World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature May Hawas

She seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed. (6)

….

Again it occurred to him that Tereza was a child put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket and sent downstream. Tomas did not realise at the time that metaphors are dangerous.

Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love. (10)
On the one hand, Tereza is weak. This is evident in her encounters with men where she rarely instigates the action: as a dance partner with Tomas’s colleague (16), in the affair with the mysterious engineer (138-59), and against her voyeur stepfather (42). On the other hand, the child in the bulrush basket is weak only theoretically. There is no question of the child being abandoned and left to die; divine miracles require happy endings. The narrator’s reflection that “[i]f the Pharaoh’s daughter hadn’t snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the waves, there would have been no...civilization as we now know it!” (10) is tongue-in-cheek. Tomas may feel sorry enough for the ‘child’ but he is drawn to it like Pharoah’s daughter is drawn to baby Moses: inevitably. This ‘love of fate’ or ‘amor fati’ (20) is the source of Tereza’s power. The nation does not only need its strong men to fight for and cultivate it, it demands that they do so. The strength of even the smallest, politically weakest and most dependent nation lies in the manic pull this “mad myth” exerts on its members. Tomas’s relation to Tereza, a mix of “hysteria” (7), “love” (7), “compassion” (20) or an urge to “lie down beside her and want to die with her” (7) is akin to Benedict Anderson’s nationalist sentiment created through a fantasy of kinship: “a fraternity that makes it possible . . . for so many millions of people not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (Anderson 6). When Tereza leaves her small town to approach/offer herself up to Tomas in Prague (prompting Tomas’s introspection by the window) it is implicitly inevitable that Tomas take her in with her suitcase; indeed, he himself at some point is not quite sure how it comes about. When Tereza abandons Tomas later in Zurich and returns to occupied Prague, Tomas feels obliged to take yet another life-changing decision to follow her for his own sense of wholeness.

Because of these binaries the connection between Tomas and Tereza is simultaneously described as tug-and-pull, action and response. As Tomas cheats on Tereza, she stands on a par with Czech destiny in European history, and becomes, rather literally with the Moses metaphor, a ‘testament betrayed’. Tereza’s victimhood often parallels the historical moments highlighted in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: beloved Prague now occupied by the Russians and forsaken by its leaders, glorious Bohemia now divided and past, ideal Europa kidnapped and ravished, and naive Czechoslovakia sacrificed in Munich. Tereza’s victimhood parallels the betrayal of the Czech people by neighbouring European powers: whether in the early invasions by European Empires or at later times, with the larger European nations’ failure to honour their defence treaties with Czechoslovakia. Tereza, or the Czech ‘ideal’, is also betrayed by the Czech nationalists themselves who are too ready to overwrite Czech history with new narratives: by affiliating it to Russia such as “well-meaning” Communist government officials during the Cold War, or by stressing the Czech Republic’s smaller ethnicities at the risk of its wider European affiliation, or by the Czech dissenters narcissistically advocating protest for protest’s sake rather than for real political change. As Tomas sticks by Tereza’s side: as he marries her, follows her across borders, mourns Karenin with her, refuses to sign a petition because getting involved with politics would upset her, and moves to the countryside to please her, he dies, as Sabina puts it “as Tristan, not as Don Juan” (121). Metaphorically speaking, he has rescued Moses from the river; symbolically speaking, he has remained true to Bohemia’s Europeanism by refusing to accede to other, local and narrower political allegiances; and novelistically-speaking, the author has attempted to dialogue with the greater literary history of the European novel.

Thus, Kundera locates the individual in the nation, and the individual and the nation in history. Sections of philosophical musing expressed by an I-narrator (often introduced as the voice of the author himself) ponder the plight of individuals caught in difficult decisions and reflect on the fate of ‘small nations’ held at the mercy of more powerful ones. The ineffectual nation-hood system of mother- or fatherland that stresses newly-defined local identities is dismissed in favour of the idea of a ‘world’-nation –Europe being the world– with the warning that that too will die if its culture turns totalitarian, and a homogenising supra-national discourse effaces the diversity of smaller nation-states within the bloc. Kundera’s challenging of the Orientalisation of Czech culture, with the Czech people pictured as some sort of small and undistinguished exotic relatives of Western Europeans, and his insistence that Bohemia, or Central Europe, is the birthplace of much that is considered quintessentially ‘European’ from the Reformation to avant-garde art has made his voice one of resistance for many of the ‘minor’ cultures of the continent. Kundera’s novel makes manifest too the appeal and tension inherent in the idea of a united Europe. At its best the relation between the small and larger nations of Europe is one of intercultural dialogue, where diversity brings about the flowering of great philosophies, music and the novel form (its EU parallel being that integration entails libertarian human rights, economic prosperity, etc). At its weakest a pan-European discourse reveals the inconsistencies in speaking of a ‘united’ continent’ as it glosses over which countries are represented, when and how, and which countries’ interests gain priority in times of trouble. So pan-European discourse can be dangerous at both ‘extremes’, in its divisiveness, if it distances Eastern and Central European peoples from Western European culture and disregards their contributions to mainstream European thought, or at the other end, if it centralizes culture and steamrolls over the diversity of the peoples in the Continent.

The Judaic/Biblical metaphor aptly reflects Kundera’s transcendental supra-national perspective: transnational as he counters a localised Czech nationalism (specifically that of the Czech/oslovak Republic during the Cold War) by stressing the shared European ‘world’ of specific ancient or classical religions; and supra-national as he limits that vision, by dismissing the connections these religions and their intellectual heritage might determine to ‘non-Europe’, whether located within or in propinquity to ‘Europe’ (such as many ‘Eastern’ European nations, as well as Russia),⁴² or located outside of Europe, ‘the rest of the West’. Thus, in the statement quoted above, “[t]here would have been no…civilization as we now know it”, civilization refers to European civilisation although the two religions he speaks of were neither born in Europe nor restricted to Europeans, and although the myth he speaks of is shared in exactly the same narrative version by a third religion in the so-called Abrahamic tripartite: Islam.⁴³ Read long enough, Kundera’s European supra-nation would have one believe that Pharaoh’s daughter plucked Moses from the Rhine.⁴⁴

The same metaphor delineates too the literary world or literary history⁴⁵ in which Kundera has repeatedly shown he would like his work to be read, that of the ‘European novel’,⁴⁶ that is, “not only novels created in Europe by Europeans but novels that belong to a history that began with the dawn of the Modern Era in Europe” (Testaments Betrayed 28):
I speak of the European novel not only to distinguish it from, say, the Chinese novel but also to point out that its history is transnational; that the French novel, the English novel, the Hungarian novel, are in no position to create autonomous histories of their own but are all part of a common, supranational history that provides the only context capable of revealing both the direction of the novel’s evolution and the value of particular works. [Italics in original] (Testaments Betrayed 28)
This European novel then, is ‘transnational’ and ‘supranational’ but still distinctive from ‘the Chinese novel’ or that from Japan and ancient Greece. Why? In Kundera’s view the European novel is a child of the (European) “Modern Era” which started with the break from a European Christian, particularly Catholic, past: anything that comes before seems irrelevant to the European novel. Anything that comes after, such as the “1920s and 30s authors of North America” or the “60s of Latin America,” is a reaction to the European child of the European Modern Era, and, as Kundera writes in his critical collection Testaments Betrayed, although “a bit foreign to European taste”, may be tentatively considered “an extension of the history of the European novel, of its form and of its spirit, and … even astonishingly close to its earliest beginnings…the old Rabelaisian sap” (30).

“Astonishingly” is the key word here. There is no question, none, in Kundera’s worldview that the ‘Rabelaisian’ spirit or the Christian beginnings may have emerged from or been influenced by any cultures from outside of Europe, although in later modern times (but only after the ‘end’ of the modern era in Europe) and in exceptional circumstances, he does allow North Americans and Mexicans in as “non-resident contributors” (Wood 70). There is no consideration that the split between the mediaeval European Christian world and the beginning of the secular Modern Era, or in Kundera’s words elsewhere, the tension between “Catholicism and scepticism” which “defined Europe” (Kramer n.pag) was influenced or spurred on by the writings of or even conflicts with any culture outside of Europe. Kundera’s idea of culture, particularly novelistic culture, seems monolithic, deterministic, and the exclusive property of small groups which are identified as either European or torch-bearers of European culture.

To clarify the boundary of this ‘supra-nation’, rather than consider where Kundera locates ‘non-European' culture, it may be useful instead to look at how he assesses the novels actually allowed to be ‘an extension of the history of the European novel’, such as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
A situation unique in history: Rushdie belongs by origin to a Muslim society that, in large part, is still living in the period before the Modern Era. He wrote his book on Europe, in the Modern Era –or, more precisely, at the end of that era.

Just as Iranian Islam was at the time moving away from religious moderation toward a combative theocracy, so, with Rushdie, the history of the novel was moving from the genteel, professorial smile of Thomas Mann to an unbridled wellspring of Rabelaisian humor. The antithesis collided, each in its extreme form. (Testaments Betrayed 25)

Kundera seems so desperate to escape being considered a national representative or some sort of Czech provincial in the wider world of letters that he aggrandises a European collective enough to provincialize anything outside it instead. “How to define ‘provincialism’?” He asks in a more recent essay on World Literature, and answers: it is “the inability (or refusal) to see one’s own culture in the large context” [italics in original] (The Curtain 37). It might be added that it is also the inability to perceive a larger context to one’s perspective of a ‘large context’. Although Kundera often praises Rushdie as one of the writers of the ‘global south’ (and the allusion to Rabelais whom Kundera considers one of the founding fathers of the European novelistic tradition shows how highly he regards Rushdie’s work), Kundera always carefully locates such texts against or in relation to a progressive determinacy of linear development started and measured by European civilization. There is a difference here between having a perspective from a centre, which everyone has, and which is arguable, defendable and negotiable, and between defining a region, as Kundera does, as the world that matters (in the same time, no less, as he resists this ‘world’s’ denigration of his own ‘small’ culture). There is a difference too between considering European culture as the civilised world’s culture, with world-European borders, a world-European market and its own world-European novelistic and historical time –which is problematic enough albeit still defendable– and between seeming to refer to the culture of the European peoples as if it were a result of some centuries of in-breeding, which it certainly is not. One of the main reasons after all that European culture has been and remains a great culture is because of its globality: its interactions, its worldliness, and its world-wide dissemination and appreciation. Kundera’s rationale behind this integral ‘supranational’ cultural unity carries all the subtlety of the nationalism of the stud-farm, propelled by the inherent (Romantic) idea of ‘national’ culture as a seamless, organic cultural unit, but which itself belies the actual potential for unity of a political region as a rational consensus on common laws and culture, and to which belonging is, to a certain extent, voluntary and pluralist.

Why is the Modern Era capitalized? Because it is identifiable as a European locus of novelistic time starting from Cervantes through Rabelais and Central European culture to the rest of the world where texts written by those sensible people, such as Rushdie, produce for the ‘children of Europe’ new examples of a European craft by dealing consciously with the history of the European novel. But why does Rushdie’s ‘Muslim society’ live ‘in the pre-Modern Era’? The assumption that in the subcontinent there is no ‘modernity’, by any common definition of what modernity may mean, seems dubious, particularly bearing in mind the Indian subcontinent’s centuries-old cultural prosperity and industrial power, despite or even because of its terrible historical burdens. (It is in this context supremely ironic that the Prague Spring context which established Milan Kundera’s international fame had at least some of its origins of non-violent resistance in India). Kundera also dismisses the literary traditions in South Asia which boasts in some form or other of an unbroken tradition of oral and written art that spans some two and a half millennia (Pollock), the vast cultural and economic prosperity of the ancient trade routes, and, if all these do not count, assumes moreover that some 350 years of various European occupations from the fifteenth century to the middle of the twentieth did not leave a single common (multi-directional) cultural footprint. Moreover, why do Rushdie’s origins come from outside the European Modern Era? His father was a Cambridge-educated lawyer and businessman; his mother a teacher. His father intentionally adopted the name ‘Rushdie’ from ‘Ibn Rushd’ (Averroes) who is sometimes claimed as the founding father of Western secular thought, for his writings prompted the tension between religion and scepticism –the ‘two poles’ that ‘define’ Europe and start the ‘Modern Era’ as Kundera would have it. Yet Rushdie still comes from a pre-Modern Era, and writes The Satanic Verses in Europe towards the ‘end’ of the Modern Era (ostensibly when such writers, despite being “non-European in taste”, and coming from ‘pre-modern’ societies, ‘began’ infiltrating the European-world market). So much for Averroes.

If this kind of vision is traditional enough and certainly not unique to Kundera, although it might be uncommon in such a widely-read author today, further on in the piece on Satanic Verses quoted above, even more logical confusion appears. Kundera writes: ‘Just as Iranian Islam was at the time moving away from religious moderation toward a combative theocracy, so, with Rushdie, the history of the novel was moving from the genteel, professorial smile of Thomas Mann to an unbridled wellspring of Rabelaisian humor’ (Testaments Betrayed 25). When did the Iranian Islamic Revolution ‘move away’ from ‘religious moderation’ toward a ‘combative theocracy’? The Satanic Verses appeared in 1988, nine years after the Iranian Revolution; the regime the Revolution had itself overturned (rather than gradually ‘moved away’ from) was not one of “religious moderation” but forced ‘anti-clericism’ and had as much in common with ‘religious moderation’ as Khomeini’s subsequent regime had with liberation; and finally, ‘combative’ of what? The logical disconnection continues: ‘so, with Rushdie, the history of the novel was moving from the genteel, professorial smile of Thomas Mann to an unbridled wellspring of Rabelaisian humor’. Rushdie and Rabelais? Possibly . More accurately: Rabelais, the 1001 Nights, Latin American magical realism, the Old Testament and the Quran –at least– prompt Rushdie’s novelistic storytelling. Canonising Rabelais (or Rushdie for that matter) as a national ‘founding father’, or the Quran, as a national ‘founding text’, makes the literary canon parochial and insular –beset with precisely the kind of ethno-political affiliation that Kundera tries to transcend for himself and his own work.⁴⁷ The syncretic process of all cultures, the way they are created by the appropriation of artefacts and meanings from other civilisations and their own internal heterogeneity is acknowledged by Kundera as only possible within strict ethno-European borders.
The ‘Voyage-In’

Beer in the Snooker Club takes the form of a Bildungsroman. Distanced from his local community by the colonial education he has received, a Cairene flâneur goes on a journey of learning accompanied by his best friend, faces certain hurdles which cause him to have a minor epiphany, indulges in a few affairs, some good for him, others less so, and finally marries, or at any rate, proposes marriage to an old girlfriend. Beer in the Snooker Club is also a classic literary ‘voyage-in’, depicting the protagonist’s journey to the metropolitan centre, his lack of integration there, and his return to the ‘margins’. In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said describes the concept of the ‘voyage in’ as “the conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten history….carried out by dozens of scholars, critics, and intellectuals in the peripheral world” (260-61). Sometimes third-world critics and artists contributed to and reformulated major avant-garde movements with the result of transforming in fundamental ways diverse fields of modern enquiry and common perceptions of the experience of modernity. Said argues that such a movement was largely a form of resistance to the colonial culture, a way of “dealing frontally with the metropolitan culture, using the techniques, discourses, and weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved exclusively for the European” (293; see also Fanon 1976). Since many third-world writers locate themselves from within the European culture they critique whether by physical location or by education, Said sees that their texts need to be read contrapuntally, “according neither [culture] the privilege of ‘objectivity’ to ‘our side’ nor the encumbrance of ‘subjectivity’ to ‘theirs’” (312).

If the concept of the classic Bildungsroman as it first arose aimed to show a young man growing gradually into his national/cultural community and from there his larger universal role in humanity (and there is some debate on the objective of closure), Ghali’s Bildungsroman shows in fact the opposite: alienation from family, community, nation and ‘humanity’ at large; and this situation is directly linked to the loss of his ‘birthright’ (of ‘mother tongue’, citizenship, etc.) due to colonialism. The more ‘experience’ Ram gains on his voyage to the metropolis, the more he understands what he has lost. A genre that has travelled across borders and languages and often acquired different forms in diverse parts of the world, the Bildungsroman has been appropriated repeatedly by artists identifying themselves as writing from locations of resistance with precisely this end in view, such as for instance the Spanish-American, the African and the feminist Bildungsroman (see Doub; Collins; Bolaki, respectively).⁴⁸

Ram travels from Cairo to London where he gains first-hand experience of his second-degree status in the world of the ‘white’ man, before returning to Cairo and finding himself alienated there as well because of the English ‘knowledge’ he has acquired. He ‘writes back’ to the Empire, criticising British imperialism for having formed him in its image and then refused to accept him. Finding that his love affair with Edna, a Jewish Egyptian woman, is doomed to fail in a 1950s Egypt that will eventually expel its Jewish community, Ram ‘writes back’ to the new Egyptian military class. He critiques Nasser’s government for spouting the best of the time’s egalitarian socialist rhetoric and practising its worst excesses, torture camps and nationalisation included. Aware of his alienation from both cultures Ram builds a potential nation in the imagination (as British imperialism had built one for him of Britain before), a cross-section of all he finds favourable in both cultures: the structures for political stability, secularism and intellectual opportunity of the West, and Ram’s own lived experience of the pluralistic tolerance, camaraderie and wealth of upper class Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. Ram’s cross-nation appears as global multiculturalism with a socialist face –a utopian ideal that the ending of the book itself wryly mocks.

Rather than a homogeneous supra-national concept such as the pan-Arabism Nasser is drawn shoving down everyone’s throat,⁴⁹ Ram’s nation presents any combination of the various social groups in Egypt, divided, as far as the members of these groups are concerned, hierarchically into semi-recognisable strata. Ram seems to view these sub-communities as forming a whole by existing exclusively alongside and overlapping with each other. Unlike the outward-looking public vision of supra-nations, Ram’s cross-national vision is inward-looking, personal in tone, and can best be described as ‘milieu politics’. His rather picaresque mingling among ‘Egyptian society’, polite or otherwise, represents one social milieu after another: rich Egyptian landowners working alongside, or in league with, the British administration, European settlers and small professionals (Turks, Armenians, Greeks), indigenous non-Muslim Egyptians (Jews and Copts), peasants working the land, and even the students, who were often mobilised in political protest at the time. The sum of all of these together stripped of their social inequality is Ram’s socialist-inspired idea of a whole community; a political concept that acknowledges all of these is his ideal nation-state, and that is what he seems to pose as an alternative to any homogenous national identity. To transcend the nation Ram delves deep into himself, and rather than make the personal political, makes the political personal, even if he dwindles into banality:

Egypt to me is so many different things. Playing snooker with Doromian and Varenian the Armenians, is Egypt to me. Sarcastic remarks are Egypt to me –not only the fellah and his plight. Riding the tram is Egypt...How can I explain to you that Egypt to me is something unconscious, is nothing particularly political, or...or...oh, never mind. (190)
The key to Ram’s self-knowledge lies with Edna who plays a part in Ram’s Bildung. The idea of knowledge in its many aspects –whether self-knowledge, institutional forms of gaining knowledge like schools, knowledge of the world or worldliness, or the existential dilemma of one’s presence and purpose in the world– is integral to Beer in the Snooker Club. Ram perceives himself as a fundamentally unhappy person because of what he learns.⁵⁰ Not only does Edna introduce Ram to politics, sex and travel, but she highlights for him the significance of knowledge itself. Coming from the same upper social class, Edna encourages Ram to question its economic injustices; a student of the same British education system, she indirectly pushes home to him why this is as much a cause for lament and condemnation as it is a sign of privilege. Edna also enables Ram to go to Europe where he first becomes aware of himself as a colonial ‘subject’. She introduces him to love and love-making, a fundamental concept of experience in the Bildungsroman. She introduces him to politics by imparting to him a new critical consciousness of the world. Finally, she teaches him about knowledge itself as she gains access to his previously solitary reading experience, suggests things for him to read and encourages him to critique them. From the beginning of their meeting, Edna, Ram’s personal formation and politics are one and the same thing.

Ram’s voracious reading enables him and his best friend and literary counterpart Font to dream of ‘living’; and ‘life’, as is the case of the third-world elite almost everywhere, means ‘life in Europe’ or ‘the West’. In one of the most lyrical passages in the book, innocence and experience, awareness of self and other merge ironically and contrapuntally as Ram describes how his imagination about other cultures was first awakened. Blending together a series of distinct nationalist clichés, the passage is rather long but it is worth quoting:

The world of ice and snow in winter and red, slanting roof-tops was beginning to call us. The world of intellectuals and underground metros and cobbled streets and a green countryside which we had never seen, beckoned to us. The world where students had rooms, and typists for girl-friends, and sang songs and drank beer in large mugs, shouted to us. A whole imaginary world. A mixture of all the cities in Europe; where pubs were confused with zinc bars and where Piccadilly led to the Champs-Elysées; where there was something called the ‘bourgeoisie’ and someone called the ‘landlady’; where there were Grand hotels and Fiat factories and bull-fighting; where Americans were conspicuous and anarchists wore beards and where there was something called the ‘Left’; where Christopher Isherwood’s German family lived, where Swedes had the highest standard of living and where poets lived in garrets and there were indoor swimming pools.
I wanted to live. I read and read and Edna spoke and I wanted to live. I wanted to have affairs with countesses and to fall in love with a barmaid and to be a gigolo and to be a political leader and to win at Monte Carlo and to be down-and-out in London and to be an artist and to be elegant and also to be in rags. (54-55)
In what it portrays of the yearning to experience Europe and the synonymous relation between ‘the West’ and ‘knowledge’, Ram evokes the Egyptian equivalent of the ‘Grand Tour’ for most wealthy bicultural Egyptians of the time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Grand Tour was an ideological exercise aiming to “round out the education of young [British] men of the ruling classes by exposing them to the treasured artefacts and ennobling society of the Continent. Usually occurring just after completion of studies at Oxford or Cambridge,…[it was] a social ritual intended to prepare these young men to assume the leadership positions preordained for them at home” (Buzard 38). The Egyptian young man of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could travel to England or France after appropriate schooling, and become –here the complication of inferiority culture comes in– not exactly cultured, but, with his first-hand experience of the centre, almost validated and polished enough to take on some of the imperial culture’s mission on his return to his own country.

Ram gradually leaves behind this one-directional, cultural mimicry of national stereotypes to acquire a more critical ability to assess the political situation of Egypt-in-the-world, and it is Edna too who initiates him in this journey of political becoming. Unlike many of his contemporaries Ghali does not reuse the same ‘chaste and spiritual East’/‘materialist and whore-ish West’ binary so prevalent in the anti-colonial discourses of early and mid-twentieth century Egypt. Ram does not reflect on the love affair with Edna, even if unsuccessful, as a kind of ‘impossible’ love allegory to symbolise the impossibility that ‘East’ and ‘West’ should ever politically meet.⁵¹ Instead, Ram resists both essentialist nationalisms. Ram’s politics start from what he calls “harassing the English troops at Suez” (43), a participation he describes in a routine-like manner as quite apolitical: “I had no politics in me then. I didn’t consider the Egyptian revolution and getting rid of Farouk to be politics” (48), although the incident would result in the death of three of his friends. He describes the almost naive fervour that caught hold of him and Font when the revolution started: “The only important thing which happened to us was the Egyptian revolution. We took to it wholeheartedly and naturally, without any fanaticism or object in view” (52). Their reaction is ‘whole-hearted’ because the one consensus in all definitions of nationalist sovereignty is that the collective and political sources of government should be congruent, and accordingly, for Ram, rooting for one’s ‘own’ camp rather than the other becomes a ‘natural’ action.

Then Edna appears, and Ram begins to envision politics as agency and responsibility on a global scale:
To begin with Edna’s politics were not noticed by us at all, but gently she talked to us about oppressed people in Africa and Asia and even some parts of Europe, and Font and I started to read political books with more interest. The more we read, the more we wanted to learn and the more ignorant we felt. We learnt, for the first time, the history of British imperialism and why we didn’t want the British troops in the Suez Canal area. Up to then we had shouted ‘evacuation’ like everyone else, without precisely knowing why evacuation was so important. Gradually, we began to see ourselves as members of humanity in general and not just as Egyptians. [My italics] (52-53)
As Edna teaches him about politics, she becomes politics, and his passion for her, reciprocated, realised or otherwise, is projected onto politics. As he tells her “I loved you and that was the main thing in my life. It was when you would suddenly leave and I imagined I had lost you for good, that my anger at things political became personal” (187).

For Ram, loving Edna or getting into a love relationship with Edna is engaging in politics. The symbolism of the victimised Jewish Egyptian woman here carries a different even if related significance to the victims of anti-Semitism. When Ghali defends the right of Jews to settle in a national home, he defends it from a ‘contrapuntal’ perspective: one, on a global level, that finds particular sympathy for the victims of fascism. He also defends it, however, with a particular ‘Eastern’ understanding. As a Copt, his perspective is touched by his belonging to a religious community which has had its own political grievances with the Egyptian state, and which had started a dialogue for political representation and citizenship of its own from the beginning of the nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century. As an Egyptian, Ghali knew very well that the Jewish community in Egypt was one of the oldest in the world, that the secular liberal Egyptian nationalist movement early in the century had rightly claimed the three religions as part of Egyptian nationalist identity, and that the persecution of this community was a violation of the imagined ‘fraternity’ of the supposed nation. As an Egyptian of a certain class, Ghali had also lived through or directly inherited the many contradictions and failures of Egypt’s short-lived liberal period, where the primary spokesmen of Egypt’s leading class –Muslims, Christians and Jews– seemed simultaneously subordinate to the British and in complicity with them and other non-Egyptian residents in exploiting the Egyptian poor (or at least some of the poor). Finally, as an Egyptian who actually lived at a time when refugees and immigrants from around the world had settled in Egypt and made it prosper, the party-sponsored and later state-sponsored xenophobia on the rise in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the expulsions and persecutions of those deemed to be non-Egyptian must have seemed like a populist and violent mercurial mood-change.

Ghali’s advocacy of tolerance occurs at intersections of political grievances and misalliances, economic conflicts of interest, and long-standing issues of legal representation and justice. Ram’s position on Israel and his relation with Edna are caught in these intersections; intersections which are local, but which are also, in their ethical considerations, and in the inseparable entwinement of local Egyptian politics with colonialism, global. As Ram understands the globality of these intersections, he can reject the local solutions offered by the Nasserites with a counter-imaginary (more philosophical than political) ‘cross-nation’.

Edna then pays for Ram and Font to travel to England and fulfil their dream of ‘living’, and the journey to the centre is a shock. Relatives of their old headmaster treat them as Political Others even as they befriend them; an ex-officer who had been based in Suez drives their second-class humanity home to them by calling them “filthy wogs” and “ruddy Jews” (84-102); the Home Office Aliens Department is staffed with “the rudest people on earth” (82), and before they leave, Suez happens. Ram’s reading, however, enables him to connect all the other Suezes in Africa and Asia, as well as the people –English, French, Jewish, etc.– who were not personally responsible for, and who even protested and otherwise condemned the military aggressions caused by their governments. This is partly where his cosmopolitanism lies: in the incapability of choosing one camp over another like any extreme nationalist.

The Voyage Out Again

The interest both protagonists take in women is prompted by the failure of the political situation as they see it. They turn away from the failed system of (natal/national) ‘filiation’ to an alternative ‘affiliation’ by seeking romance on their own terms. The protagonists’ political detachment is initiated by a ‘generational’ disruption. The absence of, or conflict with, parent figures distances them from the home, hearth and ‘herd’⁵² –in Ram’s case reminiscent of the scenario in the classic Bildungsroman which often prefigures the protagonist’s journey. Tomas has had a painful divorce, is estranged from his son, and has been disowned by his parents, while Ram has lost his father to debt and death, dislikes his matriarch aunt, despises his cousin, and is dependent (or “sponges” as he puts it) on his family. Because of their political disenchantment and familial alienation, the now ‘emasculated’ male protagonists turn to the women to save themselves from being social pariahs, to start a new community (even of two) with a new vested authority for personal (and now embittered) self-empowerment.

Tainted by post-colonial or political violence, sex at once acquires exploitative functions and marks defensive and aggressive attempts to regain a violated masculinity.⁵³ Ram, with characteristic airiness, wonders how Font and Levy could speak about useless politics when there was a woman present: “Doromian the Armenian once said that most men have their brains in their instruments and I wondered why Freud took so many volumes to say just that…I go about pretending otherwise, but the fact is, no matter how important the subject I am discussing, let a beautiful woman appear and I know where my brain is” (34). Conquered sexually, the women make possible the victory over territory, the coloniser and the emancipated-but-corrupt colonised. Sex becomes symbolic for political activity, an attempt to assert the masculinity of the narrators in the face of their political powerlessness. In this sense both texts revolve around the phalluses of Tomas and Ram which may be put out of action by the totalitarian or supremacist cultures they live in. Their sexual activity becomes a celebration and revival of their virility, perhaps one reason why both narratives have their misogynist moments. Beyond the main romance or love triangle in each novel both men take some care to explicate their other (naturally successful) relationships with the opposite sex.

Tomas begins by explaining the secret of his sexual success to an absurd rule of threes: “Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart” (11). The sexual theorizing continues until Tomas seems to perfect sexual infidelity to the extent that it is portrayed as matter-of-fact and everyday, which perhaps it might have been in certain experimental communities in the sixties. Tomas is surgeon and cartographer rolled into one as he slits open women with surgical precision and reveals new worlds (193-4).⁵⁴ The systematic cataloguing of Tomas’s sexual encounters towards the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being makes an organised list worthy of Robinson Crusoe; the series of his orgasmic visits as a window washer ends with a neat tally: “Two hundred, give or take a few….That’s not so many… I’ve been involved with women for about twenty-five years now. Divide two hundred by twenty five and you’ll see it only comes to eight or so new women a year” (192). Tereza’s horrific dreams and her constant unhappiness cannot change Tomas. His adultery only stops when he tires of it; his virility, the narrator is careful to make very clear, still functions perfectly, but his soul is tired. The decision too is portrayed dulcetly. Tomas does not stop cheating on his wife when he gets older as much as he ‘retires’ from his life as Don Juan, in much the same way as he retires to the suburbs.

The choice of women denotes the borders of Tomas and Ram’s transnational imaginary. All of Tomas’s partners with the exception of Sabina remain unnamed. All are posited as either aesthetic experiments (to be viewed, assessed or allegorised from a distance), and above all, all seem to come from Tomas’s vaguely European borders. Yet who are these two hundred-odd women? Do any come from Czechoslovakia’s many minorities? At one point a woman ‘with a German accent’ calls Tomas at home, an accent suggestive, one might initially think, of national issues, considering the position of German-Czechs or German-speaking Czechs for at least a hundred years in different political ‘eras’ during Czech/oslovakian nation-formation, whether as the largest elite ‘minority’ during the Austro-Hungarian empire, and after its break up, or as a voting bloc largely supportive of the Sudeten German Party in 1938. Yet that is the only time Tomas’s mistress calls him, and the incident is the last time we hear about either her or the accent. Who the women are is not as important as the fact that Tomas is performing. Although they appear to have taken up quite some time in Tomas’s life, these scores of women remain nameless and largely silent except to occasionally mutter acquiescence. They fade into the background of the story quite easily, making what could have been an otherwise scintillating tale of Tomas’s sexual feats (two hundred affairs over some two hundred pages would border on another genre) seem oddly nonchalant. At the end of the day Tomas’s world of women seems really to be the Bohemian triangle of Tomas, Tereza and Sabina set in the world of the European cultural supra-nation. His choice between them, to be ‘Don Juan’ or ‘Tristan’ as it is described in the novel, is a choice of whether to ‘betray’ the ‘literary’ testament of Moses and follow Sabina (who rejects any sort of political affiliation whatsoever) on her liminal path to the European back of the beyond, that is, the United States, or to save the ‘ideal’ Tereza (who rejects Czech state politics after the Prague Spring) by retreating with her into the Bohemian countryside.

Rather than represent normality the relationships with women in Beer in the Snooker Club are often meant to surprise and shock, and are directly linked to the political dilemma of resisting or assimilating with the state. Sexual violence appears immediately with the first piece of information given about Edna: she has been whipped in the face by an Egyptian police officer. Ram’s reaction when he learns this is at first hysteric defensiveness. “So bloody what?” He shouts. “Aren’t there bloody officers in Israel?” (35) Then he breaks down in face of “the uselessness of it all and the unfairness of it all” (36) –or in Césaire’s eloquent phrasing elsewhere: “the awful futility of our raison d’être” (2). Towards the end of the novel when Ram momentarily breaks down and carries his colonised burden to another woman, the only lucid complaint that he can make as he shouts uncontrollably is that Edna has been whipped by an officer. A projection of the rage within as much as it is a denouncement of the Egyptian state’s corruption and the inevitable violence of national/mass hysteria, the whipping underscores Ram’s feelings of political chaos and incapability.

Unlike Tomas, Ram names and describes the women he sleeps with, marking the ‘worlds’ he circulates in. The obvious point of comparison with Edna is Didi whom Ram ends up marrying, (a similar love triangle appears in The Unbearable Lightness of Being between Tereza and Sabina) but Ram also has affairs with Lady Tannerly, Caroline and Shirley, and it is no coincidence that they are all Westerners. Western women come to represent, or at least seem to represent to Ram, a culture that is for the moment doubly reprehensible, being affiliated to the coloniser (unwanted) and female (weak). Lady Tannerly is married to that eternal figure of ridicule, the British civil servant, and is known for her peccadilloes with younger Egyptian men of the Gezira Club whom she introduces to the ‘terrible disenchantment’ of first-time sex. According to Ram, Lady Tannerly is not even worthy of the epithet ‘mistress’, “you just fuck her” (128). Portrayed slightly more humanely, Shirley’s main fault is being engaged to Steve Warden. Having been insulted and hit by Suez-army officer Steve (who also stands for the coloniser in general) Ram sleeps with the former’s fiancée in a defensive attempt to injure the supremacist culture and meet it on its own violent terms. Although Ram explains the Shirley affair as the only closure possible to a certain type of day, it is more an attempt to avenge the inculcated sense of wrong in his Egyptianness, to defeat his insecurities, and decolonise his past.⁵⁵ When Ram returns to Egypt, the figure of Shirley is replaced by American Caroline, married to yet another figure of ridicule, the American social helper, who, Ram presciently implies, represents the new power in Egypt.⁵⁶ Resenting Caroline because of her easy dollars, nerve-grating accent, and the new ‘world order’ that she unintentionally represents, Ram is suddenly struck full of ‘white women wisdom’:
It seems difficult to imagine that there was an age when man was gallant to woman and kissed her hand and her desire was a command. To me, it is a little bit possible to imagine such a time, because gallantries, in Egypt, are still practised after a fashion and welcomed by the women. But I know that to be conspicuously gallant to the average European or American woman, makes her despise you. (133)

The solution seems to be: despise them first, and if you can also make fun of their husbands, as Ram does of Jack, then so much the better.

Nor are Ram’s sexual encounters ever ‘casual affairs’, the names or faces of these women can never be forgotten, and usually incite commentary and critique on the social structures they reflect. That sex can only be casual poses ethical or moral questions. Thus, Font becomes angry with Ram when the latter spends the night with Shirley, and accuses him of being like all those spoilt wealthy Egyptian boys with nothing on their minds except having a good time. This is also partly why the men’s adolescent encounters with sex are tinged with secrecy and a comic desperation as they muster up enough courage –and pocket money– to steal a few moments with a prostitute. Too rigid a conformity to ‘proper’ sexual mores, however, is also mocked; it is after all, even in Egypt, also the sixties. At the Gezira Club where local marriage prospects are met and made, Ram notes wryly that very properly the Muslims marry Muslims and Christians marry Christians. Teasing his Cairene friends for being virgins, he makes fun of his countless girl cousins at the French convent schools who, for all their extravagant make-up and stylishness outside the school gates, would remain virgins until they got married. Meanwhile, his mother, widowed in her thirties, ‘that miserable widow’ having properly ‘sacrificed’ her life for her son by not marrying again, masturbates during siesta time when the stillness of the heat makes her loneliness unbearable.

Despite the preoccupation with and significance of sexual prowess, it is the main romances in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club that take centre place particularly because of how much they, as experiences essential to the protagonists’ formative integration into society, push Tomas and Ram to introspection. As Tereza and Edna prompt Tomas and Ram respectively to make personal, political or politicised decisions, the men, contemplating their options, realise the gulf between themselves and the state, and sense the ambiguous and fleeting nature of perception, and so they digress into philosophy, heightening and drawing out these moments into long periods of self-contemplation. The split point-of-view expresses their continuously developing states of knowledge. It is as if the omniscient narrator, having ceased to be all-knowing, splinters into many selves, none of them having the same assurance of the old, and all of them in dialogic relation to each other.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera’s multiple narrators (introduced in the very first line as Tomas ponders his relationship with Tereza) highlight the experimental artistic artificiality of the text, and draw attention to the novel as a work of art. Kundera’s multiple narrators –Tomas (the first person, autobiographical narrator), the omniscient narrator (the fictional artist), and the author (the master-artist)– stand as pseudo-personas of each other.⁵⁷ The multi-perspective narration presents a smooth, fluid but fluctuating and obvious movement from one point of view to the other, manifesting a constant tension between perspectives and questioning the veracity of all perception. Tomas is in a sense many protagonists mulling over the same ideological dilemmas, primary among which is the question of where the individual should stand vis-à-vis the nation, and where the Czech people should stand vis-à-vis Europe. The narrator recounts Tomas’s dilemma via the medium of narrative, as the artist-god, doing what Tomas does to his patients with a scalpel, but endowed instead with omniscient knowledge and agency. The narrator makes Tomas’s lightness bearable because the former has captured with Tomas’s individuality a fictional possibility and writes it into the continuous history of the novel. The author, meanwhile, has drawn a sketch (partly a memory or a trace of past sketches in endless recurrence), has shaded it in with new artistic possibilities, created a new outline altogether, and perhaps even set a mould for a pattern. In their diverse actions, perspectives and authorities the multiple narrators explore the novelistic process of creation, but also problematise the sense (or crisis) of existence at the heart of both The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club: that of confused men in solitude facing moral decisions which have large political consequences.

The question Tomas poses as he decides between his individual freedom, love’s obligations and the state’s dictates is often a choice between individual identity and collective norms. Since possibilities for the artistic representation of individual identity are endless, Tomas’s decisions become complicated with optional selves –Sabina, Franz, Tomas’s son– all potential fictional Tomases on the creator artist’s divine canvas, and all battling out the same questions of individual and national identities within the same political situation. The move between the characters’ perspectives effects a kind of dialogism between them, creating characters, all different but all posing as potential realisations of one or another idea of the omniscient narrator, himself a persona of the author’s:

It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying ‘Einmal ist keinmal’. Tereza was born of the rumbling of a stomach. (37)

….

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself? …. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. (The Unbearable Lightness of Being 215)

The many potential ‘selves’ draw attention to the transitory, tenuous and individualistic nature of cognition (and by extension any decisions taken based on that cognition), and simultaneously refute the holistic tendency of nationalism to collectivise individuals and make them one univocal mass.

Meanwhile Ram specifies the moment in England (where Edna has first made him yearn to go, and then paid for him to do so) when he first feels his consciousness of things divide into two, one experiencing the action and the other observing and assessing (Beer in the Snooker Club 68). In contrast to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the first-person narrative voice in Beer in the Snooker Club as it highlights the precise moment of disjuncture draws attention to a contradictory (or contrapuntal?) plurality in Ram’s personality. This ‘split into two’, described by Ram as a felt moment of experience rather than an experimentation with the novel form, makes Beer in the Snooker Club (despite being sub-titled ‘A Novel’) read more like a personal memoir. The double narrative voice points to the dualist perspectives of awareness resulting specifically from the protagonist’s journey to England.

I…wondered whether meeting these people and receiving their hospitality was really enjoyable. That moment …was the very beginning –the first time in my life that I had felt myself cleave into two entities, the one participating and the other watching and judging. (68)

….

I have become a character in a book or in some other feat of the imagination; my own actor in my own theatre; my own spectator in my own improvised play. Both audience and participant in one –a fictitious character. (Beer in the Snooker Club 60)

This cleavage marks Self and perceived Self. From then on Ram’s awareness of himself as ‘two entities’ makes him wonder if anything he experiences is ‘really real’, and makes him suspect that everything he does, from ordering a drink to refusing to seek employment or taking an unwavering political stance, is an act, what he frequently refers to as a “gimmick” (68). Multiple layers of consciousness in Beer in the Snooker Club draw attention to the unreliability of Ram’s perceived experience. Rather than the primarily aesthetic value that the multiple-narrator technique holds for Kundera, (although the artistic preoccupation is there too, as seen in Ghali’s metaphors ‘character in a book’, ‘my own actor in my own theatre’, etc.), it conveys thematically the troubled process of formation of the colonised subject post-independence.

While the precise moment Ram ‘feels his soul split into two’ occurs about a third of the way into the narrative, the alternate perspectives appear from the beginning, narrating and commenting on Ram’s journey, poignantly underlining his loneliness and alienation. They help describe a neither-here-nor-there hybrid space, a personal-national space which is ambiguous and slippery. Telling his story in retrospect as he sits in a bar in Egypt, Ram writes:

The mental sophistication of Europe has killed something good and natural in us, killed it for good…forever. To me, now, it is apparent that we have, both Font and myself, lost the best thing we ever had: the gift of our birth, as it were; something indescribable but solid and hidden and, most of all, natural. We have lost it forever. And those who know what it is, cannot possess it…Gradually, I have lost my natural self.…We left, Font and I, for London. For dreamed-of Europe, for ‘civilization’, for ‘freedom of speech’, for ‘culture’, for ‘life’. We left that day and we shall never return, although we are back here again. (60)

Preceded by a confusion of past and present events the impressive prolepsis of the last line asserts a new imagined moment of time and place. What Ram means simply in the last line is that going to London was an experience that changed him forever. Yet the prolepsis spoken in the present time of narration to refer to the future of an event that happened in the past problematizes the linear chronology of time, as well as the fixed geographical literality of space. So there emerge multiple Londons: the London that Ram knows before going, the London he experiences when he arrives, the London he travels from, the London he takes back with him (as he sits in Cairo). With its mixture of tenses, the prolepsis mixes up time to highlight that the ‘space’ constructed or imagined through knowledge is individualistic, ongoing and varying.

This uncertainty of one’s place in the world is Ram’s imagined national space, inhabited, as he sees it, by all those (postcolonial) people like himself who have lost the ‘gift of their birth’ (or have alternatively, inherited it, in Kiran Desai’s memorable title “the inheritance of loss”). What is the ‘gift of birth’? It is the assurance that some people have of the narratives of national History, and their places within it. In contrast, there is no such tenuousness in Tomas’s or any other character’s perception in The Unbearable Lightness of Being; every character is certain of his or her position within or rather antipathy towards the nation at a certain moment in time, (even if the nation itself, in the ‘endless returns’ of history, might perish).⁵⁸

This certainty of one’s place in the nation is also reflected in the individual’s or protagonist’s views of the coloniser. Although the narrators in both The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club criticise the occupation of their countries, the former narrator’s critique of imperialist culture is different from that of the latter. Ram sees Europe, particularly Britain, as an occupying empire to be resisted, but also as a culture that he feels affiliated to. An Anglophile who views Western culture as something from which profit and pleasure is to be gained, Ram sees himself as belonging to the ‘West’ by virtue of a shared humanity. On the other hand, the authorial narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being views Russia only as an alien occupying Other, an opposite culture, an aberrant deviation from Bohemia’s true and proper historical course, just one more conqueror of Bohemia and proprietor of Bohemian history.

A discussion of the nation-state requires discussing the city, considered as a site for national sovereignty as well as for modernity, a figure for the modern condition and that of the avant-garde and also a microcosm for the global.⁵⁹ The supra/cross perspectives appear in the ways the authors use the capital and countryside, the locales where the love affairs take place. Ghali’s Cairo is a lived, rather elite Cairo; his highly autobiographical vision of an upper class Cairene family is strengthened by direct allusions to families and places that resound of a faded prosperity but live on in the names of streets and residences, scholarships or statues until today (as well as in the proliferating and rather self-laudatory memoirs and conferences on the subject in the present). The power of his cosmopolitan vision as resistance lies in how he tries to subvert the highly public Nasserite rhetoric by describing the highly private salons and clubs of the leisured Egyptian classes during the 1940s and 50s. Ram mentions old, wealthy and politically affluent Coptic families such as Doss and Nackla, chic café-bars and restaurant rooftops (some still bearing the same names today but having lost their glory) such as Groppi’s bar and the Semiramis hotel rooftop.⁶⁰ Ram’s Gezira Club is still alive and functioning but the faces have changed as Egypt’s middle class has grown and new members have brought in their often conservative pastimes with them. Ram makes concession only to the public monuments of the pyramids and the Sphinx, and even those are personalised as he parodies how history is (re)written, and speaks of how he and Edna strolled around them “like English couples at Brighton” (43). Ram replaces Nasser’s public-rousing speeches with fleeting images of Egypt’s many classes, drawing private or personally-experienced ‘communities’ to counter ‘euphoric’ nationalist rhetoric.

Meanwhile Kundera’s narrative resists the political status quo by making the political situation of the Czech nation (and Europe) susceptible to overwriting and overhaul by a greater force: the grand march of History; every public figure, monument or political event is marked by the possibility of imminent disappearance or dismissal. There is nothing mentioned in The Unbearable Lightness of Being about Prague’s literary circles or small avant-garde theatres which Kundera knew so well and which often became sites for political dissent. Instead, Kundera describes the public façades of central administration: town squares and political borders, national rivers and central stations, and anonymous or renamed streets and spas, spires and cemeteries. Rather than describing them with a vague nostalgia, Kundera writes bitterly of how they have been defaced, wrecked, bombed or wiped out, renamed and forgotten, or left as reminders of Czech weakness during wars. Instead of the nationally-symbolic Sphinx and pyramids being pushed into the background by the personal (if gimmicky) image of two lovers strolling around them, the personal histories of Tomas and Franz are wiped out by the viciously irrelevant inscriptions which their relatives add to their headstones, their lives made as light as the wings of the moth flying too close to the candle in the ending scene.

The protagonists’ affinities to capital and countryside too, differ in the texts by virtue of the women’s influence. Tereza views Prague, for example, as a site for experience that is soured by bad politics. She moves to Prague because it represents a possible life with Tomas; she leaves because the Russian occupation makes her helpless; she returns to Prague because she cannot live without the security net of what is familiar; she leaves again for the countryside because the latter supplants the capital in her mind as a place of freedom and authenticity. Her perceptions of the city change with its fluctuating political equilibrium: “[Prague] was the most beautiful city in the world” (143), its sounds are “faint and sweet, like thousands of distant violins” (145), but it grows ‘ugly’ with foreign occupation; so too, is her emotional stability determined, as she feels ‘happiest’ during the Prague Spring (possibly the only event in Czech history that passes muster for Kundera) and helpless and effaced in Switzerland. Tereza’s unhappiness in certain places also pushes Tomas to relocate with her despite his own career problems.

It is the chapter entitled “Soul and Body” which marks the peak of the affinity between Tereza and the city: the chapter captures the extent to which the national dream has soured, and reads like an aubade to Prague with Tereza standing in the centre. “Soul and Body” is a decided farewell to a beloved city where ideals have become impossible, played out against the backdrop of the evocative sounds of the city and violin music. The chapter starts with the story of Prochazka being harassed to death by the police. Next, Tereza finds herself indulging in a passing sexual encounter that she regrets, but suspects wildly that she has been manipulated into by the state and its secret police. Tereza’s two dreams then reiterate her unhappiness about Tomas’s intolerable infidelities. She decides to leave Prague. The chapter ends with Tereza waking up early and, “grief-stricken”, watching the nationally-symbolic Vltava⁶¹ running slowly out of the city carrying some of Prague’s monuments and landmarks along with it. Tereza resorts to the countryside to seek the ‘authentic’ national experience after the capital’s national ideal has been lost. The idyllic stereotype or myth of that vague terrain for urban citizens called ‘the country’ depicts it as the seat of what is ‘authentic’ or ‘original’ about cultures, the source for folkloric music, costumes, values, and other national traditions,⁶² and draws on a traditional, even clichéd, paradigm of the city as the centre for vice, change and experience as opposed to the country as a source of innocence, authenticity and perenniality, peopled with ‘simple’ folk who crack jokes about their pet pigs. The paradisiacal model the ‘countryside’ connotes and to which Kundera, not without irony, directly alludes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being with his discussion of the “idyll”, also builds on the Judaic/Biblical tradition he takes as a common European myth of descent. More physically even, in many areas of the connected and shared countryside in Europe, particularly in the context of the free movement of peoples, it is easier to imagine (note, imagine) borders blending and being forgotten.

This perspective is vastly different from Ram’s. The growth and urbanization of urban and rural areas in Egypt has been highly discrepant (one of the reasons why migration to the capital over the past decades has created a polluted monster of some twenty million residents). For many town-born Egyptians who have no direct experience of the countryside, the experience of the millions of farmers/peasants living in the towns, villages, rural centres, shanties, etc. along the Nile seems far removed from their daily lives –even if at the time Ghali was writing the entire population of Cairo was ‘only’ about two and a half million, and snatches of agricultural land and open fields could still be spied between the suburbs and downtown areas. What the Egyptian peasantry has really offered for modern Egyptian nationalist history is a hugely-versatile, easily-manipulated nation symbol and nation myth (as well as a huge voting bloc): the epic of a vast majority tilling the land and slaving for an indifferent minority ruling class since the pharaohs. Even if Ram was part of the landowning class, whose fortunes indeed depended wholly on the land, such classes usually leased their land to farmers but had no direct hand in overseeing it. Like millions of city-bred fellow Egyptians, Ram has in fact no personal experience of country life, the supposedly ‘authentic’ source of the national tradition.

This is why it is significant that it is Edna, the rich Jewish woman holding a British passport, who makes Ram identify with this side of Egypt, telling him of her relationship with her nanny’s son, Adle, in the village, and how they are caught and punished by her parents, and that Adle eventually dies in the war with Israel. To ‘discover’ these Egyptians, Ram has to “disguise” himself in “Arab” garb and go native. Even if his ideas of socialist democracy (as popular in Egypt, as both Font and Edna show, as they were in Europe in the fifties and sixties) make Ram prioritise the problem of redressing the economic inequalities in Egypt, he draws attention to the way the symbols of peasantry and countryside were efficiently and insincerely evoked and manipulated for the purpose of mass mobilisation by Nasser: “The word ‘Egypt’ evokes in you, I suppose, a scene of a fellah [peasant] trudging home in the twilight, a spade over his shoulder, and his son leading a cow behind him. Well, Egypt is a place where middle-aged people play croquet (128)”.⁶³ Reading between the lines evokes a more prominent sense of identification with another part of Egypt, namely Upper Egypt, or the south, to which most Copts trace their ancestry, truly or mythologically, ‘as far back as the Pharaohs’. Although Ram identifies himself as Coptic, he does not highlight Coptic problems in Egypt, but he does bring up Upper Egypt (where one uncle still lives) as a possible last refuge where he and Edna can live together in peace (like Tomas and Tereza in the refuge of the Bohemian countryside).

E. M. Forster wrote in 1927 that had it not been for marriage or death novelists would have been hard pressed to end their novels; and with much of the same resignation Kundera marries and then kills off Tomas and Tereza and Ghali marries off Ram to Didi, marking the culmination of the love affairs at the heart of the novels. The two protagonists seem to learn that resisting ideas which smack of the herd will compel them to liminal societal positions, and for the sake of sane communal belonging they commit themselves to a partner over whom at least they have some measure of control. Tomas ultimately wishes for anonymity and reprieve with an understanding partner in tow: “[Tomas] longed for a holiday. But for an absolute holiday, a rest from all imperatives, from all ‘Es muss sein!’ If he could take a rest (a permanent rest) from the hospital operating table, then why not from the world operating table” [italics in original] (228). He aligns himself with Tereza rather than the more exciting Sabina to metaphorically save the child in the bulrush basket but also to save himself from being abandoned, for Sabina offers no long-term solace even for the similarly lonely. Defined by her own dictionary understanding of ‘betrayal’, Sabina will never ‘keep ranks’. As he moves further and further to the margins of society, out of the medical profession, away from the capital, and into the Edenic countryside, Tomas can towards the end of his life declare his freedom and autonomy to his supportive partner in their secluded world of two: “‘Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions’” (305). Or as Kundera puts it elsewhere: “[H]uman life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That –that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel” (The Curtain 10). Tomas’s position is less political engagement than an ironic celebration of banality, of an understanding of ‘human defeat’.

Ram stresses his world-weariness almost from the opening page, and his decision to marry comes when he wishes, like Tomas, for ‘a rest from all imperatives’: “Oh, blissful ignorance. Wasn’t it nice to go to the Catholic Church with my mother before I ever heard of Salazar or the blessed troops to Ethiopia?” (36). Finding out that Edna is married to an Israeli who has been wounded trying to escape from a prison in Egypt, and realising that Edna’s political engagement is as inevitable as it is self-destructive pushes Ram to leave her: “I realized the extent of my love for her and also realized that we would have to part. I saw her bullied by nationalities and races and political events and revolutions and dictatorships and particularly by her own vague idealism” (122). After the novel-length longing for Edna and incessant self-contemplation, Ram’s decision to marry Didi, who only appears towards the end of the book and whose complacency and political righteousness Ram finds infuriating, sounds rather abrupt. Rich, complacent, comme-il-faut Didi, however, also offers peace and “serenity”, disengagement. (The word ‘serenity’ is significant, featuring in Ghali’s chilling suicide note as a word he had always loved, and a state which, by his act of suicide, he looks forward to achieving (Soueif “Goat Face” 11; Ghali Diaries n.pag)). So Ram tears up the discriminating photos of Nasser’s concentration camps he has hidden under a floorboard, promises Didi he will “give up that other business”, and offers to marry her if she will support him and his mother. For some reason Didi agrees to this less than charming proposal, (Ram, like Tomas, thinks his success lies in his sex appeal), and Ram celebrates his upcoming nuptials by meeting his friends for a game of snooker in much the same way as the novel started. He has met the human imperative that makes people social animals –on his own terms.

The positioning of the solitary individual in what Michael Wood calls “a site of chosen loneliness, of freedom and kindness, a model of democratic exemption from the hustle of totalitarian or merely busy politics” (2) helps to situate history as something against which individuals are pitted, a situation they are committed to changing but a state of being in which they are ironically also helpless. The responsibility of the engaged intellectual may require addressing political issues, but as a fictional ‘type’, the protagonist addresses politics ‘existentially’ rather than actively. Hence the protagonists engage only superficially in politics: as solitary individuals with no supporters, history happens around and above them. Ram’s relationship with Edna, what he describes as “un amour like literature engagé” (171-72), fails precisely because of engagement; while Tomas’s supervisor makes Tomas’s foremost responsibility clear to him with the first spot of political trouble: “You know as well as I do…that you’re no writer or journalist or saviour of the nation” (173). The popularity of Sartre’s ‘committed literature’ had spread like wildfire around the Arabic-speaking world in the mid-forties, finding fertile ground in the political turbulence of the Middle East. While culture in Czechoslovakia had always tended to be deeply engaged with philosophical thinking, artists active in the ‘cultural renaissance’ of 1956-68, mostly in their thirties and forties, carrying the burdens of decades of occupation and ‘socialist realism’, similarly found in committed literature a malleable method to address social ills and become the “conscience of the nation”. ⁶⁴ Such writers also found an audience more than willing to listen.⁶⁵ Yet for all their political commitment it is political responsibility and representation as a raison d’être for art that Ghali and Kundera’s protagonists precisely resist.⁶⁶

In a context when being communist, and then socialist, was seen as a call to resist fascism, social injustice, exploitation and the rest of it, both novels are heavily concerned with resisting the post-communist state and what have now become the iconicized characteristics of the ‘party-state’: censorship, government corruption, secret police, or ‘totalitarianism-general’. Such issues are vehemently critiqued. Nevertheless, the narrators’ primary position seems to be one of estrangement from the absurd world of the state, a particular characteristic of post-war societies, perhaps, but also one that comes from existing-in-the-world, or world-weariness.⁶⁷ Without dismissing the centrality of political engagement to the narratives, and inasmuch as any novel is not political (as the Mourid Barghouti epigraph to this chapter lyrically puts it),⁶⁸ it is highly unlikely that there was a historical moment in most societies that did not appear to be either ‘in crisis’ or ‘in transition’, particularly if it was in transition between one crisis and another.

The disillusionment with political engagement is evident in the distant tone the narrators adopt when describing their ‘experiences’, particularly, as this chapter has shown, with women.⁶⁹ Ram’s wry humour, his detached elitism and public-school moralism is reminiscent of the British “intelligent comic novel” (Lodge n.pag), an artistic pose that could be represented by such figures as Kingsley Amis, and a time when making strong political statements was a subversive activity, collectively performed in solidarity, but was also and above all, an opportunity for a cynical self-deprecation that was somehow disengaged and terribly witty. Meanwhile Tomas’s sole interest in politics seems broadly philosophical (should Czech Communists take the blame like Oedipus?) while Czech history happens ‘elsewhere’. Kundera’s sensitised self-consciousness loses political activism somewhere in the dense palimpsest of highbrow literary and philosophical ideas. The texts celebrate above all the ‘average man’ (or intellectual) who could be ideally just that; who lived in a reality in which the smallest manifestations of everyday culture were not saturated with politics. It is at this point, when the ‘average dissenter’ of the angry 1960s aspires not to make political postures, shout political slogans, or take part in political marches but idealises instead a mundane everyday reality like starting a relationship, going out for a drink, or practising a profession, that he/she becomes a critical intellectual, as removed from his/her space and time as rooted within it. For both protagonists can see that there is something rather fake, pretentious and aesthetically off-putting –‘kitschy’ in Kundera’s phrasing, ‘gimmicky’ in Ram’s– about impassioned masses of people, even a mass of ostensibly intelligent individuals, carried forward by the irrational feeling of what Kundera often calls ‘ecstasy’. Rather than a struggle for what is right, it resembles too much a struggle for righteousness, a kind of ‘moral exhibitionism’.

Appearing towards the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Franz’s march with the ‘international community’ in Cambodia takes this idea of committed protestors and intellectuals doing more harm than good to farcical proportions; the scene also makes a jibe at Havel’s slogan of ‘living in truth’⁷⁰ which Franz takes as his motto. The march in Cambodia is depicted complete with exaggerated stereotypes: sensationalist journalists, posturing actresses, glib politicians and well-meaning but uncomprehending ‘humanitarians’. This is followed by the drawn-out story of how Franz dies, ‘not with a bang but with a whimper’. Franz does not get injured on the life-threatening political march but is mugged as a tourist in Thailand. He does not mercifully die at once but is hospitalised, completely dependent on others, back home. He is accompanied in hospital by a wife who hates him; and his tombstone inscription will deny what had seemed to him to be the most meaningful act of his life. To ‘live in truth’, Franz dies for kitsch.

A similar although less bitter fate awaits Font in Beer in the Snooker Club. Ram tells of finding his best friend Font pushing a barrow in the Cairo streets. “There he was then. Selling cucumbers. Cucumbers of all things. Of course I understood. He was Jimmy Porter. We had seen the play together in London and there he was, a degree in his pocket and selling cucumbers”…. ‘Font’, I asked in English, ‘what do the other barrow boys think of Virginia Woolf?’” (15). Like Jimmy Porter who abandons his studies to eventually run a small sweet shop, and equally, Edna in Beer in the Snooker Club, one of the wealthiest women in Egypt, who travels on the third-class tram because it is a sign of equality, Font is a romanticised socialist, ‘living for his beliefs’, but doing no practical good. Unlike Franz in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, however, Font meets less drastic ends. Asked by an old school friend in Cairo to run his snooker club, Font thus spends his time wiping snooker tables with old copies of, of all things, the Literary Supplement. Ram does not spare himself the gentle mockery of his own ‘gimmicks’ either. Having narrated Egypt’s troubled half century, scandalised the family, and got embroiled in at least two failed relationships, Ram’s (sad) tale intentionally ends with what one assumes to have been meant as a devastatingly witty parting shot at his own political sincerity: “And then I went to Groppi’s [for a whisky]”.⁷¹

Faced with the option-turned-obligation of being pigeon-holed within one national identity or another, the protagonists find themselves caught in a series of tensions between action and decision, individual self-determination (what the protagonist ‘I’ feels like doing) and state determination (what the protagonist feels the state obliges him to do); or what the individual (devoid of historical determination) potentially might have done and what the state, similarly de-historicised, potentially might have been; or, finally, what the individual would like to do, and what society or the nation would like the individual to do. Finding themselves in a constant state of liminality as the options they are given seem increasingly stultifying, the protagonists imagine a time and place where they would not need to make such choices. Rather than give their opinions on decisions taken around roundtables and in political headquarters, the protagonists of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club stress precisely the distance they feel from those discussions and headquarters. The novels emphasise that from the individual’s viewpoint there appears a rift if not an outright contradiction between the ‘nation’ and its ‘individuals’, a discrepant hyphen between the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’, and a gulf between the individual’s lived perception of community and the state’s self-propagated image. The novels emphasise too, that resisting national affiliations or transcending them requires locating the nation in a larger world perspective: that is, both relating the nation to other nations, as well as defining the ‘world’ itself: its parameters, its literature, who it includes and who it forgets. For Kundera the larger perspective takes the shape of a supra-nation and is rendered in the context of canonical literary history, while Ghali’s counter-imaginary is constructed as a cross-nation and is rendered in terms of a weary, old-world cosmopolitanism.