ABSTRACT
The leitmotif of this chapter is in many ways identical to that of Chapter 4: an emancipatory critique, through the art of the novel as an instrument of counterhegemonic political action, of the totalizing tendencies inherent in the global spread of Western liberal democracy and market capitalism. This time, however, the critique comes from the pen of Milan Kundera. His Cold War reputation as a political novelist writing against the state is well known and has made him into a darling of the liberal West, as the chapter notes in a biographical sketch mentioning Kundera’s leading role in the Prague Spring of 1968 and his subsequent exile from Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. But this reputation conveniently ignores that his artistic resistance is not tied exclusively to his anti-Stalinist dissent prior to 1989 and in his recent fiction turns against the dictate of imagology: the homogenizing mass-media culture of Western capitalism as the ostensibly post-ideological climax of humankind’s universal evolution toward freedom. The chapter recovers this forgotten part of Kundera’s legacy by explaining the role of his poetic style, including irony and polyphony, in cultivating a sense of tragedy and ambiguity against the triumphalist certitudes of the liberal-capitalist end of history.
