SOURCE: "Amid Chaos, the Survival of Form: Laughable Loves," in Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs, University of South Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 162-90.

[Misurella is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he suggests that Laughable Loves revolves "on the theme of our helplessness before external events and the inadequacy of language as a tool in controlling or understanding them"]

[An] interest in ironic play, polyphony, and thematic variation as the basis of his concept of the novel's form has led Kundera to regard Laughable Loves as a novel in seven parts, although it began as a collection of ten separate stories published in three separate volumes in Czech. In The Art of the Novel, while discussing how frequently he resorts to seven-part structures in his novels, he says he eliminated three of the original ten Laughable Loves stories and "the whole thing became very coherent, in a way that prefigured The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: the same themes (especially the hoax) make a single entity out of seven narratives, the fourth and sixth of which are further linked by having the same protagonist, Dr. Havel. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, too, the fourth and sixth parts are linked by the same character: Tamina." So Laughable Loves might be appropriately titled as The Book of Laughable Loves, and in fact, according to Kundera, at his request the work carries just that title in its German and Spanish versions.

If, as he says, the hoax works as a principal theme in the book, we can extend that idea by conceiving of it as a novel about mistaken beliefs: in the self, in relationships, in human character, and, ultimately, existence, at least existence as exemplified in ideological traps such as religion and political philosophy. But Laughable Loves works also, and more importantly, as all of Kundera's novels do, as a higher mediation on faith in relation to language and reality. Time and again Kundera has shown how language, our primary tool in understanding and remembering, is, in and of itself, a fallible keeper of truth simply because it not only reflects reality, but through the lies of fiction creates a reality of its own that may be more believable—and more dangerous. So in Laughable Loves we go from "Nobody Will Laugh," a story about lying and "making it" through "Edward and God," a story about faith and "making it," both of which show the lie somehow betraying the liar with a new reality. Between those two stories Kundera portrays men and women using and abusing each other for their own purposes at all ages, from youth in the beginning to age at the conclusion, the two functioning as bookends for the various stages of adult human experience. In all stories love and sex at their least serious become the field on which highly metaphysical questions and fictions of self, existence, love, and God are debated. In "Nobody Will Laugh" the narrator Klima states the human problem succinctly, lamenting our inability to control the stories of our own lives: "They aren't our stories at all," he says; "they are foisted on us from somewhere outside." If the idea sounds suspiciously similar to the one that Jacques repeats from his former captain, we can point to it as an example of Kundera's consistency and underline Klima's words as another variation on the theme of our helplessness before external events and the inadequacy of language as a tool in controlling or understanding them.

"NOBODY WILL LAUGH"

[In "Nobody Will Laugh"] Klima, an instructor of art history, sits at home with his lover, Klara, a young woman of "excellent" family, and celebrates his recent success, the publication of a study in an important visual arts magazine, while reading a letter from another scholar. The letter, from a man named Zaturetsky, asks him to review an article for publication in the same magazine that has accepted Klima's for publication. Next morning Klima reads Zaturetsky's article and finds it laughably earnest, full of platitudes, and as scholarship essentially worthless. Then the editor of the arts journal calls, encouraging Klima to say something short and negative because, he says, Zaturetsky keeps badgering them, insisting that they do not understand him and that only an expert such as Klima could appreciate his research. Flattered by Zaturetsky's good opinion, and angered because he had difficulty getting his own work published in the journal, Klima can not bring himself to write the negative evaluation. Instead, he gives a vague promise to the editor and writes to Zaturetsky himself, flattering the man at the same time he says that other specialists suspect his own opinions and that therefore his recommendation would, in the end, work against the article. Mailing the letter, Klima thinks he can forget about the article and the man, but, as he ruefully says, Zaturetsky did not forget him. There follows one of those long, complicated plot mazes Kundera runs his characters through in order to make us laugh, see the irony of frivolous behavior turned into life-changing fate (as he did with Ludvik in The Joke) and good intentions working against the good of those intending.

Zaturetsky confronts Klima at one of his lectures, asking for his review, and Klima, seeing stubbornness and asceticism written in the lines of the man's face, promises "something vague." Instead of writing the review, however, he avoids Zaturetsky, changing the days of his lectures, asking the department secretary to lie about his whereabouts, until Zaturetsky, stubbornly seeking him out, complains to the dean and finally receives the address of Klima's apartment in Prague. In a scene baring one of Kundera's favorite themes, and one filled with potential comedy as well, Zaturetsky invades Klima's privacy: banging insistently on the apartment door while Klara sits alone, he forces her to respond at last and leaves a note to remind Klima about the review. From this point, the meeting of inept scholar and beautiful young protégée, the curve of Klima's fate turns irrevocably downward.

Zaturetsky arrives at the university again a few days later, asks Klima for the review, and Klima, seeing the man's mundane, ascetic nature as material for a joke, accuses him of making sexual advances to Klara at the apartment. Enraged, Zaturetsky denies the accusation, saying he has a wife and family, and threatens to get even as Klima, believing his own lie for a moment, dismisses the man triumphantly, believing the matter finished. But a few days later Klara receives a note from Mrs. Zaturetsky demanding that she come to her apartment to explain the accusations against her husband. Of course, Klara does not go, but in short order Mrs. Zaturetsky attempts to find Klima at the university and then she and her husband seek Klara at her job. Both attempts fail, but when Klima's department chairman calls him into the office to discuss the renewal of his contract, the Zaturetskys' presence hangs ominously over the meeting. The chairman tells Klima that his article has offended the dean and that the dean, because of Zaturetsky's complaints, now thinks Klima has missed his lectures for months. Klima tries to dismiss the complaints as frivolous or untrue but, at home that night, he finds a letter from the local Party committee asking to see him.

At the meeting Klima learns of complaints about Klara's presence from other tenants, hears about his "missed" lectures, and listens to the accusations of the Zaturetskys. Most ominous, perhaps, in light of what we know about Ludvik Jahn from The Joke, one of the committee members refers to Klima as an intellectual and sees him as refusing to help his fellow worker, Zaturetsky. With his job clearly threatened, and the slope of his fate seeming to slide downward, Klima searches for basic values and discovers the importance of his love for Klara. But with complaints from the other tenants and their privacy invaded by Zaturetsky, she can no longer live with him, and so they meet at a borrowed apartment. In a scene reminiscent of the ones between Lucie and Ludvik in The Joke, Klima learns that Klara feels uncomfortable meeting him in the apartment and they argue over the review he has to write. Pragmatic, she tells him to solve his problems by praising Zaturetsky's article, but in a second statement about his basic values, Klima insists that he cannot lie or joke about his work. In order to save himself and Klara, however, he asks Mrs. Zaturetsky to his apartment. Finally telling the truth, he says that her husband's article is scientifically worthless and reads passages from it along with passages from other writers to show its lack of originality. She leaves, stunned, but although the matter of the Zaturetskys seems at rest, Klima learns from Klara that the descent of his life has really just begun. Having spoken to the editor of the visual arts journal herself, she has learned that Klima will not continue at his teaching post, and she implies that the editor will now get her the job Klima himself had promised her. Shaking his hand "clearly for the last time," Klara leaves. Alone, now facing the loss of the two things he has considered most important to him, Klima looks at recent events and, resilient, still finds amusement. Having told Klara earlier that life's purpose is to entertain, he can now find comfort in the thought that his story is comic rather than tragic.

"THE GOLDEN APPLE of DESIRE"

If "Nobody Will Laugh" contains in miniature many of the elements of Kundera's first novel, The Joke, "The Golden Apple of Desire" contains elements of his two most recent novels: in its title a major image from Immortality and in character and event the married Don Juan theme so powerfully developed in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In addition, this second Laughable Loves story handles a pair of picaros, as does Jacques and His Master, and endows them with contrasting attitudes in the manner of Professor Avenarius and the caricature Kundera draws of himself in Immortality.

The narrator, apparently an art historian, sits in a Prague café leafing through a rare book on Etruscan culture and waits for his friend Martin, who can do what the studious narrator finds impossible: he can stop any woman on the street and engage her in flirtatious conversation, although he often stops at talk and passes her on to his friends. With the theme of language underlined by the narrator's comments, Martin arrives and Kundera moves on to the second part of the story, appropriately called "The Adventure Begins." Seeing a beautiful young woman at a nearby table, Martin follows her to the cloakroom and, looking for a prop, takes the narrator's rare art book, says it is too heavy to carry, and drops it into the woman's bag. They talk, Martin learns that she works as a nurse in a country hospital, and, after the three walk together to her bus to the country, he promises that he and the narrator will drive to the hospital on the following Saturday to retrieve the book. As the section ends we learn that Martin, who has recently turned forty, has a young wife at home. He loves her and fears her, the narrator tells us, and immediately Martin tries to invent a story he can tell her to get out of the house. In this way both characters reveal themselves as trapped—one by life, the other by art—and both look to language and the imagination as a means of escape.

The narrator borrows a car and the two drive to the nurse's country town. Along the way to meeting her they stop several women, and the narrator explains Martin's stages in the game of seduction: "registration," "making contact," and what the narrator refers to as the "last level," presumably sex, the exclusive interest in which he passes off as a trait of "primitive" men. But the more refined, stylized pursuit that Martin and the narrator practice has its ridiculous side as well, for clearly, as the "adventure" of the day continues, we see the two men as ineffectual: romantics chasing beautiful maidens in a dreamlike game of words whose world is the only reality they can control.

They meet the nurse, retrieve the narrator's book, and arrange to meet her and her girlfriend after work, at seven o'clock. Martin convinces the nurse to arrange for the four of them to go to a lakeside cabin, but as he and the narrator walk about the town to occupy the time, Martin says they have to leave for Prague by eight so he can play his customary Saturday night game of cards with his wife. Nevertheless, despite only an hour alone with the young nurses, Martin feels they have time to seduce them. Meanwhile, they "register" and "make contact" with two other women, both of whom promise to meet them in a few minutes but do not return. As the afternoon passes, we come to see how much these two Don Juans are really Don Quixotes in disguise and how, despite the lure of desire that Martin lives for and that the narrator only imitates, they have no real, physical amorous goals. They lie, to themselves and others, anticipating future adventures, eagerly planning for them, but never attaining the last level of fulfillment in them. After yet another of the women they talked to does not meet them as agreed, the narrator speculates that she did not return because she believed the fiction they concocted about shooting a film on the subject of Etruscans in Bohemia. He says that it might have gone better for them if she had not believed their story. He then discusses the danger of too much faith, saying that when people believe in something completely, their faith will "turn it into something absurd," a fair comment, it seems, on the adventure the two men constantly pursue.

They return to meet the nurses at seven o'clock, park near the hospital gate, and the narrator watches for them in the rear view mirror. He sees the two nurses, obviously dressed and eager to meet them, emerge from the hospital gate. Caught up in his thoughts about the danger of too much faith, the narrator sees his friend as a forty-year-old married man playing the game of youth without knowing it. Looking at his own behavior, he considers himself more ridiculous than Martin because he knows they are merely playing: "Why at this time should I behave as if an amorous adventure lay before me, when I know that at most a single aimless hour with unknown and indifferent girls awaits me?" Without informing his friend that the nurses are there, the narrator drives away, assuring Martin that they will not arrive.

In the final scene the narrator, feeling guilty, wonders whether he can ever give up the "gestures which signify youth" for him. As they discuss a female medical student "invented" by the narrator for possible future adventure, he and Martin discuss passing her between themselves and decide to impress her by saying that Martin is an athlete. Martin sees it as "in the realm of possibility," although he is unathletic and forty years old. The story ends pathetically, with the friends' mutual, implausible lie imposing itself upon the narrator's story, or fiction; he describes the joining as a "beautiful, ripe, shining apple" dangling before them. As they follow it down the road toward the sunset, the narrator calls it "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," an image that some twenty years later, at the end of Immortality, Kundera, with ironic purpose, would resurrect as a brightly colored ball floating above a mirrored swimming pool in Montparnasse: Narcissus meeting Helen, a sign of Goethe's "eternal feminine" drawing us on.

"THE HITCHHIKING GAME"

If "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire" leaves its two main characters permanently on the road in the midst of the perpetual and futile game of the chase after women, Kundera uses the next story ["The Hitchhiking Game"] to carry on that theme, this time as a variation, making a woman part of the journey. A young couple traveling in a sports car sees the gas gauge turn toward empty and, after some flirtatious conversation about hitchhikers, stop for fuel at a station. As they wait for service, the young woman goes into the woods behind the station to relieve herself, and the young man reflects on her purity, as he calls it, because she speaks so shyly of her body functions. Charmed, he realizes that at her young age the shyness soon must pass.

The next section of the story elaborates on the young woman's reflections as she walks into the woods and steps behind a bush to, as Kundera says, give "herself up to her good mood." Angry about her shyness, she longs to feel more free about her body, reminding herself that the body we receive at birth is just one out of millions of possibilities, making it random, impersonal, and strictly on loan. For the moment at one with her body, she loves her traveling companion because he accepts her wholly, in no way encouraging the usual dualism of body and spirit from which she suffers. But, like Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the young woman is jealous also, worrying about keeping her lover, fearing that he will leave her one day for a more physical woman, one more comfortable (and in harmony) with her body. After she leaves the woods, instead of returning to the car, she walks along the highway in the direction they are traveling. The young man catches up, and she waves; he rolls down his window to ask if she needs a ride. Smiling flirtatiously, the woman says she does and enters the car. In that way, lightly, innocuously, the hitchhiking game begins for these two travelers, a game, or fiction, that goes to the heart of self and what Kundera might call its various possibilities.

Driving, they continue to flirt, as if they really are strangers, and although the young man, through tenderness, attempts to reestablish their normal conversational tone, the woman insists on the new one. She imagines herself as seeing her lover now as a different person, the man he is with other, more free-living, women. Jealous, she continues to flirt with him and ultimately, caught up in her act, suffers because, as with the narrator of "Nobody Will Laugh," the fiction comes to dominate their reality. Playing a "role out of trashy literature," she provokes her young man to respond in kind, and the two find themselves, almost against their will, playing out the game. The young man turns off the road, taking another direction from the one they are traveling, and suddenly, but separately, both experience a refreshing rush of freedom from the ordered, frustrating existence they have lived till then. Seeking lightheartedness and irresponsibility, they drive into an unknown country town and take a room for the night. The game continues, increasing its hold on them moment by moment, and the young man wonders whether he now sees his lover's real self, freed from inhibition by the roles they are playing. She feels different herself, shameless, without history or obligations and, at last, the woman she wants to be, and that she imagines her lover wants her to be: a pickup for whom "everything" is "permitted."

In their room after dinner, they play out the conclusion to the game. The young man, angry that his girlfriend performs the role of whore so well, speaks to her coarsely, refusing to kiss her and giving her money to force her to humiliate herself through obscene gestures and motions. She tries to reassert her normal behavior, but he continues to treat her like a bought woman, and in a scene with the emotional brutality of Ludvik Jahn's sexual punishment of Helena in The Joke, aggressively pulls her into bed, where their sex, a complex mixture of anger and impersonal desire, yields a moment that Kundera describes as one with "two bodies in perfect harmony, two sensual bodies, alien to each other." The young woman, having experienced what she has always most dreaded, sex without love or emotion, admits to herself that despite her horror she has experienced sexual pleasure like no other in her life. Frightened by what she has learned about herself, she lies in the dark beside her young man, both their masks off now, and cries out "I am me, I am me," while her lover, searching for compassion ("from afar," Kundera tells us), tries to comfort her. For both of them, however, the game that began so innocently, spontaneously, has irrevocably changed their lives as well as their love.

"SYMPOSIUM"

Appropriately, after two explorations of the nature of physical desire, Kundera turns to present a parody of the most famous Western work on ideal, or spiritual, love, Plato's Symposium, a philosophic dialogue that treats love from the perspectives of myth, poetry, reason (really false, sophistic reason), and comedy before giving itself over to Socrates's discussion defining love as intellectual rather than physical, a desire for beauty in its ideal form.

Our concept of Platonic love originates in this dialogue, and Kundera performs a parodic variation on it [in "Symposium"] by staging a discussion of love in a hospital, place of bodily breakdown and repair, that decidedly emphasizes the physical even as it comically belies the validity of that very solid source of erotic power. Immediately breaking down any possible realistic reading of the story, Kundera separates it into acts instead of chapters and sets the scene of the staff room at "any hospital in any town that you like." What's more, he makes obvious authorial intrusions with ironic titles to the sections of each act, and in introducing his characters says that they have gathered there under "less than important" pretexts, presumably to drink and chat, but also, we must remember, because the author has put them there arbitrarily. With the stage set, characters introduced, and, by means of parabasis, the author's presence very firmly announced, the drama begins.

Dr. Havel and Nurse Alzhbeta sit in a hospital staff room drinking, although they are on night duty, with three other physicians on the staff: the chief physician, elderly and bald; a thirty-year-old woman doctor from another ward; and Flaishman, the youngest of them, a ward intern whose naïve self-centeredness makes him one of those angelic innocents Kundera has treated so frequently and ironically in his fiction. The others have various degrees of experience, fitting for their years, and although the evening passes with what Kundera calls "appreciative chatter," we learn of some tensions. Alzhbeta has drunk too much and begins to flirt with Dr. Havel, whose response sets off whatever drama the evening will have. Complaining that as a nurse Alzhbeta should understand the limits of the flesh, Havel criticizes her desire, a vitality that he calls "incorrigible," and declares that her body movements make his head spin. "Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous—like God!" he says, ordering her to leave him alone and go about her business of injecting patients. When she leaves to do just that, the chief physician wonders aloud why Havel refuses the nurse's advances when normally, like death, he will, as the chief says, "take everything."

The two phrases, about Alzhbeta's breasts and Havel's desire, combine to state the basic metaphysical themes that Kundera handles in this story, ironically joining (and inverting) the spiritual with the physical and the erotic with the eternal. During a discussion that reinforces this yoking of opposites, the chief physician speaks of his greatest amorous success as one with a sexually experienced woman who refused to go to bed with him. He describes her refusal as a sign of lifelong commitment since he was her "first and last" refused man. The banter continues, with Havel admitting he does not know why he rejects Alzhbeta, since he has slept with uglier, more aggressive women, and he finally blames it on caprice, raising that capriciousness to a philosophic level by calling it a "scrap of freedom" in a "world of iron laws." The three drink to freedom, and at that moment, young Flaishman enters the room, having gone off to buy a bottle of champagne.

Immediately, Havel and the chief physician take advantage of the intern's youthful egotism, claiming that for months Alzhbeta has wanted him while he has ungallantly looked the other way. Flaishman, described as slow, not because of clumsiness but because of preoccupation with his inner self, replies that he is not interested in the nurse and absolves himself from guilt, saying he is not responsible for pain he causes involuntarily. At this point Alzhbeta returns to the room, drinks champagne, and the chief physician voices one of Kundera's most prominent themes: Ignorance absolves no one, not even innocents, since "Ignorance is a fault," and man bears responsibility for it. It is a theme Kundera would turn to again in other books, and the reader may recognize in Flaishman the same self-conscious innocence (and the same attachment to his mother) that motivates Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere. The woman doctor defends Flaishman, and he takes it as a sign that she is interested in him. She has apparently intrigued him since they met, and when she goes to the window and declares how lovely it looks outside under the full moon, he takes her comment as a hint that she wants to be with him in the open air. He leaves the room, his chest swelling with absolute certainty that she will follow him, and enters the garden to await her. Knowing that a great love experience is imminent, he leans against a tree and smokes, romantically seeing himself in the garden at the same time; but when he turns toward the sound of footsteps behind him he finds, rather than the woman doctor, the chief physician out to relieve his bladder. As "Act One" ends, this sudden change from romance to biological necessity comically underlines the dualism in Flaishman's (and we might say European) self-consciousness.

In "Act Two" Kundera accentuates the duality. Flaishman and the chief physician return to the staff room to find Alzhbeta, drunk, in the midst of a mock striptease that creates one of the most memorable parodic scenes in Kundera's fiction. With her body everywhere in the room, "like God," she circles the other characters, revolving especially about Havel, who sits with his head down as if attending a funeral. Alzhbeta encourages him to look at her, saying that she is vital, alive, at least temporarily, and, at that comment, the narrator describes her backside as "splendidly formed grief dancing close to Havel, who, despite her encouragement, keeps his eyes turned to the floor. In pantomime she removes all her clothes, and, on tiptoe at the end of her dance, in the "glory of her fictional nakedness," stares down at her body, self-involved in the same way Flaishman is when he studies himself internally or stands in the garden waiting for romance to begin.

Exhausted finally, Alzhbeta collapses at Havel's feet and asks for pep pills to provide more energy. He gives her a sleeping pill instead, and when she, more tired and drunk, tries to sit on his lap, he moves his legs so she falls to the floor. Embarrassed, Alzhbeta decides to go to bed, calling the others beasts and idiots for having laughed at her. After she leaves, the doctors continue their banter. When the woman doctor refers to Havel as a Don Juan, the chief physician disagrees, again likening his colleague to death. Havel agrees with the chief physician's assessment. In a long analytic speech that lifts the consideration of love to a mythic level, he says that Don Juan is no longer a valid figure because in his time he conquered convention and innocence, defying death and God for sexual pleasure, while today's more liberal conventions would make him a collector with no tragic import. Claiming to be a mere comic figure himself, Havel says that whatever small grandeur he possesses exists only against the "background" of Don Juan's "tragic gaiety." The woman doctor compliments Havel on his fine speech, noting that it contradicts his claim to a humble masculine role. Calling him an "old fraud," she remarks on the beauty of the night, and Flaishman, once more misreading her comment as a signal, excuses himself to go into the garden. But as "Act Two" ends, Flaishman again finds something unexpected. Sure that romance is imminent, he smells gas as he leaves the building, tracks it to the nurses' quarters, and finds Alzhbeta lying on her couch, unconsicous and naked, with the unlit jet to the gas stove on. He opens the window and calls the others to help save her (as they do), but not before seeing, in yet another inversion (death made to look sexual and beautiful), just how lovely her body really is.

In "Act Three' Kundera begins to unwind the story, even as he continues the philosophic explorations. With Alzhbeta's life saved, the three doctors and Flaishman debate what happened in the nurses' room, disagreeing as much about the experience of death as they did earlier about erotic ones. As they debate, Kundera turns Alzhbeta's body (and her handling of it) into a sign for which each speaker seeks to find some meaning. Flaishman, self-absorbed romantic that he is, believes that Alzhbeta tried to kill herself out of love for him, condemns his egocentricity for not responding to her, and, reversing his earlier thinking, accepts responsibility for the unintended pain he caused. The chief physician, still superficially clever, believes Alzhbeta set up the suicide without intending to achieve it; she undressed, he says, turned on the gas, and, to tempt Havel, left the door to her room open so that he would discover her and see her beautiful body. Havel shrugs in resignation, saying he believes Alzhbeta intended to kill herself but not for him alone; everyone, not just Havel, refused her, he says, and she intended to be found naked, glorious, slipping into "intercourse with death," so that those she left behind would be envious and long at last for her underestimated body. Practical, the woman doctor refutes the other opinions, saying Alzhbeta gassed herself by mistake. She had returned to her room, finished the striptease; this time removing her clothes for real, then put on coffee to await Havel, who she thought would arrive when the other doctors left for the night; tired, she fell asleep and the water for the coffee boiled over to put out the gas flame. Havel objects to this theory and asks for an explanation of Alzhbeta's comment about being alive, if only temporarily. The woman doctor, having previously called Havel a fraud for his fine talk about Don Juan, tells him that ninety-nine percent of all statements have no meaning; that is, they are fictional. Whether Kundera intends her comment as his central theme or not, he ends "Act Three" ironically with a view of patent self-delusion: Flaishman again, seated in his parents' garden, feeling words like "beloved" and "death" filling his chest and lifting him as if he wore wings (the angel motif again), and believing that in Alzhbeta he has at long last found absolute love.

To corroborate that theme, "Act Four" presents a scene of completely idle chatter. Late at night the woman doctor returns to the staff room, claiming she cannot sleep. She and Havel talk, each claiming a lack of sexual interest in the other, primarily because of their shared affection for the chief physician. Echoing Plato, Havel says friendship between men is much more important than erotic love of women, and he goes on to say that he sees his own future in the chief physician's pretentious behavior. With the decay of the body that comes with age, he says, a man must pretend, creating "everything that he no longer is." The woman doctor understands and agrees that she too could do nothing to harm the chief physician. But their shared affection for the chief becomes the primary motive for their betrayal of him. Havel would do nothing to harm him, the woman doctor says, so "I can depend on you. I can make love with you." She sits on Havel's knee and unbuttons his shirt. In a parabatic aside that makes up a section heading, the narrator asks a question whose answer is obvious, "What Did Dr. Havel Do?" In a teasing response the narrator also says, "Ah, that's some question."

Since the answer to that question is not in words but in imagination and (as we imagine it) action, it is fitting that Kundera makes the final act of his philosophic drama revolve around a set of inventions and imaginations that in all likelihood will not be realized. He begins with Flaishman offering flowers to Alzhbeta and just avoiding the impulse to ask her to marry him. Overcome with the grandeur of his feeling, he thanks her for existing, squeezes her shoulder, and leaves to go back on duty. In the staff room he finds Havel, the chief physician, and the woman doctor still debating the suicide. Alzhbeta has confirmed the woman doctor's theory about the water boiling over, but the chief physician reminds them she could be lying since people who attempt suicide are regularly sent to asylums in their country. With the truth thus undermined, even from its source, the three continue to disagree, with each reversing a previously stated opinion. The chief physician now thinks Alzhbeta might have intended to kill herself; the woman doctor, in order "to make the world more beautiful," says they should agree; and Havel, feeling guilty about the previous night, claims that only love, not friendship, is important enough to be worth a suicide. The story ends with Flaishman, ever living in his illusions, hearing the woman doctor exclaim, as she looks through the window to a beautiful day, that she is happy to be alive. Once again, he interprets her words as a romantic signal, feels grateful for having settled his feeling for Alzhbeta with flowers "and some nice words," and (but we are left to imagine this, nothing more) excuses himself to go into the garden. The story begins again, Kundera tells us, but with Flaishman feeling stronger, older, having received a most romantic (and questionable) gift, a "splendid . .. invigorating death" that, along with love, has been investigated and debated from positions similar to those in Plato's Symposium: myth, poetry (Flaishman's emotions), specious reasoning (all that empty talk, especially about Alzhbeta's "suicide"), and, a Kunderan specialty from beginning to end, ironic comedy.

"LET THE OLD DEAD MAKE ROOM FOR THE YOUNG DEAD"

"Symposium" is perhaps the high point of Laughable Loves so far, its joining of farce with philosophic seriousness a key to Kundera's stated ambitions for fiction, while the three stories that follow serve as a coda of sorts, further exploring meaning through the experience of love, the memory of love, and the language that attempts, but finally fails, to encapsulate them.

From a discussion of the search for truth and reality in love and death, Kundera moves to a discussion of reality itself, especially in relation to human character. In "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," an autumnal story, he presents a pair of former lovers, meeting again in a small Czech town after fifteen years, who make the futile attempt to bring together their younger with their present selves. Complicating the situation, both have reached crisis points in their lives, moments when they are made painfully aware of the passage of time and the increased imminence of their deaths.

The woman (we never know her name) has come to this small town where her husband lies buried only to find out that the lease on the land that holds his grave has run out and the authorities have removed the body and headstone and replaced them with the remains of another. When she complains that the authorities should have let her know that the lease had run out so she could renew it, an official mutters the words that become the title and motif of this story: "The old dead ought to make room for the young dead. " The woman wanders about the town, filled with remorse for her loss and her carelessness, and upset because she knows her son, who still loves his father, will accuse her of forgetting him. Looking to pass the time until her bus leaves for Prague, she meets a younger man with whom she spent a night some fifteen years before. He, twenty years younger than she but preoccupied with his own advancing age (thirty-five) and the signs of an inevitable bald spot on his head, almost passes her by until he recognizes her smile. As he talks to her, he feels the whole experience of the single night they spent together return. With all the cafes filled and dirty, he invites her to his apartment for coffee, and there the drama of four selves in two characters plays itself out in a single room that calls to the characters' minds another, smaller one they had made love in fifteen years before.

In an elegiac tone much like the one he uses in "The Middle-Aged Man" section of Life is Elsewhere and "The Dial" in Immortality (both are "guest-house" chapters, separate structures that are yet still part of the formal estate that makes up the world of the novel they inhabit), Kundera tells us something about the man's memory of the woman. She had been beautiful, not only older but married to an older man, more experienced, and therefore mysterious to him. After several meetings in small cafés, she had agreed to meet him in his room. Overwhelmed to be with her alone, he could not act naturally or confidently, and because of his inexperience she had to lead them into the act of love. Shamed, he had turned off the lights before they undressed and, although they were sexually intimate, he could not see her face. Now, like Rubens in Immortality, in the midst of evaluating his life and seeing it as pitifully uneventful, he realizes he made love to an important woman without knowing her, and seeks to redress that essential emptiness in their second meeting.

Looking at her, hearing her talk about annual visits to her husband's grave on All Soul's Day, the man analyzes her appearance and sees that with wrinkles of age, gray hair, and sagging skin, the woman eludes him still because she is not what she was. But in a narrative moment that looks forward to the genesis of Immortality, Kundera has the man offer the woman some cognac, and the charm of her gesture as she refuses transports him, allows him to glimpse her younger self again, in the way he recognized her through her smile when they met on the street. Moved to pity as well as recognition, he talks of the terrible trail of a life passed too swiftly, as well as the end that beckons to everyone. But she responds to his gravity without a touch of sympathy, calling his remarks "superficial." To the woman, the narrator tells us, life has meaning in the work humans do, not in their bodies that so quickly decay.

She speaks of her own work as an organizer of cultural programs and as a mother giving "everything that a mother can" to her son while she, in age, quietly slips into the background of his life. From that statement Kundera continues to provide details of her life with her son: he has subjugated her (while other men have failed), forcing her into the confines of a proper widow's role by detesting everything youthful and sexual about her until she gave in finally, telling herself that although he nudged her toward the grave, she could live beautifully through him.

The man accepts her argument, seeing it as consistent with his impression of her as a woman intensely interested in beauty and opposed to ugliness and bad taste. He recalls their one night together, her grace and frankness a contrast to his own awkwardness and shame, and thinks of her as beyond his imagination even though they had made love. Her whispered words and the features of her face eluded him in the dark, and after their shared emotions he could only think of her as mysterious and "unreal." He tells her about his experience, and she interprets his account as proof that the worth of a human life is best measured in its extension beyound the self into the memories and experiences of others. Enjoying this perception, she wonders as he strokes her hand whether he touches the skin of the woman he talks to or the woman about whom he talks. At the same time she perceives his own multiple self, acknowledging that she likes this man better than the inexperienced youth she went to bed with fifteen years before.

He embraces her and she, aware of her body's age and mortality against his memory of her youth, resists, begging him not to destroy the "memorial" of her erected in his mind. He lies, telling her he still finds her beautiful, even though he admits to himself that making love will end for him in disgust. His desire for what she was, for his memory of the woman who eluded him in youth and who has remained a mystery for him through the years, becomes a symbol for everything his life has lacked; finally, it overwhelms his physical revulsion. He tells her not to fight him, aware only that should they make love today he will finally see her face and, perhaps, read the expression he lost in the dark fifteen years before. At the same time he wants "to debase this reading immediately," and he realizes that he desires her now because the disgust that follows will allow him to put the lie to all she has represented through the years: the opportunities lost, the experiences missed, the pleasures never enjoyed; his disgust would render them all as "dust," mere images of memory or desire, "doomed to destruction."

The woman still resists but, regretting the loss of her husband's grave site and seeing her son in the man's face, feels enraged at the trap her age, the widow's role, and her son's expectations have erected around her. She declares to herself the end of all memorials. The "old dead must make room for the young dead," she thinks, repeating the cemetery official's remark, "and yes, my boy, all memorials [are] for nothing." In a complete loss of the faith that has sustained her through the years, she decides to favor physical life over memorials. She will make love to the man, the last "who would appeal to her and whom, at the same time, she could have" because things outside herself, other people's thoughts and memory have no real importance now. She gives in and, in a moving narrative moment filled with the intimacy of shame and self-knowledge, begins to undress. Kundera concludes the story ironically, a grimace of despair slightly leavened with bitter laughter over what the two characters will not only feel but see: "This time the room was full of light."

"DR. HAVEL AFTER TWENTY YEARS"

Another autumnal story about the body's mortality and the way the spirit combats decay through language, "Dr. Havel after Twenty Years" does a variation on the previous story's motif of love in age. In this version, however, Kundera has age make love with youth and shows how, because of language's abilities to alter and create reality, youth, rather than age, feels privileged.

Twenty years after the events of "Symposium," Dr. Havel, now married to a beautiful, well-known actress with a film just appearing in the theaters, finds himself with gallbladder problems and taking the cure at a small spa in the country. His wife, despite her beauty, feels jealous because of Havel's well-known, and well-deserved, reputation as a lover, but to his disappointment he finds himself overlooked by the women at the spa. When, at the suggestion of Dr. Frantishka (Havel's female physician), the young male editor of the spa's newspaper comes to arrange an interview, not with Havel but his wife during one of her visits, Havel reads it as a sign of how low his reputation has sunk.

However, the editor, who has heard about Havel's conquests and is insecure about his own erotic abilities, asks the older man to meet his girlfriend and evaluate her from his expert point of view. Dr. Havel agrees, and finds himself repelled by what he calls the young woman's small-town looks—she is thin, with freckles around her nose—and especially her talkativeness. Embarrassed, the editor defends his girlfriend as being "nice," but Havel replies that dogs, canaries, and ducklings can also be nice. He urges the editor to cultivate his taste by throwing "small fish back into the water" and learn to find true erotic beauty by seeking the unusual. Genuinely loving the young woman, the editor nevertheless accepts Havel's judgment and, when he meets the beautiful Mrs. Havel, becomes convinced he has taken a lesson from a master.

In the meantime, Havel, seeing new respect from others as he walks through the spa with his wife on his arm, feels more confident about himself and, in a playful mood, recommends Dr. Frantishka to the editor. She does not conform to the "ready-made prettiness" of small-town tastes, he says, and possesses very "expressive" legs. Urging the editor to listen to what those legs are "saying," Havel plants the seed of desire in the editor's imagination, just as his wife's presence creates attention from two of the women who previously spurned him. The love scene between the editor and Dr. Frantishka takes on a central role, ranking as one of the funniest that Kundera has written. In a sweet yet farcical variation of the son and lover motif he treated in "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," Kundera describes the editor fighting to maintain his sexual ardor as Dr. Frantishka, more talkative than his girlfriend, babbles about her children: "Beautiful, beautiful!" she calls them; and when the editor, striving to maintain physical passion, says how much he wanted to make love to her when they first met, she replies by comparing him to her son: "That kid wants everything too." Finally, their sex at last completed, she gives his hair a matronly stroke, saying he has a "cute little mop" just like her son's, although Kundera, humanely and in good humor, describes her as feeling younger and, with gratitude, "foolishly good."

The story ends with Havel and the editor meeting next day. Havel's wife has returned to Prague and the doctor himself awaits another woman. The editor, slightly ashamed of his experience with Frantishka, hides it at first, but eventually provides details when Havel questions him. Enthusiastic about his own prospects now, Havel responds positively to the tale of Frantishka's conversation. He tells the editor that bodily pleasure felt in silence only grows "tiresomely similar," making one woman become like all the others. Yet we seek sexual adventures, he says, "to remember them" and, anticipating a theme from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Havel adds that it takes language, words spoken "at this most banal of moments," to make the sexual experience unforgettable. Although he is known as a collector of women, Havel tells the editor he has a different assessment of himself. Baldly stating one of Kundera's most prominent ideas while underlining the thematic role of language in Laughable Loves, he says, "In reality, I'm far more a collector of words"—that is, words spoken during coitus—than of women. Ironically, he follows that self-assessment by walking away hand in hand with a young woman he has met at the spa. Described as resembling a "riding horse," she heads with him toward the spa promenade where, presumably, instead of listening to her words, he will treat her like a prize possession and show her off.

"EDWARD AND GOD"

In Immortality Professor Avenarius says that most men, given the choice, would rather be seen with a beautiful woman than sleep with her, and Havel, the self-proclaimed "collector of words," serves to confirm that assessment at the end of the previous story, making him a collector of images (and self-images) as well. As Kundera probes the reality behind the lies of language in Laughable Loves, he moves through various shadowy areas of philosophic truth, and in this last story of the collection he takes as his final topic the essence of the self as it relates to religious and ideological faith. A companion piece to "The Hitchhiking Game," it is perhaps the most ambitious of the stories in this book, one that embodies most of the narrative techniques and themes that we associate with Kundera in his novels: parabasis and authorial intrusion, variation, social and physical necessity as a method of character motivation, use of theatrical tableaux, gravity of subject handled with light technique, parody of ideological innocence, irony, and finally laughter at the way fate turns against the best human intentions. In its concern with Communist Party guilt and restitution it parallels The Joke and Life Is Elsewhere; in its exploration of the trap that life has become it looks forward to The Farewell Party and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; and in the farce it makes of the mysteries (and lies) inflating and deflating reputations as well as love affairs it joins The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality.

Edward, a schoolteacher, not by choice, visits his brother in the country to discuss problems he will have in obtaining a teaching position from a school supervisor, Miss Chehachkova, a party zealot who many years ago caused Edward's brother to lose his status as a university student, for behaving with unbecoming levity after Stalin's death. Edward's brother was forced to leave Prague and work in the country as a result of Miss Chehachkova's denunciation, but he has adjusted well to his fate, acquiring a house, a family, a dog, and a cottage. Edward's brother tells him not to worry about the supervisor, saying that she has always gone after young men and so she will probably look favorably on him. She may even wish to redress the old wrong she did to him, he says, believing that even party zealots possess consciences.

Edward has just graduated from a teacher's college, and to his relief he finds that his brother is right about Miss Chehachkova. Tall, ugly, with black eyes and just a hint of a black moustache, she responds well to Edward and succeeds in finding a teaching position for him. The position, Kundera says, makes Edward "neither happy nor sad," since he puts a teaching career in the category of the "unserious" things in life, principally because it did not fit what he considered to be his true nature and he did not freely choose it. Rather, external conditions, such as the accident of academic and party affiliations (and successful performance during examinations), had chosen him for the career. Thus, he sees chance as the primary cause of his occupation, and because of that he regards it as "laughable," a key word in terms of the title of the book and the theme of this particular story. Kundera explains further: "What is obligatory was unserious (laughable) . . . what is non-obligatory was serious," and so chance, operating as necessity through Edward's grades, party membership, and scores, leads Edward into his career, allowing him no freedom of choice. But Kundera reveals the non-obligatory and serious side of Edward's experience through his love life, in this case a beautiful young woman whom he meets at school.

However, the young woman, Alice, believes in God, presenting a difficulty for Edward. Saying she could not live without meaning, Alice asks Edward whether he has religious faith, and as he, not wanting to lose her, struggles for a fitting reply, encourages him to speak honestly. Without such honesty, "there wouldn't be any sense" in their being together, she says. Edward confesses to religious doubts but goes to church with Alice on Sunday and finds himself moved by the ceremony. Emotionally compelled to kneel on the floor, he feels "magnificently free" at the same time, perhaps because in religious faith he senses the operation of choice rather than necessity. He lies, telling Alice he no longer harbors doubts about God, but unfortunately, as they leave the church together, with his soul "full of laughter," Miss Chehachkova passes and sees them on the steps.

When he meets the supervisor at school during the week, he explains his presence at church by citing an interest in baroque architecture. Clearly, Miss Chehachkova does not believe him, and therefore he excuses himself from church with Alice the following Sunday. Annoyed, she criticizes his wavering belief, and Kundera, in a parabatic aside that prefigures the technique of the novels that come afterward, describes how Edward burns with desire for Alice's body while the Seventh Commandment, forbidding adultery, remains Alice's primary means of testing her faith. The other nine commandments, Kundera says, about honoring parents, not killing, and not coveting neighbors' goods or wives, seem self-evident to her, while the seventh is inconvenient and therefore requires commitment. Using faith to fight her, Edward raises the issue of a less forbidding New Testament God allowing and encouraging love, even including sex. He quotes St. Paul, "Everything is pure to the man who is pure at heart" and refers to Augustine's "Love God and do what you will." When Alice continues to refuse him, romantically and sexually, he begins to exaggerate his religious zeal, accusing Alice of being too complacent to be truly religious. Finally, performing what amounts to a parody of faith, he ostentatiously crosses himself before a crucifix in the street. A woman janitor from his school sees him, reports him to the Party Committee, and, as Kundera says, making use of a pun on ideological as well as religious faith, "Edward realized that he was lost."

Called before the committee, presided over by Miss Chehachkova, Edward feels overwhelmed by the situation. He cannot, like Ludvik Jahn, bring himself to call his actions a joke because he is sensitive to the gravity with which the committee members regard the situation. Instead, he asks permission to be frank, and the supervisor, echoing Alice when she and Edward discussed religion, tells him he must be frank or else there is no point in their meeting. Gratified, he confesses that he does in fact believe in God even though he does not want to, since religious faith has no place in modern life. Acknowledging the contradiction between what he knows and what he believes, Edward simply hangs his head and says he feels that "He exists." Sympathetic, probably because Edward is a young man, Miss Chehachkova urges the committee to give reason a chance to defeat faith and promises to take charge of his reeducation.

At this point some readers may begin to see Edward as a manipulator of women, playing on their political and religious beliefs for his own gain. Perhaps. And, consistent with that viewpoint, Kundera tells us that Edward felt relieved to be in the supervisor's hands, resolving immediately to gain her favor "as a man." But let us not forget that the social, political world manipulates him, and he must defend himself against it any way he can. From that viewpoint the women also manipulate Edward, and we should remember that with this story's title Kundera has set out to examine, though irony, the larger philosophic issue of belief; erotic romance happens to be the field upon which he studies it.

Alice and Miss Chehachkova represent two possible directions for personal belief to take in life, as well as two possible sources of manipulation. Edward is caught between them. Discussing the Communist Party and the pain that she admits it has caused, Miss Chehachkova gives a clear variation on Alice's statement about God: Without something other than herself to believe in, she says, "I couldn't perhaps live at all." Edward asks about her personal life, whether it could not be satisfying in and of itself, and her bitter smile makes him see her evident loneliness and passion, with political commitment being an inadequate substitute for love. They go on to discuss the nature of belief and recognize the impossibility of joining religion and Communism. Miss Chehachkova, responding to the intimacy of her pupil's sympathetic attention, tells Edward that she likes his youth and especially likes him. At this moment, as Kundera points out, something important happens: the trap Edward has been working so hard to construct for his supervisor suddenly springs, but not on her. Instead, it closes on him.

Edward replies to Miss Chehachkova's statement by saying, "not too expressively," that he likes her also. She reacts with surprise, saying she is an old woman, and Edward feels obligated to deny it, calling her sense of age "nonsense". She tells him not to lie. He says, seemingly sincere, that he finds her pretty, that he likes women with black hair. The scene, humorous and wrenching at the same time, reads very much like a passage from Witold Gombrowicz, with Edward feeling himself pushed deeper and deeper into a performance made necessary by the situation, even as he plays (to himself) the character of the freewheeling Don Juan. When the directress asks why he has never spoken to her about his feelings before, he delivers a plausible response, but one that only makes things worse for him. People would have thought "I was sucking up to you," he tells her, and she replies that he should not be ashamed: "It has been decided that you must meet with me from time to time." That their meetings are obligatory places them under Edward's category of the "unserious" or laughable; more important, as the story develops, the scene itself signals a drastic turn in Edward's fate, placing him solidly in the Kafkan realm of what Kundera calls the "horror of the comic," where the jaws of necessity have sprung closed on his freedom. But Edward does not know that yet, and as he leaves, Miss Chehachkova strokes his hand, sending him home like a successful Don Juan, "with the sprightly feelings of a winner."

For a time Edward's sense of his situation seems correct. He has become the stuff of legend among his friends, and the virtuous Alice, now perceiving him as a martyr for his religious beliefs, agrees to spend a weekend in the country with him. But before that occurs he meets again with the supervisor in her apartment, and he learns that, for her too, principles fall easily before passion. In a parabatic passage that lays out the theatrical as well as philosophic content of the following scene, Kundera reminds the reader how fallible is man's sense of his future before the workings of external forces: "A man imagines that he is playing his role in a particular play, and does not suspect that in the meantime they have changed the scenery without his noticing." Finding himself in the "middle of a rather different performance," he must, in all innocence, improvise his actions and his words, with the plot now inevitably working against him. Such is Edward's experience with his supervisor.

Feeling confident when he arrives at her apartment, Edward finds himself trapped by what Kundera calls "The change of program" and realizes that the bottle of cognac, the intense look in Miss Chehachkova's eyes, and their increasingly personal rather than ideological conversation will lead them directly into each other's arms. Repelled by her ugliness, Edward feels his livelihood threatened, and as he leads her around the room in a romantic dance, drinks glass after glass of cognac to numb himself against his feelings.

The comic and philosophic point to the scene, of course, is that Edward must make love to Miss Chehachkova in order to keep his job, "unserious" though he thinks it may be. Touching her breast, he gives himself up to "irreversible necessity", placing the scene (and himself) in the realm of the laughable, despite the genuine terror he must feel when his body rebels against the moment's needs. With the supervisor standing naked before him, he finds he must improvise, and he calls upon religion to cover this physical lack of desire. Declaring their actions sinful, he demands that she kneel, clasp her hands, and pray, and the "threefold image of degradation", as Kundera calls it, excites him at last. As she finishes her prayer, he lifts her off the floor and carries her to the couch.

Kundera follows Edward's near physical failure with a scene about a spiritual one. The next weekend Edward travels to the country with Alice and finds, now to his dismay, that she no longer feels reluctant to go to bed with him. The change bothers rather than enchants him because it occurs independent of his efforts and without any acceptable logic. In fact, as Edward analyzes it, Alice will sleep with him now because of a mistaken belief that he has been martyred for his religious beliefs. Yet if he did not betray God before the Party Committee, Edward wonders, why should she betray her religious principles (as the supervisor did her political ones) before Edward? With such doubts in mind, he speaks to his brother, who turns the table of ethics on him and his own actions. When Edward tells about his seduction of Miss Chehachkova, Edward's brother disapproves, saying that whatever else he has done, he has never lied. In reply Edward talks of the madness of speaking truthfully to a madman. Seeing the world as insane, he says, "If I obstinately told the truth to its face, it would mean that I was taking it seriously". And taking the world, or a madman, seriously, Edward tells his brother, would make him unserious (or laughable) and mad himself.

The conversation reaches the heart of Edward's feelings and, we might say, relates the primary question in Kundera's fiction: What is the real value of truth, beauty, and human goodness in an insane, chaotic world made comprehensible only through fictions? Having realized his physical desires at last, Edward becomes obsessed with Alice's lack of faith as they journey homeward. His conscience revolts against her and, with the plot of his life changing despite his passionate desire for her body, Edward comes to see Alice, and everyone else he knows, as "beings without firm substance," people "with interchangeable attitudes," and admits himself to be a mere shadow, or imitation, of them. Remorseful despite his physical attraction to her, he tells Alice that she disgusts him, and when they arrive in Prague the good-byes they say are clearly final.

Kundera ends the story and the book with images of spiritual ambivalence: Edward, done with both his desire and regret for Alice, sees Miss Chehachkova weekly, with the intent of doing so until his position at the school is secure. Meanwhile, he has begun to seek other woman, and his success with them more than satisfies his physical needs. A pensive, perhaps even monkish, Don Juan, he appreciates quiet moments alone, and his nostalgic longing for deity dramatizes the spiritual dissatisfaction in his life. Too bright to see God as real, Kundera says, Edward is yet too weak to ignore his wish for Him. In a scene of spiritual emptiness reminiscent in tone of the one that closes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he presents a theatrical tableau: Edward, in church, thoughtfully looking up at the cupola and, in his melancholy, suddenly seeing the face of God. Not mythically sexual, like the golden apple of eternal desire or a brightly colored ball tossed from a woman's outstretched hand, the image clearly, and sadly, draws everyone, including Edward, on.

So a book that begins with laughter, ends with poetry. Unlike Klima, in "Nobody Will Laugh," Edward lacks an ironic sense of himself. Still, he smiles and, Kundera says, feels happy. He asks us to keep that sad fictional image of Edward (keeping that charged fictional image of spiritual longing) in our memories. It is a paradox of longing, Kundera says, and a poetry of need. In the world that neither Edward nor any of the other characters made, it is a truth whose only expression comes in the fictional world of dreams.