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The Waning of Shame in Modern Life: Kundera’s Novels as a Case Study

in an interview. “I might exaggerate by saying that I am in a sense ‘sculpted’ for discretion.” Whether the story takes place in Czechoslovakia after 1968 or consumerist western Europe, Kundera brings to life the way privacy protects those experiences that leave the self most vulnerable. He reveals this chiefly by negation, presenting us with the specter of a world not only where the public sphere and the sense of common life have all but disappeared, but also where intimacy and the sense of shame are on the verge of extinction. And it has been Kundera’s singular “obsession” with privacy—the sphere that has always been home to the bodily aspects of life—that has driven him to delve into what the narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being calls “the irreconcilable duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience.” This dualism is, of course, as old as Western civilization, but the modern obsession with privacy is only as old as the nineteenth century, when the cult of domesticity offered for the first time the closeness of personal relations as the truest source of happiness. Even though this new emphasis on romantic love, family, and friendship gave rise to a richness of intimate engagement never before seen in history, a life lived in the narrow confines of the private sphere was a life lived in close proximity to the life process itself—that is, the maintenance and reproduction of the human species. And one of its most disturbing consequences was that