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The Set Up

Milan Kundera wrote this, his first, novel in his early 30's.

I had already read and loved two later works, and was expecting it to be somehow inferior, as if he was still learning the ropes. However, it's an amazingly mature novel, and could fit anywhere in his body of work.

For all its metaphysical concerns, the writing style is very much concerned with the material world and the dynamism within it. Philosophy derives partly from the activity of external factors. The first person narrators discover what people are thinking indirectly from their actions. Kundera observes and describes a character's behaviour rather than dwelling directly on their psychology. We see what characters have done, then we see them come undone. Bit by bit, by accumulation of knowledge, we start to understand why.

The novel plays out like a tense game of chess. Every move is precisely choreographed. Kundera sets the characters off on their journey, then follows them with his camera. And we follow him. Sometimes the work reads like a novelisation of a film or play. It portrays exactly what we see. Not a word is wasted.



The Joke

The concept of a joke pervades the novel. The title derives from a postcard the protagonist, Ludvik, writes to Marketa, the target of his affection, while she is studying Marxism in a Czech summer school in the early 60's:

"Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"

The postcard is discovered by the Communist authorities, and after a brief investigation, hearing and vote, Ludvik is expelled from the Party, sacked from his teaching position at a university and sent off to work in a mine with enemies of the state.

Despite her beauty, Marketa is credulous, intellectually dull and lacking in a sense of humour. Ludvik's postcard is an attempt to play a silly joke on Marketa. However, the joke is lost on both Marketa and the state.

The Trap

In his preface, Kundera denies that the novel was designed to be a "major indictment of Stalinism". Instead, he argues that it's a love story. It is that, but I think he's being just a little ingenuous. Kundera pays equal attention to the political. Whether or not society had similar problems under Communism and Capitalism, Kundera describes a rigidity and humourlessness that affects both individuals and the state. Later, he would write of "the trap the world has become".

The underlying problem is both social and political: the tendency of both the individual and the state to be overly serious, inflexible, self-protective and punitive.

Whatever the political system, a sense of humour is a safety valve that allows pent up personal and social pressures to escape. Humour can relax, relieve and release tension (not to mention pretension).

If humour isn't possible or it doesn't work in the circumstances, the person, the collective remains too highly-strung, too highly sprung. The joke is a spring, a coil that allows the situation to uncoil and the tension to dissipate. A joke is what allows a tree to bend and sway in the wind.

The Structure

Kundera tells his tale in seven separate parts, each of which is divided into sub-parts. Each part is narrated by one of the major characters, three men, and one woman (Helena). One of the other characters, Lucie, is a trigger point for much of the action. However, she doesn't tell her own story. Instead, the other characters shine a light on her from outside. We are never confident that we have gotten to know her. She remains elusive.

After publication, a Czech critic observed that there was a mathematical structure to the novel (that wasn't apparent to Kundera himself). If you broke the novel into 18 parts, Ludvik's monologue took up 12, Jaroslav three, Kostka two, and Helena one. I can't help picturing this as a fern-like fractal that furls and unfurls in the telling. Thus, the coiling and uncoiling of the joke (and its aftermath) is reflected in the structure of the novel.

The Punch Line

Apart from the joke, as Kundera states, the novel is a love story. We see most of it from Ludvik's twenty/thirty-something point of view. We see what he does to women and why. It's not always a pretty picture, but it is truthful. Ludvik's goal isn't always his own sexual pleasure or that of his companion. His relationship with Helena (whose story we hear from her) is motivated by revenge on a rival (which proves to be misconceived).

Some readers might complain about Ludvik's or Kundera's sexism and cruelty. However, overall, the design of the novel allows us to witness different perspectives in a polyphonic manner. When we see the situation from the other side(s), we learn that Ludvik might equally have been the victim of a cosmic joke.



[Both photos are stills from the 1969 film of the novel directed by Jaromil Jireš.]

The Recognition

"The Joke" is effectively a caveat against egotism, a warning against selfishness, especially in sexual relationships. In the Communist polit-speak used against Ludvik, it's a reproach of "traces of individualism" and "intellectual tendencies", the refusal to submit to the greater good (whether of the couple or of society). However, these traces and tendencies go further than Communist society, hence the broader ambitions Kundera had for his novel.

Whatever the political environment, Kundera describes a "depression over the bleakness of our erotic horizons".

How men in particular deal with this bleakness and depression reflects in their sexual behaviour. It's too easy for men to take it out on the woman closest to them.

Ludvik comments on "the incredible human capacity for transforming reality into a likeness of desires or ideals..." He describes the women in his life as angels and goddesses. There's a lack of reality in his perspective. Inevitably, it compromises the relationship itself:

"...a man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to appear a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions."

So women, equally, have desires and ideals that might misguide them. For both genders, then, desire is often founded in self-deceit, if not also the deceit of others.

The Vain Pursuit

Ludvik defines women in relation to himself and his own needs. Lucie's truth is hidden from Ludvik, because his gaze is single-mindedly selfish:

"I'd always taken comfort in seeing Lucie as something abstract, a legend and a myth, but now I realised that behind the poetry of my vision hid a starkly unpoetic reality; that I didn't know her as she actually was, in and of herself. All I'd been able to perceive (in my youthful egocentricity) was those aspects of her being touching directly on me (my loneliness, my captivity, my desire for tenderness and affection); she had never been anything more to me than a function of my situation, everything she was in her own right, had escaped me entirely."

Ultimately, Lucie reveals to Ludvik and via him to all men how much of their love is mere "vain pursuit". By extension, Kundera suggests that, both in our vanity and in our pursuit, we are the brunt of our own joke.