Crossing the Border: Exile in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

• Main Authors: Huei-chuan Lan, 藍慧娟
• Other Authors: Frank W. Stevenson
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96341381567584814598

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 西洋語文研究所 === 88 === The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the first novel Milan Kundera wrote during his exile in France. But his positive attitude toward his involuntary exile, his attempt to take his exile as a spur to creativity, prevents this novel from being merely a working through of his trauma triggered by his exile. In this thesis, I explore the notion of exile as an approach to the interpretive study of this novel. Using this notion as an approach to certain essential themes and characters as well as its very structure, I am interpreting “exile” on a fairly abstract level of analysis. I confine myself to three definitions of exile: exile is defined as a rebellion against forgetting, a crossing of the border, a voyage of the epic. In Chapter One, the contrapuntal concepts of exile and community are interwoven with the themes of memory and forgetting in order to examine the life situation of certain characters. A community constructs its own perfect order, unity and harmony by erasing from itself all historical fact or historical reference. This erasure of history and memory from a communal ring results in forgetting. Exile from the closure of community is a rebellion against forgetting. In Chapter Two, at the center of my discussion is a crossing of a border both conceptual and existential. As far as the conceptual border is concerned, I relate Kundera’s concern with men’s entrapment within the fetters of rigid conceptions to Edward Said’s concept of home as a prison and exile as a border-crossing, in order to cast light on exile as the crossing of the boundaries of one’s conventional thinking. In the exile in thought, I explicate the exile in life as a crossing of the ontological border separating significance from the meaningless in human existence. The third chapter is concerned with the form of the novel－variation－which is originally the musical form. Kundera compares this musical form to “a voyage of the epic.” This variation form is a form of exile, exile from any single, self-enclosed truth or center, any central “theme.”