Relation and Identity: Milan Kundera and Dany Laferrière Redefine the World

Abstract

In the Western literary system, foreign authors, especially those outside the West, are often expected to serve as native informants, although only to corroborate what the West already knows. Timothy Brennan describes, for example, the reception of Third World texts in the West, noting the work of Fredric Jameson, who makes Third-World literature an important artefact or record, but an artefact without theoretical importance (37). Politically themed Third World texts gain favor with Western critics, but only in keeping with metropolitan tastes and agendas (38). Second-World texts, as well, succeed in the West when they feature the ideological over the philosophical or aesthetic. Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic, for instance, recounts the story of an editor informing her that because she writes literature, her work is unpublishable and asks if she has anything about the war, since publishing anything else at the time would be [f]rom a moral standpoint (141). On ethical grounds, the West thus obligates non-Western authors to bear witness to conditions in their countries, reserving for itself--whose ideological house is presumably in order--the right to pure literature. Foreign authors who do not wish to have their subject matter and style dictated to them struggle against the West's expectations. Rather than defending the right to an essentialized difference, however, some writers have made effective use of the opposite strategy: inserting themselves into the West. I do not intend by this a catering to Western tastes and norms but instead an expansion of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the West that force a rethinking of Western identity itself. Neither is this redefined Western identity homogeneous and stable. The new identities created by these authors are akin to Edouard Glissant's concept of which depends on difference for its very existence. In what follows, I examine the assertion of Relational identities by two novelists, one the so-called Second World (Milan Kundera) and the other the Third World (Dany Laferriere). Both authors experienced totalitarian conditions in their home countries and decided to emigrate. Kundera ran afoul of the Communist Party in Soviet-occupied former Czechoslovakia and had his books banned 1970 onwards. He moved to France in 1975, had his Czech citizenship revoked in 1979, and became a French citizen in 1981. Since 1991 he has been writing his novels in French, while he began publishing essays originally penned in French even earlier. Whereas Kundera faced censorship and official blackballing, the threat to Laferriere under the reign of the Duvaliers was much graver. A journalist at the time, he had had one close friend murdered, another jailed, and could only expect to be next. Laferriere therefore emigrated to Montreal in 1976, where his first novel was published in 1985. Before settling permanently in Montreal, he also spent some years living in New York and Miami. Based on their personal histories, both Kundera and Laferriere run up against certain expectations for their work as it circulates in the West, expectations against which they actively struggle using similar strategies. Laferriere lays claim to an American identity--the Americas, not the U.S.--while Milan Kundera asserts a European, not merely Eastern European, one. Laferriere's and Kundera's insistence that both their homelands and host lands fall under these identities enables a refiguration of the West's geocultural borders and of the peoples from there. In this article, I first outline some of the concepts basic to Glissant's Poetics of concepts drawn his own position excentric to the West as a writer Martinique. Relation, I argue, serves as a useful frame for thinking of the alternative identities asserted by Kundera and Laferriere. I then describe the theoretical steps that Kundera has taken in his essays to discard what Ugresic terms the baggage of the EEW (Eastern European Writer) (137-39). …