The Festival of Insignificance

  Further praise for The Festival of Insignificance:

  ‘The vivacity of Kundera’s prose (translated by Linda Asher), the whirl of his ideas, and his sincere engagement with grand narratives and troubling questions remind you what a rare talent he is.’ Independent

  ‘Baffling, brilliant, funny and very easy to read.’ Metro

  ‘Kundera has an inimitable lightness of touch; he avoids literary effect and respects the residues of meaning that accumulates in ordinary things … Each episode, understated but nevertheless polished until you can see right through it to the emptiness beyond, is pure and diaphanous, like an angel.’ Literary Review

  ‘The heavy ideas interlock with a narrative given extended metaphorical expression in the falling to earth of a floating feather. Going somewhere going nowhere. It’s a beautifully composed work.’ The Times

  ‘Uplifting … The literary equivalent of a Sunday afternoon with an old friend who is wise enough to know that dealing directly with terrible things like loneliness, death and disappointment is not necessarily how the mind works – or what the spirit needs.’ Evening Standard

  ‘Kundera’s writing is most powerful when it is kaleidoscopic, zooming in pointedly on his characters and then panning out to link their emotions to human experience.’ The Economist

  ‘This short work is not slight at all. In fact, this may be the great ironist’s most magnificent joke: that this novella has all the bearing of many thousands of books.’ Herald

  ‘A featherlight monument against oblivion, an exemplary assertion of inchoate individuality, a declaration that if insignificance is to be faced down at all it can only be through the permanence of art.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘This slight but wonderful novel offers its own distinct brand of pleasure … Delightful … Insigificance is not the work of a grumpy old man but of a grinning old man … With its mix of reality and fantasy, comedy and melancholy, Insignificance calls to mind the Fellini films Kundera so reveres … If this is the last novel he ever publishes, it will make for a fitting capstone on an extraordinary career.’ Slate

  ‘Compelling … That Kundera has his tongue half in his cheek is part of the charm … Offers both a continuation of Kundera’s signature investigations and a reaction to the toxicity of the present day.’ Los Angeles Times

  ‘Slender but weighty, thoroughly cerebral … What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state between being and nothingness. Far from rehashing this theme, it presses it into new form: shorter, tighter, fired by aging rather than by coming of age. It would be a poor fit for Hollywood, but it’s a perfect one for Kundera, and for anyone who has looked at life in hindsight.’ Boston Globe

  MILAN KUNDERA

  THE FESTIVAL OF

  INSIGNIFICANCE

  A NOVEL

  Translated from the French by Linda Asher

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Part One: Introducing the Heroes

  Part Two: The Marionette Theater

  Part Three: Alain and Charles Often Think About Their Mothers

  Part Four: They Are All in Search of a Good Mood

  Part Five: A Little Feather Floats Beneath the Ceiling

  Part Six: Angels Falling

  Part Seven: The Festival of Insignificance

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Introducing the Heroes

  Alain Meditates on the Navel

  It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls, who—every one of them—showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated; captivated and even disturbed: It was as if their seductive power no longer resided in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts, but in that small round hole located in the center of the body.

  This provoked him to reflect: If a man (or an era) sees the center of female seductive power in the thighs, how to describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: The length of the thighs is the metaphoric image of the long, fascinating road (which is why the thighs must be long) that leads to erotic achievement; indeed, Alain said to himself, even in midcoitus the length of the thighs endows woman with the romantic magic of the inaccessible.

  If a man (or an era) sees the center of female seductive power in the buttocks, how to describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: brutality, high spirits, the shortest road to the goal; a goal all the more exciting for being double.

  If a man (or an era) sees the center of female seductive power in the breasts, how to describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: sanctification of woman; the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus; the male sex on its knees before the noble mission of the female sex.

  But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel?

  Ramon Strolls in the Luxembourg Gardens

  At about the same time as Alain was musing on the different sources of feminine seductiveness, Ramon was approaching the museum at the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, where for the past month Chagall paintings were on exhibit. He would have liked to see them, but he knew in advance that he would never have the stomach to willingly become part of that endless queue shuffling slowly toward the entrance. He looked at the people in line, their faces paralyzed by boredom, he pictured the galleries where their bodies and their chatter would obscure the paintings, and after a moment he turned away and started down a path that crossed the park.

  There the atmosphere was more agreeable; the human species seemed fewer and freer; some were running, not because they were in a hurry but because they liked to run; some were sauntering along eating an ice cream; on the lawn among the trees the disciples of some Asian practice were performing strange slow motions; farther along, in an immense circle, stood great white statues of the queens of France; and farther still, on the grass beneath the trees, here and there in every direction, stood sculptures of poets, painters, scientists; Ramon stopped in front of a suntanned, appealing adolescent, naked under his shorts, who was selling masks of the faces of Balzac, Berlioz, Hugo, Dumas. Ramon could not help smiling, and he continued his walk through the garden of geniuses who, modest as they were, surrounded by the benign indifference of these strollers, must feel comfortably liberated, for no one stopped to examine their faces or read the inscriptions on the pedestals. Ramon inhaled that indifference like a soothing calm. Gradually a slow, almost happy smile appeared on his face.

  The Cancer Will Not Happen

  At about the same time as Ramon was deciding against the Chagall show and choosing to stroll in the park, D’Ardelo was climbing the stairs to his doctor’s office. It was exactly three weeks before his birthday. For several years past, he had come to detest birthdays. Because of the numbers affixed to them. Still, he did not quite reject them, for the pleasure of the attention paid him mattered more than the shame of aging. Especially because, this time, the medical appointment gave the approaching date a new coloration. For today he was to learn the results of all the tests that would tell him if his body’s suspicious symptoms were due to cancer or not. He stepped into the waiting room and repeated to himself, in quaking tones, that in three weeks he would be marking both his so-distant birth and his so-near death—that he would be celebrating a double event.

  But as soon as he saw the doctor’s smiling face he understood that death had turned away. The doctor gripp
ed his hand in brotherly fashion. D’Ardelo, his eyes tearing, could not speak a word.

  The doctor’s office was on l’avenue de l’Observatoire, a few hundred yards from the Luxembourg Gardens. D’Ardelo lived on a little street at the far side of the park, so he set out to return across it. Walking amid the greenery brought back a nearly giddy good humor, especially when he rounded the great ring of statues of the onetime queens of France, all of them carved from white marble, standing in solemn postures that struck him as humorous, even jolly, as if these women meant to cheer the good news he had just learned. Unable to help himself, he raised a hand in salute two or three times, and broke into laughter.

  The Secret Charm of a Grave Illness

  It was somewhere around there, close to the queens of France, that Ramon encountered D’Ardelo, who till a year earlier had been a colleague of his in an institute whose name does not matter here. The two men stopped face-to-face, and after the usual greetings, D’Ardelo started talking, his voice strangely excited:

  “Listen, my friend—do you know La Franck, the great Madame Franck? Two days ago her partner died.” He paused, and in Ramon’s mind there appeared the face of a famous beauty he knew only from photographs.

  “A very painful death,” D’Ardelo continued. “She went through the whole thing with him. Ah, how she suffered!”

  Fascinated, Ramon gazed at the cheerful face telling him this doleful story.

  “But imagine—the very evening of the morning she’d held his dying body in her arms, she had dinner with a few friends and myself, and—you wouldn’t believe it—she was almost merry! I was so impressed! What strength! What love of life! Her eyes were still red from tears, and here she was laughing! And yet we all knew how much she’d loved him! How she must have suffered! The power in the woman!”

  Exactly as a quarter-hour earlier at the doctor’s office, tears glistened in D’Ardelo’s eyes. For as he spoke of Madame Franck’s spirit, he was thinking of himself. Hadn’t he also lived for a whole month in the presence of death? Hadn’t his own character been put through a harsh ordeal as well? Even now that it was only a memory, the cancer stayed with him like the glow of a small bulb that, mysteriously, amazed him. But he managed to control his feelings and took a more prosaic tone: “By the way, if I’m not mistaken, don’t you know some fellow who can put together a cocktail party—see to the food and all that?”

  “I do, yes,” said Ramon.

  Said D’Ardelo, “I’m going to give a little party for my birthday.”

  After the excited remarks on the famous Madame Franck, the light tone of this last line allowed Ramon to smile: “I take it your own life is going well!”

  Odd; the comment displeased D’Ardelo. As if the overly light tone destroyed the strange beauty of his good mood, magically marked as it was by the pathos of death, whose shadow still preoccupied him. “Yes,” he said, “things are all right.” Then after a pause he added, “Even though …”

  He paused again, then: “You know, I’m just coming from my doctor.”

  The confusion on his interlocutor’s face was gratifying; he let the silence go on, long enough so that Ramon could not help but ask: “And? Is something wrong?”

  “There is.”

  And D’Ardelo fell silent again, and again Ramon could not help but ask: “What did the doctor tell you?”

  At that moment D’Ardelo saw his own face in Ramon’s eyes as if in a mirror: the face of a man already old but still good-looking, marked by a sadness that made it even more appealing; he thought how this sad handsome man was soon to celebrate his birthday, and the idea he had dwelled on before his doctor appointment sprang anew into his head—the enthralling idea of a double celebration, a celebration for birth and death at once. He went on watching himself in Ramon’s eyes; then, in a very calm, very soft voice, he said, “Cancer.”

  Ramon stammered something, and clumsily, fraternally, he laid a hand on D’Ardelo’s arm: “But that can be treated …”

  “Too late, alas. But forget what I’ve just told you, don’t mention it to anyone; and do give all the more thought to my cocktail party. Life must go on!” said D’Ardelo, and before resuming his walk, he raised a hand in a sign of farewell, and this diffident, nearly shy gesture had an unexpected charm that touched Ramon.

  Inexplicable Lie, Inexplicable Laughter

  The encounter of the two former colleagues ended with that beautiful gesture. But I cannot help wondering: Why did D’Ardelo lie?

  D’Ardelo asked himself that question immediately afterward, and he did not know the answer either. No, he was not ashamed of having lied. What intrigued him was his inability to understand the reason for the lie. Normally, if a person lies, the point is to deceive someone and draw an advantage from that. But what could he possibly gain from inventing a case of cancer? Oddly, as he thought about the senselessness of his lie, he could not help laughing. And that laughter itself was incomprehensible to him. Why did he laugh? Did he find his behavior comical? No. A feel for the comical was actually not his strong point. Just simply, without knowing why, his fictional cancer pleased him. He went on his way and continued to laugh. He laughed and took pleasure in his good mood.

  Ramon Pays Charles a Visit

  An hour after his encounter with D’Ardelo, Ramon was already at Charles’s apartment. “I come bearing a gift: a cocktail party job for you,” he said.

  “Bravo! We’ll need it this year,” said Charles, and he invited his friend to sit down across from him at a low table.

  “A gift for you. And for Caliban. In fact, where is he?”

  “Where should he be? At his house, with his wife.”

  “But I hope he’s still doing cocktail parties with you?”

  “Oh, yes. The theaters are still ignoring him.”

  Ramon saw a fairly thick book on the table. He leaned forward and could not hide his surprise: “Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. Why is that here?”

  “Our master gave it to me as a gift.”

  “But what could he find interesting in it?”

  “He underlined a few paragraphs for me. What I’ve read was quite amusing.”

  “Amusing?”

  “The story of the twenty-four partridges.”

  “What?”

  “The story of the twenty-four partridges. You don’t know it? And yet that was the beginning of the great change in the world!”

  “The great change in the world? Nothing less than that?”

  “Nothing less. Caliban thinks so too. But tell me, what is this cocktail party, and at whose house?”

  Ramon explained, and Charles asked, “Who is this D’Ardelo? A jackass like all my clients?”

  “Of course.”

  “And what’s his brand of stupidity?”

  “What’s his …” Ramon repeated, thoughtful. Then: “You know my friend Quaquelique?”

  Ramon’s Lesson on Brilliance and Insignificance

  “My old friend Quaquelique,” Ramon went on, “is one of the greatest womanizers I’ve ever known. Once I went to a reception where both of them were present, D’Ardelo and he. They didn’t know each other. By chance they were standing in the same crowded room, and D’Ardelo probably never even noticed my friend. There were some fine-looking women there, and D’Ardelo is crazy for them. He would go to impossible lengths to get them to pay attention to him. That night, witty talk shot from his mouth like fireworks.”

  “Off-color?”

  “The contrary. Even his jokes are always moral, optimistic, respectable, but at the same time so elegantly subtle, convoluted, so difficult to understand, that they command attention but without an immediate effect. You have to wait three or four seconds until he breaks into laughter himself, and another few seconds go by before his listeners understand and politely join in. Then, just when everyone starts laughing—and this is a bit of technique I want you to appreciate!—he turns serious; neutral, almost indifferent, he watches his audience, and secretly, with a certain vanity, he t
akes delight in their laughter. Quaquelique’s way is just the opposite. Not that he’s silent: When he’s in company he is constantly murmuring something under his breath, in his frail voice, more a kind of whistle than speech, but nothing he says draws any attention.”

  Charles laughed.

  “Don’t laugh. Speaking without drawing attention—that’s not easy! Being ever-present by your voice and yet keeping unheard—that takes virtuosity.”

  “The point of that virtuosity escapes me.”

  “Silence draws attention. It can be disturbing. Make you seem enigmatic, or suspect. And that’s precisely what Quaquelique wants to avoid. Like at that party I mentioned. There was a very beautiful woman there who fascinated D’Ardelo. Every now and then Quaquelique would make some completely banal remark to her, uninteresting, nothing. But the more agreeable to her in that it demanded no intelligent response whatever, no ready wit. After a while I notice that Quaquelique is no longer there. Intrigued now, I observe the woman. D’Ardelo has just uttered one of his bons mots, the five-second silence ensues, then he breaks into laughter, and after another three seconds the other people do the same. And meantime, under cover of the laughter, the woman has moved off toward the door. D’Ardelo, flattered by the echo his bon mot has set off, continues with his verbal display. A moment later he notices that the lovely woman is gone. And because he has no idea that a Quaquelique exists, he cannot comprehend her disappearance. He has understood nothing—and to this day he understands nothing—about the value of insignificance. And that is the answer to your question about the nature of D’Ardelo’s stupidity.”

  “The uselessness of brilliance—yes, I get it.”

  “More than useless. It’s harmful. When a brilliant fellow tries to seduce a woman, she has the sense she’s entering a kind of competition. She feels obliged to shine too, to not give herself over without some resistance. Whereas insignificance sets her free. Spares her the need for vigilance. Requires no presence of mind. Makes her incautious, and thus more easily accessible. But to go on: With D’Ardelo, what you have is not an insignificant fellow but a Narcissus. And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person’s eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors. And in the end that is what matters for the two of you: He is nice. Of course, in my opinion he is mainly a snob. But even between him and me, something has changed. I just learned that he’s very sick. And from that moment on I see him differently.”