Author: Vladimir Miletić
At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border?
Milan Kundera, Identity
I am not one of those psychotherapists who look to the future because the past is dead or anything as ridiculously optimistic. I like the past, especially when it’s murky and ambivalent. I like re-telling past stories because they unlock different futures.
A topic that I often find myself reflecting on is why I had such a strong reaction to personal construct psychology when I encountered it for the first time. Reading Kelly felt like I had finally found someone who was able to articulate all my intuitions about how human beings work and what our fragile relationship to the world may be like. There is no simple answer to a question like that one, only fragments, an ocean of bits and pieces, coincidences, relationships – and books! And because, as Kelly put it, time provides the ultimate bond between things, as years go by, I am able to weave better stories and connect more dots about my life.
This week, I was saddened to learn that one of my favorite writers has died. At the age of 94, Milan Kundera passed away in France, his adopted homeland. I was very lucky to grow up in a family of readers with a sizeable library of books to choose from and that library included all of Milan Kundera’s works. One Tuesday afternoon in 1999, I was bored after school, and I pulled a book from my aunt’s bookshelf. It was a 1970s Yugoslav edition of Kundera’s first novel, The Joke. I opened the book and read the original title in Czech: Žert. There was something about that word that was cheeky and seductive even though I didn’t and still don’t speak Czech, and I immediately and somewhat randomly decided to read it, even though my aunt wasn’t sure if it was age appropriate. She was always unnecessarily concerned with such things, and luckily my father was around to intervene with his famous words: “If he doesn’t understand it, he can simply stop reading it.”
This was the start of a love affair that would last until a few days ago, until July 11th, 2023 – also Tuesday, by the way – when Milan Kundera stopped writing. His short stories, essays and novels have opened a whole world for me. He was one of the people who paved the way for Kelly to come into my life years later, even though this only became obvious with passage of time.
Every few years, when I re-read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I watch out for my own emotional reactions. I can track how I change based on how I react to Tomáš, Tereza or the ever-fascinating Sabina, who famously exclaimed that her enemy is not communism, but kitsch. When I identify with Tereza, I know I’m overdue for some dependency dispersion! Kundera opened the door that led me to the many wonderful worlds of Bohumil Hrabal, Jaroslav Seifert, Klima, Škvorecky, etc. Along with another Central European writer, Danilo Kiš, Kundera has shaped my literary taste almost entirely.
In The Joke, a young communist named Ludvik makes an innocent joke in a letter to a friend, and that joke ruins his life. The 14-year-old Vladimir reading this for the first time couldn’t really appreciate Kundera’s commentary on the political and social climate of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s but I could very easily understand the dangers of taking things too seriously. A core construct was born: you can either be one of those people who have dogmas that blind you to life and its possibilities, or you can have irony and be free! It’s a construct that is alive and well to this day. It was that construct that would probably direct me toward what eventually became my profession. When you don’t have a dogma, you can’t help but enjoy hearing a multitude of different stories.
A slight digression, but I can’t help myself. The Joke gave me another important maxim that I still subscribe to: Optimism is the opium of the people! I know this was a costly wordplay for poor Ludvik, but I am immensely grateful for it.
Kundera’s complete suspicion of any Truth with a capital “T” has something profoundly constructivist about it. In his novels, he made us aware of the many illusions we take as truths and taught us how to approach them playfully, even (especially) when they have tragic consequences. His novels are there to ask questions, to remind us of the contingent and made-up nature of the stories we tell ourselves, but not to give us any final answers. For an adolescent just stepping into a big, messy world, understanding that no truth deserves that capital “T” was a powerful weapon.
From what I gather, Kundera is a bit of a controversial figure in his former homeland. Having emigrated to France in the mid-1970s, Kundera never looked back as far as we can tell. He returned to Czech Republic infrequently and often in disguise, carrying a French passport, as his native citizenship had been revoked soon after his emigration. His last novel in Czech was Immortality after which he abandoned the language and began writing in French. This didn’t go unnoticed, and it was widely unappreciated, by his Czech compatriots, his readers worldwide and literary critics alike.
Putting those reactions aside for a moment, can you think of a better example of Kellyan reconstruction than the joke Milan Kundera pulled on all of us? Over the period of a decade or so, Kundera gradually stopped being Czech and, abandoning his Czech identity, he became French, only naturally changing languages in the process. This new Kundera requires a different way of reading, a different set of expectations. The French Kundera is a different writer from the Czech Kundera, even when he discusses similar issues. This shift alienated all too many of his readers, as they somehow expected Kundera to forever remain the dissident, but he had other plans. His second novel as the French Kundera was Identity. A couple, Chantal and Jean-Marc, are at the center of the novel, two people whose identities Kundera keeps composing and deconstructing as the story unfolds, showing us just how profoundly relational our existence is, perhaps echoing elements of his own transition and giving me a lesson in personal construct psychology over a decade before I was to hear about it.
Nothing about Kundera was smooth or seamless. He was a complicated man who wrote complicated books and lived a complicated life. He had a complicated relationship with his homeland, with France, with his language, with translators (especially with translators!), with his readers, with the Nobel committee who unjustly overlooked him, with communism, with bureaucracy – and with himself. What he had in abundance was irony and willingness to ask questions and listen with curiosity, to reconstruct what he cannot deny. And he had a sharp, albeit imperfect pen, the only pen possible, because, according to his own words from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “there is no perfection, only life.”
To say goodbye to one of the people who set me on course to become a constructivist, I am going to re-read his last novel in Czech, because that’s where he’s heading now.