In Search of the Poetics of Milan Kundera : from poetic beginnings to his last novel The Festival of Insignificance
Abstract
The monograph In Search of the Poetics of Milan Kundera, with the sub-heading from poetic beginnings to his last novel The Festival of Insignificance, represents the first ever comprehensive discourse in the study of the oeuvre of Milan Kundera in which a substantial degree of attention is focused on his early work. The introductory chapter is further guided by an ethos of emphatic focus on his early writing, and for this reason in this chapter I also paraphrase Kundera's first longer essay ("On Inheritance Disputes", 1955).
The chapter opens out into a more theoretically oriented discussion, in which I thematise the fundamental principles of Kundera's output (lyrical, epic and dramatic). With reference to these three creative principles, as well as with regard to the historical context of his work, I demonstrate that the transformation of the poet into a novelist was a more complex process, and was nowhere near as sudden as Milan Kundera himself describes it in his later authorial stylisation.
In the second chapter I focus on the emotional anchoring of Kundera's output, concluding with an essay on Kundera's monographic discourse on Vančura's Art of the Novel, in which the author seeks a way out of a narratively awkward situation. In the third chapter I return to the historical context of Kundera's oeuvre, to its violently disrupted continuity in Czechoslovakia, as well as to a dual perspective on the novel Life is Elsewhere: since its understanding of the aggression of lyricism shall culminate shortly after the invasion of August 1968 at a military road checkpoint. 428 The focus of the second half of chapter three is an extensive analysis of the theatre play The Owners of the Keys.
This play presents dreamlike states as a specific form of human conduct. Beneath the perspective of drama, dreamlike states and intimacy, the most extensive fourth chapter presents a return to poetry as a portent of Kundera's future work.
At the same time a clear distinction is drawn between the epically conceived poetry from the collection Man: A Wide Garden and the intimate lyricism of the minimally implicitly dialogic Monologues. In the next part (of chapter four) I summarise Milan Kundera's conception of poetic image.
For Kundera, poetic image is above all a means of understanding human emotions. The concluding section of the fourth chapter is dedicated to the specific allusive play which Kundera sets in motion with his poetry in the novel Identity.
The following three chapters are devoted to Milan Kundera's work as a novelist. In the fifth chapter I offer a more general view of the narrative approaches in which Kundera's clear endeavour is to loosen the narrative play to the maximum possible extent.
I also focus attention on the anti-romantic perspective of Kundera's novel writing. The central metaphor of the sixth chapter is narration as a precious asset.
In this chapter I elaborate upon the themes of the first section, dedicated to his early work. Here I map further narrative strategies, such as the alienating technique of prematurely revealing the death of the protagonists.
In the concluding seventh chapter I focus attention not only on the differences of the novels of the "French cycle", but also on their formal linkage to Kundera's previous output. I interpret his last novel as an expression and innovative culmination of the author's entire oeuvre.