SOURCE: "Laughable Loves; or, The Impossible Don Juan," in Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, pp. 52-73.

[In the following essay, Banerjee contrasts Kundera's portrayal of the Don Juan myth with traditional versions.]

Laughable Loves was the first of Milan Kundera's works to reach American readers. It was published in New York in 1974, with an introduction by Philip Roth, while its author was still living in Czechoslovakia. But all seven stories that make up the volume were written much earlier, between 1959 and 1969, during that marvelous decade of Czech culture which was also a time of great artistic ferment for Kundera. Originally, the title Směšné lásky (Laughable Loves) linked a series of ten short stories issued in three separate "notebooks," the last of which saw print in 1969, during the final gasp of Czech literary freedom. In the definitive form achieved after several authorial interventions, stripped down to seven entries rearranged in a sequence that highlights the emotional counterpoint between laughter and pathos, Laughable Loves prefigures the structural archetype of Kundera's later, elliptical novels.

In his dialogue with Christian Salmon, Kundera offers his quintessential definition of the novel as "a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters." And when his interlocutor objects that by so broad a definition even The Decameron could be called a novel, Kundera retorts, "I won't be so provocative as to call The Decameron a novel. Still, that book is one of the first efforts in modern Europe to create a large-scale composition in narrative prose, and as such it has a place in the history of the novel at least as its source and forerunner." Granting Kundera the same latitude he himself gives Boccaccio, we may discuss Laughable Loves as an experimental link in the sequence of his novels and a source of some of his important themes.

Though Laughable Loves obviously lacks unity of action and has independent sets of characters (the single exception being Dr. Havel, who connects the fourth and sixth stories), the series achieves internal coherence as a reflection on the paradoxical entanglements of three major themes. These themes, first raised in the opening trio of stories to be more fully developed in the remaining four (all of which date from the last stage of composition), are: the uneasy nature of truth in an age of easy certainties; modern Don Juanism; and the discord between body and soul in erotic situations. While the book employs a diversity of narrators, the perspective on the action throughout is one of irony, which Kundera considers "consubstantial" with the spirit of the European novel.

The laughter resounding in these tales of erotic debacle is never quite free of the admixture of sadness that turns it into a grimace. But the narrative tempo is allegro con brio, and the resourceful narrators manage to maintain a posture of playful brightness even when the action explodes in their faces. This is particularly true of the opening entry, "Nobody Will Laugh," which is told by an unlucky jester caught in a society where laughter has been suspended. At the beginning of the story, he is a successful university lecturer in art history who finds himself comfortably in possession of a beautiful mistress named Klara. By the end, she has turned against him and left him "because a man who lies can't be respected by any woman."

This reversal originates in the narrator's unfortunate attempt to evade the truth, an instinctive, dubiously motivated reaction that might even be construed as a sudden access of kindness. As a professional art historian, he is being badgered for a critical appraisal by an amateur scholar who has written an utterly worthless, derivative article about a well-known nineteenth-century Czech painter. Since he is at core a man of strict intellectual standards, the narrator cannot praise Mr. Zaturetsky's pedantic drivel, but there is something within him that rebels against the thought of playing executioner of the little man's plodding hopes and ambitions. Unfortunately for both of them, Zaturetsky is relentless in his pursuit of the punishing truth, and he finally manages to corner his unwilling critic, who has been playing an elaborate game of escape from his would-be victim. Zaturetsky even tracks down our hero's private retreat, a bachelor flat where he keeps Klara under wraps. When this carefully preserved separation between public obligations and secret pleasures crumbles, indulgence gives way to spite, and he falsely accuses the little man of trying to seduce Klara. The situation becomes grave when Zaturetsky's personal outrage escalates into an accusation of slander that is instantly submitted for investigation and eventual judgment by the neighborhood committee of comrades, which keeps a tight watch over socialist morals.

The inventive fibster soon discovers that all around him expected laughter has frozen into rigid indignation. He cannot even persuade his mistress that a personal code of integrity lies concealed under the elaborate structure of deception he has erected. Klara will not understand the distinction between the lie in the heart and the lie on the lips, and she urges him to get everyone out of trouble by satisfying Zaturetsky's craving for scholarly approval. Even though he feels himself driven to a fall by the laughable lie of his own creation, our hero resists her expedient advice and instead proceeds to tell Zaturetsky's wife what he really thinks of her husband's article. But that longsuffering woman harbors a pathetic faith in her partner's vocation that makes her utterly impervious to the truth at hand, and in the end the liar turned truthteller in extremis finds himself surrounded by distrust. To cap it all, his mistress accuses him of being a "stereotyped cynic" to justify dropping him. In the "chilly silence" that descends on him after that parting shot, the newly self-aware narrator consoles himself with the thought that he is a lonely comic spirit stranded in a world of banished laughter.

In this overture to a cycle of tales where, as Philip Roth tells us [in his introduction to the collection], "erotic play and power are the subjects frequently at the center," the love interest stays in the background. It is a losing stake, thrown almost casually into a game of make-believe played at the extreme edges of the problem of truth. In positing a disjunction between intellectual truth and the pleasures of Eros, which are the chosen domain of the nonserious spirit, this story, the only one Kundera preserved from the first notebook (1963), anticipates the masterly "Symposium" (1969).

In the book's definitive sequence, "Nobody Will Laugh" and "Symposium" frame two stories about the pursuit of sexual love, both published originally in 1965. "The Hitchhiking Game," the third of the series of seven, places a physically confident young man of twenty-eight opposite a woman six years younger who is only just discovering her body's potential to give and receive pleasure. The two have been lovers for a year, but she is still anguished about her lack of sexual ease. Imagining her reserve to be an obstacle for her lover, whom she adores with a jealous passion, she never suspects that he cherishes her shyness as a sign of innocence. While driving together on the first day of a holiday trip to the mountains, they inadvertently stumble into an adventure of erotic exploration, a dangerous game of masks that will throw their love off course. Attempting to imitate the kind of sophisticated flirtation she thinks he enjoys when he is away from her, the young woman pretends to be a hitchhiker and assumes the suggestive manner of an easy pickup. At first reluctantly, then with mounting ferocity, the young man responds to her provocative double-talk by escalating the verbal game into gesture. At the end of the road down which imagination leads them, they stand opposite each other in a hotel room, two faceless bodies topped by masks. Their lovemaking is a grappling in the dark, neither of them knowing the other who lies in this harsh embrace while the body's pleasure feeds the pain it inflicts on the exiled soul.

Roth writes that this "confusion of identities, and the heightened eroticism [it] provokes in the lovers, with its scary sado-masochistic edge, is not so catastrophic to either of them as his joke turns out to be for Ludvik Jahn." Perhaps so. It is true that the private catastrophe that results from this brutal marivaudage remains locked behind a bedroom door. But it seems to me that Roth, who sees the grimness of these tales in the long shadow society casts over the erotic game, misses the metaphysical dimension of Kundera's dark vision of the comedy of the sexes.

The theme of Don Juanism makes its first appearance in "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," the second of the seven tales. Here Kundera's Don Juan is Martin, a man who has just crossed the threshold of forty, and is married and in love with his wife. His chronicler is a younger friend, a scholar by profession, and by predilection a student of the discipline of the erotic chase that Martin exemplifies and teaches. This unnamed narrator casts a reflective eye on the action as it unfolds within the time span of a single Saturday afternoon. The master, with his disciple in tow, embarks on the road of sexual adventure that will take them from their starting point in Prague, from village to village, to their appointed goal at a small-town hospital where two nurses are awaiting them.

Behind the wheel of a rented Fiat, the obliging pupil drives along, compelled by the imperious desire for adventure that resides within the older man sitting in the passenger seat beside him. The undivided quality of his master's will fascinates him like a force of nature. For his part, he knows he has been tricked into joining the action: the preceding Monday, when they met one of the nurses in Prague, Martin had managed to snatch a rare book about Etruscan culture from his hands and slip it into her bag while negotiating the weekend rendezvous. The prospect of reclaiming that book taints his own motivation with a distinctly scholarly duplicity. He admits to himself that unlike Martin, he is a mere "dilettante," a man "playing at something which Martin lives." "Sometimes," he reflects, "I have the feeling that the whole of my polygamous life is a consequence of nothing but my imitation of other men." Yet he also acknowledges that playful imitation has been the controlling value of his life, an imperative of sorts, to which he has consistently subordinated all his personal interests and desires.

Martin and his narrator/companion represent Kundera's first variation on that mythical pair of sexual adventurers, Don Juan and his servant, whose name keeps changing with each new version of the story while his master's remains fixed forever. Don Juan's man is called Catalinón in Tirso de Molina's The Playboy of Seville; or, Supper with a Statue (1616?), becoming Sganarelle in Molière's Dom Juan (1665), and thereafter Leporello in Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto to Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (1787). Kierkegaard, in an essay on Mozart's tragicomic opera, observed that "there is also something erotic in Leporello's relationship to Don Juan, there is a power by which Don Juan captivates him, even against his will" ["The Immediate Stages of the Erotic or the Musical Erotic," Either/Or, translated by David F. Swenson, 1944]. This brilliant perception sheds indirect light on the bond that unites Martin and his friend. They are attached to each other by something that approximates but does not quite match the power of erotic seduction. Rather, they are inseparable as two game players are, who need each other to carry on with the game. Martin, whom his companion posits as the natural Don Juan, serves as a talismanic figure in whose living presence the illusion of physical authenticity is preserved, and he in turn uses his friend, always so obedient to the call of his master's unquestionable desire for women, as the mirror that will return a reassuring image of his own fabulous potency. Both are caught in a shared delusion of a perennially conquering male sexuality.

Kierkegaard heard in Mozart's opera the "opulent moment" of sensuousness rising above the dread to which Christian spirituality had consigned it. He interpreted Don Giovanni as the supreme classical expression of the Don Juan myth, capturing in all its ideality, as only music could, the "daemonic joy of life" that is Don Juan's gift to women. Kundera's treatment of the myth in Laughable Loves is essentially antimusical, charting an aggressively intellectual territory at the opposite pole from the Mozartian spirit of immediacy as Kierkegaard defined it. In Da Ponte's libretto, it is the servant Leporello who recites the famous catalogue of Don Giovanni's conquests, an "epic survey of his master's life," Kierkegaard calls it, whose tantalizingly incomplete tally of 1,003 invites the imagination to lose itself in an ever-expanding prospect of seductions to come. Kierkegaard conceived Mozart's Don Giovanni as "handsome, not very young," and placed his age at thirty-three, "the length of a generation." Martin, at forty, falls well within that span, in our contemporary reckoning. But Kundera's variation on Leporello clearly breaks away from the original mold. In the opera, Don Giovanni's power over Leporello is such that the servant can almost be assimilated to his master, even becoming "a voice for Don Juan." In the first scene of the second act, Don Giovanni and Leporello exchange costumes; the servant, instructed by his master, dons the mythical hat with white feathers, the broad cloak, and the sword of the sexual conquistador to woo the discarded Elvira, while the real Don Juan borrows his servant's clothes to seduce Elvira's maid.

The type of the great aristocrat slumming, le grand seigneur qui s'encanaille, was familiar to Parisian playgoers in the waning decades of the eighteenth century. Beaumarchais, whose comedy The Marriage of Figaro Da Ponte had adapted for Mozart a year earlier, in 1786, used the type con brio, provoking dangerously ambiguous laughter in the urbanized aristocratic audience. Don Juan also takes advantage of his servant one time too many, since for him too, it is growing late for such tricks. In his socialist Bohemia, Kundera's Don Juan retains no servant to compile the record of his amorous exploits. He is reduced to being his own accountant, but he requires a secondary male presence at his heels to witness the actuarial function that rivals and ultimately overwhelms the primary activity for which Don Juan's sword once stood as guarantor and metonymic emblem.

Martin is a highly theoretical quantifier of women. He has invented an elaborate verbal technique for targeting and pinning down his prey, and this is the essence of the art of seduction he teaches his disciple. In describing the two initial stages of his strictly codified, systematic approach to women, he deliberately uses the abstract, latinate words registrá (registration) and kontaktá (contact), words a pollster might use in preparing a survey. Martin's erotic foreplay is a cerebral activity that imitates the precision of a laboratory experiment, within a time frame arbitrarily limited as in a bureaucratic schedule. The adventure of the high road to sexual conquest starts in Prague at 2:00 P.M. and ends there before the stroke of 9:00 so that Martin, a devoted husband, can play a promised game of cards with his wife. The interval thus circumscribed is spacious enough for the two men to duly register and contact a number of new women on the way to the predetermined assignation with the nurses. The sexual consummation is postponed to a hypothetical future as the new contacts are carefully tucked away in Don Juan's impressive file.

Philip Roth has compared the Don Juanism in this story to "a sport played by a man against a team of women, oftentimes without body contact"—a witty metaphor that effectively expresses Roth's sense of the tale as a "mild satire" on Don Juanism. Martin's intellectual invention compares favorably with the typical spectator sport that middle-aged men commonly indulge in on Saturday afternoons, in New York as in Prague, seated before their television screens. But it seems to me that Kundera's tale has a deeper bottom than mild satire can fathom. The reflective narrator who watches Martin's game while also participating in it is contemplated from an even greater distance by the all-seeing yet unseen author. It was Kundera, after all, who gave the tale an epigraph from Pascal's Pensée 139, on divertissement: ". . . ils ne savent pas que ce n'est que la chasse, et non pas la prise qu'ils recherchent" (". . . they do not know that they seek only the chase and not the quarry"). The hunt, that quintessentially aristocratic sport of the seventeenth century, is Pascal's elected metaphor for the concept of divertissement, which he defines as "une occupation violente et impétueuse qui les détourne de penser à soi" ("a violent and impetuous activity that deflects men from thinking about themselves"). In Kundera's fiction, sex, not sport, is the privileged trope for the obsessive chase after nothingness that drives human beings away from the thought of death, which seems unbearable when all sense of God has been voided in the head. But Kundera insists on retaining the original, nonmetaphoric meaning of the word divertissement, which denotes a frivolous kind of entertainment. Frivolity assumes the value of a philosophical concept in Kundera's world. It functions as a snare for the spirit of gravity, or as an acid test for questions of the order Pascal raises in his meditation on the misery of the human condition in the absence of God.

By the end of the mock-epic narrative, Martin's reflective companion will have understood the illusory nature of his master's activity. At bottom, Martin is a mere imitator, just like his pupil, even though his game may be constructed from a real memory of his younger self. The narrator voices off abruptly at the moment when his cameralike eye has trained its lens on Martin, and himself at his side, traveling the road of return, suspended in futile animation within an ephemeral present quickened by elusive anticipation. Stoically faithful to the obligation of frivolity that Kundera likes to impose on his most conscious male characters, the disingenuous companion of borrowed adventure cuts off the inconclusive action with a fine verbal flourish, pinning down the forever receding object by naming it The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire. The sexual connotation of the symbolic apple lingers on within the word like a precious essence, even though Eve herself has become the vanishing point of an illusionistic prospect. The allusion to the primal sin in the lost garden, whose grave echo was heard in the Pascal epigraph, dissipates in the advancing twilight.

Kundera's Don Juans are haunted by the pathos of imitation and the consciousness of living a parodistic derivative of a once charismatic identity. In Laughable Loves, the perfection of the type is the intellectual and sexually practiced Dr. Havel, a man of wit who figures as the lead character in two of the stories. The first of these, "Symposium," takes the form of a miniature drama in five acts, built around the twin questions of love and death. Like the Platonic dialogue from which it takes off, it is primarily a drama of ideas. Talk occupies the foreground while a single event, Alzhbeta's questionable suicide attempt, occurs in the background and is brought forward for commentary, somewhat like Alcibiades' failed seduction of Socrates in Plato's text. The conversation, which engages three men and two women, plays itself out during an improvised party in a hospital staff room. Dr. Havel and the sex-starved nurse Alzhbeta are both on duty, and they are joined by three colleagues: the chief physician, a bald, aging, happily married philanderer; his attractive younger mistress, who is also a doctor; and the handsome young intern Flaishman.

The atmosphere inside the room is licentious and charged with crisscrossing currents of sexual tension. Alzhbeta, a mature woman whose beautiful body is topped by a repulsive face, desires Dr. Havel in particular and all men in general, only to be rebuffed by the three who are present. Flaishman, the would-be romantic, is drawn to the woman doctor and believes he has read the signals of his imminent success in her vaguely flirtatious manner. But she, whom her lover the chief physician has dubbed Diana, "cold, sportive, and spiteful," in the second act, will take sexual aim at her lover's friend Dr. Havel in the fourth act. The chief physician, also ranked as the senior libertine of the group, delivers himself of a tongue-in-cheek panegyric to Platonic love in the first act, having earlier expressed the opinion that "eroticism is not only a desire for the body, but to an equal extent a desire for honor. The partner, whom you've won, who cares about you and loves you, is your mirror, the measure of what you are and what you stand for. In eroticism we seek the image of our own significance and importance."

In postulating a solipsistic Eros, the chief physician has undermined the basic assumption behind the doctrine of philosophical love Diotima once taught Socrates. Plato's Eros is a force that unites two selves in the pursuit of a good higher than either of them can contain or muster in isolation. Diotima taught that the function of Eros was "that of procreation in what is beautiful, and such procreation can be either physical or spiritual" [Plato, Symposium]. Before bidding the physical realm of being farewell, the woman of Mantinea restored its essential dignity to the human body, by appropriating it as a central symbol of vitality in her myth of the philosopher's quest for truth and beauty. By contrast, Alzhbeta's body is held in contempt by the assembled sophists, whose practice of love is mired in mockery and whose discourse never rises above the level of doxa.

Alzhbeta is reduced to making imaginary love to herself in a sad mock striptease, which she performs fully clothed in the second act, to the embarrassment of those present. She leaves the room an offended woman, having unwittingly swallowed a dose of sleeping pills administered by Havel instead of the pep pill she had asked for. The truth about Alzhbeta's ensuing brush with death by gas inhalation is never established in the text. The chief physician calls it a fake suicide attempt staged to attract Havel's attention. Flaishman considers Alzhbeta's unrequited love for him the cause of a real suicide attempt that fans the flame of his erotic conceit. The woman doctor argues that it was a mishap: Alzhbeta's coffee water boiled over and extinguished the gas burner after she fell asleep. Dr. Havel affirms that Alzhbeta's intent was to offer her body to death since the living would have no part of it.

Death as the substitute lover is an image from Dr. Havel's myth about himself. In the first act, referring to his friend's sexual omnivorousness, the chief physician says, "You're like death; you take everything," and urges Alzhbeta's body upon him. In the second act, he reiterates that definition—"Havel is death"—contradicting the woman doctor, who says that "Havel is Don Juan. He's not old, but he's getting old." This exchange prompts Dr. Havel to deliver a brief discourse on "the end of the Don Juans."

"If I should pass judgment on whether I'm Don Juan or death, I must incline, albeit unhappily, toward the chief physician's opinion," said Havel, taking a long drink. "Don Juan. He, after all, was a conqueror. Rather in capital letters. A Great Conqueror. But I ask you, how can you be a conqueror in a domain where no one refuses you, where everything is possible and everything is permitted? Don Juan's era has come to an end. Today, Don Juan's descendant no longer conquers, but only collects. The figure of the Great Collector has taken the place of the Great Conqueror, only the Collector is no longer really Don Juan at all. Don Juan was a tragic figure. He was burdened by his guilt. He sinned gaily and laughed at God. He was a blasphemer and ended up in hell."

In quite another context, Kundera has called Prague the city of endings. It is the same city that had turned festive for Mozart when it saw and heard the world premiere of his Don Giovanni in 1787. With an uncanny sense of time and place, Kundera has brought the mythical playboy from Seville to die of exhaustion in an anonymous hospital not far from the old imperial town that was once the stage of his most refined triumph. Almost two centuries after Mozart, Kundera sees the defiance of death (in the form of the Commander's statue), and the subsequent descent into hell, as a verbal metaphor that evokes nostalgia rather than dread. He ushers his Don Juan to extinction with a flourish of talk aimed at chasing away a yawn, and not, like Tirso de Molina, with one last stab of the fabled blade into the empty air [See Tirso de Molina, The Playboy of Seville; or, Supper with a Statue].

Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the tragicomic myth of Don Juan is a legacy from the crepuscular glory of Spain's Golden Age. In the original play, Tirso portrayed Don Juan as a trickster, a feckless young man without a thought for death. "Plenty of time for that" is his refrain-like retort to all sermons. The fatal shaking of hands with the statue of the dead Commander is more a gesture of bravado than of blasphemy. It is above all an instinctive expression of the caste value of physical courage, the only virtue this aristocratic clown honors. But though his appetites may enjoy complete license, his mind is not yet libertine. "Let me send for a priest at least; I want to confess and be absolved" he cries on his way to hell.

It was Molière who first developed the intellectual potential of the type in his comedy Dom Juan. His hero believes in nothing save his own reason. "I believe two and two make four Sganarelle, and four and four make eight," he declares, mocking his superstitious servant. He is the ideal grand seigneur after the Fronde, untrammeled by feudal obligations and chafing at the tightening grip of authority. Molière endows him with a pursuing wife, Elvira, a woman no sooner wed than abandoned. Dom Juan argues the case for his boundless appetite for women and his need for variety on the basis of a convenient definition of Nature. He does not wait to be challenged to supper with the statue but initiates the invitation himself. Before going down under the Commander, he has one final chance to reject Elvira, when she enters as a veiled figure of Repentance, soon to be changed into the image of Time the Reaper, with scythe in hand. Arrogant to the end, the aristocratic libertine defies the moral connotation of death twice, once in the form of Repentance the temporal worm, and then as Damnation, the eternal one.

In Mozart's music for Da Ponte's libretto of Don Giovanni, Don Juan emerges in his fullest incarnation, brilliantly modulating the tension between the tragic and comic modes that was inherent in the myth from the start. Don Giovanni is the lyric embodiment of the phallic illusion that death can be conquered in the repetition ad infinitum of the small death of sexual consummation, when time, in its relentless thrust, is seized and held fast against the vertiginous beat of a woman's heart. If Mozart's Don Juan blasphemes, it is with the conviction of his loins, and not, like Molière's libertine, with his head.

Dr. Havel's postmortem invocation of the Don Juan myth alludes to all three classical versions of the hero—the conquistador turned playboy, the licentious blasphemer, and the genius of seduction—only to negate them in the type of the Great Collector. On Havel's argument, Don Juanism is a practical and philosophical impossibility. The Great Collector, the image of a Don Juan defeated by the absence of resistance, is contaminated by death long before his term on earth is up. Once his heroic antagonism with death has been demystified, the Great Conqueror assumes the attributes of his hated enemy. Dr. Havel admits to being "at most a figure of comedy," but it is a comedy corroded by sadness, without the expansive vitality of the Spanish archetype. "Only against the historical background of his tragic gaiety can you to some extent perceive the comic sadness of my womanizing existence," says Havel, admitting an awareness of his own lack of authenticity.

It is revealing that Havel, whose body is at its sexual apex in "Symposium" even as his mind sounds the death knell of the Don Juan myth, should be almost frantic to resurrect that myth when we meet him again in "Dr. Havel After Twenty Years." At this late stage in his career, he is a married man who has just developed gallbladder trouble. He finds himself wifeless on the tiny stage of a provincial spa, where he has gone to take the waters, and where he discovers to his dismay that his reputation as a Don Juan has preceded his anatomy down the road to decay. In his new vulnerability, he must endure the humiliation of being handled with businesslike indifference by a young masseuse administering water therapy. Even though he has long known that Don Juanism has lost its epic status, he now experiences a pathetic need to practice it again. This longing is not quite a desire for women but rather a violently childish caprice for something of himself that now seems gone forever. In his hour of need, the two subordinate characters from the old myth come to the rescue of the aging Don Juan: Leporello, in the familiar form of a younger disciple, and Elvira, the pursuing wife. In Kundera's variation, the wife is a glamorous movie star whose devotion to Havel is fed by a smoldering jealousy of his philandering. When she makes her appearance in the town, the provincial public is mesmerized by her unquestionable beauty and the magnitude of her fame. Riding the comet tail of that mirage, Havel slips back into the highest orbit of his former identity. Once again, all women are accessible to him, and he happily harnesses his verbal technique to his derivative charisma as the man in possession of a mysterious and beautiful wife.

Feeling reinstated in his mastery, Havel turns playfully malicious. His young friend and admirer, a local journalist, has succumbed to the seduction of his Don Juan reputation and has solicited his expert opinion on the worth of his current erotic interest, a young woman with whom he is starting to fall in love. In a tour de force of verbal mystification, Havel succeeds in redirecting his friend's attention to the frankly middle-aged Dr. Frantishka, whose expressive legs and manner of walking, he claims, possess a beauty far superior to "ready-made prettiness." The kindly woman doctor is in reality the embodiment of everything maternal, a category of femininity that stands at the opposite pole from the erotic in Kundera's world. She will keep on babbling about her grown son even as the baffled young journalist is making love to her. When the obedient disciple reports back to his master on this experience, Havel launches into a discourse on the role of words in making the most casual sexual encounter uniquely memorable. "They say of me that I'm a collector of women," explains the ci-devant Don Juan turned erotic sophist. "In reality, I'm far more a collector of words."

Its essential physicality infected by words, the Don Juan myth in Laughable Loves is also touched by a corresponding erosion of gender privilege. Woman, after all, no less than man, can play at being the Great Collector, and "death" (smrt) is female in Czech, as in the Romance languages. In the two remaining stories of the cycle, Kundera shows two mature women exercising a highly contemporary equality with men in the matter of sexual adventurism. In Kundera's fiction, supremacy in that domain belongs to technique, which goes with age and experience. But his erotic women seem to have a greater capacity than the men for slipping into blasphemy.

In "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," a story that belongs to the same 1969 cycle as the Havel diptych, a woman of dignity, a widow of ten years well into her fifties, surrenders herself to a man twenty years her junior. The event occurs during her trip to a small town to visit her husband's grave. But when the widow arrives at the cemetery, whose path she knows so well, she finds that "where the gray sandstone monument with the name of her husband in gold lettering used to be, precisely on that spot (she confidently recognized the two neighboring graves) now stood a black marble headstone with a quite different name in gilt." The cemetery administration explains that her ten-year lease on the grave has expired and was canceled automatically, without notice, because of overcrowding. The operative rule, they say, is that "the old dead ought to make room for the young dead". This statement of necessity couched as an upbeat slogan in the style of a mass society with futuristic ambitions, offends her spirit of reverence. Yet before the day is over, she herself will fling memory and self-respect to the winds for the sake of one last moment of sexual pleasure. She will give herself to the younger man who made love to her inexpertly once before, fifteen years earlier, when she still wore the halo of sexual grace.

The widow's conscious choice of sex above honor, the stepping over sacred memorials to the past and to the dead, recalls the blasphemous wooing in the cemetery that Pushkin imagined as the scene of Don Juan's greatest triumph. Kierkegaard, having postulated a reflective seducer, a master of "the beguiling, systematic, continuous seduction," as the romantic counterpart to the classical Don Juan, ruled Byron's Don Juan a failure because his seduction "extends itself epic ally." Writing in 1843, he did not know Pushkin's one-act play The Stone Guest (1830), where the romantic type of Don Juan achieves its ideal expression. In that drama, Doña Anna is the widow, not the daughter, of the Commander Don Juan has slain, apparently without any particular intent: "When hard by the Escurial we met, / He ran upon my sword-point and expired, / Just like a dragon-fly upon a pin." Don Juan first courts Doña Anna disguised as a monk, while she is at her devotions in front of her dead husband's monument. But the erotic will of this intensive seducer requires that he snatch the widow from the embrace of death and possess her in his own name, with his true identity unmasked. In the culminating fourth scene of the drama, which fuses the adventure of seduction and the confrontation with the statue, Don Juan and Doña Anna are both supremely conscious of the shadow of death at their shoulders, and they end by sinking into the ground in a mutual embrace. "Ah, what is death? For one sweet moment's tryst / I'd give my life without a murmur," Don Juan whispers to Doña Anna, who hesitates on the brink of surrender. He throws his defiance of death at her feet as his ultimate forfeit in a game where she hazards her feminine honor. But his victory over her, anticipated in the kiss she allows him just when the statue knocks at the door, is as much an expression of her tender pity for him ("And so you are concerned about the life / Of poor Juan!") as of her pride at having secured such a pledge of passion.

In Kundera's treatment of the wooing-over-the-grave motif, the woman's surrender also represents a collapse from the maternal into the erotic, but it is accomplished in a psychic atmosphere tainted by cynicism and vindictiveness. Kundera's fifty-five-year-old widow, who is also the mother of a demanding adolescent, harbors no illusions about the sexual moment she is about to share with this man from her distant past, almost a stranger to her now, but in whose memory she is enshrined as an elusively beautiful image. "She knew men and their approach to the female body. She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance." Neither of them really believes his tempting assurance that "she was still beautiful, that in fact nothing had changed, that a human being always remains the same." She, in particular, is painfully lucid about her body's inadequacy for the task to which their mutual greed for a taste of the past compels her. Like Pushkin's Doña Anna, she must choose between the moment's seduction and her honor, though in this case the memorial she is about to betray is more "her memorial, which this man beside her had honored for fifteen years in his thoughts," than her husband's. She suddenly visualizes her "son-enemy" as a monster of youthful egotism denying her the last vestiges of sexuality and pushing her closer to her grave. It is he, the living ghost, rather than her buried husband, who stands at her shoulder with a forbidding memento mori countenance while she hesitates. When she finally gives in to her insistent seducer, she inwardly hisses at her invisible son the blasphemous words "The old dead must make room for the young dead, my boy!", and with that profane thought, she turns to her last joyless lovemaking. Kundera, like Pushkin before him, interrupts the erotic scene at the moment of her yielding, but not before he has changed the embracing lovers into an obscene vision of carrion flesh mating over an open grave.

The last of the stories, "Edward and God," is the adventure of a seducer who, entangled in an irresistible combination of social necessity and his own hypocrisy, becomes a blasphemer in spite of himself. Edward begins by courting Alice, a young woman whose anachronistic religiosity forbids sexual consummation outside marriage. In order to achieve his end, he feigns a vague yearning for Alice's God, which immediately heightens her interest in their relationship. He goes with her to church, carefully mimicking her pious gestures with the studied mien of a Tartuffe. But soon his devotion is duly noted by the powers that be, and since this is a small town in the late fifties, he is hauled before a committee of socialist inquisitors at the school where he teaches.

The school directress is a fanatical Communist who was the cause of Edward's older brother's expulsion from the university years earlier, when he made light of her extravagant display of grief over Stalin's death. Now she is an ugly spinster "with the greasy black hair of a gypsy, black eyes, and black down under her nose", and with a secret penchant for young men. In imminent danger of being driven out of his job, Edward summons his powers of hypocrisy. This time he plays the other side of the coin of his putative faith in God, reinterpreting the theology of doubt with which he had courted the reluctant Alice as a crisis of a convinced Communist assailed by irrational religious belief. He explains to the committee that in spite of all the arguments his well-trained reason may advance, he cannot get rid of his faith in God. "You see, comrades, I'm telling it to you the way it is. It's better that I confess to you, because I don't want to be a hypocrite. I want you to know what I'm really like," he tells them, hanging his head.

This ostentatious demonstration of sincerity touches a responsive chord in the directress's gypsy heart. She takes Edward under her wing as her special pedagogic project, and he soon realizes that the game has slipped out of his control and that he is now a pawn in her erotic power play. The stage is thus set for the grotesque scene in the bachelorette flat where the directress has lured him for the kill. Entangled in the strings of his virtuoso lies, Edward is forced to confront the consequences of his words, and when the moment of truth ripens to the point where rhetoric must yield to action, Edward fears that "his body would sabotage his assiduous will." The anguish of physical impotence is holding him in a deadly grip when in a sudden inspiration he seizes upon the power of blasphemy to stiffen his faltering desire. Acting out the role of a religious man about to overstep the barrier of mortal sin, Edward commands the atheist woman to assume a kneeling posture and pray, "so that God may forgive us."

As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure: in front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness.

Edward, master of the easy lie, who has devised this farcical scene of make-believe blasphemy out of extreme expediency, is suddenly transformed into a master of erotic sadism. Intoxicated by "this threefold image of degradation", he finds that he can now command his body at will. The double-edged blasphemy performed at crosspurposes by the believing Communist and the assumed Christian acts like a magic philter to release Edward's sexual drive.

The conquest of Alice, which follows in the next section, is almost a letdown for Edward after the satanic high he has reached with the directress. Alice gives herself to him because she sees him as a martyr suffering at the hands of the Communist system she hates. But Edward, who knows better, is disappointed in the second prize his hypocrisy has won for him. He secretly reproaches Alice for so easily betraying her once all-powerful God of chastity.

Edward's story is told by a discursive narrator whose ironic manner recalls the narrator/participant of "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire." This time, the final click of the camera delivers a double exposure of Edward: as he sits alone in an empty church, "tormented with sorrow, because God does not exist," the shadow of a smile is superimposed on his face, with its solemn mask, for the grieving hypocrite senses "the genuine living face of God" emerging from the depths of that sorrow. The narrator treats Edward's sad face as a photographic pentimento and begs his readers, "Please, keep him in your memory with this smile," having already implicated us all in Edward's condition with a dramatic sigh in the manner of Gogol: "Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously!"

The world of Edward, which he shares with Martin and Dr. Havel and all the other sophistic lovers and their victims, is a small socialist country with sealed borders, where a man can travel from the center to the periphery and back again in the space of a single afternoon. On that radically reduced theatrum mundi, men and women pursue each other, striving to recapture a sense of their own centrality by escaping the dull anonymity of their social condition into the illusion of a privileged sexual moment. But in the place of sensuality they find only a phantom freedom, a verbal artifact that functions as the dialectical negation of a ubiquitous external power that has posited itself as the only permissible image of God.