Midriffs for the New Millennium: On Milan Kundera's Festival of Insignificance

Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance, translated by Linda Asher (2014; HarperCollins, 2015)

Midriffs are “in” and have been so since the millennium. So at least runs the insight of Alain, one of four friends who weave their way through Milan Kundera’s final novel, The Festival of Insignificance (2014). This isn’t some throwaway observation; it’s the insight that opens the novel:

It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls, who—every one of them—showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated; captivated and even disturbed: It was as if their seductive power no longer resided in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts, but in that small round hole located in the center of the body.

This interest in the navel runs straight through The Festival of Insignificance, reappearing several times. When Ramon, one of the other friends, observes that exposed midriffs are a fashion trend, Alain fires back:

Don’t forget that the navel fashion came in with the new century! As if on that symbolic date someone raised the blinds that, for centuries, had kept us from seeing the essential thing: that individuality is an illusion!

A bared stomach reveals that individuality is an illusion. Kundera, an absurdist provocateur, is poking fun. He is poking fun at Alain, his character, who contemplates the navel, and at us, his readers, who contemplate alongside him. But jokes, Kundera never tired of demonstrating, contain more truth than most logical axioms. Odd as this may sound, the belly button holds a key to the existential question of how one must live...

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