The themes in and the problem with Kundera's Laughter and Forgetting

As noted yesterday the great power of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is its grounding in the Eastern bloc politics - the oppression of writers during the Soviet dominance, especially galling in Czechoslovakia, which had a tradition of literary and cinematic innovation and openness, leading to the exile of many writers (and suppression or worse of others), Kundera included. As he imagines in the section Litost, he is situated in an apt high up in a tower in the French city or Rennes (where he settled when first in exile) and looking back - figuratively - on Prague and the literary culture. It's a painful, mournful image; despite his international success as an exiled writer in France, he thinks of his homeland and native language. The theme of the novel seems to be that there are various not remedies for but anodynes against oppression and censorship, notably laughter (literary humor, raucous storytelling), "forgetting" (the willed absence of knowledge of death and destruction) - the title elements - but also creation of a literature of innovation, comradeship (especially among writers), and above all sex and sexual freedom. Just about every section of this multifaceted novel - each section standing independently, almost like a stanza in modernist poem - concerns sexual relationship, and in several it concerns the lover - in one section a man and in another a woman - striving to recover a packet of love letters or diary notes, a conscious act of forgetting, in fact obliterating the past - and a parallel to the writer's trying to destroy published (and unpublished) literary works or to take shelter in a pseudonym, all to keep a step ahead of the oppressive state. Also as noted in previous posts, one "modern" theme that clearly does not enter into the novel is that of women's liberation and women's rights; MK's view of sex is inevitably from the male POV, and the women are pretty much without exception treated as objects of desire and the men depicted as Lotharios. In that way this novel, experimental and on the cutting edge of form and style in its time, seems dated and remote - though who can't help but feel we should cut some slack for a writer uprooted from his homeland and his native language?

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