Falling Out of History
Kundera acknowledges in retrospect that the theme of lightness, later developed especially in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, appears already in The Joke, and he wonders whether it is the case with novelists in general that the same basic themes recur throughout their work (The Art 136–37). In fact, most of the recurrent principal themes of Kundera’s later works are already present in The Joke: the antagonism between body and soul, the opposition between the particular and the universal, the themes of lyricism, sentimentalism, falling and vertigo, lightness, “ultimate beauty,” the idea of the individual as the constructor of his or her own image, the ugliness of the modern world, the idea of disengagement of the act from the agent’s intentions, history as a playground for the immature, and forgetting as an anthropological constant. Actually, several of his most important themes occur already in the short stories of Laughable Loves (see Chvatik, Die Fallen 21, 64, 65, 80), such as the combinations of love and ridicule and of laughter and seriousness which can suddenly be reversed. The individual’s efforts to control events and the ensuing failure are one of the main themes in “Nobody Will Laugh” as well as in “I, the Sad God,” Kundera’s first short story, which was omitted from the Western edition of Laughable Loves (see Woods, Translating 76–77). The problem of personal identity is a central theme in several stories, for instance, “The Hitchhiking Game.” The story “Eduard and God” deals with the difficulty of finding significance in one’s life and actions under oppressive conditions, which determine how one is allowed to act and think and even decide one’s profession. In such circumstances significance is sought in the realm of private life, where free choices are to some extent still possible, but even there finding it is difficult.
A comparison between the short stories of Laughable Loves and Kundera’s later works is rewarding not only on the thematic level but also with regard to the various narrative techniques which Kundera “rehearses” in the short stories and later utilizes in his novels (see Chvatik, Die Fallen 21, 51). The “natural” introduction to Kundera’s art of the novel, however, is of course his first novel, The Joke. The themes which remain important in his novelistic oeuvre—those which are to be considered as his contribution to the novelistic discoveries of man’s existential possibilities—are displayed here in a historical setting, which facilitates their comprehension by the reader. The Joke also offers access to Kundera’s art of novelistic composition. While the narrative mode and structure of The Joke are atypical of Kundera and less original than those of his later works, an analysis of the novel allows us to identify certain Kunderan principles of constructing a novel in statu nascendi and to understand where they come from. All this is connected with the main objective of this chapter, which is to elucidate the motives and reasoning which prompted Kundera to assume an “anthropological” way of thinking and a pessimistic view of History (on Kundera and history, see also Ivanova).
From the collective to the private, from History to anthropology
The chain of events which takes place in the present of the novel is condensed so as to cover a single weekend, but in a series of retrospective reminiscences the narrative conveys essential elements in the life of the protagonist and to a lesser extent of three or four other characters. Ludvik’s story is told largely through his own narration, but skillfully intertwined with it is the first-person narration of three of his acquaintances, explicating his story from different points of view. On the whole the novel is not elliptic, unlike Kundera’s later works, in which everything that is thematically irrelevant is omitted. The Joke can be characterized as representative of “realist modernism” or “modern realism” (see, e.g., Cravens 106; Lodge 143; Němcová Banerjee, Terminal 11; Porter 39), spanning the period from, say, William Faulkner to Saul Bellow and Heinrich Böll. On the one hand, the narration does not spare concrete realistic details and places events in a specific historical and geographical setting; on the other hand, unlike the typical nineteenth-century realist novel, it does not proceed in chronological order and employs the technique of shifting perspective. The point-of-view technique and the complex temporal structures became distinctive features of the modernist novel that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. In the modernist novel, events are always experienced by someone, and it makes a difference who that character is. Moreover, events are not automatically integrated into the story, which has to be constructed with events brought together so as to form a significant whole. In other words, the experienced reality is no longer the same for everybody, and the story requires acts of arranging, combining, and interpreting events.
Ludvik Jahn had been a devoted communist who, following the revolution of 1948, participated actively in the building of a socialist Czechoslovakia. His story goes back to the moment when his life was changed by a postcard. He sent the card to his girlfriend, who was spending her summer vacation at a communist summer camp, in Ludvik’s view wasting the only time they could have devoted to each other. Tormented by the frustration he felt because of her absence, he expresses his irritation over her letter “that was pure Marketa: full of earnest enthusiasm for everything around her; she liked everything: the early-morning calisthenics, the talks, the discussions, even the songs they sang; she praised the ‘healthy atmosphere’ that reigned there; and diligently she added a few words to the effect that the revolution in the West would not be long in coming” (32; unless quoted otherwise, references are to the final edition of 1992). Merely to “hurt, shock and confuse her,” he writes on an open postcard: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik” (32). To Ludvik’s misfortune, the card is read in a different discursive code from that in which it was written (see Chvatík, “Milan Kundera and the Crisis” 29, “Milan Kundera als Übersetzer” 153): those who read the card do not see a joke in it. Misunderstanding in communication, which is so typical of all of Kundera’s works, has in this case fatal consequences (see, e.g., Draper 72–74; Richterová). The post-1948 period was an age of official optimism and cheerfulness, yet it lacked any sense of humor. Joking or doubting in the Voltairean spirit was foreign to this era “of great collective faith,” as Ludvik’s friend Kostka puts it (224). Ludvik is stigmatized as an enemy of the working class and expelled from the communist party and the university. He then has to do military service in a penal battalion, followed by several years working in a coalmine. An account of his years in the penal battalion is given in retrospective first-person narration, while the events in the present revolve around Ludvik’s plan to take his revenge on his former party comrade Pavel Zemanek, who more than anyone else he considers responsible for the tragic turn his life took fifteen years earlier.
For the reader familiar with the main events of Kundera’s past, it is not difficult to discover similarities between his life and the protagonist’s, such as their commitment to the cause of socialism after the revolution of 1948 and their casting out from the party owing to the intolerance of mockery. However, Kundera argues that any attempt to interpret the oeuvre of a novelist in terms of his life is preposterous and contrary to the novelist’s intentions (The Art 145–46). This kind of psychological explanation invalidates the truth claim of the novel: truth meant to be relevant to human beings in general is reduced to truth which concerns a single person only. Nevertheless, is not the assumption of a significant connection between Kundera’s experience and the content of his works entirely consistent with his view that truths in a novel are always perspectival? Moreover, if he has arrived at his general conclusions as to History, human beings, and the world on the basis of particular experiences—is not experience necessarily particular?—this is no reason why one should not take them seriously or suspect their validity. In my view, following Kundera’s path starting with his experiences and ending with his general statements can help us understand the latter.
According to Kundera, The Joke is no more a historical or political novel than any of his other novels. Scholars of Czech literature and history, however, maintain that The Joke should be studied in relation to Czech history despite Kundera’s insistence that for him contemporary Czech history serves as a mere source of materials through which he explores human existence (The Art 35–44; see also Doležel; Jungmann; Matejka; Porter; Steiner, “Ironies,” “Justice,” The Deserts). Since the art of the novel is a realm of freedom apart from History, it is in principle wrong to see in the novel an expression of a historical era (see Testaments 15–16). However, I argue that Kundera as a novelist is not as independent of History as he claims in that his views of humanity and history have been shaped by his personal historical experience. To put it in the form of a paradox, his denial of individuals’ historical existence has historical reasons. This is to say that he does not escape History even when he chooses to found his views about humanity on anthropology rather than history.
In fact, the very idea that history had revealed unexpected human possibilities was the common experience of Czech intellectuals in the 1960s. In an account of the atmosphere shortly before and after 1968, Václav Havel described the experience of having faced completely different modes of existence within a relatively short period of time. What to Kundera appears the anthropological truth of human existence is described by Havel as experience derived from contemporary history:
None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events, both visible and invisible. Who would have believed—at a time when the Novotný regime was corroding away because the entire nation was behaving like Švejks—that half a year later that same society would display a genuine civic-mindedness, and that a year later this recently apathetic, sceptical, and demoralized society would stand up with such courage and intelligence to a foreign power! And who would have suspected that, after scarcely a year had gone by, this same society would, as swiftly as the wind blows, lapse back into a state of demoralization far deeper than its original one! After all these experiences, one must be very careful about coming to any conclusions about the way we are, or what can be expected of us. (Disturbing 109)
Kundera does not hide the fact that his vision of History as a playground for the immature has its origin in his experience of the Czech revolution. Kundera is not alone in considering this as a revolution of youth; on the contrary, it was in fact the older generation’s failure to consolidate a democratic society before World War II that opened up the field for an effort by the very young to establish a new kind of society (see Liehm, Trois générations 16–21). The generalization that revolutions in general are an undertaking of the young, however, stems from Kundera alone. His conviction that a mature person should comprehend that History is beyond human control derives from his experience as a young revolutionary, one who participated in the building of a communist future and became bitterly disappointed. Havel identifies this disappointment as the key to Kundera’s later skepticism: “Complete skepticism [concerning politics and history] is a psychologically understandable consequence of discovering that one’s enthusiasms were based on illusion” (Disturbing 177). Consequently, after this experience Kundera seeks freedom of action only outside History, in private life and in the realm of art. His conviction that the individual preserves some freedom even under the harshest constraints thus originates from a political context, not from his study of Sartre and existentialism, as is sometimes supposed. The similarities between the existentialism of the 1950s and Kundera’s worldview may result from a similar experience of spiritual-cultural depression and the sense of being crushed by the events that followed both World War II and the crumbling of the ideals of revolutionary youth.
A friend from Ludvik’s youth, Jaroslav, recalls that after 1948 Ludvik had “the look all Communists had at the time. As if he’d made a secret pact with the future and had thereby acquired the right to act in its name” (The Joke 139). His Marxist world-view led Ludvik to believe that he knew what the future would bring and dedicated his actions to serve the fulfillment of History. His expulsion from the party, however, shatters his pact with the future and his life is thrown off the path of History. Yet Ludvik’s destiny is not the only thread in The Joke through which the loss of History as the individual’s home and sphere of action is followed. In Testaments Betrayed Kundera remarks that in The Joke he depicts in the four characters who function as focalizers in the narration four modes of communist ideology, derived from four European heritages: “Ludvik: the communism that springs from the caustic Voltairean spirit; Jaroslav: communism as the desire to reconstruct the patriarchal past that is preserved in folklore; Kostka: communist utopia grafted onto the Gospel; Helena: communism as the wellspring of enthusiasm in a homo sentimentalis” (Testaments 13).
Ludvik represents the intellectual and critical “Enlightenment” line of communist ideology. This intellectual and critical attitude he shares with the implied author of The Joke. For the reader this is the attitude of Kundera himself as he appears in all of his books, and he demands the same intellectual and critical attitude of other novelists. Kundera considers the concept of the narrator, as distinguished from the real author, as unnecessary, a “phantom of literary theory,” not to mention the concept of the implied author (see Parnell 148); it is he himself who speaks in his novels (Vibert, “Milan Kundera” 111). He sees Marxism as representing the critical and self-critical spirit of the Enlightenment, yet under communist rule all forms of criticism were banned. Instead of pursuing intellectual and critical analysis, the dominant attitude turned out to be an emotional identification with the ideal society as well as with the group that was supposed to fulfill this ideal.
Kostka, the Christian communist, claims that the attitude of young people in 1948 and after was more religious than intellectual and that communist ideology was a sort of collective faith that demanded sacrificing individual interests for common goals: “A man who kept in step with this era experienced feelings that were akin to religious ones: he renounced his ego, his person, his private life in favor of something higher, something suprapersonal” (224). However, Kostka finds that the lack of God at the very core of the movement was a weakness that jeopardized its future: “What a pity that it was incapable of taking its religious self-knowledge through to the ultimate conclusion. It had religious gestures and feelings but remained empty and godless within” (225). The quasi-religious attitude was characteristic of the young Ludvik as well, yet he preserves a certain independence of mind, and it is precisely this that eventually causes his catastrophe. The other types of young communists have succeeded in relinquishing their own selves and merging with the collective ideal more completely than he has.
The tension between intellectualism and emotional collectivism in the communist movement is presented on several occasions. The young Ludvik created a picture of a future collective life, one in which people would be connected with each other “by a host of rituals,” both old ones, such as traditional seasonal festivals, and new ones, such as May Day celebrations (141). In the present of the novel, the mature Ludvik observes the ritual of the “welcoming of new citizens to life,” created to supplant the baptismal ceremony (172). The account of the event is accurate but immersed in a delicate irony. In a discussion with Jaroslav, Ludvik criticizes another case of quasi-religious myth making, namely, the way in which Julius Fučík has been turned into an icon of the communists’ heroic struggle (154–56), an icon that, as Peter Steiner remarks, contains Christological parallels (The Deserts 20). This means that Kundera, through his protagonist, is now criticizing the myth-making process to which he himself as a young poet, the author of The Last May, contributed (see Steiner, The Deserts 22; Woods, Translating 95). Yet, despite his criticism of this deliberate creation of emotionally powerful myths and rituals, Ludvik is enthralled by some forms of traditional collective culture, especially folk music.
Jaroslav represents in the novel the synthesis of two collectivisms, communism and folk culture. Moravian folklore and especially Moravian folk music offer him the possibility of being absorbed into something greater than the individual life. Jaroslav’s experience is a typical experience of Romantic de-individuation (most adequately expressed in a passage not included in the “final” English translation): “We heard the folk songs and we suddenly saw that they were the most essential of essentials. I consecrated my life to them. Through them I merge with the stream which flows deep below. I am a wave of this stream. I am both the wave and the river. And I like it” (The Joke [1969] 127). This is the experience of the dissolving of the boundaries of the individual, of a sense of being at one with everyone else and with all existing things. Through his identification with the folk culture, Jaroslav feels that his life is following an ancient pattern and that he himself does not need to search for meaning in the events of his life. The fulfillment of the ancient pattern gives these events a meaning and a beauty otherwise unattainable. He falls in love with his future wife when he recognizes in her the “poor servant girl” of folk songs, and he feels as if he were “reliving a love experienced a thousand times over” (145). He also, to his own surprise, recalls the ancient rite of the bride’s losing her virginity, as it was performed at their wedding ceremony, much more vividly than the actual event (148). The pattern, the Platonic model of the event, is more real than the event itself, and the possibility of recognizing traditional meanings in events gives Jaroslav access to a meaningful life. His longing is the longing of modern human beings for a premodern security: he wants to recognize “the inexorable order” of things, an order he accepts and merges with (149). Thus, Jaroslav finds in folk culture what the romantic Pasenow in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers seeks in religion, a return to the security of a world of traditionally established meanings, a world in which the individual, his life, and his deeds are collectively determined.
In the first years after the revolution, communist ideology supported the revival of folk culture and thus it harmonized with Jaroslav’s reveries. However, in the end he has had to face the failure of the undertaking: instead of a majority of people, only a shrinking number of amateurs is any longer interested in Moravian folklore. Jaroslav feels that he is living in a world of dreams, one that has drifted far away from the actual world of the present. However, that more is at stake with the folk music and folk culture in The Joke than a reverie of a romantic village musician is indicated by the inclusion in the novel of a long nonfictional section on the various historical layers of Moravian folk music, including illustrations with score samples; the earliest layers are traced back to remote pagan centuries. Kundera has commented on the purpose of this section, saying that it opens up in the story a window onto a thousand years of the history of an art, thus connecting the remote past with the present (Biron 4). Layers from different centuries are discerned in contemporary folk music, although it is noted that their original forms and meanings cannot be identified satisfactorily. This mysterious but still attractive folklore which carries an obscure message from a remote past provides the background for Ludvik’s reencounter with his own past. The setting of the events in the present is a small Moravian town at the time of a festivity called the Ride of the Kings. The origins of the ritual and its precise meaning have already sunk into oblivion—paradoxically, as folklore is supposed to have a sense-giving function in the collective. Even Ludvik has a sense of nostalgia, watching the performance of the nearly unintelligible remnants of a folkloristic tradition in a world that has turned hostile to it. For Ludvik and Jaroslav the performance represents an “ultimate beauty” which is at the point of disappearing (132).
For Ludvik, folk music is the form of collectivism to which he feels more attracted than any other, yet, unlike Jaroslav, it has for him, in a definitive sense, lost its validity in the present-day world. He criticizes the efforts of Jaroslav and his companions in the folk music group to revive the traditions of folk music and poetry by applying them to modern topics and sees this as artificial and far from how people nowadays actually feel and think (154–56). Yet at the end of the novel Ludvik resumes his place among the players in the group and finds in the old music consolation for his disappointments: “I felt happy inside these songs (inside the glass cabin of these songs) where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable” (315). The songs offer him only momentary escape from reality; their beauty belongs to another world and is preserved only under protective glass.
Kostka recognizes in communism the idea of Christian brotherhood. Under the communist regime he has had to suffer because of his religious convictions, but his faith has protected him from disappointments. When he is forced to resign from his post as a lecturer at the university, the wrong that is inflicted on him is transformed in his mind into God’s appeal to him, which he willingly follows: “They thought I would find my freedom restrained, but on the contrary I had just discovered the real meaning of freedom” (213). Kostka thus merges with the will of God, which he recognizes even in the oppressive measures taken against him. In his acceptance of God’s will he is safe, whatever happens to him. Yet, thinking back on his life on the occasion of Ludvik’s visit, he is astonished to realize that the patterns he thought he discerned in the events of his life may be deceptive. He now understands that his decision to divorce his wife was prompted by his fear of women, just as now is his reluctance to take responsibility for a woman who is in love with him. He begins to suspect that what he has previously seen as God’s guidance has in fact been his own doing (245–46). Is the significance he surmises in the events truly God’s voice or does it originate in himself, in his own hopes and fears?
In all these cases, what is experienced as the essence of the communist ideology is collectivity, of being part of something greater than the individual, whether the basis for this lies in a rational analysis of the history of class struggle, in folklore, or in the Christian faith. For the fourth type, the sentimental communist exemplified by Helena, intellectual reflections play a minor role only. For her, communism means an emotional merging and identification with the crowd, and political meetings are a chance to experience great, elevating emotions. Helena’s identification with ideology and her glorification of her life through it is anti-intellectual and leads to a distortion of the facts. Of the four characters, Helena is the only one who after fifteen years is not aware that ideology has brought her to a dead end. She does of course notice that the crowd around her has shrunk considerably and that her views provoke opposition and criticism, but she does not realize that the ideas she still holds have generally proved untenable. For the reader, the hollowness of her ideological pose is clearly visible; nevertheless, like the other three characters, Helena represents an “honest” communist view of life in that she acts out of the deepest conviction (although in Kundera’s opinion, sentimentalists like her cannot help constantly embellishing themselves in their own eyes and in this sense are being dishonest). The only character in The Joke who actually abuses communist ideology is Helena’s husband, the opportunist Pavel Zemanek, who after 1948 was known as a radical communist and a disciplined comrade, but now, fifteen years later, is fashionably liberal. He still teaches Marxism-Leninism at the university, but he prefers to call himself a lecturer in “philosophy” (270).
The fact that the four characters representing the four types of “honest” communists act as different points of view through which the narration alternately occurs suggests that The Joke is a political and historical novel aiming at a critical analysis of communist ideology and of the reasons why socialism failed in Czechoslovakia. However, Kundera assures us that this is not the case: The Joke is not about Stalinism (see the preface to the 1982 English edition of The Joke; The Joke [1984] v). Indeed, the novel does not offer any record of the political events in Czechoslovakia or search for any historical reasons for political developments; rather, the political sphere is depicted as it is experienced by a number of individuals and as it plays a role in their lives, decisions, and actions. What interests Kundera is how the characters make use of politics to construct their personal views of the world and to satisfy their personal needs. For the protagonist Ludvik, what is ultimately important is what political events reveal to him about human nature, or, as Kundera puts it, about human possibilities of existence. Ludvik starts with a communist view of the world and consequently a political and historical one and with a view of himself as an active subject participating in History, but he ends by searching for possibilities of existence outside History and by valuing individuality and privacy rather than merging with a community or identifying with an idea that transcends himself.
It is important to note that Ludvik does not gradually distance himself from communist ideology through critical thought. Even at the moment of his expulsion from the party, he still supports communism and collectivism with the same enthusiasm as his colleagues. The following quotation is a part of Jaroslav’s stream of consciousness, recalling what Ludvik used to preach fifteen years earlier: “Capitalism had destroyed this old collective life. And so folk art had lost its foundations, its reason for being, its function. It would be useless to try to resurrect it while social conditions were such that man lived cut off from man, everyone for himself. But socialism would liberate people from the yoke of their isolation. They would live in a new collectivity. United by a common interest. Their private and public lives would merge. They would be connected by a host of rituals” (141). The art that the communist Ludvik propagates is anonymous folk art that expresses collective feelings, thus the opposite of what Kundera later comes to define as the essence of the art of the novel. Similarly, Ludvik’s original belief in the controllability of History is the opposite of what (the mature) Kundera contends: the young revolutionaries believe that they are steering the “steed of History” toward a desired goal in the future.
Expelled from both the university and the party, Ludvik is compelled to release his hold on the reins of History. Falling away from History, he also falls away from the course of his life. He feels that he has lost the ground from under his feet, and this feeling remains with him. At the end of the novel Ludvik comes to realize that this sense of falling is a constant condition in his life: “I told myself with astonishment that my only home was this descent, this searching, eager fall, and I abandoned myself to it and to my sweet vertigo” (316). “Vertigo” is one of Kundera’s recurrent keywords. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being he explains that vertigo is the “intoxication of the weak,” their longing to fall, to give in to their own weakness (76). The notion is defined without reference to any specific historical context. It is interesting to find the same expression used in Liehm’s account of the situation in Czechoslovakia in 1966, in the context of the Czechoslovak politics in the 1950s. Liehm describes a sense of vertigo in thinking about the deeds of the young communists back then (Trois 64).
For Kundera, “falling,” as well as the related metaphor “vertigo,” are “existential metaphors.” He introduces this concept in the context of Kafka’s work, but it applies to his own novels as well. He differentiates between lyrical metaphors and “existential or phenomenological” ones (Testaments 103). Kafka’s metaphorical imagination “was driven exclusively by the wish to decipher, to understand, to grasp the meaning of the characters’ actions, the meaning of the situations in which they find themselves” (Testaments 104). This is precisely how the metaphor of falling works: it gives metaphoric expression to an existential situation, that of finding oneself suddenly without solid ground for one’s whole existence. This metaphor characterizes Ludvik’s sense of life: it is his existential metaphor, describing the situation which predominantly characterizes his being-in-the-world. This is how existential human situations are dealt with in Kundera’s novels: they are represented as experienced by a certain individual and as characteristic of that individual. Kundera himself points out that he defines these situations by means of a theme word which conveys the life theme of an individual (or one of the themes). In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example, the theme words belonging to Tomas are “lightness” and “weight.” In speaking of these theme words, however, Kundera does not mention that they are mostly metaphorical; only in Immortality, his last grand novel, does he—or rather his alter ego in the novel—reason that the deepest foundation or “ground” of an individual, from which his or her actions arise, can be grasped only by a metaphor (Immortality 265). Yet, most of the theme words that characterize an existential human situation and consequently the individual who experiences that situation recurrently in his or her life are metaphorical.
Along with “falling,” denoting a sense of groundlessness, and “vertigo,” the temptation to give in to one’s weakness and let oneself fall, yet another experience is presented as characteristic of Ludvik’s being-in-the-world, as his existential experience. When he is pushed from the track of his life by his fellow students for a trifling reason—because of a joke—Ludvik loses his faith in solidarity, comradeship, and in humankind in general. He has to witness his fellow students and party comrades, without a single exception, unhesitatingly voting against him, thus ruining his life, and he is convinced that they would just as readily have condemned him to death. After this, he cannot help but see in each and every person this same capacity. For him the human being is a creature that is capable of sentencing his fellows to death without a wince. This is for Ludvik an existential experience that defines his concept of humankind forever.
The endless falling and the human capacity to sentence one’s fellow human beings to death serve to exemplify Kundera’s use of history. Rather than analyzing historical developments and their specific historical backgrounds, Kundera is in search of suprahistorical, anthropological human possibilities which take shape in the experience of an individual, characterizing his or her being-in-the-world (see Liehm, “Interview” 106). Kundera’s idea that history reveals anthropological human possibilities may seem flawless: if individuals in a particular historical situation act in a certain way or have a certain kind of experience, such acting or experiencing belongs to the range of human possibilities. Nevertheless, one might object to Kundera’s manner of using abstraction. What Kundera presents as a universal human possibility may actually be something that is bound inseparably to a particular historical situation only and would never be realized under other circumstances. In other words, human beings may be changing historically to a greater extent than Kundera assumes. However, while for Hegel and Marx there exists no suprahistorically and anthropologically essential humanity, but a human being becomes what he or she is through the process of history alone, in Kundera’s view human beings are not a product of History, nor is (H)istory a human product. Kundera considers history a power which is hostile toward the individual, who has to stand up against it; thus, he separates human beings “as such” from history. History does not produce human beings; it is productive only in the sense that it spurs the realization of certain existential possibilities (The Art 36–37, 115). The possibilities revealed by history are general, supra- or nonhistorical, and are limited in number. The sum of these possibilities constitutes what, from an anthropological point of view, the human being is.
Kundera’s thinking represents a reversion from historicism back to early Enlightenment thinking, which sought the truth about humanity not in history but in “human nature.” Although late Enlightenment thinking was already more historically oriented (see Blanke and Rüsen), the discipline of anthropology was constructed in parallel with that of history not only in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but also later in the “historical” nineteenth century. In the course of the eighteenth century, anthropology was established as a science which was neither a branch of metaphysics nor theologically based, nor did it follow the methods of the experimental natural sciences. Anthropology found its place in an area which overlapped with philosophy and the newer disciplines of geography, ethnography, and the late eighteenth-century “empirical science of the soul” (see Marquardt). The objective of anthropology in the eighteenth century was to provide a general definition of the physical and moral nature of human beings as well as to map differences between the sexes, nations, races, character types, and so on. In the nineteenth century the anthropological view competed with the historical view of man (Marquardt 368–69). In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries new forms of both anthropological and historical views evolved, redefining the basis of the human and social sciences. Likewise, Kundera’s anthropological view of humankind is a “modernized” version of anthropology, in that rather than “human nature,” his objects of study are the existential possibilities of human beings. Yet, in spite of his applying the Heideggerian concept of existential possibilities, Kundera stands much closer to an ahistorical, anthropological understanding of the essence of humankind than to Heidegger’s philosophy of existence, which claims that no definable essence of man can be found. Kundera’s views are closer to those of Wilhelm Dilthey, who gave up the idea of the philosophy of history as the basis for an understanding of humankind and resorted to the idea of a common human nature that provides a key to understanding humanity under different cultural and historical conditions. Dilthey occasionally found support for his anthropology in biology (see Marquardt 369), and a similar view is found especially in Kundera’s later works.
According to Kundera the same possibilities of human existence which are unveiled in the public sphere of History may appear in the private sphere as well. One example of this is self-culpabilization, which Kundera points out as an anthropological possibility which can be realized under certain circumstances in private life or commonly in society in certain historical situations (Testaments 201). An example of socially induced self-culpabilization occurs in Ludvik, who at first tries to preserve his ideological worldview by searching for the weaknesses and defects in his character and the attitude for which he was condemned. A further example of the universality of human possibilities is that in the penal battalion Ludvik encounters precisely the same anthropological possibilities of human existence as everywhere else.
Living in the penal battalion means for Ludvik a life outside of History and therefore also without a future; the only thing he is left with are the meaningless moments of the present. When the first shock of arriving in the penal battalion is over, he experiences his new existence as the sheer passage of time: “All I had left was time. . . . It was not the time with which I had previously had dealings, a time metamorphosed into work, love, effort of every kind . . . Now it came to me stripped, just as it is, in its true and original form, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living sheer time, sheer empty time) so as not to forget it for a moment, keep it constantly before me, and feel its weight” (The Joke 53). That life feels like the passage of “sheer empty time” derives from the fact that the men in the penal battalion experience their living and doing as senseless. External force keeps them following a certain course every day: “Thus, with remarkable speed, each of us was stripped of his own will and became something externally resembling an object (dumped, disposed, dispatched, consigned) and internally something like a man (suffering, irritated, apprehensive). . . . The depersonalization which had overwhelmed us appeared in those first days to be utterly opaque. The impersonal, prescribed functions we carried out replaced every human activity” (The Joke [1969] 46). Ludvik feels that he is no longer the subject of his own life but has become an object whose life is determined by others (117).
This impression of depersonalization and dehumanization, however, turns out to be deceptive. When Ludvik leaves the daylight of History in order to enter the “dark room” of the penal settlement, at first he cannot discern anything (49). But soon he is able to recognize differences in the behavior of his fellow convicts. He understands that even under the heaviest constraints of the settlement the convicts act as subjects. In fact, the extreme conditions of the penal settlement provide him with a chance for “anthropological” studies: on a small scale the circumstances represent a world turned into a trap and thus reveal the alternatives left even then for a human being. Later, Kundera remarks in Testaments Betrayed that he has no understanding for people who complain about “the forty lost years” under communist rule, as if they had had no life at all during these years (Testaments 223–24). He himself is interested in the existential possibilities of man even under the harshest constraints of History.
Ludvik’s attitude toward his fellow convicts undergoes a change: he comes to understand that despite the obvious differences, the dynamic of the labor corps resembles that of the community of his old comrades. The members of the penal battalion are, similarly, bound together by solidarity and this enables them to carry out ventures, for instance, covering for each other so as to be able to leave the barracks without permission. However, Ludvik’s apprehension of humans who are able to send their fellow human beings to death is reinforced when a young communist called Alexej arrives in the penal battalion. The newcomer intends to obey orders in an exemplary manner so that he can prove his unshaken loyalty to communist ideals. His behavior provokes antipathy among his fellow convicts and this results in bullying and leads ultimately to Alexej’s suicide. The event reinforces Ludvik’s earlier “fundamental anthropological experience” (The Art 37): “I began to have doubts about the value of our solidarity, which was based solely on the force of circumstance and an urge for self-preservation that compressed us into a densely packed flock. And I began to think that the black insignia group was as capable of bullying a man (making him an outcast, hounding him to death) as the group raising their hands in the university lecture hall that day in the past [when Ludvik was expelled from the university], or perhaps as capable as any group” (The Joke 115). This experience confirms in him the belief that no trustworthy community exists; there is no true togetherness among humans.
Ludvik’s second, even more profound reason to mistrust any collective is his recognition that the judgment of a collective is no less fallible than that of an individual. Upon his arrival in the penal battalion, Ludvik wants to set himself apart from the rest of the convicts by assuring himself and his superiors that he is not a class enemy and that his sentence was due merely to a misunderstanding. However, he soon comes to realize that he is not the only one who has been wrongly sentenced. Earlier he had not found it problematic to categorize people into “us,” that is, the (young) communists, the builders of the future and the “others,” the bourgeois, the enemy, those representing the past and thus excluded from the making of History. Now he recognizes that ideological categorizers are indifferent as to what happens to the individual. Not only the convicted but also those who pass judgment relinquish their sovereignty as acting subjects. When they act in the name of ideological truth and History, they do not consider themselves as responsible. Ludvik now realizes that when his fellow students condemned him as a traitor, they did not think of themselves as personally responsible for ruining his life. Now awakening from his “lyrical” dream, Ludvik rejects any collective identification and considers each individual’s actions as decisions for which he or she alone is responsible.
Yet another reason for the mistrust of History is the individual’s inability to control the effects of his or her actions, which are meant to form History. In the present time of The Joke, fifteen years after the protagonist was pronounced guilty by the tribunal of his communist comrades, Ludvik, Kostka, and Jaroslav can only feel irony in looking back at the past, when, as Kostka puts it, “people here thought they were but a few steps from paradise. How proud they were: it was their paradise, they were on their way to it with no need of anyone in heaven above. And suddenly it melted away before their eyes” (209). The point is not only that the three protagonists—each for a different, personal reason—have lost their “faith,” but that the communist project in general has failed to fulfill its promises. As described in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the revolutionary acts broke free from their agents and turned into things they were not meant to become (9). From this experience Ludvik draws the conclusion that History cannot be controlled.
In Kundera’s opinion, one should accept the relativity of all truths and the uncontrollability of History. Yet we might ask whether in saying this Kundera is not actually replacing one “truth” about History with another: rather than seeing History as graspable and controllable, he regards it as incomprehensible and uninfluenced by human actions and decisions. Everywhere in Kundera’s novels and essays, History appears as a destructive force, turning human life into a trap from which there is no escape. Thus, the optimism of the Marxist worldview is replaced by pessimism. History is reified as a mythical power independent of human beings and incomprehensible to us. In the dispute in 1967–68, Kundera was accused by Havel of historical pessimism and of hypostasizing history as a superhuman realm. Later Havel explained that the difference between them was that Kundera looked at history “from above,” from the point of view of those who once believed that they could control History, but who, having experienced a great disappointment, thought that the only choice was to flee from it. However, for Havel it is impossible to retreat from history completely, because even our most ordinary actions are embedded in it. If we look at history “from underneath,” from a grassroots level, we recognize that while we cannot guide the course of History, we may participate in it by performing small yet significant actions (Disturbing 180). One could say that Kundera, who has switched from an optimistic view of history to a pessimistic one, still adheres to the mythical image of the “steed of History.” The steed, however, has been transformed into a beast, a mythical monster that cannot be conquered or tamed (see also Papoušek, “Strategy” 13). He believes that to avoid being crushed by this monster, we have to establish our human existence outside its realm.
The Joke is a key to understanding Kundera’s thinking and his oeuvre, because through Ludvik’s story we can understand how certain conceptions of community, ideology, humanity, and History result from falling from the saddle of History. The changes in Ludvik’s view of History take place in three or four phases. The first is the sense of shock which follows his expulsion from the university and the party. This might be called the experience of being pushed from the saddle of History. The second phase follows his insight into the fact that the judgments and sentences of collectives are not the judgments of an infallible History. In the third phase, through his love for Lucie, a modest working girl, he gains a new understanding of life as it is lived outside History. The fourth phase begins when he draws a lesson from the failure of his attempt to take his revenge on Zemanek, who presided over the meeting which fifteen years earlier had decided the course of his life.
Ludvik gets a chance to take his revenge on Zemanek by seducing his wife, Helena. Yet it turns out that Helena’s new boyfriend suits the husband’s plans perfectly, since their marriage has long since withered and is now merely a formality. Zemanek himself shows up with a much younger and fashionable woman to whom the ideals of the revolution appear remote and quaint. For Ludvik, the envisaged retaliation is transformed into a joke at his own expense. His encounter with Zemanek eventually turns out differently from what he had expected. Zemanek has no intention of apologizing; in fact, he apparently has no compunctions, as if the past no longer matters; he introduces Ludvik to his girlfriend as a fellow student from university and talks to him just as he would to any other old acquaintance. From this Ludvik draws the conclusion that an action meant to correct a past wrong does not reach the past event. History does not allow us to redress past injustices; rather, History makes past events lose their significance and sink into oblivion. If the injustice suffered by Ludvik is not Zemanek’s concern or the concern of anyone else who was present, then who is to blame for the wrongdoing? “The errors were so common and universal that they didn’t represent exceptions or faults in the order of things; on the contrary, they constituted that order. What was it, then, that was mistaken? History itself? History the divine, the rational? . . . What if history plays jokes?” (288–89). History does not follow the principles of rationality and justice. Either it is indifferent to human beings or—assuming that there is somewhat more intentionality to History’s “doings”—it uses them as its toys.
Ludvik’s—and Kundera’s—reflections on History are meant in the first place as a refutation of the view of history created in the nineteenth century to replace the earlier view of the unchangeable, metaphysical essence of humanity and of the order of things, the view of History on which the twentieth-century communist movements were founded. Consequently, Kundera looks at the communist revolution in Czechoslovakia as merely one example of the nature of historical processes in general. We might ask, however, whether something essential is not being ignored when Kundera proceeds so quickly to his general conclusions. We may agree that the outcome of the revolutionaries’ acts did not correspond to their intentions; in fact, in such situations they probably seldom do. Yet, considering that the first years of communist rule in Czechoslovakia resulted, proportionally, in more victims than in other countries of the region (Steiner, Deserts 215, “Justice” 676), this may appear to be evading questions of responsibility and guilt.
Kundera has been criticized for a biased narration of Ludvik, who “is eager to paint himself as a victim of communism, not as one of its promoters” (Steiner, “Justice” 676). Ludvik admits that he belonged to the camp of those who expelled people from the university after the coup in 1948 but he also says that he personally had “never voted for anyone’s downfall” (The Joke 55) and he adds, “but I am perfectly aware that this is of questionable merit, since I was deprived of the right to raise my hand” (77). His career in the party remained too short to be invited to vote at meetings like the one in which he was condemned. Peter Steiner remarks that being a communist student after 1948, Ludvik must have taken part in the firing of ideologically suspicious professors (Deserts 206). However, the criticism is based on the presupposition that Ludvik must in every respect represent the real situation in Czechoslovakia at the time; the novel does not assign him such activities. As I discuss above, Kundera does not analyze in any of his novels actual political events in Czechoslovakia after 1948. His persistent preference for looking at History at a general, anthropological level might be interpreted as an evasion of questions of responsibility and guilt. However, the tables can be turned, as Kundera himself does, by arguing that analyzing a historical situation from a general point of view—what human beings are capable of under certain circumstances—rather than stressing the particularity of events is more apt to counteract too facile a judgment of particular individuals in history as the villains, while the judge himself feels innocent and safe (see Encounter 48). In Kundera’s view, historical catastrophes should teach humankind to think in a more complex, less black-and-white manner (see Testaments 232). Moreover, we must not forget that while Ludvik in The Joke is presented as a victim of the regime of terror rather than as its perpetrator, in his next novel, Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera offers an analysis of the psyche of a young communist who is guilty of destroying the lives of others. Yet, even here Kundera deals with the issue on a general, typical level rather than as a specific historical case.
In Kundera’s view, the most general lesson we learn about History is that we must not place any reliance on it. But what grounds are left to justify the individual’s decisions and actions, and what is it that gives meaning to life, now that traditional patterns no longer assign meaning to one’s acts and experiences? What can we do, now that we can no longer rely either on History—which is beyond human control, lacks any direction, and does not follow the principles of justice or reason—or on the collective, which can at any time ostracize us? In my view, this is precisely the fundamental question pervading Kundera’s entire novelistic oeuvre. The reader, however, does not necessarily perceive it as such, since Kundera directs our attention to other themes or key concepts in his novels; “History” is not even listed among his important themes in “Sixty-three Words” in The Art of the Novel. What is more, in his “phenomenological” investigation the themes appear as independent of any historical or other restrictions whatsoever. Yet most of them, such as privacy and the public sphere, the “lyrical” attitude to life, vertigo, falling or the lightness of being, attain their full meaning only in the frame of Kundera’s conception of History and the individual’s existence in relation to it.
From life story of the protagonist to analysis of existential situations
As the consequence of a joke, not only does Ludvik lose touch with History, but his own life ceases to appear to him as a meaningful whole. This experience teaches him, within the framework of an individual’s life, the same lesson he learned from History: the consequences of an action may bear no relation whatsoever to the agent’s intentions. The discrepancy between intention and consequences is so unbearable that Ludvik first, like his comrades, tries to discover some revelation of his true character in those casually written words on the postcard. After fifteen years it is still difficult for him to accept that the course of his life was determined by such triviality. Although he regards himself as a rational being, he confesses to being haunted by the strange feeling or superstition “that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life” (The Joke 164).
In modernity it is assumed that a person’s individuality is most perfectly conveyed by his or her life story. In premodern thinking, the individual was defined in terms of general categories: identity was defined by one’s place in the natural and social order as well as by one’s moral character. Since in modernity a human being is conceived of as an individual personality, these criteria are no longer sufficient to characterize him or her and individuality is to be sought in one’s actions, experiences, and feelings, and ultimately in one’s life as a whole. The view that emphasizes the individuality of every human being emerged in the late eighteenth century and was manifested in the novels of that period (see Saariluoma [Steinby], Erzählstruktur). Kundera, however, claims that the idea that “it is through action that [man] distinguishes himself from others and becomes an individual” is present already in the work of Dante and Boccaccio (The Art 23). He also points out that the conviction that the individual is revealed through his or her actions was questioned already by Diderot in his Jacques le Fatalist: Jacques “could never recognize himself in his action. Between the act and himself, a chasm opens. Man hopes to reveal his own image through his act, but that image bears no resemblance to him” (24). Kundera shares this Diderotean conception but he seems to overlook the fact that there is actually a fundamental difference in their views arising from the difference in their historical positions. In asserting the incidental nature of a person’s life Diderot is questioning the omnipotence of Providence, whereas for Kundera, “incidental” refers to the uncontrollability of human actions and of History.
Starting with Goethe, the modern novel was based on the assumption that an individual’s identity can be discovered in his or her life story (see, e.g., Ehrich-Haefeli; Saariluoma [Steinby], “Narrativisation”); this is why it is an individual life story that generally constitutes the basic structure of the novel. But if one’s life is coincidental in relation to oneself, any grounds for choosing the life story as the basic structure of the novel no longer exist. In The Joke, the protagonist’s life story, or rather the story of his personal disaster, still emerges as an organizing principle of the work as a whole. Its role, however, is definitely weakened by two factors. On the one hand, Ludvik’s point of view is not the only one in the story but is supplemented by three others; on the other hand, the existential situations or “anthropological truths” which characterize the protagonist’s being-in-the-world are strongly emphasized, rather than the turns of his life as a whole. Just as concrete history in The Joke is reduced to certain very general lessons conveying the “truth” of History as such, in the protagonist’s life story certain existential situations and themes distill the “essence” of his existence. Several of these themes are repeated in different versions in the lives of the three other characters, such as the utopia of the human community and the quest for meaningfulness in one’s life. Underneath the surface of the protagonist’s story, the typical mode in which Kundera’s later novels are constructed is already emerging. Rather than life stories, the whole is constituted by themes and their variations carried by different characters in various situations. With The Joke, in which we can recognize in statu nascendi, the structural principle of the “novel in the form of variations” (The Book of Laughter 227), or the “polyphonic” novel (see Biron 9; Chvatik, Die Fallen 64, 65, 84; Čulík 217, 220), it is apparent that much more is at stake than merely a technique of narration and composition. That the novel is for Kundera a kind of thematic composition ensues from the way he conceives life: containing too many incidental and irrelevant elements the individual’s life story is without any inner logic and is therefore inadequate to provide a novel with a basic structure. Therefore, Kundera concentrates exclusively on the situations in a character’s life which elucidate his or her being-in-the-world and that by the same token serve as material for the exploration of the possibilities of human existence.
What then remains for us as individuals that would allow us to feel our existence as meaningful, now that we are cut off both from History and from any metaphysical order, and are unable even to shape our own life so as to express our true self? One threatens to sink into a meaninglessness of being or feels the “oppressive lightness of the void” (The Joke 250). To be rescued, Ludvik needs the experience of meaningfulness, which he is deprived of in his daily life in the penal battalion. As in the story “Eduard and God,” meaningfulness can be found only outside the realm of compulsions. To Ludvik this possibility is offered in his relationship to Lucie, the working girl whom he sees on his rare evening leaves. Ludvik speaks of her entering into his life in religious terms: “Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself” (66). Through her, he “saw spread before [him], hidden beneath history’s soaring wings, a forgotten meadow of everyday life” (71–72). She has never even dreamed of touching the great wheel of History: “She knew nothing of history, she lived beneath it; it held no attraction to her, it was alien to her; she knew nothing of the great and contemporary concerns; she lived for her small and eternal concerns” (72). Ludvik continues the use of quasi-religious terms in describing his sense of being redeemed from History: “And suddenly I’d been liberated; Lucie had come to take me off to her gray paradise, and the step that such a short time before had seemed so formidable, the one I would take in getting out of history, was suddenly a step toward release. Lucie held me shyly by the elbow, and I let myself be led” (72) He looks upon her as “a gift from heaven,” and their love brings him “a growing sense of inner peace” (77); in the 1969 edition, even more poetically, “from day to day my skies became bluer and bluer” (75). Life for Ludvik is no longer the sheer meaningless passage of time, but full of meaning which structures his time. Although he can see Lucie only seldom, his experience of time is now structured by meetings with her, recalling past ones and anticipating those to come. The religious vocabulary in which Ludvik expresses his new sense of the meaningfulness of life is significant in that it indicates that this new meaningfulness appears to him as a mysterious, quasi-religious gift.
Kundera’s claim that The Joke is not a political novel but a love story (Preface [1982] v) sounds like a sarcastic comment, provoked by Western critics’ assumption that an “East European” dissident writer is necessarily to be read politically, and the comment has therefore seldom been taken seriously. Another reason why Kundera’s statement has not been followed may be the image evoked in all our minds by the term “love story,” that is, a story intended to make the reader identify with the lovers, feel with them, and follow the development of their relationship until its happy (or sometimes unhappy) end. Instead, in Kundera’s novels—in The Joke, but in his later novels as well—love is examined as an existential human possibility. In fact, love is regarded as one of the few possibilities of experiencing meaningfulness in life that are still left for human beings, in a world that has turned into a trap. The Joke, however, is a novel about the failure of love. For a long time Ludvik’s love for Lucie is brotherly and tender and without sensuality, but when eventually he approaches her sexually she refuses him and soon afterwards disappears from the town. In his memories she appears poetized as “the goddess of escape, the goddess of vain pursuit,” who still holds his head in her hands (203). Fifteen years later, when he learns more about her from Kostka, he understands that these poetical metaphors covered the unpoetical truth that their love was ruined by his own immaturity. It allowed him to recognize in her only a mirror of himself, not a creature independent of himself and with a past of her own. He was incapable of seeing “what she was in and to herself” (251), she existed for him only as part of their shared love story. Thus their love was doomed to fail not because of the circumstances, but owing to the “anthropological” possibility embodied in the young man he was then, that is, to the narcissistic egocentrism of a youth. The religious vocabulary in which Ludvik was used to think of his love now appears as an indication of his self-centered, sentimental attitude, which makes of another human being a quasi-religious revelation bestowed upon him so as to make his own life significant and beautiful.
In The Joke, the discussion of humankind’s anthropological possibilities is embedded more smoothly in the narrative than in Kundera’s later novels. However, despite the fact that The Joke is richer in description and detail than in his later novels, Kundera does not expect the reader to identify with the characters; to the contrary, he requires an analytical and distanced attitude. This is supported by Ludvik’s own analytical description of his experiences. For example, he analyzes his relationship with Marketa as follows: “The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves (in this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically). Since I have spoken of my school boyish agitation over Marketa, I should point out that it stemmed not so much from my being in love as from my awkward lack of self-assurance, which weighed on me and came to rule my thoughts and feelings much more than Marketa herself” (33). Ludvik analyzes his “awkward age” of erotic inexperience in general terms, from the distance created by his maturity fifteen years later. Yet he confronts his experiences with impassibilité and analyticity not only in looking back, but also in speaking of his present self. For instance, he renders an unembellished and detailed description of his state of mind after the seduction of Zemanek’s wife Helena, of the satisfaction he feels at the (apparent) success of his revenge, and of the sudden transformation of his state of mind when she tells him that the marriage has long since practically ceased to exist: “But now I saw her nudity in a new light; it was nudity denuded, denuded of the power to excite that until now had eliminated all the faults of age . . . her physical unloveliness lost all its power to excite and it too became only itself: a simple unloveliness” (200). Now he would like to get rid of her as soon as possible: “I longed for her to be gone; for her body (so hopelessly material) to dematerialize, melt, turn into a stream and flow away, or evaporate and vanish out the window—but the body was here, a body I had stolen from no one, in which I’d vanquished no one, destroyed no one, a body abandoned, deserted by its spouse, a body I had intended to use but which had used me and was now insolently enjoying its triumph, exulting, jumping for joy” (201). The embarrassing scene is presented with analytical precision, resulting in multiple ironies aimed in different ways at both Ludvik and Helena, who is—or sentimentally fancies herself to be—in love with him.
Readers might take an ironical attitude even when the narrator is not capable of this. A good example is the section where Helena ponders the criticism she has recently faced within the party. Following her fierce attacks on other party members’ extramarital affairs, she is accused of hypocrisy, since the failure of her own marriage has long been common knowledge: “[They] called me a hypocrite, trying to pillory others for breaking up marriages, trying to expel, dismiss, destroy, when I myself was unfaithful to my husband at every opportunity, that was how they put it at the meeting, but behind my back they were even more vicious, they said I was a nun in public and a whore in private, as if they couldn’t see that the only reason I was so hard on others was that I knew what an unhappy marriage meant, it wasn’t hate that made me do what I did, it was love, love of love, love of their house and home, love of their children, I wanted to help them, I too have a child, a home, and I tremble for them!” (21). The accuracy of this account, the close rendering of her feelings and thoughts, does not cause the reader to identify with the narrator, but calls for a critical and ironic distance.
Analytical, distanced, and ironical attitudes toward the represented object or event are typical of Kundera’s art of the novel. In his later novels, however, Kundera uses a narrator who is detached from the fictional world of the novel—or, rather, it is he himself who speaks (see Vibert, “Milan Kundera” 111). The question of how a character like Helena, who lacks any capacity for analytical thought, can possibly articulate her thoughts and emotions so clearly then disappears. The narrator still follows closely what occurs in the mind of the character, but the conceptual accuracy of the account, often transcending that character’s capacity, comes from the narrator, that is, from the author himself. In The Art of the Novel Kundera gives examples to illustrate his technique: “Even if I’m the one speaking, my reflections are connected to a character. I want to think his attitudes, his way of seeing things, in his stead and more deeply than he could do it himself. Part 2 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with a long meditation on the interrelations between the body and the soul. “Yes, it is the author speaking, but everything he says is valid only within the magnetic field of a character: Tereza. It is Tereza’s way of seeing things (though never formulated by her)” (79–80); “You see, I don’t show you what happens inside Jaromil’s head [in Life Is Elsewhere]; rather, I show what happens inside my own: I observe my Jaromil for a long while, and I try, step by step, to get to the heart of his attitude, in order to understand it, name it, grasp it” (31). The tradition of this narrative strategy, whereby the experience itself and the ability to articulate the experience through language are kept distinct and are bestowed on different agents, goes back to Kundera’s predecessors, Broch und Musil. In the next chapter I focus on Kundera’s conception of the novel in relation to the heritage of the Central European “Pleiades.”