Cianci Melo-Carrillo

Immortality (1990) by Milan Kundera

(Last novel in Czech, written after becoming French citizen)
Main Characters:
Milan Kundera (Narrator)Used by MK to voice opinions about novel writing.
Professor AvenariusSocrates-like character that serves as companion/teacher to Kundera.
Agnes (G)Kunderas invention for his novel. She is given birth by the gesture of waving.
PaulAgnes husband. Nave, and lover of modernity. Lawyer.
LauraAgnes sister. Complete opposite of Agnes. Lover of ambiguity and immortality.
BettinaBased loosely on historical figure. Embodies the gesture for immortality.
GoetheBased loosely on historical figure. Obsessed with his image (for the most part).
HemmingwayBased loosely on his writings. Companion to dead Goethe.
Rubens: Protagonist of Kunderas other Unbearable Lightness of Being. Saddest erotic story
Overview:
Milan Kundera sits on a deck chair by the pool of his health club waiting for Professor
Avenarius. He sees an old lady performing a youthful gesture to a lifeguard who was teaching
how to swim: she waves her arm above her head. Agnes is born out of this gesture.
Agnes, Laura, and Paul form the main narrative of Immorality. Through them, Kundera explores
modernity, narcissism, immortality, music, love, feelings, ambiguity, fighting and Imagology.
Goethe and Bettina form the second narrative. They envelop antiquity, before the advent of
technology and during the rise of Romanticism. Their type of immortality is different (grander).
Image is their main exploration.
Style:
Several frame narratives are occurring at once. They are anachronistic and often refer back to the
same events but through the perspective
Themes:
Laura-

Full of dreams, her head looks

up at the heavens, and her
body is drawn to the earth.
Her behind and her breasts,
also look rather heavy, look
downward

Agnes:
her body rises like a flame.
And her head is always slightly
bowed: a skeptical head
looking at the ground.

ImmortalityWe have to distinguish between so-called minor immortality, the memory of a person in the
minds of those who knew him (the kind of immortality a village major longed for), and great
immortality, which means the memory of a person in the minds of people who never knew him
personally. There are certain paths in life that from the very beginning place a person face to face
with such great immortality, uncertain, it is true, even improbable, yet undeniably possible: they
are the paths of artist and statesmen (48-49).
One starts thinking about immortality in childhood. Furthermore, Bettina belonged to the
generation of Romantics, who were dazzled by death from the moment they first saw the light of
day (65).
On the contrary, the older he got, the more attractive he became, because the closer he was to
death, the closer he was to immortality (65).
Immortality sticks to death as tightly as Laurel to Hardy, we can say that our immortality is with
us, too (71).
In reference to Goethe: Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all (71).
On the Art of the NovelGrundoriginally meaning soil and later basis.such a Grund is inscribed deep in all of us,
it is the ever-present cause of our actions, it is the soil from which our fate grows. I am trying to
graps the Grund hidden at the bottom of each of my character, and I am convinced more and
more that it had the nature of a metaphor (237).
It is the most important thought that ever occurred to me (237).
What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every
adaptation contains nothing but the nonessential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels
nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be
adapted, other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold (237-38).
Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most
beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to
the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded it concentrated. The novel
is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw (238).
Modernity:
Diabolum always managed to appropriate every organization whose original gold was to
destroy it (228).
to be absolutely modern means to be ally to ones gravediggers (141).
All ideologies have been defeated: in the end their dogmas were unmasked as illusionsFor
example, communist used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat
would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe
workers were driving their own cars, they felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them.
Reality was stronger than ideologyimagology is stronger than reality (114).