God’s Laughter: Lhashamgyal and the “Kundera Effect”

Lucia Galli

 

Abstract: This article aims to gauge Milan Kundera’s impact, or bakchak (bag chags), on Lhashamgyal’s creative writing. To do so, relevant sections from his most recent collection of nonfictional prose (My Loneliness and Your Literature 2018) will be read against the novella I am a fish in Yamdrok Yumtso (Nga yi yar ’brog g.yu mtsho’i nang gi nya zhig yin 2016). The relevance of the text for the present study is both general and specific. In and by itself, the novella is but a tassel of Lhashamgyal’s literary composition, a version out of many whereby recurrent themes are explicated. It is the concretization of these general, thematically resonant patterns into distinct motifs that ensures the uniqueness of the work under scrutiny, making it the perfect case study for any analysis of Kundera’s influence on the Tibetan writer’s production. While mainly a study of an author’s impact upon another, the present article also reflects upon the role of literature in the creation, preservation, and diffusion of ethnic and cultural identity, arguing that the depth of the “Kundera Effect” best transpires in its being dissonant to rather than harmonic with Lhashamgyal’s oeuvre, especially in their respective understanding of the connection between language and identity.

Keywords: Lhashamgyal, Milan Kundera, language, fiction, contemporary Tibetan literature

 

This is a century of hyphens. We live in a trans-cultural, post-millennial, and hyper-connected world, where communication is immediate and social interactions pervasive. In this age of distraction, unvetted content, AI-generated feeds, and insta-stories, what future, if any, awaits literature? Is the writer still someone with “original ideas and an inimitable voice … (who) inscribes himself on the spiritual map of his time, his country, on the map of the history of ideas” (The Art of the Novel 69) as Milan Kundera posited more than thirty years ago or has virtual reality effectively outdated human imagination? Are we, in short, done with reading literature?

These questions, with which countless literary theorists, philosophers, historians, social scientists, poets, and novelists have grappled since the late 1990s, are even more relevant in the case of minority languages and literatures, due to their intrinsic (in)visibility. Far from tolling the death knell of literature, web-based writing – elastic, non-hierarchical, interactive – has presented minority language users with unexpected avenues of literary exposure, discussion, and experimentation, fostering a sense of literary awareness among the younger generations and effectively contributing to a diversification of literary production both inside and outside the cyber space. The impact of technology on minority language ideology and practices (and vice versa) is particularly nuanced in contexts characterized by strict policing of social media spaces, as is the case of the People’s Republic of China. As interest for the ethno-politics of the PRC has recently grown, so too has scholarship on its ethnic minority languages, in particular those whose endangerment depends on political reasons (e.g., Uygur, Mongolian, Tibetan). As the third decade of the new millennium moves on, concern for the sociolinguistic and cultural consequences of China’s assimilationist language policy on Tibetan speakers has transcended the limited confines of specialized academic circles (Tournadre; Tournadre et al.; Germano; Roche, ‘The Vitality of Tibet’s Minority Languages in the Twenty-First Century’, ‘Introduction: The Transformation of Tibet’s Language Ecology in the Twenty-First Century’; Roche and Hiroyuki) to impact the international community at large (Minority Rights Group International; Human Rights Watch; Human Rights Council). With the disuse of the Tibetan language in primary education and the consequent progressive erosion of Tibetan oracy and literacy, there has been an emergence of code-switching, language crossing, and translinguistic practices among urban Tibetans, factors further enhanced by the diffusion of social networks and instant messenger platforms in the early 2010s. By 2016, the main operating systems of smartphones and computers had built-in software support for Tibetan fonts, and Tibetans’ online presence boomed, with blogs, forums, and channels catering for Tibetan language users, both literate and illiterate. As noted by Daniel Cunliffe and Rhodri ap Dyfrig in their study of Welsh language media space, the audio-visual nature of content-sharing platforms permits writing to be less of a critical issue in comparison to blogging (143), yet it is the latter that most reveals the importance of literacy in any discussion about language use and language value, especially in the Tibetan context, where the existence of mutually incomprehensible “dialects,” regional orthographic variations, and lack of specific colloquial competences (Tournadre et al.) adds another layer of complications to the consolidation of a vernacular literature. In the forty-odd years since the first state-sponsored literary journals,[1] questions of value have gradually replaced issues of form, as the circulation of free verses, short stories, and non-fictional prose in Tibetan language has gained momentum through online media. By increasing spatial and temporal flexibility, internet and smartphones have dramatically affected the dissemination, reception, and reproduction of literary content. The popularity of multimedia platforms like Douyin (TikTok), Weibo or WeChat among Tibetans inside and outside the PRC means that millions of texts, songs, and videos are produced, shared, and consumed at any given place and time. With disparate content moving through and across levels and scales, literature is now the province of the web; in such transmedia environment, technology and authorship become intricately entwined. Fluid authorial authority, fandom phenomena, and the regression of literacy through its online use are only a few of the issues faced by contemporary Tibetan literature. In an interview posted on May 11, 2020 on Tri Semba’s Literary Blog (khri sems dpa’i rtsom rig spyi stegs), a popular public account on WeChat, ten Tibetan authors, among whom figured writers, critics, and poets, intervened on the state of the art.[2] Their answers, ranging from a cautious optimism to open disillusionment, expose the growing pains of contemporary Tibetan literary scene and contribute to the ongoing debate on the value of literature and literacy in forming personal and ethno-cultural identities. As publications have gradually moved from conventional media to digital platforms, so too has the relationship between author and readership shifted. The writer’s need to eviscerate their work, to explain the rationale behind it, is no longer the remit of interested subscribers, but of the cyber audience at large. As some grab the opportunities offered by instant readership, relishing their celebrity status, a few suffer their enhanced visibility as an unwanted but necessary corollary of living up to a responsibility that is first and foremost an ethical one. In a time of socio-cultural and historical uncertainty, with Tibetan oracy and literacy waning and the value of literature questioned, it falls on authors like Lhashamgyal (Lha byams rgyal) to most passionately fight their corner. Winner of several literary prizes, Lhashamgyal has been on the forefront of creative writing since the late 1990s. Mostly known for his short stories, he is also a novelist, a translator, and a prolific essayist, with dozens of articles to his credit in both Tibetan and Chinese. Plauded for his talent, Lhashamgyal has become, in spite of himself, a literary phenomenon, with works engendering a growing body of scholarship both inside and outside the PRC.[3] Born in 1977 in Trika (Khri ka) County, a rural area of Amdo, his life trajectory, made of geographical relocation and cultural adaptation, mirrors that of many other Tibetan intellectuals. Holder of a BA and MA degrees in Tibetan literature and studies from the Central University for Nationalities of Beijing and a PhD in anthropology from the Southwest Minzu University of Chengdu, he currently works a researcher in the Religion Research Institute of the China Tibetology Research Center (Beijing), of which is also Deputy Director.

A leading voice in the contemporary Tibetan literary scene, Lhashamgyal the Writer is a thaumatrope: like the two faces of a spinning coin, the rural child, and the urban scholar morph into something unique, an author for whom a search for meaning is both the means and end of literature. In his contribution to Tri Semba’s post, Lhashamgyal posits literary truth (rtsom rig gi bden pa) – in his view indissolubly entwined with human life – as a prerequisite for any literary works. While acknowledging the cognitive value of literature in general and creative writing in particular, Lhashamgyal deprives the author of any higher ground. The truth he is referring to is not, in other words, the writer’s knowledge, to be imparted to the reader as a pedagogical act. On the contrary, the epistemic value of literature lies in its being a paradigm of knowing, a process that encapsulates and engenders our natural skills, that of listening, observing, watching, discussing, imagining, and modelling (Taha). More a discoverer than a preacher, the writer thus moves from a place of uncertainty and possibility: Lhashamgyal’s fiction raises questions that are rarely answered. It is up to the readers, involved in a complex and multilayered dialogue with the author, to find a fitting explanation, deconstructing and reconstructing the text in accordance with their own experiences, emotions, and perspectives. Analytical and largely self-reflective, Lhashamgyal’s fiction feeds on his nonfictional prose, the imaginative world of his creation providing the background against which to stage society’s contradictions and personal idiosyncrasies, all in the effort to capture the “intangible,” a truth that transcends the peculiarities of the moment to become universal. This quest for meaning is performed through a narrative that favors showing over describing, intuition over exposition, discourse over story. Crafted around rhythm and flow rather than plot and structure, Lhashamgyal’s fiction is lyrical in form and essayistic in essence, a crossover between prose and storytelling through which to pursue a broader intellectual investigation. Trademark of Lhashamgyal’s fiction, the disruption of the chronological presentations of events through non-linear narrative and the consequent weakening of the logical sequence of time/space and cause/effect relationships in the story have been met with skepticism and open criticism in some literary circles. In an interview with  the magazine Tibetan Literature and Arts (Bod kyi rtsom rig rgyu rtsal) dated September 29, 2016 and reprinted as part of the collected volume My Loneliness and Your Literature (Nga yi kher rkyang dang khyed kyi rtsom rig 2018), Lhashamgyal turns his critics’ argument on its head by problematizing mainstream interpretations of prose and storytelling and ascribing any alleged plot deficiency to the reader’s inability to correctly recognize and parse his fiction.

I want to talk about my fiction and the prosy feeling of it. My stories do not have much of a plot, at least not a complicated one, so they may give the impression that it is not important, I think … Some writers are masters in devising plots, twists, and sequences of events. (237) … I am prone to changes of mood and cannot write a story without it having atmosphere and setting, that is a feature of mine. In my fiction, descriptions of the surroundings and of the changes in human emotions are more important than plot twists and sequence of events. I think that may give readers the impression that my fiction is prosy. Yet, there is a main theme that is brought forth, and my stories have a plot with a beginning and an end. It is perhaps a simple one, but for someone who knows how to look deeper, that plot may be a complex one. My fiction narrates a whole story, and that is what differentiates it from mere prose. (238) The most relevant issue is whether the reader has a literary training. There are many types of readers. Some read fiction to pass the time, like watching a TV drama. Others ease their minds or get an independent understanding of the world through fiction, and they converse with the author amidst his or her stories. It is the fulfilment of this special need of my readers that is most important to my fiction. (239)

To support his claim that “there are not agreed-upon standards for the art of fiction, nor decided formulas and precise canons that must be hold up by everyone” (My Loneliness and Your Literature 238), Lhashamgyal calls on a few representatives of the avant-garde movement, from the Austrian-Czech Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and the Czech Milan Kundera (1929-2023) to the Chinese Su Tong (b. 1963), Yu hua (b. 1960), and Mo Yan (b. 1955), to show the capacity of fiction to encompass any imbalances between story (i.e., what is told) and discourse (i.e., how it is told). “Masters in crafting plots” like Kafka, Su Tong, Yu hua, and Mo Yan “make no efforts to detail the surrounding context or the characters’ psychology” (My Loneliness and Your Literature 239): their focus is on describing rather than showing. On the other hand, Kundera’s emphasis is on the articulation of possibilities, of which fictional characters are literary concretizations. As Thomas Harrison reminds us, the entire novel Immortality (Nesmrtelnost 1988) was conceived by Kundera as a literary-philosophical elaboration of a particular gesture, behind which the author “imagined a character; and behind that character, a story” (6). This stylistic feature, in which discourse trumps over story, is likened by Lhashamgyal to his own, in that “Kundera’s fiction gives the sensation that the main theme of the story has been expounded like a scholarly essay, after much analysis by the author himself” (My Loneliness and Your Literature 239). These references show how Lhashamgyal the Scholar discreetly informs the Writer, each of his subtle innuendos to other works and other authors providing a unique interpretative key to his craft. If Ibrahim Taha is correct in suggesting that “literature is a new way of texting existing texts” (442), then it is not too farfetched to conceive Lhashamgyal’s writings as metatexts through which the author critically discusses his own as well as others’ work, thus creating transcultural narratives that “transcend the borders of a single culture and nation, (to) promote and engage with a wider global literary perspective and, possibly, a new way of imagining and living identity” (Dagnino, Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility 2). As other contemporary Amdo Tibetan novelists and poets educated in mainland China – Chone Yum Tsering (Co ne yum tshe ring, b. 1977), Re Kangling (Re rkang gling, b. 1979), or Tsewang Namgyal (Tshe dbang rnam rgyal, b. 1992), just to name a few – Lhashamgyal transposes in his writings the cultural and identity metamorphoses engendered by the process of “creative transpatriation,” a concept introduced by Arianna Dagnino to synthetically indicate the “physical, emotional detachment (where detachment means critical distance, not the opposite of commitment) from one’s own primordial culture, territory, roots (the ‘individual’ motherland) as well as intellectual disalignment from one’s own national/ethnic ‘collective’ fatherland” (‘Transculturalism and Transcultural Literature in the 21st Century’ 7), all necessary steps of transculturalism. This is not a state, but a constant renegotiation of identity (Brancato), that Lhashamgyal performs by vicariously (re)experiencing through his fictional characters the painful processes of physical/spatial/imaginary deterritorialization, linguistic dis/appropriation, and cultural displacement. While the autobiographic quality of Lhashamgyal’s writings has been noted elsewhere (Lama Jabb 107–09; Robin; Norbu) and need not to be repeated here, no study has been conducted on specific authorial influences on his literary oeuvre. The present article aims to partially address this gap in the scholarship by reading Lhashamgyal’s approach to literature in light of Milan Kundera’s production. To prompt the drawing of transcultural, trans-temporal, and trans-spatial connections between the two authors is Lhashamgyal himself, who has been rather transparent in crediting the Czech writer as an early and enduring influence.

 

I have been reading many foreign authors since childhood. I cannot say that I had a favorite one. I read a bit of everything, whoever the writer, but had I to say who among those I liked the most, that is Milan Kundera. I read all his works. The reason is that a superior wisdom is exposed in each of his stories. When reaching the end of one of his works, one feels as though they have received some philosophical answer to a situation – his are not mere tales. At times his prose is nothing but a commentary. It is really peculiar. I do like his writings, but I have no desire to imitate his style. That style works for him, but certainly not for me. Take my stories: I can only write what has an aesthetic feeling to it. By that I mean the feeling of something beautiful like poetry, or that has a rhythm like music. Sometimes I listen to music while writing, even when the topic is a dramatic one. No matter what, I must write with sense of beauty. Even if it is a tragedy, I want it to be aesthetically pleasing. (My Loneliness and Your Literature 165–66)

 

The passage above is extracted from an interview dated 2014 and reprinted in My Loneliness and Your Literature. This is one of several pieces in which Lhashamgyal discusses Kundera’s works, either by themselves or in comparison to his own production. In juxtaposing Kundera’s sophisticated musings and abhorrence for lyricism with his need for aesthetic sensations, Lhashamgyal belies the deep and somewhat dissonant impression – bakchak (bag chags) in Tibetan – left by the Czech writer on his own interpretation of literature as a cognitive act. In its intangible persistence, this “Kundera Effect” operates at a conscious as much as unconscious level, in line with the Buddhist understanding of bakchak as dormant traits imprinted in the mind. Traces of it may be found in Lhashamgyal’s own understanding of literature as “a way to capture the expressions of living; in it the seriousness of thought and the changes of emotions become one. It is heavy and stiff, light and flexible” (My Loneliness and Your Literature 176, my italics). It is no stretch of imagination to read this coniunctio oppositorum against the leitmotif of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí 1984), albeit without the same philosophical underpinnings. Whereas the Czech writer conceives of lightness and heaviness in relation to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, Lhashamgyal frames these concepts in terms of creative expression. To him, a work of literature must necessarily strike a balance between heaviness of essence and lightness of form, so to be able to convey analytical reflections through lyrical prose.

To gauge the Czech writer’s impact on particular aspects of Lhashamgyal’s creative writing, relevant sections from his most recent collection of nonfictional prose (My Loneliness and Your Literature) will be read against the novella I am a fish in Yamdrok Yumtso (Nga yi yar ’brog g.yu mtsho’i nang gi nya zhig yin), hereafter “Fish,” a work originally serialized in the journal Light Rain (sBrang char) between the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 and later included in a collected volume of medium length stories (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 1–126). The relevance of the text for the present study is both general and specific. In and by itself, the novella is but a tassel of Lhashamgyal’s literary composition, a version out of many whereby recurrent themes and meta themes (e.g., nostalgia, childhood, displacement, loneliness) are explicated, in line with the writer’s understanding of his own literature as a unicum, a notion that he borrows from Kundera. As the Czech writer “compiles his works with regard to an overall oeuvre, rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time” (Ricard 14), so too does Lhashamgyal. Like a performer’s signature melody, a handful of meta themes recur across his entire production, a refrain that remains constant despite fluctuations of tone, register, and pace. It is the concretization of these general, thematically resonant patterns into distinct motifs (e.g., jokes, fish, city) that ensures the uniqueness of the work under scrutiny, making of “Fish” the perfect case study for any analysis of Kundera’s influence on the Tibetan writer’s production. As Lhashamgyal himself has clarified, this “impression” or bakchak is more thematic than stylistic: his aim is not to ape Kundera’s writing style (or anyone else’s, for that matter) rather to address some of the Czech writer’s questions of knowledge and existential uncertainty, which he recognized of universal import, in accordance with his own sensitivity and proclivities. To Kundera’s philosophical and at times aesthetically disruptive style, Lhashamgyal thus counters an evocative, often poetic, prose. The images he uses in his narrative are the tool through which he lyrically expresses the ambivalences and affectations of contemporary Tibetan society, that he perceives as “ripe but not mature; inherited but not improved; deluded and without self-control; thwarted and frustrated; thoughtless and vain; fickle and impatient; conceited and arrogant” (Khri sems dpa’).

From the late 1990s to the early 2010s, Lhashamgyal’s output had mainly been limited to fiction, a tendency that culminated with the publication of his first and only novel to date, Beloved Children of Tibet (Bod kyi gces phrug 2012), in 2010. By the end of 2014, the writer had entered a new creative phase, one marked by a stronger, more intentional engagement with prose. The four-time recipient of the prestigious Light Rain literary award was ready to push the limits of convention, shifting the attention from story to discourse.

 

Starting a few years ago (i.e., around 2014), there has been a change in the direction of my literature. Rather than writing solely fiction, I learned to experiment with other forms of prose. I wrote a few literary essays like, for instance, “Tibetans of Beijing” and “Japan in the eyes of a Tibetan,” that will be collected into a special volume next year. In terms of fiction, after the novella I am a fish in Yamdrok Yumtso, I wrote five short stories in quick succession, and I am now working hard to finish a couple more – I’d like to publish them in a collected volume. (My Loneliness and Your Literature 213–14)

 

The excerpt above, taken from his 2016 interview with Tibetan Literature and Arts, refers to a period of intense literary production and experimentation that began at the end of 2014 with the drafting of “Fish” and continued up to early 2018 with the publication of the collected volume My Loneliness and Your Literature. In the months between the serialization of his novella – “a mid-length story of about 50,000 characters, in the writing of which I invested much energy” (My Loneliness and Your Literature 168) – and the posting of the essay “The man who can never go home” (Phyi log mi thub pa’i mi, 2018) on Tibetan Literature Website (Bod kyi rtsom rig dra ba), Lhashamgyal wrote several nonfictional pieces, that read as a critical analysis of the writer’s stance on themes the articulation of which posits the existence of what has been previously referred to as the “Kundera Effect.” The Czech author informs in fact Lhashamgyal’s perspective upon time, identity, memory, and language, questioning any certainty the Tibetan writer may have had over reality, and forcing his quest for meaning beyond the apparent absurdity of existence. It has been said that Lhashamgyal’s fiction feeds upon his nonfictional prose, but the reverse is also true, to the extent that the motifs and symbols of “Fish” cannot be interpreted without reference to the essays written in the months following the novella’s publication. In a non-linear narrative much resembling the one favored by Lhashamgyal in his fiction, a handful of separate yet interconnected nonfictional compositions – “Tibetans of Beijing” (Pe cin gi bod pa, 2015), “An ordinary morning of my life” (Tshe ’di’i ches spyir btang go zhogs pa zhig, 2016), “Experiences of modern literature” (gSar rtsom gyi myong ba), “Notes of a wanderer” (ʼKhyam po’i zin tho), and the already mentioned “The man who can never go back” – will be hereafter used in the study of “Fish” imagery to position those motifs and symbols in relation to Kundera’s impact on Lhashamgyal’s articulation of recurrent themes. These will be presented in the following pages as distinct subparagraphs, whereby each theme will be examined in connection with the associated image(s). A brief summary of the novella’s plot will be provided beforehand.

 

I Am a Fish in Yamdrok Yumtso – No Place Like Home, no Pain Like Love

“Fish” is a first-person narrative in eighteen chapters by one Pelha (dPal lha), a twenty-something Tibetan girl from Lhokha, a southeastern prefecture of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). The apparent simplicity of the plot – unrequited young love, loss of innocence, and ensuing drama – belies the complexity of execution of a novella that moves outside the slipstream of linear, casual plotting, following Pelha’s limited first-person narrative up to her tragic(omic) death. Analepsis and prolepsis merge with the atemporality of dreams and extracorporeal experiences, making the reader’s grasp over time and space tenuous at best. At the core of “Fish” are two interconnected stories – hereafter referred to as main plot (i.e., Beijing) and background plot (i.e., Pelha’s childhood) – that unfold retrospectively, as the point of origin from which they are told belongs to the future, that is to say the eternal present of Pelha’s end. Despite the impression of agency fostered by the limited first-person narrative, the events had already taken place in another time and space and are as such immutable. The novella opens on a conversation between Pelha and the Amdowa Namdröl (rNam grol), on a hot summer day in early 2010s Beijing, three years after Pelha’s fated encounter with Yudrön (g.Yu sgron), a Chinese-looking Amdowa girl, who claimed acquaintance with the man of her dreams, a Khampa singer named Sumpa (Sum pa). According to Yudrön, the young man lived in Beijing, regularly having gigs at a local Tibetan club where she worked as a dancer. Galvanized by the prospect of meeting Sumpa and convinced that she would earn more as an entertainer than selling prayer-flags to tourists visiting the Gampala Pass, Pelha headed towards the Chinese capital, leaving behind her mother and their village on the shores of the Yamdrok Yumtso lake. The real Sumpa soon reveals himself to be simultaneously more – handsomer, grander – and less – cold, aloof – that the Sumpa in Pelha’s mind, but her love is that of the devotee – blind, unconditional, and resilient in the face of evidence. It is while working night shifts at the club that Pelha meets Namdröl, one of Sumpa’s friends and an expert of Tibetan culture. The bespectacled man both intrigues and repels her: just like his ever-dirty lenses, he too is non-transparent, his bonhomie somewhat false and forced. It is Namdröl the first to notice Pelha’s nine-eyed dzi, the only tangible memory of her estranged father. The agate, together with Pelha’s recurrent dream of turning into a fish, is symbolically charged and features predominantly throughout the narrative, to the extent of being a passive agent of change. At the end, it is the loss of the dzi, replaced with a fake without Pelha’s knowing, that sets in motion the events that lead to her death. Captured in the final scene is the image of an enraged and disbelieving Pelha lashing out to the sky, her anguish cry that of the fatherless child who has lost her innocence. Her sudden end – freakish and senseless, in a word, absurd – resets the narrative tense to the present, an epiphanic moment that has been proleptically constructed through half-utterances, family secrets, visions, and prophetic dreams hinting at Pelha being half-human and half-lu (klu). The background narration is thus simultaneously analeptic to the main narrative and proleptic to the now (unfolding) present, where death is not the end but the beginning. The Pelha of the past, that broken body lying stiff and heavy on an anonymous street of Beijing, is not the Pelha of the present, that light, agile fish in Yamdrok Yumtso. This moment of magical realism is all Lhashamgyal needs to escape the absurdity of existence and partially assuage his nostalgia for a fatherland (pha yul) to which he fears he can never return.

 

“Things are not as simple as you think” (Kundera, The Art of the Novel 18): Meta Themes in “Fish”

The Absurdity of Human Existence, or “the joke”

With its “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard xxiv), postmodernism has eroded man’s reliability on a metaphysical reality. Gone are the infallibility of scientific inquiry, the linear progress of history, and the unquestionable existence of ideals. In face of life’s meaninglessness, the individual’s urgency to justify existence has grown into a generalized sense of angst, encapsulated by Albert Camus (1913-60)’s concept of the Absurd – “the consternation we experience when our need for metaphysical order clashes with the universe’s obstinate refusal to furnish it” (Colli). As any other human emotion, the roots of the Absurd must be sought within, not without, and against a world that is not irrational in so much as arational, the only response is an ironic detachment. It is when placing themselves outside and above life’s mess that the postmodern wo/man is able to appreciate the comicality of its absurdity. To search for meaning where there is none is thus an act of defiance to be performed through irony and irreverence, a stance embraced by Kundera, who claims the novel to be “by definition, the ironic art” (The Art of the Novel 134) that “came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter” (158). The “cheerful indifference” (Colli) of the postmodern wo/man is thus a reverberation, at times cynical, at others hysterical, of that primordial divine laughter. Kundera’s idea that “history plays jokes” (The Joke 288) subtends most of Lhashamgyal’s plot construction in “Fish.” Ludvik Jahn’s sad insight in The Joke (Žert, 1967) – “I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable” (Kundera, The Joke 288) – resonates in Namdröl’s grim assessment of his marriage: “It seemed that fate had played a trick on me, but life was a joke I held in no regard” (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 91). Like Tadeusz Kantor’s (1915-90) “Theatre of Death,” Kundera’s humor evokes both laughter and despair, equal and opposite reactions to the awareness of one’s own inconsequentiality. In Pelha’s eyes, the empty performativity of human existence all but disguises the absurdity of it:

 

At times I felt that our whole life was some sort of show, created by someone to make fun of us. Its characters would bring on stage the different events of life, but when all was said and done, everything would inevitably end in laughter or tears, as though it was nothing more than a joke. At the end of the day, wasn’t my own coming to this world also the result of a trick? (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 79)

 

Pelha sees her own conception as a prank (rtsed mtshar) in which the naivety of her mother and the trickery of her father coalesced into making of her the butt of a joke. Lhashamgyal’s novella thus effectively achieves tragedy through its opposite – comedy. Pelha is first and foremost a tragicomic character: like Kantor’s gallows humor, what happens to her “is funny because is tragic; it is tragic because is funny” (Romanska 14). Lhashamgyal invites the reader to partake in the irony of his heroine’s absurd end, to laugh at the grotesque ludicrousness of her dying due to a slip-and-fall accident not with the cynicism of the nihilist but with the defiance of the one who takes a leap of faith. Pelha’s survival – of the spirit if not the flesh – is thus presented as a sort of magical thinking meant to ward off death and oblivion.

To the positive attitude of Pelha, who throughout the novella still clings, against better judgement, to hope, Lhashamgyal contrasts the egotism and emotional immaturity of Namdröl. Like Kundera’s Tomáš in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Namdröl too is “a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it” (Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being 7). Namdröl’s narcissistic personality forces him to perform what he cannot naturally feel; it is such play pretend that leads Sumpa to define his friend as rabbé ribi (rab be ri be), a Tibetan term indicating opacity as much as unreliability. Namdröl’s emotions are a reaction to exogenous rather than endogenous stimuli, a shallow empathy that is the consequence of his stunted emotional growth. Forced into an arranged marriage at the age of fifteen, Namdröl never had the opportunity to organically develop an ability to decodify complex emotions. He was not aware of what love was at the time, and his failed attempts to engender an emotion he was not familiar with generated anxiety and frustration. To him love soon became a burden that fastened him to the ground, a prison he longed to escape. To the heaviness of life’s responsibilities Namdröl prefers the lightness of casual sex, that he disguises as a form of love. Pelha too falls into the trap of Namdröl’s opacity, as she herself grimly realizes in the aftermath of their one-night stand.

 

Yet, last night I had trusted what Namdröl had told me and believed I had really stolen his heart. It may have been so, but on my way home that morning I laughed at myself for having thought that. Sumpa had warned me that Namdröl was an opaque man. It seemed I too had lost my bearings amidst his ambiguity. (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 99)

 

Against a life that is meaningless, Tomáš and Namdröl are similarly caught between lightness and heaviness. While Tomáš – a man who had “harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of Parmenides and make heavy go to light” (Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being 189) – eventually finds contentment in the heaviness of his love for Tereza, Namdröl’s drama is to be crushed under the unbearable lightness of being. To him life is a joke to be laughed at with the hysterical, helpless laughter of a madman.

 

He acted as though he was telling funny jokes, but I didn’t laugh at most of them, and the only loud cries of “ha, ha, ha” and “ho, ho, ho” were his. His glasses slipped down his nose from time to time, and he wiped off tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. He occasionally talked and cried at the same time, and I couldn’t decide whether those in his eyes were tears of joy or sorrow. (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 7)

 

The Relativity of Time, or “the city”

Built upon a provocative question – “why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” (Slowness 3) – Kundera’s Slowness (La Lenteur 1995) examines “the secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting,” positing that “the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting” (Slowness 39). Lhashamgyal too is fascinated by what scientists define as the “two times problem” regarding the veridical (i.e., physical) and illusory (i.e., perceived) nature of time. Relativity theory tells us that there is no absolute time independent of space, yet the way humans experience time in their minds defy what laws of physics suggest. This “manifested time” is “the sum of human temporal experiences that are readily perceived and recognized by the mind. It includes experiences associated with ‘subjective time’ and the flow (passage) of time” (Gruber et al. 4), and it is at the basis of our perceptions of potentially variable past/present/future, dynamics of temporal experiences (e.g., change), and duration judgements (i.e., time speed perception). People’s chronoception is also affected by spatial experiences, as showed by the following rendering of Pelha’s childhood’s psycho-spatial dimensions:

 

My impression of what we call “time” was something formless back then, akin to a patient traveler. From the shores of the ceaselessly moving Yamdrok Yumtso, we could see the black spot of someone coming along in the distance, and for us “time” was the sight of someone coming from afar and the patient waiting for the shadowy form of that black spot to gradually come closer. … My sense of “time” was as slow as that. And the same was true for the passing of time. … The passing of time was as slow as the gait of those men walking away. The formless time manifested itself in the light that shone golden over the mountain peaks rising in direction of the distant sunset, its shadow a corporeal thing that fell over those wayfarers’ bodies. The pace of the passing time was just as slow as that back then. (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 96–97)

 

Lhashamgyal’s interpretation of physical distance in relation to a psycho-spatial framework recalls Kundera’s narrative of Karel’s mind in the second part (“Mama”) of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění 1978), “where crossing (physical) distance translates in the mind of Karel as equal to the passage of a certain time span (or even age)” (Boange). Pelha’s crystalized memory of those “amblers of yesteryear” (Kundera, Slowness 3), for whom “time” was “something formless, … akin to a patient traveler” (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 96) clashes with the impatient, anxiogenic atmosphere of Beijing. The city – frenzied, polluted, congested – interferes with Pelha’s perception of time and space, enhancing her sense of loneliness and disconnection.

 

In the place where I grew up, on the shores of Yamdrok Yumtso … the setting sun was like a longtime friend, casting its flickering golden glances backwards as if it couldn’t make up his mind. … in Beijing night fell in the blink of an eye. (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 9)

 

I never saw the sun rising in the east or setting in west while in Beijing. I couldn’t even tell where east and west were – I was a girl who had indeed lost her bearings in the city. (68)

 

To the cyclical regularities of rural environment, urban life counters notions of velocity and acceleration. The city conveys a sense of ontological urgency: it is here that man “gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed” (Kundera, Slowness 2). In a fast-moving world, time is a commodity in scarce supply, as the accelerating dynamism of modernization transforms time structures and time horizons. This “grave and sharpening scarcity of time” (Hartmut xxxix) elicited by the acceleration of the tempo of life is what Lhashamgyal defines as a “social epidemic.”

 

“How fast time goes!” This is something that has tumbled out of the mouth of many people around me, but I am sure that it is not time that has gotten faster, but us men. As if we were a car, we press down with force on our accelerator, and we run ever faster on the road that separates the two ends of our life (i.e., birth and death). I can neither understand what that extraordinary power that propels us forward may be, nor fathom what we are actually chasing as we run ahead in such a suicidal way. … it has thus occurred to me that I must worry for my beloved son. This life of his that is yet to come will be divided into many fragments of time against the backdrop of this century, each fragment to be in turn further shattered into smaller pieces, all of those eventually becoming no more than minuscule gaps hovering away with the ticking sound of an hour hand. And like that, my little child too will gradually morph into one of those who remarks on how fast time flies, I am sure of it. At that time, my son will not feel that his life has been long, but rather that it has reached the end in a very short time. How sad that is! Stemming from such a realization, a concern has jumped up in my mind … that thoughtlessness and hurry have become the epidemics of this century. (Lha byams rgyal, Beloved Children of Tibet)

 

Extracted from the unnumbered epilogue of Lhashamgyal’s novel Beloved Children of Tibet, the above excerpt confirms the writer’s longstanding unease at the “crisis of time” (Hartmut xxxix) that plagues high-speed societies. The chronic paucity of (uncommitted) time and the imperative of an ever-increasing productivity, performance, and growth concur to create “pathological consequences such as anxiety, depression and phobias (in psychological terms) and alienation, disenchantment and anomie (in sociological terms)” (Vostal 243, italics in original). Rosa Hartmut uses a felicitous oxymoron – “frenetic standstill” (318) – to indicate the paradoxical nature of chronoception in urban settings. To a surge in actions and experience per unit of time corresponds an upsurge of phenomena that are “reflected individually in manifestations of ‘ennui’ or ‘existential boredom’ and collectively in the diagnosis of cultural crystallization, or the ‘end of history,’ but in both cases as the perception of a return of the ever same” (Hartmut 303–04, italics in original). In other words, the episodic and often superficial character of modern (inter)actions transforms the speeding up of time into an aimless drifting, wherein events seem to be repeating in a loop. Captured into a self-imposed cage of responsibilities, deadlines, and engagements, the modern wo/man feels to “no longer ha(ve) any time for the ‘genuinely important things’ in life” (Hartmut 317), with the consequent loss of depth, direction, and meaning to experiences of both life and time. The city steals time and robs people of their sense of identity and belonging. Speaking of Beijing, Lhashamgyal curtly says it to be “a particularly unfriendly metropolis” (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 65), in which he had been “wasting away, like a piece of discarded trash” (55). The massed presence of human beings living in close physical proximity paradoxically engenders and amplifies the individual’s sense of estrangement.

 

Although there are hundreds of thousands of people bustling about, there is no one to bond with. It is even possible that none of them will ever be part of your life’s path. Perhaps you connect with a few, but as soon as you turn direction, they easily become strangers again. In this city, you may have had a neighbor for the past ten years and still don’t know who they are. Here people are suspicious of one another. The world is vast, yet here your own world gets ever smaller, until eventually you own nothing, not even your apartment. (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 65)

 

People disappear in the expanse of Beijing, “like drops of water in the ocean … like fish diving deep into the bottom of oceanic crowds, sometimes emerging to take a breath near the shore, their foamy round bubbles certain proof of them still being alive” (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 68). In a city where “twenty million people scrape by” (55), individual encounters have a sporadic, aleatory character. To Pelha, her patrons are as ephemeral as ghosts haunting the club at night. It is indicative that her knowledge of Namdröl is, in many ways, connected to the same feelings of vagueness and randomness, to the extent that she is forced to question whether her duration judgement (i.e., her estimate of the amount of time elapsed between instances of seeing Namdröl) has not been affected by his being “invisible” at her eyes.

 

Namdröl was not someone I found transparent.

He was one of the Tibetan patrons who came to The Lhasa Sunlight. Like them, he was drawn there, coming from an undefined corner of this big city, to fade back once again into the belly of Beijing, not to be seen for a long time. Or maybe he had become someone who was not visible. He was that kind of man. (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 85)

 

The Power or Dreams, or “the fish”

In advocating the need for “a new art of novelistic counterpoint (which can blend philosophy, narrative, and dream into one music)” (The Art of the Novel 65), Kundera discloses the importance of oneiric experiences as both source of inspiration and narrative strategy in his own work, from the earliest Life is Elsewhere (Život je jinde 1969), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the latest Ignorance (L’ignorance 2000) and The Festival of Insignificance (La fête de l’insignifiance 2015). “Freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude,” the oneiric narrative “ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought” (Kundera, The Art of the Novel 80–81), thus requiring the reader to abandon any attempt at interpretative decoding and trust the author’s imaginative power. To Kundera, “(d)reaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being 55). In line with his understanding of oneiric narrative as “imagination” (Kundera, The Art of the Novel 80), the Czech writer’s oeuvre draws on his own oneiric experiences to recreate that “polyphonic confrontation” (The Art of the Novel 82) of dream and reality that is one of the elements of novelistic counterpoint: “Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs” (Carlisle 55). That dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations – experienced and/or narrated – are the fullest expression of a writer’s imagination is also one of Lhashamgyal’s personal convictions. In the essay “My loneliness and your literature,” he presents his creativity as a sort of coping mechanism against an ever-present sense of existential loneliness. Against a world that is isolated and isolating, the only response left to Lhashamgyal, both the child and the adult, is thus to daydream.

In those (early) years, when I sat alone at the top of a mountain and, squinting my eyes, looked all around me, I had the abysmal feeling that there was no one else alive. (My Loneliness and Your Literature 121) … Thinking about it now, that loneliness may have been the prelude to my daydreams and fantasies. When I sat at the top of one of those mountains, I seemed to do nothing else but daydreaming and fantasizing. (122) … I created characters that did not exist, based on the experiences of a ten-year-old kid, and in their company, I lived a life of love, hatred, and passion. (123) … I wish to talk more about my loneliness, the reason being that those literary works of mine that you read are nothing more than notes of my lonely life. (125) … When I am by myself, I feel that all the turmoil, trouble, and issues I have been through are the cause of my loneliness. They are just like those vast mountains and empty places I observed as a child, and I feel again like that kid. Like him, I too have started to have daydreams and fantasies that far exceed reality, and the scraping of the pen on white paper or the clicking of my fingers hitting the keyboard have become the melody of my life amidst the circling of months and years. They are the rhythm of both my loneliness and your literature. (125-26) … I fantasize and dream freely about the paths I have crossed, the people I have known, the life I have been familiar with, and I can fabricate anything I wish in my imagination. In my stories, I create new worlds and different ways of living. Sometimes I have such hallucinations that I can no longer distinguish which one is true: the life I am living and that exists in reality or the world that I am writing in my story. (128)

In spite of the realistic anchor of his stories, Lhashamgyal’s loneliness occasionally comes up in the narrative as excursions into magic realism, “a mode of narration that naturalises or normalises the supernatural” (Warnes 3), thus blurring the line between the possible and the impossible. In his study of hyperreality and magical realism, Eugene L. Arva correctly remarks on the distinctiveness of the magical realist image, due to its being “the result of an aporetic attitude toward reality” that nevertheless “recreates the real – the limit events that resist representation – as an immediate, felt reality” (60). The scholar further clarifies that “(m)ore often than not, magical realist images attempt to recreate traumatic events by simulating the overwhelming affects that prevented their narrativization in the first place” (Arva 61 italics in original). With their richness in sensory details, Pelha’s recurrent dream, episodic depersonalization, and hallucinatory states turn Lhashamgyal’s own traumatic memories – the sense of loneliness, displacement, alienation, helplessness – into a cathartic narrative. Through the lyrical, metaphorical language of the oneiric, the writer exorcises the pain and horror he feels at the absurdity of life. As Kundera says, “it is not the meaning that precedes the dream, but the dream that precedes the meaning” (The Art of the Novel 132). This is evident when considering Pelha’s dream as a structural prolepsis whose meaning belongs not to the time of the narrative but to that of the narrator, that is to say a future that is already in place (Currie 30). The significance of the dream is ensured through line-level repetitions, which inject a sense of urgency and disquiet, as the fantastic gives way to the horrific. By simulating the trauma to come (the death of the body), Pelha’s dream anticipates the impossible possibility of an incorporeal afterlife. Counterpoint to the sensory overload of the dream are recurrent episodes of depersonalization and derealization connected to situations of intense stress; it is worth noticing that these incidents appear to be stimulated by the urban environment and its high-speed society, whereas hallucinatory events are accounted for only in the background plot and seem as such confined to the rural past.

 

The Unreturnable Homeland, or “the nine-eyed dzi”

“‘Home’ is something very ambiguous for me. I wonder if our notion of home isn’t, in the end, an illusion, a myth. I wonder if we are not victims of that myth. I wonder if our ideas of having roots – d’être enraciné – is simply a fiction we cling to” (Kramer, italics in original). Kundera’s somber reflection, pronounced during an interview with The New York Times, belies the uneasiness of a man for whom home is something unattainable, unreturnable, heavy in its essence as is light in its absence. The Czech writer constantly wrestles with the paradox of having been allowed to leave but prevented from returning – in Anna Parker’s words, “(i)t seems that Kundera came to accept exclusion as a permanent state of being” (Parker). The author’s positive obsession for his natal land can be easily quantified: out of the eleven works that comprise his entire novelistic production, eight are set in Czechoslovakia. It was only in the early 1990s, with the publication of his first works in French – Slowness (1995), Identity (L’Identité 1998), and The Festival of Insignificance (2015) – that France replaced Czechoslovakia as the main setting of action.[4] A deviation from this trend is Ignorance, Kundera’s second-to-last novel and by far the most detailed exploration of the theme of homecoming and its variations (i.e., nostalgia, memory, alienation, identity). The work follows the return home of two Czech émigrés, Irena and Josef, and the inevitable sense of alienation brought forth by the unravelling of their illusions. The joy of the “Great Return” – the ecstasy felt by Odysseus when awakening on Ithaca’s shore – tragically shatters against the disinterest of those who have been left behind. Like Homer’s hero “was amazed to realise that his life, the very essence of his life, its center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost, and could retrieve only by telling about it” (Kundera, Ignorance 34), so too Irena needs her childhood friends to acknowledge and validate who she has become. Their failure to do that feels to Irena like an excision of sorts, as though her outgrown limbs had to be cut off to fit the image that they had of her.

 

By their total uninterest in her experience abroad, they amputated twenty years from her life. Now, with this interrogation, they are trying to stitch her old past onto her present life. As if they were amputating her forearm and attaching the hand directly to the elbow; as if they were amputating her calves and joining her feet to her knees. (Kundera, Ignorance 43)

 

The above excerpt also features in Lhashamgyal’s essay “The man who can never go home,” where the writer elaborates upon the themes of exile, homecoming, and memory, articulating his argument through extensive references to Kundera’s Ignorance. It is the figure of the émigré – “someone who can never go back” (Lha byams rgyal, “The Man Who Can Never Go Home”) – that particularly fascinates Lhashamgyal. As a man who has spent the last twenty years away from his homeland, he too feels now as

 

one of those who must live their life never to return to their natal place. It is not simply the body, made of flesh and blood, that cannot go back, but also what we call “mind,” the very embodiment of our joy, sorrow, love, and hatred. (“The Man Who Can Never Go Home”)

 

If retuning home is a matter of desire rather than possibility for a post-1990s Kundera, the opposite is true for a forty-year-old Lhashamgyal.

 

Can I go back? Do I even want to go back? Would the collective weight of my love for my family, my birthplace, my people be enough to pull my wandering, soaring soul back from this distance place and closer to them? It seems that up to this moment I have never seriously thought about it. … I realize now that there is no sense in my asking if I want to go back – I should rather consider whether it is even possible for me to go back. (“The Man Who Can Never Go Home”)

 

The impossibility to which Lhashamgyal refers is the realization that the home of his memory is nowhere to be found.

 

In those twenty years I have been away from my birthplace, this backwater village has changed like a snake shedding its skin. Or maybe I am the one who has changed. … I really don’t know. … What I do know is that my homeland now, twenty years later, is not the one I think about when I am in Beijing. The homeland that I have in my mind is the one I left behind when I set off on my journey, the one that existed twenty years ago. (“The Man Who Can Never Go Home”)

 

That “emigration-dream” that Kundera sees as a collective nightmare haunting each and every émigré (“the horror of that return to their native land,” Ignorance 15) is to Lhashamgyal the expression of a longing that can neither be satisfied nor extinguished. Both writers suffer from nostalgia, although it affects them differently. The tragedy of Irena is to have her soul “split between two contradictory desires: her desire to return on the one hand, and her hatred of her former world on the other” (Muhsin 78). It is when the dreamed/dreaded return finally comes about that nostalgia reveals to be “something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing” (Kundera, Ignorance 6). It is a loss that is filled in the absence, to the extent that the émigré becomes a stranger in a strange land, to paraphrase Daniel Boscaljon (2), helpless in the face of “the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was” (Kundera, Ignorance 124). Through his characters, Kundera “undermine(s) the notion of the Great Return” (Doloughan 147) and with it the “idea that life beyond one’s roots is not life anymore” (Kramer). While Irena and Josef have woken up to a life of their own choosing, to a future that is “not here. In France. Better yet, somewhere else. Anywhere” (Kundera, Ignorance 170), Pelha is still very much ensnared in the “emigration-dream.” Like Odysseus’, her nostalgia “suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else” (Kundera, Ignorance 33); it is akin to a lacking, a void that threatens to swallow her. Away from home, she is lost, first and foremost to herself. To her obsession with returning Lhashamgyal counters Yudrön (“when I think about going back, I have no desire to return,” Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 67) and Namdröl’s (“I have no desire to go back,” 93) disinterest. It is Sumpa’s metaphor of the ship that best elucidates the difference between Pelha and her fellow countrymen.

 

“I can’t go back to that life,” he said.

“Why?”

“Have you ever seen a ship, Pelha?” he asked, then without waiting for my reply, said, “the ship is very safe when tied at the dock, but it’s not for that purpose that it was built. Likewise, I’d be the happiest were I to stay in our homeland, but that would not be the reason I came to this world.” (113)

 

To motivate Sumpa, Namdröl, Yudrön, and the nameless Tibetan youths who every day wash up in Beijing like human flotsam is the same existential dissatisfaction Lhashamgyal diagnoses in himself: “that desire to move towards or away from something, be it physical or mental, is what seeps through the blood cells of our veins. … I am sure that it is that peculiarity of character that turns so many of us travelers into émigrés” ( “The Man Who Can Never Go Home”). The nomadic nature of Sumpa (“the one who had traveled to the end of the world,” Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 56), Namdröl (“a runaway,” 92), and Yudrön (“a wanderer,” 113) suits the ever-shifting ground of Beijing. They all are, in their own right, social chameleons, part conmen and part sycophants. Pelha, on the other hand, is neither. Her naivety and purity set her apart, making her “not equipped to live in the city” (112). The more she inures herself to Beijing, the stronger her longing for home becomes. Pelha’s nostalgia coalesces around the nine-eyed dzi, a memento of childhood promises yet to be fulfilled. The proleptic section of Pelha’s receiving the agate from her mother coincides with the start of her oneiric experiences and must be therefore read in juxtaposition with it. Building upon half-truths and dreams, the then five-year-old Pelha believed her father to be a fish of Yamdrok Yumtso. To convince her otherwise, her mother pulled a nine-eyed dzi out of her breast pocket and handed it to her, saying:

 

“Pelha, your father was not a fish but a great tradesman. He has gone far away for business but left this dzi for you. A stone just like this one hangs at your father’s neck. You must never lose it! If you do, you won’t recognize him when he comes back.” (31)

 

To the nightmarish experience of the night Pelha counters the wistful hope with which she greets each coming dawn, a perception that will reveal itself to be misplaced due to the misconstrued symbolism with which the dzi is charged in the narrative. A bewitched (and bewitching) object, the bead acts a catalyst of greed and misfortune, its unmistakable pattern of eyes almost sinister in its ominousness (“Pupil-like, those round, white lines seemed to be staring unblinkingly at something,” 34). Laden with Pelha’s hopes and longing, the dzi is the conditional promise – of acceptance, love, integration – upon which her own sense of self has been built. The swapping of the dzi with a fake triggers Pelha’s unravelling: like a boat without a ballast, she tips and sinks. The absurdity of her death couples here with the tragedy of her misplaced trust: in her mother (who lied to her), her estranged father (who never knew of her existence), her younger brother (who mishandles the money she gives him), her alleged friends (among whom hides the thief), and in her own belief that a return to the homeland of her mind is indeed possible.

 

Conclusion: Lhashamgyal Beyond Kundera

 

I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. (Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being 221)

 

In the above passage, extracted from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera expands on the principle that “a character exists … to explore a certain theme, a certain idea” (in Kramer 1984) and it is as such an “experimental self” (Kundera, The Art of the Novel 34). This concept resonates with Lhashamgyal’s own understanding of fiction as a testing ground where to play out issues of identity, memory, nostalgia, alienation, and displacement. As many mouthpieces of his own feelings, doubts, and beliefs, his characters act out those parts of himself that are universal in their baseness: homesickness, jealousy, ambition, cynicism, arrogance. Whereas the two writers’ conception of fiction as “investigation of human life” coincide – as do too, to a lesser or greater extent, the meta themes that cross their respective oeuvres – their perception of the role and importance of language within their literature differ considerably. Starting from 1993, Kundera switched his writing language from Czech to French, thus freeing himself from what he perceived to be “a nation’s possessiveness toward its artists … a small-context terrorism that reduces the entire meaning of a work to the role it plays in its homeland” (Kundera, ‘Die Weltliteratur’ italics in original). To those who branded him part of the “Slavic world,” he explained “that while there is a linguistic unity among the Slavic nations, there is no Slavic culture, no Slavic world, and that the history of the Czechs …  is entirely Western” (‘Die Weltliteratur’ italics in original). With the adoption of French as language of writing, Kundera meant to remove himself from a cultural context in which he had been erroneously pigeonholed, “a displacement … that felt like deportation” (‘Die Weltliteratur’). Lhashamgyal’s stance on literature, language, and national identity much diverges from Kundera’s, being in a way more akin to Kafka’s idea that a minority literature (or more precisely “small literature”) “is less an affair of literary history than an affair of the people” (Kafka 163).

 

Some have said to me, “Why can’t you do something worthier than writing fiction?” When I hear this, I can see their prejudice, which is an expression of their considering as the entirety of myself what is only a portion of it. … I chose to become a writer because I am certain that literature holds an essential meaning for the individual, the people, and the language. Take us Tibetans and our own language, for instance. We are now at a pivotal moment. This is the time for everyone to exert themselves on what is vital: the preservation and protection of our culture, the improvement and betterment of our language. This is something that has become firsthand knowledge. Under such conditions, I think that my writing fiction in my ancestral language is especially beneficial in and of itself and were everyone to do the same of their own volition, I believe that our language, that has come down to us growing and undiminished, will not become a butter lamp in the wind of time. (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 178)

 

Stories are very important in Tibetan literature. On the one hand, they are directly connected with the flourishing and declining of the written language, as their prose perfects, improves, and expands it. When many people read stories, the foundation of Tibetan society itself comes to be strengthened. This particular duty rests solely with Tibetan storywriters; it is not a responsibility that falls on authors from other countries or ethnic groups. This (obligation) is something crucial that has been brought about by Tibet’s contemporary historical situation as well as the condition of its written language. On the other hand, I think that stories are also connected with the preservation and diffusion of Tibetan culture. They serve as a medium for an author who has contemplated society, existence, and human nature to share their unique insights through the use of characters, storyline, and personal reflections. It is for this reason that Tibetan stories subsume perspectives – upon life, values, and the world – that are quintessentially Tibetan, and through them, Tibetan readers may organically inherit concepts that belongs to the traditional culture of our people. (216–17)

 

The above passages, taken from the essay “Experiences of modern literature” and the 2016 interview with Tibetan Literature and Arts respectively, not only elucidate Lhashamgyal’s position but also reveal that dissonance that makes his oeuvre a unique counterpoint to Kundera’s polyphonic compositions. Although neither author presents it as such, their respective language choice is directly political. Through his adoption of French as writing language, Kundera publicly disenfranchises himself from the Slavic world, effectively nipping any attempt at “provincializing” his works in the bud. As a translingual author living in exile, he was “intimately attuned to discrepancies in language and its untranslatability” (Woods 428), and therefore aware that his language was neither French nor Czech, but rather “elsewhere.” In her study of Kundera’s translingualism, Michelle Woods observes that the writer’s “linguistic aesthetics consistently estrange French and Frenchness” (428), to the extent that scholar talks of a “Kunderization of language” (441). The essay “Sixty-three words” (“Soixante-treize mots”), a “personal dictionary” of keywords to be used as a guideline to the linguistic aesthetics and language of his novels (Woods 429; Kundera, The Art of the Novel 121–56), perfectly exemplifies the heteroglossic nature of his French. The economy and precision of Kundera’s French prose, that critics like François Ricard labelled as “classic,” are thus the product of a studied sophistication, if not artful mystification.[5] Signature style of his French production, Kundera’s obsession for stylistic unity translates in a use of the language that is “considered, personal, and transgressive” (Woods 428), that dares, in other words, to breach linguistic norms to preserve the authenticity of the author’s style. The lyricized prose, with its use of repetitions, unusual syntax, and euphony, is at times “deliberately inelegant and in pointed conversation with the idea of classical prose,” all in the effort to locate itself and its author “elsewhere.” The “otherwhereness” of Kundera’s French answers the urgency to intellectually relocate himself and his oeuvre, to no longer be just another “man from the East” (Kundera, ‘Die Weltliteratur’). There is thus a certain expediency in Kundera’s claim of a fundamental distinction between Czech language and Czech culture – Slavic the first, Western the second – a pragmatism born by his “overwhelming need to control the reader’s response” (Dvořáková), the same impulse that fed his distrust for critics and translators (“Alas, our translators betray us. They do not dare translate the unusual in our texts – the uncommon, the original. … To protect themselves, they trivialize us. You have no idea how much time and energy I have lost correcting the translations of my books,” Carlisle). To Kundera’s rejection of his mother tongue in the pursuit of what the Czech philosopher Václav Bělohradský defines the “dream of absolute authorship” (Dvořáková), Lhashamgyal counters a profound conviction in the indissolubility of Tibetan language, culture, and identity.

 

Many now say that (our) literature is disappearing. This is a sign that they know nothing of literature; whether it is fine to say that literature is declining, saying that literature is turning into nothing is a mistake. It is impossible for literature to become non-existent unless the way of life of its people has been destroyed or their language has disappeared. Since literature is a means to capture or identify the (different) expressions of a people, in the end it is impossible for it to perish if the people (that created it) have not perished. (My Loneliness and Your Literature 178)

 

Only if one looks at the facts, it may be possible to find a suitable answer to the question of what contemporary Tibetan literature is, as that (i.e., answer) will naturally turn into a convoluted discussion regarding the general conditions of the Tibetan people. Contemporary Tibetan literature is an amalgam of the state of Tibetan language (oral and written), culture, and society. (Khri sems dpa’)

 

The two passages above, taken from the essay “Experiences in modern literature” and Tri Semba’s blog respectively, clarify Lhashamgyal’s understanding of the interdependence of language, literature, culture, and identity, at both individual and ethno-national level. This vision clashes with the reality on the ground. The divergence of dialects and the lack of transregional spoken language not only forces reliance on foreign languages (e.g., Chinese, Hindi, English) but also negatively affects contemporary literary production. Despite a remarkably conservative orthography, syntax, and grammar, written Tibetan is ill-suited to accommodate colloquial, spoken terms that have no standardized spelling (Germano). Lhashamgyal’s awareness of Tibetan heteroglossic complexities grew exponentially in the years following the publication of “Sunshine on the road” (Lam gyi nyi ’od), the first of his Lhasa-based short stories. The success of the work, originally published in Light Rain in 2009, was mostly due to Lhashamgyal’s mastery of central Tibetan dialect, a linguistic skill rather rare among eastern Tibetan speakers.

 

When I wrote that story, I never thought it would have such an impact. As soon as it was written and published in Light Rain, it seemed as though it had suddenly become the best story I had ever written, everyone was praising it. I then met in New York a former school principal of mine, now based in America, and he too spoke about my “Sunshine on the road,” saying that he read it online and thought it very good that I wrote in the central Tibetan dialect. It was this sort of praise that got me thinking and made me realize (a few things). First, that I am an Amdowa who has written a story depicting a central Tibetan lifestyle; secondly, that I am a speaker of an eastern Tibetan dialect (i.e., Am-ke, am skad) who has written a story in a pure central Tibetan dialect (i.e., Lhasa-ke, lha sa skad). (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 230)

 

When writing “Sunshine on the road” I became aware of what is commonly said: that no central Tibetan can understand something written by an Amdowa and no Amdowa can understand something written by a central Tibetan. Take for instance a writer of modern Tibetan fiction. An Amdowa author does not write about central Tibetan lifestyle, and likewise one from Ü-Tsang (does not write about eastern Tibetan lifestyle). When they write, one does not use the central Tibetan dialect (dbus skad), the other does not use the eastern Tibetan dialect (am skad). Generally, Tibetan (bod skad) is a single language with few local linguistic variations, but there are groups of readers and groups of writers who, having turned those small differences into lines of demarcation between one another, never cross them; those who try to create forms of mutual integration are few and sparse in between. In this day and age, Tibetans from Ü-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham happen to travel a lot among each other, yet from the point of view of the literary language, there are not many writers who combine the dialects with one another. Due to that, there are three different literatures based on different dialects. This is an issue I was rather well-equipped to avoid, since during my seven years at the Central University for Nationalities, most of my teachers and friends at the dormitory were from Ü-Tsang. I therefore thought that were I to write something that integrated the dialects, it would certainly benefit the unity of a common language and culture rather than being useful to literature alone. (153–54)

 

The linguistic course set in “Sunshine on the road” continues in “Fish,” “the proof of Lhashamgyal’s growth and the milestone of his reached maturity” (Chos skyong, “Wind and Time: Still Sunshine on the Road”). The main narrative, told in Pelha’s central Tibetan dialect, is enlivened with Amdowa and Khampa variations, that often lend themselves to comical puns and wordplays. The setting itself – Beijing – allows the writer to play with contradictions, juxtaposing Sumpa’s ignorance of other Tibetan dialects with Pelha’s surprise at Namdröl’s fluency in Lhasa-ke (Lha byams rgyal, Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas 70) or Pelha’s illiteracy in Chinese (10) with Yudrön’s mixture of Chinese and Amdo terms (70).[6] The heteroglossic, multilingual, and transcultural urban environment gives way to misunderstandings, miscommunications, arguments, and silences, often produced, instigated, and cleared through and across social media platforms. In making fun of Tibetans’ obsession for the I-Phone 5 – “the trülku of cell phones” (17) – Lhashamgyal wittingly targets the inequalities in their access to communication and technology. For many minority language users around the world, the digital divide is also a language (and literacy) divide, as far as the absence of supported interface languages prevents the circulation of contents and conversations. For Pelha, who does not read or write Chinese, the impossibility of affording an I-Phone with built-in software support for Tibetan fonts translates into a diminished ability to communicate and a consequent dependency over others’ goodwill (i.e., Yudrön’s) for decoding any written content that would be otherwise inaccessible to her. It is ironic that when she finally gets an I-Phone 5, she has no use for it. All her friends speak (and write in) Chinese, and the only person whom she could text in Tibetan is her mother, who owns no phone. Pelha’s sense of alienation and displacement in Beijing mirrors Lhashamgyal’s fear of the city’s erasing effect upon himself, his son, and his fellow Tibetans. This anxiety, which features in several of his nonfiction writings, dominates “Tibetans of Beijing,” one of the most intimate of Lhashamgyal’s essays. Here the writer confesses the trick he devised to teach his son not to mix Chinese and Tibetan: a gentle slap and a tilt of the head when speaking – right for Tibetan, left for Chinese. And yet, Lhashamgyal doubts the validity of entrusting the future hope of an entire ethnicity upon this method: “it may be that the reminder of my smack will no longer be effective and that there will be no path forward for the Tibetan language, regardless of whether my child tilts his head left or right” (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 74). It is the terror at the prospect of “melting like a snowball, like a lump of butter in the hands of Beijing” (74) that feeds Lhashamgyal’s vision “to be the liquid nourishment that moistures the sprouts of the plateau” (74) – to find, in other words, his own way home. To a Kundera who, already five years prior to his linguistic “turn,” expresses no wish to go back to Czechoslovakia (“This is why I do not feel like an émigré. I live here, in France, and I am happy, very happy here,” Elgrably and Kundera 11–12), there is a Lhashamgyal who cannot stop looking over his shoulder, there where he is not, in his old country, with his old friends (“I have always known that it is impossible for me to go back, yet I constantly yearn for a way to return to my homeland,” (“The Man Who Can Never Go Home”). Their use of the language reflects this diversity of positions: if Kundera’s writing language is neither French nor Czech but “elsewhere,” Lhashamgyal’s is “elsewhen,” a time suspended between past and future, memory and hope, loneliness and literature.

What started as a study of an author’s impact upon another has gradually turned into a reflection upon the role of literature in the creation, preservation, and diffusion of ethnic and cultural identity, especially in the context of minority language users. Influences may be positive, and as such stimulate emulation, or negative, and thus lead to rejection; in the case at hand, the depth of the “Kundera Effect” best transpires in its being dissonant to rather than harmonic with Lhashamgyal’s oeuvre. As the present article has showed, both writers explore existential and humanistic themes, posing questions related to meaning, identity, and knowledge, yet their intellectual quest subscribes to opposing paradigms. Kundera’s perspective is that of the antilyric, “of irony, of demystification, of the relativization of truth, of feelings, of attitudes,” (Biron et al.) to be achieved through self-detachment from one’s homeland and its language. To such a view, Lhashamgyal counters a profound identification with his feelings; he is, in other words, lyric, in so far as his writings endorse what Kundera discards as “the unimpeachable myths” – “the myth of youth, of motherhood, of poetry” (Biron et al.). Such an irreconcilability of positions – antilyric one, lyric the other – transpires in their respective responses to the tragedy of existence. To the atheist Kundera, death is the ultimate probability, from which there is no return (“All the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return,” (The Joke 148). This unbearable lightness of being – the awareness that life is absurd and there is no reprieve, either in this life or in the next – sets Kundera apart from Lhashamgyal, for whom to die is to live again, and perchance “be born once more in the homeland, Tibet” (“The Man Who Can Never Go Home”). In the Tibetan writer’s oeuvre, this myth of homecoming – that Kundera rejects as delusional – translates into an identification of language and ethnic identity. The émigré’s estrangement from their own mother tongue, that Kundera sees as an inevitable consequence of the emigration process, is for Lhashamgyal “an ineffable bitterness,” the same he feels when confronted with his older colleagues’ failure in teaching Tibetan to their children (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 58).

 

I always connect literature and the fate of Tibetan language. We have many bilingual writers, and because of that, some have gradually abandoned Tibetan and write instead in Chinese. As there are fewer and fewer who speak or read Tibetan nowadays, the condition of our language is worsening. It is for this reason that I believe writing in Tibetan to be an undisputable duty for any Tibetan writer.

 

Our writers have another responsibility, beside that of writing in Tibetan: they must give thought to the Tibetan language – its beginning and end as well as its progress. This is a duty that Chinese writers do not have, and it trumps the responsibility of writing itself. It is an obligation to reach the end of this century having perfected our language and to give it to the many who (still) read and use it. It is a responsibility that has naturally fallen on our shoulders – and it is indeed a pressing matter. (Lha byams rgyal, My Loneliness and Your Literature 161–62)

 

The above excerpt, part of a longer interview, illustrates Lhashamgyal’s personal commitment to the preservation, improvement, and diffusion of the Tibetan language through the literary medium. It is apt to conclude this study with a reflection on the way similar situations may engender different, sometimes opposite, reactions. While both writers have experienced, in different forms, the strictures of censorship and government control, their views of mass and social media as tools of expression and creativity differ considerably. To Kundera’s skepticism and suspicion, Lhashamgyal counters a moderate enthusiasm in the positive role that these multimodal semiotic resources may have in the maintenance and revitalization of minority languages. The digital future of Tibetan literature appears promising, but it is still early days. It is admittedly a long and fraught path, one to be travelled, as Lhashamgyal himself suggests, “with the disciple of a wayfarer – silent, glistening with sweat, patient in the face of loneliness, doggedly moving forward one step at a time” (Khri sems dpa’).

 

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Notes

[1] The emergence of a Tibetan “new literature” (rtsom rig gsar rtsom) is conventionally traced back to the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping’s reforms sparked political actions aimed at minority culture revival. Collaborations between the central party’s administration and Tibetan intelligentsia translated into a series of cultural initiatives, ranging from state-run literary journals and conferences on national minorities literature to a program of state-sponsored publications and several literary prizes for national minorities literary works (Robin 117). Interested readers are referred to Shakya (‘The Waterfall and Fragrant Flowers’; The Emergence of Modern Tibetan Literature), Hartley (Contextually Speaking; ‘Tibetan Publishing in the Early Post-Mao Period’; ‘Ascendancy of the Term Rtsom-Rig in Tibetan Literary Discourse’), Hartley and Schiaffini-Vedani, Lama Jabb, and Grokhovskiy.

[2] An English translation of the blog post was published on the website High Peaks Pure Earth on August 4, 2020; see ‘Young Tibetan Writers Discuss the State of Modern Tibetan Literature’. For the original version, see Khri sems dpa’.

[3] While non-academic analyses of Lhashamgyal’s writings abound in the cyber space, formal studies by Tibetan scholars have proved to be less accessible. Interested readers are referred to Chos skyong (‘Wind and Time: Still Sunshine on the Road’) and Norbu’s relevant passages from Pad ma phag mo rta mgrin and Chos skyong (A Study of Contemporary Tibetan Literature); see also Lama Jabb (107–09) and Robin for studies in English. For English translations of Lhashamgyal’s writings, see Lhashamgyal and Robin, Lhashamgyal and Peacock, Lhashamgyal and Fitzgerald, Lhashamgyal and Rongwo Lugyal, Lhashamgyal and Schiaffini-Vedani, Lhashamgyal, Dickie, and Shastri.

[4] Although published after Kundera’s emigration to Paris in 1975, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality were French translations of original works in Czech written in 1978, 1982, and 1988 respectively.

[5] The reference is here to Jan Novák and his controversial biography (in Czech) of Kundera’s life up to 1975. Despite not being the first study casting doubts on the veracity of Kundera’s pronouncements, the timing of Novák’s book – published in 2020, a few months after a series of scandals that invested Kundera – reignited the debate around the Czech author.

[6] The mixing of Chinese and Tibetan, a common phenomenon in urban setting, is often referred to as “the half-goat, half-sheep language” (ra ma lug skad) (Tournadre 4).

 

Lucia Galli holds a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. Previous research fellow at the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l’Asie orientale (CRCAO, Paris) and member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), she is currently an independent scholar. Her most recent publications include peer-reviewed articles in Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Life Writing, Revue d’etudes tibétaines, and Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines.