“The comic is more cruel: it brutally reveals to us the insignificance of everything.”
Born from the union of two short texts published in the 1980s in Le Débat, the book offers an even more intimate insight into Kundera. In both the first essay (Prague, Disappearing Poetry) and the second (Eighty-Nine Words), one gets the impression of a champion of beauty, memory, truth, and a firm resolve to avoid compromise.
With the Force of Reason, he reminds us that “culture in Prague is as old as the West itself,” a fact that is, in some respects, incontrovertible, as the city was one of the most dynamic centers of modern thought, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, we discover that Kafka and Čapek were not just two shining meteors outside of space and time, but were part of an intense intellectual milieu, one that we can never fully understand. A tradition in which Kundera roots his own culture, the last torchbearer of a passing of the torch: that a person exists because others have existed before them, shaping them through their writings and thoughts.
The beginning of the sixth chapter is written in stone. Referring to a famous biography of Kafka, Kundera observes how the author Klaus Wagenbach examines Prague and its culture at length, yet without knowing the language. This begs the question: what has he really examined? If you don’t speak a language, if you can’t discern the nuances between spoken and unspoken words, how can you expect to understand a culture? This has often happened to us too, and we have come to understand how speaking a language can be the first key to opening the doors of a country.
This is certainly an important position, one we feel we can share, in this constant modern approximation whereby everything is reduced to preconceived patterns of values and analysis, distancing ourselves from the complexity of things, in all their forms. Analysis and understanding arise from complexity, not from simplification.
The second text (Eighty-Nine Words) is also highly impactful for those who love the nuances of the world, in which Kundera sows on paper the key words of his idea of literature and his perception of writing; and we like to think that from so much sowing, some other plant may grow, sooner or later.
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Milan Kundera, Prague, disappearing poetry, Adelphi, Milano, 2024