... or, perhaps, of “being no more”.

At first, I was not sure which title to choose: “lightness of dying” or “lightness of being no more”?

But then I opted for “dying”, because death does not mean that one is no more. Death is simply the end of physical being, but the other being – the philosophical, the non-material – goes on, even after death.

Milan Kundera, the naturalised-French Czech author, who passed away, aged 94, on the eleventh of this month, was not interested in the physical. In his non-fiction The Art of the Novel, he argued that the physical appearance of characters in a novel (or a short story) is not important – the reader can actually supply that. What is important is the description of what goes on inside the character. Kundera wrote novels (mostly) to do philosophy and delve into “being”. And dying, I contend, does not truncate “being”. Despite his physical death, Kundera will live on in his works. I know it’s almost a cliché, but it’s a beautiful cliché, and it’s also interesting. Dun Karm captured it nicely in his verse, “Il-Poeta jmut ’ma l-Għanja tibqa’” [The Poet dies; the Song stays on].

The first book by Kundera I read – Laughable Loves, of 1969 – I read on the plane in 1995, on my way back home from a Vienna International Model of the United Nations session. I was young and impressionable, and Kundera impressed me, particularly the short story “Edward and God”. As is my habit, when a writer impresses me I buy all their books. So over the years, I collected Kundera’s opera omnia, often times buying the English and the Italian translations (as my French is not always up to scratch), from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, to The Farewell Party and, possibly his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Kundera’s novels are a journey through his developing philosophy; he invented plots and characters in order to elaborate and articulate his ruminations. One characteristic of his novels is that they abound with criticism of totalitarianism, particularly the Soviet version as experienced in his native Czechoslovakia, a country that now no longer exists as it split into Czechia and Slovakia.

Irony abounds in Kundera’s works – and irony always works as a test: the intelligent reader usually gets the drift; the others usually read a message – but Kundera declared that his works have no message. Instead of a message (the literary equivalent of a sound bite), there’s philosophy, or, to put it more aptly, structured analysis. This, Kundera directed at the horrors committed in his country and the rest of the Communist bloc in the name of Ideology. The Polish professor and politician Ryszard Legutko has recently criticised the current neoliberal ideology as eerily similar to the communist ideology of yesteryear. This could be the reason why Kundera’s works lost some of their lustre of late – it might be that intelligent people noticed the similarities Legutko singled out and did not want to work out why late capitalist liberalism is paradoxically similar to the communism Kundera criticised.

Be that as it may. Kundera’s drift is that totalitarianism, with its insistence on not allowing any space for the individual outside the dominant ideology, is bad. There is a thread running through his novels: the political exploration of individualism versus totalitarianism. In a sense, Kundera seems to have walked along the same path as Patrick MacGoohan in his The Prisoner, the surrealist TV series of 1967 that has now achieved cult status.

In one of Kundera’s novels, I discovered the concept of litost, a Czech word that Kundera claims cannot be translated. It means, more or less, “a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery”. Kundera claims it is one of the keys to a proper understanding of the human soul.

This is characteristic when you read Kundera – the concepts stay with you, the plots and the characters don’t. In fact, I barely remember the story which Kundera created as an excuse to convey this philosophical concept. For a long time, I thought I was the only one to have this reaction to Kundera’s works.

Then I read an article in The Guardian and found out that it is a common phenomenon. People sometimes laugh (at the irony), then simply forget his books. Indeed, Kundera’s books lack a sense of “felt life”. The Guardian argued they “really belong to that tributary of ironic, equivocal writing in which the authors are so conscious of the contradictions, pitfalls and contrivances inherent in the act of creating fictions that their books themselves become, on one level, parodies or at least self-interrogations”. But I would add that Kundera was a philosopher who used story-telling to convey his philosophy. I think Umberto Eco was referring to this method when he observed that abstract thinking is best expressed through stories. Clearly, Eco was not original. The Jews had already understood this when they composed their Sacred Writings – they expressed the abstract notions relating to the Divine by concretising them in stories that, to the rational mind, at times seem absurd to the point of evading belief.

Kundera is dead. Will his works live on? The truth is that very few authors survive the passage of time. Only time will tell whether Kundera’s name will live on, or not. In the meantime, however, the phrase “the unbearable lightness of being” has entered common parlance, at least those who have a certain level of culture use it. (As an aside, an important cultural test is to see whether that phrase can be translated into Maltese. To my mind, it can only if we coin a word for “being”, possibly by drawing from the linguistic stream of Arabic that flows beneath the surface of our language.)

Ultimately, Kundera’s “life after death” will be another exploration of the unbearable lightness of being.

Sofia

The word Sophia in classic Greek means “wisdom”. Philo-sophy means “love for wisdom”. Fate wanted the passing away of Milan Kundera (the philosopher disguised as novelist) to coincide with the shameful treatment given by Labour to the relatives of Jean Paul Sofia, the young man who died when a wall fell down on him as he was working on a building site.

Labour voted in Parliament against an Opposition motion to allow a public inquiry into the episode. The Prime Minister keeps inexplicably defending the decision to have only a magisterial inquiry, which would establish criminal liability (if any) while avoiding the issue of administrative responsibility (if any).

Robert Abela’s attitude defies all notions of transparency and, essentially, democracy. I know many Labourites who cannot understand the Prime Minister’s stance. The publicly-undisclosed opinion of these Labourites confirms that the opinion publicly aired by other Labourites is widely shared. The shock at Labour’s cavalier attitude toward the quest for the truth behind Mr Sofia’s death is shared across the board, from Nationalists to thinking Labourites. Well, at least Robert Abela managed to instil some sort of national unity in this country. Pity is that he managed to do it for the wrong reasons – another confirmation, if any was needed, of the weakness leadership style (or even qualities) of the current Prime Minister.

In time, we shall get to know more about what lies behind Labour’s intransigence on this matter. For the moment, however, the Prime Minister’s attitude reminds one of the themes of Milan Kundera’s novels... in particular, how totalitarianism crushes the individual. Under Robert Abela, Being becomes truly unbearable light. The inherent value of the life that young man lost during the accident got blown away by the wind of (totalitarian) politics, and only God knows what else.

I use “totalitarian” purposely. It seems that the Labour parliamentary group was not proud of the way it was forced to vote. If Labour were really democratic, it would have allowed its MPs to vote according to their conscience. Ultimately, the Sofia Saga is not a matter of political ideology – it’s a matter of conscience.

The lightness with which Dr Abela is treating this case is unbearable. Not only for the family – obviously upset and hurt – but for that part of the population which believes in a set of values, ranging from the ethical and communitarian to the democratic.

Indeed, the Sofia Saga has highlighted two contradictions in the current political situation.

First, the contradiction in Liberal Democracy as experienced under Labour. In theory we live in a liberal democratic country. By liberal I understand freedom and equality, broad concept of equality, and basic protection of minorities. By democracy I understand rule of law, checks and balances among institutions and levels of government, and state capacity in an important and effective bureaucracy.

Labour has managed to sever “liberal” from “democratic”. It puts a lot of effort of equality – even boosting basic protection of minorities and broad concept of equality to levels that do not really reflect the culture of the country – while ignoring or just paying lip services to the basic tenets of democracy.

It was only natural that the Nationalists should then insist on the democratic part of the equation: rule of law, check and balances, state administration.

The Sofia Saga shows that Labour is interested only in promoting its liberal agenda, while persisting in ignoring the rule of law and the other fundamental principles of democracy.

Labour’s motion to put pressure on the judiciary is anti-democratic (to hurry up the magisterial inquiry). In a democracy the branches of the State do not put direct pressure on each other, because they are presumed to be autonomous. When the Executive puts pressure on the Judiciary, we’re entering totalitarian territory.

But also trying to avoid the quest for the truth from the administrative side indicates totalitarian traits. The Opposition’s request for a public inquiry is legitimate because in a democracy the electorate has the right to understand how public affairs are administered. When the Government wants to hide this, then it is the time to be worried. The electorate should be worried, and should demonstrate this worry openly.

The second contradiction highlighted by the Sofia Saga is limited to the Labour Party. Is it still a workers’ party, or has it become a travesty? Mr Sofia was a worker, small fry. Opposition Leader used the mot juste in Maltese: iż-żgħir, literally meaning “the small fellow”. Labour used to be the natural defender of the working class. It has now lost its soul. It is possible that Labourites now feel litost.

Another theme present in Kundera’s oeuvre is Forgetting. Perhaps Robert Abela is banking on the electorate’s tendency to forget. He’s calculating that, eventually, the people will forget, and whoever is being protected will get away Scot-Free. Shame on him!