroduces Tamina, previously the main character of Part Four, and then clarifies that the book is ‘a novel in the form of variations.’1 For the novel’s extra-diegetic narrator, who has modelled his work explicitly upon the principles of Beethoven’s own musical variations as discovered through the narrator’s relationship with his musicologist father, this means that ‘The various parts [of the novel] follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation, the understanding of which recedes from [his] sight into the distance’ ( LF , 227). The innovations that this narrator locates in Beethoven’s variations provide him with two key insights. Firstly, the concept of the infinite does not just apply to the endless space existing outside of and beyond the exterior contours of each physical object, but also to the secretive interior space ‘lying hidden in all things’, including those ‘things’ belonging to the more abstract world of concepts and themes (226). Secondly, through the particular style of variation form in which Beethoven excelled, this abstract interior infinity can not only be observed, but journeyed through and investigated as readily as the infinity of more physical spaces, as successive variations on a theme proceed from the simplicity and coherence of that theme’s outside surface and proceed deeper and deeper into and through the interior that stretches boundlessly beneath it. For its narrator, what makes Laughter and Forgetting a novel, rather than a series of short stories, is not a unity of narrative or character or place, but the seven sections’ shared devotion to picking apart the same themes, which, as the variations upon them accrue, are approached from disparate, occasionally contradictory angles, which muddy rather than deepen any understanding of these themes as entities that can be readily grasped as a totality, or conceptually finalised. 2 The surface version of the theme of forgetting is provided in Part One by Mirek’s naively black-and- white hypothesis that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’, forgetting being here an imposition of those in charge against the people they are attempting to dominate, and memory the tool of the oppressed best suited to combating this practice (3). Successive sections of the novel then move through an unfolding sequence of variations upon the theme of forgetting that open this simplistic treatment to vigorous problematisations. Mirek himself, for example, soon demonstrates that forgetting can be a process deliberately effected in order to whitewash ungainly aspects of our own past, so that he himself is aligned with the very phenomenon that he envisages as inflicted upon him from above (30). The following section then 5 demonstrates that forgetting can be an entirely natural process arrived at through aging (59), while later sections show Tamina concertedly working to enshrine her memories against a potentially fatal forgetting advanced by not just a temporal distance, but an enforced geographical distance also (114- 16). Investigating a theme via variation form can thus facilitate the very opposite of reaching a definitive conclusion regarding its essence, which potentially takes on additional levels of complexity and nuance for as long as the continuing voyage keeps the boundless interiority of the theme as the subject of its investigation. Central to this thesis is the notion that the structural principles of Laughter and Forgetting apply not only to that novel, but to Kundera’s oeuvre as a whole, which functions on a large scale much like Laughter and Forgetting in microcosm. What the narrator of that novel takes from Beethoven and applies to the structure of his single text, Kundera too applies to the structure of his oeuvre, each novel in which contains, to a greater or lesser extent, major or minor variations on the themes placed at the front and centre of each of his other novels. Just three pages before the above explanation of the nature of Laughter and Forgetting , for example, the text directly evokes the categories of ‘lightness’ and ‘weight’ that will be placed at the forefront of Kundera’s next novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (224). As this thesis will spend much of its time demonstrating, this is just one of numerous possible examples of a common thematic overspill from novel to novel. The result is an oeuvre that can be envisaged as a cat’s cradle of overlapping sequences of variations, together leading into and through the infinite interiors of each of the oeuvre’s key themes. This thesis too is a voyage, which sets out to explore three of the possible series of variations that run throughout Kundera’s oeuvre, starting from the opening scene of his very first novel, The Joke , and proceeding into the interiors of what, at the time of writing, are his three latest: the critically neglected French novels Slowness , Identity and Ignorance . It is a thesis about these three French novels, and whenever these three novels go offstage, it is a thesis for them. As this voyage progresses, it will chart three series of variations on the eponymous themes of these French novels from The Joke and across Kundera’s Czech fiction. It will demonstrate how the prevailing trends and turns within these three series are then engaged with in the respective French novels that place these three themes in the foreground. It will consider also how each French novel builds too upon the nature of the previous French novel’s engagement with the prior variations on its own theme, as these three texts carry the oeuvre ever further towards its eventual silence. This thesis does not seek to establish a general rule about how variation form is deployed to a greater or lesser extent across postmodern fiction, but to use one author’s heavy use of it, across an oeuvre dedicated to one particular novelist project, as a lens through which to examine the place in this oeuvre of the three late French novels Slowness , Identity and Ignorance. Having said this, Kundera’s use of variation form as a structuring principle across his oeuvre does not make him anything like the only author to borrow from music. Calvin S. Brown’s Music 6 and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts is one of the earliest works to investigate the various formal similarities between music and literature and is a useful starting point for a consideration of the ways in which the latter has sometimes modelled itself upon borrowings from the former, including that of the principle of theme and variations that Brown argues has been prevalent in music since the sixteenth-century. 3 His investigation of this specific cross-over, in both the aforementioned book and a later essay “Theme and Variations as a Literary Form”, principally restricts itself to a small handful of poetic case-studies, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost and Browning’s The Ring and the Book , with only a fleeting and somewhat simplistic reference to Don Quixote as a novel ‘built on various episodes each of which is a different manifestation of the same general idea.’ 4 It is worth pointing out that Cervantes’ text is not only understandable as a novel in the form of variations if we take each of Quixote and Sancho’s encounters with various objects and groups of people essentially to echo the same basic set-up.
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