Time and Distance
[In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus evaluates "the new 'definitive' version" of The Joke in relation to contemporary history.]
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the animals say to Nietzsche's philosopher-mystic:
"Look, we know what you teach: that all things return forever, and we along with them, and that we have already been here an infinite number of times, and all things along with us."
According to Milan Kundera, this "mad myth" is Nietzsche's means of forcing us to contemplate the horror as well as the beauty and sublimity of life's events in a way which prevents our overlooking them because they are so fleeting. Without some such concept—that an event may return again and again to haunt us—"We would need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment" (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Repetition, recurrence, the myth of eternal return show the weight of history and create the awareness that life has significance and depth. In some fashion, this fact is illustrated in each of the works which follow. Each is concerned with time, and each creates perspective and distance. Each also deals with recurrence, without which time itself is only duration.
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[When] it originally came out—in Czechoslovakia in 1965—the publication of Kundera's The Joke, must have seemed like a miracle, though with the crackdown following the Prague Spring three years later, it was one of the first works suppressed and its author banned. In the space remaining, I cannot treat the details that have made the new "definitive" version of The Joke necessary. But since the recent events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, it may be time to re-read the novel anyway, for in the interim, history has played an even greater joke on Communism itself, and Kundera's reflections may provide a hint as to why it occurred.
The novel begins as its principal character Ludvik stands at a crossroads in a small Moravian village where he grew up on the day before a festival celebrating the traditional Ride of the Kings, a folk ritual from the remote past. Ludvik, however, has come home primarily to carry out a private act of revenge against someone who had played an important role in the most significant event of his life—his expulsion from the university and from the Party for playing a stupid, adolescent joke. The joke had consisted of sending a postcard with some anti-Party slogans on it to a girl he was courting, and Ludvik means to cuckold the party official who had an opportunity to prevent Ludvik's expulsion but who had engineered it instead. In the town he also sees people from his youth whom he had left when as a student he went to Prague.
Actually, three types of history are present in Ludvik's situation: personal, political, and Moravian. The latter includes the folk traditions inherent in the Ride of the Kings as well as comments about folk music and Christianity later in the novel. Each type of history represents a form of recurrence that Ludvik would rather be without. The desire to lay the blame for all his failures on a single absurd event in the past, always before his eyes, has led him to pursue a needless act of revenge. Communism, "official history," has meant that once out of the Party he has no place in history. And the nostalgic belief in "origins" seems like mindless obedience to a set of rituals repeated aimlessly from the past. During a moment of revelation late in the novel, Ludvik says:
Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs)…. [Whereas] In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.
And, in fact, Ludvik's revenge fails, even at the moment of his success. No longer a serious threat, Communism too becomes irrelevant to his personal life. And the Ride of the Kings will always contain a message which "will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen."
Yet as in most of his novels since The Joke this vision of the quixotic unreliability of history is as liberating as it is a source of despair. Long before the current breakup of the Eastern bloc, the Hungarian Gyorgy Konrad's classic Anti-Politics argued that Russian-style, "official" Communism would increasingly become irrelevant because people would find the means to create spontaneous unofficial social, political, and economic organizations within the official state. And just as a country cannot do without some kind of organization it cannot eliminate history either.
History, recurrence, creates weight and depth and perspective. Painful as such knowledge may be, it provides us with identity and community, two things we will always need. Nonetheless, like Ludvik, we might prefer a version of history which is more humane, essentially private, contingent, semi-official, made up on the run. Perhaps that is what Eastern Europe is learning now, though it is a view of things which, like Nietzsche's myth of eternal return, may essentially be mad.
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