The last novel by Milan Kundera as a reflection, reinterpretation and dénouement of the author's distinctive poetics. A study of The Festival of Insignificance
Abstract
This study focuses on the last novel by Milan Kundera La fête de l'insignifiance (The Festival of Insignificance), which came out in Italian quite unexpectedly in 2013, two years after the "definitive" completion of the author's work in the prestige La Pléiade series. In this novel Milan Kundera moves resolutely beyond the horizon of his previous poetics, carrying on from his usual motifs, but not in order to repeat them, but quite the reverse, in order to redefine and re-encode them.
This novel forms a kind of counterpoint to his previous work. This study focuses on the way the author reconceives his creative output in his last work: whether on the topic of mothers and their previous despotic relations with their sons, a reassessment of eroticism, the newly conceived role of laughter and an era defined as the age following the twilight of the joke, radicalized internal focalization, which no longer plays the role of a kind of semantic anchor and the like.
As The Festival of Insignificance holds up a unique mirror to his previous work, we can follow him in the light of motifs from previous novels and prose works such as I, Mournful God, The Farewell Waltz, Jacques and his Master, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Life is Elsewhere. Of course, what is also essential here is the newly defined literature as a space in which authors attempt to resist the watchful surveillance of nature (materialized and metaphysically anchored in the novel as the blind eye of the belly button).
Kundera's last novel is thus also treated as a discomforting interpretational challenge that can be answered with an integrative interpretational gesture that attempts to achieve refraction into various lines of meaning, where Milan Kundera's last novel is dealt with as the vanishing point of his entire work.