Milan Kundera and the Erasure of History and Memory…

I’m returning to one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite pieces of literature: these two quotes by Milan Kundera from his 1978 masterpiece, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. They are both particularly striking, ominous, and prescient at this point in time, socially and politically, and in every other way imaginable. Everyone will interpret them in a different manner, based on their sociopolitical beliefs and geography. Kundera had an extraordinary capability to capture and contextualize the complexities, arc, drama, tapestry, contradictions, and historicity of human existence and experience, intertwining philosophy, history, psychology, human (mis)behavior and often misanthropy, politics, art, and sexuality. Of course, he had tremendous experience with all these subjects, having lived under the brutal and oppressive totalitarian communist Czechoslovakian government after its capture and subjugation by the Soviet Union. He suffered many indignities, both as a writer and a human being, at the hands of this regime until he escaped and became a permanent exile in France in 1975. But (thankfully for us), he could never shake off the trauma of these catastrophic and abominable human historical and socio-political “failures” (to put it very mildly) and thus went on to produce what became some of the greatest and most ominous and apocalyptic literary masterworks— fiction and nonfiction alike — with his gaze fixed on the society in which we now find ourselves: one within which we may feel inescapably and irrevocably ensnared, destined to live out our futures in the merciless unfolding of a history in the making, and one from which we ultimately cannot escape, even when we recognize its inexorable approach.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera wrote “The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! for everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.” Sadly, this “age of universal deafness and incomprehension” has arrived as Kundera predicted, in no small part thanks to the digital and mass social media age and society through and in which everyone and everything is subsumed and is drowning without a lifejacket.