Perceiving the Fictional World of Nesmrtelnost Through Kundera’s “I”

Abstract

Kundera's characters have always struggled both with images and identities they have constructed for themselves and that others have constructed for them. Since Milan Kundera's emigration to France, much of his fiction has explored such struggles through dialogical split between youthful characters who live in the fragile world of lyrical self-expression and definition, and cynical narrator, literary representative of the author, who resides in world of political realities and external definition of individuals. As readers have become used to Kundera's technique of self disclosing narrative, many have quite naturally associated the Kundera who inhabits his fiction with the writer himself. Nesmrtelnost (Immortality, 1991) does not accept such familiarity between reader and author; the novel seems to shake finger at those who confuse writer with the image created through his or her work. This is accomplished by implicating the falsity of human perception in both seemingly real and visibly fictional worlds through the juxtaposition of the plausible against the artificial and by drawing attention to our subjectivity in reference to early formalist polemics. Self-disclosing narratives such as those employed by Kundera function by making what is normally covert, overt. Fiction becomes game between author and reader. Immortality plays with the reader's perceptions by creating three tiered fictional world which consists of what appear to be three possible worlds. The first, the world of the self disclosing narrator, Milan Kundera, is the highly believable and recognizable world of contemporary Paris. It is this world that seems to guide the reader through the text. The second, the world of the characters, is avowedly artificial, though it is born out of familiar elements brought from the first world. Immorality's third possible world is the amorphous realm of the immortals where the likes of Hemmingway and Goethe meet to discuss their fates, i.e., images of them constructed out of popular opinion. The novel's narrator gains our trust as readers, and then shocks us by allowing the three tiers to collide, thus drawing attention to the artificiality of all fictional worlds, as well as the frailty of our perceptions in the actual world. Kundera's narrators typically provide background material regarding pertinent historical and literary information. In the case of Immortality, the novel is peppered with myriad allusions to twentieth-century literary polemics, in particular certain ideas of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky sought to combat nineteenth-century Positivism and the often quoted and, to be fair, misquoted, ideas of Potebnya's is thinking in images.3 In the fictional world of Immortality, characters think and view literature and the world around them in terms of images. The narration, however, is constructed in terms of Shklovsky's ideals for art as propounded in Art as Device. Shklovsky's argument, briefly stated, is that the habitual way of thinking is to make the unfamiliar as easily digestible as possible. Normally our perceptions are automatic, which is way of saying that they are minimal... Since perception is usually too automatic, art develops variety of techniques to impede perception, or at least to call attention to themselves.4 It is in this study that Shklovsky identified series of literary devices that shaped the way generation of scholars read literature and writers composed fiction. Such devices are employed in Immortality in self-conscious manner. These techniques include: ostranenie (defamiliarization), a device by which phenomenon is taken out of its conventional context so that it may once again be seen, not merely recognized; zatrudnennaia forma (defacilitation), any device that forces the reader or listener to follow the text with an intense conscious effort and to wonder about its meaning..., and (lastly) obnazhennie priema (laying bare the device). …