This interview is condensed from two conversations Milan Kundera would have had with Martin Nagy, regarding my piece "Exile: A Body Taken Out of Context," had I located him. These are the questions I would have authorized Milan Kundera to ask me. Milan Kundera was part of "Afterword: A Talk with the Author" by Philip Roth; wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and The Art of the Novel; and held a teaching post at the film academy (Afterword 230). During the conversations, Kundera spoke sporadically in another language. The omniscient author served as his translator and mine. In the following transcribed text of the interview, "M" stands for Milan Kundera and "M" stands for Martin Nagy.
M: "According to my calculations there are two or three new fictional characters baptized on earth every second. As a result, I am always unsure of myself when it comes time for me to enter that vast crowd of John the Baptists" (The Book of…Kundera 79). You've taken your characters out of your life. Do you feel any trepidation?
M: Despite attempts to keep identities fluid, my characters become immersed in the context of the events I've taken out of their lives. But the characters of this story have emerged from the baptismal font with new names.
M: Is that to protect their identities?
M: No. It's to keep the readers from identifying my characters with me and my life.
M: Has anyone ever read your creative nonfiction piece, "Exile: A Body Taken Out of Context"?
M: No. That would be impossible.
M: To understand this interview, is it important to know the history of the characters in that piece?
M: No. Whatever needs to be known of them the interview itself tells (The Art of...Kundera 39).
M: You began "Exile" with Kevin's story. Born in Hong Kong, he came to the US for college when he was nineteen.
M: Kevin was named Pak-Wah-Wong at birth. At his baptism, he took the name Kevin.
We lived together during his residency at a children's hospital, before I moved into the monastery.
His student visa had expired. He applied for citizenship but was denied. The immigration department forgot about him.
Despite being an illegal alien, he began a practice as a pediatrician.
He never visited his parents in Hong Kong. He knew that if he crossed the US border, he couldn't return.
Kevin attended a lecture given by the exiled Dalai Lama. Afterwards, Kevin introduced himself. The Dalai Lama and Kevin went off by themselves for a couple of hours. After talking with him, the Dalai Lama took off his prayer shawl and handed it to Kevin.
Later, Kevin met a senator who procured his citizenship. He prepared to visit his parents for the Chinese New Year. He had not seen them for fifteen years
The week before he left, Kevin's mother dreamed that a prayer shawl left Kevin's home in the US and landed on her home in Hong Kong. At the same time, a car driven by a drunk teenager hit Kevin's car head on. Kevin was killed.
I asked his brother if I could have Kevin's journals, but he never sent them to me.
Because of Kevin's reputation for philanthropy and laughter, a TV station aired a report on him and a library was named in memorial to him. M: Did you throw this story in merely to make arbitrary connections with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—lost letters (the journals), angels, and borders; laughter, remembering, and forgetting; a dream, an exile, and a death; biculturalism and so on—so that this interview would seem related to my Book?
M: Kevin is the metaphor. "Exile: A Body Taken Out of Context" documents the bifurcation suffered by trauma victims of the world they had known just moments before their trauma. Trauma often turns into exile, and exile is a death for the traumatized. The minute after a trauma, their expression of the language becomes bicultural. Their experience becomes untranslatable. They're cut off and can never go home again.
Besides that, arbitrary connections with unconnected events, smells, and sounds represent the triggers to memories that can keep the traumatized exiled from the world and people around them.
M: So it is like one of the themes of my Book, "forgetting. This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of the self. But what is this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life" (Afterword 234).
M: What terrifies the traumatized is the reliving of the past. Remembering is a form of death ever present within life.
Rose petals blanketed their bed. Perfume and perspiration rose and fell in each breath. Dewy and damp, Claire and her husband clung to each other. And they laughed and laughed.
Later in the evening, they held hands as they walked along a dirt road near their cabin. Gray pine smoke curled from the chimneys of cabins like incense rising to heaven. A power line buzzed. They breathed blue spruce and pine, and infinite darkness rose before them. An abandoned dog wailed.
Ahead, the trail vanished into a dense veil of evergreen trees.
He told Claire: The wooded area is only about a hundred yards thick.
I want to go back, she said.
It's just a clump of trees.
I don't want to go in there.
He stepped toward the woods.
Claire screamed, I want to go back!
Claire's muscles tensed.
The moment compressed time. A displaced memory. Unsuccessful forgetting. Ghosts rose to Claire from the woods—real and present. Remembered violence penetrated and pushed its way through her until it exited as raging panic. Bits and pieces of story flew through Claire's gasps and screams:
When she was fifteen, Claire and her older sister, Ann, walked to the pet shop to buy a goldfish.
A small wooded area lay between the house and pet store. They cut through the woods on their way home.
Claire carried a plastic sandwich bag that held a goldfish floating in water.
A man stepped from the shadows and grabbed Ann.
Claire dropped the bag, and water spilled into the ground.
Claire fought the man off Ann. Ann ran.
The goldfish died shrouded in clear plastic.
The man grabbed Claire.
Raped her.
Claire heard voices—people walking through the woods.
The man must have heard them. He stopped pushing his rage into her.
He slashed his knife through her throat and ran.
Claire jerked her head back as the knife penetrated her throat. According to the hospital nurse, the jerk kept the knife from landing a fatal gash to a vein. Claire was left with a flesh wound to her throat and a blood-soaked Mickey Mouse T-shirt.
The man escaped.
And suddenly childhood, which we all lyricize and adore, revealed itself as pure horror. As a trap (Afterword 235). Or as light ruining a print by hitting photographic paper before it goes into the developer (The Book of...Kundera 100). M: "I like to intervene directly as author, as myself. In that case, tone is crucial. From the very first word, my thoughts have a tone that is playful, ironic, provocative, experimental or inquiring" (The Art of...Kundera 80).
You've lost that tone. The horror of the events you presented in "Exile" overshadows any playfulness you planned. Laughing after such scenes of violence would be a sacrilege. The readers would have to betray your characters. They have more sympathy for your characters than they do for you. As the author, you're dead, you've been forgotten. Nonfiction has sabotaged your humor. You've lost my fiction/metafiction distance that keeps the reader off balance.
M: Even if much of your Book of Laughter and Forgetting was fiction. I didn't laugh. In fact, I cringed when Tamina was raped by the children. You talked about laughter. The Book amused me. But, I didn't laugh.
M: In any event, do victims of trauma think their destruction is coming soon?
M: That depends on what you mean by "soon."
M: Today, tomorrow, or the day after.
M: The feeling that their world is rushing to ruin is always with them.
M: So then they have nothing to worry about.
M: On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind, there must be something to it (Afterword 229). Victims seem to carry the memory of victimization on their faces, in their actions, in their words. Victims are often victimized more than once. They telegraph to perpetrators that they're victims. They have to protect themselves from betraying themselves.
...Fred was Claire's counselor. During one of their counseling sessions, Fred walked over to her and unbuttoned her blouse. She froze. Never went back. Claire's ex-fiancé raped her, and when scorned, he exacted vengeance with his bare hands by strangling to death her lop-eared rabbit. Her ex-boyfriend raped her in front of his fraternity buddies. A Russian cyclist tried to force himself on her. Why do victims remain victims?...
M: In any event, it seems to me that this concern or paranoia is the background against which all the events in your piece take place (Afterword 229).
M: It's paranoia, but it's more. It's memory mixing with the present. "It is to symbols they are reacting when they believe they are acting upon reality" (The Art of...Kundera 61). "It is the system of con-fusions, the system of symbolic thought, that underlies all behavior, individual as well as collective. We need only examine our own lives to see how much this irrational system, far more than any reasoned thought, directs our attitudes" (The Art of...Kundera 62). But even more so for victims of trauma. Their blood remembers. They live in a New World dictated by the Old World. They can return to the trauma at any trigger.
...I ordered dark roast coffee. Joe ordered Chai tea.
Soldiering seemed to wear on him. He looked intently and spoke, "I have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. I've been in survival mode for thirty years."
Joe wrapped both hands around his cup and sipped his tea. He always asked for a paper cup. He said that if he needed to leave, it was easier to have his drink ready to go. I wondered at the significance of always being prepared and anticipating leaving quickly.
"My counselor says that PTSD has been a good friend to me. It's helped me function from day to day."
Joe looked out of the corner of his eye, and then chuckled in a guttural staccato that sounded like an M-16 clip being emptied in the distance. "For the profession I was in, PTSD worked well. The adrenaline would kick in. I'd go into combat. As an attorney, I became aggressive. There were a few times when a judge told me, 'Counselor, stop harassing the witness.' But the war's over and I need to learn how to behave in a way that's more appropriate for civilian life."e
"I've never considered that some people don't have a vision for the war. You couldn't be there without getting the intensity on you. At the VA, we talk in phrases and shortcuts, because we all understand the language."
"Do you get flashbacks?"
"Anything can be a trigger. For me, a slight noise in the middle of the night and I'm sitting upright in bed. All my adrenaline starts pumping. I usually grab a book to read, because I know that no matter what I do I'm not going back to sleep."
Besides the adrenaline response, there's a nor-adrenaline response. Nor-adrenaline shuts you down. You can't respond.
M: I "begin The Unbearable Lightness of Being by reflecting on Nietzsche's eternal return...That reflection introduces directly, from the very first line of the novel, the fundamental situation of a character...it sets out his problem: the lightness of existence in a world where there is no eternal return" (The Art of...Kundera 29).
M: What terrifies the traumatized is the reliving of the past ever present within everyday life.
M: In your piece, the body remembers, indistinctly.
…One time when Claire's husband was caressing her, she was able to tell him, "I'm starting to feel frazzled from being touched." All the other nights when Claire's husband would rest his hand on her, she'd angrily thrash about without explanation until he wasn't touching her. Her body couldn't distinguish between affection and aggression. She lost the ability to communicate intimately with her body…
M: "The memory of revulsion was stronger than the memory of tenderness. (God yes, the memory of revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness!)" (The Book of...Kundera 114).
M: Yes, man uses the same physiologic manifestation—intercourse—to express two different metaphysical attitudes (Afterword 232).
There are two kinds of intercourse, aggression and affection, and the traumatized's bodies cannot distinguish them.
There are two kinds of passion, and their bodies cannot distinguish them.
M: In my Book, after the man who had followed him began laughing and nodded at him, Mirek felt a sudden anxiety at this show of intimacy.
M: Yes, because it implied more intimate ties to come (The Book of...Kundera 22). For the traumatized, intimacy is suspect, even the cause for anxiety.
…Finally, Karen could stand it no longer. She exploded at the kindly old man who would hug her when she visited church. He reminded her of her grandfather who had repeatedly molested her as a child. She couldn't stand to be touched by him. "The first blow had caught her unawares, and she would never forget it" (The Book of...Kundera 71).
M: There are two kinds of touching, and their bodies cannot distinguish between them.
...When the police finally questioned Claire, they asked "What were you wearing?"
They didn't believe her. They implied that somehow she enticed the man to rape her...
M: When anxiety and ill-treatment blur the victims' boundaries between enemy and friend, "they are sealed off from visitors" (Afterword 230).
…"One of the members of our unit sneaked out one night to find the house of ill-repute in the nearby Vietnamese village. Definitely an off-limits activity for troops. While he was there, the MPs drove up. The Madame pushed aside a rug and opened a door on the floor. 'Go down here,' she ordered. The soldier jumped into a space under the floor big enough for about five people to sit in. The Madame closed the door. The American soldier sat down and looked up. Across from him sat a Viet Cong officer like this:" Joe put his index finger to his lips in the shh sign. He broke into a sort of self-restrained rapid-fire laugh. Two enemies huddled together in hiding from a common threat...
M: None of us should be trusted. In Bohemia, I had some fine young friends, whom I claimed I would never betray (The Book of...Kundera 58). One of which was a young magazine editor who gave me work. Twenty pages later I felt a violent desire to make love to her. Or to be more exact, a violent desire to rape her (The Book of...Kundera 75).
M: When I was getting ready to leave my job as the counselor at a half-way house for teenagers, I assumed that there would be no love loss. The teenagers typically resisted all my attempts to work with them.
Much to my astonishment, they threw me a surprise going away party on my last day. Everyone was there, and they spent their own money and planned the party themselves. When I called for a reference, the director said that I had effected the teenagers more than any other counselor.
They're so used to abuse and rejection that they can't risk trusting. They can't risk showing affection. They'd gone through the system of foster homes. No one else wanted them. That's when they came to the half-way house.
One time I overheard the teenage boys discussing when each had lost his virginity. They'd all lost their virginity by the age of seven.
When I left, I promised some of them that I would write, but I never did.
M: You said that another symptom of trauma victims is a sort of amnesia.
M: Claire "had lost all sense of chronology" (The Book of...Kundera 85). She couldn't tell me what year she graduated from high school or college or the year her child died or most of the details of her childhood.
…Joe and I were sitting on a bench in front of the hotel. The bench set about two yards from the street. The rumble and clamor of cars made it difficult for me to hear Joe. He kept his voice low, but sustained a point-blank intensity.
"I can't always retrieve all of my memory. I'm laying in a bunker for four hours. I can't move, because the shelling won't stop. There's a pile of dead Marines next to me. I know they're there, but my memory won't let me look at them. A few days later, I was lying in a medical detachment. I heard some shelling. I freaked out. I rolled onto the floor, covered my head and yelled, 'Incoming!' I remember the guy on the cot next to me looking at me and saying, 'I know you'll be going home, soon.' "...
DALAI LAMA: "By generating insight into the true nature of reality and eliminating affective states of mind such as craving and hatred, one can achieve a completely purified state of mind, free from suffering...Otherwise, if there was no hope or no possibility of freedom from suffering, mere reflection on suffering just becomes morbid thinking, and would be quite negative" (The Art of...The Dalai Lama 143).
M: This frees the person from suffering. But to free the people from suffering, we must break the magic circle of dancing symbols. "Communist Russia won the war of symbols: it succeeded…in providing the symbols of Good and Evil…This is why people hold massive demonstrations against the war in Vietnam…while the Afghanistan war is, so to speak, symbolically mute, or at any rate beyond the magic circle of absolute Evil, the geyser of symbols" (The Art of…Kundera 62).
If we write about suffering, if we begin a dialogue about suffering and spread that dialogue throughout the world, we can expose the guilt and negate the effects of suffering. It becomes cathartic. It starts a movement toward change—toward eliminating suffering.
DALAI LAMA: But the effect of all this writing transmits a kind of flashback to the cause, because it creates a sense of isolation. General isolation causes graphomania (an obsession with writing books), mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without (The Book of...Kundera 92).
M: " 'That's just like me, I..." (The Book of...Kundera 79).
DALAI LAMA: "This is why I see the art of ellipsis as crucial. It insists that we go directly to the heart of things" (The Art of…Kundera 72).
M: The heart of the matter is that "all catastrophes concern the entire world, and that consequently we are more and more determined by external conditions, by situations that no one can escape and that more and more make us resemble one another" (The Art of...Kundera 27).
DALAI LAMA: "The law of death is among all living" (The Art of...The Dalai Lama 134). "There's really no avoiding the fact that suffering is part of life. And of course we have a natural tendency to dislike our suffering and problems" (The Art of...The Dalai Lama 139). In Buddhism in general, a lot of attention is paid to our attitudes towards our rivals or enemies. If you can learn to develop patience and tolerance towards your enemies, then everything else becomes much easier" (The Art of...The Dalai Lama 178).
Joe: After a long, hard time of skirmishes with the Viet Cong, my platoon was walking past a crop field. It was late in the day. Several villagers were working in the field. Suddenly my eye caught a couple of figures in the field. One was standing. The other was sitting on a piece of farm equipment. The figures were pretending to work but were watching us closely out of the corners of their eyes. I could tell by the way they were built and dressed that they were Viet Cong soldiers. My eyes met the eyes of the bigger soldier on the farm equipment. We stared into each other's eyes for a moment. His eyes were filled with terror. He knew I knew he wasn't a villager. I turned my head away so no one would look to see what I was looking at. No one else took notice of the two soldiers. I was tired. I couldn't stand for any more killing. I needed some decency. These men didn't need to die. I kept walking.
DALAI LAMA: "Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one's own skin, in one's own brain."
"Unhappiness comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity" (The Art of...The Dalai Lama 153).
M: "But I think that ordinarily people don't view the very nature of our existence to be characterized by suffering…I mean on your birthday people usually say, 'Happy Birthday!,' when actually the day of your birth was the birth of your suffering. But nobody says, 'Happy Birth-of-Suffering-day!' " (The Art of...The Dalai Lama 139).
Kevin: "We leave the leaves in the pot when we make tea. The first impression is bitterness. Americans like everything to taste sweet, then it becomes bitter in their stomachs. For the Chinese, the tea at first tastes bitter, but the aftertaste is sweet."
M: Yes, "a sense of humor is a trustworthy sign of recognition. I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor" (Afterword 232).
M: Are you fading me out of the interview?
M: "It's a well-known situation where the offense seeks the punishment" (The Art of...Kundera 102). M: Regarding the traumatized, however, "the person punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense" (The Art of...Kundera 103). "The punished beg for recognition of their guilt!" (The Art of...Kundera 103). M: Litost is a Czech word with no exact translation into any other language. It designates a feeling as infinite as being suspended over an abyss, a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse, and an indefinable longing. The first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog (The Book of...Kundera 121).
…Eventually, Claire decided that her husband didn't love her. He thought he did. She believed he didn't. She said that she wanted to separate, wanted to divorce. It was a preemptive move—less painful than the rejection that she was sure was just beyond tomorrow…
M: "Trying to hide, feeling guilty—that's the beginning of the end" (The Book of...Kundera 4).
M: Is "Exile: A Body Taken Out of Context" a story? It seems to be only a lot of events strung together.
M: Do you remember from your days at the film academy the form of film comedy called repetitio ad absurdum? Or maybe it was called reductio ad absurdum? Or repetitio ad nauseum? In any event, laughter is sparked by the endless repetition of a line or event throughout the film, as is or in variation.
This entire piece is a story in the form of variations.
The individuals follow each other like individual stretches of a journey leading toward a theme, a thought, a single individual, the sense of whom fades into the distance.
It is a story about Claire, and whenever Claire is absent, it is a story for Claire. She is the main character and main audience, and all the other events are variations on her story and come together in her life as in a mirror.
It is a story about laughter and forgetting, about forgetting and prayer, about prayer and the angels (The Book of…Kundera 165).
…Eight years before she met her husband, Claire prepared to jump off a cliff. Her college roommate pulled her to the ground to keep her from committing suicide.
In the book of Tobit, Sarah is suicidal. She's had seven husbands and each died during the consummation. She asks God to take her life. In another city, Tobiah asks God to end his life, too.
God sends the angel Raphael, who brings Tobiah and Sarah together. Raphael gives Tobiah a remedy and a prayer to break the curse on Sarah's life. Tobiah prays before the consummation and lives.
After the reception, Claire and her husband entered the suite, embraced, kissed. He took Claire by the hand. They knelt. From memory, he recited Tobiah's Old Testament marriage prayer. He unlaced Claire's dress. Removed her underclothes. Perfume and perspiration rose and fell in each breath. Dewy and damp, they clung to each other. They laughed and laughed…
M: How are you related to the characters in "Exile"?
M: Friends.
M: Why did you write about friends instead of yourself?
M: I had no interest in myself.
M: You've been a social worker, a priest, a writer. Were you trying to be a hero, a savior? Or maybe it's a sort of voyeurism.
"Exiles," maybe even your vocations, are encounters of two worlds.
On one side, each friend's world is sinking under the weight of history, and you view that world with immense skepticism. On the other side, you're suffering from the lack of great historic events. This is why you revel in radical ideologic postures. It's the lyrical, neurotic expectation of some great deed of your own which however is not coming, and will never come" (Afterword 231).
M: Oh.
M: To give an example of your posture, you twist all of your friends' lives into "happy endings." Claire discovers that she can express her rage and love playing the piano—through Bartók, Beethoven and Chopin. Kevin is memorialized. The half-way house children grow up to be well-adjusted adults. Karen and Joe recover through therapy. Michael, Pat, Lisa, Camille, Kim, Martin, Jennifer, Peggy, Milan, John, Gabriel and all the other victims of rape and abuse go on to live well-adjusted lives. And on and on.
You seemed to be pushing hard for a normative and prescriptive world view. You seem to have the misguided notion that the purpose of therapy is to fix everyone's behavior so they fit into what you think is healthy, happy behavior.
You do everything you can to dissolve your characters gradually into your own civilization (Afterword 230).
"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything" (Afterword 237). "The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a source of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to...answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties" (Afterword 237).
"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise—the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. André Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live" (Afterword 233).
You assume that your friends are happy, but how often do they maintain their silence, because they live in glass houses, and they can't see which hand holds a rock and which hand holds a squeegee.
"This has now been completely forgotten but it is the crux of the matter" (Afterword 234).
M: Are you "airbrushing" (The Book of...Kundera 3) me out of my own story?
M: Up 'til now, you've called this piece an interview rather than a story. So then—is it a story or not?
M: As far as my own quite personal aesthetic judgment goes, it really is a story, but I have no wish to force this opinion on anyone (Afterword 232).
...Then, Milan Kundera started laughing. Deep ringing laughter. He grabbed me around the shoulders and started dancing me in a magic circle like some Russian dance, like Tevia singing "To Life" in Fiddler on the Roof. Our faces distorted with laughter as we floated toward the ceiling like the laughers in Mary Poppins.
No sooner did his hair touch the ceiling than it yielded to him, and up he went through the opening. Finally, his shoes vanished into thin air. He faded into the distance (The Book of...Kundera 74).
I bumped my head on the ceiling and disappeared beneath the surface...
I remember him time and time again laughing and saying, "God loves too much."
...Claire's wedding veil couldn't pin down her tumbling auburn hair. She looked as French as the women in Renoir's paintings with their round faces, fair complexions and thick reddish hair.
Milan Kundera. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, 1986. (The Art of...Kundera)
Milan Kundera. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. (The Book of...Kundera)
Philip Roth. "Afterword: A Talk with the Author." Appendix to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. 229-237. (Afterword)
His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutter, MD. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.