Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be

Since the fall of communism, Eastern and Central Europe have been living in the time of returns. The region is supposed to be returning, after decades of Soviet-imposed hibernation, to its legitimate place in Europe and in Western civilization. There is a rush of returning exiles, sometimes exiles’ children, who spent the better part of their lives abroad. Returning to this hitherto fatalistic domain are the very notions of the future, of second chances, of free choice but also of envy, loneliness and moral ambiguity that can no longer be blamed on the “political system.” All those returns, and the tricks played by memory on people and nations in transition, are the subject of “Ignorance,” the new novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera--by far his most successful since “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

It may appear that “Nostalgia” would have been a more fitting title. The word, as the author reminds us, is derived from the Greek nostos (“return”) and algos (“pain, grief, sorrow”). In Kundera’s novel, however, the term assumes a double meaning: not only of sorrow caused by the desire to return but also of pain caused by actual return. For Kundera, nostalgia is a profoundly deceptive sentiment. The author points out that in Spanish, the word for nostalgia or longing is anoranza, related, via the Catalan, to the Latin word ignorantia. We feel nostalgic because we no longer know the place or person or the moment in the past we long for. When nostalgia settles in, the object of desire is already fading. Nostalgia, writes Kundera, is a self-sufficient sentiment, “fully absorbed ... by its suffering and nothing else.” In other words, it is a form of not knowing, and it rarely survives a confrontation with reality.

This is what happens to the novel’s two Czech protagonists, Irena and Josef, who left Czechoslovakia in the gloomy post-1968 years. Irena, who has been living in Paris, travels to Prague to join her companion, a doting but sexually withdrawn Swedish businessman who wants to relocate them there permanently. Recently widowed Josef, who ended up in Denmark, is flying to his native country to see if his antipathy for his countrymen has abated in the years of his absence. The two meet accidentally in the Paris airport, and Irena recognizes Josef as a man who many years ago tried to pick her up in a Prague bar. She suddenly feels nostalgic for that moment--perhaps a missed chance to push her life into a different groove--and starts to flirt with Josef on the plane. Josef remembers nothing of their past encounter and has no idea who Irena is, but he plays along out of embarrassment and curiosity. They agree to meet in Prague.

What looks like one of Kundera’s “laughable loves”--sexual farces of misdirected desires and casual lies--will be postponed, however, until the novel’s closing chapters. First the couple must cope with the ambiguity of their return to the place they left more than 20 years ago. On an earlier visit to Prague, Irena discovered that her old friends were not only completely uninterested in her life abroad but also struggled hard to make her forget it as well--to force her to remember only what they remembered. But attempting to connect her old and new lives was a hasty, painful surgery: It resulted in the amputation of the most vital part of her experience and the stitching of her nearly forgotten past to the present moment. The process left her feeling “shortened, diminished, like a dwarf.”

This time, Irena notices, with dismay, that her old self, a timid, insecure woman dominated by her mother--the self she thought she had shed forever during her tough and lonely years in Paris--is inexplicably resurfacing and taking over her life. Her relationship with the kindly Swede grows even more frustrating and strained, then takes a bizarre turn. Her Parisian friends drift away--no longer interested in a former exile turned mere expatriate.

Irena has a chilling sensation of living through the familiar dream of all exiles but with a new, sinister twist: You return to the old country and realize that you never will be able to leave it again. This time you are ensnared not by the police or border guards but by your old, discarded life that has been lying in wait all those years, ready to pounce on you as soon as you show up. For Irena, the political freedom--freedom of movement and of choice--turns into a trap. She even surprises herself feeling nostalgic for the old impermeable borders.

In the meantime, Josef--who thinks he suffers from “nostalgic insufficiency” or “masochistic distortion of memory” and recalls only the ugly and shameful events from his past (although he has curiously forgotten the ugliest and most shameful one of all)--discovers that his country has already started to forget about itself. Everything looks different, and Josef has difficulty finding his mother’s grave; billboards in his hometown are meaningless to him; even the spoken language has changed its melody. Josef’s old friend, once an ardent communist, refuses to discuss the failure of a Marxist utopia. When Josef visits his brother, the past comes back only in innuendoes, recriminations and coy remarks about property rights: “During his absence, an invisible broom had swept across the landscape of his childhood, wiping away everything familiar; the encounter he had expected never took place.”

Josef also observes a political paradox: the country, though nominally free, seems to be less independent and less aware of its recent history: It is quickly dissolving into the blandly homogenous “modern world.” Noticing his own old watch on his brother’s wrist, Josef realizes that he is merely an unwanted shadow passing through this transformed reality. “He had the sense he was coming back into the world as might a dead man emerging from his tomb after twenty years: touching the ground with a timid foot that’s lost the habit of walking; barely recognizing the world he had lived in but continually stumbling over the leavings from his life.”

A break in a life’s continuity, says Kundera, cannot be repaired. No one really returns. Only people living side by side in constant, daily contact remember roughly the same things and inhabit the same universe. When lives diverge, memories fall out of sync and all sense of commonality evaporates. “It’s only when you come back to the country after a long absence that you notice the obvious: People aren’t interested in one another, it’s taken for granted,” says Josef when he meets Irena in Prague.

Still, in Kundera’s fiction, the heroes who understand everything often fall again into the same trap. Their sense of closeness, even sameness, after the failure of their attempted “Grand Return” proves to be another illusion. Not only is their coming together based on an “unjust and revolting inequality” caused by Irena’s sentimental self-deception and Josef’s awkward lie, but their recent experiences are pushing them in opposite directions. Irena dreams of an escape--this time a real one--not only from Prague but also from her old self, from “the life this city is weaving for her.” Josef is closing old accounts and getting ready to return to his real, private Ithaca--his home in Denmark and his wife’s grave.

“Ignorance” culminates in one of Kundera’s typically inconclusive endings--with Irena sleeping in a drunken stupor and Josef departing unaware that, by shutting the door on his Czech past, he has probably trapped Irena in the rubble of her own life.

“The novelistic exploration of the theme of forgetting has no end and no conclusion,” Kundera remarked in one of his essays. In “Ignorance,” he returns to one of his earlier observations, that forgetting is not really an opposite of remembering, but is part of it. Since our memory can hold only a minuscule fraction of our experience, we must constantly forget in order to remember. As a result, the author points out in one of the novel’s digressions how remembered “reality” consists of accidental fragments, gaps, jump cuts, broken narratives and falsehoods substituting for forgotten causal links. This accidental, unreliable and constantly shifting entity constitutes, nevertheless, a significant part of what we take for our “self.” It certainly defines our understanding, our moral choices, our emotions, our ability or inability to love.

Should we be surprised by the results? This is one of Kundera’s general “existential statements” and also one that is particularly pertinent to today’s Eastern and Central Europe. As Kundera correctly intuited in his earlier novels, the most persistent problems of the region have less to do with tyranny, oppression or other political injustices and more to do with distorted, suppressed memories and deposits of shame, resulting, he says, in incessant “punitive expeditions into the past to hunt down the guilty parties.”

Finally, “Ignorance” itself presents an interesting paradox. In his three previous, rather unsatisfactory novels, “Immortality” (his last one written in Czech), “Slowness” and “Identity” (like “Ignorance,” written in French), Kundera tried to distance himself, thematically and psychologically, from his native Central European realm. In “Ignorance,” which tells about the impossibility of returns, he makes his own successful return to familiar ground and to his old literary excellence. His irony and wit are back on target, his characters vivid and convincing, his intelligence no longer groping for a topic. So welcome back, Milan. Yes, this is still your home--it seems you cannot do without it.