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PARTISAN REVIEW
what it seemed to be, a thriller and love story. It is an existential drama.
The feelings of fear, excitement, and sensuality are self-injected antidotes
to the temptations of melodrama, which always makes bad art. The same
technique is used by Kundera in
The Farewell Party.
Written in the form
of a five-part vaudeville (the on ly one of his novels in that particular
form, the others having followed closely the polyphonic-lyrical form
composed of seven parts), it seems to have a clear plot. A famous jazz
trumpetist, married to a beautiful former singer, seeks to escape disaster in
the form of adulterous fatherhood. Not until very late in the novel does
the key scene flutter by. Again, a man is leaving his country. He tells
himself that he has no other choice, but he knows he is lying. In
The
Book oj Laughter and Forgetting,
the exiting character splits in two. One
part of him, the man, stays. The other part, the woman, leaves but later
returns, only to drown while trying to escape from Paradise, a children's
island where the past is abolished . In
The Unbearable Lightness oj Being,
the woman returns first; the man follows her, and they both die in a
traffic accident.
Kundera's style gives his characters an absolute freedom. They are
introduced without warning and vanish without smoke. And they never
seem to be prisoners of plot. Often there is no clear plot at all. Time
collapses; characters enter and leave as if by their own free will. They live
dream-lives. Dreams themselves are part of the characters, defining their
worlds just as much as so-called reality does. There is an impulse at work
here, a drive towards the fantastic, which seems to grow organically out
of the fine thread sewing together the different parts of the novel,
making the narrative thick and light at the same time, creating a lyricism
filled with magic and beauty.
This same aesthetic can also be found in the surrealism of Carlos
Fuentes, the postmodernism of Jorge Luis Borges, and the magical real–
ism of Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende.
Expanding the field of vision, we can find a whole "family" or set of
families in Central and Eastern Europe that fit rather well into this de–
scription: The Serbo-Croation writer Danilo Kis, the Czech dramatist
Vaclav Havel, the Russian novelists and dramatists Andrei Amalrik, Alek–
sandr Vampilov, and Vasily Aksyonov, the Polish dramatist Slawomir
Mrozek. Lately identified as "postmodernist," these Central and East
European writers have much less in common with North American and
Western European contemporary writers than the term suggests. What is
called "postmodernism" today is too broad a term
to
be meaningful for
close textual studies. Postmodernism in the North American and Western
European context is basically a revolt against reason as such, fueled by a
moral and cultural relativism that has revived the nihilism of the last cen–
tury but is deprived of faith in the avant garde, which finally died away
