Dancing in a ring

Henri Marisse

Notable and Quotable

Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2014

Milan Kundera on the dangerous temptation to ‘dance in a ring.’

From the novel “The Book of Laugh-ter and For­get­ting” (1979) by Mi­lan Kun­dera:

Danc­ing in a ring is magic; a ring dance speaks to us from the an­cient depths of our mem­o­ries. Madame Raphael, the teacher, . . . wished to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a cir­cle of men and women with whom she could hold hands in a ring dance, at first in the Methodist Church (her fa­ther was a re­li­gious fa­natic), then in the Com­mu­nist Party, then in the Trot­sky­ist Party, then in a Trot­sky­ist splin­ter party, then in the move­ment against abortion (a child has a right to life!), then in the move­ment to le­gal­ize abor­tion (a woman has a right to her body!), then she looked for it in Marxists, in psy­cho­an­a­lysts, in struc­tural­ists, looked for it in Lenin, in Zen Buddhism, in Mao Tse-tung, among the fol­low­ers of yoga, in the school of the nou­veau ro­man, and fi­nally she wishes at least to be in per­fect harmony with her stu­dents . . .

I too once danced in a ring. It was in 1948. In my coun­try, the Com­munists had taken power, the Social­ist and de­mo­c­ra­tic Chris­t­ian min­is­ters had taken refuge abroad, and I took other Com­mu­nist stu­dents by the hands or shoul­ders and we took two steps in place, one step for­ward, raised the left leg to one side and then the right to the other, and we did this nearly every month, be­cause we al­ways had some­thing to cel­e­brate, an an­niver­sary or some other event, old in­jus­tices were re­dressed, new in­jus­tices were per­pe­trated, fac­to­ries were na­tion­al­ized, thou­sands of peo-ple went to prison, med­ical care was free, to­bac­conists saw their shops con­fis­cated, aged work­ers va­ca­tioned for the first time in ex­pro­pri­ated villas, and on our faces we had the smile of hap­pi­ness. Then one day I said some­thing I should not have said, was ex­pelled from the party, and had to leave the ring dance.