SOURCE: "The Cyclic Form of Laughable Loves," in Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction, edited by Aron Aji, Garland Publishing Inc., 1992, pp. 132-52.

[In the following essay, Carroll considers Laughable Loves as a short story cycle, in which awareness of the interrelationship of the stories is essential for a full understanding of each individual narrative and the collection as a whole.]

The fiction of Milan Kundera has inspired an avalanche of critical attention in recent years; in fact, as we come to realize the importance of his work, Kundera studies are becoming, as this volume evidences, something of a "growth industry." The works that have attracted the greatest critical attention are his most recent (and most fully realized) offerings: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, in order to understand Kundera's work as a whole, we must turn back to his earliest fiction. We must do so, first of all and most obviously, because there is a thematic nexus that links all of the works of any given writer's oeuvre; naturally, we find that these works as a whole are characterized by certain (we might say "Kunderan") preoccupations. Second, we must do so in order to understand the aesthetic trajectory of his career, for these works not only represent a continuation of the traditional function of prose fiction as thematic exploration through what Kundera (in Art of the Novel) refers to as nondidactic discourse: they also continue another tradition, that of formal complexity and experimentation—the tradition of, to name a few, Conrad, Kafka, and Nabokov. Kundera's aesthetic trajectory is best understood by turning to his very first work as a fiction writer, Laughable Loves, a work which serves as the aesthetic prototype for The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and to some extent The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Unfortunately, the importance of this early work is generally overlooked; this is in part due to the fact that until quite recently a definitive English-language edition has not been available.

Laughable Loves has, for a contemporary work, a rather involved publication history. As Kundera himself remarked in an interview with Lois Oppenheim [in Review of Contemporary Fiction, 2 (1989)], his first short story "I, Sad God" (1959), marks the end of his career as a poet and playwright and the beginning of his career as a fiction writer. In 1963, this story and two others ("My Nurse Above All Others" and "Nobody Will Laugh") were published (by Cekoslovensky Spisovatel, the Czech state publishing organ) in a single volume, entitled Smesne Lasky [Laughable Loves]. In 1965, a Second Rook of Laughable Loves was published: it included "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," "The Herald," and perhaps the most renowned Kundera story, "The Hitchhiking Game." In 1968, a Third Book of Laughable Loves was published; it included "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," "Symposium," "Edward and God," and "Doctor Havel After Ten Years."

The three separate books were published for the first time as a single volume in 1970—the last book by Kundera to be published in his native land (although with the Czech revolution of November 1989, there can be no doubt that Kundera's works will once again be available in his own country). In this edition, Kundera eliminated two of the stories ("My Nurse Above All Others" and "The Herald") but otherwise retained the same order and the tripartite structure, which is indicated in this volume by upper case Roman numerals and a blank page between each volume.

Also in 1970, Gallimard Publishers released a first French edition of Risibles Amours. Kundera decided to drop yet another story ("I, Sad God"), leaving seven of the original ten. For the first French edition Kundera also eliminated the tripartite division indicated by the Roman numerals and inverted the ordering of the last two pairs of stories, forming what would be the final, intended arrangement:

Nobody Will Laugh

The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire

The Hitchhiking Game

Symposium

Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead

Doctor Havel After Ten Years

Edward and God

The French edition was followed by Polish and Italian editions, and in 1974, the first English-language edition (Knopf). However, this first English edition (as Kundera points out in an Poznamka autora [Author's Note] which accompanies the 1981 Czech-language edition published in Toronto) presents the stories in an arbitrary order. During this period just before his emigration, Kundera had a difficult time managing his affairs. The arrangement for the English edition was done, as he points out, without his knowledge, and he was not happy with it. The first English edition obscures the relationship between Laughable Loves and the work for which it served as a prototype, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. This is no small matter, for Kundera's fiction, like that of James Joyce, is characterized by an almost obsessive concern for the architectonics of narrative form. To read the stories of Laughable Loves in random order is no more critically acceptable than it would be to read Joyce's Dubliners in like fashion. In any case, this first English edition was reprinted for the first time by Penguin in 1975 and then reprinted (according to the publishing information in the revised edition of the text) nine times between 1980 and 1988.

In 1979, Gallimard provided Kundera with the opportunity to revise, resulting in a definitive French edition. The ordering of the stories was the same as that of the 1970 French edition, but Kundera made a number of relatively minor textual changes. In 1981, the firm 88 Publishers (located in Toronto) published a definitive Czech edition, and in 1987, Penguin published the first definitive English-language edition, which followed the ordering of stories indicated in the Gallimard.

When read in its intended arrangement, Laughable Loves is a work with a totalizing form. This was apparent even before the work was at last completed. After the second volume of Laughable Loves was published, a number of Czech reviewers pointed in one way or another to the volumes' common thematic center. Juri Opelik, for instance, noted [in a review in Listy 15 (1969)] that the stories use the theme of sexuality to examine problems of ideology. Another Czech critic, Milan Blahynka, noted [in a review in Planten 1 (1967)] that the first two volumes of Laughable Loves can be seen as having an overall dialectic pattern. And in an article on Kundera published in 1975, Robert Porter extends Blahynka's notion of a dialectical pattern in the cycle to include all three volumes. According to Porter, the first volume of stories center on characters who fail in their efforts to control the lives of others, while the second volume demonstrates that people are not even capable of controlling their own lives, for "a new dimension may suddenly emerge, a game may become too real, a joke become a tragedy." In the third volume, Porter sees a synthesis: having shown that man cannot control the lives of others or, for that matter, his own, man must now "come to terms with the world and with what freedom he has" ("Freedom Is My Love," Index on Censorship 4, No. 4, 1975). In very schematic terms, then, Blahynka and Porter correctly identify the thematic unity and complex interplay of parts in this work.

The arrangement, the unity, and the interplay of discrete narrative units in Laughable Loves is not, of course, unique. Forrest L. Ingram, in a ground-breaking study entitled Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century; Studies in a Literary Genre, brought critical attention to bear on a number of notable cycles such as Dubliners, The Hunger Artist, and Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. Ingram defines the story cycle as a "set of stories linked to each other in such a way as to maintain a balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the larger unit." An important element of this fundamental scheme is a dynamic tension between the independence and the inter-dependence of the constituent parts—a structural ambiguity. Every story cycle, says Ingram, is characterized by a "double tendency of asserting the individuality of its components" while simultaneously asserting "the bonds of unity which make the many into a single whole." The individual units of the cycle are discrete in that they have their own beginnings, middles, and ends, and that they can be read as complete works in and of themselves—they can stand up on their own without the contextual support of the cycle. The totality of the cycle, on the other hand, results from what Ingram calls the "dynamic patterns of recurrence and development."

The patterns of recurrence may be of several varieties; for example, a thematic axis—in the case of Dubliners, the "paralysis" of Irish culture. Certain characters or character types may also provide a repetitive pattern, as with Nick Adams in Hemingway's In Our Times, who, as Susan Garland Mann notes in her study of this genre, serves as the work's "most explicit unifying device". The pattern of development, on the other hand, may assume the same forms but in a way that creates a linear trajectory and thus a kind of mega-narrative for the cycle: in Dubliners the characters become progressively older as one moves through the cycle; more significantly, as Brewster Ghiselin observes [in "The Unity of Dubliners," Accent, Spring, 1956], there is a discernible "movement of the human soul, in desire of life, through various conditions." And in Faulkner's The Unvanquished Ingram observes a "logically sequential development of action" as one moves from story to story. The twin patterns of recurrence and development, then, account for a cycle's unity, and these patterns are set in opposition to the independence, the sense of self-containedness and closure, of each of the constituent narrative units. It should be noted that none of this need be symmetrical—some stories in a cycle may be fiercely independent, even to the point of seeming out of place. Other stories may form subsets, a strategy that is an important part of Kundera's two cyclic works: the stories "Symposium" and "Dr. Havel After Twenty Years" establish the only instance of narrative continuity (in the usual sense) in Laughable Loves; this is likewise true of Parts Four and Six of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In this instance, a particular bonding of stories gives the work added coherence to stabilize, as it were, the contrasting pull of disunity. On the other hand, as Gerald Kennedy points out in his study of the short story cycle [in "Towards a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle," Journal of the Short Story in English 11 (1988)], clusters of stories within a collection "may give special attention to a particular idea; in effect, such combinations form a sequence within a sequence." This is precisely what Maria Banerjee observes in her recent essay on a pair of stories in Laughable Loves. She notes that in "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," and "Doctor Havel After Twenty Years," Kundera makes explicit use of the Don Juan myth ["The Impossible Don Juan," Review of Contemporary Fiction 2 (1989)]. In the former story, we find a variation on that "mythical pair of sexual adventures, Don Juan and his servant" and in the latter, the young editor is reminiscent of Don Juan's servant while Havel's wife reminds us of the pursuing spouse, Elvira.

Another important aspect of Ingram's theory is the notion of a "spectrum" of story cycles, which in turn suggests three sub-genres: the composed, the arranged, and the completed cycle. The composed cycle is one which the author "had conceived as a whole from the time he wrote its first story," and as such the author composes his work according to the demands of a "master plan." The arranged cycle is at the other end of the spectrum, consisting of stories "which an author or editor-author has brought together to illuminate or comment upon one another by juxtaposition or association," and they are obviously the "loosest" of story cycles. The third subgenre that Ingram describes is the "completed" cycle, which consists of stories that are

neither strictly composed nor arranged. They may have begun as independent dissociated stories. But soon their author became conscious of unifying strands which he may have, even subconsciously, woven into the action of the stories. Consciously, then, he completed the unifying task which he may have subconsciously begun.

Two notable examples of the third type, the completed cycle, are found in Kafka's Ein Hungerkunstler and Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples. Although the stories of Kafka's cycle were written over a period of four years, and despite the fact that one of the four was previously published, it is also true that Kafka carefully selected the stories he wished to include in a single volume and that he firmly insisted that the stories be arranged in a particular way. Welty likewise had strong feelings about the arrangement of her story cycle, and her comments on the composing process in the case of cyclic form are revealing. "All this time in the back of my head," Welty says, "these connections had worked themselves out. I had just go get the clue, like a belated detective . . ." (Conversations with Eudora Welty, edited by Peggy Whitman, 1984).

Apparently, the cyclic mode of composition was ingrained in Kundera as an aesthetic practice before he even turned to fiction. Kundera's father was a noted music professor, and Kundera himself was a musician and composer during the first phase of his artistic carrer. In Art of the Novel, Kundera goes to impressive extremes to demonstrate that the architectonics of his literary works are derived from his musical ideas. In discussing one of his early compositions, he notes that it

was almost a caricature preview of the architecture of my novels, whose future existence I didn't even faintly suspect at that time. That Composition for Four Instruments is divided—imagine!—into seven parts. As in my novels, the piece consists of parts that are very heterogenous in form. . . . That formal diversity is balanced by a very strong thematic unity: from start to finish, only two themes ... are elaborated.

These cyclic tendencies carried over to Kundera's first literary efforts: as Opelik notes, Laughable Loves bears considerable resemblance to Kundera's lyric cycle, Monology. In this respect, Kundera's literary career parallels that of two other notable writers: James Joyce's poem-cycle, Chamber Music, is clearly a prelude to Dubliners; William Faulkner's Visions of Spring Day may likewise be viewed as a formal experiment that paved the way for Go Down, Moses. In this regard, all three writers may be said to possess what P. M. Kramer, in her work on cyclic form, has called a "cyclic habit of mind" [The Cyclical Method of Composition in Gottfried Keller's "Das Sinngedicht", 1939].

Given that Kundera wrote the stories of Laughable Loves over a ten-year period and that the final form of the work came to him in the process of composition, arrangement, and rearrangement, it seems clear that it may be regarded as (to use Ingram's "spectrum") a completed cycle, and that his experience in the creation of this work inevitably influenced the form of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a much more aesthetically ambitious and unified work—a composed cycle. As Kundera himself said in a 1983 interview, in the process of eliminating three of the original ten stories and arranging the final version, "the collection had become very coherent, foreshadowing the composition of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting " ("The Art of Fiction LXXXI," Paris Review, Summer, 1984). This makes it all the more apparent that to read the stories of Laughable Loves in random order would be to disregard the authorial intent and the aesthetic coherence of this work.

The question of response, important in the study of any literary form, is particularly important in the study of cyclic texts, for their generic nature is not signaled by any traditional code—and yet, they elicit in the reader, in the process of successive interpretive activities, a sense of their generic nature. They provide for a particular kind of literary experience. As Ingram points out, the stories of a cycle are connected in such a way that the "reader's experience of each is modified by his experience of others." Further, "while each story in a cycle may be relatively simple, the dynamic of the cycle itself often poses a major challenge to the critic. . . . Shifting internal relationships, of course, continually alter the originally perceived pattern of the whole cycle." In spite of this statement, however, Ingram's analyses of various story cycles do not attempt to reconstruct this dynamism: Ingram's "fundamental assumptions," as he puts it, are in keeping with the New Critical formalism of Cleanth Brooks. Thus, as Gerald Kennedy notes in a recent article on the "poetics" of story cycles, Ingram treats the "unity of those works as an intrinsic feature of the writing rather than as a function or product of his own reading." Nonetheless, Ingram is absolutely correct in pointing to the "challenge to the critic" which is entailed in such an endeavor. The challenge is that of tracing a hypothetic reading activity as it moves through the maze of textual connections.

What happens when we read, and more particularly, what happens when we read a cyclic text? The most satisfying answers, it seems to me, are to be found in phenomenology, particularly in Wolfgang Iser's adaption of Husserl's foundational concept, protension and retention:

... throughout the reading process there is a continual interplay between modified expectations and transformed memories. However, the text itself does not formulate expectations or their modification; nor does it specify how the connectability of memories is to be implemented. This is the province of the reader himself, and so here we have a first insight into how the synthesizing activity of the reader enables the text to be translated and transferred to his own mind. This process of translation also shows upon the basic hermeneutic structure of reading. Each sentence correlate contains what one might call a hollow section, which looks forward to the next corrolate, and a retrospective section, which answers the expectations of the preceding sentence (now a part of the background). Thus every moment of reading is a dialectic of protension and retention, conveying a future horizon yet to be occupied, along with a past (and continually fading) horizon already filled. . . . [The Act of Reading, 1978]

In her essay on cyclic form, Agnes Gereben discusses a similar phenomenon, although her grammatics are on the level of narratological units rather than the sentence and are thus even more well-suited for our purposes. She refers to this feature as the "network of cross-reference" in cyclic texts. As she explains it, if a prior narrative unit of a given story cycle contains, for instance, "an objectified simile, a situation, an attitude or value," and this given element reoccurs in a later narrative unit, then there is no 'vacuum' in the reader's mind where it tries to find its location, but it 'triggers' a field in it that has already been conditioned" ["The Syntactics of Cycles of Short Stories," Essays in Poetics, 1 (1986)].

Regarding Laughable Loves, a good place to start is in the middle, for by doing so we may trace several strands of the dialectic of retention. The title of the third story, "The Hitchhiking Game," demonstrates how textual structures such as sub-titles and prefaces may serve as a key to form and meaning, for it announces that we shall most likely be presented with characters who are game players, and with this a pre-conditioned field is "triggered." That is, even by the second story of the cycle ("The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire") a perceptible pattern of games, established in the first story ("Nobody Will Laugh"), becomes evident. In the protagonists of the first two stories, Klima and Martin respectively, we have the repetition of a character type in that they are both deeply involved in "games" that are hopelessly and pathologically out-of-control. In Klima's case the problem is so severe that it is not so much that he is playing a joke as it is that he is being played by a joke. He continues in his refusal to write a review of Zaturetsky's article and thus embarks on a peculiar game of hiding from the man. His motivation in this regard is complex: he enjoys Zaturetsky's adulation of him, and as a result he has no desire to devastate the man by rejecting his mediocre review. More importantly, however, he is intimidated by Zaturetsky's strong will, and more importantly still, there is his love for the "game"—a game that turns the respected scholar into a child lost in a fantasy world. In his delight at having successfully eluded Zaturetsky through a series of ruses, Klima exclaims, "I longed to put on a bowler hat and stick on a beard. I felt like Sherlock Holmes or the invisible man .. . I felt like a little boy." His game inevitably leads to his downfall—to the examining committee and dismissal (an institution and an act that are repeatedly portrayed in Kundera's fiction).

Martin's game is likewise compulsive and out of control, and, like Klima's, regressive in nature: womanizing is Martin's way of denying that he is getting old. As the narrator explains, Martin has "the most regular sort of marriage" and "above this reality (and simultaneous with it), Martin's youth continues, a restless, gay, and erring youth transformed into a mere game." In these two stories, then, the reader finds a repetition, the simultaneous presence of similarity and difference: the game played by Martin in "Golden Apple" is, first of all, an ironic inversion of the one played by Klima, for in Klima's game of lying and avoidance, it is he, Klima, who is the prey while Zaturetsky is the pursuer; conversely, it is Martin who is the pursuer and women—women of all kinds—who are the prey. Furthermore, the reader's initial recognition of cyclicity informs an act of protension: the reader will be inclined to expect more of the same, and the ensuing narrative units will be read with the suspicion that recurrent themes, character types, and tropes may be lurking therein. Iser calls this the "the consistency building habit which underlies all comprehension." Thus, the observation of a thematic connection between the second and the first stories leads inexorably to other connections, leads to the filling of conceptual "gaps." The reader has begun to intuit the genre.

And thus, to return now to where we were—at the beginning of the third story, "The Hitchhiking Game"—the reader enters the story preconditioned by the game motif. The game played by the young man and his girl (the characters in this story are weirdly anonymous) is yet another kind of game: he pretends to be the type of man who uses women as mere instruments of pleasure, while she, at first coerced by the young man but later doing so of her own volition, plays the role of the freewheeling, lascivious woman. As different as this game is from those played in the previous two stories, there is yet an underlying similarity: Martin pretends to be a young man merrily going about the business of sowing his wild oats while he is in fact a middle-aged married man; Klima, the college professor, pretends to be a prankish schoolboy. It is furthermore noteworthy that the young man provides another example of the regressive personality type, for his desire to be the "heartless tough guy," we are told, is rooted in the "childish desires [which] withstand all the snares of the adult mind and often survive into ripe old age." Through this psychological profile, the underlying similarity between the regressive types—Klima, Martin, and the young man—emerges quite unmistakably. And as in the case of the game played by Klima, the young couple's game of make-believe along with their lack of foresight soon gets out of control and leads to yet another downfall. For Klima, that downfall is the destruction of a career; for the couple in the present story, it is the destruction of a relationship. This game motif continues through a number of other stories in the cycle, in particular the "Havel stories," both of which revolve around cruel hoaxes.

At this stage of the cycle another thematic gestalt begins to emerge: the related notions of womanizing, eroticism, and sexual identity. The successive kinds of womanizing which become apparent as one moves through the cycle forms an ironic sequence: in the first story, we have a man (Zaturetsky) who is in no way a womanizer but who is nonetheless accused (by the playful Klima) of being one. In the second story, we have a skillful lady's man (Martin, who has gone so far as to create a bizarre kind of science of the activity, replete with its own jargon) who would be a full-blown womanizer were it not for his essential conventionality and his guilty regard for his wife. And in the third story, we have a young man who fantasizes about being a lewd, whoring tough-guy, a womanizer of the worst kind, while he is actually a typical young man in a typical monogamous relationship.

It is in the fourth story, "Symposium," in the character of Alzhbeta, that the reader finds thematic and imagistic elements which enable him to once again cast back through the text in order to form a larger constellation of meaning. When Alzhbeta performs a mock strip-tease for a rather uninterested group of doctors, the resultant image strongly echoes the young woman's strip-tease in "The Hitchhiking Game," a fact which points to the special power of mental imagery in the process of constructing text totality. And yet, even as the reader notes this similarity, there are also a number of discernible and significant differences. The young woman of the previous story has to assume the role of the whore in order to feel comfortable with her sexuality. Alzhbeta, on the other hand, is fully at ease with her body—indeed, her only problem seems to be getting someone to take notice of it, and thus she cries out "Look at me! I am alive anyhow!. . . . For the time being I am still alive!" This refrain clearly recalls the "pitiful tautology" of the young woman: "I am me, I am me . . ." The ironic inversion (a trope repeatedly invoked as the spokes of the cycle come together), however, is that while Alzhbeta wants her sexuality to be noticed, the young woman wants her lover to forget her sexuality (manifested in her role as the whore) and recall her inner, personal identity.

The endings of narratives—cycles included—hold a position of particular importance in terms of the reading process. At the moment of textual closure, the process of protension has ceased, for there is no more text for the reader to anticipate. At this juncture the reader's attention becomes fully retentive, and the text becomes less a temporal and more a spacial entity: as Elaine Torgovnick notes, the text now "seems to pose before our eye to assume its geometry" [Closure in the Novel, 1981]. The activity which takes place at the point of closure, a point at which the reader looks back into the text with the desire to grasp its totality, is best described by Barbara Smith's term, "retrospective patterning" [Poetic Closure, 1968]. The term is apt, for it encapsulates the paradoxical combination of dynamism (retrospection is an activity, a mental process) and stasis (a pattern is a static entity). The patterns that congeal, to return to Ingram's theory, may either be linear or repetitive—what Ingram calls "patterns of development" and "patterns of recurrence" respectively. Furthermore, entirely new thematic configurations may be triggered by the activity. As Iser notes, a basic element of the reading process, is this succession of gestalt formations; furthermore, "each gestalt bears with it those possibilities which it has excluded but which may eventually invalidate it." Acts of memory and reinterpretation within the reading process, then, can allow for a conceptual realignment of text which had already been conceptualized. The parts of a cycle are indeed, as Ingram says, like the moving and shifting parts of a mobile.

Placing the reader at the end of the cycle—that is, at the seventh and final story, "Edward and God"—we can observe a number of ways in which the thematic gestalten which evolve during the process of moving through the cycle become "retrospectively patterned." To return to our discussion of the various female characters in the cycle, Chehachkova, the major female figure of the seventh story, is, at first, completely unlike any of the other female characters we have encountered thus far. She is, first and foremost, a dedicated Communist. But when she decides to confess her innermost beliefs, she reveals that she holds a transcendental view—albeit a kind of socialist transcendentalism. Chehachkova espouses a belief in something beyond the self—"man is not in this world for his own sake." At this point a linear pattern in terms of the representation of women in the cycle is revealed: as we have moved towards the end of the cycle, the female characters become progressively more inclined to make pronouncements as per the possibility of transcending mortality. Consider the woman in the fifth story, "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," who sees her son as an extension of her life and who believes that a man's accomplishments transend his physical being. Consider also Doctor Frantishka (from the sixth story, "Dr. Havel After Twenty Years"), who makes similar proclamations to her young lover. Given this trend, it seems with the title "Edward and God" that perhaps we have been inevitably led to the transcendent word and concept par excellence. And indeed, the story ends with Edward in a church. And though the narrator notes that the story does not end with "so ostentatious a paradox" as Edward's religious conversion, he does long for the God who does not exist.

Chehachkova is furthermore related to other female characters in the text in that she too will strip before the examining eye of the male. She is thus the final link in a chain of women (enchained women) who are put time and again in this (usually compromising) position. And like the women in "The Hitchhiking Game" and "Symposium," she wants her partner to see not merely her appearance, but her inner essence, and thus her cry—"I am not a boring woman! That I am not"—is but another version of Alzhbeta's "Look at me .. . I am alive" and the young woman's lament, "I am me!" Moreover, her male counterpart is much like the other male counterparts in that he finds a certain excitement in subjecting women to degradation. The scene in which Edward forces Chehachkova to kneel naked before him while reciting the Lord's Prayer clearly recalls the strip scene in "Hitchhiking Game," but with (yet another) ironic inversion: whereas the young man in the previous story got his thrills by making his lover act like a whore while doing a striptease, Edward wants Chehachkova to behave like a devout Christian (fitting, for she is indeed a Stalinist nun). In both cases the result is the same—degradation for the female, excitement for the male.

Thus, at this late juncture in the cycle yet another thematic gestalt emerges, a socio-sexual one triggered by the repeated female image—the "games" the various male characters play are often at the expense of women. This is most obviously the case in the Havel stories and "The Hitchhiking Game." However, upon reconsideration and a realignment of what Gereben calls "the network of crossreference," it is true of other characters in the cycle as well: consider the way Professor Klima toys with Klara, offering her false promises of a better life. Or Martin, who thinks nothing of "registering" a woman, making a date, and then leaving her in the lurch, and thus Martin is another punishing womanizer. Or the male protagonist of "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," whose sexual desire "was mixed with the desire to debase" the woman from his past.

Of the various forms of closural patterns, the most relevant, of course, to the cycle is what Torgovnick, in her catalogue of closural activities, calls circularity, which occurs when the ending "clearly recalls the beginning in some way, perhaps in its language or in situation." In Laughable Loves, this occurs through character, for Chehachkova's male counterpart, Edward, is almost a re-enactment of Professor Klima. Like Klima, Edward experiences an exhilarating moment of freedom when he does something he knows he shouldn't—in this case attending a Catholic Mass. In the church, Edward could not resist a "compelling desire" to kneel, to cross himself, in short, to "do something he'd never done before," and in so doing he feels "magnificently free." And like Klima, he is a teacher, one who is, moreover, under the scrutiny of those who doubt he is fit to teach. Edward's story is also one of persecution and that peculiar Stalinist institution, the examining committee. Finally, as in the case of Klima and other characters we have discussed, Edward finds that once one has started a game, it takes on a life of it own and sweeps one along with it, whether one wishes it to or not.

The more political nature of "Edward and God" (overt references to the death of Stalin, the revolutionary generation, and the polarized nature of Czech society after the revolution) along with the way it mirrors the first story of the cycle together set the stage for textual realignment and transformation. In the final story, the examination of political structures re-emerges, retentively reactivates similar material in the first unit of the cycle, and, as though illuminated by refracted light bouncing back and forth between the opening and closing units, the political ramifications (dormant in the reader's consciousness since Klima's ordeal with the examining committee) of the intervening units become emphasized.

Take "The Hitchhiking Game." The young man, as we have seen, is drawn towards the brutal results of his fantasy. But what lies behind the game? What is the motive? "The main road of [the young man's] life," we are told, "was drawn with implacable precision. . . . Even two weeks' vacation didn't give him a feeling of liberation and adventure; the gray shadow of precise planning lay even here." When he decides to take the road which leads to some place other than their all-too-planned vacation, it pushes the game "into a higher gear," but it also stands as a decisive move towards freedom, a break with the gloomy and monotonous "plannedness" of things. The girl's willingness to play the game and become the fantasy woman, the woman of "happy go lucky irresponsibility" is similar: ". . . she had quite a tiresome job . . . and a sick mother. So she often felt tired. . . . She didn't have particularly good nerves or self-confidence and easily fell into a state of anxiety or fear."

An important part of their motive, then, is to escape the dismal limitations of their life. Once the reader comes to this realization, it can be connected with what he has read in other parts of the cycle, and this thematic gestalt absorbs other units of text. Thus, Martin's womanizing seemed at first to be largely a matter of trying to deny the aging process and the ineluctable forward march of time. But we will also remember that he is a married man with a job, and his erotic games must be cut short so that he can get home by the matrimonially-imposed deadline of 9:00 p.m. And so he too plays a game not only because of his regressive personality, but, at least in a limited sense, as a bid for freedom. Dr. Havel reveals similar motives when he rationalizes his rejection of a woman (a bizarre move for a confirmed womanizer). He first states that, given his predictable behavior, he should have slept with her: "All the statistics would have worked it out that way." And then he quickly adds that "perhaps for those very reasons, I don't take her. Perhaps I want to resist necessity. To trip up causality. To throw off the predictability of the world's course through the whimsicality of caprice." As Banerjee notes, Don Juans do what they do in order to escape "the dull anonymity of their social condition." Much the same is true of the male character of the fifth story ("Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead"), whose desire to recapture the past is the flip side of his reconciliation to his "not too exciting life . . . and the monotonous rowdiness which surrounded him at work," Furthermore, Klima's game with Zaturetsky, a game which initially seemed to be a manifestation of a regressive personality, is now opened for re-conceptualization and can become part of a new thematic configuration, one based on a social rather than psychoanalytic model. After all, early in that story, after he had been more-or-less ordered to follow standard procedure and write a nasty letter to Zaturestsky trashing his work, Klima thinks to himself, "why should I have to be Mr. Zaturetsky's executioner?" Thus, Klima's game may also be seen as an attempt to break away from narrow organizational limits.

It is clear that these characters share similar motivations. They all seem, as Havel articulates it (speaking, as it were, on behalf of the other characters), to want to "derail life from its dreary predictability." Those games may thus be viewed as originating in a desire to break free from a rigid social order, and thus those game-players may be driven not only by psychopathological conditions, but also by their discontent with the social arena in which they play. They are trapped by routine, and the reader's recognition of this reinforces the deepening impression that the effects of social and political conditions on the individual is a central theme of this work.

This dynamic, in terms of response and closure, illustrates the operation of "retrospective patterning," which in this case encourages the emergence of a thematic gestalt that is political in nature: in the final conceptualization, when one lifts the photographic plate from the chemical bath, a portrait of a politically-oppressive society is seen to have developed. However mild, ironic, and subdued that portrait may be, it is nonetheless unmistakably there. It is important to note, however, that the characters of Laughable Loves are never more than dimly aware of their collective malady, and this very lack of awareness emerges as an important corollary of this thematic core. Character after character, one realizes in retrospect, is peculiarly blind to his own motivations and to where his actions lead. Certainly, Edward moves blindly towards disaster, as do the young man ("Hitchhiking Game") and Martin. This blindness is perhaps most apparent in the very first story, "Nobody Will Laugh." Klima himself puts it in no uncertain terms: "man passes," he says, "through the present with his eyes blindfolded. . . . Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it had." Which, it occurs to me, may be taken as an allegory for the reading process itself, particularly in regards to the dialectic of retention and closural activities. The reader must, if he wishes to pass through the text at all, proceed at least partially "blindfolded" with the understanding that meaning generally emerges in retrospect.

As with Laughable Loves, Kundera's later work, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, may be described as having a cyclic form; a number of critics have commented upon this in terms that clearly resemble Ingram's definition. John Updike, for example, notes that the book is "more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel" [Hugging the Shore, 1988]. In like fashion, Terry Eagleton points out that the "structural subversiveness" of this work "lies simply in the loose consciousness whereby they encompass different stories, sometimes to the point of appearing like a set of nouvelles within the same covers" ["Estrangement and Irony," Salmagundi 73 (1987)]. R. B. Gill, in an explicit comparison of The Book and Dubliners, suggests that it is best regarded not as a novel "in the usual sense, [but as] a series of parts, one could call then stories, each thematically related to the others, a series of variations on a theme" ["Bargaining in Good Faith: The Laughter of Vonnegut, Grass, and Kundera," in Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction, ed. Aron Aji]. And as David Lodge notes in a statement that reveals the way in which the critic must inevitably deal with cycles, "the only way to deal, critically, with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is to review its textual strategies in the order in which they are experienced by the reader" ["Milan Kundera, and the Idea of the Author in Modern Criticism," Critical Quarterly, Spring-Summer, 1984].

For all their similarities, there are also significant differences between these two works. Perhaps the most important and innovative of those features is The Book's "polygeneric" character. The stories of Laughable Loves are, in and of themselves, short stories of a relatively conventional sort. By contrast, The Book is made up of seven Parts which in turn are fragmented in that they constitute a generic smorgasbord: informal essay (history, musicology, philosophy), the fantastic, and autobiography. As Herbert Eagle remarks [in "Genre and Paradigm in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," in Language and Literary Theory, edited by Benjamin A. Stolz and others, 1984], Kundera is a writer whose mastery covers a number of widely divergent genres aside from fiction—poetry, the essay, and, in the Czech tradition, feuilletons. "In this diverse oeuvre," Eagle notes, there are persistent themes that, in The Book, Kundera explores in a format which allows him to write "in all of his favorite genres simultaneously. . . . " Thus, while The Book is certainly in cyclic form, it is not, to be precise, a short story cycle, and it thus exceeds its generic identity (perhaps it is more accurate to call it a "polygeneric cycle"). The Book also obviously differs from Laughable Loves in that it is peppered with statements which address the problems of fictional discourse, a genre which has come to be termed metafiction. As Charles Moles worth asserts [in "Kundera and The Book: The Unsaid and the Unsayable," in Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction, ed. Aron Aji] "The Book, in addition to its thematic unity, has a structural unity that is achieved by its "concern with itself as a novel".

Furthermore, the nascent political concerns of Laughable Loves find fruition in The Book, Kundera's first work as an exile. The former work, to be sure, has a political element, for as Jeffery Goldfarb notes [in Beyond Glasnost, 1989], "The stories in Laughable Loves are [Kundera's] most explicitly non-political," and yet "they are about the ironies of domination and subjugation." In all these instances, however, the critique is a veiled one. The Book, on the other hand, attempts a much broader critique: problems of cultural heritage and national identity are explored in conjunction with a dominant event (the 1968 invasion) and a dominant theme ("organized forgetting").

Finally, the apparent aesthetic design of The Book makes it an example of what Ingram calls a composed cycle, while Laughable Loves is a completed cycle, one of "looser" design. This generic distinction is mirrored in the different quality of aesthetic experience which these works elicit in the reader—what Iser calls the "generic control of aesthetic response". Furthermore, in his essay on Kundera, Lodge claims that "whereas in The Joke Kundera displayed, at the first attempt, his mastery of the modernist novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a masterpiece of postmodern fiction . . ." Similarly, I would suggest that Laughable Loves may be viewed as a modernist cycle, while The Book may be viewed as a postmodernist one.

In his later work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera combines his novelistic tendencies (The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party) with his cyclic ones, thus affecting a fusion of his various experiments with narrative architectonics. Kundera accomplishes this by returning to the essay-mode used to such great advantage in The Book and interweaving the essayistic sections (which are thematically anchored in the Nietzschian concept of the eternal return) with fictive events (rooted, as in The Book, in the 1968 invasion) concerning four central characters who serve as alternating focal points for the novel's seven parts.

As successful as Kundera's more novelistic works are, I would suggest that his two works in cyclic form are even more so, largely because of their cyclicity. Because of its paratactic superstructure, cyclic form seems to have certain advantages in describing social situations that are characterized by fragmentation and anomie and/or a narrative consciousness characterized by these qualities. As Mann notes, cycles are "especially well suited to handle certain subjects, including the sense of fragmentation or indeterminacy that many twentieth-century characters experience." And as Stevick suggests in his comments on Hemingway's cycle In Our Time, cyclic form may be a cognate of a given ideological construct:

Explicitly developed progressions between narrative units imply a great deal, one hardly realizes how much until one notices their absence: they imply a coherence within the fictive world that is physical, epistemologica!, and moral. Most of these coherences Hemingway did not believe in and would not counterfeit. The interchapters of In Our Time in their relation to the stories that occur between them, are examples of a lack of faith in coherence made into a structural principle. [The Chapter in Fiction: Theories of Narrative Division, 1970]

Certainly, the cycle has an advantage over the novel in this regard in that it shows a broad cross-section of characters who, as in Laughable Loves, are isolated from one another, quite different from one another, and yet have similar, socially-determined problems.

Perhaps the two most notable story cycles are Joyce's Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. One must first note the uncanny similarity between the work of Joyce and Anderson. As Martha Curry points out, it is indeed an incredible coincidence that in the first decade of the twentieth century Joyce wrote a sequence of interrelated stories "depicting the drab, isolated, and frustrated citizens of Dublin and that in the next decade Anderson wrote stories of the same kind of people in a small Midwestern town" ["Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce," American Literature 52 (1980)]. What is even more remarkable is that in spite of the affinities between these two works, Anderson, as Curry goes to great lengths to demonstrate, was unaware of Dubliners at the time. This strongly suggests that cyclic form is conducive to the fictive rendering of a certain type of experience—what Joyce referred to as "paralysis" and what Anderson called the "starved side of American small town life." The formal similarity of the two works is furthermore interesting when one considers the differences between Joyce and Anderson. Joyce, on the one hand, was well-versed in aesthetic theory and often drew on this theoretical knowledge in his practice as a writer. Anderson, on the other hand, though well-read and not at all the naif he has often been regarded as, was "almost completely ignorant of aesthetic theory" (Curry). It seems, then, that even though Joyce took the "high road" of academic knowledge and Anderson took the "low road" of a strong aesthetic intuition, they both had a similar point-of-departure (anomized characters as subject) and the same point-of-arrival (cyclic form).

Another analogous work in this regard is Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, which has been called "Wright's Dubliners" [Craig Hansen Werner, Paradoxical Resolutions, 1982]. In this work, Wright presents a varied cross-section of Black Americans in their struggle against oppression. The discrimination and violence faced by Black Americans is such that when one compares it to the struggles of other nationalities, one does so at the risk of trivialization. Nonetheless, it is a struggle that is not without its similarities to the Irish situation portrayed by Joyce or the Czech situation portrayed by Kundera. Wright's cycle is characterized, as is Dubliners, by a linear pattern of development in which each protagonist is older than his predecessor in the cycle. The first stories in this work take particular advantage of the fragmentation effect of cyclic form by showing the futility of isolated struggle while the closing stories, paralleling the reader's sense of totality, suggest the possibilities of social consciousness and collective action. As in other cycles, Wright's is characterized by what Ingram calls a "pattern of development" and what I have elsewhere called a mega-narrative: we see a trajectory which parallels the African-American's quest for freedom. As McCall points out, in each of the four stories Wright "broadens the areas of responsibility on the part of each succeeding main character, moving from boy to community leader, from victim to victor, so that the stories will compose a rising tide of militancy" [The Example of Richard Wright, 1969]. And again, such a social portrait seems to find its best expression in cyclic form.

Both Laughable Loves and The Book have much in common with these works by Joyce, Anderson, and Wright. For example, R. B. Gill notes a number of affinities between The Book and Dubliners. In addition to their shared formal characteristics, "both books are the work of an exile trying to make sense of his lost country and of his reasons for leaving it. Both are realistic appraisals of the paralysis that has afflicted their homelands." Furthermore, all four of these writers have endeavored to provide, among other things, a portrait of an oppressive society. They were all, in one way or another, exiles—Anderson, in a figurative sense, an exile from the trappings of small-town America; Joyce, an exile by choice from his stultifying and provincial homeland; Wright, also an exile by volition, living out the last decade of his life in France in a gesture that he had given up on the possibility of change in America; and Kundera, who, as it were, purchased his exile (also to France) through the very act of writing. After the 1970 publication of Laughable Loves, the Czech regime banned Kundera's works, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1979 while Kundera was living in France, caused the regime to exile him in absentia. All of these writers created works that portray what might be termed "anomized" or "paralyzed" societies as viewed by the self-exiled artist; and all these works are cycles.

To say that cyclic form is suited to a particular cultural experience and intent on the part of the author may seem to be overstating the case; after all, there are any number of novels which depict such societies, and thus it would be premature to postulate something akin to a scientific law of literary form regarding story cycles (or for that matter, any other literary phenomenon). On the other hand, I think that the affinities outlined above strike one as being something more than coincidence. Specific literary form, specific generic types, the above evidence suggests, have sociological cognates.

Which brings us to the question of genre itself. One problem with arguing that The Book is an example of the cycle genre is that Kundera himself prefers to call it a novel. In his view, the novel as genre is not identified by narrative continuity or for that matter any other structural feature. As he puts it, it is a mistake "to regard a certain stereotyped structure as the inviolable essence of the novel" (Art of the Novel). Rather, he defines it in terms of its spirit of inquiry (which he finds particularly evident in Diderot and Sterne) and its ability both to absorb and to undermine other, dogmatic discourses.

So which is it—novel or cycle?

A generic designation is not important in and of itself. As Todorov notes, "categories have merely a constructed existence," and as a result, a work can manifest "more than one category, more than one genre" [The Fantastic, translated by Richard Howard, 1973]. The importance of generic designation is its heuristic value in relation to one's purpose. Mine has been to reveal the formal complexity of Laughable Loves, its role in Kundera's aesthetic development, the nature of the reading experience it elicits, and its similarities, in purpose and form, to a number of other notable works.