Memory is often embodied in objects – memorials, texts, talismans, images. Though one could argue that such artifacts operate to prompt remembrance, they are often perceived actually to contain memory within them or indeed to be synonymous with memory. No object is more equated with memory than the camera image, in particular the photograph. Memory appears to reside within the photographic image, to tell its story in response to our gaze.
Marita Sturken
I was asked recently, in an informal conversation with a colleague, if I remembered the events surrounding the fall of the Slobodan Miloshevic regime in Yugoslavia, in October of 2000. As I found myself searching for a meaningful answer (one beyond the cliché phrase: Yes, of course I do. I was there. I saw it all!), I found myself uttering the following string of broken thoughts: I remember that day, October 5th 2000, quite vividly; actually, what I remember the most are the photographic images that I took of that day; in a way, these images form my memories of that revolutionary day, these photos are my memory of those historic moments. Hearing myself say this, I began to think about the implications of my statement.
Can an image, such as a photograph, represent the equivalent of a memory of those times? How can a still image caught in time shape our personal memory of past occurrences, and at the same time, how can it affect the way we structure our distinct cultural narratives? If so, to what extent does a photograph obfuscate the boundaries existing between one’s history and one’s cultural memory?
An emphasis on photographs as providers/disclaimers of memory, personal as well as cultural, constitutes an integral part of Milan Kundera’s work, particularly in two of his most acclaimed novels to date, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Both novels open with sequences that are closely tied to photographic images of historical events and/or historical figures. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera revisits a crucial moment in twentieth-century Czech history, i.e., he tells us of the circumstances surrounding Klement Gottwald’s 1948 public address which announced the beginning of a new chapter in Czech history, namely the founding of Communist Czechoslovakia. We are told that the day was a rather cold one, and since the new Communist leader was hatless, his comrade, Vladimir Clementis, graciously lend him his own fur hat. We are also told that this moment of kindness set amidst the greater historical spectacle was captured in a photograph, one that every child ‘memorized’ due to the tireless efficiency of the Communist party’s propaganda bureau. However, a paragraph later we are cautiously reminded of the power of technology as we learn about Clementis’ fatal end, only four years after the seminal photograph was taken. (Since he was accused of treason, Vladimir Clementis’ presence in the 1948 photograph was made obsolete; he was ‘taken’ out of the frame, thus removed from history by the same devoted workers of the propaganda bureau. Kundera tells us that the only signifier of his past presence in cultural history was the borrowed fur hat adorning Gottwald’s head.)
On the other hand, the photographic images that preoccupy Kundera the narrator in the opening lines of The Unbearable Lightness of Being are not directly linked to recent Czech history; they are black-and-white portrait-photographs of Adolph Hitler. He comes across these still images as he leafs through a book on Hitler; almost instantly, the photographs evoke within him a sense of longing for the days of his now-forgone childhood. Nonetheless, immediately within the next paragraph, Kundera the narrator explains this rather unusual way of triggering one’s past memories: “This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.” As in the case with the Gottwald photograph and its impact on the formation of Czech consciousness, so does this instance of re-memberance upon a photographic image explore the various ways through which totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s grip on the Soviet Union and its ‘Satelite States’) control the power of technology (a camera image) wielding a nation’s cultural memory.
The Kundera scholar Hana Píchová discusses the role photographic documentation plays in the production of cultural memory as it relates to the author’s conceptualization of the relationship existing between memory and forgetting. In her book, The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, Píchová examines Kundera’s personal investment in this visual interplay by focusing on two distinct practices behind Kundera’s treatment of photographic images in both The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Píchová traces a link between Kundera’s “expansion of topic and scope” in the latter of the two and “a deeper and more far-reaching exploration of the subject of photography.” Píchová then continues to attest that -
Although in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the treatment of photography is restricted to the discussion of the photograph’s function, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being both the role of the person behind the camera and the consequences of capturing a frozen moment of reality on film are included within the purview of the narrator’s panoramic gaze. These photographic issues are juxtaposed with the ongoing philosophical reflections about remembering and forgetting and are especially emphasized in the novel’s pivotal scene: the scene that depicts the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a crucial event that not only motivates the main protagonists’ physical and emotional upheavals but also sets the cameras clicking.
The cameras click as the Czech ‘warriors’ confront the invader’s formidable troops, creating a troubling and unexpected sense of unease: how does one ‘fight against’ an ‘army of pointed lenses’? Kundera situates his narrative tread within these dissembling events, positioning one of his four main characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza (the professional photographer) on the brink of “staring death in the face”. Tereza’s week-long photographic binge comes as a result of her being influenced by two opposing forces, that of ‘lightness’, which in turn tends to one’s personal needs and wants, and that of ‘heaviness’, which looks after the safe-keeping of one’s cultural history. The camera replaces Tomas as Tereza’s ‘significant other’ during these seven days of searching for personal appeasement and historical retribution. As Píchová points out, “while Tereza is framing the outer world, history in its making, she is also taking aim at an inner, personal world in which she is experiencing for the first time an unknown sense of self-worth and meaning.”
Regrettably, the exhilarated sense of self is of a transient nature: Tereza’s ‘equilibrium’ is shattered together with her nation’s dreams of a different, better reality. Therefore, Tereza’s identification with her nation, her culture, her country and its territory comes as no surprise; she ‘battles’ the Soviet tanks ‘armed’ with her camera trying to capture for posterity a momentary part of Czechoslovakia’s cultural and historic life:
She shot roll after roll and gave about half of them, undeveloped, to foreign journalists (the borders were still open, and reporters passing through were grateful for any kind of document). Many of her photographs turned up in the Western press. They were pictures of tanks, of threatening fists, of houses destroyed, of corpses covered with bloodstained red-white-and-blue Czech flags, of young men on motorcycles racing full speed around the tanks and waving Czech flags on long staffs, of young girls in unbelievably short skirts provoking the miserable sexually famished Russian soldiers by kissing random passersby before their eyes. As I have said, the Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria.
As a character who grasps for life through her dreams and dream-like visions, Tereza’s inclination towards viewing the world through image-spanned segments make her work unlike any of the other photographing ‘warriors’. Píchová comments on this truthful quality of Tereza’a craftsmanship by observing that Tereza “captures reality as [it] is with her artistic eye, searching “behind the scenes,” unveiling the truth.” According to Píchová, Tereza’s need for truthfulness in her life and in her art, is exhibited through the way she approaches her work; instead of developing most of the rolls herself, thus having the opportunity to “beautify or reconstruct the pictures or choose the best of them,” Tereza hands the undeveloped rolls to foreigners, who will then take them outside Czechoslovakia, to places and people that might not harm them in any way, allowing for history to be portrayed the way it had happened.
As a matter of fact, Tereza’s photographs, those few that she manages to carry with her as she and Tomas cross into Switzerland, are appreciated for their unique sensibility while at the same time they fail ‘to live up to their potential’; in other words, the West had already lost interest in the Soviet ‘intervention’ on the streets of Prague, so Tereza’s faithful photography and her ‘candid images’ are forced to join in on “a long chain of forgetting…stripped of their context and meaning, their life span is even shorter than that of the political event they happen to depict.”
Ironically, the same photographs that liberated Tereza’s spirit, and gave her a power of self, constituting a testimony of her struggle to prevent the ‘airbrushing tactics’ of the diligent hands of the propaganda bureau from ‘working their magic’ (which, in the case of Vladimir Clementis’ image proved quite a ‘handful’), reclaim their political potential once Tereza returns to Czechoslovakia, thus reuniting the images with their context. However, in the totalitarian reality of post-1968 Prague Spring Czechoslovakia, as Píchová shrewdly remarks, “these documents of violence against a helpless people now serve to implicate not those who committed the violence but those who were its victims.” Even though she finds out that none of her own work had been used by the government to rob people off from their sense of self, manipulating the same cultural memory she had been striving to record, Tereza no longer views her ‘liberator’ (“the mechanical eye”) with the same innocent gaze: “It was a picture of a young man grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd looking on in the background. “Collaborator Punished” read the caption. Tereza let out her breath. No it wasn’t one of hers. Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks. How naïve she had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.”
This volatile futility of a photographic record of a historic event/person when ‘read’ out of context is not far from Kundera’s own (purposeful) re-casting of the Klement Gottwald-Vladimir Clementis’ 1948 image, as found in the opening sequences of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It appears that Kundera the novelist has misappropriated the circumstances of the pivotal scene from Czechoslovak post-World War II history. Recent archival research has proven the existence of the infamous photograph; however, there is no ‘recollection’ of the comradely gesture: no fur hat was either borrowed or lent. (In her examination of Kundera’s ‘mischievous storytelling’, the critic Hana Píchová quotes the work of Jindřich Toman who, in turn, has shown how Mr. Kundera’s re-telling of the historical event is rather on the imaginative side, i.e., “in 1989, the Czech journal Kmen once again reproduced the original photograph depicting the birth of communist Czechoslovakia. Here Gottwald appears in a fur hat, and right next to him stands the smiling Clementis sporting an elegant hat. It does not appear as if anybody is giving away anything at all, or that Clementis ever possessed a fur hat.”)
What was the incentive for such a play with Czech cultural memory? Is this slight re-imagining of Czech history issued as a cautionary warning? Is Kundera the novelist teaching us a lesson about our twentieth-century tendency to forget without questioning the meaning of this rather harmful practice?
I would like to believe that Kundera’s playfulness with the Gottwald-Clementis 1948 photographic image serves as an example of the author’s unceasing quest for a narrative re-examination of ‘truth’ and ‘truthfulness’. For cultural memory, in this case Czech cultural memory, to stay abreast of the imposed, futile forgetfulness of a totalitarian regime, it is up to us, up to our consciousness, to keep it at bay. Still images can be quite imposing both through their silent claim on ‘the actual past’ and our simultaneous willingness to embrace this claim without questioning, at face value. They ‘help’ us blur the boundaries existing between the image of a historical event and a historical event as an image, between cultural memory and cultural fantasy, between life re-membered and life dis-membered. In order to keep this in mind, we need the ‘pronounced stillness’ of a narrative’s “questioning form”, such as Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Through the art of fictional re-memberance, Kundera not only exposes the piercing superficiality of a totalitarian ‘agenda’ but also reasserts the power of “a narrative tradition characterized by questioning” in the making and preservation of cultural memory. At the end, what we truly get out of Kundera’ narrative play with the multiple meanings behind photographic images is the ability to see ‘how we see our past’ while questioning our present. He doesn’t offer a clear-cut answer as far as photography (as an instrument for documenting life in history) is concerned; nonetheless, as the critic Píchová aptly points out, in her study of Kundera’s novelistic work, it is the questioning of formulaic acceptance, not the certainty of one’s answer, that counts. As long as we can question our personal memory, we can allow our cultural selves to become a part of a memory’s victory over forgetfulness.
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