The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Kundera

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

"She said he had made love to her like an intellectual. [...] she was capable of giving the most concrete of acts an abstract significance and her own dissatisfaction a political name."

"For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women."

"We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past."

"They wanted to efface hundreds of thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an
unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his whole body on that idyll, like a stain."

The truth about communism- I don't care how much people want to go back- these lives were REAL and they did EXIST.

"[...] every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love."

"The mystic must not be afraid of ridicule if he wants to go to the limits, the limits of humility or the limits of sensual pleasure."

"There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other."

Funny- the laughter of the angel is to promote order and rationality while the devil's laughter is to "deprive everything of meaning"- which is why the devil's laughter is more powerful, for it undermines reason.

"And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles."

Everyone wants to be part of a ring dance, where you lose yourself and become free- everything becomes innocent. No matter what society- communists, baptists, anarchists (yes they have societies too)- it is a joy to be part of something, constantly moving round and round. It's interesting the narrator, still wants to go back to the dance- even though they kicked him out mercilessly.

"[...] throughout the world the angels had occupied all positions of authority, all the general staffs, had taken over the left and the right, the Arabs and the Jews, the Russian generals and the Russian dissidents."

All of these orders are the angels- they are all the same- they are all "fighting for the future of the human race".And anyone against these orders need to be exterminated- which is what Kundera explains- laughter is the ultimate antidote to undermine these powers. He clumps in all parts of the system- even the opposition. All of them are part of the same wish for an order. And the devil is there to undermine all of this authority and destroy it's seriousness. Which is why laughter is from the devil.

Wait- are people within the circles part of the societal orders? Or are these orders just means to provide a reason for dancing? And that the dance itself is what matters, no matter which ideology brought united these hands together.After all- Kundera says laughter is a sensual pleasure: "But by now the three dancing women were unaware of the others, they were concentrating entirely on themselves and on their sensual pleasure." In a way they are laughing the way the devil laughs- without any purpose. They are forming this circle within a social code/construct, and so they always disappear from this world- the laughter takes them away.

The girls have found some logic through laughter- anything which they can't explain they attribute it to "comic effect" and therefore solving the problem.

"[...] farther and farther from my country into the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all my words with its jangle."

So since he was out of the circle of innocence- he was doomed to live in this order of things- where the angels are actually evil. I think he flipped the roles- and made the devil good and the angels bad. For maybe in the communistic world that's how it was- everything appeared not as it was.

Basically people didn't believe in the system- they just wanted to be free internally.
Just like the Professor- he also wants to find his own circle, his own laughter- where relief/refuge is found from his loneliness. He is left in reality, while the circle creates an ideal dimension.

"We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. [...] What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one passion's different results."


Our stories are important and not the results- some get lucky.

"Yes, I realize you don't know what I'm talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise-the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music-we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year." 

He's saying that we can hear the beauty of silence through some insignificant object falling- silence needs to be heard, for it is beautiful.

Beautiful commentary on what the ostriches told Tamina- about themselves! It's funny, we live our lives thinking that certain things mean something, that people are interested in us. But in fact- they couldn't care less- they are interested in themselves. I also loved how he made fun of the guy who was talking about his orgasms, same as an ostrich talking about what he ate that day. Bullshit- bla bla bla. Constant wasting of words.

"Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals: Banaka, Bibi, I, and Goethe."

An extremely cyncial view on writing. I cannot say that I agree- some are more enlightened than others- some understand their lives/experiences more.

"[...] the universe of his blood and thoughts!"

That sounds so funny.

"Worshipers are disarmed when faced by a woman, because they're still in their mothers' shadows. In every woman they see a messenger from their mother and submit to her. Their mothers' skirts spread over them like the sky."

"It's just those details-poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul-that make a woman lively and real. [...] I assure you, my friend, your small-town woman is just what a poet needs, and I congratulate you!"

That makes me feel so much better about myself :)

"[...] because to understand is to merge and to identify with. That is the secret of poetry.
We consume ourselves in the beloved woman, we consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we bum in the landscape we are moved by."

Love and laughter: "Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter."

Ah sensuality is not love.

"Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery."

"The child plays a wrong note on his violin over and over until the teacher goes mad and
throws him out the window. As he falls, the child is delighted by the thought that the nasty teacher will be charged with murder."

"That was litost talking! A man possessed by it takes revenge through his own annihilation.
The child lies shattered on the sidewalk, but its immortal soul is going to be eternally thrilled because the
violin teacher has hanged himself from the window catch."

Poor students- another word for it would be 'loser'- someone who always gets the short end of the stick. And yet like Kundera said, these ones rise higher and higher through their poetry. And then they float high above us- where they belong.

Also a beautiful memorial to his group of Czech poets and the nonsense they used to discuss. 

The possibility of a death of a people comes with death itself.

"[...] because love is a continual interrogation."

"That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are unconcerned about the infinitude our papa has within him."

Not specifically our father- but a person close to us. We want to go into the universe of another person and not the universe around us.

This novel is not about the angels- but about the people that were outcasts from the circle- the ones who were lost because they lost something.

Sadness connects one to their past.

"Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord ! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge !" 

"And so she closed her eyes again to enjoy her body, because for the first time in her life her body was taking pleasure in the absence of the soul, which, imagining nothing, remembering nothing, had quietly left the room."

She found refuge in the past- before everything happened. There was nothing to forget for then, nothing had yet begun.

"If fascination with the word "forward" has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?"

Today's music:
There is no more boisterous, no more unanimous agreement than the agreement with being. About
that, Arabs join with Jews and Czechs with Russians. Bodies toss in rhythm, drunk with their awareness that they exist. That is why no work of Beethoven's has ever been experienced with such great collective passion as this unvaryingly repetitive thrumming of guitars." 

YOLO- drunk with the awareness that we exist!!!!

I see- the system makes us want to forget- which is why we join these circles of sensuality- to forget our past, to forget everything. But the narrator couldn't be part of it- he was outside of it all, doomed and yet able to observe and be conscious. Then we forget- we forget what is happening even around us. That is why Kunder mentions the music of today- in fact it is another way of chanting, just like in the soviet regime. Like he says, music has returned to a state before it's great achievements, back when it was primeval. And in this way- just like Tamira, we are able to ignore everything around us, all of our pain.

"Or to put it another way: sexuality freed from its diabolic ties to love had become a joy of angelic simplicity."

The secret of regimes' putting hope in children:
"Children are the future not because they will one day be adults but because humanity is becoming more and more a child, because childhood is the image of the future.
He shouted "Children, never look back !" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."

And it's marvelous how today's young generation has no concern for remembering anything- it is a government's dream.

"Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia,
is more or less the same to the earth."

Thanks Kundera :) So true!

I like his explanation on "the best progressive idea possible"- provocative enough to shock people but modest enough to get supporters- therefore it will always be safe.

"Less well known is that a woman is not entirely defenseless against that gaze. If she is turned into a thing, then she watches the man with the gaze of a thing. It is as if a hammer suddenly had eyes and watched the carpenter grip it to drive in a nail. Seeing the hammer's malicious gaze, the carpenter loses his self-confidence and hits his thumb."

And we say that objectification is bad! He's talking about sex as the transition of a woman from a creature into an object and to a woman again... my what power he gives men! I don't know whether I fully agree...

"It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense."

That border is always with us, hovering.

-----
The title is very telling- this book was about Laughter and Forgetting. He wrote a lot about forgetting- basically in the political sphere as well as how individuals want to forget certain things in their past. It is all the same, whether politically or individually- the action of wanting to forget is everywhere. The connection though- between the political and how it affects individuals is that politicians use this desire to forget for their own gain. Various causes such as bettering mankind, environmentalism, christianity, feminism or whatever you want- it is all a medium in which we can connect to others and therefore become free. We all want to be part of a ring, to forget our beginnings and our ends- to become infinite.
Marketa was able to have sexual pleasure when she forgot about her husband (imagined him with his head cut off)- he says so in other places- love sometimes is an obstacle to climax. Reminds me of his other story- where a young couple do role playing and they are able to enjoy sex while forgetting their identities.
Michelle and Gabrielle are both angels' names- from what I understood, they were finding sensuality and a sense of freedom within a society through laughter. I may be wrong of course.
Poets are the ones who will forever be rejected from the "circle" and they experience a sense of "litost" which makes them write masterpieces. For if one were in the circle, one wouldn't have a sense to write. But what we learn from the Tamira character is that once we have exterminated the past with our freedom won through sensuality- we are nothing anymore. And she lived out her existence paranoid whether she will step on the line or not (hopscotch). We become obsessed with an insignificant detail- which doesn't give meaning to our lives. So which is better- suffering or ignorance?
The part about laughter I didn't fully understand. Basically laughter is undermining what is serious and real and gives us a freedom to escape all that. And in that way we can forget about our current suffering- but is it from the devil or from the angels? The angels seem to be evil in this book so I don't know.


A lot of concepts- more than I can process right now- so much to think about! I am sure I will read this again someday- when life experience will give me the ability to understand it more. It seems to me that he has so many messages hidden. Oh Kundera- Tell me your secrets! :)


Edgard Varese- apparently the Father of Electronic Music! He's very beautiful.

Pub- Pdf