His career, began with a joke—which is the literal translation of the title of Milan Kundera's debut novel Žert —but readers familiar with this author's worldview will not be surprised at the eventual adverse consequences. In Kundera's fiction, jokes are rarely a laughing matter, and laughter itself the most equivocal of human traits.
Milan Kundera published The Joke in 1967, taking advantage of the brief loosening in Soviet control to release a book that satirized the authoritarian politics of post-World War II Czechoslovakia. The punchline could have been easily predicted: after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the following year, Kundera was blacklisted and his works banned. Even so, Kundera held out hopes of reforming communism, and entered into public debate with Václav Havel, who countered that the system was hopelessly flawed and required replacement. By 1975, Kundera had abandoned his reformist dreams, and escaped to a teaching position in France, where he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting . In response, the Czech government revoked Kundera's citizenship.
If we take Kundera at his word, he wants to be seen as a novelist, first and foremost, rather than a political dissident. Yet it is hard to read this startling and unsettling book without placing it in the context of the political upheavals of its times. And even if Kundera aimed to leave politics behind—in his later work he made a marked attempt to distance himself from the subject—the various factions have refused to relieve Kundera of responsibility for his ideological commitments. In 2008, a Czech magazine reported that Kundera had served as an informant to the police in 1950, denouncing Czech pilot Miroslav Dvořáček as a Western spy—Dvořáček later served 14 years in a prison labor camp. Kundera denied the allegations, but the police station report from 1950, which names Kundera as the informant, has been validated as an authentic document.
There is heavy irony in the fact that the two authors best known as critics of the "forgetfulness" of the post-WWII generation—Kundera and Günter Grass —have both themselves been accused of embracing a similar absentmindedness when confronting their personal pasts. In both instances, the persistence of memory—or at least documents in the files— overcame the powers of forgetfulness.
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , as in the Dvořáček affair, the struggle is not about defining the future, but redefining the past. Kundera sets the tone for the book in its opening pages, relating the story of Communist party leader and hard-line Stalinist Klement Gottwald, who gave a speech from a balcony in Prague's Old Town Square on a chilly, snowy day in February 1948. At one point, Vlado Clementis, standing next to the speaker, removes his fur hat and places it on Gottwald's head. After Clementis was denounced as a Trotskyite, Zionist and "bourgeois nationalist" and executed in 1952, his image was retrospectively removed from photos of 1948 speech. But the fur hat remained—a telling Kunder-esque-and perhaps Dvořáček-esque-reminder that even our forgetting requires us to remember.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a novel in seven parts, but each section is more a stand-alone story than part of a larger narrative. The unity to the work is provided by the recurring themes: the malleability of memory, the pain of laughter, the mutual deceptions of human relationships, our eager self-abasements in the petty corruptions of the political and sexual. Stories are interspersed with long philosophical passages—and in this regard, Kundera is more akin to Musil and Dostoevsky than to his contemporaries—but the plots are vivid, succinct, and intensely modern in their psychological trappings. Even when the characters in Kundera's world seem on the verge of turning into symbolic personae, the author invariably intervenes before they become too abstract, and immerses them into a crude and brutal reality.
Kundera also incorporates elements of magical realism into his story, again reaching for a larger, symbolic resonance even as he adds the most fanciful details. At one point in his novel, the communist true believers become so detached from practical exigencies of the world around them that they actually start floating up into the air. "Yes, they were soaring over Wenceslaus Square," the earthbound narrator relates with half- suppressed envy, "their dancing ring resembled a great wreath flying off, and I ran on the ground below and looked up to see them, as they soared farther and farther away, and there below them was Prague with its cafes full of poets and its prisons full of betrayers of the people."
Some of the best passages in this novel confront the political situation with a similar mixture of the fantastic and acerbic. In this regard, Kundera inevitably reminds us of Kafka and Orwell, those two masters at wrapping up provocation in the trappings of a modern fairy tale. At one juncture in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , a brilliant exposition of factional politics takes on the guise of a quasi-scriptural account of confrontation between angels and devils. Here Kundera is as biting as he is unconventional—his tragedy stemming not from overt evil, but rather the proud over-reaching of the seraphim and cherubim. A more realistic account could hardly do such a convincing job of capturing the profundity of seemingly good and decent people backing a totalitarian regime that brutally suppressed all opposition.
"To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels," Kundera writes. "Things are of course more complicated than that...If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels' power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils' reign), we could not live either." In the Czecho- slovakia of the Soviet era, the angels are in control- imposing their "incontestable" meanings on all events. "Yes, say what you will, the Communists were more intelligent," Kundera explains at one point. "They had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only some tiresome and threadbare moral principles, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order."
It is in the context of these larger dramas, that the individual escapades of this novel must be viewed. Kundera presents tales of Tamina, the exile who longs to recover the diaries and letters she left back in Prague, the butcher's wife Krystyna, who enjoys her affair with a student all the more because it is never consummated, the dissident writer (named Kundera here) who tries to influence public affairs through a horoscope he writes anonymously for a Communist party leader. A pathos and despair arises even in the most intimate moments—perhaps especially in the most intimate moments—and the only weapon left for those who lack incontestable meanings is laughter. But the laughter in Kundera's world is often the bitterest form of human expression.
This novel remain less known to readers than Kundera's 1984 work The Unbearable Lightness of Being , yet I would recommend The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as the superior book, and the place to start for readers hoping to come to grips with this seminal author. Even as the historical events that gave rise to the conflicts related in Kundera's novel fade into the uneasy forgetfulness of history, the human foibles on display here are—sadly!—all too timeless. We now live in the exact opposite of Kundera's universe, participating in a digital age in which every tweet and text message is stored forever in archival memory. Strange to say, this new state of affairs only reinforces the lessons and amplifies the intense reverberations of this book, one that teaches us that fools may dispute endlessly about the future...yet you can always identify the most repressive powers by their heavy-handed determination to define and control our past.