Milan Kundera Short Fiction Analysis
That the West expects writers from Eastern (or what Milan Kundera prefers to call Central) Europe to be political was something Kundera learned the hard way when an English publisher, in the wake of the Soviet invasion, restructured and to some extent even rewrote The Joke to make it into what Kundera subsequently claimed it was not: a political protest against communism rather than a work of fiction (or, as Kundera countered at the time, a love story only). In terms of ideological preference, Kundera describes himself as “an agnostic” no more interested in a literature of politics than in a literature of the author’s personality. He is, in other words, no more and no less opposed to communist ideology than he is to capitalist (or communist) “Imagology,” as he terms the assault upon individual freedom in his sixth novel, Nesmrtelnost (1990; Immortality, 1991). His fiction is neither political nor didactic (moralistic), autobiographical nor journalistic. Rather, it is deeply meditative—more an exploration than an explanation.
Kundera traces his literary lineage back to Miguel de Cervantes, François Rabelais, Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, and more recently to the great twentieth century Central European writers Hermann Broch, Jaroslav Haek, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Witold Gombrowicz. What attracts him to the first four is their sense of play, and to the latter five their “search for new forms,” a search that is at once “impassioned” yet “devoid of any avant-garde ideology (faith in progress, revolution, and so on).” “The great Central European novelists ask themselves what man’s possibilities are in a world that has become a trap,” or, as Kundera explained to fellow novelist Philip Roth, a pair of traps: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other, with human beings attempting to negotiate the narrow path between the two. Kundera conceives of his negotiation not in terms of mimetic plots but instead as existential inquiries that raise questions rather than offer answers, preferring the demystifying “wisdom of uncertainty” to the “noisy foolishness” of received ideas. Thus, instead of the plot and characters of conventional fiction, Kundera offers a theme and variation approach, with characters who are not mimetic representations but instead “experimental egos” and the author’s “own unrealized possibilities.” Yet for all the open-ended complexity of Kundera’s fiction, his writing proves remarkably clear and concise, almost classically chaste in style despite its often erotic subject matter. It is also a prose that strives to be what Kundera believes Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-1767) and Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (wr. c. 1771; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, 1797) are: “absolutely irreducible” and “totally unrewritable,” qualities as necessary in the media-maddened West as they were in an eastern police state.
Kundera, along with Havel, is one of contemporary Czechoslovakia’s two most important writers and, after Franz Kafka, the country’s most interesting, influential, and international novelist—“the other K,” as Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes called him. Such flattering comparisons are fully merited, for not only is Kundera, in his own largely apolitical and anti-ideological way, as devoted as Havel to resisting totalitarianism in its various guises, but also, as Kafka did before him, he has changed the very shape and scope of the twentieth century novel, giving it a new form and a new importance. For a writer so intellectually complex and aesthetically uncompromising, he has achieved a surprisingly large but wholly deserved following increased by, perhaps, but certainly not owing to, the popularity of Philip Kaufman’s 1987 film version of Kundera’s fifth novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Laughable Loves
Kundera’s...
(This entire section contains 3577 words.)
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stories have received little critical attention, overshadowed by his better-known and more ambitious novels. He began writing the stories as a way of relaxing while working on his first play. He soon realized, however, that fiction would serve him far better than drama or poetry as a means for dealing with the “fascinating and enigmatic” reality in which he then found himself and his compatriots. Just as important, only when he began to write the first of his stories was Kundera able to find “my voice, my style, and myself.” Kundera, who completed the last of the stories only three days before the Soviet invasion, said thatLaughable Loves is the book that he is “fondest of because it reflects the happiest time of my life.” Laughable Loves is important for another reason, for in these early stories one finds the wellsprings of Kundera’s later novels (which some convention-bound reviewers have complained are not novels at all but instead story collections). The form of the novel as Hermann Broch and Kafka practiced it and as the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin came to define it provided Kundera with the scope and flexibility that his imagination required, but a scope and flexibility already manifest in miniature as they were in Laughable Loves. In them, the reader finds ample evidence of Kundera’s early interest in, and mastery of, the theme and variation approach, which would provide him with a potent means for countering what Terry Eagleton has called “the totalitarian drive of literary fiction.”
Laughable Loves is more than the title of three slender volumes published during the 1960’s and of the collection of eight of the ten original stories published in 1970 (seven in the French and English editions, 1970 and 1974 respectively). Laughable Loves refers as well to the theme on which each of the stories plays its variations—a theme that Kundera also treats in each of his six novels. Love figures prominently and ambiguously throughout Kundera’s fiction: partly as a release from everyday reality, partly as a way of achieving at least a momentary personal freedom, partly as a revelation of character, and partly as an epistemological delusion (in Immortality Kundera writes that love gives one “the illusion of knowing the other”). Love then, is not so much a state of being as it is the intersection of various social, sexual, political, and epistemological forces, a struggle against power that all too often—and perhaps all too predictably—turns into the exercise of power over another. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for example, “love is a constant interrogation,” and in La Valse aux adieux (1976; The Farewell Party, 1977), an unfaithful yet in his own way loving husband is “always suspecting his wife of suspecting him.” The relation between love and totalitarianism proves both close and comic, “laughable,” a word that here means more than simply “amusing.” Kundera conceives of laughter as the antidote to the seriousness that he believes characterizes the modern, journalistic age. As he explains in his introduction to Jacques and His Master, taking the world seriously means “believing what the world would have us believe.” Not surprisingly, given the complexity of his meditative style of fiction making, Kundera defines laughter in a twofold way: as an expression of the sheer joy of being and as a more or less existential negation of the world’s seriousness. Kundera as hedonist and kitsch destroyer approves of both and also understands that, taken to the extreme, each poses its own danger: the fanaticism of the totalitarian idyll often associated with a youthful lyrical (poetic) idealism and the absolute skepticism of the unbeliever.
“Nobody Will Laugh”
Both extremes manifest themselves in the opening story of Laughable Loves. “Nikdo se nebude smát” (“Nobody Will Laugh”) bears a striking resemblance to Kundera’s slightly later first novel. The story’s main character (and narrator), Klima, receives a pleading and obsequious letter from a stranger, Mr. Zaturetsky, asking him to read and recommend his enclosed essay for publication in the Visual Arts Journal, which, unbeknown to Zaturetsky, rejected the narrator’s “controversial” study which that very day appeared in a less orthodox but also less prestigious publication. Seeing that Zaturetsky’s essay is unoriginal to the point of being unintentionally plagiaristic but on the other hand unwilling to do the hatchet work of the very editor who rejected his essay, Klima decides to amuse himself by writing a long and cynically sympathetic letter in which he manages to make no final evaluation whatsoever. Klima has, however, underestimated his petitioner’s desperation and persistence. Zaturetsky repeatedly appears at the university and even shows up at Klima’s attic apartment, where he finds not Klima but the beautiful Klara, who has been sleeping with Klima while he fulfills his promise of finding her a better job. Klima’s efforts to elude Zaturetsky prove as desperate and humorous as Zaturetsky’s attempts to locate him: Klima changes his teaching schedule, pretends to be in Germany, dresses up a student in his hat and coat, has the department secretary lie for him, and finally, when at last confronted by his nemesis, charges Zaturetsky with having made sexual advances toward Klara.
Following the zany yet terrifying logic of Kundera’s fiction and Eugène Ionesco’s plays, the consequences of Klima’s little joke grow more and more serious, even as Klima continues to believe that everyone will laugh once his story is told. Klima, however, is wrong: “Nobody will laugh.” The local committee finds him lacking in seriousness; he will lose his faculty position and with it his future and Klara, who has already found someone better suited—and more powerfully placed—to get her what she wants. Klima does find some comfort in the knowledge that his story “was not of the tragic, but rather of the comic variety.” Humor such as this comes perilously close to horror, particularly the horror of absurdity without end, an absurdity that permeates every corner of existence, including Mrs. Zaturetsky’s dedication to her husband and his essay, which she has never even read. “It wasn’t a question of willful plagiarism,” Klima realizes, “but rather an unconscious submission to those authorities who inspired in Mr. Zaturetsky a feeling of sincere and inordinate respect” of the very same kind that the woefully inadequate and inept Mr. Zaturetsky inspires in his utterly sexless, wholly humorless, and therefore laughable wife.
“The Hitchhiking Game”
Submission of a different kind plays a key role in “Falený autostop” (“The Hitchhiking Game”). Here, instead of Klima’s friendly first-person narration, Kundera adopts an emotionally distant prose reminiscent of the existential gaze described by Jean-Paul Sartre. A “young man,” twenty-eight, and a “girl,” twenty-two, lovers, are driving toward the resort where they will spend the next two weeks on vacation. He values her modesty; she wishes she were more open about her body. Making clear that she does not enjoy his little game of running out of fuel and making her hitchhike to the nearest station, she makes him stop for gasoline. Instead of precluding their usual game, however, this stop enables him to play a variation on it. He pretends that she is a hitchhiker to whom he is giving a ride. Although there are still only two bodies in the car, there are now at least four “possible selves”: the young man, the girl, the young man whom the young man is pretending to be, and the hitchhiker whom the girl is pretending to be. The dizzying proliferation of fictive selves signals considerably more than narrative gamesmanship; there arises the complex question of whether, and to what degree, these pretended, or possible, selves conceal or reveal the nameless and perhaps identityless young man’s and the girl’s actual selves (and the related question of whether a phrase such as “actual self” can now be said to mean anything at all). No longer on the road to their planned destination (the resort where they had reserved a room), they discover that “fiction was suddenly making an assault upon real life” and, worse, that “there’s no escape from a game,” least of all a game involving the politics of sexual power and identity. Just as “the game merged with life,” multiple images merge, stacked one upon the other in the eye of the lover turned beholder. Freed to play the part of whore, the girl ironically achieves a greater sexual freedom and pleasure than she had known before, but she immediately feels she has paid too high a price: her self. Hearing her repeat her plaintive and “pitiful tautology”—“I am me, I am me”—the young man understands “the sad emptiness of the girl’s assertion.” This emptiness recalls Klima’s recognition of his comical fate at the end of “Nobody Will Laugh,” but the last lines of “The Hitchhiking Game” are bleaker still: “There were still thirteen days’ vacation byefore them.”
“Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead”
Similarly bleak prospects, coupled with a dizzying array of possible selves, characterize “At ustoupí starí mrtví mladym mrtvym” (“Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead”). The title suggests an ironic take of the familiar carpe diem theme. Two lovers meet after ten years. He is now thirty-five, divorced, living alone in a provincial town, working at a job that affords him no satisfaction. She is now nearly fifty, a widow who has just discovered that she has forgotten to renew the lease on her husband’s grave. Thus she takes the cemetery administrator’s words to her, which form the story’s title, first as a reproach and then as her rationale for having sex with her former lover. No act in Kundera’s fiction is ever quite so simply motivated, however, and hers involves as much revenge as love—revenge against the son who has forced her to play the widow’s role—and it involves, too, as much self-assertion as self-accusation. The lovemaking proves no less ambiguously motivated for the man who wishes to possess at last the woman who has eluded him (along with so much else in his inconsequential life) for so long, even though he knows that their encounter will end in disgust. Yet he finds this prospect oddly exciting: he, whether he realized it or only vaguely suspected it, could not strip all these pleasures that had been denied him of their significance and color (for it was precisely their colorfulness that made his life so sadly dull), he could reveal that they were worthless, that they were only appearances doomed to destruction, that they were only metamorphosed dust; he could take revenge upon them, demean them, destroy them.
“Symposium”
Kundera’s two Dr. Havel stories treat much the same theme but in a far more playful way. “Symposion” (“Symposium”) draws its title from Plato and its five-act structure from drama. Its five characters—the chief physician, Havel, the aging Nurse Alzbeta, the attractive thirty-year-old woman doctor, and the young intern Flaishman—offer a host of sexual possibilities (permutations based as much on misreadings, misstatements, and expectations as on sexual preferences). The story focuses on Nurse Alzbeta’s efforts to attract Havel’s attention, efforts that nearly result in her death (variously read—and misread—as a suicide attempt). Her striptease becomes an apt metaphor for the story itself insofar as the story reveals more and more of the characters’ deceits and self-deceptions while nevertheless managing, like any good striptease, to conceal the very mystery it entices the viewer/reader into believing will be exposed (revealed as well as made vulnerable). In “Dr. Havel Twenty Years Later,” Havel is made to play Alzbeta’s part, with, however, considerably more success, thanks to his established position, his reputation as a Don Juan, and especially his marriage to a beautiful and well-known actress. As in “Symposium,” there is a youth (here it is a young editor, and in “Symposium” it is the intern) willing to take one of Havel’s little jokes seriously because the joke appeals to his naïve sense of self-importance and his need to have his identity validated by someone older and more authoritative.
“Edward and God”
Edward, in “Eduard a Buh” (“Edward and God”), proves less naïve and more manipulative though perhaps no less self-deluded. A joke played at the expense of the ultra-Stalinist Miss Chekachkova costs Edward’s brother his job but indirectly helps secure for Edward a teaching position at the school that she now runs. Far more self-aware than either Flaishman or the editor, Edward divides his life into two spheres: the serious and obligatory on the one hand and the unserious and nonobligatory on the other (teaching he places in the latter category). Edward, however, is not nearly as free as he thinks. His pursuit of Alice, a churchgoer, jeopardizes his position at the state school; in parallel fashion, his radical skepticism, cynical in nature, jeopardizes his relationship with Alice (whose religious fervor is more political than spiritual in origin, a fact of which she remains serenely unaware). During his private reeducation session, Edward turns the tables on the spinsterish Miss Chekachkova, ordering this ardent communist to strip, kneel, and recite the Lord’s Prayer. Finding her humiliation sexually exciting, he carries her off to bed. He also—and again under false pretenses—overcomes Alice’s very different scruples (she mistakenly believes Miss Chekachkova and the other communists are persecuting him for his religious beliefs). Although he finds any God that would forbid extramarital sex “rather comical,” Edward becomes angry when Alice consents to his sexual advances, believing that she has betrayed her God too easily. In “Edward and God,” as in all Kundera’s stories and novels, reversals and incongruities such as these abound, nowhere more ambiguously than in this story’s closing paragraphs. Edward, still a nonbeliever, sits in a church, “tormented with sorrow, because God does not exist. But just at this moment his sorrow is so great that suddenly from its depth emerges the genuine living face of God.” In describing Edward as having “a sorrow in his heart and a smile on his lips,” the narrator is drawing on the poetry of the Czech writer Karel Hynek Mácha and the romantic lyricism that Kundera has often criticized for making a value of feeling and the excesses it engenders. “For my part,” Kundera has explained, “I’m always tempted to reverse the terms, ‘a faint sadness on one’s lips and a deep laugh in one’s heart.’” From such a depth of heart—“and art”—Kundera’s “laughable loves” emerge as early variations on a persistent theme.
“The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire”
“Zlaté jablko vecné touhy” (“The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire”) is divided into such mini-chapters as “The Insidious Nature of Excessive Faith” and “In Praise of Friendship,” offering a structured approach to a central character whose life revolves around the obsessive pursuit of women. His friend, the narrator, a university professor of Greek culture, is swept along by the much more self-confident Martin, as Martin obsessively flirts with women and collects their names and numbers. Only one of several problems is the fact that Martin is married and claims to revere his wife. In an effort to snag a beautiful girl at a cafe, Martin gives her a book on Estruscan culture belonging to the narrator. They arrange to meet the girl, a nurse at a country hospital, the following day. Martin calls the initial view of a woman a “sighting,” explaining,it is not as difficult, for someone with numerical requirements, to seduce a girl as it is to know enough girls one hasn’t yet seduced it is necessary always to sight women, that is, to record in a notebook the names of women who have attracted us and whom we could one day board.
Boarding is the next step in getting in touch with a potential conquest by gaining access to her. The narrator trusts Martin’s taste better than his own, believing that he merely plays “at something Martin lives.” With only a few hours to wait for the nurse and a female friend to get off work, Martin persists in flirting with other women just for boarding practice. He even goes so far as to tell a girl whom he wishes to impress that he is the film director Milos Forman. The tables turn when this girl-child stands the men up. As Martin has assured his wife he will be home early that evening, they have only one hour to pick up and seduce the nurse and her friend. They wait outside the hospital, and Martin becomes extremely anxious. Finally, as the women approach the car, Martin inexplicably drives off. The narrator later repents for not believing in Martin’s “divine power of womanizing.” He lies to Martin about a woman he is close to seducing. They concoct a scenario where Martin will pass himself off as someone not associated with his friend and “board” the same woman. Such a delicious possibility, the narrator proposes, is the Golden Apple of Eternal Desire. There is both a tenderness and a compassionate sense of humor with which Kundera handles Martin. However, it is the narrator for whom one feels the most as he has little sense of his ability to attract women and lives through the more assured power of another man’s prowess. In the end, he must invent an imaginary woman with whom they both fantasize a sensual experience. Kundera has said that Laughable Loves represents one of the happiest times in his own life. While “The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire” reflects a double life of sorts, the spirit of conquest certainly can be a joyous one at times.