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The Festival of Insignificance
by Milan Kundera
The Festival of Insignificance marks Kundera's return to his literary Ithaca after a thirteen year odyssey away. Each character within the story in their own wise participates in this absurd festival, that is, an existence in a world that cannot be contemplated in earnest. This is the Kundera we have read in Slowness. We cannot take him seriously. This is not to say that what he has written is without value or exists as mere farce. Far from it. Kundera merely means to, through scenes such as the schizophrenic episode in which the navel-gazing Alain, by some seeming chaos in space and time, jostles his absentee mother, or Stalin intruding on the final scene, lead us away from the grave seriousness man adopts to defend against life's absurdity. Nearly every episode, even those more despondent in tone, possesses some element of the comical.
The novel opens with Alain meditating on the navel, figuring that this recently uncurtained region of the feminine form comprises the final of four erotic anatomical features of a woman. The ass, breasts and thighs comprise the first three which man has always known to arouse desire, each of them serving to distinguish one woman from another. Alain says a man could identify his lovers ass from a crowd of asses, yet no man could identify a woman's navel, however dear she was to him. A woman's navel becomes, for Alain, representative of their sexual uniformity.
We then meet D'Ardelo who is visiting his doctor to learn of the results from his recent tests to determine whether or not he has cancer. It is near his birthday, and he plans to celebrate not only the occasion of his very distant birth, but also the occasion of his possibly very near death. However, the doctor's smiling face dashes this design. For some reason, D'Ardelo, who runs into Ramon afterward, tells him that he does, in fact, have cancer. We can only assume that D’Ardelo lied out of a spirit of prankishness as we later learn Ramon and D'Ardelo feel no particular sort of way about each other.
Ramon continues on to call on his friend, Charles, who is in business with his friend Caliban as caterers with a plan to throw a cocktail party for D'Ardelo's birthday. This desire of Ramon's is bolstered by a strange sort of affection he now feels for "the jerk," D'Ardelo. This party then becomes the venue of a farcical soiree.
Caliban once was an actor eventually failing to land further stints. For the occasion of the party, he decides to impersonate a Pakistani man. He makes the acquaintance of a Portuguese woman, a lonely housemaid who feels united to Caliban through their seeming linguistic estrangement. She communicates with him in Portuguese, not knowing he speaks perfect French, and Caliban replies in his fabricated Pakistani. The conversation proceeds naturally as though they seem to understand one another. Indeed, on some primordial level, despite differences in culture and language (which is a perpetuated joke on Caliban's end), they do.
Here also we have Madame La Franck in attendance, a mature woman in her 50's who none in the party have made the acquaintance yet who is well known by all through pictures. During an awkward attempt at introduction, D'Ardelo's daughter continues to repeat herself as Madame La Franck negotiates with a large morsel of food in her mouth. After swallowing the food, she makes a random remark that "Human existence is nothing but solitude."
"Oh, how true that is!" D'Ardelo's daughter responds.
La Franck continues: "A solitude surrounded by other solitudes."
Alain, rustled by his meditations on the navel, having been spurned into this contemplation by a memory he has of the last time he saw his mother in which she tickled his navel before running off to America, begins to have conversations with his mother through a framed photo of her on his wall and seemingly through telepathy whilst on his motorcycle. As stated earlier, he had bumped into her on her way back home after a failed suicide attempt motivated by her unwanted pregnancy. She had attempted to drown herself (what is it with Kundera and the acts of drowning that mark the exit, attempted or successful, of so many of his characters?), deciding only to live after pushing the head of a would-be rescuer underwater, ultimately drowning him. She had fought to defend her death from rescue. Why, then, had she decided against committing the act of suicide after murdering her wishful savior?
The conversations he has with his mother are bleak. She calls him an idiot after expressing her guilt for bringing him into a world he did not ask to be born into.
"I'll be frank," Alain's mother says. "I've always felt it's horrible to send a person into the world who didn't ask to be there....You're here as you are because I was weak. That was my fault. Forgive me."
Alain finally says, after some moments of silence: "What is it you feel guilty for? For not having the strength to prevent my birth? Or for not reconciling yourself to my life, which, as it happens, is actually not so bad?"
Interspersed throughout the narratives of the cast of characters participating in the festival of insignificance are interludes of Stalin's farcical escapades. He regales his comrades with an anecdote of how, once when he was hunting in the winter, he came across twenty-four partridges. Having only a dozen rounds, he picked off half of the crowd, returned home to reload, then returned to the same site where the surviving partridges remained and eliminated them as well. Krueschev, after the men made for the pissoir (Stalin pissed in a private bathroom), expressed his incredulity over Stalin's unbelievable story. Later we learn Stalin was outside the pissoir listening to their remarks, amused at the hilarity of their disbelief over what Stalin had meant as a joke. This, for Kundera, marked the birth of the post-joke age, the advent of an era that has forgotten humor, a humanity that takes its world seriously.
As Ramon and Charles, along with Caliban and Alain, discuss how, years ago, their relatives had supported Stalin, who was the perceived "great hero of progress," Charles says to Ramon, "I imagine your father was already a little skeptical about him, your generation more so, and for mine, he had become the greatest criminal of all."
Ramon's reply is as poignant as it is wise: "Yes, that's how it goes. People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time."
Is this not one of man's greatest tragedies; that even lovers who have known each other for years could still remain incomprehensible to one another?
Kalinin, a dear comrade of Stalin's, has problems with his prostate and needs to relieve himself frequently. The occasion of his speeches became a sort of debacle with him exiting the stage every fifteen or so minutes to relieve himself. While Kalinin was away a symphony would begin to play while dancers performed for the crowd. When Stalin had been giving a particular speech, he noticed Kalinin's tortured movements, the grim, pale expressions haunting his face as he struggled to contain himself. Noticing this, Stalin, to amuse himself, would slow the proceeding of the speech, his enunciation becoming more deliberate, his oration more precise. Finally, once his comrades expression turned to relief, thus communicating that he had pissed himself and conquered his grand struggle against his natural imperative, Stalin would quickly bring the speech to its conclusion.
The boys take to the park after visiting a museum. Eventually, Stalin emerges on the scene accompanied with his comrade Kalinin, who is eager to piss. Stalin takes aim and blasts the nose off of the statue of the Queen of France, Marie de Medicis, a woman known for her ugly looks. The crowd, not sure whether to hiss at him or applaud him, remains observant. Kalinin ducks behind numerous statues to avoid being seen pissing by the crowd.
"Pissing in the most famous French park -- that's forbidden!" Stalin shouts, bursting into laughter. His laughter invites the puzzled crowd into joining him in his good humor.
When D'Ardelo comments on Stalin and Kalinin, perceiving them as two struggling actors, struggling to live, he recalls his fabricated affliction and continues: "I'm struggling too."
This invites Ramon to discuss the matter of insignificance with this man he rather dislikes yet is moved to feel some sort of sympathy for owing to his faked illness.
"Insignificance," he says, "is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it....The children laughing...without knowing why -- isn't that beautiful?"
Soon thereafter, Stalin takes his comrade Kalinin by the shoulders and announces that "My old friend here has sworn on his honor that he will never again piss on the ladies of France!"
Afterwards, a carriage conducted by a child pick chauffeurs the two comrades through the Luxembourg Gardens and out of sight. Our story ends here.
My primary complaint with the book is that it is so short. We have waited thirteen years to hear from Kundera once more, yet we are only granted enough material to last the better part of two hours. We are not given the rich and detailed personal histories with which he has crafted his characters in other stories. Perhaps this was deliberate, though.
Ramon makes the remark on two people being unable to understand one another when conversing at two differing points in time, delivered into an encounter with another through the circumstantial difference of each person's personal history. This elimination of the characters' history offers their being as it appears in itself at that particular time. We do not encounter Alain or Charles or D'Ardelo in the context of their personal history -- they do not communicate to us from a specific point in time, thus they are not, and will not become at a later time, incomprehensible. They appear to us as they are, born of an era that has forgotten humor.
If the author in his advanced age, thirteen years following what was at that time his final novel, still retains his poignant sense of humor in the face of life's misfortunes, despite all he has lived through, considering the "termites of reduction" which are eating away at the art form he holds most dear, and mankind's all-encompassing inclination towards forgetting; if Kundera is able to laugh at life's tragicomic insignificance, does The Festival of Insignificance not ask that we endeavor to do the same?
The novel opens with Alain meditating on the navel, figuring that this recently uncurtained region of the feminine form comprises the final of four erotic anatomical features of a woman. The ass, breasts and thighs comprise the first three which man has always known to arouse desire, each of them serving to distinguish one woman from another. Alain says a man could identify his lovers ass from a crowd of asses, yet no man could identify a woman's navel, however dear she was to him. A woman's navel becomes, for Alain, representative of their sexual uniformity.
We then meet D'Ardelo who is visiting his doctor to learn of the results from his recent tests to determine whether or not he has cancer. It is near his birthday, and he plans to celebrate not only the occasion of his very distant birth, but also the occasion of his possibly very near death. However, the doctor's smiling face dashes this design. For some reason, D'Ardelo, who runs into Ramon afterward, tells him that he does, in fact, have cancer. We can only assume that D’Ardelo lied out of a spirit of prankishness as we later learn Ramon and D'Ardelo feel no particular sort of way about each other.
Ramon continues on to call on his friend, Charles, who is in business with his friend Caliban as caterers with a plan to throw a cocktail party for D'Ardelo's birthday. This desire of Ramon's is bolstered by a strange sort of affection he now feels for "the jerk," D'Ardelo. This party then becomes the venue of a farcical soiree.
Caliban once was an actor eventually failing to land further stints. For the occasion of the party, he decides to impersonate a Pakistani man. He makes the acquaintance of a Portuguese woman, a lonely housemaid who feels united to Caliban through their seeming linguistic estrangement. She communicates with him in Portuguese, not knowing he speaks perfect French, and Caliban replies in his fabricated Pakistani. The conversation proceeds naturally as though they seem to understand one another. Indeed, on some primordial level, despite differences in culture and language (which is a perpetuated joke on Caliban's end), they do.
Here also we have Madame La Franck in attendance, a mature woman in her 50's who none in the party have made the acquaintance yet who is well known by all through pictures. During an awkward attempt at introduction, D'Ardelo's daughter continues to repeat herself as Madame La Franck negotiates with a large morsel of food in her mouth. After swallowing the food, she makes a random remark that "Human existence is nothing but solitude."
"Oh, how true that is!" D'Ardelo's daughter responds.
La Franck continues: "A solitude surrounded by other solitudes."
Alain, rustled by his meditations on the navel, having been spurned into this contemplation by a memory he has of the last time he saw his mother in which she tickled his navel before running off to America, begins to have conversations with his mother through a framed photo of her on his wall and seemingly through telepathy whilst on his motorcycle. As stated earlier, he had bumped into her on her way back home after a failed suicide attempt motivated by her unwanted pregnancy. She had attempted to drown herself (what is it with Kundera and the acts of drowning that mark the exit, attempted or successful, of so many of his characters?), deciding only to live after pushing the head of a would-be rescuer underwater, ultimately drowning him. She had fought to defend her death from rescue. Why, then, had she decided against committing the act of suicide after murdering her wishful savior?
The conversations he has with his mother are bleak. She calls him an idiot after expressing her guilt for bringing him into a world he did not ask to be born into.
"I'll be frank," Alain's mother says. "I've always felt it's horrible to send a person into the world who didn't ask to be there....You're here as you are because I was weak. That was my fault. Forgive me."
Alain finally says, after some moments of silence: "What is it you feel guilty for? For not having the strength to prevent my birth? Or for not reconciling yourself to my life, which, as it happens, is actually not so bad?"
Interspersed throughout the narratives of the cast of characters participating in the festival of insignificance are interludes of Stalin's farcical escapades. He regales his comrades with an anecdote of how, once when he was hunting in the winter, he came across twenty-four partridges. Having only a dozen rounds, he picked off half of the crowd, returned home to reload, then returned to the same site where the surviving partridges remained and eliminated them as well. Krueschev, after the men made for the pissoir (Stalin pissed in a private bathroom), expressed his incredulity over Stalin's unbelievable story. Later we learn Stalin was outside the pissoir listening to their remarks, amused at the hilarity of their disbelief over what Stalin had meant as a joke. This, for Kundera, marked the birth of the post-joke age, the advent of an era that has forgotten humor, a humanity that takes its world seriously.
As Ramon and Charles, along with Caliban and Alain, discuss how, years ago, their relatives had supported Stalin, who was the perceived "great hero of progress," Charles says to Ramon, "I imagine your father was already a little skeptical about him, your generation more so, and for mine, he had become the greatest criminal of all."
Ramon's reply is as poignant as it is wise: "Yes, that's how it goes. People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time."
Is this not one of man's greatest tragedies; that even lovers who have known each other for years could still remain incomprehensible to one another?
Kalinin, a dear comrade of Stalin's, has problems with his prostate and needs to relieve himself frequently. The occasion of his speeches became a sort of debacle with him exiting the stage every fifteen or so minutes to relieve himself. While Kalinin was away a symphony would begin to play while dancers performed for the crowd. When Stalin had been giving a particular speech, he noticed Kalinin's tortured movements, the grim, pale expressions haunting his face as he struggled to contain himself. Noticing this, Stalin, to amuse himself, would slow the proceeding of the speech, his enunciation becoming more deliberate, his oration more precise. Finally, once his comrades expression turned to relief, thus communicating that he had pissed himself and conquered his grand struggle against his natural imperative, Stalin would quickly bring the speech to its conclusion.
The boys take to the park after visiting a museum. Eventually, Stalin emerges on the scene accompanied with his comrade Kalinin, who is eager to piss. Stalin takes aim and blasts the nose off of the statue of the Queen of France, Marie de Medicis, a woman known for her ugly looks. The crowd, not sure whether to hiss at him or applaud him, remains observant. Kalinin ducks behind numerous statues to avoid being seen pissing by the crowd.
"Pissing in the most famous French park -- that's forbidden!" Stalin shouts, bursting into laughter. His laughter invites the puzzled crowd into joining him in his good humor.
When D'Ardelo comments on Stalin and Kalinin, perceiving them as two struggling actors, struggling to live, he recalls his fabricated affliction and continues: "I'm struggling too."
This invites Ramon to discuss the matter of insignificance with this man he rather dislikes yet is moved to feel some sort of sympathy for owing to his faked illness.
"Insignificance," he says, "is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it....The children laughing...without knowing why -- isn't that beautiful?"
Soon thereafter, Stalin takes his comrade Kalinin by the shoulders and announces that "My old friend here has sworn on his honor that he will never again piss on the ladies of France!"
Afterwards, a carriage conducted by a child pick chauffeurs the two comrades through the Luxembourg Gardens and out of sight. Our story ends here.
My primary complaint with the book is that it is so short. We have waited thirteen years to hear from Kundera once more, yet we are only granted enough material to last the better part of two hours. We are not given the rich and detailed personal histories with which he has crafted his characters in other stories. Perhaps this was deliberate, though.
Ramon makes the remark on two people being unable to understand one another when conversing at two differing points in time, delivered into an encounter with another through the circumstantial difference of each person's personal history. This elimination of the characters' history offers their being as it appears in itself at that particular time. We do not encounter Alain or Charles or D'Ardelo in the context of their personal history -- they do not communicate to us from a specific point in time, thus they are not, and will not become at a later time, incomprehensible. They appear to us as they are, born of an era that has forgotten humor.
If the author in his advanced age, thirteen years following what was at that time his final novel, still retains his poignant sense of humor in the face of life's misfortunes, despite all he has lived through, considering the "termites of reduction" which are eating away at the art form he holds most dear, and mankind's all-encompassing inclination towards forgetting; if Kundera is able to laugh at life's tragicomic insignificance, does The Festival of Insignificance not ask that we endeavor to do the same?