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PARTISAN REVIEW
a concert pianist, a former jazz musician, and author of a study of
the Czech composer
Leo~
Janalek. As a fiction writer, he wants to
leave his political past behind him so that he can create it anew in his
imagination. When asked about the criticism of his political aloof–
ness by other dissidents, Kundera defends himself philosophically.
Political concepts are inadequate to a proper understanding of hu–
man life, he says. He passed twenty years in a country (Communist
Czechoslovakia) where
any
human problem, large or small, was con–
sidered only in the political context, and now he wanted to concen–
trate on other things. But the terrorists and bureaucrats of all politi–
cal persuasions are undermining human life. "They are telling us,"
he says, "you are never free. Even in a democracy, when you are a
citizen of another country, we can reach you."
Asked why he lumps together bureaucrats and terrorists, Kun–
dera replies as if it were a matter of structural linguistics . The terror–
ist and bureaucrat share an interlocked vocabulary that "restricts,
reduces, limits" the idea of what we make of ourselves as human.
"The terrorist endangers private life, and, as Kafka has shown, the
bureaucrat invades it. Because of them we are in danger of hearing
Newspeak and Doublethink everywhere."
"We have taken the habit, in our days," Kundera says, "of ex–
aggerating the importance of the political system (it is the heritage of
vulgarized Marxism, adopted, very curiously, by both the right and
the left), and we have ceased to understand what culture is."
InJanuary 1980, Milan Kundera published an essay on Kafka
in
Le Debat,
a French intellectual journal. The essay, "Quelque Part
La
Derriere" ("Somewhere Behind There"), describes the Kafka–
esque universe and relates it to the absurd in twentieth century art
and life.
It
is Kundera's clearest statement about the relationship be–
tween twentieth century politics and literature. In the article, Kun–
dera says that the term
kafkaian
"determined solely by the images of a
novelist, appears to be the only common denominator of situations
(equally literary as real) which no other word," psychological, socio–
logical, or political, can define. He lists four conditions that typify
the Kafkaesque in contemporary life: (1) its universe is an immense,
labyrinthine institution obeying laws that the ordinary individual
cannot understand and that have no relation to human needs or in–
terests. This institution is a mechanism, like a computer, that has
been programmed, but we no longer know when or by whom; (2) in
the bureaucratic universe of Kafkaesque social life, the institutional
dossier operates as a Platonic ideal: it, rather than physical existence,
