Milan Kundera’s “Slowness”
Milan Kundera’s Slowness is not really about slowness. Slowness is discussed at the beginning and at the end of the book, so that the reader is accompanied, almost led by hand, through the various events and themes to find an overarching moral and message. This is not a book for people who don’t like to be told what to think. It abounds in theories and judgement. However, it also artfully combines plots and themes, overlapping time and space, in an extremely humorous, pleasant, and very entertaining narration.
If Slowness is not about slowness, what is it about then? In a larger sense, it is about modernity, and some of its obsessions: speed, ecstasy, glory, admiration. In the main body of the book, where theories and stories interlace before the author’s interpretation, that’s where things get interesting, and sometimes a little dirtier, less defined. In every situation, in every page, Kundera mixes themes of happiness, pleasure, intimacy, and secrecy, together with all their opposites, often employing the trope of the ‘dancer’ – the attention seeker who yearns for an invisible audience, which in modern times is offered by the media. The setting, a French chateau, unifies the various stories: there, the narrator is on holiday with his wife; Vincent pursues an affair with a woman he meets at an entomology conference; a Czech scientist considers his past; a politician seeks glory while a woman obsessively pursues him; and – a few centuries earlier – Madame de T. spends a carefully orchestrated secret night of pleasure with the Chevalier, in order to remove suspicion from her lover.
This last story is told in Vivant Denon’s novella Point de lendemain (No Tomorrow), first published in 1777. In Slowness, it ends up overlapping with the contemporary events which take place at the conference: Vincent and the Chevalier, the modern and the past, encounter. But we’ll get back to that later. The night which Madame de T. and the Chevalier spend together becomes one of the two focuses of the book, in clear opposition with the night which Vincent and Julia, the entomologist’s secretary, spend together. Madame de T. and the Chevalier prolong and extend their night at every turn, slowly, sensually: they walk together, begin to make love in one location, walk again, and make love until dawn in another location. It is a secret, intimate night – indeed, the secrecy is such that we don’t even know their names –; it is a night of impossible pleasure. Vincent and Julia, strolling in those same chateau gardens, uncoordinatedly miss intimacy at every turn. As they are about to commence their night of passion in the hotel swimming pool, they hear footsteps, and the farce begins: they become ‘dancers,’ performers, putting up a vulgar show of insults, pseudo-assault, and pretend intercourse. When Vincent and the Chevalier meet, they represent and oppose the nights they spent: exhibitionism and secrecy, emptiness and intimacy. It is at this point that we are exposed to one last swooping net of connections: happiness is slowness is remembering, and misery is speed is forgetting.
Happiness and ecstasy are well distinguished: happiness is understood in an Epicurean sense as lack of suffering, and as secret pleasure, while ecstasy is understood as pleasure which is immediate, dragging one out of time and space, like an orgasm. “Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man,” the narrator notes. In Slowness, speed brings ecstasy but it doesn’t bring happiness. Vincent, at the end of his night, in the morning, traveling home: “He has only one desire: to forget this night speedily, this entire disastrous night, erase it, wipe it out, nullify it – and in this moment he feels an unquenchable thirst for speed. His step firm, he hastens towards his motorcycle, he desires his motorcycle, he is swept with love for his motorcycle, for his motorcycle on which he will forget everything, on which he will forget himself.” Madam de T. on the other hand, seems to embody the Epicurean ideal of happiness, with her life steeped in pleasure and in secrecy – as Kundera reminds us, Epicurus instructed his disciples “You shall live hidden!”; in privacy, and in the slow pursuit of pleasure, she is the ideological opposite of the modern ‘dancer.’ She is: “Lovable lover of pleasure. Gentle protective liar. Guardian of happiness.”
The Chevalier, at the end of his night, in the morning, traveling home: “He feels a new wave of weariness. He strokes his face with his hand and catches the scent of love Madame the T. has left on his fingers. That scent stirs him to nostalgia, and he wants to be alone in the chaise to be carried slowly, dreamily, to Paris.” Nostalgia is an appropriate word to discuss Slowness. The narrator is nostalgic for slower times, for more private times. At the same time, he makes fun of this idea when it comes from Vincent’s mouth, in the exposition of the ‘dancer’ theory, which becomes ridiculed as a rejection of the present and modernity. As Kundera seems to recognise that it’s a time of media, of speed, ecstasy, and publicity, he can’t but melancholically exalt a world of secrecy, lies, love affairs, and pursuit of pleasure which he finds in aristocratic eighteenth-century France. There’s some humour in this; – indeed, there’s some humour everywhere in the book, which is its most pleasant and redeeming quality.
