SOURCE: "Estrangement and Irony," in Salmagundi, No. 73, Winter, 1987, pp. 25-32.

In the following essay, Eagleton considers the various ideological conflicts that inform Kundera's fiction.

Milan Kundera tells the story in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting of a Czech being sick in the middle of Prague, not long after the Soviet invasion of the country. Another Czech wanders up to him, shakes his head and says: "I know-exactly what you mean".

The joke here, of course, is that the second Czech reads as significant what is in fact just a random event. In the post-capitalist bureaucracies, even vomiting is made to assume some kind of instant symbolic meaning. Nothing in Eastern Europe can happen by accident. The logical extreme of this attitude is paranoia, a condition in which reality becomes so pervasively, oppressively meaningful that its slightest fragments operate as minatory signs in some utterly coherent text. Once...