On Roth and Kundera

Philip Roth writes the most amazing sentences; he threads together sparkling strings of words that throw off lights and colours at once bizarre and wonderful, comical and tragic, laden with meaning but flashing with the odd gleam of the absurd. His fiction is unashamedly fictional, his narratives never missing a turn for the comic, the tangent of the tale never missing a beat and never missing a trick. Milan Kundera’s works, in contrast, are more allegorical than absurdist: his novels describe worlds where gravity is literally defied, where weight and lightness are inverted, and humanity is shaken to pieces by the laughter of angels and devils. While it is the fertility of Roth’s imagination that imbues his plots with a delirious comic energy, it is the poverty of Kundera’s world that leads him to create meaning, through his own fiction, out of a past that was harrowing and a future that is forbidding.

The dark overtones Kundera paints, tied to the shadowy history of his country, give his tales of joking angels and children’s islands an unshakeable sense of realism that is too painful to be absurdist, too ironic to be comic, and yet too empty to be ironic, too laughable to be really funny. Yet the laughter in Kundera’s novels has nothing of the halting, awkward Pinteresque quality, like a bad joke that falls flat. On the contrary, it is a laughter as otherworldly as it is tragic, “real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide…bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad…and we laugh our laughter to the infinity of laughter…O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter; to laugh is to live profoundly.” This is the sound that is heard in “the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all words with its jangle.”

Insistent and exigent in Kundera’s novels is an element of self-awareness that subverts all comedy, “the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch”, the metaphysical recognition of one’s own misery that gives litost its torment. Kundera’s characters refer to themselves as Sisyphus, and the boulders they roll up the hill are the burdens they bear for each other; in his novels there is nothing of the scorn that Camus argued would surmount any fate, that would allow us to “imagine Sisyphus happy”. His characters do not laugh with joy. It is the madness of their laughter that gives their laughter its madness.