Twenty years ago, when the Critical Quarterly and I were young, and Milan Kundera was writing The Joke and wondering, no doubt, whether he would be allowed to publish it, it's very unlikely that I would have been asked, or, if asked, agreed, to write a critical article about a Czech novelist. The defiant, I-Like-It-Here provincialism of the Movement, the jealous guarding of the English Great Tradition by Leavis and his disciples, and the New Criticism's focus on stylistic nuance in literary texts, all militated against taking a professional interest in foreign writing. I was never under the spell of Leavis, but I was a literary child of the 1950s, and, as a critic, I was committed to the kind of close reading that, it seemed, could only be performed on and in one's mother tongue. In Language of Fiction (1966) I argued that meaning was as inseparable from verbal form in the novel as the New Criticism had shown it to be in lyric poetry; and that although prose fiction was more translatable than verse, since in it sound and rhythm were less important, nevertheless there was bound to be such a degree of alteration and loss of meaning in the translation of a novel that the critic could never 'possess' it with the necessary confidence.

I no longer hold this position with the puritanical rigour expressed in the first part of Language of Fiction. Exposure to the Continental European structuralist tradition of poetics and criticism has shown me that literary narrative operates several codes of communication simultaneously, and in most of them (for instance, enigma, sequence, irony, perspective) effects are readily transferable from one natural language to another (and even from one medium to another). A flashback is a flashback in any language; so is a shift in point of view, a peripeteia, or an 'open' ending.

This does not entail any downgrading of language in the novel. Kundera himself claims that total commitment to the novel as verbal art for which I tried to provide a theoretical justification in Language of Fiction. 'Ever since Madame Bovary', he observes in the preface to the new edition of The Joke, 'the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry, and the novelist (any novelist worthy of the name) endows every word of his prose with the uniqueness of the word in a poem.' This does not mean that translation is impossible—if it did then a novelist like Kundera, writing in a minority language whose native speakers are forbidden access to his books, might as well shoot himself…. [On the contrary, many] tropes and figures are translatable between most Indo-European languages.

The problem of translation, then, is no longer a disincentive to addressing oneself to the critical consideration of a Czech novelist; and the conscious insularity of British literary culture in the 1950s has long since lost whatever justification it may once have had in encouraging a new wave of writers. But in the meantime, a new critical anxiety has arisen to threaten the project. To write on the fiction of 'Milan Kundera' is almost inevitably to accord that name the unity and substance of an historic individual …: Milan Kundera, the author. But the liveliest and most innovative discourses of contemporary criticism, loosely describable as 'post-structuralist', have thrown the idea of the author very much into question.

Roland Barthes announced the 'Death of the Author' with characteristic Nietzschean relish back in 1968, at about the same time that Russian tanks were rolling into Czechoslovakia…. [His] proclamation, startling in 1968, is now a commonplace of academic criticism in the fashionable 'deconstructionist' mode, but has had little or no effect on the actual practice of writing outside the academy, which remains obstinately authorcentred. Books are still identified and classified according to author. The value attributed to books brings kudos, prizes and royalties to their authors, who are the object of considerable public interest. Poststructuralist theorists, some of whom have been known to collaborate in this process, would no doubt explain it by saying that the institution of literature is still in thrall to bourgeois ideology. (pp. 106-07)

It is, of course, undeniable that the modern 'author' is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The further we peer back into history, the more anonymous and collective the production of stories, lyrics and drama appears. And Foucault is quite right to say that, looking in the opposite direction, 'We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author'. Whether one would wish to live in it is, however, another matter. George Orwell imagined such a culture in 1984.

The idea of the author which Barthes and Foucault seek to discredit is the product of humanism and the Enlightenment as well as of capitalism. Collective, anonymous art belongs historically to eras when slavery and serfdom were deemed ethically acceptable. Copyright is only one of many 'rights'—freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religious worship—which the bourgeois ideology of liberal humanism has claimed for the individual human being. Only those who take such freedoms for granted in their daily lives could perhaps contemplate with satisfaction the obsolescence of the idea which sustains and justifies them.

Of course the poststructuralist critique of the bourgeois or liberal humanist concept of individual man does not represent itself as totalitarian, but as utopian. (p. 108)

When The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published, the government of Czechoslovakia deprived Milan Kundera of his citizenship in absentia. That a government should be stung into taking such revenge on an individual author is perhaps a good reason for wanting to defend the idea of authorship. If The Book of Laughter and Forgetting had been an anonymous discourse, like the anti-government jokes that circulate in all totalitarian states, the politicians would have found it easier to ignore.

One reason why the poststructuralist critique of the idea of the author has been so warmly welcomed in some quarters of academe is that it is presented as a liberation, a critical utopia. 'The Death of the Author, the Absolute Subject of literature, means the liberation of the text from the authority of a presence behind it which gives it meaning', says Catherine Belsey, enthusiastically paraphrasing Barthes. 'Released from the constraints of a single and univocal reading, the text becomes available for production, plural, contradictory, capable of change.' Behind this argument is a quite false antithesis between two models of interpretation, one of which we are told we must choose: either (A) the text contains a single meaning which the author intended and which it is the duty of the critic to establish, or (B) the text is a system capable of generating an infinite number of meanings when activated by the reader. (p. 109)

No one who is seriously engaged in the practice of writing fiction and familiar with modern critical theory (I speak personally, but also, I venture to think, for Kundera) could accept either of these positions as starkly stated here. Works of literature—in our era of civilisation, at least—do not come into being by accident. They are intentional acts, produced by individual writers employing shared codes of signification according to a certain design, weighing and measuring the interrelation of part to part and parts to the developing whole, projecting the work against the anticipated response of a hypothetical reader. Without such control and design there would be no reason to write one sentence rather than another, or to arrange one's sentences in any particular order. There would be no ground, either, on which to object to censorship…. But once the child leaves home—the book is published—a different situation obtains. It is of the nature of texts, especially fictional ones, that they have gaps and indeterminacies which may be filled in by different readers in different ways, and it is of the nature of codes that, once brought into play, they may generate patterns of significance which were not consciously intended by the author who activated them, and which do not require his 'authorisation' to be accepted as valid interpretations of the text.

The serious modern writer is, therefore, likely to be just as suspicious of position A, above, as of position B. He (or she) knows that the proponents of A are all too eager to discard the 'implied author' of a text in pursuit of the 'real author', and to ask the latter what he 'meant' by his text instead of taking the trouble to read it attentively. The writer therefore finds ways of evading such questions, or confusing such questioners, by masks, disguises, obliquities and ambiguities, by hiding secret meanings in his text—secret, sometimes, even from himself.

Milan Kundera seems to be a case in point. He was at the very outset of his literary career a victim of the Intentional Fallacy (a fallacy that is committed by imputing and inferring intentions on the basis of extra-textual evidence). Here is a writer with a history of courageous resistance to the dominant ideology of a Communist State, finally forced into exile as the price of his intellectual independence. Must he not be labelled a 'dissident' writer? Since his books refer to the injustices and bad faith of the Communist régime in Czechoslovakia, must this not be what his fiction is about? That is precisely how The Joke has been received in the West. Kundera records, in the preface to the new edition, that, 'When, in 1980, during a television panel discussion devoted to my works, someone called The Joke "a major indictment of Stalinism", I was quick to interject, "Spare me your Stalinism, please. The Joke is a love story".'

This interjection is itself a statement of authorial intention, which we are not bound to accept. It is, indeed, a consciously simplistic description of The Joke, designed to head off a differently reductive reading of the text. But it does point us in the right direction. Kundera's work is ultimately more concerned with love—and death—than with politics; but it has been his fate to live in a country where life is willy-nilly conditioned by politics to an extent that has no equivalent in western democracies, so that these themes present themselves to his imagination inevitably and inextricably entangled with recent political history. But, as Kundera himself put it, repudiating the label of 'dissident writer':

If you cannot view the art that comes to you from Prague, Budapest or Warsaw in any other way than by means of this wretched political code, you murder it, no less brutally than the work of the Stalinist dogmatists. And you are quite unable to hear its true voice. The importance of this art does not lie in the fact that it pillories this or that political regime, but that, on the strength of social and human experience of a kind people here in the West cannot even imagine, it offers new testimony about mankind.

As if to elude being read exclusively in the 'political code', Kundera concentrated subsequently on erotic comedy, often black comedy, in such works as The Farewell Party and Laughable Loves. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting he returned to the explicit treatment of political material and dealt very directly with the effect of politics on his own life—but in a book so original, idiosyncratic and surprising in form that it offers the strongest possible resistance to a 'single univocal reading'. Whereas in The Joke Kundera displayed, at the first attempt, his mastery of the modernist novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a masterpiece of postmodernist fiction…. (pp. 109-11)

[A] summary gives some idea of the narrative content of The Joke, and as a bare story has, I dare say, a certain interest. But it conveys very little idea of what it is like to read The Joke, because, there, the information … comes to the reader in an entirely different order and in an entirely different mode of discourse. (p. 114)

As we read The Joke we necessarily 'make sense' of the narrative by restoring the codes of causality and chronology which have been deliberately 'scrambled' in the text. But this is not to say that the meaning of the text is the fabula which we can disinter from the sjuzet. On the contrary, the meaning inheres in the hermeneutic process itself: the reader's activity in interpreting and making sense of the story, responding to the clues and cues provided by the text, constantly readjusting a provisional interpretation in the light of new knowledge, reenacts the efforts of the characters to make sense of their own lives. (p. 115)

The Joke is manifestly a 'modern' novel, but it would be hard to believe that it was composed in the manner Roland Barthes attributes to the 'modern scriptor', who 'is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate'. On the contrary, we have in reading The Joke an overwhelming sense of a creative mind behind the text, its 'implied author', who constructed its labyrinth of meanings with love and dedication and immense skill over a long period of time, during which the design of the whole must have been present to his consciousness. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, however, seems, in part, to fit Barthes' prescription/description of the modern text as 'a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash'. It is 'original', but lacks the rich, 'deep', slowly emerging, satisfying aesthetic and thematic unity of The Joke. It is fragmentary, disjunctive, confused and confusing; it has an improvised air. Instead of telling a single, unified story, it tells several separate stories, only two of which concern the same character…. The kind of 'recognitions' which illuminate The Joke are deliberately frustrated in the later book. (p. 116)

The method used to study the form of The Joke—inferring the fabula and comparing it with the sjuzet—will hardly do in this instance. There are too many discrete fabulas to cope with, and in any case they are narrated in a rather straightforward summary fashion. The 'deformation' of the fabula in the sjuzet consists not so much in the manipulation of chronology and point of view as in the disruption of the temporal-spatial continuity of the narrative by the intrusions and digressions of the authorial narrator. This narrator identifies himself quite unambiguously as 'Milan Kundera', and relates several apparently 'true' stories about his own life. Paradoxically, this overt appearance of the author in the text does not make it easier, but harder, to determine what it 'means'. The real author has, as it were, leapfrogged over the implied author, to appear as a trope in his own text, which makes it all the harder to identify the implied author's attitudes and values. There three versions of the author are, obviously, very closely related, but do not quite coincide with each other.

The only way to deal, critically, with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is to review its textual strategies in the order in which they are experienced by the reader. (pp. 116-17)

[The following passage appears near the end of Part Three, entitled 'The Angels':]

… And I ran after that voice through the streets in the hope of keeping up with that wonderful wreath of bodies rising above the city, and I realised with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any….

This passage has the sublime perfection of a Joycean 'epiphany', but in its astonishing shift from the historical to the fantastic it strikes a characteristically 'postmodernist' note—one that has caused Milan Kundera to be linked with such writers as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie, under the umbrella of 'magic realism'. Kundera uses this technique more modestly and sparingly (and perhaps for that reason more effectively) than they do, but with the same implied justification: that the contradictions and outrages of modern history are of such a scale that only the overt 'lie' of the fantastic or grotesque image can adequately represent them. The power and effectiveness of this passage could not, however, be conveyed by quoting it out of context. It brings together, with devastating rhetorical force, bits of information and symbolic motifs that have been previously introduced into the text with deceptive casualness. It is this periodic convergence of diverse and apparently disparate discourses that gives The Book of Laughter and Forgetting its unity. (p. 119)

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting contains many … enigmas, contradictions, ambiguities, which are not resolved. It never allows the reader the luxury of identifying with a secure authorial position that is invulnerable to criticism and irony. But that it is the work of a distinctive, gifted, self-conscious 'author' is never in doubt. (p. 120)

David Lodge, "Milan Kundera, and the Idea of the Author in Modern Criticism," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 26. Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Summer, 1984, pp. 105-21.