Václav Havel by Zbigniew Kresowaty.
Of all the novels I read in college and grad school as a precocious bibliophile, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the one that probably stuck the hardest to my ribs. It wasn’t my favorite novel or even one I necessarily think of when I’m rattling off a list of Great Works That Have Moved Me ™ when I want to sound smart and interesting to a stranger at a party. I think it’s because Kundera’s voice seems to have wormed its way into my ear, assimilating his ideas so seamlessly with my brain that I don’t even realize they’re his until moments like today, when I stop to think about why I am not a moral exhibitionist.
Unbearable Lightness is a War and Peace style blend of politics (it’s set around the time of the Prague Spring), love (but the tanks play second fiddle to Czech girls’ mini skirts), and philosophical rumination (Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return features prominently). There is a moment where Tomas is asked by a dissident to sign a petition to free some political prisoners – an act he rejects on a variety of grounds, primary among them the fact that dissidents seem to care more about being viewed as heroes by history than performing any pragmatic, altruistic action.
The roots of this view, that protest and dissidence is primarily a self-aggrandizing, egotistical endeavor, trace back to an essayistic argument between Kundera and Vaclav Havel, basically the chief dissident of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s (and, later, friend of Frank Zappa and president of democratic Czechoslovakia). Havel insisted that after the Soviet takeover, political action on the part of those opposed to the Soviet regime was necessary, despite the seemingly hopeless situation the Czechs found themselves in. Kundera fired back that the political action Havel referred to had two aims: (1) to unmask the world in all its irreparable amorality, and (2) to display its author in all his pure morality.
I have thought a lot about this debate over the years. Even before reading Kundera, I sympathized with his position; student protest, particularly around the start of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan during my first year of college, struck me as paltry and vain, in both senses. I couldn’t stomach the idea of one man or woman standing up in a crowd and declaring him or herself the arbiter of truth in a world of lies, not to mention myself in that role. Those who truly wanted the world to change, I reasoned, would do it within the system – cynically, deviously, hiding their true intentions and secretly chipping away at the foundations until one day the great granite face of the world suddenly resembled their personal vision of it. Expecting that great granite face to turn on its pedestal, stare at one lonely individual standing up with a placard in the middle of the freshman quad, and tremble and shatter from the power of the almighty truth seemed… well, downright silly.
At that age, like many of my peers, I had a blog (ages 16-21, Livejournal, no judgment), in which I recorded daily ruminations and impressionistic accounts culled from my rather conventionally lonely and troubled adolescence. My greatest enemies were the truism on one side and pretentiousness on the other, and stalwart effort went into maintaining a persona of ironic, aesthetic detachment. I was certainly no Kundera, but the gist was the same – I was Tomas, fallible and quixotic creature, and I wanted no part in putting my name on something permanent and declamatory.
Like all maxims, though, moral exhibitionism is easy to turn on its head. It’s hard to read Kundera’s essay on moral exhibitionism now without smiling sardonically at his own obsession not to sully his hands in the mundane dealings of politics and remain ideologically pure. After all, there is no better author on the subject of unmasking the immorality of the world than Kundera himself, who ruthlessly deconstructs the petty delusions of his characters with scene after scene of humiliation and hamartia. And few authors are better at maintaining their ironic distance from their subject matter, always twelve steps ahead of worldly ambition in a realm of pure aestheticism. It’s trite, but Kundera’s inaction was always just another kind of action, more rarefied and gnomic, but still speaking against some great granite monolith, still gleefully intended to cause certain fault-lines to tremble in the world.
These days, the pressure to maintain some kind of distinction between the one kind of moral speech and the other seems less important to me. Exhibitionism is only a matter of degree, and to aim for the opposite extremely, terrified secrecy, feels equally selfish and vain. I’d like to navigate the distinction in this blog, with full awareness that I may at times slip into embarrassing hubris. The risk seems worth it, both to flex the authority I often feel I lack, and to avoid the much greater peril than, as Tomas feared, being immortalized, misquoted, and hopelessly misunderstood in history books – to say nothing at all.
Moral exhibitionism 