The Festival of Insignificance, by Milan Kundera

 

Reading Kundera's final work of fiction is probably not the best way to get started on his oeuvre, considering that it is laconic, spanning just over a hundred pages. Despite this, The Festival of Insignificance is quite an interesting read; not just for the book itself, but also for what it tells us about Milan Kundera. His characteristic bons mots still stand out, like the passage about the nature of a Narcissus that was particularly enthralling. While it is a fun read, what I found more interesting was how the author handles himself throughout the book. This was, as I'd mentioned earlier, his last fiction novel before he passed away last year, and he was bound to get self-indulgent.

Positioning himself as the "master" in the tale, the puppeteer of the narrative, the tale of four friends - Alain, Caliban, Charles, and Ramon - is intertwined with that of another, an elongated version of the Stalin jokes one might have heard of. A seemingly insignificant joke about Stalin hunting twenty-four partridges becomes a subject for discussion and even a critical analysis of him and his loyal aides. A former member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party who went into exile in France, he fleshes out his disconnect with the modern political scene by focusing on the Soviet strongman, sparing nuances of his character and playing on the common perception of him. In fact, in one passage he separates the ages of the four friends, each of whom belongs to a different age group, by comparing their birth year with Stalin's timeline, as we do for Jesus in our modern calendar.

The main plot, or the main event, so to speak, is the celebration of the birthday of D'Ardelo, Ramon's former colleague. D'Ardelo had just been informed by the doctor that he was safe from cancer, yet he involuntarily lied about it persisting to Ramon. Parallelly, we see Stalin and his aides converse, and Alain hallucinates conversations and flashbacks with his mother. Ramon's ramblings about the importance of insignificance, and how it is the essence of life, can be considered the epigraph.

One gets the feeling that this is Kundera's way of saying "Fuck you!" by not wanting to say anything, yet he cannot help by saying so much in so few words. The irony! Or perhaps I am the fool he points his finger at and laughs while I try to explain what I see in the book. The novel offers more insight into Kundera than the narrative that plays out. In the Kundera canon, this book may seem insignificant, yet to him, that trait of insignificance is quite significant to him. The male characters are all extensions of himself at different points in time, and now he wishes to find meaning in life as he ages. It is his grappling with this question that he manifests in the form of a book, questioning the value that life carries, and if it carries none, it must still mean something or at least matter, must it not! The book uses several channels to try and drive home that insignificance is indeed important, specifically the example of the naming of Kaliningrad. These channels are also what he uses to indulge in himself, for a transfixion on this particular subject is a sign of existentialism in a man on his way to disappear. Will he vanish into the annals of history, or will he, like Stalin, be remembered for generations to come?

This is his swansong; he wants to say something more before he goes. However, the world has passed him by. Nobody wants to hear what he has to say, and even if they do, the generational gap prevents them from understanding each other. This feeling of helplessness he names Madeleine, Alain's girlfriend. For someone renowned for his humour, he laments the death of the joke. When even someone like Stalin cracks a joke, it flies over the heads of Kruschev and his aides. Cribbing about the post-joke world, he focuses this unhappiness on Ramon's bad mood at D'Ardelo's party. It is difficult to keep up with the times, and maybe the nature of his jokes has failed to do just that. The overt sexist tones in his descriptions of women are something I can't figure out, and don't help with this either.

At the party, while conversing with Caliban, he brings up the concept of the Hegelian good mood, which explains why he claims that jokes are dead. His malaise prevents him from appreciating the humour, something he would enjoy otherwise. Comedy used to be a way to entertain himself, but now it has become a chore, like Caliban's farcical 'Pakistani'. Does Kundera write this book because he enjoys it, or does he do it out of compulsion, to vent out his frustrations with the world?

The book opens with Alain observing the navels of the women who walk past, and wondering about the erotic nature of the female body. While it does beg the question of misogyny, the obsession with the navel does have another dimension to it - one of genesis. His focus on that, falling angels, the closure that Alain seeks so desperately that he hallucinates conversations, and so on, all tend to the overthinking syllabus of an ailing man. As Diane Johnson says in her article on the book in the New York Times, "Maybe the real joke here is that, sadly, although Kundera is still the powerful and incisive writer he always was, what he has to tell us seems to have less relevance."