Milan Kundera: Surviving Kitsch

“We really don’t search archives for attractive information for the media.” said Vojtech Ripka in an October New York Times article. He was referring to findings by the Czech-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes that outed author Milan Kundera as a one-time informer for the Czech Communist regime in the 1950s, which the reclusive Kundera, now 79, angrily denied.

A word I learned (or thought I did) by osmosis, “kitsch” is defined by Kundera in his 1982 book “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” as “the absolute denial of shit.”

In America we hear kitsch in the same sentence as camp, and both words are most often used adjectivally to describe low-brow art; things magneted to refrigerators, propped ironically in hutches and on altars, things described as “guilty pleasures.”

But Kundera puts kitsch in context, first through his character Sabina, an artist who dismisses all untruths and fights to recognize and suppress her own (and our own, Kundera says) sentimentality. Then, through the lens of the 1968 “Prague Spring” and occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces, Kundera extols kitch’s virtues as a political tool.

Totalitarian kitsch, Kundera says, is the sentimentalization of the country, the party, the government. A government that only distinguishes between “good” and “better”; a government that denies its own shit.

And “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” defies narrative kitsch, too. The characters vacillate. Where we want and expect Tomas to be a Howard Roark figure of principals and sacrifices, he is that only part of the time. Where the final resolution would be – had the novel been written by someone else – here occurs in the middle of the book. The narrative is turned on its head, with Kundera popping in now and then to remind us that the book is an invention.

But the recent allegations, which if true reveal that the then-21-year-old student Kundera made a police report about a man who was later convicted of spying against the Czech government, provide a whiff of narrative kitsch of their own.

Because Kundera, it is suggested, was a “true believer” in Communism as a student and young man, and only cooled on it when his government made a hash of the philosophy. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is populated with characters who inform on others and who justify atrocities in service to totalitarian kitsch. “We didn’t know,” Kundera quotes them. The denial of shit.

But if the definition of kitsch can be extended to the pat phrase and the easy answer, the conventional, doesn’t the widespread acceptance of an iconoclastic work such as Kundera’s threaten it, too? Think of the lesser (or greater) imitators of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs”: we can’t even watch the originals now without lamenting their dissolution.

So haven’t meta-projects like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Sixth Sense” become kitschy, too? And is the subversion of Kundera’s own dissident character by a 58-year-old police report just the narrative anti-zing we’ve come to not-expect?

And once we start, the kitsch keeps coming; it kitschochets between the book, the author, and history.

First, we kitschily apply the words of one great author to the life of another. “If it were true, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answered it” says Antony in “Julius Caesar.” If it were true, Kundera committed an act out of ignorance (‘We didn’t know”) that sent a man to 14 years of labor in uranium mines.

Then comes Life Imitates Art. While it is convention to graft the author onto his stronger protagonists, Kundera has instead become his character Tereza, who unwittingly cheats on her husband with a Communist spy only to realize later that the interlude had been recrded as potential blackmail.

While Mr. Ripka denied fishing for damaging information on Kundera, it is no secret that the author is not loved in the former Czechoslovakia, which he fled in 1970 for Paris. The Czech Republic lives uneasly with its puppet regime past.

The unearthing of the 1950s police report is the clearest echo from the book, as Kundera the narrator points out that damning information was often collected by the Communists to be released at just the right time. Calling the allegations “pure lies” last month, Kundera said they amounted to “the assassination of an author.”

We will defy kitsch by refusing to end this article with Kundera’s assassination. But we must also by all means forgive what Kundera denies ever happened, so where does that leave us, narratively?

Buy The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Buy “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” movie

See also: Report Says Acclaimed Czech Writer Informed on a Supposed Spy, The Big Website About Milan Kundera