While everyone was falling in and out of love with Kundera in the 1980s, I was learning how to moo like a cow, oink like a pig, baa like a sheep, so you’ll have to forgive me for coming to this, the last of Kundera’s “middle period novels” so late in the game. Fortunately, as its title implies, Immortality is a complex, nuanced novel of enduring relevance, for while we may not all be obsessed with the life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and running off to Switzerland, we do all ruminate from time to time on our own mortality and what it says about our actions in this single fleeting lifetime.
While awaiting his friend, Professor Avenarius, Kundera observes a woman in the pool of his health club. Though she is in her sixties, as she leaves she waves at the life guard in a manner that makes Kundera feel a pang in his heart: “That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover” (3). He assigns her a name, Agnes, and for the next three hundred pages, he invents for her a story: how she first developed the wave as a girl, how her sister, Laura, stole the gesture and how, after her death, her husband Paul performs it for us one final time.
Interspersed between the nonlinear narrative sections are two different elements: (a) a literary biography of Goethe, which focuses on his relationship with Bettina von Arnim, (b) and metafictional sections in which the author himself discusses the novel he is writing (this novel) with his good friend Avenarius.
Goethe
What do the literary biography sections add? How do they move the narrative forward? In one sense, they don’t. During one discussion with Avenarius, Kundera decries novels that are too obedient to “the rules of unity of action,” labeling dramatic tension the “real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages…into steps leading to the final resolution” (238) rather than moments to be savored as one would savor a delicious meal. In this light, we read the biography not for plot but for theme. While Goethe doesn’t appear in the events of the novel, we see parallels from his life in the actions of Paul, himself an intellectual with his own radio show full of complex ideas and words “the whole staff would afterward secretly look up in the dictionary” (119); while Bettina contributes nothing to the story, her gestures and intentions are reincarnated in Laura as she attempts to steal Paul from her sister in the same manner that Bettina attempted to steal Goethe from Frau Goethe. Through these parallels, Kundera develops his ideas on both identity and individuality. What does Bettina’s unique and innocent independence mean if it can be imitated a century later? Then there is the sexual ambiguity both Laura and Bettina employ and for the same advantage. If these strategies of coquetry are so universal, then how ambiguous could they really be?
The biographical sections also reinforce two structural elements: (a) that this is a work of metafiction in which the author and his thoughts will be inserted directly, and (b) that it is nonlinear, for even the biography of Goethe jumps forward and backward, focusing on major themes rather than plot, in the way literary analysis tends to do.
Metafiction
As Kundera reminds us throughout the novel, these characters aren’t real. After all, it is no great coincidence they’re lives contain so many parallels to the life of Goethe. However, what the narrator cannot tell us, for he lacks the self-awareness to do so, is that he too is a construct, the narrator-Kundera that the real-Kundera has invented to serve in his stead. Such is the nature of all metafiction: even the character who declares him or herself the creator is still contained within the work itself, is still being written by someone else unseen.
This is made most explicitly evident in the closing section when Kundera and Avenarius (a real colleague or a reincarnation of positivist German-Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius?) find themselves “standing face to face with Paul” (333) at the very same health club where Kundera invented Agnes. Paul has lost his wife, he’s struggled to raise their daughter with the help of his new wife, Laura, but everything is not smooth sailing. It is here with the merging of these two worlds that we finally understand (if we haven’t already) just how fictional Kundera is and his conversations with Avenarius. We knew that Agnes’ Switzerland and Paul’s radio station were fictional, but this too? Ah, metafiction, the truth that tells a lie!
Gestures
Flowing entirely from a single gesture–Agnes waving as she leaves the pool–this is certainly a novel of gestures. Again and again, we are directed to the idea of gesture as identity: in the girlish wave, in the dark glasses, in the hereditary expressions of Paul’s face, in the oppression of the imagologues, and finally in the “gesture of longing for immortality” that drives so many of the actions in the novel.
Each character longs for the kind of legacy left by great works of brilliance, charity, love, while avoiding the infamy that often accompanies it. This dichotomy is made starkly apparent in the sections dedicated to the ghosts of Goethe and Ernest Hemingway. There in the afterlife, Hemingway complains about the attention he now receives. “Instead of reading my books, they’re writing books about me.” The critics accuse him of not loving his wife, ignoring his son, lying, lacking sincerity, and other moral failings. Goethe responds, “That’s immortality…[It] means eternal trial” (87). With attention comes scrutiny. Though both men are remembered for their superhuman work, they’re also remembered for their very human failings, just as the author-narrator no doubt will be.
Conclusion
All novels tell us have to read them. This I firmly believe. An author uses structure, genre, and repetition to signal the reader. In metafiction, the author does this even more directly. In the end, Immortality, is an analysis of itself, commenting on the characters the way a literary analysis would and critiquing itself as it builds itself, but by taking a step back, we can see it is also simpler than that. It is a novel about a novelist. Here is his life, recorded linearly; here is his friend Avenarius with whom he discusses his work as he is writing it; here is all of his inspiration presented in the scattered, fragmented, and nonlinear way that novels present themselves to their creators. It just so happens that Kundera (the character) gets to meet his creations in real-life at the end.
Steven J Kolbe 