Polyphony of exile in Ignorance by Milan Kundera
L’Ignorance, polyphonie de l’exil, ou Milan Kundera contre le « prêt-à-penser »
Résumé
This article focuses on the existential problematic of exile in Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, published in 2000. As usual, Kundera offers a polyphonic novel where the characters are considered as « experimental egos ». We follow the trajectories of two Czechoslovak political emigrants who return home after the collapse of the communist regime. From a polyphonic perspective, we study two discourses of exile : the first, historical discourse, reduces the emigrant to suffering ; the second, poetic discourse inspired by The Odyssey, considers the exil from the point of view of nostalgia.