"Homo Homini Lupus:" Milan Kundera's "The Joke"

Author(s): Frances L. Restuccia and Milan Kundera

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 281-299
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208535
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HOMO HOMINI LUPUS: MILAN KUNDERA'S THE JOKE

Frances L. Restuccia

As opposed to Terry Eagleton who in Salmagundi politici

aesthetics of Kundera's fiction - Eagleton sees Kundera's war
kitsch as an assault on "that triumphalistic sentimentality w
Stalinism's ideological stock-in-trade" (31)- Milan Kundera h
has insisted that his novels, like all novels, be received aesth
rather than politically. In "Sixty-three Words," under "Misom
he condemns "an intellectual, sophisticated misomusy" that
revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthe
doctrine of engage art: art as an instrument of politics" (Ar
About The Joke, Kundera writes: "Ludvik's fundamental ant
logical experience . . . has historical roots, but the description
history itself (the role of the Party, the political bases of terro
organization of social institutions, etc.) does not interest me, an
will not find it in the novel" (Art 37). As if attempting to f
Eagleton, Kundera begins his preface to The Joke with, "When i
during a television panel discussion devoted to my works, so
called The Joke 'a minor indictment of Stalinism,' I was quick to
ject, 'Spare me your Stalinism, please. The Joke is a love stor
Perhaps the best we can do in locating the politics of Kun
novels is to take our lead from his own paradoxical assessment o
"political" import of Kafka's novels - that it "lies precisely i
'nonengagement,' that is to say, in their total autonomy from all
cal programs, ideological concepts, and futurological prognos
116-17). Kundera, then, is perhaps political insofar as he is not P
cal. His reflections on literature would indicate that his concern is not
with public but with private life ("The Joke is a love story!") in all
its aesthetic opacity. But how does he conceive of personal relations?

Contemporary Literature XXXI, 3 0010-7484/90/0003-0281 $1.50/0

?1990 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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The answer to this question allows us to understand why critics are
tempted to give Kundera a political reading.
In his writing - both critical and fictional - as well as in interviews,
Kundera seems dedicated to pointing out the isomorphism of ordi-
nary human behavior and the sadism of militaristic governments. In
"Somewhere Behind," Kundera responds with a curious story about
private life to the question of how Kafka's apparently apolitical works
are perceived as so politically threatening that in some countries they
are banned. In 1951, during the Stalinist trials in Prague, a woman
convicted of crimes she has not committed refuses to comply with her
persecutors and after several years of incarceration is released. But
later in her life, she terrorizes her twenty-five-year-old son whose
"crime" of oversleeping evokes tears from his mother and immediate
guilt and confession from the son: "It's true, all I did was oversleep
[the son explains to Kundera], but what my mother reproached me
for is something much deeper. It's my ... selfish attitude" (Art 109).
Kundera describes the event as a "Stalinist mini-trial," understanding
epiphanically that "the psychological mechanisms that function in great
(apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as
those that regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations"
(Art 109). This pressure that ordinary folk inflict on others to be self-
indicting is part of what Kundera terms "the Kafkan": "it was from
the family, from the relationship between the child and the deified
power of the parents, that Kafka drew his knowledge of the technique
of culpabilization, which became a major theme of his fiction" (Art
109-10).
The totalitarianism of everyday life pervades Kundera's work as
well as Kafka's. It is one of the aims of this essay to focus on its emer-
gence in The Joke: there, for the most part, men victimized by the
Communist Party in turn become victimizers who wield power over
and even brutalize other men and, more dramatically, women. I want
to investigate this reflection of public sadomasochism in the private
sphere; but first I want to identify various possible implications of
the sadomasochism in the novel, so that we can approach cases of
it with the question of politics sharply in mind.
Kundera's subject matter invites us to ask whether he sympathizes
with Freud's observations in Civilization and Its Discontents that "men
are not gentle creatures [but] . . . are, on the contrary, creatures among
whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of
aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a poten-
tial helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to

282 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work
without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize
his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and
to kill him. Homo homini lupus" (111). Does Kundera likewise suggest
that human ruthlessness is instinctive? In The Farewell Party, we read
that Jakub's neighbors "had found their cat in front of their door with
his tongue cut out, his legs tied, and nails hammered into both eye
sockets. Neighborhood children were playing grown-up games" (115).
Or does Kundera mean to say that cruelty is merely a contingent fact
of human life, because it is a specific function of totalitarianism? This
position would align him with Jessica Benjamin, who in The Bonds
of Love diagnoses cruelty as a cultural, hence rectifiable, aspect of
ordinary human relations. Benjamin in fact invokes what she takes
to be Kundera's concept of "co-feeling" to convey her idea of inter-
subjectivity. Intersubjective interaction breaks down "oppositions
between powerful and helpless, active and passive; it counteracts the
tendency to objectify and deny recognition to those weaker or different
-to the other. It forms the basis of compassion" (48).
Or, a final hypothesis, is Kundera merely posing questions (is
Freud right?), exploring human possibilities (how far will people go
in brutalizing others?), leaving everything wide open? In The Art of
the Novel, he stresses that the novel's job is to inquire and not to take
a moral position or to judge. To Philip Roth, he states baldly that
"A novel does not assert anything; [it] searches and poses questions"
(Roth 237). So although there are moments when Kundera speaks
straightforwardly on the subject of domination - in response to the
self-posed question of "Why did Germany, why does Russia today
want to dominate the world? To be richer? Happier?" he says, "Not
at all. The aggressivity of force is thoroughly disinterested; unmoti-
vated; it wills only its own will; it is pure irrationality" (Art 10)- his
theory of the novel instructs us not to expect this sort of belief to
crystallize into a political program, or even concept, in his fiction.
The compelling point seems to be that insofar as the novel takes
a stand, makes a statement, even were it to be antitotalitarian in
content, the novel itself risks becoming totalitarian. But "as a model
of this Western world, grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of
things human, the novel [as Kundera sees it] is incompatible with the
totalitarian universe" (Art 13-14). Kundera's sole weapons against
totalitarian Truth are the relative truths of literary ambiguity, a glori-
fied term in his lexicon: "The art of the novel is founded on, indeed,
masters the use of, ambiguity" ("Conversations" 6). Kundera-as-novelist

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is willing to attach himself to one thing alone: to "the depreciated legacy
of Cervantes" (Art 20), that is, to epistemological difficulty and the
elusiveness of truth. We may assume then that The Joke is a "meditative
interrogation (interrogative meditation)" (Art 31) on hypothetical power
struggles in the personal domain. In "Dialogue on the Art of the
Novel," Kundera explains his interest not in reality but in existence,
not in what has occurred but in what is possible, in "everything that
man can become, everything he's capable of" (Art 42).
One might be inclined to applaud Kundera's refusal of any defini-
tive and totalizing position - either of Eagleton's Political or Freud's
or Benjamin's interpersonal/political variety - as the best tactic of the
antitotalitarian novel. But there is a serious complication: when what
is being explored (as in The Joke) is the human capacity to violate
others, and in particular women's capacity to enjoy such violation,
might not ambiguity, mere exploration, be irresponsible? Such explora-
tion not only opens up the possibility that Freud is correct in thinking
that aggressiveness is instinctive, but it puts forward the notion that
sadomasochism is innately sex-specific, as men reap pleasure from
inflicting pain and women reap pleasure from receiving it. Men of
course have been known to be masochists and so might have been rep-
resented in Kundera as masochists with sadistic female counterparts
(a scenario that materializes in the "original" text of masochism,
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, as well as in Joyce's
Ulysses). But Kundera is in general more faithful to real life, in which
men tend to oppress and violate women rather than the reverse,
although occasionally in his fiction a cruel woman (Ruzena, in The
Farewell Party, for example) turns up. And because Kundera explores
the mundane paradigm of men's sadism and women's masochism in
the spirit of Cervantes, honoring epistemological difficulty and the
elusiveness of truth, leaving unclarified the roots of female masochism,
the question becomes, what is - especially for women - at stake? What
are the sexual politics of the indeterminacy of the Kunderan text?

I want to approach the issue of sexual politics in The Joke by

way of the men. The novel seems to be investigating the possibility
that all men are sadists, if not rapists, potential rapists, or at least
metaphorical rapists. First the Communists expel Ludvik from the uni-
versity and the Party and force him to work inhumanly hard in the
mines for writing on a post card to Marketa what Ludvik claims is
a joke: "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere
stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!" (26). Ludvik's bonds to the

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Party and his Comrades are broken irrevocably when he encounters
in the military a corporal whose apparent "utter lack of sadism set[s]
him off from the others" (43) but who turns out to have a habit of
conjuring images of Ludvik as a fantasy imperialist to inspire himself
to become an excellent marksman. Even nice guys are vicious.
Mistreated horribly by the Communists, Ludvik in turn attempts
physically to force Lucie, a young, sensitive, melancholy woman he
comes to love, to have sex with him. Although he testifies that the
"total desire" he feels for Lucie precludes violence, it seems, given the
wrestling match that ensues between them, that his desire gets entangled
intricately with violence. In perhaps the most excruciating, nerve-
frazzling scene of the book, when Lucie denies him sexual pleasure,
a tormented, pitiful Ludvik, severely punished by the Party, launches
"a fresh attack": "I rolled over onto her, using all the strength I could
muster, managed to pull up her skirt, tear off her bra, and grab hold
of her breasts" (98). He is seized soon thereafter with "an insane rage"
and ends up slapping Lucie across the face.
As we and Ludvik learn subsequently, Lucie's terrified resistance
to his sexual advances is the result of her often having been gang-raped
at an earlier time in her life. She has known a host of brutal men.
Her father had beaten her; she eventually marries a man who beats
her. Even Kostka, who teaches Christianity to Lucie and appears to
befriend her, realizes that in the end he was "a seducer in priest's robes"
(200).
Kundera appears to be implicating all men in the crime of violence
against weaker others. This idea of male brutality without exception
(which I believe pervades The Joke: even apparently gentle Jaroslav,
with his peaceful traditional ways, explodes in domestic violence against
his wife Vlasta) is prefigured in the novel when Ludvik imagines how
Party members would have voted had the punishment for his joke
been hanging by the neck. All of them would have raised their hands
to condemn him. Ludvik even laughs at himself for thinking "that
if [he] had been in their position [he] wouldn't have acted as they did"
(66). Here Ludvik articulates his own unexceptional baseness; later,
after his "demolition job" on Helena, he exults in it. We would seem
to have in all of these abuses of power fictional expression of Kundera's
theorem that "the psychological mechanisms that function in great
(apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as
those that regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations"
(Art 109). Both of these levels-the public and the private-get
rendered in all their inextricability in a mural created by one of the
men in the military camp. Cenek's allegorical representation of the

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Red Army's significance for the Communist struggle in Czechoslo-
vakia-a Soviet soldier surrounded by eight or nine naked female
figures in provocative poses, who actually represent women in Cenek's
past, one of whom enjoyed his beating her - hints at the twofold abuse.
The Red Army "rapes" Czechoslovakia as men "rape" women.
But what may have the appearance of radical feminist doctrine -
the proposition in The Joke that all men are rapists - turns out from
a feminist perspective to be quite problematic. Kundera does not seem
to be constructing a case against culture, or even Communism per se:
anti-Stalinists (pace Eagleton) seem incapable of holding themselves
back. All men are implicated; Kundera italicizes this. Yet even if, having
glimpsed in Kundera's story cultural or ideological origins of male bru-
tality, we were able somehow to get beyond the hurdle that there are
no exceptions to the rule, which implies (although it may not prove,
since all men are in culture) that abusive male behavior is inherent,
and beyond the novel's sympathetic depiction of Ludvik's struggle to
make love to Lucie against her will (both of these points make it hard
to see culture as the singled-out problem), Kundera has adamantly
prohibited a political critique. He offers us hard, messy moral/political
predicaments but asks us to refrain from responding on any level other
than the aesthetic.
And while men seek to batter others, women seek to be battered.
Plenty of men in The Joke experience cruelty, usually at the hands
of other men; but no man in the novel asks for it. Women in The Joke
submit to it, crave it, and some revel in it. That women indulge in
submissive behavior in an effort to achieve recognition, a sense of iden-
tity, a feeling of relationship (of any sort, however base) is drama-
tized as prostitutes are egged on, rejected, and thus ironically put in
the doubly groveling position of having to work against male indiffer-
ence to or even repulsion from their seductive charms to effect their
own sexual objectification. In one case, Ludvik pulls away from the
prostitute he is in the middle of having sex with; she looks up at him
"almost frightened and [says], 'Hey, what's going on?"' (52). (She has
already been paid, so her dismay is not a financial matter.) Lucie's
participation in the activities of the gang that regularly raped her can
be attributed to her psychological need to find substitute parents: "She
took part in their drinking bouts with blind obedience. It provided
an outlet for the unrequited love she felt for her father and mother"
(195). Unlike other, more demonstrably masochistic women in the
novel - such as Alena, Cenek's first sexual partner, who yells at him
"Beat me, you little snot-nose, you! Beat me hard!" (73)- Lucie does

286 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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not demand punishment, but neither does she desert the gang. While
the psychologies of the female characters in The Joke may be par-
ticular, the women arrive at the same exploited position.
The grand finale of female masochism obviously takes place when
Helena opens herself joyously to Ludvik's "demolition job." Helena
responds to Ludvik's unrelenting sexual convulsions, his efforts to rob
Pavel Zemanek's (her husband's, Ludvik's chief enemy's) "sacred
chamber; to ransack it, make a shambles of it!" (171) with sugary
phrases. He lays his hand on her face "as if it were something to be
. . pummeled or kneaded," and he feels "her face welcoming [his]
hand on precisely those terms: like a thing eager to be turned and
pummeled." This gesture metamorphoses into slapping, to which
Helena reacts with sobbing and moaning but also "with excitement,
not pain": "her chin strained up to find [him], and [he] beat her and
beat her and beat her; then [he] saw her breasts straining upward as
well and (arching up over her) beat her all over her arms and sides
and breasts . . ." (172). Helena then showers him with wet kisses, pro-
claims her love and happiness, boasts of her former certainty that their
"two bodies had instantly signed that secret pact the human body signs
only once in a lifetime" (174). True, once-in-a-lifetime romance takes
sadomasochistic/male-female form.
It would be obtuse not to notice that, through Helena's announce-
ment that her husband (Zemanek) and Ludvik resemble each other
the point is being made that Communist tyrants and the tyrannize
alike tyrannize. But how is the representation of tyrannizers primaril
as men and the happily tyrannized as women justified? To do a femi-
nist reading: perhaps Kundera (through his emphasis, if not hyperbole
means to expose cultural influences on women to behave masochist
cally, to reveal how men use women as punching bags. Perhaps the
parodic nature of especially Helena's craving for sadistic treatmen
is meant to challenge the popular notion that, as Kaja Silverman
phrases it, masochism is a requisite "element of 'normal' female sub
jectivity, providing a crucial mechanism for eroticizing lack and sub-
ordination" (36). It also seems possible that Kundera defetishizes th
female body by showing it in a battered, pitiful state, by stressin
women's pain rather than male sexual pleasure. Ludvik finds Helen
nauseating during and especially after the act. Is Kundera, in his
antipathy to the exploitation of others, reinforcing the horror of men'
behavior, refusing himself to participate erotically (as a writer) in
Ludvik's sick sex act? Unlike, say, the sadomasochistic love scene i
the film Blue Velvet, in which Dorothy (the Isabella Rossellini char

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acter) asks to be beaten, this encounter between Ludvik and Helena
would entice, I think I can safely say, no one. Or, to reverse tacks:
does this scene along with the other examples of female masochism
underscore the alignment Freud makes between femininity and maso-
chism that Silverman critiques?' Does masochism in The Joke begin
to look essentially constitutive of female subjectivity? One might wish
to preserve Kundera's ambiguity, in the spirit of his questioning uncer-
tainty; but can ambiguity on such questions plead innocence? Not only
does it fail to shut down some frightening possibilities, but in its indefi-
niteness it leaves a vacuum that some agency (more power hungry than
the reader-willing-to-entertain-uncertainty) might wish to fill in.

Ironically, The Joke appears to signal the political danger of the

ambiguity of the written word. First of all, Kundera seems to be
travestying the Communists' unsophisticated hermeneutical practices.
They are not interested in the context or conditions in which Ludvik's
post card message was written: "How you wrote it is immaterial" (29).
They discount hidden personal motives, missing that Ludvik might
have written it, however insouciantly, to correct an emotional
imbalance in his relations with Marketa (she seems to have the upper
hand, content to go off to Communist training camp during a time
when Ludvik wants to see her). That they find play, including literary
play, anathema is emblematized by their stern reaction to both Ludvik's
post card, a missive of pleasure, not seriousness, and his joke. Ludvik
insists that his words are "meaningless" and that it was "all in fun";
but the humorless Party members find "objective significance" in the
writing on the card (29). Yet at the same time that Kundera denigrates
the Communist interpretive style, he demonstrates the vulnerability
of linguistic play to oppressive political agendas. Is The Joke not then
suggesting that (1) writing surpasses politics, that it cannot be assimi-
lated by politics, but that (2) attempts to assimilate it will be made,
and the more slippery a piece of writing, the more vulnerable?
If one were not so nervous about reading Kundera for doctrine,
one might discern in the post card incident a warning about the con-
stitutive evasiveness of language, although the overall point seems to

'See Kaja Silverman's "Masochism and Male Subjectivity" for discussion of

Freud's persistent conception of masochism as feminine, even though he regards
"feminine masochism [as] a specifically male pathology, so named because it posi-
tions its sufferer as a woman" (35). Silverman speculates that masochism is theorized
only for men - is in other words defined pathologically as "a male rather than a female
phenomenon" - because it is an accepted aspect of" 'normal' female subjectivity" (36).

288 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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be paradoxical. Reading "objectively" is to plunder a text, to read as
a fascist. Adolf Hitler's own reading approach as he describes it in
Mein Kampf epitomizes this half of the idea: one should "retain the
essential, [and]forget the non-essential," Hitler writes (14). Hitler read
practically and opportunistically: "a man who possesses the art of
correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet,
instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion
is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his
purpose or generally worth knowing" (36; emphasis added). (What is
subjectively functional is projected as objectively essential; the contra-
diction is no doubt definitive of the totalitarian mind.) Like the Com-
munists in Kundera's novel, Hitler seems threatened by amorphous,
uninterpreted prose and so trained himself to extract self-promoting
single meanings from what he read, thus efficiently bypassing all
complication. (Hence his indictment of modernism in general as de-
generate art.)
We can deduce from The Art of the Novel that Kundera scorns
such a reading strategy; but in portraying the dehumanizing conse-
quences of textuality falling into the wrong hands in The Joke, he
simultaneously underscores the danger of free-floating signifiers. The
hermeneutical point about Ludvik's message to Marketa is not merely
its status as a joke or nonjoke but that what it means is elusive, sur-
passing Ludvik's intention. Is or isn't "Mockery . . . a rust that cor-
rodes all it touches" (203)? Is or isn't the card an expression of Ludvik's
"individuality" and anti-Communist sentiment? Do we know?
Anxiety over political appropriation of elusive language surfaces
in Derrida's own treatment of his famous post card. He writes that
"With the progress of the post the State police has always gained
ground" (Post Card 37). For the most part, however, Derrida cele-
brates the post card as a minuscule yet ultimate deconstructive text.
Because I think that this conception of the post card can enhance our
understanding of Ludvik's, I want to touch on some of Derrida's
notions as well as to read them against the reading practice of the
Communists who intercept Ludvik's card. Thus we can witness
Kundera's staging of the clash between the pleasure of the text and
totalitarian hermeneutics.
Derrida early on poses the questions "Who is writing? To whom?"
(5). Cast into the mailbox, as if into an alienating mechanism, the card
slips away from its author, who relinquishes his/her possession of it.
Ludvik's authorship is likewise in doubt since he is young and therefore
has "several faces," all of which are "real" (25). But despite their per-
ception of Ludvik's two faces (the doubleness is to them only a matter

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of hypocrisy), the Party insists, "we know who you are" (29). The Party
members who intercept Ludvik's post card believe in their ability to
get at authenticity: "you wrote what you really felt" (29). For Derrida,
"it is the postal, the Postal Principle as differantial relay, that regu-
larly prevents, delays, endispatches the depositing of the thesis, for-
bidding rest and ceaselessly causing to run, deposing or deporting the
movement of speculation" (54). His post card, intercepted interminably
because of the postmodern impossibility of ownership (no matter what
precautions are taken, all letters are intercepted), no longer has "the
chance of reaching any determinable person, in any (determinable)
place whatever" (51). Yet in spite of Ludvik's post card's Derridean
polyvalence, it reaches quite determinable persons in a determinable
place, where it yields an all too decipherable meaning.
Kundera would seem to be demonstrating how the State gains
ground through the progress of the post. While Derrida himself is well
aware that "Writing is unthinkable without repression" ("Freud" 113),
Kundera dramatizes the threat of an overtly political repression of writ-
ing - as that repression is facilitated by an attempt at liberation of the
signifying system. The political seizure and reductive defining of
Ludvik's message to Marketa admittedly might very well be a gross
extension of the constitutive repression within language: the latter may,
in other words, bear a close kinship to real life political enactments
of repression. But even more terrifying, as Kundera illustrates, is that
the very attempt to release the repressed otherness from lan-
guage - Ludvik's playful prose - results in the expansion of a police
state.

This warning about writing/art overlaps in The Joke with a related

warning for women. Not only texts but women (similarly conceiv
to be elusive, hard to pin down, indefinite, by Derrida [in Spurs], oth
male theorists [see Alice Jardine's Gynesis], and French feminists alik
are misread and misused in the novel. In this way, too, Kundera's
attraction to and simultaneous worry about indeterminacy come
the surface. For example, Lucie Sebetka's charming inability (or
perhaps lack of desire) to insert herself into the symbolic order leads
to her mistreatment. She is cut off from the power of language. Com
municating her affection for Ludvik through the "language of flowers
(she regularly offers him bunches of flowers through the fence at hi
military camp), Lucie compensates for her frequent silences. Ludv
surmises that Lucie's "tongue-tied state, her lack of verbal eloquence,
made her think of flowers as a form of speech - not the heavy-hande
imagery of conventional flower symbolism, but an older, vaguer, mor
instinctive precursor of language; perhaps, having always been sparing

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of words, she instinctively longed for a mute, preverbal stage of evolu-
tion when people communicated with a minimum of gestures" (68).
Lucie seems located in a Kristevan proto-verbal semiotic space. And
Ludvik's eventual realization that he has appropriated Lucie and thus
has never really got to know her shows not only awareness (Ludvik's
and Kundera's) of her exploitation but its relationship to her elusive-
ness. Ludvik conceived of Lucie as "the goddess of smoke," as "some-
thing abstract, a legend and a myth"; but he now realizes that "behind
the poetry of [his] vision hid a starkly unpoetic reality; that . . . [he]
didn't know her as she actually was, in and of herself. . . . She had
never been anything more to [him] than a function of[his] situation"
(210).
Especially the way this is phrased invokes a parallel between
Ludvik's exploitation of Lucie and the Communists' reading of
Ludvik's post card, their interpretation of which is obviously a func-
tion of their situation - the method of reading that Hitler prescribed.
The Communists and Ludvik extract from writing and women what
they can use. Kundera does seem to regard both art and women as
anterior to the symbolic order and its law - or at least as balanced deli-
cately on the semiotic/symbolic border - and thus as exploitable. He
imagines the original, horribly butchered English translation of The
Joke as a "rape" (Joke xvi). (The untranslatable is what totalitarians
cannot read in their own language - language that is still embodied,
in flowers, in sounds, in the interactions of a personal relation.) And
Kundera makes the parallel between women and art again in an inter-
view in Salmagundi, where, in anxious defense of his depictions of
women, he comments that "Lucie is true poetry" ("Conversations" 23).
Kristeva's description of the semiotic as distinct from the "realm of
signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in
other words, a realm of positions" (Revolution 43), given Kundera's
distaste for the role of assertion and judgment in the novel, facilitates
our sense of the affinity between Lucie and Kundera's conception of
art. That Kundera aligns women in general with the inchoate is also
suggested by the breakdown that occurs at the end of his conversation
with Jordan Elgrably in Salmagundi. Forthcoming on questions under
the headings of "Writing," "Exile," "Politics and Culture,"
"Translation," and "Life in France," Kundera is finally asked about
"Women." At first he defends himself admirably enough against the
charge that he portrays men as intellectuals and professionals and
women as not particularly well educated or intelligent; but then
Kundera becomes either tired or testy. His answers shrink to a few
words at most, and finally he allows his exasperation to show: "Dear

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Jordan, there are questions which I like to answer, and there are others
that I neither wish nor know how to respond to. . . . I don't know
how to tell you why the women in my novels are the way they are. ....
There is a limit beyond which the novelist can theorize no further on
his own novels and whence he must know how to keep his silence.
We have reached that limit" (24). It appears that "dear Jordan" has
been chastised (even Kundera sets up minitrials?) for raising the
unspeakable subject.

Ambiguity may always be the last stage of our thinking about

Kundera, but his novels lure us to shape them into a polemic before
we come to realize the impossibility, or violation, of such an approach.
Discussions about Kundera may therefore tend to be especially cir-
cumlocutory, as one sorts out and entertains the various incipient ideas
the text toys with, if only to decide in the end that they are not, and
must not be, hypostatized. Yet it is in part Kundera's ambiguity itself
that leads us back to an analysis of the politics of ordinary life: the
vulnerability of the equivocal post card allows us to feel Kundera's
sympathy for the vulnerability of women. Totalitarian reading is a kind
of sadism; identification on the part of victims with masters and inter-
pretive mastery is a kind of masochism.
We might, then, read Kundera as attacking the notion of "the
Kafkan" in general from two angles. First, he may appear to urge all
victims (women and men) to resist admitting to guilt they do not feel
and internalizing the incriminating point of view of those who attempt
to master them, at times to the extent that punishment becomes desir-
able. What most upsets Ludvik about his post card trial is that he begins
"to see the three sentences on the postcard through the eyes of [his]
interrogators" (37). Ludvik becomes reconciled to the idea that he has
transgressed, so that "torrents of tortured self-criticism [start] whirling
through [his] head" (37). More specifically, through its depiction of
women's susceptibility to rape (of all forms), The Joke can be read
as embodying Kristeva's view that women need access to the symbolic
and the subjectivity and empowerment that come with it.2 Kundera
avoids merely idealizing women as goddesses of abstraction, myth,
or the semiotic by showing the liabilities of such a role.
Second, just as The Joke may be seen as exposing the mechanisms
of masochism - the victim's internalization of the law against himself/

2See, for example, Kristeva's "Women's Time," where she advocates finally that
women interiorize "the founding separation of the socio-symbolic contract" (210).

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herself- it may appear equally to repudiate sadism and in particular
the Kafkan relay of sadism that I have discussed, where the punished
in turn becomes the punisher. The Joke abounds with examples of
this process; and Ludvik seems to lament it. Near the end, when Ludvik
meditates on the parallel between his and Lucie's lives, when he realizes
that both of their "life stories" were "stories of devastation" and that
they lived "in a world of devastation," he expresses the wish that they
had been able to "commiserate with the things thus devastated,"
regretting that they turned their backs on them, offending both the
other victims they failed and themselves in the process (262). This would
after all seem to be a call for compassion, for Jessica Benjamin's "co-
feeling," a concept elaborated in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
"to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with
the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion-joy,
anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of
soucit [Czech], wsp61czucie [Polish], Mitgefiihl [German], medkiinsla
[Swedish]) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagi-
nation, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments,
then, it is supreme" (20).
However- and now I betray my own argument, guided by the
equivocation of Kundera's text - "sentiments" here has I think a pejora-
tive ring to it, especially in the context of a novel by a writer who loathes
kitsch. In expressing, and I would say sharing, the view of Jakub in
The Farewell Party that what is especially disgusting about humanity
is "the way human cruelty, baseness, and narrowness so often lie con-
cealed under a veil of lyricism and sentiment" (93), Kundera taints
the term ("sentiments") as it is used in the later novel. In addition,
the narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being subsequently refers
to "compassion (co-feeling)" as "the Devil's gift" (21). (In Kundera,
we recall, "Everything terrestrial which belongs to God may also belong
to the devil" [Joke 198].) And compassion turns out accordingly to
be more of a curse than anything else for Tomas, since it intensifies
his sympathy and love for Tereza, while doing nothing to diminish
his drive to make love to other women. Tomas ends up remaining with
Tereza (even following her back to the black hole of occupied Prague
from Zurich) at the same time that he torments her - as well as himself
since he feels her pain - with his obsessive infidelities.
Tomas's problem, as well as the reason why Kundera does not
appear to be promoting the simple notion of compassion, may be at
least partly due to the lack of kinship between co-feeling and desire,
to the dependency of desire on distance and difference, if not resistance

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and antagonism, rather than on identification. (Even Tereza's very soul
gets aroused when, with the engineer, it is betrayed by her body.) This
hypothesis is articulated in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by
one of Kundera's male characters. In "The Border," Jan not only pro-
claims the value for eroticism of the old set of rules prescribing the
male's pursuit of the provocative but hard-to-get female but suggests
that rape, the culmination of this chase, "is an integral part of eroti-
cism" (211). The quest for domination breeds sexual excitement. Con-
versely, at the end of the story, the sexual ennui of the nude beach -
"naked genitals [stare] dully, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand" (228)-
seems the result of a lack of tension, of pure exposure without the
lure that some clothing (veiling bodily treasures) against bare skin can
produce.
So although one may find it appealing to think that Kundera calls
for compassion, urges repudiation of the sadomasochism of "the
Kafkan," of both the instilling of guilt in others and the internaliza-
tion of unwarranted guilt in oneself, and thus hopes to liberate men
and women from the rapist/rape victim relationship, this reading is
nonetheless on weak ground. While The Joke may be interpreted as
admonishing writers about the political dangers of ambiguity, and while
it correspondingly bespeaks the need for women to gain access to lan-
guage and power to protect themselves from "rape," it simultaneously
points to pervasive aggressiveness especially in men and to pervasive
male abuse of women, representing no concrete grounds on which to
base opposition to such behavior, and moreover entertaining the notion
that desire is predicated on the rapist/rape victim axis. The constitu-
tive ambiguity of The Joke (bolstered by our awareness of the allegiance
to ambiguity that Kundera demonstrates outside of his fiction) finally
supports provisionally both of these readings. It is as likely that
Kundera urges resistance to "the Kafkan" through compassion as it
is that he presents the dependency of desire on a victimizer/victim pact.
This is not to criticize Kundera for weak or faulty logic. I read
him as staunchly, consistently faithful to ambiguity, even if it leaves
open the possibility that "Men are not gentle creatures" and that women
reap pleasure from punishment. Kundera has stressed that his novels
offer questions and no answers. Yet his antifascist aesthetics (opposed
to totalitarian Truth) paradoxically, albeit provisionally, keep alive
the proposition that men are fascists and that women enjoy fascist
brutality. The idea that Kundera believes in a violent, cruel uncon-
scious is at times hard to resist ("The aggressivity of force . . . is pure
irrationality"). But even the less extreme view that he refuses ultimately
to locate, leaves ambiguous, the origin of "the Kafkan"-that "the

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public is the mirror of the private, the private reflects the public" (Art
112)- does not preclude the possibility of his covert representation
of a violent, cruel unconscious for men and a masochistic unconscious
for women.
This particular paradox - that Kundera's antifascist aesthetics pre-
serve the hypothesis that sadomasochism constitutes male/female sub-
jectivity-is embodied neatly in the symbol of Sabina's hat in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being. The hat holds several different sig-
nificances, which leads one to perceive it as a rich, ambiguous symbol,
perhaps even as an emblem of the ambiguity of symbols since its
referents are so many. The bowler hat is (1) a "reminder of a forgotten
grandfather," (2) "a memento of [Sabina's] father," (3) "a prop for
her love games with Tomas," (4) "a sign of her originality," and (5)
"a sentimental object," now that she is abroad (87). But meaning
number three is less innocuous in its misogynist specificity than it
appears in this list. On Sabina's head, as she stands half-dressed and
gazing with Tomas into the mirror, the hat signifies "violence against
Sabina, against her dignity as a woman" (86). The hat evokes the
"humiliation" of her part in their sexual games (87). Instead of correct-
ing this imbalance between them ("if it had been fun [Tomas] was after,
he, too, would have had to strip and don a bowler hat" [87]), Sabina
"provocatively played it for all it was worth, as if submitting of her
own will to public rape" (87). Tomas and Sabina subsequently make
love with great gusto. Although we could bring to bear on this scene
the questions about sadomasochism and male/female subjectivity, or
sadomasochism and desire, and so forth, that have been raised in the
course of this essay, my stress is on the paradigmatic nature of the
ambiguity of Sabina's hat. Such textual excess includes, covers over,
and (as I will conclude by arguing) is founded on exploitation of
women. Maintaining the literary aporia for Kundera seems to entail
flirting with antifeminist politics, if not playing into the hands of con-
servative politics in general.
This is how it comes out theoretically, anyway. It may be that
Kundera's dedication to antifascist literary modernity is, strangely
enough, unredeemably at loggerheads with his antifascist values.
Perhaps this is why such a striking disparity arises between his sharply
opinionated, and aggressively expressed, attitudes (about all sorts of
things, even "the opium of communism" ["Conversations" 15]) and
his insistence upon the indefiniteness of his fiction. In "Literary His-
tory and Literary Modernity," Paul de Man notes a similar clash in
Nietzsche, who "finally has to bring the two incompatibles, history
and modernity (now using the term in the full sense of a radical

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renewal), together in a paradox that cannot be resolved" (150). De
Man shows that, like Nietzsche's, Baudelaire's modernity is "a for-
getting. . . . The human figures that epitomize modernity are defined
by experiences such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of per-
ception that results from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a
past that has not yet had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception"
(157).
One part of Kundera craves this clear slate so profoundly that
he disavows the politics of his fiction ("Spare me your Stalinism, please.
The Joke is a love story!"). He even concludes his preface to The Joke
outrageously with gratitude for his readers' lack of historical conscious-
ness, since only their ignorance allows his novel to be read as he wishes
it to be, as "merely a novel" (xvi). Kundera's modernity, like Nietzsche's
and Baudelaire's in de Man's account, is a rejection of history. Anti-
pathetic to the inelegant stylelessness of Communism, Kundera longs
to produce Nabokovian realms of pure aesthetic bliss.
Yet his undermining sarcasm (indicating his political opinions and
his keen historical consciousness) breaks through loud and clear:
"Today, in a world of ever accelerating forgetting, Prague has long
since lost its topicality. Surely no one at the American Embassy there
has an inkling that Russian soldiers stole pears from the garden four-
teen years ago. Yet only thanks to that forgetting (and here we have
the final paradox of The Joke) can the novel ultimately be what it
has always meant to be: merely a novel" (Joke xvi). Opinions and tones
here clash: outrage becomes cool academic irony. Kundera's commit-
ment to human liberation from "the Kafkan," even within his fiction,
is too (admirably) fierce for us to ignore. Surely he is urging opposition
to the law of sadomasochism. Surely he understands that to abandon,
by mystifying, such a position is to serve the interests of the very sadists
who figure so centrally in his writing. And yet again, in so many
vignettes in Kundera, even those in the best position to be empathetic
with the oppressed oppress. In The Farewell Party, Jakub comments
that the saddest discovery of his life is that "victims are no better than
their oppressors" (70). In his cheerier moods, Kundera may wish for
the efficacy of human compassion and thus the breaking of the sado-
masochistic chain, but that sentiment seems inevitably to come up
against (as Tereza realizes while tenderly stroking her cancerous dog)
"the constant power play among individuals" (Unbearable 289).
Not only, then, do I see ambiguity (Kundera's antifascist
aesthetics, his modernity) theoretically cloaking the Freudian position
whose motto is homo homini lupus, but it looks as though Kundera

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finds the idea of instinctive human ruthlessness to be at the very least
as compelling as the view that totalitarian governments are to blame
(the latter being his antifascist position, also cloaked in his text by
his ambiguity). Perhaps Kundera does not allow his novels to be desig-
nated anti-Stalinist in part because he has observed the pervasive
"Stalinism" of everyday life. To return to Civilization and Its Dis-
contents, Freud argues against the Communist assumption that a causal
relation exists between private property and human aggressiveness:

According to [Communists], man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his

neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his
nature. .... I am able [however] to recognize that the psychological premises
on which the system [of Communism] is based are an untenable illusion ...
Aggressiveness . . . reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when
property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery ... ;
it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with
the single exception, perhaps, of the mother's relation to her male child). (113)

To this, Kundera seems to add a supplement. First he shows that Com-

munists themselves turned out to epitomize Freud's point. Then he
illustrates that, although Communism, like private property, may have
become an instrument of human aggressiveness, it would be myopic
to think that to abolish Communism, or tyrannical government in gen-
eral, would be to abolish cruelty. In this interpretation, then, the iso-
morphism of private and public ruthlessness would not be a causal
relation but would testify to the sadistic human condition.
In veiling the idea that a sexist sadomasochism is instinctive, the
constitutive equivocation of Kundera's writing is disturbing for a few
reasons. Such a notion obviously leads to continued social production
and acceptance of male brutality.3 More insidiously, Kundera's align-
ment of women with the very indeterminacy that covers over the
hypothesis that sadomasochism is universally inherent forces women -
insofar as they remain outside of the symbolic order, in the aesthetic
space of ambiguity-to veil their own oppression. The very textual
obfuscation that enacts a celebration of the feminine simultaneously
ensures women's powerlessness. In identifying women with aesthetic
opacity, Kundera probably means to pay tribute to them and to grant
that they have a certain strength in their resistance to totalitarianism
in its various forms, just as he sees aesthetic opacity itself as anti-

3For discussion of the ill social effects of such a notion as well as the way it
plays into the hands of conservative politics, see Carol S. Vance's "Pleasure and
Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality."

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totalitarian. A certain subversive force does indeed come with an
amorphous, indefinite, polysemic identity (or lack of identity), whi
is obviously why feminists have been celebrating it. But it is an inv
tation to power which it then, obligingly, conceals. Just as the inde
terminate text is apt to have a meaning imposed on it (or gets "rape
Kundera's nebulous, malleable women are also, it seems inevitabl
abused. While the Communists pierce texts with their clarity, a dan
Kundera emphatically signals, Kundera himself sustains potential sex
beliefs about desire and sadomasochistic male-female relations by
means of the veil of feminine obscurity. He takes up indefiniten
as his own literary value, allows women to embody it and theref
pay the price for it, and shrouds the process in indefiniteness.

Boston College

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