The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard 9781472543431, 9781441118653

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It could be said that I am playing at something that Martin lives. Sometimes I have the feeling that the whole of my polygamous life is a consequence of my imitation of other men; although I am not denying that I have taken a liking for this imitation. Milan Kundera, “The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire”

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Foreword by Andrew McKenna

In a letter from prison Dietrich Bonhoffer complains about books “whose productions seem to me to be lacking the hilaritas—cheerfulness—which is to be found in any really great and free intellectual achievement.” This is a startling comment from a man sentenced to death for conspiring against a murderous regime. The conjoining of laughter and moral freedom is worth sounding out, and Trevor Merrill’s deft reading of the novels of Milan Kundera has a lot to teach us about it. The Joke, Laughable Loves, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting : Surely Kundera means us to understand something about humor, which we find is both a theme and a structuring principle of his fictions, its exercise being a way of knowing. To give but a single example: in one of his novels someone tells a joke about a man throwing up on the street in Prague; another man passing by stops to remark, “I know just what you mean.” As if a visceral disgust is pandemic, the all-pervasive response to the grim realities of totalitarian rule; and as if the author’s joke served as a necessary purgative for his indignation. Among the many rewarding concepts that Merrill imparts to us is a definition of the novel as “satire gone wrong,” by which we are meant to understand our best fiction as issuing from a defining correction, something like a conversion, by which an author abandons all pretense to moral privilege. His characters elude the writer’s censure; they are allowed a freedom to emerge in a more fully rounded way than in satire, and are effectively left to their own devices in fashioning the misery they concoct for themselves. The work of desengaño or disillusionment is something the readers have to do on their own. René Girard has written that “all great novels tend to the comic,” and this is the case that Merrill makes for Kundera, who came to admire Girard’s ideas during his exile in Paris. A footnote in his Testaments Betrayed praises Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel as the best book to read on narrative fiction. This does not mean that Kundera plots his stories according to a grid provided by Girard’s mimetic theory, but that he shares with the French critic the same insights into human interaction. Cervantes is the mentor they have in common as the originator of the modern novel, which is borne aloft by the fundamental intuition that our desires require models, that we desire according to others, and that it is precisely when we ignore or deny this basic reality that we get into the most trouble, with ourselves and with one another.

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Foreword

This cannot fail to lead to ironic consequences, especially in our amorous relationships, and we are not surprised to learn that irony is the master trope of Kundera’s craft. In one of his tales, for instance, two lovers playfully adopt the roles of prostitute and patron, only to find their own identity compromised by the sybaritic thrills their little drama has afforded them. Because of all the sexual antics we find in his novels, Kundera is sometimes appraised as a hedonist, our neo-Sadean “philosopher of the bedroom,” reveling in erotic emancipation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He is a moralist in the neoclassic sense (in the sense of Pascal, for whom “La vraie morale se moque de la morale”), a canny observer of mores, customs, in all their waywardness. This quagmire of foibles and delusions is what Merrill tracks as “the labyrinth of desire.” It is a telling figure that names the myriad byways and obstructions that our desires encounter in quest of objects fashioned by rivalries and rejections, by insecurities and deluded expectations. We witness sadism, masochism, and voyeurism, not for the titillation they afford, but as widespread pathologies of a desire that finds obstacles in its models and regularly works to its own frustration amid cyclothymic bouts of devotion and rejection, of adoration and humiliation. Kundera is no high-culture advocate of “free love,” but a keen observer of our amorous misprisions, as we find them neatly defined in a passage like this: “Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.” Narcissus redivivus. This helps to account for “the unbearable lightness of being” that names Kundera’s best-known work; it is akin to the “ontological malaise” that for Girard is endemic to the omnivorous sway of mimetic desire in modern culture. This has special relevance, I think, for our vaunted “sexual revolution,” in which desires detached from discredited institutional restraints are destined to meander fecklessly in search of exemplars for the brittle identity we claim as our own. Merrill provides us with an integral reading of Kundera’s novels; he connects the novelist’s fictions with his historical experience of exile, internal and external, as a prerequisite for an apolitical, cosmopolitan detachment, for—dare I say?—a more objective viewpoint, one that is dispassionate, and commensurately droll. For Kundera, life behind the Iron Curtain is but a more compact, condensed experience, a caricature, in sum, of our muddled entanglements. Perhaps exile is the hallmark, the defining condition of all our best authors: Cervantes tells us at the outset of his gamboling prologue to Don Quixote that his orphan of a text is born in a prison.

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Merrill furthermore connects Kundera’s basic insights with noteworthy aspects of his narrative technique: authorial asides and prolonged interventions concerning the world he evokes, even the work he is writing; unresolved speculation on his characters’ moods and motivations; apparent divagations on music that harmonize with the fugal and polyphonic structures of his storytelling. Kundera’s art is at antipodes from the selfreferential hijinks of much postmodern fiction in its obsession with the impossibilities of narrative closure. Instead his formal virtuosity involves the reader’s complicity in the organic relation between the desire for fiction and the fictions of desire. A number of these resources link Kundera’s oeuvre to the very Central European tradition of the essayistic novel, whose emergence in the twentieth century with Broch, Musil, and Mann— but we find this in Proust as well—does not mark a turn against or away from “literature,” but a heightened awareness of its real cognitive appeal, its “wisdom,” as Merrill entitles his concluding chapter. It’s no big deal for a writer to advise against taking ourselves too seriously; it is no slight achievement of what we extoll as creative imagination to reveal that truth is a laughing matter.

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Author’s Preface

In one of his short stories, Milan Kundera describes a group of characters from a Czech resort town who succumb to the influence of two outsiders from the big city—an aging doctor with a reputation for womanizing and his wife, a famous actress. In their eagerness to resemble and impress these visitors, the villagers end up becoming madly attracted to objects that have little or no intrinsic value, simply because their idols desire them, or appear to do so. The gravitational pull of these pseudo-objects is no less powerful for being the result of snobbish impulses. Indeed, the frenzied strength of the villagers’ feelings stands in inverse ratio to the real merits of the person desired, who appears all the more enthralling the less objectively desirable he or she truly is. This is no accident. In order to call attention to the prodigious force of vicarious attraction, the novelist has deliberately emphasized the contrast between the object’s empirical charmlessness and the tremendous allure it acquires in the eyes of the villagers. This procedure is so effective that the tale has a quasi-pedagogical flavor, which suits my purposes in this book extremely well. It is tempting to view this story (which I analyze at some length in Chapters 2 and 3) as a description of inauthentic desire. This is a fair assessment, provided we acknowledge the absence, at least in Kundera’s world, of any desire that could be called authentic. His cynical libertines (including the aforementioned doctor) dance to the same imitative tune as do his naïve romantics. In other words, the distinction between enlightened Don Juans and benighted adolescents, which crops up repeatedly in the critical literature about Kundera, may be less essential than it seems. Many of his characters think of themselves as pleasure-seekers, yet few manage to experience anything remotely like pleasure. That is why I write in Chapter 6 that Kundera is “no apologist of hedonism but rather the melancholy prophet of a world in which rampant imitative desire has made hedonism impossible.” What underwrites the values that guide our actions? And if the goals we pursue appear worthy merely because someone else has deemed them so, how should we go about choosing a direction for our lives? Kundera’s fiction doesn’t answer these questions, it merely raises them. “A novel does not assert anything,” says the author in an interview with Philip Roth. “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”

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I share René Girard’s view that literary interpretation is “the continuation of literature.” For some time after I discovered them in college, I admired Kundera’s novels so passionately that I wished more than anything that I had written them myself. I have come to realize since that the aesthetic pleasure and sheer sport to be had from, as Girard puts it, formalizing the “implicit or already half-explicit systems” in those novels is more rewarding than would be the tedious exercise of rewriting them à la Pierre Menard. As Proust observes in Time Regained, “one can only recreate what one loves by repudiating it.” Many people have contributed to this book in one way or another, and I owe thanks to them all. Benoît and Emmanuelle Chantre generously supported the research that gave rise to this project. Jean-Michel Oughourlian imparted his knowledge of mimetic theory and his love of a good laugh during our many work sessions. His wife, Helen, was a kind and welcoming hostess. Eric Gans read through the early drafts of this project; his expert guidance and insights shaped later versions. François Ricard offered invaluable comments and advice. Milan Kundera also read the manuscript and shared his feedback over the course of unforgettable conversations. In my search for a publisher I had the good fortune to happen upon Haaris Naqvi, my editor at Bloomsbury, who has been a patient and sensitive guide through the labyrinth of publication. Andrew McKenna’s shrewd comments and encouraging words spurred me on as I completed my revisions. I am grateful to him for agreeing to enrich this essay with his foreword. Karen Gorton, Haley Malm, S. Morrow Pettigrew, and Joshua Stein read the manuscript and helped me to clarify my ideas and strengthen my arguments. The time and energy they devoted to this task resulted in substantial improvements—I alone am responsible for the flaws that remain. I also owe thanks to Sorcha Cribben-Merrill, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Scott Garrels, Bill Johnsen, Jimmy Kaltreider, Efrain Kristal (whose illuminating lectures on Dante inspired the nine-part structure of this book), and Domenico Palumbo for their support and assistance, and to Susan Merrill for her help in choosing the title. My father, Richard Merrill, came up with the original idea for the triangular motif that (strikingly reimagined by Bloomsbury’s designer) graces the cover of this book. He also created the elegant diagram in Chapter 2, which displays his characteristic flair as an illustrator. Finally, my wife, Caroline, assisted me in more ways than I can count. In Paris, as I worked on the first draft, she submitted with good grace to the inconveniences of life in our tiny apartment under the eaves. Without her efficiency, good humor, and moral support, this project would never have come to fruition.

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“Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women”

The first pages of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting draw an ironic parallel: Mirek, an outspoken dissident, courageously opposes the totalitarian power, which manipulates the past by refashioning collective memory. And yet Mirek himself behaves just like the Communist regime: in his private, individual sphere, he would like to exert absolute control over his reputation and erase his youthful mistakes. As the novel begins, he has gone to pay a call on his former mistress, Zdena, an unattractive woman with whom he had a liaison when he was 20. Mirek wants to banish all trace of Zdena from his past and the first part of the novel recounts his (unsuccessful) efforts to retrieve some compromising love letters from her. Why, exactly, does Mirek feel so ashamed of having loved Zdena? Kundera reflects on his character’s reasons for wanting to pretend that the juvenile affair never happened and concludes that Mirek fears its potentially damaging repercussions. Should his association with an ugly woman become common knowledge, it could ruin his image in the eyes of other females: Some years earlier, he’d had a pretty mistress. Once, she returned from a visit to the town where Zdena lived and asked with annoyance: “Tell me, how could you possibly have gone to bed with that horror?” He professed that she was only an acquaintance and vehemently denied having had an affair with her. For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake. (16)

With cruel simplicity, this passage sums up a fundamental insight in an aphorism worthy of La Rochefoucauld. It concisely defines a phenomenon that pervades Kundera’s oeuvre, one that his readers have for the most part ignored.

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Many women would no doubt protest that a man’s dating résumé matters not in the least to them. I have no intention of questioning their sincerity. It is true, after all (or so my wife tells me), that one is unlikely to hear a woman declare, even to her closest friends, that she is in search of a beau with gorgeous exes. Nor, for that matter, are many men likely to announce that they lust after a woman if, and only if, she possesses handsome and virile admirers. Such external factors have no business interfering with our personal freedom to choose. What we say and what we do, however, may be two very different things, especially where love is concerned. Kundera’s aphorism draws attention to our often unconscious tendency to look to others as guides and to assign greater weight to their endorsement than to our own impressions and judgments. While plastic beauty may catch the eye, it takes something more to hold our interest. Physical desirability is fairly objective, but the mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes a woman swoon over one good-looking man but not another isn’t programmed into the lucky fellow’s DNA. Though they certainly can’t hurt, perfectly chiseled features and a rippling abdomen do not in themselves a ladykiller make. Perhaps the secret to attraction lies not in the object of desire but in the subjectivity of the one who desires. After all, different women have different tastes. Some prefer trim blonds, others husky brown-haired men; some like bookworms, others outgoing party animals. Th is, too, is no doubt true to a certain extent. Must we conclude that a woman’s choice springs from subjective preferences impermeable to outside influence? That she never deviates from her favorite type? If we’re to believe Kundera’s aphorism, the notion that primal instincts alone govern our choices is as misleading as the idea that individual fancy always overrides biology. Both theories miss the mark: the one aims too low, the other too high. Human beings are neither slaves to their genetic code nor whimsical free spirits whose infallible inner voice tells them what to want. At first glance, the objective account of desire seems diametrically opposed to the subjective one. In truth, however, the two resemble each other in one important way: each assumes that people know “deep down” what to desire. Kundera proposes an unsettling alternative to that assumption: we desire primarily what others already desire, or what they appear to desire. After all, doesn’t a beautiful woman’s expert opinion say more about whether a man is desirable than a cleft chin and broad shoulders ever could? Just as a famous actor’s endorsement of a wristwatch entices more buyers than a demonstration of its escapement mechanism, a balding, pot-bellied fellow with a gorgeous blond on his arm stirs our imaginations, making us believe that he possesses hidden talents, or at least a colossal bank account.

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In short, Kundera’s aphorism tells us that our desires are influenced by what others desire. In other words, they are derivative, mediated, imitative. Kundera leads his readers into a labyrinth where stable reference points have melted away. In his novels, value—be it the erotic value of a man or a woman or the aesthetic value of a line of poetry—springs neither from the innate qualities of things nor from people’s own tastes, but rather from the endorsement of an admired third party, a model whose influence shapes, distorts, or transforms our feelings, our perception of the world, even our sense of self. Many, if not most, works of fiction (and most movies, too) downplay or remain blind to imitation’s role in bringing our desires, ambitions, and judgments to life. These narratives perpetuate the myth that our most powerful amorous passions spring from a place deep inside us and that the torments we endure “for love” are ennobling and meaningful. They would have us believe (to take but one example) that Annie’s sudden passion for Sam Baldwin in Sleepless in Seattle has nothing to do with the thousands of other female listeners who heard his story on the radio and who have been showering him with love letters and proposals. The movie portrays Annie’s love as spontaneous, unique, and individual, and therefore unrelated to the precedent set by the crowd.1 Kundera doesn’t subscribe to this humorless, über-romantic vision, nor does he succumb to an equally juvenile nihilism, which would mean sneering at even genuine human connections. Instead, with wit and charm, he does all he can to bring the imitative phenomenon to our attention. Though he doesn’t deny that we possess free will, he does make us think twice about who we are and why we want the things we do. If I had to sum up the overarching thesis of this book in a few words, I would start with the following assertion: Kundera’s novels show how hard it is for human beings to behave as hedonists, to live for volupté alone. This is because imitative desire skews our priorities, and it does this most persistently in the very laissez-faire cultural environment where hedonism becomes a theoretical possibility. Even as we claim (good individualists that we are) to be looking out for our own best interests and seeking pleasure and personal satisfaction, we unconsciously let others pull our strings. And if we give them free rein, their influence may orient our desires toward unworthy goals or lure us into adversarial tangles. We live in a world of hypertrophied imitation, as reflected in phrases like “trending,” “going viral,” and “memes.” Business strategists and marketers see this as an opportunity,2 as does the general public, and rightly so. Following the crowd can maximize our chances of acquiring the best consumer goods or finding the most amusing videos on YouTube. Thanks

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to the “early adopters,” we can delegate the hard work of spotting the next big thing to those with specialized knowledge and experience. However, trusting the experts comes with a built-in danger, for the very social forces that drive consumer society can also lead to overvaluing, meaningless one-upmanship, and even escalating conflict. Just as some celebrities are famous merely for being famous, some objects become desirable only because others have deemed them so, and not because they have any inherent worth. Nowhere is this danger more apparent than in our love lives, where we too often give silly games of desire the power to override our common sense. This is where Kundera’s fiction comes in. By showing us truths that we might otherwise keep from ourselves, truths that most novels and films conceal, his books point the way to a more honest self-examination. The example I provided from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting could give the impression that Kundera (and I) think that women are the only ones to fall prey to imitative influence. I want to banish that misconception right away: in Kundera’s universe, men and women alike tend to borrow their desires from someone else. To illustrate this point, a passage from Kundera’s novel Immortality will serve nicely. Professor Avenarius is having dinner with Milan Kundera (who is a character in the novel). Avenarius asks his dining companion to imagine that he has the choice between spending the night with a worldfamous actress, on condition that nobody ever know, and walking through the streets of his hometown with the same woman on his arm, on condition that he never get to sleep with her. Avenarius concludes that everyone would claim to prefer the night of love to the public stroll. What people really want, however, is to be seen with a celebrity: . . . all of them would want to appear to themselves, to their wives and even to the bald official conducting the poll as hedonists. This, however, is a self-delusion. Their comedy act. Nowadays hedonists no longer exist. . . . No matter what they say, if they had a real choice to make, all of them, I repeat, all of them would prefer to stroll with her down the avenue. Because all of them are eager for admiration and not for pleasure. For appearance and not reality. (385)

The structure of Avenarius’s thought experiment echoes the aforementioned imitative aphorism point by point. Here, however, we see the triangle from a new perspective. The focus rests squarely on the man, who relies on the crowd’s admiring looks to give his fragile ego a boost. The pseudo-hedonist dangles a famous beauty beneath the gazes of his peers so that their envy

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will glance off her and ricochet in his direction. Rather than obeying the dictates of his sexual urges, contemporary man (like the women in the aphorism above) behaves as a homo mimeticus. He wishes to benefit second-hand from the luster of the famous actress rather than to experience her body firsthand. To express this idea aphoristically, we might say: “A man wants a beautiful woman not for what she can do for him, but for what she can do for his image.” Even when Kundera’s protagonists do enter the bedroom, they take little pleasure in each other. Rivalry, not sensuality, prevails. Elsewhere in Immortality, Kundera offers a comic description of coitus envisioned as a struggle between two unhappy antagonists, each intent on outperforming the other, neither deriving the slightest enjoyment from the sexual act: . . . he had no chance to decide whether or not he was excited or whether he was experiencing anything that could be called pleasure. She didn’t think about pleasure or excitement, either. . . . And her sex, moving up and down, turned into a machine of war which she set in motion and controlled. . . . These exhausting gymnastics on the couch and on the carpet, with both of them bathed in perspiration, both of them out of breath, resembled in pantomime a merciless fight in which she attacked and he defended himself. . . . (169)

The idea of sex as a weapon is nothing new. We need only think of Madame de Merteuil, the cold-hearted seductress from the eighteenth-century novel Dangerous Liaisons, who uses her charms to lure and deceive. In spite of their thirst for power, however, Merteuil and her male counterpart, Valmont, derive physical satisfaction from going to bed with their conquests. Their aims are nefarious, the destination is tragic, but the journey itself is a pleasant one. In Immortality, by contrast, as in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, resentment, envy, and jealousy have chased pleasure into the wings and occupied center stage. Kundera holds up a revealing mirror to our contemporary era of pseudo-hedonism. Shattering the pieties of the sexual revolution, he points again and again to the subordination of concrete pleasures and common sense to the laughable illusions of imitative desire. Readers familiar with the work of René Girard may fear that by the time I have finished with Kundera, he will have been Girardized, stuffed into a neat, ready-made package, wrapped up and tied with a bow. I hope

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these fears will prove groundless. While I do mean to show that Kundera is deliberately playing with the phenomenon that Girard called “triangular desire” back in 1961, I do not mean to insinuate that Kundera is some kind of closet Girardian, or that his work can be reduced, once and for all, to a bunch of triangles. Nor am I attempting to smuggle Girard’s religious beliefs into Kundera’s fiction. In his novels, Kundera seeks to undermine and relativize away every stable certainty, which explains his distaste not only for ideological but also religious systems. His “satanic” side, as François Ricard would say, stands in contrast to the Christian faith that Girard has defended from his first book on. But this should not deter us from exploring fruitful points of convergence. Though the differences between the two men and their visions remain meaningful on one level, they matter far less on the deeper level that interests me here. Unlike Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and other French critics of the 1960s and 1970s whose flights of theoretical fancy arguably have little to offer novelists, Girard is the sort of thinker whom writers admire because he has useful things to teach them about literature and human nature. In his essay Testaments Betrayed, Kundera mentions Girard in a footnote: “At last, an occasion to cite René Girard; his Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque is the best book I have ever read on the art of the novel” (184). I take this as evidence that criticism and literature can provide mutual enrichment, as they did, for example, in the days of Prague structuralism and the Czech avant-garde, when critics like Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský rubbed shoulders with artists, poets, and novelists, including Kundera’s beloved Vladislav Vančura. Nonetheless, in the pages that follow I will do my best to refrain from using imitation as an a priori “critical lens” through which to read Kundera’s novels, as if this notion existed independently of them, as an unvarying concept that would allow us to deduce everything in advance. Imitative desire is a concept. However, it can only be understood in the flesh, through its specific incarnations. It must be derived empirically, teased out of the human relationships that brilliant authors like Kundera make it their business to explore and analyze. That is why I want to persuade you that Kundera himself has deliberately and knowingly placed imitation and rivalry at the very heart of his novels. Although others before him have apprehended the reality of triangular desire, few writers, if any, have portrayed its workings so clearly. By reading him, we come to a better understanding of the tricks desire plays on us. His fiction helps us see why we tend to believe (erroneously) that our most powerful feelings are necessarily the most authentic ones. It hones our

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ability to think critically about such romantic notions as “the one” and “love at first sight.” And it obliges us to recognize that the very people we detest most fervently are often secret sharers whom we ourselves have transformed into enemies, simply by wanting the same things they do. Still, some Kundera fans may raise their eyebrows at my relentless focus on imitative desire in such works as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Laughable Loves. After all, the author has made plain his repugnance for the kind of oversimplifying interpretations that boil literature down to a message or a theory. The only argument I can offer in my defense is that the results speak for themselves. When I began tracking down the various instances of imitation in Kundera’s work, I wasn’t sure what I would find, or even if I would find anything. As I turned up example after example, I felt like someone who has stumbled upon not just one buried treasure, but a whole series of treasures, a veritable Ali Baba’s Cave—except that Kundera writes about imitative desire in such a straightforward manner that, when you know what to look for, the treasure is blatantly obvious. I thus invite my readers to let me guide them through what Kundera calls the “labyrinth of values,” and to experience for themselves how the perspective I have adopted can bring an overlooked dimension of his fiction into sharp focus—and, at the same time, how that fiction can supply precious insights into our love and sex lives.

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Into the Labyrinth of Values

The transfiguration of the object In The Western Canon, his 1995 survey of literary masterpieces, Harold Bloom included The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a list of canonical contemporary works at the end of his book.1 By 2003, his opinion had changed. In his introduction to a volume of essays on Kundera, he suggests that The Unbearable Lightness is outdated, its themes and characters rendered obsolete by the fall of the Berlin Wall: “The Prague Moment” has gone by. Young people no longer go off to the Czech capital with Kundera in their back-packs. I cannot think that Kundera much relishes being praised as another Post-Modernist. He is aware that Cervantes outdoes everyone at the art of the self-conscious novel. I end, as I began, in some doubt as to Kundera’s lasting eminence. Much talent has been invested, ere this, in what proved to be Period Pieces.2

It would be hard to imagine a more dismissive appraisal. Bloom reduces Kundera’s most famous and highly regarded book (and, by extension, the author’s whole oeuvre) to a portrait of the Communist period in Prague. In doing so, he alludes to a common criticism of Kundera’s novels, namely that their most avid readers are ingenuous college students who, enchanted by the author’s erotic preoccupations and “philosophical” depth, set off on their European tours with his books as guides. Bloom delivers the verdict with his usual high-handedness. Yet he raises legitimate questions about literary value. What ingredient enables a work to transcend the historical moment in which it was written? And why is the allusion to the Kundera craze among college students so damning? The first question is hard to answer. And, in any event, it would be futile to make predictions about the way posterity will judge Kundera’s novels, especially given that most prognostications of this sort amount to attempts (à la Bloom’s Western Canon) at generating self-fulfi lling prophecy. The second question seems to me at once more intriguing and less fraught. Bloom’s reference to Cervantes provides a possible answer. Don Quixote

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goes mad from reading too many novels and sets out into a degraded world to resurrect the obsolete institution of chivalry. In his appraisal of Kundera’s “lasting eminence,” Bloom implies (unwittingly I suspect) that the young people gallivanting around Eastern Europe with The Unbearable Lightness of Being in their backpacks relate to Kundera’s novels in the same way that Don Quixote related to his cherished romances. These novels, he suggests, give their impressionable readers a model, an “ego ideal” that Bloom doesn’t bother to define but which, if we had to sketch its hazy contours, would probably consist in some incarnation of the Kunderian “epic womanizer,” a seductive mixture of sexual promiscuity and irony, with some quotes from Nietzsche thrown in for good measure. Bloom’s dismissal of Kundera likens the Prague Moment to Quixote’s romantic illusion. Kundera’s novels awakened dreams of adventure in a generation of college students. They quenched an adolescent thirst for erotic titillation and justified this guilty pleasure by wreathing the sex scenes in meditations on lightness and weight. Bloom writes that Kundera, like Philip Roth, believes sincerely in the myth of the libertine, and that he places a Don Juan at the center of his novel (in this case, Tomas from The Unbearable Lightness) because this character’s philandering strikes him as aesthetically pleasing and therefore worthy of fictional portrayal. Bloom may not be entirely wrong about the libertine character’s inherent dramatic value (there is something appealingly bold about the Don Juan figure as portrayed by Molière or Mozart), on which Roth, in his estimation, capitalizes more successfully than Kundera. But in casting Kundera’s libertine character as a latter-day version of Amadis of Gaul and the young readers as randy Quixotes eager to experience the erotic possibilities to which their eyes have been opened by The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it seems to me that he perpetuates a preexisting confusion. We might call this misunderstanding the “Quixotic fallacy.” It occurs when overenthusiastic readers set about emulating a fictional character who, in many cases, makes a wholly unsuitable role model. The best example of this tendency is, of course, none other than the romantic interpretations of Don Quixote, which raise the misunderstanding to the second power, since the reader’s mistake reproduces that of the deluded main character. Deaf to the author’s satirical intentions, readers from Coleridge to Ortega have hailed Quixote as a sublime outsider and the novel in which he appears as an invitation to embark on impossible quests.3 The history of literature is strewn with similar examples. Almost two centuries after Cervantes, a wave of suicides greeted the publication of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, as if the mere representation of the act amounted to condoning it, and despite the fact that Goethe claimed to have killed off his character

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in order to save himself. More recently, Kerouac’s On the Road has inspired countless college students to drive across country in emulation of the Beat Generation’s original road trips. In short, whatever the author’s intentions, there will always be readers who, like Don Quixote, see a novel’s main character as the ideal into which they dream of being transformed. What Bloom calls the Prague Moment is indeed over. Yet that is no reason for expelling Kundera’s works from the Western canon. For before the Prague Moment had ever begun, before impressionable college students set off from the American provinces to cosmopolitan Europe in hopes of becoming more like the Kunderian libertine Tomas, Kundera himself, in an early short story entitled “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” foresaw its existence and provided an interpretation not so far from Bloom’s but infi nitely more self-aware and amusing. Kundera’s great ancestor is, as Bloom disparagingly but, I think, correctly suggests, Miguel de Cervantes. Unlike Bloom, however, I maintain that as far as self-conscious novel writing goes, Kundera is the equal of his master. “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” can be found in the short-story collection Laughable Loves.4 It dates from the beginning of Kundera’s mature period, and many of the themes that he would go on to address in his later novels show up here for the first time, above all that of “erotic play and power,” as Philip Roth put it in his introduction to the first English translation of the collection.5 In this takeoff on the Don Juan myth, Kundera deflates our romantic illusions with playful good humor, making us laugh not only at the characters but also at ourselves. As the story unfolds, Doctor Havel, an aging skirt-chaser, arrives in a little spa town to take the cure. A young journalist seeks him out because he wants to interview Havel’s wife, a famous actress, only to learn after the fact that Havel is a well-known personage in his own right. A female doctor informs him of Havel’s legendary prowess as a seducer, which is said to be unequaled in all of Czechoslovakia, and deems the hapless young fellow an “ignoramus” in the field of erotic knowledge. Greatly impressed, the journalist can think of nothing but his image in the doctor’s eyes. He is all the more anguished because during their first meeting he made an unfavorable impression: . . . the editor was mortified to have been called an ignoramus, and even to have confirmed this by never having heard of Havel. And because he had always longingly dreamed of someday being an expert like this man, it bothered him that he had acted like a disagreeable fool precisely in front of him, in front of his master. (204)

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Many a young man has dreamed of becoming a great seducer. This one, however, is especially lucky. He has crossed paths with Don Juan in person and may even get a crash course in the art of womanizing. He could certainly use one. As Kundera describes him, the journalist is not exactly the type who overwhelms women with his confidence and charm: He was always unsure of himself and for this reason slavishly dependent on the people with whom he came in contact. It was in their sight and judgment that he timidly found out what he was like and how much he was worth. (203)

In the pages that follow, Kundera explores the comic possibilities opened up by the journalist’s desperate need for affirmation. Over dinner with Havel, whom he seeks out and soon succeeds in meeting for a second time, the acolyte tries to maneuver his way into the master’s good graces by showing that he is a connoisseur of cheese, wine, and women. These subjects represent the three sacraments of the Epicurean credo: “Eat, Drink, and be Merry.” Doesn’t this prove that the journalist is a budding libertine with a penchant for debauchery? Hardly. He may see himself that way, but it would be more accurate to describe him as a wine snob striving to impress the sommelier than as a hard-core foodie who answers only to his taste buds. He is so eager to please that he forgets to focus on what pleases him: He was like a student at the final high school oral examination before his committee. He didn’t try to say what he thought and do what he wanted, but attempted to satisfy the examiners; he tried to divine their thoughts, their whims, their taste; he wanted to be worthy of them. (207)

Alas, Havel’s questions befuddle the young man, and he falls into a dejected silence while listening to the doctor recount a series of witty anecdotes about himself. The journalist admires Havel just as American college students, heading off to Prague, used to read about and admire the libertine protagonist of The Unbearable Lightness of Being—who, it should be noted, is also a doctor, implying great savoir faire and wide and varied experience with the female anatomy. Like those impressionable students, the journalist wants to put his youthful clumsiness behind him and to become a favorite of the ladies, “an expert like this man.” Thus he expresses his intention of throwing off the mediocre, close-minded worldview instilled in him by the provincial town’s inhabitants. Ashamed of his sheeplike conformity, which he now sees clearly, he declares that he will henceforth adopt Havel’s sophisticated,

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cosmopolitan attitudes as his own. “It’s terrible,” he exclaims, “to see the world through their myopic eyes!” (224). Although he succeeds in extricating himself from his reliance on the villagers and their opinions, the journalist remains as deluded and dependent as ever. He has done nothing more than exchange his former model for a new one; it is now through Havel’s eyes that he wishes to see. What René Girard describes in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel as the triangular structure of desire begins to take shape. The journalist occupies one corner of the triangle as the subject, the imitator. Havel stands at the apex as the master, the model of desire. Whatever object he desires or appears to desire will also look desirable to the journalist (Figure 2.1). The triangle, of course, is nothing but a metaphor that expresses the nonlinear geometry of desire, a structural model that changes in shape and size according to the distance between mediator and imitator. It has no existence in reality. “The real structures,” as Girard points out in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, “are intersubjective.”6 Moreover, the metaphor works

Figure 2.1 “The Triangle of Desire” © Richard Merrill 2012

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better in some instances than in others (when a single individual serves as both model and object of desire, as in the case of the seducer who feigns selflove the better to attract the interest of his admirers, the triangle is harder to see, although still present). This story, however, suits my pedagogical purposes so well that I am almost embarrassed. “Dr. Havel” seems to have been expressly conceived in some Girardian laboratory to illustrate the triangle of desire, so closely do the characters’ interactions approximate the archetypal mimetic configuration.7 Just as he wants to eat the same cheeses and drink the same wines as his model, the journalist also wants to possess the sort of woman that Havel likes. He thus asks permission to bring his girlfriend to dinner so that the lubricious doctor can pass judgment on her beauty: he spoke . . . once more about his girl and invited Havel to take a look at her the next day and to let him know how she looked to him in the light of his experience; put differently (yes, in his whimsical frame of mind he used these words), to check her out. (209)

By virtue of their proximity to the model, the sneakers worn by a famous athlete or the watch endorsed by a legendary movie star seem endowed with supernatural properties. Advertisers would have us believe that anyone who acquires those sneakers or that watch (or their mass-produced replicas) will also come into possession of the superpowers. By the same token, drinking Havel’s favorite vintage or sleeping with a woman of whom he approves is, for the journalist, a way of imbibing his charisma and potency, his “mojo.” Havel’s approval acts as a touchstone: the imitator can only desire a girl if she enters the model’s radiant sphere of influence, where she becomes the means of communing with him. Without the inspiration afforded by his master’s antecedent desire, the journalist lacks the inner resources to love his girlfriend. He has so little confidence in himself and his own perceptions that he never bothers to wonder whether he derives any pleasure from the girl’s company, whether she excites him or makes him laugh. He discounts that sort of concrete, firsthand evidence because it comes from an untrustworthy source: himself. Instead of relying on his five senses and his own powers of discernment, he outsources the act of judgment to Havel, the high-powered “expert”: The young man really did not know what his girl was like, he wasn’t able to pass judgment on the degree of her beauty and attractiveness. [. . .] But precisely because what concerned him was the judgment of others, he had not dared to rely on his own eyes; until now, on the contrary, he had considered it sufficient to listen to the voice of general

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opinion and to accept it. But what was the voice of general opinion against the voice of a master and an expert? (217–18)

The journalist never considers the possibility that a renowned authority could be fallible. In a bad mood because some local women have rejected him, the doctor decides to amuse himself at his young friend’s expense. Although the girlfriend is young and pretty, Havel implies to his disciple that she has failed to pass muster. Without going so far as to put his advice into words, he hints that the journalist would be remiss if he failed to pursue a local woman named Frantiska instead. She is a middle-aged mother so plain and unremarkable that when the doctor mentions her name, the journalist confesses that it has never occurred to him to “look at her as a woman” (225). According to Havel, however, Frantiska possesses a sort of beauty that is altogether more alluring and sophisticated than the vulgar shapeliness the young man has favored up till now: “. . . the ordinary taste of a small town creates a false ideal of beauty, which is essentially unerotic, even antierotic. Whereas genuine, explosive erotic magic remains unnoticed by those with such taste. There are women all around us who would be capable of leading a man to the most dizzying heights of sensual adventure, and no one here sees them . . . Tell me, my dear editor . . . have you ever noticed that Frantiska is an extraordinary woman?” (224–5)

The aging Don Juan plays upon his admirer’s snobbery (we can almost see him kissing his fingertips in sensual delectation as he describes Frantiska) and the journalist falls for the hoax because, like the rest of us, he tends to disbelieve his own eyes and to mistake the foolishness pitched to him by someone else for a nugget of pure wisdom. To remove any lingering doubts, Havel strengthens his case with the aid of triangular advertising: he tells the journalist that any of his friends “would give all their worldly goods” (225) for an opportunity to spend just one night with Frantiska. And to complete the sales pitch he praises her legs with great fervor: “But have you noticed how she walks?” continued Havel. “Have you ever noticed that her legs literally speak when she walks? My dear editor, if you heard what her legs were saying, you would blush, even though I know you’re a hell of a libertine.” (225)

Seduced by this description (and no doubt flattered to hear Havel call him a libertine), the journalist realizes how foolish he has been and thanks the erotic expert for having opened his eyes to the truth. To put it kindly,

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Frantiska is no longer in the first bloom of youth. The editor, however, is convinced by Havel’s endorsement. In defiance of reality, he now sees her as an incomparable prize, all the more bewitching in that she transcends the usual canons of beauty. And so, smothering the inner voice of his conscience and feelings (for, as Kundera notes, the journalist does have genuine feelings, it’s just that he allows the model’s judgment to override them), he breaks up with his pretty girlfriend and in no time manages to have his way with the homely woman doctor: . . . the editor had dropped in on the woman doctor the very same day that his master had praised her. . . . he claimed that she possessed a hidden beauty that was worth more than banal shapeliness; he praised her walk and told her that when she walked her legs were most expressive. (233)

Rather than downplaying or dissimulating the imitative genesis of illusion, Kundera does everything possible to accentuate it. He writes that the journalist desires Frantiska because of Havel “whose genius had entered him and now dwelled within him” (235). Instead of traveling in a straight line from subject to object, desire makes a detour through the model. Just as Don Quixote desires via Amadis, the journalist desires via Havel. The doctor’s interest envelopes its objects in a shimmering halo; his indifference renders them odious. Merely by showing approval or disapproval, he transforms frogs into princesses and princesses into frogs with the ease of a magician waving his wand. The object has been transfigured in the model’s gaze, but not only that: Havel speaks through the young man in the same way that Cyrano speaks through his friend Christian in Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac. In repeating Havel’s words verbatim, the journalist allows his master to possess him and to engender in him a new self born of this possession. In Christian’s case, the possession is deliberate and open (though concealed from Roxanne); in the journalist’s case, the process is less strategic, less self-aware. Hence the delicious comic spectacle of a young man whose very self is driven and sustained by the model’s energy, manipulated by Havel as a marionette is manipulated by the marionettist. As Jean-Michel Oughourlian would say, the journalist is “the puppet of [Havel’s] desire.”8 The story’s exaggerated depiction of the triangular nature of desire, the transfiguration of an unattractive woman into a beauty by the sheer magic of mimetic suggestion, the way in which the journalist allows his master to speak through him—all of this adds up to a vignette that surpasses in sheer farcical cartoonishness just about any portrayal of desire-by-imitation

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outside of Cervantes, Kundera’s acknowledged master. The story recalls the scene at the beginning of the first volume of Don Quixote in which the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure arrives at a country inn: At the door there happened to be two young women, the kind they call ladies of easy virtue, who were on their way to Sevilla with some muledrivers who had decided to stop at the inn that night, and since everything our adventurer thought, saw, or imagined seemed to happen according to what he had read, as soon as he saw the inn it appeared to him to be a castle complete with four towers and spires of gleaming silver, not to mention a drawbridge and deep motal and all the other details depicted on such castles [. . .] . . . he rode toward the door of the inn and saw the two profligate wenches standing there, and he thought they were two fair damsels or two gracious ladies taking their ease at the entrance to the castle.9

Here, it is not windmills that are mistaken for giants but prostitutes that are mistaken for high-born ladies. Cervantes chooses women at the lowest end of the social scale not because he wants us to laugh at their expense but in order to point up his hero’s madness. The wider the distance between the women’s actual standing and their perceived value, the more obvious Don Quixote’s misapprehension of the world and the more delightfully comical the scene. Kundera likewise exaggerates the gap between reality and illusion for the purpose of generating comic effects. It is hard to say whether the story is funny because he is deliberately trying to illustrate the triumph of imitative suggestion over personal impression, or whether he succeeds in showing us how imitation works simply because he has a funny story in mind and wants us to savor its most comic features. In either case, the story’s humor is inseparable from its insights into the human condition. Our tendency as human beings is to hold the more embarrassing parts of our inner lives at arm’s length, where we need not own up to them. In an age of crumbling taboos, sexual braggadocio has become socially acceptable, at least in some contexts, but most of us refrain from speaking openly about our own envy, jealousy, and snobbery (other people’s envy is, of course, always fair game). The novelist’s art lies in describing those embarrassing secrets from the inside, in such a clear, recognizable way that we cannot help but see ourselves in the description and acknowledge its accuracy. In other words, the little comedy reveals a profound anthropological truth not despite but because of its silliness. The author caricatures imitative desire by exaggerating the most typical features of the journalist’s snobbish personality and eliminating everything else, a bit like a cartoonist

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accentuating a characteristic cleft in some politician’s chin or making an already long nose still longer. Kundera pulls off the mask of dignity behind which we conceal our secret debt to others. In bringing us face to face with our intimately familiar yet repressed triangular snobbery, he holds up a concave mirror in which we at once recognize and refuse to recognize ourselves. Th is mingled recognition and refusal—the feeling that if we do not dig in our heels the “self” to which we cling might slip away—results in a liberating catharsis called laughter, signaling that the description has hit home even as we release the unbearable tension it creates in us. “Dr. Havel” obliges us to look at Kundera’s work from a new angle. No longer can we place our author exclusively in the tradition of the great Central European writers—Musil, Broch, Kafka—whom he claims as his own predecessors. Nor can we see him merely as the successor of Diderot and Sterne, unless we recognize that Sterne saw himself as a purveyor of what he called “Cervantick wit.” It is Cervantes who is the great forerunner in this early story, which holds if not the key then at least a key to unlocking the significance of Kundera’s work, both for the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and in the context of the entire history of the novel. And we need not stop there. In this early text, the author goes beyond mere narrative illustration and formulates the principle that governs the behavior of his characters. In enumerating the benefits that the journalist hopes to derive from having Havel check out his girlfriend, Kundera writes: . . . if the master voiced his approval . . . [. . .] the girl would mean more to the young man than before, and the pleasure he experienced in her presence would change from fictional to real (for the young man occasionally realized that the world in which he lived was for him a labyrinth of values, whose worth he only quite dimly surmised; therefore he knew that illusory values could become real values only when they were endorsed ). (210)

This passage emphasizes the total subordination of the physical to the metaphysical. Nothing could be more concrete and presumably immune to the distortions of snobbery than pleasure, which after all is a sensation easily verified and hard to mistake for its opposite. Yet we see here that second-hand influence triumphs over even the first-hand experience of pleasure, for that pleasure would remain “fictional,” in other words unreal, intangible, impossible to experience as such, unless Havel gave the thumbs

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up, whereupon the young man would at once begin experiencing and savoring his pleasure as real and palpable. Having given this very telling example, Kundera then goes on to state the general law embodied by the young man’s inability to feel pleasure without Havel’s approval. For those who dislike the term “imitative desire,” his “endorsed value,” although a little cumbersome, accurately and succinctly accounts for the phenomenon in question. Like the celebrities who endorse products on television, Havel behaves as an erotic spokesperson and the editor as a trusting consumer who “buys” whatever the master recommends. Value—that is to say, that which is desirable, estimable, worthy of interest, and good to appropriate—is determined by endorsement or (with a nod to the academic context) by peer review. Finally, the passage provides the reader with an illuminating metaphor for imitative desire: the journalist, writes Kundera, wanders in a labyrinth. In an article on Racine’s Phaedra, Jacques-Jude Lépine reads the labyrinth as a figure for the erosion of qualitative barriers and hierarchies (primogeniture, the incest taboo, the caste system, and so on) that channel desire, steering potential rivals away from each other. For Lépine, the labyrinth metaphor represents the confusion brought about (and exacerbated) by unfettered imitative desire; it expresses what happens when individuals turn away en masse from established models and seek to assert their originality, which they do in the only way they know how, namely by copying one another’s desires.10 A labyrinth is characterized by the disorienting absence of landmarks, as anyone who has ventured into the maze at Hampton Court, lost his way in a foreign city, or dealt with some bureaucratic conundrum well knows. A person seeking a way out may be desperate enough to follow any directional marker, without bothering to wonder where it will lead them. With his use of the labyrinth image, Kundera alludes to what Hermann Broch, in his novel The Sleepwalkers, called the “disintegration of values,” that is to say the gradual disappearance of signposts pointing to a transcendent vanishing point, the loss of inherited customs and collective, common ground. The withdrawal of the gods and the collapse of hierarchies leaves an existential void filled by the various Havels who exert their sway on the human soul. The journalist’s inability to choose the right way himself, which leads him to rely on Havel’s misguided directions, bears witness to a broader social crisis. Other stories in Laughable Loves allude to the damaging or absurd consequences of Communist rule in Kundera’s native Bohemia: an art professor loses his post in “Nobody Will Laugh”; a school teacher runs afoul of his Communist colleagues in “Eduard and God.” In “Dr. Havel,” nobody gets fired for political reasons or interrogated by a Marxist school committee

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(nor for that matter is there any mention of the “cult of personality,” though in a nonpolitical context, and on a small scale, the phrase could be applied to the journalist’s worship of Havel). The social crisis can be felt in an indirect way, however, notably in the lack of reliable existential reference points in the maze at whose center stands Havel, diabolical mediator of desire. In this disorienting maze, the “illusory” values are those of the Pascalian “detestable self,” which is unable to find its way without guidance from a divinized model. Meanwhile, the only “real” values are the ones endorsed by that same model, whose stay in the spa town is temporary and who will be replaced the next day by someone else. From the very beginning of his oeuvre, then, Kundera handles the imitative paradox with a playful exuberance that recalls the work of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Molière. Not content to point out the phenomenon, he also accounts for it in theoretical terms, using figurative language to drive home his point. What should we take away from this story? First, we should recognize that the journalist’s attraction to Frantiska has nothing to do with her physical characteristics or her seductive personality and everything to do with Havel’s supposed opinion of her. As the psychologist Sam Sommers observes, when asked about the criteria that determine our interest in a potential mate, we generally cite a shapely body, a pretty face, or a knack for witty conversation: “. . . ask people what leads them to fall for someone, and their answers seem ripped right from the personal ads or one of those match-making websites that promises scientific compatibility analysis.”11 Focused entirely on the object, we neglect to factor peer influence into the equation of desire, convinced that in the journalist’s place we would choose the pretty girlfriend instead of the aging doctoress. In short, though we may acknowledge the story’s validity as an illustration of the imitative mechanism, we tend to limit its scope. It is always others who desire mimetically, never ourselves. Admitting that we in any way resemble the foolish journalist would entail giving up our object-oriented psychology and along with it some of our pride. Do we possess the sense of humor to do this? Such is the test with which we as readers are confronted, but only because the author passed it fi rst. I suspect that Kundera was able to write his tale because at about the age of 30 he suddenly realized that his own desire was in reality no more authentic than anyone else’s (I address his transformation in Chapter 8). He recognized at his own expense the model’s role in designating the object of attraction. To the extent that we too are willing to sacrifice some of our precious

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dignity, “Dr. Havel” disabuses us of the idea that it is exclusively a person’s individual merits that draws us to them. Second, we should note the powerful effects (and affects) produced by imitation. From the individual’s perspective, mediated desires feel stronger and more authentic, and seem more credible and trustworthy, than his own perceptions, feelings, or judgments. Kundera’s understanding of imitation inverts the accepted hierarchy of things, which accords less strength to imitated feelings and desires than to spontaneous impressions. A widespread dogma springs from this romantic conception: the stronger the feeling, the more authentic it must be. Kundera turns this idea upside down and in doing so he revolutionizes our understanding of desire: the less authentic the feeling, the stronger and more intensely “ours” it seems. This doesn’t mean that lack of affect denotes authenticity or that we should buy into the mystique of the “cool” temperament, which merely stands the romantic cult of feeling on its head. But it does mean that a pounding heart no more guarantees that we have found “the one” than powerful anger ensures that we are fighting for a just cause. In recent decades, IQ has given way to “emotional intelligence.” We use the words “I feel like” rather than “I think” to express our opinions. Refusing to submit to what he calls the “dictatorship of the heart,” Kundera’s novels warn us against placing too much faith in our emotions. In subsequent books, Kundera’s comedic description of imitative illusion gives way to more complex approaches to desire. In particular, he pays increased attention to the broader, historical impact of the mirages and frustrations born of imitation. He analyzes imitative desire’s collective manifestations along with its individual, personal ones, showing how they interrelate. And he returns to the scenario of the experienced Don Juan and his candid disciple, notably in the farcical novel Slowness, in which the apprentice seducer embodies contemporary society’s disconnection from reality.

Metamorphoses of Kristyna Before moving on to the question of rivalry, I would like to give another telling example of imitative desire and its transfiguring power. The passages I have in mind can be found in Part Five of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in which a young poet invites his mistress, a butcher’s wife from the provinces, to spend the weekend with him in Prague.

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The first transfiguration occurs when the woman arrives in the city. The student meets her in a dingy café and there he realizes that she is not as attractive as he previously thought: . . . the small-town sylph of his vacation was sitting in the corner near the toilets, at a table meant not for customers but for dirty dishes. She had dressed with the awkward formality of a provincial lady visiting the capital after a long absence and wanting to sample all its delights. She was wearing a hat, garish beads around her neck, and black highheeled pumps. (171)

Kundera gives us the student’s first impression so that we can savor every comical detail with him, and then describes his reaction. The reader can smile at the provincial lady’s get-up and feel sorry about the obviously unfriendly way she has been treated at the restaurant. The student, however, can feel only embarrassment: The student felt his cheeks burning—not with excitement but with disappointment. The impression Kristyna created against the backdrop of a small town, with its butchers, mechanics, and pensioners, was entirely different in Prague, the city of pretty students and hairdressers. With her ridiculous beads and her discreet gold tooth (in an upper corner of her mouth), she seemed to personify the negation of that youthful feminine beauty in jeans who had been cruelly rejecting him for months. He made his way uncertainly to her. . . . (171)

Kristyna appears beautiful in the student’s provincial hometown and ugly against the backdrop of Prague. Here, the mediator is not a single individual so much as a context, a backdrop. The student cannot help seeing his mistress through the eyes of the city’s inhabitants. Next to the beautiful hairdressers and pretty girls who populate the Prague streets, she can only appear in a disadvantageous light. Kundera once again makes the reader feel the disconcerting relativity of all aesthetic and erotic judgments. Is the real Kristyna the one whom the student found terribly attractive or the one whom he now finds unattractive? We find ourselves back in the labyrinth of values, in which the only means of settling such matters is to bring them before an expert. The student seems to realize that his desire for Kristyna is being influenced by the negative judgment he imagines others are passing on her. He hopes to restore her beauty by bringing her back to his apartment: “He

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wanted to take her to his room quickly, hide her from everyone’s sight, and wait for the privacy of their refuge to revive the vanished charm” (172). The student is not as unhappy as most of Kundera’s characters. Though he persists in finding Kristyna unattractive, he does not want to get rid of her. It has been ages since he last slept with a woman and she represents his best chance of putting an end to the drought. There is no particular cause for applauding his motives. But we can at least congratulate him on the concreteness of his desire. He is after sexual gratification and he is not snobbish enough to let his imitative desire triumph over his carnal urges. The student is particularly torn about Kristyna because he has been invited that very evening to a gathering of the country’s most famous poets. He longs to bed his female guest, yet he also wants badly to attend the gathering. In the end, full of maternal good will, Kristyna urges him not to pass up the opportunity to fraternize with such illustrious company. Taking a book of verses by the most famous poet of them all, whom Kundera has nicknamed Goethe, he promises at her request to get his mistress a dedication: The student was exultant. The great poet’s inscription would replace, for Kristyna, the theaters and variety shows. . . . As he expected, the intimacy of his attic room had revived Kristyna’s charm. The young women coming and going on the streets had vanished, and the enchantment of her modesty silently invaded the room. The disappointment slowly wore off. . . . (175)

Isolated from the crowd, Kristyna appears attractive once more. The student behaves a little bit like Havel, but with much different intentions. He uses mimetic magic to make the girl he is with seem more attractive, but his manipulation is really quite harmless. He deliberately leads Kristyna back to his room so that he will no longer be forced into comparing her unfavorably to the pretty girls on the street and obliged to imagine that she reflects poorly on him in the eye of public opinion. This decision should be regarded as evidence of a certain wisdom. The student could have broken with his girlfriend, as the journalist in “Dr. Havel” did. Or he could have tried to arouse some other man’s interest in her, driving up her market value but creating a rival for himself in the process. Instead, he finds a solution that involves no unnecessary risk of conflict. For what he finds attractive about Kristyna is not her flashy sexiness but rather her modesty. Indeed, in this story, the brief access of snobbery to which the student falls prey only highlights the fundamental tenderness of his feelings for her.

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At the gathering of the poets, the student speaks out in defense of Lermontov (the nickname that Kundera has given to another of the Czech poets at the gathering) and with his words earns the admiration of the others. He soon fi nds himself in conversation with Goethe himself and, unable to think of any more interesting topic, begins to tell the great poet about Kristyna, the butcher’s wife. Goethe listens with sincere interest and the student soon confesses that Kristyna has a gold tooth and dresses badly. He hastens to explain that such little details, typical of a provincial woman, were precisely what drew him to her in the first place. Taking up his pen, Goethe assures him that he has chosen his mistress wisely and agrees with pleasure to dedicate the book of verses: “Then he bent over the title page, took out his pen, and started to write. Enthusiastically, nearly in a trance, his face radiant with love and understanding, he fi lled the whole page” (192). Goethe is no diabolical divinity à la Havel. He plays the role of a benevolent, loving God who seconds the disciple’s desire without entering into a competitive relationship with him. He wants only for the student to be happy and his dedication accomplishes that goal: The student took back the book and blushed proudly. What Goethe had written to a woman unknown to him was beautiful and sad, yearning and sensual, lively and wise, and the student was certain that such beautiful words had never been addressed to any woman. He thought of Kristyna and desired her infinitely. Poetry had cast a cloak woven of the most sublime words over her ridiculous clothes. She had been turned into a queen. (192)

The metamorphosis is complete; the shimmering cloak of words enwraps Kristyna in its radiance. The allurements of the big city threatened the relationship between the young lover and his mistress. Now Goethe’s warm words have resuscitated the student’s desire and aroused in him a desperate yearning for her. It is perhaps no accident that of all the episodes in Kundera’s novels, this one in particular radiates good-natured humor and charm. The events it describes are bathed in the author’s nostalgia for his native land and his youthful days in Prague. In the end, the spirit of masculine camaraderie trumps the snobbery of invidious comparison. And the ruses employed in these passages stem from fundamentally benevolent intentions. Havel, too, was a magician whose wand transformed frogs into princesses. But he performed his black magic with a sardonic humor verging on malice. The poets appear to us through the golden mists of Kundera’s memories. Unlike

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Havel, they are benevolent divinities intervening for good in the lives of men. The legendary names increase their mythical stature; the little club in which they meet is a kind of Mount Olympus. Later in the evening, the student speaks with Petrarch, who, proclaiming that to love a woman means being entirely consumed by her, admonishes him not to listen to the cynical libertine Boccaccio: The student listened to Petrarch ardently and saw before him the image of Kristyna, about whose charms he had had his doubts some hours earlier. He was ashamed of those doubts now, because they belonged to the less good (Boccaccian) half of his being; they sprang from his weakness, not his strength: they proved that he did not dare enter into love completely, with all his being, proved that he was afraid of being consumed by a woman. (199)

The student promises himself to love Kristyna as she has never been loved before. Kundera observes: “A short time earlier, Goethe had arrayed her in a royal cloak, and now Petrarch was adding to the fire in the student’s heart. The night awaiting him would be blessed by two poets” (199). As if to emphasize the role played by imitative illusion in the episode, Kundera provides us with not one but a pair of Cyranos. Lyrical poetry is supposed to spring from the deepest and most personal recesses of the poet’s soul. The student’s soul, however, is fi lled with yearnings and feelings placed there by others. The two poets perform the function of the street-corner scribe or even of the mass-produced greeting card. Their prestige in the eyes of the young man, however, lends extraordinary evocativeness to their words, which fi ll him with borrowed feelings more powerful and more seemingly authentic than any spontaneous ones could be. The evening ends, alas, in disappointing fashion. Fearing a pregnancy and happy just to spend the night embracing the student chastely, Kristyna repels his advances and returns to her provincial town on the train the following day without ever having given the student what he wanted. However, a final pirouette puts things right again: disappointed because Kristyna would not sleep with him, the student goes back to the club where, in the company of Petrarch and Lermontov, he receives unexpected consolation. The two poets read a note written by the butcher’s wife and take it for a poetic verse of the student’s creation. Thus is the young hero (whom Kundera rather unkindly calls an “incorrigible idiot” (212)) welcomed into the club of poets as an equal, Kristyna’s simple message (“I await you. I love you. Kristyna. Midnight.”) having been transformed and draped, as was Kristyna herself, in royal garb by the benevolent divinities of poetry.

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The Book of Imitation and Desire

“An imitation of feeling” Eva Le Grand’s Kundera, or, The Memory of Desire surveys the author’s work in a series of lucid, free-flowing variations. Since the word “desire” occurs in the very title of the book, it would seem natural to turn to Le Grand for a definition of desire as portrayed in Kundera’s novels. For Le Grand, the author’s master theme is “kitsch,” understood not just as an aesthetic but also and indeed primarily as an existential category. In her conception, kitsch is an attitude of delusion or denial that bears a strong resemblance to the kind of transfiguring desire I have been examining. She defines it as the faculty for substituting “dreams of a better world (paradise lost as bright future) for reality,” for “misrepresenting what is real as an idyllic and ecstatic vision of the world to which we sacrifice without scruple all ethical and critical awareness.”12 On one level, it’s hard to argue with this definition. After all, it squares with commonsense folk wisdom: we see what we want to see or, as an old proverb has it, we think the moon is made of green cheese. In other words, when we desire something without cause, this is because we have allowed our wishful thinking to interfere with our perception. Our dreams, wishes, and desires (“dreams of a better world”) make things appear otherwise than they really are (“misrepresenting what is real”). Le Grand emphasizes that the illusion does not cling to objects themselves but she never quite explains where it comes from or what produces it. And since we cannot blame the world itself—in Le Grand’s terms, “what is real”—we must conclude that the mirage originates within the subject. In her view, Kundera’s novels reverse that subjective error, undoing the spell that shrouds reality and revealing the objective world to us once more. She sees Kundera (rightly so) as a demolisher of illusions and his novels as a means of demystifying the twentieth century’s most pernicious myths, both personal and political. François Ricard takes a similar approach: “. . . reading a novel by Kundera is always an experience of disillusionment.”13 Le Grand’s definition of desire as it functions in Kundera’s novels applies nicely to “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years.” The young journalist “misrepresents what is real,” taking an unattractive woman for an alluring one. His judgment paralyzed, he has no scruples about “sacrificing” his pretty girlfriend to Havel’s plan, despite his qualms and the substitute’s lack of beauty. Moreover, Le Grand adds an ethical dimension to our understanding of the story, raising issues of responsibility and reminding us that actions performed in a deluded state may cause harm and suffering.

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In short, she traces a faithful picture of desire as it appears in the text. Almost all of the story’s features (substitution, sacrifice, lack of awareness, the transfiguration of the object) find an echo in her definition of kitsch. All, that is, but one. There remains that one missing ingredient, an ingredient so important and, in this story at least, so obvious that most critics appear to have passed over it in silence, perhaps in the belief that such low-hanging fruit offered insufficient exercise for their interpretive powers. Once we add it, everything falls into place, and even the text’s ethical implications become richer and more complex. Le Grand refers to the missing ingredient when, in the process of refining her definition, she writes: “The very knowledge of the world becomes contaminated, all the more so because it does not rest on a real-life feeling, but on an imitation of feeling.”14 The word “imitation” pries open Le Grand’s psychology of the subject and transforms it from within. When she begins to speak of “sentimentalist imitations” and of characters “experiencing feelings ‘by proxy’” her linear framework acquires three-dimensional depth, and her reading shifts into a higher gear. Content to point out the phenomenon’s existence without delving any deeper into the matter, Le Grand never pursues this promising line of inquiry. If she had done so, she would have discovered that imitation plays a much greater role in Kundera’s fiction than his readers have hitherto suspected. One instance of the “imitation of feeling” she speaks of occurs in the novel Life Is Elsewhere. Jaromil, the talented yet naïve poet, has gone back to his red-headed girlfriend’s basement apartment. She is wearing a dress with large buttons down the front. He clumsily tries to undo them, not realizing that they serve a merely ornamental function. Laughing, the girl tells him that she will undress herself and reaches back to unzip her dress. Angry at having made such a maladroit error, Jaromil insists on undoing the zipper himself. Kundera reveals the reason for Jaromil’s insistence. The young man is playing a role that he has learned by rote from books. He lacks erotic experience but precisely for this reason he has rigid preconceptions about how his encounter with the girl should go: . . . it was utterly unpleasant to him that the girl wanted to undress herself. To his mind the difference between amorous undressing and ordinary undressing consisted precisely in the woman being undressed by the man. This idea had not been instilled in him by experience, but by literature and its suggestive phrases: “he knew how to disrobe a woman”; “he

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The Book of Imitation and Desire impatiently tore off her dress.” He could not imagine physical love without a prologue of confused and eager gestures to undo buttons, pull down zippers, lift up sweaters. (268)

The word “suggestive” should be understood in two senses. The sentences in the books Jaromil reads possess an arousing, erotic charge and they also suggest to the young man the right way of behaving with a woman. From Jaromil’s Bovaryesque vantage point, the prelude to his lovemaking with the young girl lacks frenzied passion. The real-life scene fails to correspond to the imaginary ones conjured up by dimestore novels. Jaromil’s determination to unbutton the girl’s dress stems not from any actual, urgent physical longing for her. He is neither overcome by passion nor blinded by lust. Rather, he wants to be overcome by passion and blinded by lust. The episode recalls Kundera’s analysis of homo sentimentalis in Immortality: It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel (decide to feel, just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly called hysteria. That’s why homo sentimentalis (a person who has raised feeling to a value) is in reality identical to homo hystericus. (219)

The hysteric’s idée fixe comes to him or her from afar: Don Quixote decides to love Dulcinea because he is attempting to live out the narrative trajectory suggested to him by his favorite romances of chivalry. The feeling of extreme passion has become a value for him because it is (or is believed to be) a value for the model. He does not experience his imitation as such, however. Rather, he sincerely believes in the authenticity of his feeling, just as the journalist in “Dr. Havel” no doubt believes in the intense erotic desire that overwhelms him in the presence of the wrinkled Frantiska, not realizing that this desire comes to him from Havel. Though on some level his imitation is more deliberate than the journalist’s, Jaromil, too, believes sincerely and wholeheartedly in the conception of love that he has picked up from books. The disagreeable sensation he experiences at the idea that his girlfriend should undress herself is in itself authentic, to the extent that he truly does feel it. As Kundera writes in Immortality, the critique of homo sentimentalis should not make us think that “a person who imitates feeling does not feel. An actor playing the role of old King Lear stands on the stage and faces the audience full of the real sadness of

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betrayal, but this sadness evaporates the moment the performance is over” (219). Jaromil identifies entirely with his role and it is for this reason that the girl’s reactions cause him so much distress: she refuses to play her designated part in the theater of lovemaking! This part, however (like his own), exists entirely in his hypersusceptible mind, a figment of literary suggestiveness understood in the two senses of the word. Le Grand’s conception of desire is too beholden to philosophy. She puts the emphasis on subjectivity, whereas Kundera accentuates the model. Downplaying the parts of her definition that would have us think desire springs from some inner core, we should highlight the passages in which she speaks of imitation. In this way, we critics can extend and elucidate the novel’s intuitions rather than lagging far behind them. If we fail to do this, our critical reading will operate at a level of awareness beneath that of the text. Psychologies of the subject neglect to warn us that we shouldn’t always heed Obi-Wan Kenobi’s advice to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (“Trust your feelings, Luke!”). The “force” that is flowing through us may be cosmic energy, but it could also come from a soft drink advertisement, our nextdoor neighbor, or, as in Jaromil’s case, a Harlequin romance novel. Those subject-oriented psychologies also fail to grasp that “Dr. Havel” and the Kristyna episode from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting act as parables about the mimetic nature of beauty. They subvert the old saw, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” After reading Kundera’s stories and novels, we should say instead: “Beauty is in the eye of the mediator.” Le Grand is not alone in according great importance to desire and illusion in Kundera’s fiction. François Ricard and Guy Scarpetta are two of Kundera’s most insightful readers, and in their essays they praise Kundera’s disabused take on love and his deconstruction of political and ideological myths. But they do not speak of imitation. In the opening pages of Agnes’s Final Afternoon, Ricard discusses the Girardian notion of “conversion,” only to set it aside.15 Meanwhile, John O’Brien sketches the main outlines of “Dr. Havel” in his study of Kundera’s work and its relationship to feminism and feminist literary criticism. However, he is too concerned with condemning Kundera’s misogynistic misrepresentations of women to attach much importance to triangular desire, except to decry Havel’s manipulative use of his wife to arouse the interest of the local women who have snubbed him (I will address this episode in the following chapter).16 Maria Nemcova Banerjee comes closest, perhaps, when in her brief analysis of the story she refers to Havel’s “derivative charisma.”17

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To my knowledge, only one reader has thoroughly explored the triangular interpretation of “Dr. Havel”—Milan Kundera himself. Here it may be worth recalling Kundera’s words during a radio appearance with René Girard: There is a short story that I would not have been able to write if I had read your book on the novel beforehand. Because you talk about a desire that is always inspired by someone else’s desire. I wrote a short story called “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” in which there is a great skirtchaser who is admired by a young disciple. And he is so dependent on the judgment of his model that he is only capable of being with the women that his model recommends to him. This great Don Juan is so sadistic that he always recommends women who are absolutely ugly. When a young woman is beautiful, he tells him, “No, it’s not worth your trouble.” And the young man obeys him completely. It’s almost the caricature of what you wrote! If I had read your book first, I would have been blocked. I had the twofold pleasure of reading you, and of reading you too late.18

The testimony of the author is by no means indispensable. After all, the textual evidence speaks for itself. But Kundera’s remarks strengthen that evidence. They lead me to the conclusion that he wrote “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” specifically in order to reveal the workings of “a desire inspired by someone else’s desire” (or, inasmuch as Dr. Havel does not actually desire Frantiska, by the appearance of that desire). It is easy to understand why Kundera would use the word “caricature.” As I remarked above, he describes the imitative mechanism the way a cartoonist sketches a face, underscoring the most important features—the disciple’s quasi-religious faith in the master; the transfiguration of the object; the imitator’s blindness to the illusion that grips him—in illuminating analytical passages. And, as we shall see in the next chapter, he even creates a second triangle that mirrors the first, shift ing the story’s center of gravity away from any one protagonist so as to focus squarely on the changes in perceived value wrought by third-party endorsement. Neither Dostoevsky nor Stendhal had any word for triangular desire or any conceptual means of dealing with the phenomenon. Even Proust lacks a good theory of mediated desire; his descriptions of triangular jealousy, prodigious though they may be, remain implicit and intuitive. These authors preceded Kundera on the path of mimetic revelation. In stories like

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“Dr. Havel,” their intuitions are shown to fit into a larger conceptual pattern. Building on the innovations of essayistic novelists like Mann, Broch, and Musil, Kundera weaves playful philosophical reflection into the narrative fabric of his books. In his hands, the novel gradually gives way to the essay, without ever abandoning its fundamental purpose, which is to explore the world of human experience.

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3

From Imitation to Rivalry

The shift from admiration to envy Having noted above that Don Quixote and the young journalist in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” have much in common, I would now like to explore what separates them. In Cervantes’ novel, Amadis and the other knights that Don Quixote imitates play the role of transcendent models, impassive, reigning benevolently over their disciple from on high. They do not pass judgment on Don Quixote, who never truly experiences the humiliation of defeat until he is unseated in single combat at the novel’s conclusion. Moreover, Dulcinea is a fantasy. Don Quixote will never consummate his love for her because she does not exist. With Cervantes, love remains chaste, uncontaminated by the sexuality tinctured with cruelty and humiliation that we call eroticism.1 By contrast, Havel intimidates the young man from the very beginning with his virile, experienced air. The metaphor of the school examination, which I cited earlier, suggests the acolyte’s panicked sense of insecurity, which stands in direct proportion to the master’s air of self-confidence. The god has come down to earth and stands in his worshiper’s path, ready to deliver a devastating verdict. He has become the Sartrean torturer (“Each of us will act as the torturer of the two others,” declares Inez in No Exit) or the Kafkan gatekeeper from the parable in The Trial, who shuts the door on the man seeking admission to the law. There is nothing more painful and humiliating than experiencing rejection at the hands of the very God one adores. When the spheres of action of model and imitator overlap, each thwarts the other’s desire. Each frustrates the other’s ability to realize his mimetically inspired goal. This is what risks happening to the journalist and Havel. Unbeknown to the young man, Havel perceives him as a rival. The doctor realizes over dinner that were he to proposition the journalist’s girlfriend, she would most likely reject him, just as the two women he accosted earlier had done. Once a great pick-up artist, Havel has put on weight and begun to have health problems. He is no longer the man he used to be. It can be no accident that he seeks to separate the girl from the journalist, to dispossess the young

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man of what he, Havel, cannot possess himself, after the manner of Aesop’s fable of the dog in the manger. For his part, the journalist admires Havel too much to imagine that the latter might envy him. He is afraid that Havel thinks him foolish and naïve, but it never crosses his mind that he might be more fortunate in love than this paragon of erotic savoir-faire. Havel’s relationship to the young woman in the story is even more obviously adversarial: “Dr. Havel looked into the girl’s blue eyes as into the hostile eyes of someone who was not going to belong to him” (219). Having realized that he could not seduce the girl, he decides that she is ugly—and this time it is not Aesop’s fable of the dog in the manger but that of the fox and the grapes that must be invoked to characterize Havel’s bad faith: “And when he understood the significance of these eyes as hostile he reciprocated with hostility, and suddenly saw before him a creature aesthetically quite unambiguous: a sickly girl, her face splattered with a smudge of freckles, insufferably garrulous” (219). This passage obliges us to revise slightly our idea of Havel. In recommending to the journalist that he throw the girl back into the water like “a true fisherman,” he acts less like a practical joker than like a disgruntled suitor. He manages to conceal his ill humor, but Kundera penetrates beneath the surface of the bon vivant’s merry disguise to reveal the depths of Havel’s unhappiness: the joy he derives from thinking of the young girl as ugly and from having the journalist’s admiring gaze fi xed upon him “was small in comparison with the bitterness that left a gaping hole inside him” (220). It is the journalist, however, whom the toxic emotions of rivalry have poisoned most thoroughly. As an antidote to his dark thoughts, Havel brings his beautiful and famous actress wife to the spa town. Meanwhile, the doctor’s assessment has persuaded the journalist that his own girlfriend is ugly and therefore unworthy of the libertine he aspires to become. Ashamed to appear in public with her, he breaks off their relationship even though deep down he still loves her. These events have put him in such a bad mood that when he encounters Havel with the beautiful actress, he no longer perceives his master with admiration but with envy: The next morning did not bring any light into his gloomy mood, and when he saw Dr. Havel walking toward him with a fashionably dressed woman, he felt within himself an envy akin to hatred. This lady was too blatantly beautiful and Dr. Havel’s mood, as he nodded gaily to the editor, was too blatantly buoyant, so that the young man felt even more wretched. (222)

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Don Quixote’s desire is, broadly speaking, benign because it is aspirational and free of stubbornness. Moreover, the suffering that befalls the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure is largely physical. The beatings that he and his squire endure, like the harm that he inflicts on himself to demonstrate the immensity of his love for Dulcinea, are typical of a pre-modern, Hegelian world of physical violence. By contrast, the suffering the journalist must endure, a kind of torment unique to the modern, democratic ethos, is primarily interior and psychological. It takes the form of humiliation, resentment, and envy. In Kundera’s novel Farewell Waltz, another character from the provinces is portrayed as envious of visitors from the big city. The nurse Ruzena, Kundera writes, feels unhappy because she envies the sophisticated women who come to take the cure: “Envy: These women came here directly from husbands and lovers, from a world she imagined teeming with a thousand possibilities inaccessible to her, even though she had prettier breasts, longer legs, and more regular features” (37). The provincial universe is situated between the regime of benign external mediation and the hellish regions of internal (or infernal) mediation2 located nearer the center of the labyrinth of values. Admiration shifts toward envy as the model comes closer, as the big city makes contact with the countryside, pollinating the provincial buds and causing new forms of desire to blossom. This shift appears clearly in the way the geographical proximity of the man Ruzena desires (a famous trumpeter) affects her mood: “When he was far away, she had been full of energetic combativeness, but now that she felt his presence, her courage failed her” (39). The distant model instills energy and fighting spirit; the proximate one drains the imitator of her energy and deprives her of her emotional resources. Envy also plays a role in Life Is Elsewhere, in which Jaromil imitates his former classmate, now a policeman: “he envied his old classmate’s manly job, his secrecy, and his wife, and also that he had to keep secrets from her and that she had to accept this; he envied his real life, whose cruel beauty (and beautiful cruelty) always outstripped him . . . he envied his real life, which he himself had not yet entered” (294). The passage echoes Kundera’s brief theory of imitative desire in “Dr. Havel,” in which “apparent” values can only become “real” when they have been endorsed by someone else. Like the journalist in that story, Jaromil sees the world his classmate occupies as more real than his own and dreams of belonging to it. The passage could stand as a warning to academics, who often speak of the “real” world, as opposed to the ivory tower of the university. Is the world

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of bankers, soldiers, and businessmen truly more real than the world of literary criticism? Writers and intellectuals must take care to avoid falling victim to the same romantic illusion as Jaromil. Where does “Dr. Havel” fit into the historical framework that Girard lays out in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel? I like to read the young man’s request that Havel “check out” his girlfriend as a parody version of Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband. In this compact, tightly plotted work, a widower pesters his late wife’s former lover into accompanying him on a visit to his pretty young fiancée. The eternal husband sets himself up for new failures by seeking out the circumstances in which he previously suffered defeat. He tries to achieve a different outcome the second time around, like a boxer clamoring for a rematch against the champion who knocked him out with a single punch. Just as the journalist asked Havel to check out his girlfriend, the eternal husband introduces his former rival to his future wife in order to receive confirmation of her allure from a recognized authority in the field. In his study of Dostoevsky, Girard suggests that he also hopes to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by vanquishing the blasé Don Juan in head-to-head erotic combat. Instead, the eternal husband looks on, miserable, as his fiancée is swept off her feet by the interloper. The eternal husband deliberately and effectively engineers his own downfall. “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” lacks the ferocious satirical power of Dostoevsky’s novel, yet it displays the same underlying structure, even if Kundera veers away from a direct confrontation between the younger man and his older rival, making no more than passing mention of the journalist’s envy and Havel’s ill-humor. Kundera sacrifices intensity to comic effect. The theme of the hoax (Havel’s deliberate mystification of the young man, whom he influences into desiring an objectively undesirable woman) enables Kundera to treat rivalry while at the same time achieving farcical effects reminiscent of Cervantes. In Kundera’s novels we enter the realm of vaudeville, but it is a dark sort of vaudeville, a boulevard theater for the twentieth century, with an existential edge. From a technical vantage point, too, the theater is an entirely appropriate reference point, especially in light of the novelist’s experience as a playwright and screenwriter.3 It would be a stretch to say that Kundera’s novels are “theatrical,” even if some of the short stories and the novel Farewell Waltz use a five-act farce structure. The theater shows without telling. Contemporary fictional technique, especially in the United States, springs from Flaubert and his impersonal narrator: “Show, don’t tell” is the writing group dogma. Kundera’s novels shatter the taboo against telling. They introduce a chatty narrator who refers to himself as “I,” apostrophizes

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the reader, asks rhetorical questions, and so on. The Dostoevskyan novel “shows” imitative desire; the Kunderian novel “tells” it. The story unfolds on stage, so to speak, but we are face to face with the narrator who, once in a while, steps aside, draws back the curtain, and allows us to have a glimpse of the action. This technical procedure gives the author license to analyze, meditate over, and reflect upon each action. For example, the journalist comes up with the idea of having Havel evaluate the beauty of his girlfriend. The idea is born of his tipsiness and his desperate wish to have something to say. He remains unaware of its wider implications. Instead, it is the narrator who explains just what advantages the journalist might hope to derive from his request. He enumerates this “triple advantage” in the manner of a list, briefly analyzing each element. The result is an eighteenth-century-style conte combined with Sartrean-style phenomenological analysis, a mixture of old-fashioned telling and meditative elucidation.

Deceit, desire, and the plight of the aging Don Juan In the first of the two interlocking plots in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” the journalist kneels down before the judgment of his master. Havel, on the other hand, seems to escape the most humiliating ordeals of desire. He never plays the role of the schoolboy trembling beneath the severe gaze of his teacher. His wife—young, beautiful, and famous—adores him as much as the journalist does. Yet we should not imagine that Havel eludes the author’s irony. The Don Juan is no more self-sufficient than his disciple, who relied on others to find out “how much he was worth” (203). As the foregoing reflections on “internal mediation” suggested, Havel’s self-esteem is a towering edifice supported by two very fragile stilts: the admiration of his disciple, and the desire of the girls he manages to seduce. Kundera goes to some lengths to show that Havel’s self-love depends on the interest that others take in him. At the first encounter with the journalist, who seeks him out, he believes, for an interview, Havel is secretly delighted with the attention, though he pretends not to be. Then, upon learning that the editor wants to interview not him but his famous actress wife, Havel is wounded and gives the young man a cold response. After the journalist’s departure, he looks at himself in the mirror, and his face “[doesn’t] please him” (202): he sees himself as ugly because the journalist prefers someone else to him. In other words, Havel is both the imitator and the object of desire: he desires himself through the journalist, who serves as his model.

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The same pattern holds true with the women in his life. In an earlier story, “Symposium,” where he plays a central role, Havel rejects a girl who offers herself to him too readily. This rejection bears witness to Havel’s derivative desire: he imitates the women who surround him. If they seem to desire themselves, he will desire them too. But if they desire him too much, they don’t desire themselves enough, and he has no model to bolster his attraction to them. Vain as he is, Havel is incapable of desiring without a precedent to show him the way. It follows that women who have a disdainful or haughty air will seem to him the most appealing ones. He will imitate their apparent self-love and desire them like crazy. And this is indeed what happens. Havel’s attempts to seduce two pretty girls he meets in the spa town come to nothing. The first one rebuffs him: “He understood that he had been rejected and that this was a new insult” (212). The second woman resembles a riding horse and Havel “always found precisely this type of woman madly attractive” (215). Likening a woman to an animal is no arbitrary literary procedure. It should be taken as a sign of the degradation of human relationships in the world of mediation described by Kundera. Apart from the obvious ribald comparison of sex to “riding,” it suggests a woman who is fundamentally other and thus inaccessible. Kundera accentuates the girl’s bestial quality not because he dislikes women and wishes to insult them but because the metaphor explains the power that a certain kind of vacuous beauty exerts over the intelligent and cultivated Don Juan: her animalistic insensitivity is at opposite poles from his aesthete’s sensitivity, her mute indifference the ideal obstacle to his desire. Faced with such mastery, Havel is immediately enslaved. He hastens to help the girl put on her coat, offering her an inviting smile. She does not smile back: “Dr. Havel felt as if he’d been slapped in the face, and in a renewed state of gloom he headed toward the café” (215). The slap is no arbitrary simile either; the presence of physical violence, if only in a metaphorical register, gives the encounter a sadistic tenor: Havel desires the woman all the more fiercely inasmuch as she is capable of bruising his ego. Wounded by the indifference of the village girls, which heralds a decline in his seductive powers, Havel resorts to a stratagem. His wife is a famous actress, and the little village knows her well. Posters advertising her latest film add to her visibility. His wife’s jealousy exasperates him, but after his failures Havel feels lonely and invites her to spend the day with him in the village. The next day, they take a stroll together and Havel notices that “several of the people who were walking about were staring at the actress; when he turned around he discovered that they were standing and looking back at them” (226). Havel “was pleasantly gratified by the attention of the passersby, and longed for the sparks of interest to alight, as much as possible,

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on him also” (227). On some pretext or other he encourages his wife to kiss him in front of one of the women who rejected him, feigning indifference the whole while. Later, they come upon the second woman by chance on their way into the restaurant: “She looked at them in surprise, stared at the actress for a long time, glanced briefly at Havel, then once again at the actress and, when she looked at Havel once more, involuntarily nodded at him” (228). Kundera underscores the involuntary nature of the reflexively imitative reaction. The spell exerted by the actress’s celebrity has made the young woman into a plaything of her desire. She does not choose to greet Havel—her greeting happens of its own accord. The unwitting endorsement provided by his wife sends Havel’s stock soaring (let us recall the aphorism with which I began this book: “Women seek men who have had beautiful women”). At peace with himself once more, the doctor arranges to meet one of the women the following day. It becomes apparent to him that . . . his wife’s brief visit had thoroughly transformed him in the eyes of this pleasant, muscular girl, that he had all of a sudden acquired charm and appeal, and, what is more, that his body was for her undoubtedly an opportunity that could secretly put her on intimate terms with a famous actress, make her equal to a celebrated woman that everybody turned around to look at. (231)

This passage makes plain the sacramental function of the object, which serves as a link between the worshiper and the goddess whom she wants to resemble. The current of desire first flowed in the young woman’s direction. Now it reverses course and begins to flow toward Havel. Desired once more, Havel no longer finds the girl worth pursuing: “It was enough for Havel that the blond woman had lost her insulting haughtiness, that she had a sweet voice and meek eyes, for the doctor no longer to desire her” (231). Once it becomes accessible, the object of desire loses its aura and enters the banal and profane circle of the self. Of course, Havel is only fooling himself: he, of all people, should know better than to take the blond woman’s submissiveness as legitimate proof of his seductive powers, since it was he who stimulated her interest by artificial means. Like a dictator who starts to believe in his own cult of personality, Havel has become the dupe of the very propaganda machine he set in motion by parading about town with his trophy wife. There is as much difference between the fat, balding Havel at the beginning of the story and the superb conquistador over whom the female villagers swoon as there is between the charmless Frantiska and the magnificent beauty perceived by

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the journalist. Only our fascination with the seducer character, whom we take more seriously than his young disciple, prevents us from laughing at the former metamorphosis in the same way as we laugh at the second. In his foreword to Le Grand’s essay on Kundera, Guy Scarpetta mourns the passing of the eighteenth-century libertine’s “magnificent sovereignty.” The so-called libertines of the twentieth century never succeeded in recapturing this “true freedom.”4 Like Scarpetta, Kundera looks upon the contemporary seducer with a skeptical eye: “Don Juan was a master, while the [contemporary libertine] is a slave” (133). The modern woman is no longer a passive object of desire; she has fought for and acquired the freedom to grant to whomever she chooses what virtue once required her to withhold. This means that we need no longer congratulate the seducer on having overcome her resistance, and that when she rejects him, he no longer has any readily available means of saving face. Over the centuries, women have become increasingly active and dangerous threats to masculine erotic supremacy. As René Girard writes, the libertine desires absolute freedom and his insecurity results from this outsized ambition: Modern vanity dreads nothing more than sheer indifference. The modern egotist is almost convinced that he is God. As such he should be invulnerable to all and all should be vulnerable to him . . . Confronted by an indifferent woman the modern seducer immediately suspects, with angoisse in his heart, that she, and not he, is the Divinity.5

The shift from the journalist’s to Havel’s mode of desiring represents what Michel Houellebecq would call an “extension du domaine de la lutte,” an “expansion of the war game.” Havel’s model stands much closer, spiritually speaking, than does the journalist’s, for Havel, deprived of his youthful virility, divested of his legendary reputation, finds that the erotic playing field has been leveled; henceforth, he moves in a world of equals, on the same plane as the women whose self-love mediates his desire. In such a world, rejection is deeply humiliating. Havel’s situation is inseparable from a specific era. The eighteenthcentury seducer could ascribe a woman’s rejection of him to her modesty or prudence. Later, I will show how Kundera compares the Old Regime libertine to the modern seducer in his novel Slowness. In anticipation of that comparison, I think it is illuminating to contrast Havel’s reaction with that of Meilcour, the hero of Wanderings of the Heart and Mind (1736), a classic libertine novel by Crébillon the younger. The protagonist of this firstperson novel meets the girl he desires in the Tuileries Garden. He wants to attract her attention but she greets him with sheer indifference:

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My unknown beauty had not even noticed me. Her disdain surprised and pained me. Vanity made me think that I did not deserve it [. . .] I thought I had been mistaken; and, unable to think badly of myself for long, I imagined that modesty alone had forced her into doing what she had done.6

Crébillon’s hero does not (at least in this passage) experience the hellish after-effects of rejection. He manages to persuade himself that the young woman’s indifference reflects her modesty rather than true disdain. Havel, on the other hand, in virtue of his historical situation (society no longer requires women to repel male advances), can attribute his failure to nothing but genuine lack of interest. He is therefore forced to resent the rejection, which floods him with noxious feelings. All of those noxious feelings flourish in the labyrinth of values. In the Communist world described by Kundera, qualitative differences—the class system—have been abolished by decree of the regime. As a result, the imitative process reaches a new stage. In his short text on Kundera, René Girard writes: The games of love and chance described by Marivaux are already programmed, in the novelistic sense, but they are not yet Kafkaesque [. . .] As the program without an author gains ground, existence and being become tragic without losing their novelistic lightness, that lightness which becomes unbearable in the Kunderian sense.7

In the eighteenth century, imitative desire is still “an aristocratic pastime that affects only a small part of the human soul,” writes Girard. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which examine the concrete reality of Communism, the model’s influence is so crushing and all-pervading that it can be qualified as totalitarian; in the former book there is no escape for Tamina on the “island of children,” while in the latter Tereza’s relationship to her mother is a totalitarian universe in miniature. Girard writes: “The collapse of common values leads to a dizzying increase in the proportion of our being that is condemned to define itself not alone or face to face with an ideal humanity, but in the unpredictable combat of little novelistic interactions.”8 Instead of an aristocrat endowed with an a priori sacred status, today’s seducer is an unstable being whose fluctuating value is determined by direct suffrage, his mediator a brutal dictator who rules over his psychic life with an iron fist. The light-hearted, playful flirtation of the eighteenth century gives way to totalitarian marivaudage.

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Kundera writes eighteenth-century-style stories of philosophy in the boudoir that unfold in a post-World War II décor of devastated values. These stories treat historical events with great parsimony. The most important landmarks of modern Czech history make their appearance: World War II (the aviator in Life Is Elsewhere); the 1948 coup and the beginning of Communist rule (Life Is Elsewhere); the political trials of the early years of Stalinism (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting); the death of Stalin (“Eduard and God”); the thaw leading up to the Prague Spring and the subsequent Russian invasion, the purges of “normalization” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being); and fi nally the Velvet Revolution (Ignorance). Yet Kundera tends to foreground the private dilemmas of individuals and to attack history in glancing fashion, making transversal cuts into events according to their influence on the lives of his characters. The sociological or historical implications of this or that moment in the Czech drama matter less to our author than the way in which history exposes the essence of human nature. Communism is a limit case that pushes the boundaries of human possibilities to new extremes. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Kirilov conceived an audacious praxis by which to test and ground their ideas about superhumanity. These figures possess a tragic grandeur that Kundera’s characters lack. Raskolnikov took his “idea” seriously; Kundera’s characters no longer even have an idea. They can do no more than act out a laughable comedy in which they themselves have long since ceased to believe. Havel is an excellent example of the post-tragic seducer, mere “collector” rather than full-fledged Don Juan. A canny manipulator of imitative desire, his awareness is on par with that of the novelist himself. But his ruses, reminiscent of advertising, mark him as a bourgeois rather than an aristocratic libertine. The aristocrat overcomes the resistance of his conquests with professions of eternal love. Even in the eighteenth century, when the language of passion begins to wear thin and serves mostly as an alibi for sexual desire, refusing to employ it means almost certain failure. Havel, on the contrary, must convince his conquests that he does not love them, or rather that he is loved by someone else. He is no hedonist; sensual pleasure interests him far less than metaphysical gratification. Or, as a character in “Symposium,” another early Kundera short story, puts it, “Eroticism is not only a desire for the body, but to an equal extent the desire for honor. The partner you’ve won, who cares about you and loves you, becomes your mirror, the measure of your importance and your merits” (112).

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Rivalry and the transfiguration of the object The link between honor and eroticism becomes even more apparent in The Joke, Kundera’s first novel, which hinges on a revenge plot. Ludvik Jahn has returned to his Moravian hometown for the purpose of sleeping with Helena, a television journalist who is married to Pavel Zemanek, an acquaintance of Ludvik’s from his student days. By defi ling Helena, he hopes to strike back indirectly at Zemanek, who, years before, was responsible for expelling the young Ludvik from both the Communist Party and the university. Thus Ludvik wishes to sleep with Helena not because he finds her attractive in her own right but because she belongs (or so he thinks) to his hated rival. At the time of his expulsion, Jahn’s offense was to have sent a flippant postcard to his girlfriend Marketa, who had happily gone off on a party-organized work retreat for the summer, leaving Ludvik behind to stew in jealous resentment. The postcard’s joking provocation (“Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.”) lands him in trouble with the party secretariat and, at the general assembly a few months later, Zemanek, the new chief of the university party organization, seizes upon the opportunity to turn the crowd against him. From the beginning, Zemanek lurks on the periphery of Ludvik’s life as a sort of doppelganger, sharing his company and tastes. Ludvik is in love with Marketa, but Zemanek is often with them: “. . . Zemanek knew Marketa. The three of us were often together on various occasions during our student days” (40). Zemanek and Ludvik have the same sense of humor. When Ludvik fools Marketa into believing in the existence of a tribe of dwarfs living in the Czech mountains, the others “bit their lips to keep from spoiling Marketa’s pleasure at learning something new, and some of them (Zemanek, in particular) joined in and endorsed my account of the dwarfs” (41). Later, Ludvik confirms that he and Zemanek both admired Marketa, and that it was precisely for this reason that they so enjoyed teasing her. The two also like the same kind of music. Ludvik is Moravian and Zemanek “loved singing Moravian folk songs” (40). A handsome fellow, he even joins the May Day parade and, as Ludvik plays the clarinet, sings and basks in the crowd’s attention, arm raised in the air. Upon her return from the summer work retreat, Marketa avoids Ludvik. Then, one day, she comes to see him. He asks her why: “She told me it was Comrade Zemanek. He had met her in a university corridor the day after the fall term began and taken her into the small office of the Natural Sciences Party Organization” (44). At this stage, Kundera provides no overt evidence

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of a rivalry between the two young men, yet the clues sprinkled through the narrative suggest, if not an open rivalry, at the very least an ambivalence born of similarity, as if the joking, charismatic, musical young Ludvik represented a threat to the joking, charismatic, musical young Zemanek, and vice versa. Somehow, it comes as no surprise to learn that Zemanek, far from saving his friend from the trap into which he has fallen because of the provocative postcard, deliberately rouses the crowd against him and quite consciously and cynically instigates his downfall. And yet, if the triangular structure went no further than this hazily outlined relationship at the beginning of the novel, it would probably not be worth analyzing The Joke from an imitative perspective at all. Th is fi rst, sketchy triangle, however, gives way in the latter part of the novel to a rigorously clear, geometrically precise imitative relationship featuring the same transfiguration of the object that occurs in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years.” It is only in retrospect, in the light furnished by this later triangular structure, that the outlines of the fi rst Ludvik–Zemanek– Marketa triangle are discernible. Ludvik has succeeded in borrowing an apartment from his friend Kostka, and there he prepares to sleep with Zemanek’s wife Helena. Th is is sex deprived of all sensual pleasure, for the sole purpose of striking out at an invisible third party who haunts the scene like a phantom. Even before Ludvik and Helena begin their lovemaking Zemanek’s presence makes itself felt. The preliminary caresses act as vengeful foreplay. Their object is not so much Helena as the man to whom she is married. Ludvik savors the coming act of love not because he anticipates with relish the pleasure it will bring him but because he senses that triumph is close at hand and fi nds himself at last in the position of power with respect to his long-standing rival: “On these legs I now placed my palms, and it was as if I had Zemanek’s very life in my grasp” (192). Later, the presence of the (absent) Zemanek is felt with still greater insistence: . . . the body had meaning for [my soul] only as a body that had been seen and loved in just the same way by someone who was not now present; that was why it tried to look at this body through the eyes of the third, the absent one; that was why it tried to become the third one’s medium; it saw the naked female body, the bent leg, the curve of belly and breast, but it all took on meaning only when my eyes became the eyes of the absent one; then, suddenly, my soul entered his alien gaze and merged with him; not only did it take possession of the bent leg and the curve of belly and breast, it took possession of them in the way they were seen by the absent third. (195)

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In this extraordinary passage, the object of desire very clearly plays second fiddle to the Other, the model who determines Ludvik’s choice and through whom he vicariously desires Helena. Even as Ludvik takes possession of Helena’s body, Zemanek takes possession of Ludvik’s soul, until the two souls become indistinguishable. The hated rival is at once radically alien and utterly like the self. Helena’s body, meanwhile, has no significance apart from its role as a link between Ludvik and Zemanek. It acts as a sort of sacrament that makes communion between the two rivals possible. Soon after this hateful fusion of souls, the sexual act becomes an act of violence. Having broken through into the secret recesses of Zemanek’s soul, Ludvik wants to lay waste to what he has found there. He seeks to give Helena orgasm after orgasm, not because he cares for her and wishes to bring her pleasure, but so as to have the same experience that Zemanek has had, to see her in the same naked, unadulterated light as her husband. The third party continues to preside over their coupling like an absent god. Ludvik’s only purpose is to tear the object away from his enemy: . . . my soul commanded me to persevere; to drive her from pleasure to pleasure; to change her body’s position so that nothing should remain hidden or concealed from the glance of the absent third; no, to grant her no respite, to repeat the convulsion again and again, the convulsion in which she is real and exact, in which she feigns nothing, by which she is engraved in the memory of the absent third like a stamp, a seal, a cipher, a sign. And thus to steal the secret cipher! to steal the royal seal! To rob Pavel Zemanek’s secret chamber; to ransack it, make a shambles of it! (195)

The violence of Ludvik’s intentions finally manifests itself in sadistic form. He beats Helena repeatedly, wrenching from her still more cries of pleasure. When she tearfully declares her love for him in the aftermath of their lovemaking, Ludvik is content to question her about Zemanek: “hadn’t she herself told me her husband had been the great love of her life?” (198). Ludvik reacts with surprise when Helena tells him that he bears “a certain resemblance” (199) to his enemy. He treats this idea as the height of absurdity, yet the reader cannot help feeling that Helena’s confused attempts to explain her intuition convey a fundamental truth about the relationship between the two men. This becomes clearer when Ludvik learns to his dismay that Helena and Zemanek have been separated for three years. His act of vengeance has missed the target. The blow he aimed at his rival bounces back at him. He has accomplished nothing, apart from causing a woman in whom he has no interest to fall in love with him.

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Yet does he really have no interest in her? Before she revealed to him that she and Zemanek, although still officially married, had agreed to separate three years before, Ludvik was undeniably interested. If there remained any doubt about the source of his interest or about the imitative mechanism at its origin, the following passages dispel it once and for all. After her revelation, Helena loses the power to excite Ludvik. Her body, no longer illuminated by its attachment to the rival, metamorphoses into a flawed object without charm: But now I saw her nudity in a new light; it was nudity denuded, denuded of the power to excite that until now had eliminated all the faults of age in which the whole history and present of Helena’s marriage seemed to be concentrated and that had therefore fascinated me. Now that she stood before me bare, without a husband or any bonds to him, utterly herself, her physical unloveliness lost all its power to excite and it too became only itself: a simple unloveliness. (200)

Helena’s body appeared to him transfigured by her relationship with Zemanek and it was for that reason that it succeeded in captivating him. The absence of these conjugal ties leaves her doubly naked: without clothing and also without the mantle of erotic attraction draped over her by the mediator of desire. Her physical flaws suddenly stand out and rather than arousing perverse excitement in him, they merely turn him off. The evident disappointment of this passage returns a few paragraphs later: “the body was here, a body I had stolen from no one, in which I’d vanquished no one, destroyed no one, a body abandoned, deserted by its spouse” (201). Zemanek, the model–rival, hovered over the coupling bodies. Now he is conspicuous by his absence, which accentuates Ludvik’s post-coital disenchantment. The sentence seeks to make us feel the void left behind by the god’s departure. Meanwhile, the verbs “stolen,” “vanquished,” and “destroyed” suggest Ludvik’s triple motive, each one another step in the escalation of vengeance. The first verb focuses on the object: one steals something. The second verb, however, shifts to the someone who is defeated. The fi nal verb expresses Ludvik’s desire not only to vanquish but also to annihilate his rival. In these three verbs we can observe the metamorphosis of rivalry, which bears first on possessions, is gradually transformed into a face-off between mutually obsessed antagonists, and ends in an explosion of destructive hatred. These verbs also follow the progression of the act of love: Ludvik’s caresses gradually became slaps, and those slaps blows that leave red welts on Helena’s body.

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Helena leaves the borrowed apartment. The next day, Ludvik runs into none other than Zemanek, who has come to the local folk festival with his attractive girlfriend, Miss Broz. Helena’s affirmations about the odd resemblance between the two men become more plausible when we learn that Zemanek has begun to play the dissident’s part at the university and that he and Ludvik are now (at least in theory) on the same side. Meanwhile, Kundera does everything possible to underscore the mingled dislike and admiration that make up Ludvik’s feelings toward Zemanek: “I contemplated Miss Broz and found her to my sorrow a handsome and likeable young woman; I felt envious regret that she wasn’t mine” (277). Having just read about the way in which Zemanek’s attachment or nonattachment to Helena was capable of rendering her body either exciting or uninteresting, it is hard not to associate this last triangle with the preceding one. If Ludvik wishes that Miss Broz could belong to him, this can only mean that she belongs to Zemanek. Taken out of context this sentence does not truly break with the romantic, linear conception of desire. But Ludvik’s “envious regret” suggests the lurking influence of the rival, while in the context of what has come before there can be little doubt as to the ambivalent, imitative origins of Ludvik’s interest in Zemanek’s girlfriend. When Zemanek and his companion finally leave, Kundera suggests the primacy of the model by the order in which he mentions the members of the departing couple: They left. I couldn’t tear my eyes off them: Zemanek walking erect, his blond head proudly (victoriously) held high, the brunette at his side; even from the back she was beautiful, she walked lightly, I liked her; I liked her almost painfully, because her departing beauty showed me its icy indifference. . . . (283)

The victorious pride of Zemanek’s regal posture testifies to Ludvik’s adversarial relationship with him. Only after playing over his erstwhile rival does Ludvik’s gaze linger on the brunette. Once more, the desire he feels for the girl is coupled with an unpleasant feeling. This time it is the girl’s glacial indifference (the necessary corollary of her interest in Zemanek) that causes him pain. This reading of The Joke confirms it as one of the most powerful of Kundera’s novels. As in “Dr. Havel,” as in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the object is transfigured by the mediator. In this case, however, the transfiguration is even more intense, because it occurs as the result of exacerbated rivalry between equals rather than in the vaudevillesque mode of a merry prank. Just as in “Dr. Havel,” Kundera does everything possible to evoke the triangularity of the relationship among Ludvik, Helena,

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and Zemanek. Though the textual evidence may not be strong enough to constitute decisive proof, it looks like he slyly underscores the similarity between the two rivals by making Helena his mouthpiece. Ludvik himself dismisses the idea as ridiculous, but the facts of the story and the emphatic insistence of the hero’s protestations suggest otherwise.

“The younger sister imitated the elder” We are working our way gradually up the rungs of a ladder leading from the least to the most psychologically damaging manifestations of triangular desire. The closer the model draws to the disciple, the more intense are the competitive energies unleashed by their interaction. Havel and the journalist have a teacher–student relationship. The young man respects Havel too much to consider him a rival. Accordingly, the older man’s good fortune arouses in him nothing more than some fleeting moments of rancor. Ludvik looks to Zemanek first as a friend and later as a despicable enemy. He cultivates sustained feelings of hatred where the journalist gives in merely to a quick burst of envy. In Immortality, Kundera’s longest and most formally ambitious novel, the model has drawn still closer to the imitator and their desires are even more inextricably intertwined than those of the two friends in The Joke. The plot centers on a love triangle, two of whose vertices are occupied by siblings. Agnes is married to Paul. After Agnes’s death, Paul marries Agnes’s younger sister, Laura. The two sisters are linked from the beginning of the story (and from their girlhood, before Paul enters the picture) by a gesture. One of Agnes’s childhood memories involves a secretary from the university where her father used to teach. This woman used to pay her father visits, and the young Agnes is intrigued by their relationship. While spying on them through the window, she sees the secretary waving goodbye: the secretary turned, smiled, and lifted her arm in the air in an unexpected gesture, easy and flowing. It was an unforgettable moment: the sandy path sparkled in the rays of the sun like a golden stream and on both sides of the gate jasmine bushes were blooming. It was as if the upward gesture wished to show the golden piece of earth the direction of flight, while the white jasmine bushes were already beginning to turn into wings. (40)

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The imagery in this short passage defies gravity; the white bushes transformed into wings suggest a dove or an angel. It is a moment of quasi-religious bedazzlement. No wonder the young Agnes finds the gesture “so unexpected and beautiful that it remained in [her] memory like the imprint of a lightening bolt; it invited her into the depths of space and time and awakened in the 16-year-old girl a vague and immense longing” (40). Later, she uses the gesture to say an encouraging goodbye to a young man who is too timid to kiss her. Spontaneously, unreflectively, she imitates the secretary; or, rather, the secretary’s gesture inhabits her, uses her: “it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations” (8). Her imitation gives rise to no unpleasant feelings or consequences. To the contrary, it allows Agnes to appropriate a bit of that sublime moment from her childhood. Rather than making her less individual, the gesture helps her to express the inexpressible: “. . . that gesture came to life and said on her behalf what she herself was unable to say” (40). The gesture possesses no more than a discreet hint of sexuality. Yet it is undeniably a grown-up gesture, as Agnes realizes when she sees her younger sister making it: she noticed her sister, younger by eight years, tossing up her arm while saying good-bye to a girlfriend. When she saw her gesture performed by a sister who had been admiring and imitating her from earliest childhood, she felt a certain unease: the adult gesture did not fit an eleven-year-old child. (41) (my emphasis)

But the real source of her unease resides in the tension between her desire to remain individuated and her growing understanding that a gesture to which everyone has access diminishes rather than increases her originality: “But more important, she realized that the gesture was available to all and thus did not really belong to her: when she waved her arm, she was actually committing theft or forgery” (41). Now she can no longer imitate openly. If at fi rst she borrowed innocently and unselfconsciously from the secretary’s repertoire of gestures, now she sees her own imitation as a counterfeit, in other words as something secondary, derivative, and inauthentic. She goes to great lengths to avoid making the gesture and she resists the imitation of which she has only now become aware: “From that time on she began to avoid that gesture . . . and she developed a distrust of gestures altogether” (41). This shift from open, spontaneous imitation to the self-conscious determination not to imitate (and not to be imitated) mirrors the transition from childhood innocence to adult awareness. Children mimic their

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parents naively and without embarrassment; adults pridefully refrain from imitating their peers in too obvious a manner: Agnes’s distrust of all gestures, awakened by her sister’s innocent copycat behavior, should be understood as a characteristically adult distrust of imitation itself. The third part of the novel (entitled “Fighting”) takes up the theme of imitation once again, this time focusing more narrowly on the relationship between Agnes and her younger sister. Here, Kundera links imitation explicitly to rivalry, and more particularly (as the part’s title implies) to the amorous struggle between Agnes and her young sister for the affections of Agnes’s husband, Paul. The story resumes where it left off at the end of the first part. Agnes used her special gesture whenever she said goodbye to a boyfriend. Little Laura hid behind a bush and waited for her sister to come home: . . . she wanted to see the kiss and to watch her sister walk to the front door. She waited for the moment when Agnes turned round and lifted her arm in the air. This movement conjured up a misty idea of love which Laura knew nothing about but which would always remain connected in her mind with the image of her attractive, gentle sister. (101)

Agnes is Laura’s model of desire. Laura crouches unseen behind a bush and vicariously learns what it is to love by watching her older sister. Already, the triangular geometry of sibling rivalry is apparent. Agnes and her boyfriend occupy two of the vertices of this triangle, and little Laura the third. The model, Agnes, designates what is desirable. The younger sister, imitating her model’s desire, should be drawn to whatever man her older sister brings home. Just as he did in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” Kundera explicitly characterizes the relationship between the two sisters as imitative. The story of the gesture is what makes it possible to understand the sibling relationship, which is defined entirely by imitation: When Agnes caught Laura borrowing her gesture in order to wave to her friends, it upset her and, as we know, ever since then she took leave of her lovers soberly and without outward display. In this short history of a gesture we can recognize the mechanism determining the relationship of the two sisters: the younger one imitated the elder, reached out her arm towards her, but at the last moment Agnes would always escape. (101)

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The older sister becomes the “ être de fuite,” the one who refuses to be imitated. Positive, open imitation is a two-way street. It requires not only that the disciple imitate the master, but also that the master should consent to being imitated. The teacher wants the pupil to learn and does everything in his power to make that possible.9 When the master withholds the object from the disciple, breaking the current of positive reciprocity, a new kind of relationship emerges. Instead of causing the disciple to abandon all efforts at appropriation, withholding the object makes it that much more desirable. The younger sister’s extended hand grasps for the object (in this case, her sister) without being able to seize it: Agnes slips through Laura’s fingers, intensifying her little sister’s desire still more. With each iteration of the pattern, the vicious circle will tighten. In this sense, the “mechanism” at work holds the potential to generate competitive, adversarial relations. Of the two sisters, Agnes is the noncompetitive one. She gives up a potentially brilliant career as a scientist, marries Paul, and takes a well-paid but unremarkable job. Meanwhile, Laura wants to be a musician. She goes to the conservatory and vows to make up for her sister’s lack of ambition by becoming famous in her stead. She does not aim to imitate what her sister actually does. In other words, she does not strive to be as self-effacing as her sister or choose to give up the pursuit of “immortality.” Rather, she imitates the possible trajectory of her sister’s life, that is to say her desire (or what she believes to be her desire), conforming her career choice to the exalted idea she has of Agnes (this explains her disappointment when Agnes refuses to pursue her academic dreams and her determination to repair what she sees as her sister’s mistake). And even as she imitates Agnes, she strives to surpass her, a dynamic for which the English language possesses a word whose meaning has shifted over the centuries, gradually effacing its most dangerous connotations: “emulation,” from the Latin aemulatio, “to rival, strive to excel,” an almost perfect synonym for imitative rivalry. Two people who make the same gesture may feel an uncomfortable sense of resemblance, but this need not in itself entail any conflict. Two people who seek fame may also live in harmony, provided they are not in the same field (and Laura at least has the good sense to choose music rather than scientific research). Two people who fall in love with the same man, however, inevitably become rivals. When the desires of the two sisters converge on a single man, Paul, he becomes the object of a bitter competition that ultimately implicates both women: One day Agnes introduced her to Paul. At the very first sight of him Laura heard an invisible someone saying to her: ‘There is a man! A real man. The only man. No other exists.’ Who was that invisible person?

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The Book of Imitation and Desire Was it perhaps Agnes herself? Yes. It was she, pointing out the way to her sister and yet at the same time claiming that way for herself [. . .] the only man she could ever have loved was at the same time the only man she must never try to win. (101–2)

This was an accident waiting to happen. Little Laura used to spy on her sister as she kissed her boyfriends goodbye. At the time, she was too innocent and too far from the sister’s sphere of possibilities to enter into rivalry with her. But the sibling competition already existed as an unrealized possibility. Suppose, however, that we didn’t know this. Taken out of context, Laura’s love for Paul would look like an amorous epiphany, the kind that comes with fireworks and swelling string music. After all, when she meets Paul for the first time, she is immediately dazzled. Isn’t this the sign that Paul is her “other half”? In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes explains that lovers feel complete and whole when they find their mate. He accounts for this with a story. There was once a race of androgynous creatures who tried to reach the heavens and challenge the gods. To punish their hubris, Zeus split them asunder and the two halves of each creature, a female half and a male half, were condemned to wander the earth in search of their lost counterpart. Paul appears to Laura as “the one,” her predestined match. By now, we know better than to take the idea of “the other half ” or “the one” too seriously. The Platonic story invests the love object with disproportionate significance. Kundera wants us to pay attention to the model instead. That is why he presents Laura’s fi rst encounter with Paul in the context of her relationship with Agnes. The history of that sibling relationship explains why Laura fi nds Paul so irresistible, right from the start. To make this clear, Kundera describes the encounter in two stages. First, he gives the conventional story that Laura would no doubt tell us if we asked her what made her fall in love with Paul: an invisible voice speaks to her: “this man is the one,” it says. The voice could come from anywhere. It could be fate that is speaking to Laura, or the invisible voice could issue from some deep, authentic part of her inaccessible to external influence. Neither of these explanations satisfies Kundera. Gradually, he lifts the veil to reveal the identity of the hidden someone. Who was it? Could it have been Agnes? The romantic lie of “love at first sight” is not so much shattered as peeled away to reveal the novelistic truth beneath it: “Yes. It was she, pointing out the way to her sister . . .” The invisible someone is located neither in Laura nor in Paul but rather in Agnes: it is her desire that arouses Laura’s and gives it both its energy and its aim.

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It is Agnes’s desire, as well, that bars the way and prevents Laura’s from achieving its secondhand goal. Agnes is at once model and obstacle. The prohibition that she embodies is not the impersonal, inviolable taboo of the law but a personal, proximate barrier against which the imitator bumps up in frustrating fashion. The incipient rivalry manifests itself in a gentle, bipolar swinging from good mood to bad: “the happy sense of staying within the family embrace was darkened by [. . .] melancholy [. . .] moods of happiness alternated with bouts of sorrow” (102). Agnes and Paul take care of Laura. With steamy metaphors, Kundera hints at an unspoken, and possibly unhealthy, complicity among the three: “all three would happily plunge into a voluptuous hot bath fed with many streams of feeling: sisterly and amorous, compassionate and sensual” (102). The trio forms a little world of ambiguous desires: Agnes’s desire awakens Laura’s for Paul; Laura, the younger sister, is forbidden, but, as we later learn, Agnes has asked her husband to look after her. She is aware that Laura admires her and wishes somehow that she could help her sister, raise her up. Thus she opens her house to Laura and, without any perversity, but nonetheless in somewhat risky fashion, consciously or unconsciously, encourages the friendship between her husband and Laura. Meanwhile, Kundera traces the evolving imitative relationship between Laura and Agnes. This time, he speaks not of a gesture but of sunglasses. Agnes has been wearing them since high school and Laura, after a miscarriage, begins to wear them too, not to hide her tears, but so that people will know that she was crying: “The glasses became a substitute for tears and in contrast to real tears . . . actually looked becoming” (103). Kundera writes: Laura’s fondness for dark glasses was, once again, as so many times before, inspired by her sister. But the story of the glasses also shows that the relationship of the sisters cannot be reduced to the mere statement that the younger imitated the elder. Yes, she imitated, but at the same time she corrected: she gave dark glasses a deeper significance, a more weighty significance, so that the dark glasses of Agnes had to blush before those of Laura for their frivolity. (103)

There is, in other words, an aggressive side to Laura’s imitation. When she puts on her sunglasses, Agnes has “the feeling that out of tact and modesty she ought to take her own glasses off ” (103). The sister’s imitation compels Agnes to abandon the behavior imitated. When one sister wears the glasses, the other cannot. Once more, observing in Laura an imitation of her own

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habits, tastes, and behaviors, Agnes wants to slip out of reach. But something has changed. This time, Laura forces her to back down. Little by little, rivalry is beginning to infi ltrate the once peaceful sibling relationship. In the wake of a painful breakup and a suicide attempt barely averted, Laura returns to Paris and rings at Paul and Agnes’s door. Paul is home alone and takes her in his arms. The gradually building erotic tension between them reaches an unbearable pitch. Laura asks Paul why they couldn’t have met each other sooner, before all the others: The words spread out between them like a mist. Paul stepped into that mist and reached out his hand like someone who can’t see and gropes his way; his hand touched Laura. Laura sighed and let Paul’s hand stay touching her skin . . . A while later Agnes returned from work and walked into the room. (200)

Suddenly, Agnes understands the stakes of the game and gives in to the undertow of rivalry: “It was no longer possible to avoid a fight” (203). At the moment the two sisters begin their verbal joust, Kundera changes technique. No longer does he use a wide-angle lens. No longer does he move back and forth in time like the Proustian narrator, making comparisons, fi lling in telling details. Now he adopts a new narrative style, explicitly invoking the theater, and writing in the present rather than the past tense: “let’s imagine the living room as a stage” (203). The narrator’s comments become stage directions, and the struggle between the two sisters builds to a climax in an intensely dramatic rather than meditatively novelistic mode. Each sister expounds her philosophy of love. Their diametrically opposite visions (Agnes the reasonable one accuses her sister of egotism; Laura the romantic accuses her sister of being unable to love) cannot conceal the fundamental resemblance between the two women. Kundera the narrator remarks ironically: “Both women talked of love, while snapping hatefully at each other” (204). Agnes is for Laura “her sister-enemy” (205), in other words, her model–rival. The imitative process has passed in stages from open imitation through ambivalence to open hostility. At the climax of the dispute, Agnes deliberately drops her sister’s sunglasses, which break into pieces. This symbolic sacrifice represents the shattering of the sibling rapport. It reflects the way in which rivalry, which begins as the fight over having an object, ends up destroying or forgetting physical objects and wagering everything on less palpable stakes, such as prestige or moral superiority. It also represents the deflection of violence against a scapegoat, real or (in this case) purely symbolic, a being

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or an object that stands in for the rival and absorbs the violence that the adversaries would otherwise infl ict on each other. For nine months, the sisters stop seeing each other. Agnes defines their relationship as a race, a competition: “Laura was a constant in her life, which was all the more tiring for Agnes because from childhood their relationship had been like a chase: Agnes ran in front, with her sister at her heels” (260). She compares herself to a heroine in a fairy tale who throws objects behind her to separate her from her wicked persecutor: “And then Agnes had only one thing left in her hand: dark glasses. She threw them to the ground and became separated from her pursuer by a field of broken glass” (261). When she has thrown the last object, the last decoy, behind her, she is left emptyhanded: Her run is nearing an end . . . She no longer has the slightest desire to continue her run. She is not a racer. She never wanted to race. She didn’t choose her sister. She wanted to be neither her model nor her rival.” (261) (my emphasis)

We can understand Agnes’s subsequent decision to go into a voluntary exile in Switzerland as the deliberate renunciation of imitative desire. In this case, it is the model who wishes to move out of range of her imitator’s hostility, rather than the imitator turning away from the model. And yet, inasmuch as the two sisters are rivals, competitors, enemies, each stands as a model and a rival for the other. Agnes’s dream of escape can thus be seen as a repudiation of the sister-enemy, a retreat from the hysteria of relationship drama, a means of extrication from the ménage à trois in which she had become entangled: When she was little, her father taught her to play chess. She was fascinated by one move, technically called castling: the player moves two chessmen in a single move: the castle and the king exchange their relative positions. She liked that move: the enemy concentrates all his effort on attacking the king and the king suddenly disappears before his eyes; he moves away. All her life she dreamed about that move, and the more exhausted she felt the more she dreamt it. (261)

Kundera uses another chess metaphor in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Tomas, boxed in by two members of the opposition who want him to sign a petition, feels like a chess player whose pieces are paralyzed and who cannot escape defeat. In the short story “The Hitchhiking Game,” the metaphor of the chess pieces trapped on the board suggests an implacable

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pattern of action and reaction, a form of relationship that transcends the individual will of each player. Here, the chess metaphor renders neither resignation nor rivalry. Agnes, too, will concede defeat in a manner of speaking. The image of the castling king, however, is ultimately a liberating, hopeful one. Agnes wishes to escape from the fatigue caused by her imitative rivalry with her sister. Her exile, which inspired François Ricard to write an essay from the perspective of her final afternoon, culminates in her death. Before the accident that takes her life, however, she has a mystical experience that must be regarded as one of the most mysterious scenes in all of Kundera’s fiction. This experience liberates her from the wearying competition with her sister and puts her in touch with a form of what René Girard calls vertical transcendence. I will explore this moment in the nextto-last chapter.

Publish or perish When Agnes breaks her sister’s sunglasses, this signals a shift from a world in which rivals quarrel over tangible things to one in which competition has become its own raison d’être. As in the potlatch, in which chieftains vie with one another to see who can destroy the most possessions, the object is sacrificed on the altar of one-upmanship: it is better to be someone than to have something. Nowhere does the judgment of one’s peers carry greater weight than in the universe of writers, which Kundera explores in the fourth part of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. His reflections on what he calls “graphomania” aim mostly at novelists, but they apply equally well to graduate students and university professors, who place boundless faith in triangular “peer reviewing” and enshrine imitative rivalry in the form of a professional credo: “publish or perish.” Kundera defines graphomania as follows: “Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers)” (127). This idea takes on a deeper significance when one considers that under the Communist regime, authors often faced the choice between publishing state-approved books for a wide readership or sharing their works in small, secret gatherings. For Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere, Sartrean littérature engagée becomes the path to glory. With the support of a former classmate who belongs to the state police, he participates in officially sponsored readings that give him exposure he would not otherwise

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have enjoyed. Similarly, in Slowness, Kundera contrasts the exhibitionism and vanity of modern politicians with the discreet anonymity under which Vivant Denon published his libertine tale No Tomorrow. Already, in Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera had addressed the question of the over-proliferation of literature. Jaromil goes to a publishing house and speaks with an editor who tells him that he receives poetry submissions at the rate of 12 new authors per day, which makes 4,380 new poets per year: “. . . keep writing,” said the editor. “I’m certain that sooner or later we’re going to be exporting poets. Other countries export technicians, engineers, wheat, or coal, but our main resource is lyrical poets. Czech lyrical poets are going to establish lyrical poetry in developing countries. In exchange for our poets we’ll get coconuts and bananas.” (291)

The editor’s words suggest the grand scale of what is happening. As literature is integrated into the global economy, the mania for writing books spreads from the prosperous European states to Africa and South America. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera formulates this idea more explicitly. He suggests that the graphomania epidemic flourishes most virulently in countries where the satisfaction of basic needs has created a surplus of free-floating desires: Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1. an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities; 2. a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3. the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twentyone times higher than in Israel . . . ). (127) The increase in general well-being conspires with the breakdown of communities and the absence of great events to create an ideal incubatory environment in which the virus can proliferate. Individuals in peaceful, wealthy countries need struggle neither for survival nor material subsistence. Freed of the necessity to sacrifice their personal desires to the higher cause

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of the group, they “catch” their hunger for literary fame from one another, as one might catch a cold. The contagion propagates according to a pattern of feedback reciprocity: . . . by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to fi lter through from outside. (127–8)

This is one of the “terminal paradoxes” that Kundera associates with the end of the Modern Period: the dissemination of books and the rise of literacy first promoted communication; now it leads to mutual misunderstanding, even to solipsism. These changes not only spell disaster for literary culture as a whole but they also poison the lives of individual authors, who must contend not only with the “anguish of the blank page” but also (and above all) with one another. In his essay The Year of Henry James, the novelist David Lodge recounts his bitter personal experience of writing and publishing a novel based on the life of Henry James at the same time that two other notable authors also published novels based on James’s life. He notes that “the proliferation in the last few decades of literary prizes . . . has intensified and institutionalized the element of competition in writing and publishing fiction—a development which may have been good for the Novel, inasmuch as it has increased public interest in literary fiction, but not for the equanimity of novelists . . .”10 In the literary world, emphasis has shifted from the novels themselves (the object) to the invidious ranking of novelists (the model–rival). Literature, like love and business, becomes another arena in which the combat for metaphysical supremacy is waged. The competition intensifies still more when two or more writers publish a book on the same subject: “Writers are always uncomfortable when they find themselves in this situation, because it threatens to detract from the originality of their work—originality being a highly valued quality in modern literary culture.”11 In some admirable passages of self-disclosure, Lodge divulges the rationale behind his writerly ethic of dissimulation: “I am usually secretive about my work-in-progress [. . .] Perhaps I am afraid that some other writer might ‘steal my idea’ if I were to broadcast it widely.”12 Lodge’s confession echoes what Girard says about asceticism-for-desire in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: “Every desire that is revealed can arouse or

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increase a rival’s desire; thus it is necessary to conceal desire in order to gain possession of the object.” When the model draws even closer, however, this strategy becomes insufficient. As Lodge notes, some writers make a point of letting everyone know what they are working on: “This may be a way of warning other writers off the subject.”13 The drive to look original outweighs the impulse to mimic. To avoid looking like followers, other writers will nip in the bud any urge to compete with the overtly displayed model. Previously, the model blessed the object and made it desirable; now his endorsement makes it untouchable. Instead of an ascending path illuminated by the mediator’s radiance, imitation is reduced to a via negativa that leads away from all possible sources of influence. The rivalry among authors is an especially acute and advanced stage in the worsening of the imitative process, as demonstrated by the writer Banaka in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. One day, he enters the café where the novel’s heroine, Tamina, tends bar. Dead drunk, he falls off his stool and briefly passes out. When he returns to consciousness, Tamina asks him what’s wrong: “Banaka looked up at her tearfully and pointed to his chest: ‘I’m nothing, do you understand? I’m nothing! I don’t exist!’” (145–6). The explanation for his self-pitying words is not long in coming: Banaka has received a bad review. The books he writes (and the opinion that others have of them) are the very measure of his being. The bad review thus has the power to annihilate Banaka, depriving him of his right to exist. In the erotic domain, the man or woman over whom the rivals fight, though transfigured by the model’s influence or forgotten in the heat of sibling rivalry, nonetheless ensures that the game has concrete stakes. The journalist in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” may take an unattractive woman for a stunning beauty because Havel has influenced him into seeing her in that light but these shifts in value occur on a superficial, upper layer. Beneath the effervescence of imitative desire, market fundamentals remain in place: the journalist’s girlfriend really is younger and better-looking than the middle-aged female doctor. Likewise, though the student in the Goethe episode changes his mind about his mistress Kristyna, finding her attractive in their provincial hometown and unattractive in Prague, then attractive again when the poets give her their blessing, he desires her sexually and she desires him in return, even if their mutual attraction is never consummated. In these stories, the imitative spell casts a gauze of illusion over the reality beneath. This concrete layer never disappears completely and the proportion of each character’s soul affected by the imitative games of love

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and chance is therefore relatively small. A part of the individual’s being remains anchored in the world of instincts and bodily needs. In the world of graphomania, by contrast, rivalry no longer has a concretely acquisitive component. The fight to “have” has given way to the fight to “be.” The underlying fundamentals evaporate and mediated judgments determine everything. The model ceases to stimulate the imitator, as he did when he played the rival’s part, creating an upsurge of energy. Instead, his mere presence has a vitiating, depressing effect. He stands in the disciple’s path as an existential roadblock: The episode of Banaka’s pointing to his chest and crying because he did not exist reminds me of a line from Goethe’s West-East Divan: “Is one alive when other men are living?” Hidden within Goethe’s question is the mystery of the writer’s condition: By writing books, a man turns into a universe (don’t we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka?), and it is precisely the nature of a universe to be unique. The existence of another universe threatens it in its very essence.

Kundera’s description confirms once more the unique intensity of literary competition. Havel’s existence aroused the journalist’s envy; Agnes aroused her younger sister Laura’s admiration and later her spite. Neither model, however, threatened the disciple’s individuality “in its very essence.” In “Dr. Havel” there are more than enough women to go around (I count at least five) and the journalist ends up happy with the one he conquers. In Immortality, Agnes and Laura fight over just one man, but at least they are fighting over something (or, if you prefer, someone). Writers fight over nothing so solid and substantial as a mate. They want existential affirmation. And, sadly, most of the time they fail to get it: “Goethe is convinced that a single glance of a single human being which fails to fall on lines written by Goethe calls into question Goethe’s very existence” (146). To drive home his point about the perverse effects of the graphomania virus, Kundera invents a parable about two cobblers: Provided their shops are not on the same street, two cobblers can live in perfect harmony. But if they start writing books on the cobbler’s lot, they are soon going to get in each other’s way and ask: “Is a cobbler alive when other cobblers are living?” (146)

So long as the two shopkeepers are jousting for customers, they manage to coexist peacefully. When they start competing for readers, however,

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the stakes of the game become immeasurably higher. The writer probably invests more of himself in his book than does the cobbler in the shoes he repairs, but even if he didn’t the mere fact of juggling words rather than hole punches and scraps of leather would put him in a fragile, unstable position: “We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish others dead (147),” declares Kundera of the writer’s lot, and no wonder. As the case of Banaka shows, authors rely exclusively on mediated feedback from readers and critics to determine success, whereas the cobbler needs nobody to tell him whether he has done a good job resoling a pair of boots. In conclusion, Kundera sounds an apocalyptic warning: “One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived” (147). These words were written in the era immediately preceding the emergence of computers and the internet. They ring still more ominously in the age of the blog, the e-book, and on-demand publishing.

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The Model as Obstacle

Strategies of revelation According to Girard’s hypothesis, every novelist comes to grips with the same reality, but at a different moment in its evolution. Each new stage in the imitative process accentuates the distinctive traits of the preceding one, in the way that a caricature brings out the features of a face. Proustian snobbery caricatures Stendhalian vanity and Dostoevskyan “underground” desire (despite the fact that Dostoevsky is chronologically prior to Proust) in turn caricatures Proustian snobbery. The closer the “mediator” or model of desire draws to the subject, the more cartoonishly exaggerated the effects of mediation: the relatively light games of love and chance played by Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black give way to the heavier, more crushing agonies of the Proustian narrator or the Dostoevskyan underground man. If Girard is right about the way the novel captures desire, a time should come when the phenomenon becomes too obvious to need revealing. In our era of stock market bubbles and reality television, mimetic desire has ballooned into a parody of itself. That is why I have been arguing that Kundera is not so much the latest in a line of revealers as he is the caricaturist of imitation. An analogy from the history of painting may help to clarify what I mean. It might be said that Kundera’s novels stand in relation to Diderot’s or Stendhal’s as a Picasso stands in relation to a canvas by Velázquez. If Picasso’s “Las Meninas” series is placed next to Velázquez’s original, it is possible to identify many common features, but what Picasso’s interpretation leaves out is just as important as what it includes: everything becomes foreground; not one square inch of the canvas has less importance than the rest. The same goes for Kundera’s work. Looking back with nostalgia to the freewheeling novels of Rabelais, Sterne, and Diderot, Kundera invents his stories with insolent disregard for the nineteenth-century plausibility imperative. Instead of portraying the world in a literal, photographic way, he writes exaggerated, cartoonlike tales. His fiction deals with many of the same problems as, say, Stendhal’s does (the problem of vanity as an obstacle

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to happiness, for example), but it omits all but the most essential details so as to hone in on the existential theme, which is always in the spotlight. Kundera not only describes the various laws of imitative desire—the inverse relationship between the strength of passion and the object’s concrete importance; the nonreciprocity of love in the universe of double mediation; the triumph of second-hand suggestion over first-hand impression, and so on—but also defines them conceptually as would an essayist, though without quite reducing them to a system. At the same time, he invents technical procedures that spring from the need to depict the newest forms of alienation and to situate them in the context of the Modern Period. Kundera shares the modernist concern for achieving a synthetic depiction of human existence without regard for “great external events,” as Auerbach puts it in Mimesis. Rather than adopting the modernist tactic of fi ltering reality through a chorus of inner voices, however, Kundera develops an original approach to narrative that dramatically increases the author’s freedom to attack his subject as he chooses: the art of novelistic polyphony, which involves weaving together straightforward narration with playful essayistic passages, autobiography, anecdote, and dream narrative. Breaking the sections of his novel up into numbered micro-chapters, he does away with smooth transitions to create a jagged mosaic of elements bound together by a single theme or group of themes. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel can help us grasp the raison d’être of this polyphonic approach. I am thinking of the chapters that concern the specific methods of revelation. Here, Girard sketches a typology of literary strategy, positing that technique is functional: a metaphor, a shift from firstto third-person narration, or an interior monologue are there not to create some arbitrary aesthetic effect, but because the novelist’s project makes their presence necessary. If it is true, as Girard supposes, that the purpose of classic literature is to disclose the workings of imitative desire, and if this desire differs in its manifestations from era to era, it follows that novelists must intuitively fashion a technique tailored to “the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries.”1 The literary strategies vary according to the narrowing distance between model and imitator. At first, the techniques involve underlining the contrast between the “sick” hero and the “healthy” norm, usually by means of some obvious, farcical misunderstanding (in Cervantes the deluded character sees giants, the sane ones see windmills; the outbreak of imitative desire has just begun, and it’s easy to spot the most virulent cases). Meanwhile, in the upper regions of “internal mediation,” the technique is the same, but inverted: now it is the “healthy” exception whose presence

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sheds a revelatory light on the vanity of those around him (in The Red and the Black, the reactionary pseudo-aristocracy is infected through and through by the imitative virus, but it takes a hotheaded outsider like Julien Sorel to reveal the ambient pettiness). As the model draws closer, desire hides behind professions of indifference or dislike. The only way to catch it out is to make comparisons over a long period of time, divulging the character’s secret worship of idols he or she pretends to disdain. The result is a narrator in constant temporal motion, winding back and forth from past to future. This shuttling movement makes it possible to juxtapose the dissimulating statements of the subject and his or her later revelatory actions (Proust does this with Madame Verdurin, who proclaims her horror of the aristocratic salons but secretly dreams of presiding over one, and ends up marrying the Prince de Guermantes). As we move even deeper into the infernal regions, the novelist reveals triangular desire by suppressing feelings and underscoring the contrast between words and actions in the present: the imitator vehemently denies the model’s influence but his actions betray him (Dostoevsky’s underground man conspicuously ignores his model, but he stamps his feet on the ground to attract attention). Finally, the novelist adopts an approach that could be described as historical: comparing and contrasting two regimes of imitation, the one characterized by structure and relative sanity, the other by disorder and melodrama, he looks out on the modern world from a balcony perched in the past. This is the case with Kundera’s novels, which range over the entire modern period, from the birth of Cartesian rationalism to the present day. Though from time to time he makes use of Cervantesque misunderstanding (notably in “Dr. Havel”) and temporal dilations and contractions à la Proust (in Immortality, for example) his true achievement, as I have already said, lies in the art of novelistic polyphony, which keeps the theme constantly in the author’s cross hairs, even as the narrative hopscotches from place to place and era to era. We can compare our author to Dostoevsky and Kafka, two writers who are often seen as prophets of totalitarianism. In Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky describes the collapse of the Russian aristocracy and the nihilism of the possessed. Yet even he could not foresee how the ideas of the Westernizers would realize themselves concretely in the future, notably in the Russian Revolution. The Czarist bureaucracy satirized in Notes from the Underground is but a dim foreshadowing of Kafka’s labyrinthine court administration. As Nathalie Sarraute has shown, Kafka extends and accentuates the characteristic traits of Dostoevsky’s characters, the seemingly irrational pirouettes that nonetheless obey a strict logic of

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repulsion and attraction.2 As he paces up and down in front of the usher’s wife and the student in chapter three of The Trial, Joseph K. recalls the underground man stomping furiously on the restaurant floor to show Zverkov and his friends that he is absolutely uninterested in them.3 Kundera can be placed in this lineage. Girard observes that Dostoevsky is the first novelist to have “envisaged the polymorphosis of his characters historically.”4 Kundera’s characters, like Dostoevsky’s, experience a fragmentation of their personality. In “The Hitchhiking Game,” an early story from Laughable Loves, the protagonist sees his girlfriend as “hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly polymorphous” (101). In The Joke, Ludvik Jahn describes his youthful self as possessing “many faces” (33). His ego lacks underlying stability and changes from situation to situation. He plays the cynical rake with some, the polite, eager young man with others: At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy. (33)

Like Dostoevsky, Kundera sees this mimetic multiplicity as a side-effect of the Enlightenment project, which tries to uproot irrational belief but ends up causing its proliferation, as he notes in The Art of the Novel: In the course of the Modern Era, Cartesian rationality has corroded, one after the other, all the values inherited from the Middle Ages. But just when reason wins a total victory, pure irrationality [. . .] seizes the world stage, because there is no longer any generally accepted value system to block its path. (10)

In terms of this study’s guiding themes, the above insight might be reformulated as follows: paradoxically, instead of ushering in a world of peace and harmony, as its adherents believed it would, the Cartesian dream of self-sufficiency ended up giving rise to the alienation of exacerbated triangular desire. With each step it took along the road of progress, humanity moved a little deeper into the labyrinth of values. Communism heralds the end of what Kundera, in Part Six of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, calls the “grand march” of utopian thinking. Liquidating the class system was supposed to be the final solution to the bourgeois problem of mediation, but it just made everything worse. Dialectical materialism places too much emphasis on the object of desire; it fails to see that envy and jealousy divide

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people against one another more fiercely still than the unequal distribution of wealth. In order to grasp this trajectory as a whole, Kundera draws a much larger existential map than his predecessors, in search of a context for the phenomena he is witnessing in the Central European “laboratory of twilight”5 and the Western society of the spectacle. One of his technical innovations consists in bringing together multiple historical periods within the same narrative space. The particular moment at which he is writing leads him to broaden the time issue beyond the Proustian problem of personal memory to the enigma of collective time, the time of Europe, Europe looking back on its own past, weighing up its history like an old man seeing his whole life in a single moment. Whence the desire to overstep the temporal limits of an individual life, to which the novel had hitherto been confined, and to insert in its space several historical periods. (16)

Kundera situated Don Juan in the large historical context in “Symposium” and “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” which chronicle the decline of a man but also the disappearance of the seducer character from the stage of Europe. This historical broadening comes through even more clearly in Kundera’s later novels. In Life Is Elsewhere, the young poet hero’s role in the 1948 coup d’état in Czechoslovakia becomes an emblem for European revolutions through a series of comparisons to Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Lermontov, Masaryk, and Shelley. In Immortality, the two narrative lines echo and resonate with each other, one a love triangle set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and peopled by characters from the time of Goethe (Goethe himself, his wife Christiane, Bettina von Arnim), the other a similar love triangle set in late twentieth-century France, which I have already examined. This juxtaposition makes possible the meditation on homo sentimentalis that occupies an important place in the novel. It is in Slowness, however, the first novel he wrote directly in French, that Kundera juxtaposes historical periods to greatest effect. In this brief comic novel, he revisits the “terminal paradox” of Don Juanism, employing a fugal architecture that allows him to compare the eighteenth and twentieth centuries: The Czech novels were in sonata form: a large-scale composition in several contrasting movements. With Immortality, I took this form as far as it could possibly go. Thereafter, it was a choice between closing

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Massimo Rizzante has noted the resemblances between Kundera’s novelistic compositions and the elements of the musical fugue: first comes the theme, which is taken up by another voice, and then echoed once more, this time in its own inverted mirror image, by the counter-theme. At the end of his article on Kundera’s art of the fugue, Rizzante offers an intriguing insight into the link between form and content: Kundera shows that man is dialogue, that he cannot help imitating others, those who have preceded him and also his contemporaries. Just as in the fugue, each voice imitates the other, responds to it and prolongs it. All participate in the great polyphonic game of human existence.7

For Rizzante, the imitative form of the fugue speaks eloquently of human interaction as intertwined and reciprocal. I would add that the fugue offers an excellent means of juxtaposing different time periods. In Slowness, using polyphony allows Kundera to switch back and forth between the aristocratic past and the democratic present, drawing the same motifs through both temporal spaces so that the reader can hear the novel’s themes resonating differently in each century.

The art of polyphonic comparison The novel deploys two plot lines simultaneously. The first is set in the present, in which the acceleration of history has spun people, events, and stories into a confusing whirlpool. It tells of a failed seduction in a restored Old Regime chateau, which has recently been transformed into an international conference center. The second plot line unfolds in counterpoint to the first and recounts a sensual night of love in the same chateau two centuries before. This second narrative line, drawn from No Tomorrow, an eighteenth-century tale by Vivant Denon, embodies the pleasures of slowness. The French Revolution swallowed up a certain frivolous, seductive way of being, epitomized by the nonchalance of the grand seigneur. In its aftermath (to use Stendhal’s terminology), “morose vanity” supplants “happy vanity.”

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Ambitious young men had a hard time breaking through the sclerotic Old Regime hierarchy, but in the post-Revolutionary, Balzacian world of the nineteenth century, they have to contend with an even more frustrating obstacle, one which, hydralike, keeps sprouting new heads: their peers. As hordes of young Rastignacs converge on Paris, their mutually thwarting ambitions breed jealousy and hatred in unprecedented quantities. By the late twentieth century, the situation assumes cartoonlike proportions. The narcissistic politicians (Kundera calls them “dancers”) in Slowness vie with each other for air time and make love not to their mistresses but to the omnipresent television cameras. Two centuries after the Revolution, acute other-consciousness has replaced the nobleman’s artless spontaneity. Slowness gathers the aristocratic and democratic universes into a single, interwoven composition, making it possible to distinguish exactly what joins and separates two eras, two attitudes, two modes of existence. First, the universe of peaceful, one-way imitation, in which a disciple absorbs the master’s lesson. This sphere is presided over by a beautiful, mature woman from the eighteenth century, Madame de T. (Kundera imagines her as voluptuous, round-waisted—the antithesis of today’s anorexic supermodels), who “possesses the wisdom of slowness and deploys the whole range of techniques for slowing things down” (36–7). She acts as a benevolent guide for a candid young chevalier. It’s an initiation story: “She gives him a short course in sentimental education, apprises him of her practical philosophy of love” (35). The chevalier is both Madame de T.’s lover and her pupil. The one-on-one tutorial takes place as they converse, for “Everything Madame de T. says is the fruit of an art, the art of conversation, which lets no gesture pass without comment and works over its meaning” (31). She conceives of seduction as a ritual, even a “technique,” with rules that can be learned. Though she is older than her young student, precisely because she is older, they manage to understand each other. The chevalier’s apprenticeship testifies to the continuity between generations, without which no transmission of wisdom could occur. Vincent, meanwhile, is a young intellectual from the contemporary period. He adores the eighteenth century, which he associates with forbidden pleasures. If he could, he would “wear the Marquis de Sade’s profi le as a badge on his lapel” (8). The story of Vincent and the young secretary he tries to seduce reveals the chasm that exists between the world of slowness and that of speeding motorcycles and hovering television cameras. While Madame de T. masters the art of conversation, Vincent falls victim to what Diderot called “ l’esprit de l’escalier,” the nagging feeling of shame and frustration that comes of thinking up a witty comeback too late. In the

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hotel bar, Vincent verbally spars with an elegant fellow who manages to have the last word: “Nothing is more humiliating than not coming up with a slashing retort to a slashing attack. In unspeakable embarrassment, amid jeering laughter, Vincent feebly withdraws” (84). In Vincent, Kundera has created his most comical inauthentic hedonist, a “libertine” who attempts to imitate the spirit of the eighteenth century, who cites Sade and dreams of having an orgy, but who instead of obeying the pleasure principle is dominated by his ressentiment. Guy Scarpetta grasps the essence of the novel’s imitative logic when he notes that the characters in Slowness act according to a pattern of “compensation.”8 All endure public or semi-public humiliation and search in vain for a means of saving face. What explains the characters’ obstinate fi xation on those who have caused or witnessed their humiliation? An answer can be found in the dialectic of desire. At first, the disciple covets the objects designated by his model. Eventually, however, the model’s capacity for denying possession becomes a prerequisite for desire, for only this interference ensures that the object will remain out of reach, its aura intact. Finally, the disciple conflates the greatest resistance with the worthiest goal. He lays siege only to impregnable citadels, pursues only cruel and disdainful maidens. In the worshiper’s eyes, the ability to impart humiliation is the surest sign that an idol is deserving of adoration. In Slowness, the model has become a stumbling block to which the imitator returns again and again, like a fly bumping repeatedly against a windowpane. Moved by the applause he has just received from his fellow entomologists, a Czech scientist goes back to his seat having forgotten to read his conference paper. Later, he falls victim to the stinging sarcasms of Berck, a media-savvy politician, who makes him the butt of a small crowd of laughing entomologists. Following that humiliating defeat, he goes down to the hotel pool with the express purpose of recapturing the advantage: He means to show off his body to the feeble intellectuals of this sophisticated, overcultivated, and ultimately perfidious country [. . .] He imagines his body parading around the pool, showing the French that there exists one utterly fundamental value, bodily perfection, the perfection he personally can boast and that none of them has any idea of. (94)

The Czech émigré views the inhabitants of his new country as a unified bloc of hostile judges. He may despise them, but he still wants to make a good impression. They occupy his thoughts and dictate his actions even as he tries to regain the upper hand. Should he manage to wow the French onlookers

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with his physique, he will nonetheless owe to them whatever satisfaction he derives from his feat. Th is farcical text provides insight into the émigré’s condition and may even serve, as my former professor Karen von Kunes once speculated, as a piece of indirect authorial self-satire. Meanwhile, Immaculata, a television journalist, is also humiliated by the holier-than-thou Berck, who rebuffs her during an interview at the conference, where he is to be decorated as an honorary entomologist. She later parades through the hotel in a white dress to make Berck realize how indifferent she is to him. She has . . . a vague but strong wish to not let herself be driven from the scene; to pass again through the precincts of her humiliation; to not consent to her defeat; and if defeat there is, to transform it into great theater, in the course of which she will set her wounded beauty shining and deploy her rebellious pride. (105)

In both cases, the loser attempts to recover his or her dignity by asserting the same unassailable superiority displayed by the fortunate winner. These characters’ movements, thoughts, and feelings are engendered and controlled by the model–obstacle (the crowd of French intellectuals at the conference; Berck). This pattern also holds true for Vincent. “The contemporary libertine is a slave,” declared Havel, and Vincent is a mere caricature of Havel, who is already a caricature of Don Juan. Like Dostoevsky’s underground man, Vincent cannot forget his rival’s jeering face: “the image of the man in the three-piece suit is still stuck like a splinter in his soul, he cannot rid himself of it” (85). His subsequent actions are a series of failed attempts to extirpate this splinter. The mediator has, so to speak, “gotten under his skin.” As the night draws to a close, he finds himself poolside with the pretty secretary, who has invited him to spend the night with her. Sensual pleasure awaits him upstairs in his hotel room. Except that Vincent is so intent on acting like a lecherous libertine that he forgets to be one. He tackles Julie and threatens to have his way with her in public, shouting obscenities at the top of his lungs. But his thoughts turn toward the imaginary audience for whom he is performing rather than toward her available body: True, the amphitheater is empty, but even though it is empty, the audience, imagined and imaginary, potential and virtual, is there, is with them [. . .] It is for them that Vincent is shouting his words, it is their admiration, their approval he hopes to win. (118)

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Finally, he leaps on her, but he is unaroused, his member limp. Has his body failed him in his hour of need? No: Vincent is not impotent. He just isn’t excited (indeed, to confirm that no physiological dysfunction has occurred, the narrator interviews the member, offering it the opportunity to defend itself, which it does very convincingly). Undeterred by his own lack of arousal, Vincent “sets about simulating coition” (121). He and Julie moan and bellow in unison, thrusting and grinding without experiencing the least pleasurable sensation: “Neither Julie nor Vincent bothers with what is going on around them [. . .] this is not an orgy they’re conducting, it is a show, and during a performance actors try not to meet the audience’s eyes” (123–4). Beneath the gaze of the anonymous and invisible public, action turns into gesticulation and existence is reduced to playacting. As Vincent struggles to save face, Kundera shows us the young man’s models parading victoriously across the stage of his psychic life, one after the next. Rarely has an author illustrated the mediator’s apotheosis in such glaring fashion. It’s hard to take Slowness seriously because the situations it describes are so over-the-top. Though the classics we venerate abound in ridiculous scenes, we persist in denigrating contemporary works like this one for their lack of weight. Meanwhile, with a sense of duty that verges on masochism, we wrestle bravely with the pretentious, plotless stuff that sometimes passes for high literature in our day. This pseudo-virtue is the literary equivalent of the inaptitude for pleasure that afflicts Kundera’s modern characters, all of whom take the path of most resistance. Slowness is a meditation on the hang-ups that interfere with our enjoyment in the bedroom, both when the lamp on the night table has been switched off, and when we have left it on to read. In her review of the novel in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani objects to the cruelty with which the author portrays Vincent, Immaculata, and the Czech scientist. I couldn’t disagree more. Indeed, where Kakutani sees chilliness, I detect only smiling good humor, with a touch of melancholy. One cannot describe the subjective reality of other-centeredness as Kundera does and stand apart from the phenomenon under observation. Far from maintaining a chilly distance, he treats even the most obnoxious blowhards with compassionate sympathy. I suspect this capacity for identifying with his characters is what enables Kundera to make us laugh at their expense. It is by accepting that he is “part of the mimetic mechanism which rules human relationships”9 that he goes beyond the flatness of mere satire. Even Kakutani is obliged to admit that “these portraits are very funny,” and here I agree with her entirely. In fact, I see Slowness as a comic masterpiece, one that concentrates in 150-odd pages Kundera’s central themes—above all that of mediated desire extinguishing

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sensual pleasure—and gives them fuller expression than perhaps any of his other works. We are left with an important question: why does Vincent fail where the eighteenth-century libertine succeeds? In order to come up with an answer, we must compare Vincent’s reactions to those of the young chevalier. When Madame de T.’s husband mocks him, the chevalier makes a witty reply. But although he manages to remain the master of the situation, he, too, feels ridiculous, especially when he learns that Madame de T. has used him as a decoy to divert attention away from her lover, the Marquis: the anecdote will get around, and he will become a joke figure [. . .] Without asking his leave, they have put a jester’s cap on his head, and he does not feel up to wearing it. In his soul he hears the voice of revolt urging him to tell his story . . . But he knows he will not be able to do that. Becoming a boor is even worse than being ludicrous. (148)

The chevalier obeys a code of decorum that matters more to him than healing the wound to his vanity. The social pact trumps the mediator’s individualized transcendence. In the end, his respect for that pact is the chevalier’s saving grace. He manages to let go of his pride, much in the way Crébillon’s hero, in the passage from Wanderings of the Heart and Mind cited in my analysis of “Dr. Havel,” convinces himself that his love object rejected him out of sheer modesty. In that era, desire was corseted in a network of unspoken rules. The chevalier’s relative peace of mind stems less from his superior individual qualities than from the spiritual resources available to him at a specific socio-historical moment. The eighteenth-century world remained stable enough to take seriously the idea that doing away with religious forms of superpersonal transcendence would make man more rational. Kundera looks back with undisguised nostalgia to an era in which the continuing influence of monarchy and church made those subversive Enlightenment ideas into a sort of delicate luxury. Today, the spiritual energies that would allow contemporary man to derive pleasure from rebelliousness have dwindled away. In Slowness, revolt is nothing but the negative homage that the disciple pays to his model-obstacle. Instead of quelling the religious impulse, the “Death of God” announced by Nietzsche has merely twisted it into grotesque forms of irrational deviated transcendence. Modern psychiatry is mostly blind to the tangled desires that undermine our mental health. It sticks the labels “neurotic” or “psychotic” on this or that aberration without realizing that mimesis is fueling the entire process. Vincent, Immaculata, and the Czech

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scientist are neurotics all, stuck to models whom they worship just as Immaculata’s lover begins to worship her the moment she rejects him: . . . this body which hitherto would give itself to him promptly and simply now rises up in front of him like a Greek statue set on a pedestal a hundred meters high. He is mad with desire, and it is a strange desire, which does not express itself sensually but fi lls his head and only his head, desire as cerebral fascination, as idée fi xe, mystical madness, the certainty that this body, and no other, is the one fated to fulfi ll his life, his entire life. (107)

In this passage, we find yet again the contrast between sensual desire and the “mystical madness” of idolatry. The metaphor of the statue shows the model in a divine light, but there is nothing of Christian sweetness about the image. Once so compliant, the mistress’s warm body has changed into cold, uninviting stone. We are in the presence of an implacable pagan divinity, the model-as-obstacle incarnate. In Slowness, Kundera has captured the deceptively simple way in which we drive ourselves and each other crazy through our helplessness to renounce unworthy models and embrace deserving ones. He puts this helplessness in context by showing the benefits of scripted conversations and predefi ned roles from a bygone era. We can no more bind desire up in a cultural corset again than we can travel back in time to the court of Louis XV. What we can do, however, is open a novel by Kundera and experience the liberating pleasure of laughing at ourselves.

A little theory of resentment Most novelists describe an apple falling from a tree. Kundera first presents us with the law of universal gravitation, and then describes the apple’s fall. Marcel Proust’s approach is similar to Kundera’s in that he, too, adduces the general law that accounts for his character’s behavior. In Proust’s case, however, the law comes second. It is there to shed light on the character’s actions a posteriori. Early in Time Regained, the narrator mentions that Monsieur Bontemps has become a Dreyfusard. How is it that a stance once so unpopular has become normal, even admirable? Proust provides an explanation: “In society (and this social phenomenon is only the application of a much more general psychological law) whether novelties are reprehensible or not, they only excite consternation until they have been

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assimilated and defended by reassuring elements.”10 This is but one example chosen almost at random among many others, but it suffices to show the order of things in Proustian narration. Kundera inverts that order. In Part Five of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “Litost,” he introduces a character called Kristyna. The part’s first chapter is entitled: “Who is Kristyna?” There follows a rather conventional enumeration of Kristyna’s traits and qualities: she is 30, has a child, is married to a butcher, and is involved in a long-term extramarital liaison with a local auto mechanic. Here we are in the familiar realm of Balzacian realism, even if the details furnished by the narrator are far less abundant than they would be in Old Goriot or Lost Illusions. In the next chapter, however, we leave this familiar realm and enter a specifically Kunderian narrative space. We are already aware that Kristyna is involved with a young man known simply as “the student.” The reader expects the following chapter to introduce the student in the same manner as Kristyna. But instead of describing the student’s appearance, his past, his family, or any of his other attributes, Kundera begins with a Czech word: “Litost.” The word, he claims, is untranslatable, and so he proceeds by a series of examples. The student (we still know nothing about him) and a girlfriend of his (presumably not Kristyna) are swimming together. She is an expert swimmer but delicately refrains from displaying her superior athletic prowess until the very end of their swim, when she suddenly races ahead: The student made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother’s overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. (166–7)

His misery manifests itself in the desire to get even. He slaps the girl, reproaching her for having put her life in danger by swimming alone in dangerous waters, and, when she bursts into tears, finds that his litost has gone away. This anecdote serves not to introduce the student, but rather the concept-word litost. We are in the realm of what Kundera defines in The Art of the Novel as “a specifically novelistic essay” (80), an ironic digression that seeks to explore rather than prove a carefully argued point. Like Musil and Broch, who seek to “marshal around the story all the means . . . that could illuminate man’s being; could make of the novel the supreme intellectual synthesis” (16), but in a more fully realized way, Kundera brings thought and reflection into the realm of the novel.

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Kundera gives a second example of litost: when he was a young boy, the student took violin lessons. He wasn’t very good and the teacher scolded him for making mistakes: “He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher’s voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he would sink deeper and deeper into his litost ” (167). Kundera defines litost as “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery” (167). He goes on to specify that litost is associated with inexperience: “It is one of the ornaments of youth” (168). Throughout these passages the young man remains a shadowy presence, a figure in the background who is summoned forth from time to time like a mannequin on which a dressmaker tries out a series of outfits. Each successive attempt at definition seeks to narrow the meaning and reduce it to its essence. Finally, Kundera gets to the heart of his idea when he notes that litost “works like a two-stroke engine. Torment is followed by the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one’s partner look as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the slapped woman cries. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love going” (168). Whatever the author may say about the untranslatability of litost, it seems to me that the word is not so very far from the French ressentiment, which (as we have seen in the previous section) also denotes the vengeful desire to exact retribution for a humiliating slight. Both litost and ressentiment are feelings, whereas imitative desire is a mechanism. The torments of litost occur when that mechanism gets stuck in an adversarial mode. The young student sees the girl as his rival and compares himself to her. She first sparks his desire to swim faster and then outdoes him, generating the contradictory feelings of admiration and frustration that together compose his hatred. In the first example of litost, the student is strong enough to discharge his humiliation on a scapegoat: his girlfriend, whom he slaps. In the second example, the young pupil is powerless to strike the violin teacher. The best he can do is to self-destruct so as to thwart her efforts to teach him. His deliberate mistakes are an inverted and negative imitation, the opposite of the perfect mimesis necessary to master a difficult piece of music. Just as her rebukes stand as an obstacle in his path, he positions himself as an obstacle in hers with his intentionally atrocious playing. Only at the end of the chapter is the student finally introduced—as the incarnation of litost. Kundera writes: “Initially this chapter was entitled “Who Is the Student?” But to deal with litost was to describe the student, who is litost incarnate” (168). The Kunderian narrative procedure turns the convention upside down. We move from the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete.

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At the very end of the little chapter, Kundera finally describes the student and his relationship with Kristyna. And only at the moment of transition between the analysis of litost and the return to conventional storytelling do we find the obtrusive Kunderian narrator intervening in the text to orient the reader. The narrator’s presence is made necessary by the author’s highly synthetic technique, which leaves out the usual transitions and markers. He is there to suture the realm of the novelistic essay to the narrative realm proper.

Litost in the underground In his introduction to Jacques and his Master, Kundera makes known his distaste for the excessively sentimental emotional climate of Dostoevsky’s fiction. He proclaims his preference for Tolstoy and though he occasionally expresses admiration for the author of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s influence on his work appears minimal. All the same, we have seen how “Dr. Havel” operates according to the same “bawd-and-cuckold” principle as Dostoevsky’s Eternal Husband, albeit in a lighter, vaudevillesque mode. Now I would like to propose a similar comparison between two episodes in Life Is Elsewhere and another classic Dostoevsky short story, “Notes from the Underground.” The second part of “Notes from the Underground,” “A Propos of the Wet Snow,” recounts an episode from the narrator’s youth. Like Kundera’s Jaromil, the underground man has an overdeveloped lyrical side and cultivates his appreciation of “the sublime and the beautiful.” One night, he enters a tavern and encounters an arrogant officer who treats him with infuriating disdain: I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word—without a warning or explanation—moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me. . . . I had been treated like a fly. This officer was over six foot, while I was a spindly little fellow. But the quarrel was in my hands. I had only to protest and I certainly would have been thrown out of the window. But I changed my mind and preferred to beat a resentful retreat.11

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For two full years the underground man nourishes his resentment, observing the officer in the street and acquiring information about him. He plans to provoke the fellow into a duel but also harbors intense feelings of admiration that coexist with his hatred: At last I determined to challenge my enemy to a duel. I composed a splendid, charming letter to him, imploring him to apologize to me, and hinting rather plainly at a duel in case of refusal.12

He longs to become the officer’s friend and dreams of “improving his mind”13 with his culture and of being shielded by the officer’s superior rank. His letter displays the ambivalence characteristic of imitative rivalry. The underground man adores his model (thus his hope of being reconciled with him and becoming his friend) and at the same time, in his pride, he feels compelled to defy him, and therefore mixes some threats into his blandishments so as to maintain his dignity and signal his readiness to take revenge. Life Is Elsewhere reproduces these two situations, yet it does so in reverse order: first, the “underground” letter; next, the physical confrontation. Jaromil has written a letter to an illustrious poet and waits anxiously for his reply. None is forthcoming and Jaromil longs more than ever for someone to wrench him from his “nothingness” (205). Finally, he decides that he must get the poet’s attention somehow, but “not by means of a letter, but by a gesture laden with poetry” (206). He cuts 20 telephone receivers from public phone booths, puts them in a box, and takes the box to the post office. He initially interprets the gesture as “a fantastic plea that he was addressing to a great poet so that he would respond to him [. . .] a gift to him of the longing for his voice” (208). But an encounter with an old classmate, now a member of the police, leads him to change his interpretation of the gift: . . . the conversation with his old classmate right afterward . . . gave his poetic act an opposite meaning: it was no longer a gift and a plea; not at all; he was proudly returning to the poet his fruitless wait; the receivers with severed wires were the severed heads of his veneration, and Jaromil was sending them to the poet with contempt, like a Turkish sultan returning to a Christian commander the severed heads of Crusaders. (208–9)

Jaromil’s gesture thus holds the potential for two contrasting (though not mutually exclusive) interpretations, just like the underground man’s letter to the officer. It is both an imploring appeal and a sarcastic declaration

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of war. Kundera separates the two moments, imputing Jaromil’s abrupt reinterpretation of the gesture to the strong, knowledgeable policeman, who galvanizes the young poet and makes him feel strong himself. The two sides of resentment do not coexist in quite the way they do in Dostoevsky’s story. Instead, one follows after the other, the appeal preceding the defiant challenge. As usual, Kundera’s narrative technique aims at maximum clarity. Every incident receives careful analysis and a magnificent metaphor crowns the passage, unveiling the sinister significance of the severed telephone receivers. By contrast, Dostoevsky’s approach gives an impression of confusion and obscurity. The first-person narrator speaks spontaneously and artlessly. He does not employ rich, metaphorical language. His tone is sarcastic where the narrator of Kundera’s novel is meditative, reflective, and ironic. Fundamentally, however, the two authors show the same process at work. In both cases, admiration precedes hatred. The underground man begs for an apology and then hints at the necessity of a duel in the event he does not receive one. Jaromil begs for the poet’s attention and then reinterprets his gesture as an insolent rejection, a cutting of ties. The two authors reveal intense admiration as the source of hatred and loft y indifference as the source of admiration (the underground man cannot forgive the officer for treating him as if he did not exist; Jaromil cannot forgive the famous poet for failing to reply to his letters). A few pages later, Kundera revisits the theme of the young poet’s ambivalent relationship to his master. This time, however, the story concerns not the fictional poet Jaromil but rather Arthur Rimbaud and his relationship to Théodore de Banville. We see once more the characteristic shift from admiration to hatred. First, Kundera cites the famous letter that Rimbaud wrote to Banville: “My dear Master: raise me up a little: I am young; give me your hand . . .” (228). Kundera writes of this naïve appeal: . . . this letter would long remain in his head as a litany of shame, as proof of his weakness and servility. He would get even with this dear master, this old idiot, this bald-headed Théodore de Banville! A year later he would cruelly ridicule all his work, all the hyacinths and languid lilies that fi ll his verse, sending his sarcasms in a letter like a registered slap in the face. (228)

Having overextended himself in his own eyes, Rimbaud feels compelled to recover his dignity by striking out at the once-beloved master. Fulsome admiration leads to the recoil of hatred.

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We see here the characteristic two-stroke mechanism of litost as defined by Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The technical procedure of mirroring Jaromil’s fictional story in the historical narrative of Rimbaud and Théodore de Banville (and vice versa) tends to archetypalize Jaromil, making him a mythical embodiment of lyrical poetry. This historicization of Jaromil’s life has something in common with the first part of “Notes from the Underground,” which presents the “theory” before the properly narrative passages in the second part. Indeed, we have seen Kundera himself adopt a similar approach in his theory of litost. However, Kundera integrates the essayistic and novelistic passages with greater premeditation than Dostoevsky, creating a seamless fusion. In accordance with the requirements of the “specifically novelistic essay” laid out in The Art of the Novel, even the essayistic passages take inspiration from the concrete lives of the characters. It is not until the very end of the novel that Jaromil truly encounters the kind of humiliation that caused Dostoevsky’s “underground” character to write his letter in the first place. The encounter takes place in the context of a meditation on honor and the poet Lermontov: “Honor is merely the hunger of your vanity, Lermontov. Honor is a mirror illusion, honor is merely a spectacle for this insignificant audience . . .” (402). Kundera apostrophizes the Czech scientist with similar words at the conclusion of Slowness, as if hoping to penetrate through the “mirror illusion” and talk some sense into his characters. What he suggests in this short passage, which precedes the climactic moment of the novel in the same way that the theory of litost preceded the action in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is the imitative nature of honor: “vanity,” “mirror,” “illusion,” “spectacle.” All of these words allude to the self’s image in the eyes of others. Once again, the reader is brought face to face with Kundera’s master theme: the triumph, in a world of internal mediation, of image over reality, appearance over being, imitation over concrete sexuality. And in this case, the triumph of imitative desire over life itself: “Is there something more precious than honor? . . . No, there is nothing more precious than honor!” (402). In another passage, describing the party at which Lermontov is humiliated, Kundera writes: “The competition continued: everyone tried to be the center of attention. Someone played the piano, couples danced, adjacent groups loudly laughed and talked; people tried to outdo each other in wit, everyone tried to surpass the others and be seen” (397). Similarly, at the party to which Jaromil is invited at the novel’s conclusion, “The guests were surpassing one another in calling attention to themselves. The young actors were behaving as if they were on stage, speaking loudly and unnaturally, and all were trying to impress with their wit or the originality

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of their opinions” (395). The world of poetry, the world of lyricism, is a world of exacerbated competition for visibility. The rivals will sacrifice sexual pleasure to honor, their most sacred value. They will even sacrifice their very lives. As Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting : “Everything our teachers called heroism may only be the form of litost I have illustrated with the example of the child and the violin teacher” (206). And in a burst of inspiration, he imagines that the Peloponnesian Wars can be explained as litost on the grand collective scale: “The Persians conquered the Peloponnesus when the Spartans made one military mistake after another. Just like the child refusing to play in tune, they were blinded by tears of rage. . . . and it is through litost that they allowed themselves to be killed to the last man” (206–7). Historians may frown at the idea of ascribing both great and small events to the same trivial cause. For Kundera, however, there is but one human reality, which is governed at every scale by the unvarying laws of imitative action and reaction. We must understand Jaromil’s ultimate defeat, then, as the result of litost, that is to say the triumph of the death instinct over the pleasure principle, the overestimation of honor and the underestimation of life. The young poet has come to a party with a beautiful young director with whom he anticipates spending a night of love. Instead, he becomes embroiled in a joust of words with a 30-year-old man, an old friend of his mentor, the painter. The 30-year-old (anonymous agent of humiliation, just as the man in the three-piece suit remains nameless in Slowness—at this stage the model– obstacle, as Girard observes in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, can be literally anyone) reproaches him with having abandoned the politically disgraced artist. They begin to argue, and Jaromil “felt the mud of humiliation running down his cheek, and he knew that with such a dirtied face he could not stay there a minute longer” (403).The man and the poet come to blows: Jaromil “raised his fist at the man, who caught Jaromil’s arm, violently twisted him around, then seized him by the collar with one hand and by the seat of the pants with the other and lifted him off the ground” (403). Those present cannot keep from laughing, and the man carries Jaromil across the room. The poet “struggled high in the air like a tender, desperate fish” (404).The man puts Jaromil outdoors on the balcony and closes the door after him. The similarities between this scene and the one in which Dostoevsky’s underground man is picked up and placed to one side are striking. In each case, an anonymous man of superior physical force becomes the fascinating obstacle who inspires the desire for vengeance. In each case, the protagonist finds it impossible to carry out this vengeance (the underground man nurses his resentment for two years before writing his letter to the officer). Kundera

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lingers over the scene with delectation, describing it in stages, and, in his usual manner, offering a point of historical comparison by simultaneously recounting the poet Lermontov’s demise. Jaromil, he writes, is even worse off than Lermontov, because there “is no literary history with its balms that could give a dignified meaning to his fall” (406). He is as ridiculous as the painter, who “imitated Breton with his leather coat and his German shepherd” (405), a shadow, a parody of the legendary stature to which he aspires. Comedy equals tragedy plus time: the forward march of history bathes Jaromil’s disgrace in a laughable light. The young poet stays out on the frigid balcony until he falls gravely ill. Soon afterward, he dies of pneumonia. In his final remarks on litost in Part Five of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera examines the case of a desire for vengeance that cannot find an outlet: “Theoreticians are familiar with this kind of situation and call it a ‘ litost block’” (207). The underground man seems to have encountered such a blockage: he has been confronted with the humiliating spectacle of his own misery and has no way to recover. The notion of a “litost block” makes it possible to understand Vincent’s predicament in Slowness and also renders Jaromil’s fate intelligible. Kundera concludes the scene with a triangular flourish, as if to reintroduce the erotic motif as a reminder of the many imitative triangles not only in this novel but throughout his oeuvre: through the balcony window, Jaromil watches the beautiful fi lmmaker and an unknown man make love. The preoccupation with honor has disqualified Jaromil from the realm of the erotic, placing him in the unenviable position of the voyeur who observes the triumph of his faceless rival from behind a glass barrier.

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5

Jealousy and its Metaphors

The game gone awry This book is a journey through the labyrinth of values in which Kundera’s characters are condemned to wander. When we first penetrated into the labyrinth, the world of familiar markers and signposts was not far behind us. “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” and the episode of Kristyna and the student in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting gave us the agreeable feeling of wandering in a forest dappled with sunlight. As we went deeper into the labyrinth, the boughs of the trees closed in around us. Light could no longer shine in through the interstices, and the games of desire lost their farcical, vaudevillesque quality. In The Joke and Immortality, the labyrinth became a place of erotic competition and anguish. The model was transformed once and for all into a rival. In Slowness, Life Is Elsewhere, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the labyrinth became an even more disorienting place, a hall of mirrors where politicians, poets, and intellectuals jousted for visibility beneath the omnipresent eye of television or surveillance cameras. The model became an existential obstacle, a human stumbling block as fascinating as it was insurmountable. The characters stopped taking any interest in sex as such and succumbed to the imitative imperative, letting their litost control them. From there, events begin to take on a hellish cast. As Jaromil dies, Kundera speaks of “the realm of the dead” (413) and writes that “fever’s fire licks at his body” (413). In the chapters that follow, we will go even farther toward the center of the labyrinth and imitative desire will become more hellish still. Dreams will play a greater part in the narrative, first in Identity, and then in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the sexual act itself takes on the triangular character noted by Martine Boyer-Weinmann in her study of Kundera. The purpose of this chapter is to focus on a theme that has received less than the attention it deserves, given its importance in Kundera’s fiction: jealousy. Girard writes that human interactions have a tendency to “program themselves.”1 Kundera’s treatment of jealousy confirms this idea.

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In his novels, jealousy frequently occurs as the result of a role play gone awry. What begins as a lighthearted game metamorphoses into mutual mistrust. The combat escalates until it takes on a life of its own. The players want to put a stop to the game yet seem incapable of halting its ineluctable development. The theme of the role play gone awry first appears in “The Hitchhiking Game,” the third story in Laughable Loves. A man in his late 20s and his modest, younger girlfriend have embarked on a vacation trip. The girl is anxious, insecure: “He knew that she loved him and that she was jealous. Jealousy isn’t a pleasant trait, but if it isn’t overdone (and if it’s combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there’s even something touching about it” (80). What the young man most likes about her is a quality of “purity” (80). Here Kundera lays the groundwork for the misunderstanding to come, for the girlfriend deplores her own straightlaced ways, which stand as evidence of her failure to keep up with the times: “She knew that her modesty was ridiculous and old-fashioned . . . She often longed to feel free and easy about her body, the way most women around her did” (81). Moreover, she is full of suspicions and fears that her boyfriend will leave her one day for a more sexually provocative woman: . . . it often occurred to her that other women (those who weren’t anxious) were more attractive and seductive, and that the young man, who did not conceal the fact that he knew this kind of woman well, would someday leave her for a woman like that. (82)

At a rest stop, the young woman disappears into the bushes to relieve herself. When she returns to the car, she flirtatiously pretends to be a hitch-hiker. The man plays along and treats her as if she were a stranger. With a flirtatiousness equal to her own, he invites her to step into the car, and she accepts with coquettish gratitude. From there, their banter takes them further and further from themselves. Each partner in the game begins to appear in a new light. The young woman wants to step into the role of the seductive other women that she imagines her boyfriend to prefer. She thinks that playing that role will liberate her from her anxiety and make him more interested in her. Instead, the game (like so many enterprises undertaken by Kundera’s characters) takes on a meaning opposite the one intended. At the same time that the young woman plays the role of the seductress, she observes her boyfriend with her own eyes, as if she were peeking out at him from behind a mask. The two-person game has become triangular. Now there is the boyfriend, the pretty hitchhiker, and the girlfriend, who,

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as if she were having an out-of-body experience, observes the scene as it unfolds, an invisible spectator. What she sees wounds her: At these words the girl looked up at him and found that he looked exactly as she imagined him in her most agonizing hours of jealousy. She was alarmed at how he was flattering her and flirting with her (an unknown hitchhiker), and how seductive he was. (85)

One metamorphosis engenders another. First, the young woman was transformed. Now, the young man begins to appear otherwise than he usually does. In response to her seductive demeanor, he has begun to treat her with a fl irtatiousness she has never known him to display. Far from making him less attractive in her eyes, this makes him more alluring than ever. Such is the transfiguring power of imitative desire. Oddly enough, the girl desires her boyfriend through the phantom hitch-hiker whose role she herself is playing. She simultaneously plays the roles of imitator and model. By her (imaginary but increasingly real) presence, the coquettish woman she is pretending to be transforms her boyfriend into a virile misogynist. The young man “began to play the tough guy who treats women to the coarser aspects of his masculinity” (87). Th is, however, is no more than an act: . . . he had never resembled a heartless tough guy, because he had never demonstrated either a particularly strong will or ruthlessness. However, if he did not resemble such a man, nonetheless he had longed to at one time. . . . And this childish desire quickly took advantage of the opportunity to embody itself in the proffered role. (88)

To whom or what is the role proffered? To the young man? Or to his childish desire? The structure of the sentence seems to suggest the latter as the more likely alternative. In other words, desire has taken charge: it seizes the occasion, acting with a will of its own. And this desire is clearly imitative to the extent that the young man wishes to resemble a hard, unscrupulous, satanic character. His girlfriend finds the game liberating. It takes her out of herself, and that self, writes Kundera, is identical with her jealousy (“. . . she herself was, above all, the epitome of jealousy” (88)). She, too, wishes to transform herself into someone else. Kundera portrays her as a Madame Bovary, a bit like Jaromil from Life Is Elsewhere, who is also mediated by dimestore novels:

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The Book of Imitation and Desire The girl could forget herself and give herself up to her role. Her role? What was her role? It was a role out of trashy literature. . . . She was an artful seductress, cleverly knowing how to use her charms. The girl slipped into this silly romantic part with an ease that astonished her. (88)

The role of the seductress has been suggested to her by a stereotyped literary precedent, just as the young man’s role is a fantasy, a caricature of the womanizer. The game they are playing is imitative in two senses: first, because each partner imitates the other, little by little raising the stakes of the game. This is the reciprocal dimension of mimesis, a constant back-and-forth that obliges each of them to react and to respond according to the other’s desire. The game is also imitative inasmuch as each partner puts on the mask of a character suggested by the mirage of desire. Each wishes to merge with this character in the way an actor plays a part on stage. The theater of desire has no audience, however, aside from the actors themselves. All the same, it is the audience that counts, for as soon they are alone, both find their real selves once more: “Once out of the car he was, of course, himself again” (91). “The girl, when she found herself alone, also threw off her role” (92). It is, in other words, for the other that each performs the borrowed part. Once the model of desire disappears, the old desire-self reemerges. On the spur of the moment, the young man unexpectedly wrenches the steering wheel and begins to direct the car away from the planned vacation destination and toward another town: “The game all at once went into a higher gear . . . Fiction was suddenly making an assault on real life” (90). The theater of illusions trumps concrete reality. The game has taken on a life of its own. The same process is at work in this story as in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years.” There, too, the young journalist sought to merge with the role of the seducer suggested to him by Havel. There, too, illusion took on greater importance than the reality it replaced. The journalist dumped his girlfriend and went off to seduce Frantiska just as, in this story, the young man, under the influence of the game, slips into the seducer’s part and decides to drive toward a new destination. Here, however, the distance between subject and model has diminished radically. We fi nd ourselves in the realm of double imitation, where relationships are like a dance in which it is impossible to tell who is leading and who is following. Just now I compared the young woman in the story to Madame Bovary. She could also be compared to Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer

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Night’s Dream, who wishes to be transformed or, as Shakespeare beautifully puts it, translated into her friend and rival Hermia: Sickness is catching; O, were favour so, Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go; My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye, My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody. Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I’d give to be to you translated O, teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius’s heart.2

As Jean-Michel Oughourlian notes in his analysis of the play in The Puppet of Desire, Helena’s desire settles on the various visible and audible attributes of her model: the tone of voice, the coquettish glance, the way of talking.3 These characteristics form the iceberg tip of Hermia’s being. In adopting them, Helena hopes to capture her friend’s ineffable essence and make it her own. Similarly, the young woman in “The Hitchhiking Game” wishes to acquire the qualities and attributes of her imaginary model, the one she thinks her boyfriend prefers to her. She tries to catch this model’s being the way Helena tries to catch Hermia’s. The young woman’s metamorphosis occurs in stages. At first, it affects only the surface of her personality. She aspires, however, as we have seen, to be utterly transformed, to give herself, as it were, a complete existential makeover. Little by little, as she grows into her role, she begins to absorb the foreign being at ever deeper levels of her self: . . . now sitting face-to-face with her, he realized that it wasn’t just the words that were turning her into a stranger, but that she had completely changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled a type of woman he knew all too well and who inspired some aversion in him. (93)

In becoming the kind of woman that her boyfriend finds slightly off-putting and vulgar, she awakens the least tender part of him, the part drawn almost against his will to immodest, sexually confident women. We are confronted with a literal possession, a total transformation that leaves none of the former self behind. The young woman’s very way of gesturing has been altered, just as Laura’s was altered by her imitation of her older sister in Immortality.

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The young man and his girlfriend stop for dinner. At the beginning of the story, she blushed with embarrassment when her boyfriend compelled her to tell him that she was going into the bushes to urinate. In the restaurant, she announces with brash confidence that she is going “to piss” (95). The metamorphosis is complete: “. . . now she was the hitchhiker, the woman without a destiny” (97). Kundera stresses the triangular, voyeuristic nature of the game. The young man cannot shake the feeling that his girlfriend is betraying him with someone else. And he, too, is jealous: . . . the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting; he saw his girl seducing a strange man, and he had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him); he had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext of her unfaithfulness. (98)

Strikingly, it is the young man who simultaneously plays the roles of seducer and cuckold in this triangular melodrama. He is relegated to the passenger’s position; meanwhile, the rival he has conjured out of thin air slides into the driver’s seat. The game, writes Kundera, is “a trap for the players” (99). It deprives them of their autonomy: “. . . in a game there lurks a lack of freedom” (99). The author compares the two players to pieces on a chessboard or a sports team on the field: “the more extreme the game became, the more it would be a game” (99)—in other words, the more the naked reciprocity of imitative interaction would supersede the individual wills of the players, transforming even their attempts to leave the playing field into moves demanding retaliation. At the conclusion of the story, the partners push the game to the outermost limit, surrendering to the roles imposed on them by the move– countermove pattern of their playacting. The young man takes the woman to their room and there he treats her as if she were a prostitute. Here, too, everything he knows comes to him second-hand, by imitation: “. . . the young man had never had a whore, and the ideas he had about them came from literature and hearsay” (103). He orders the girl to stand on a little table, which functions as a substitute for the piano in his mental image of a prostitute dancing on a piano. The profanation of the idol is complete. All love and tenderness have departed their relationship. Their bodies join on the bed. All that remains is the young man’s cruelty and the young woman’s realization that never before has she known such intense sexual pleasure (which, however, she cannot savor because of the horror her situation

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inspires in her). When their lovemaking is finally over, the young woman sobs in the darkness, repeating again and again: “I’m me, I’m me . . .” (106). What went wrong? Where did the game stop being playfully flirtatious and turn into an exchange of hateful reprisals? It is difficult to say. At the beginning, all was in place for a romantic getaway. Even the role play, when it first started, seemed the flirtatious prelude to an evening of merry, sensual delights. But somewhere along the way things began to go awry despite the best intentions of both parties. The car in which the two protagonists (soon to become antagonists) are isolated cuts them off from the outside world and from all influences aside from each other. There is nothing and nobody, no referee, no outside force to put a stop to the infernal logic of the game once it starts to play itself out. The story can be read most fruitfully as a meditation on the blurry boundaries of human identity, the malleable, shifting nature of the self, which, in the reciprocal feedback of the game, gradually loses its coherence and becomes fuzzy, smeared, double: He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other . . . everything was in the girl . . . her soul was terrifyingly amorphous [. . .] The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion. (100–1)

The singularity of identity gives way to undifferentiation. The beloved resembles all women and no longer has a definite, unique personality. Her sobbed “I am me” suggests that she is doing her best to retrieve the self left behind when she began to be transformed into (to be possessed by) the flirtatious hitch-hiker. At the beginning of the story, there remained a gap between the self that reflected and observed and the self that played the role of the hitch-hiker. By the end, however, the reflective, observing self has disappeared. There is no longer any gap between the actor and her role. And when the boundaries between self and other are effaced, identity oscillates, wavers, and finally shatters completely.

The metaphors of jealousy I will revisit the theme of jealousy and eroding identity shortly in the novel Identity, which gathers all of the themes I have been discussing so far and presents them with utmost clarity. First, however, a detour by way of Farewell Waltz.

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The novel introduces two jealous characters: Kamila, the wife of a chronically unfaithful trumpeter; and Frantisek, who is in love with Ruzena, the woman whom the trumpeter may or may not have impregnated. The trumpeter’s visit to the country spa town where Ruzena is a nurse unleashes the jealous suspicions of both Kamila (who suspects him of going to pay a call on one of his mistresses) and Frantisek (who pines after Ruzena and contemplates with horror the idea that she might be capable of sleeping with someone else). Kamila’s life is a losing battle for her husband Klima’s undivided attention. She was once a singer and “had been accustomed to admiration” (17). When illness forced her to give up singing, she discovered how to use her sadness as a means of captivating her husband. Only when he looked upon her face twisted with pain could she be sure “no other woman was competing with her in Klima’s mind” (18). Having left the stage where she could once bask in the adoration of her fans, she must now rely solely on her husband to boost her ego. And since she cannot afford to share his attention, all women are her rivals: This very beautiful woman was actually afraid of women and saw them everywhere. Nowhere could they escape her. She knew how to find them in Klima’s intonation when he greeted her upon arriving home. She knew how to detect them from the smell of his clothes. (18)

If desire were an objective matter, determined purely by biological factors, Kamila’s extraordinary beauty would act as an insurance policy against her husband’s wandering eye. In the labyrinth of values, however, there is no such thing as an objectively pretty face. Familiarity can breed contempt for even the most stunning spouse, as Kamila well knows. No wonder she is afraid of other women. Acting as model–rivals, they make the trumpeter seem intensely interesting (she imitates their desire, which heightens her own) and at the same time they prevent her from having him all to herself: the more she wants him, the less available he is; and the less available he is, the more she wants him. The first metaphor for jealousy expresses what I have been calling the transfiguration of the object: “Jealousy has an amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness. Mrs. Klima’s thoughts could go only in the direction of that painful beam, and her husband became the only man in the world” (18). All that is missing from this description is the origin of the beam. In “Dr. Havel,” Kundera could easily have written of similar rays shooting forth from Havel’s eyes and illuminating the object of his desire, shrouding the

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multitude of other women in total obscurity. Here, the imitative genesis of Kamila’s fascination does not truly appear. The reader might imagine that the beam shoots forth directly from Kamila’s eyes and illuminates Klima; in other words, that desire travels in a straight line from subject to object. The prior mention of Kamila’s fixation on her rivals, however, attenuates the linearity of the description, allowing the reader to suppose that without the presence of other women, the jealous beam would at the very least weaken and most probably disappear altogether, as indeed it does at the novel’s end when, as Elizabeth Pochoda puts it, “events fail to confirm her husband’s infidelity:”4 “She had been seeing only a single being lit up by the floodlight of her jealousy. And what would happen if that floodlight abruptly went out? In the unfocused light of day other beings would suddenly appear by the thousands, and the man she had up until now believed was the only in the world would become one among many” (261–2). In other words, it is not Kamila but the other women who single out the object and drive up its value in her eyes. Once she no longer has to fear them, she ceases to desire her husband. This idea is consistent with developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff ’s observations about infant imitation and gaze following: an “object takes on a special valence when it is looked at by a social other. It is as if having the adult shine her social spotlight on an inanimate object leaves a trace on it, an invisible mark. Such is the power of eyes, that being visually touched by the look of a social other transforms the object from a boring blob to an object of desire that cries out, ‘Look at me! Value me!’”5 Meltzoff uses practically the same metaphor as Kundera to elucidate the workings of triangular desire. Using literary resources (figurative language), science arrives at the same conclusion as the novel: the other’s desire lights up the object and compels us to take an interest in it too. A bit later, Kundera compares the pain of jealousy to that of losing a loved one and concludes that the former suffering is worse than the latter. “The pain of her grief was benignly multicolored,” writes Kundera. It was composed of several intermingled emotions, and allowed her mind to wander from past to present to future: The pain of jealousy, on the contrary, did not move about in space, it turned like a drill on a single point. There was no dispersal. [. . .] Everything was concentrated on a single (and perpetually present) image of an unfaithful body, on a single (and perpetually present) reproach. (142–3)

At work, Kamila finds it impossible to concentrate on her administrative tasks, and her distraction gives Kundera the opportunity to invent yet

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another metaphor: “. . . jealousy ran inside her like a racing engine” (143). She persuades herself that she should follow her husband to the provincial spa town where he has gone on the pretext of giving a concert, and the reader follows the inner debate between her better judgment and the casuistic voice of her jealousy. She eventually allows the sophistry of desire to prevail, managing to convince herself that she is going to join her husband for purely disinterested and selfless motives. The image of the racing engine recalls the two-stroke engine of litost: jealousy has a life and a will of its own. And it produces an insidious bad faith that in soothing Kamila’s doubts about her own motives makes it possible for her to give in to her jealous passion with a clear conscience. Kamila is jealous of Klima, who has gone to see Ruzena. Frantisek, meanwhile, is jealous of Ruzena, who is spending time with the famous trumpeter rather than with him. We first encounter the young man from the point of view of Klima and Ruzena. The headlamp of his motorcycle emerges from the darkness and envelopes them in a blinding light as they cross a dark road in the middle of the forest, where they have been walking together. The brilliant ray recalls the painful beam that characterizes Kamila’s jealousy, illuminating her spouse and shrouding other men in obscurity. Indeed, Frantisek, like Kamila, has eyes only for one woman and cannot see anyone else: “Ruzena, who had made a man of him, is above him like the lid of the firmament, of the only possible firmament. He cannot imagine life without her” (154). Ruzena describes him to Klima as a madman who follows her everywhere. Like Kamila going by train to pursue her unfaithful husband, Frantisek cannot keep from trailing the woman he loves. But he takes even greater interest in his rival, Klima, than he does in Ruzena: “He told himself that he was interested only in the trumpeter, and trailing him would not really be a violation of his promise” (154). Just as Kamila’s rivals occupy her nocturnal suspicions, Frantisek cannot tear his thoughts away from the model–rival, whom he imagines joined to the body of his beloved, an image that obsesses him: . . . it was like a drug addiction: he had to see the man; he had to see him once more, for a long time and close up. He had to look his torment in the face. He had to look at that body, whose union with Ruzena’s body seemed to him unimaginable and unbelievable. He had to look at him to confirm with his own eyes whether it was possible to think of their two bodies united. (154–5)

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Kundera introduces the notion of addiction and hints at what Philip Roth calls “the pornography of jealousy” in his novel The Dying Animal. The jealous person cannot stop picturing the very event he (or she) finds most upsetting. Th is obsession with what hurts reveals jealousy’s masochistic essence: Frantisek “was determined to control himself, to yield, to submit totally. He told himself that his love was so great that he could bear anything for its sake. Like the fairy-tale prince who endures all kinds of torments and sufferings for the sake of the princess, confronting dragons and crossing oceans, he was ready to accept fabulously excessive humiliations” (153–4). Kundera’s hyperbole undermines the romantic rhetoric, implying that, much like Don Quixote’s eagerness to do penance by beating his head against the rocks of the Sierra Morena, the young man’s thirst for submission should be regarded as comical. Later in the novel, when Klima and Ruzena go for a ride in the trumpeter’s luxury car, Frantisek follows them once again from a distance on his motorcycle. He has become a stalker, persistently pursuing the famous trumpeter. Nearer the end of the novel, Kundera uses another metaphor to make palpable the sufferings of jealousy: “Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. One can only come and go. Back and forth” (208). Like the many others that he employs to describe jealousy (the brilliant beam, the racing engine, drug addiction, the rotating of a drill), this metaphor expresses an excessive, overwhelming, and repetitive sensation of unbearable pain. The use of a succession of metaphors to bring home the various facets of jealousy recalls Proust’s narrative technique. Kundera’s metaphors, however, lack the religious coloration of Proustian imagery. They more closely resemble the “existential” or elucidating (as opposed to lyrical, beautifying) metaphors of two other masters of nonlyrical poetry, for whom the metaphor also functions aphoristically, as a means of definition: Hermann Broch and Robert Musil. Kundera’s metaphors are never arbitrarily ornamental; each one unveils a different dimension of jealousy. The blinding light defi nes it as a sort of obsessive, undivided focus; the racing engine stresses its combination of emotional excitation and stasis. The drill suggests an instrument of torture, while the toothache underscores the way that jealousy invades consciousness and drives out other thoughts and preoccupations. In the fi nal analysis, then, Kundera’s phenomenology of jealousy reveals this emotion as intensely painful, circular, and relentless; in other words, as infernal.

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“A test that gauged her susceptibility to seduction” In Life Is Elsewhere, Jaromil gets jealous because his red-headed girlfriend confesses that when she goes to the doctor she is obliged to undress in front of him. The girl, inspired no doubt by the age-old fantasy of “playing doctor,” flirtatiously acts out her medical visit for Jaromil’s benefit. She wants to pretend that he is the doctor and she his docile patient. Jaromil, however, does not feel like playing. He experiences the helpless sensation (which also afflicted the young man in “The Hitchhiking Game”) of being the invisible cuckold observing his beloved in the act of infidelity: He thought that the doctor probably touched the redhead’s breasts like this when he listened to the sounds in her chest behind the closed, mysterious doors of the examining room. He raised his head, looked at the naked girl, and felt a sharp pain, for he was seeing her just as another man, the doctor, saw her. He quickly placed both his hands on the redhead’s chest (not the doctor’s way but his own) so as to put an end to this painful game. (269)

As in “The Hitchhiking Game,” however, at the moment one partner wishes to put a stop to the game, the other one interprets the gesture as a new move. The self-programming tendency of human relationships transcends individual intentions. The reciprocity of the moves takes on a life of its own: The redhead complained: “Now, now, Doctor, what are you doing? You’re not allowed to do that!” Jaromil flared up: he saw what his girlfriend’s face expressed when a stranger’s hands were touching hers; he saw that she was complaining frivolously, and he wanted to hit her. (270)

Where there is jealousy, eroticism never lags far behind. Jaromil hates his girlfriend just as the driver hated the hitchhiker. He wants to inflict violence on her. At the same time, the presence of a third party, even if that third party is nothing but a phantom presence called into being by the game, illuminates the beloved’s body and renders it intensely desirable. The same laws of imitative desire that caused Laura to fall instantly in love with her sister’s husband lead Jaromil to perceive his girlfriend’s body as infinitely attractive in the brilliant rays of jealousy that the imaginary third party shines on it: “but at that very moment he realized that he had become

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aroused, and he tore off the girl’s underpants and entered her” (270). Th is brief episode from Life Is Elsewhere repeats in miniature the same elements that Kundera explored at much greater length in his earlier short story. The novel Identity, written in French three decades after “The Hitchhiking Game,” returns once again to the theme of the game gone awry and expands and deepens it, creating an entire novel in which the triangular structure of eroticism and the self-defeating masochism of the jealous third party take center stage. Like its predecessor Slowness, this masterly short novel, which received some poor reviews in France6, is vastly underrated. Indeed, it seems to me that Identity shows Kundera at his most characteristically Kunderian. Its analysis of the mechanisms and disorienting effects of imitative desire makes up a concentrated treatise, a summing up of all the themes I have been exploring in prior chapters. In his postface to the French Folio edition of Identity, François Ricard notes the similarities between this novel and “The Hitchhiking Game”: “a man, playfully and to respond to what he believes to be the desire of the woman he loves, makes her the object of an ‘experiment’ that puts the love she has for him to the test.”7 The difference between the two stories, he writes, resides in the maturity of the couple in Identity. Chantal has reached the age of menopause (she is plagued by hot flashes throughout the novel, which Jean-Marc mistakes for telltale flushes of embarrassment) and Jean-Marc, though younger, has left his youth behind. They are, as Ricard puts it, “lovers who have lived.”8 Indeed, it is the relatively advanced age of the female protagonist that sets up an initial misunderstanding. Jean-Marc joins Chantal in a village on the Normandy coast and there, noticing that she seems unhappy, he asks her what is wrong. The words come out of her mouth before she knows what she is saying: “Men don’t turn to look at me anymore” (21). In other words: Other men no longer desire me, I am no longer desirable because I am growing old, and this absence of male desire depresses me. These words, spoken to her companion, cannot fail to sound inappropriate. As if to add to their equivocal tenor, Chantal flushes deeply: “She flushes. She flushes as he has not seen her flush for a long time. That flush seems to betray unconfessed desires. Desires so violent that Chantal cannot resist them . . .” (22). She is aware of having said something off-key, and knows at once that Jean-Marc is liable to misread her: “her voice was bitter and melancholy. She could feel that melancholy plastered across her face and knew, instantly, that it would be misinterpreted” (23). The truth is that Chantal has hot flashes but doesn’t want Jean-Marc to know. The irony of the scene lies in the disconnect between the physical manifestations of a body (and perhaps also a sexual

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drive) on the decline and the erotic significance that her misplaced words seemingly attach to her blushes. Chantal’s confession changes her from the woman Jean-Marc knows into one he no longer recognizes: “That phrase was unlike her. And her face, looking harsh, looking old, was unlike her too” (37). This marks the beginning of a metamorphosis that gradually unfolds over the course of the novel. The first hint of the coming transformation is accompanied by a jealous twinge: His first reaction was jealousy: how could she complain that men had lost interest in her when, that very morning, he had been willing to get himself killed on the highway for the sake of being with her as soon as possible? (37)

In the end, however, he reconciles himself to the idea that any woman, young or old, needs the reassurance provided by the concupiscent gazes of strangers: “what she needs is not a loving gaze but a flood of alien, crude, lustful looks settling on her with no good will, no discrimination, no tenderness or politeness—settling on her fatally, inescapably” (38). At the same time, remembering the dizzyingly swift beginnings of their love, he recalls how easily he seduced her and realizes that his jealousy is ridiculous, for he has always had the upper hand: “From the start, he was the stronger one and she the weaker. This inequality was laid into the foundation of their love. Unjustifiable inequality, iniquitous inequality. She was weaker because she was older” (39). Instead of remaining jealous, he experiences a touch of compassion and wishes he could reassure her that she still possesses the power to captivate men in the street. The strategy he hits upon seems foolproof, but soon leads to trouble. Martine Boyer-Weinmann writes: To add some spice to their marriage, which is fading now that an aging Chantal realizes that men are no longer interested in her, Jean-Marc imagines a ruse, a stratagem, a trick. In order to revive his wife’s libido (and in doing so his confidence in his own erotic value), he sends her letters from an anonymous admirer, a descent into “mimetic rivalry” that has regrettably equivocal consequences for him.9

I can only nod approvingly at Boyer-Weinmann’s mention of mimetic rivalry, not to mention her use of the word “value,” which recalls the “labyrinth of values” into which we penetrated with “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years.” The rivalry in this novel, however, which realizes a potential left untapped in “Dr. Havel,” stems neither from the desire to

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spice up a bland conjugal life nor from Jean-Marc’s narcissistic urge to try out his powers as a seducer. In the position of strength, he has no doubts (at least not yet) about Chantal’s love for him. Nor does he seem overly concerned about her declining levels of sexual energy. Rather, he aims at boosting her self-esteem, staving off the aging process that made her seem so worryingly melancholy during their weekend in Normandy. His fi rst letters respectfully praise Chantal’s charms without resorting to off-putting innuendo. In other words, the scandal of Kundera’s plot resides in the absence of any initial perversity. Jean-Marc’s intentions are generous and do him credit. He errs only in his failure to take the uncontrollability of the imitative process into consideration. Through the mouth of another character, the cynical and provocative ad agency guru Leroy, Kundera addresses his central theme of eroticism, confirming once again the contradiction of an era which sees itself as hedonist but in truth takes little enjoyment in lovemaking: “I want to alert you. Only a very small minority really enjoys sex,” says Leroy (50). And he adds: “. . . while everyone may covet the erotic life, everyone also hates it, as the source of their troubles, their frustrations, their yearnings, their complexes, their sufferings” (51). The novel hinges on this contradiction at the heart of our sex lives, which promise immense satisfactions but frequently yield disappointments. Rather than a means to freedom, eroticism appears in this novel as an infernal trap. The characters experience nothing but torment, doubt, and unhappiness as a result of the virtual love triangle created by Jean-Marc’s anonymous letters. By contrast, their peaceful life together, before the implementation of Jean-Marc’s scheme (and again at the end of the novel, when the delirium of the game gives way to a tender bedtime conjugal scene), gives them both a sense of fulfillment, what Ricard calls “this blessed repose.”10 Jean-Marc’s letters make no demands on Chantal. In eloquent, poetic language, they express a discreet, almost respectful desire. As Kundera writes, “These were letters not of seduction but of admiration” (71). Then they shift tone and become more frankly erotic, and Chantal begins to perform the scenes they suggest to her. At her anonymous admirer’s behest, she dons a red nightgown that Jean-Marc gave to her. And as she and Jean-Marc make love, she imagines someone looking on: “. . . suddenly she has the sense that someone is there in the room observing them with an insane concentration, she sees his face, the face of [the one] who imposed the red gown on her, who imposed this act of love on her, and picturing him, she cries out in climax” (73). The observer acts as a human version of that immemorial erotic prop, the mirror, which reflects the lovers’ desire back at them and puts them in the position of voyeuristic spectators of their own

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copulation. Just as the strangeness of the game lit up the beloved’s body in “The Hitchhiking Game” and made it seem new and exciting, the imaginary stranger’s face, focused intently on the coupling bodies, redoubles Chantal’s excitement. She and Jean-Marc have entered the labyrinth of desire. I already touched briefly upon Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac while analyzing “Dr. Havel.” Now there is no need to evoke the classic text: Kundera has done so in my place: “As he wrote the second letter, he said to himself: I’m becoming Cyrano; Cyrano: the man who declares himself to the woman he loves from behind the mask of another man; who, relieved of his own name, sees the explosion of his suddenly liberated eloquence” (97). In Rostand’s play, there is little discussion of jealousy. Noble generosity prevails as Christian and Cyrano outdo each other in self-sacrificing politeness, like two gentlemen who refuse to be the first to pass through a doorway. Yet, in his preface to one edition of the play, Patrick Besnier is keen-eyed enough to discern the outline of an imitative triangle behind their indestructible friendship: . . . the presence of Christian is necessary for Roxane to be desirable—a classic scheme of amorous rivalry in which love hesitates between the rival and the object of the rivalry (unconsciously, Rostand accounts for the homosexuality of the historical Cyrano).11

The reference to the imitative genesis of homosexuality is promising, and I will revisit this idea in the following chapter. Besnier’s analysis seems a bit too speculative to me, however, as much as I applaud his efforts to see the play from the imitative vantage point. Cyrano, with his big nose, his panache, his skills as a duelist and his poetic genius, cuts a dashing figure. His words, as he declares his love from the shadows in the guise of Christian, beautifully express the essence of romantic self-abnegation. But Rostand takes Cyrano’s generosity at face value where Kundera shows it to be problematic, as the second half of Identity demonstrates. The seduction unfolds in two stages. At first, there is cause for believing that Jean-Marc’s mimetic stratagem will do good. He resembles the two poets in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting who, in changing Kristyna into a queen, use the transfiguring power of imitative desire in a gentle, benevolent way. Jean-Marc witnesses Chantal’s transformation with contentment: Cyrano he continued to be. Suspecting her of having lost faith in her charms, he described her body to her. He tried to note each part—face, nose, eyes, neck, legs—to make her proud of it again. He was happy to

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see that she dressed with greater pleasure, that she was more cheerful. . . . (97)

The story could end here. Chantal could fall back into Jean-Marc’s arms, radiant and sexy. Such a conclusion, however, would obscure the ambivalent nature of his scheme, which becomes apparent at the end of the same paragraph. Jean-Marc perceives Chantal’s renewed happiness with pleasure, and congratulates himself on the success of his plan, “. . . but at the same time his success stung him: before, she had not liked to wear the red beads around her neck, even when he asked her to; and now it was another man she was obeying” (97). The phantom Jean-Marc, Cyrano, has more influence over Chantal than does Jean-Marc himself. For the first time, he begins to imagine the possibility that Chantal wishes to betray him. The generous, good-hearted desire to bolster Chantal’s flagging self-confidence has generated adversarial tension. Jean-Marc imitates the imaginary desire of an imaginary model and this redoubles his interest in his partner, even as he suspects her of planning to deceive him: Cyrano cannot live without jealousy [. . .] If a man writes letters to a woman, his point is to prepare the ground for approaching her later to seduce her. And if the woman keeps those letters secret, it is because she wants today’s discretion to protect tomorrow’s adventure. And if she saves them besides, it means she is prepared to see that future adventure as a love affair. (97–8)

Little by little, the significance of Jean-Marc’s act shifts. It begins to resemble more and more the dubious erotic stratagem described by Boyer-Weinmann above. That Jean-Marc did not set out to satisfy his own vanity or to spice up his sex life with Chantal by introducing an imaginary rival only heightens the irony. Kundera suggests that even the most generous and well-meaning plans harbor a hidden, destructive potential. The reader has no trouble believing that the flirtatious role play described in “The Hitchhiking Game” could go terribly wrong. The youth and insecurity of the protagonists and the desire of both to be transformed into more alluring versions of themselves added additional perils to the inherent imprudence of the game. Here, however, Jean-Marc has no intention of playing with fire, and the self-programming nature of imitative desire alone accounts for the unexpected turn of events. The unity of Kundera’s oeuvre appears in the resemblances that link this short novel to the stories of Laughable Loves. That unity is also apparent in the larger context of European literary history. Reading Kundera as I am

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doing illuminates many similarities between his novels and the great works of Western literature. I compared “Dr. Havel” to Dostoevsky’s Eternal Husband. In the case of Identity, the interpolated novella “The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious” from Don Quixote is an equally valid reference point. In Cervantes’ novella, Anselmo asks his best friend Lotario to test his new bride, the beautiful Camila: . . . the desire that plagues me is my wondering if Camila, my wife, is as good and perfect as I think she is, and I cannot learn the truth except by testing her so that the test reveals the worth of her virtue, as fire shows the worth of gold. Because it seems to me, dear friend, that a woman is not virtuous if she is not solicited . . . 12

Similarly, in Kundera’s novel, Jean-Marc, less deliberately than Anselmo but with similarly destructive consequences, subjects his companion to a test: In his Cyrano role, he then pulled off his greatest feat: he captivated her. He was proud of his letter, of his seduction, but he felt a greater jealousy than ever. He was creating a phantom of a man and, without meaning to, was thus putting Chantal to a test that gauged her susceptibility to seduction by a man other than himself. (104)

The prouder Jean-Marc becomes of having broken down Chantal’s resistance, the more acutely he feels the pangs of jealousy. His most gratifying success is also his most agonizing failure. Kundera distinguishes his anguish, however, from the pornographic jealousy experienced by a Jaromil or a Frantisek, in which fondness for the significant other gives way to fi xation on the rival. At first, Jean-Marc’s jealousy spares him lewd fantasies, bu this lack of erotic content in no way diminishes the destructive power of his jealousy. Once more, as he has in so many of his previous stories and novels, Kundera stresses the transfiguring power of imitative desire, its capacity for making us see reality otherwise than as it is: His jealousy was not the same sort as he had known in his youth when his imagination would set off an agonizing erotic fantasy; this was less painful but more destructive: very gradually, it was transforming a beloved woman into the simulacrum of a beloved woman. And since she was no longer a reliable person for him, there was now no stable point in the valueless chaos that is the world. (105)

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The “valueless chaos” recalls the “labyrinth of values” that became this study’s guiding metaphor. Jean-Marc’s love for Chantal, and hers for him, anchored him in the world and provided the transcendent reference point he needed to find his existential bearings. Now, due to a machination of his own devising, he has undermined that stability and finds himself lost in a confusing maze. Ricard is right to stress that the “blessed repose” of the two lovers at the beginning of the story is “fragility itself.”13 No outside force, however, disturbs this fragile balance—Chantal’s menopause is in no way to blame. Instead, it is Jean-Marc’s noble but unwise desire to raise her up that destroys the relationship from within. It is a given of their relationship that Jean-Marc is stronger than Chantal. His desire to court her by means of the anonymous letters stemmed precisely from a wish to give her the strength she lacked. Now, the members of the couple have switched places in the hierarchy of strength. The up-and-down mechanism that Jean-Michel Oughourlian calls “the infernal seesaw” is set in motion.14 The amorous equilibrium has been upset and Jean-Marc, who was up, finds himself in the lower position, while Chantal, who was down, has become much stronger: “Actually, who is the stronger one? When they were both out on the terrain of love, perhaps it was really he. But with the terrain of love gone from under their feet, she is the strong one, and he is the weak” (125). By introducing a third party into their relationship, Jean-Marc has inverted the balance of power. His suspicions, which Kundera fi rst described as without any perverse erotic accompaniment, now become still more acute, and soon they lose their hypothetical quality and plunge him into the hell of pornographic jealousy. Chantal has left for London on an unscheduled trip, threatening to see a lubricious libertine to whom he fears she will give herself. As in “The Hitchhiking Game,” in which the game took on more reality than reality itself when the young man decided to make an unscheduled detour, the invisible model–rival has changed the course of events, causing Chantal to become someone new, someone Jean-Marc no longer recognizes: Jealousy grips him, huge and harrowing—not the abstract, mental jealousy he had experienced standing at the open wardrobe and asking himself the theoretical question about Chantal’s capacity to betray him, but jealousy as he had known it in his youth, jealousy that pierces the body, that wounds it, that is unbearable. He imagines Chantal giving herself to other men, submissive and devoted, and he can no longer contain himself. (153)

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As the train carrying Chantal to London disappears into the tunnel beneath the English Channel, an odor of brimstone emanates from the novel’s pages. She is traveling with two colleagues, the ad agency director Leroy and a “refined lady” whom Leroy likes to shock with his provocative remarks: “‘We’re going down,’ said the refined lady [. . .] ‘Into hell,’ added Chantal,” who imagines herself as Leroy’s diabolical assistant: “She enjoyed the idea of bringing this refined and prim lady to him in his bed, which she imagined not in some sumptuous London hotel but on a rostrum in the midst of fires and wailing and smoke and devils” (143–4). Chantal later finds herself at an orgy, a “Dionysian orgy” that appears to her in an infernal aspect. The male members around her look like worms: “Then she sees not earthworms but snakes; she is repelled and nonetheless still aroused [. . .] she is repelled by her own arousal for making her aware that her body belongs not to her own self but to this boggy field, this field of worms and snakes” (155). As both Jean-Marc and Chantal lose sight of reality the scenes become increasingly bizarre and nightmarish. The gentle transfiguration wrought by Havel’s prank in the early short story has given way to a hellish transfiguration that makes men and women into beasts. In The Genesis of Desire, Jean-Michel Oughourlian writes of the acceleration of rivalry, which sends each member of the couple rising and falling on the infernal seesaw at an increasingly fast rate, until the movement is a blur. It is at this stage that the spouses become strangers to each other. They cry: “He’s no longer the man I married!” or “She’s a monster!” And these exclamations reflect the way in which imitative rivalry gradually distorts reality beyond all recognition: Each of them will come little by little to see in the other a monstrous, terrifying double, a mixture of god and beast. This frightening perception is accompanied by hatred and fear. The partners in the couple will no longer recognize each other.15

Oughourlian could have added that they will no longer even recognize themselves, for Chantal has forgotten her own name. Someone addresses her as “Anne” and she wants to correct him, but “. . . she realizes that her name is somehow blocked in her mind” (164). At the climactic moment, as Anne-Chantal lets out a long, inarticulate cry, the décor suddenly changes. Jean-Marc is calling her name, and Chantal wakes up from her nightmare: it was all a dream. The technical tour de force accomplished by the novel consists in seamlessly welding the everyday real world to the dream world so that it is impossible to know where reality ends and unreality begins. Ricard notes

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that this conceit serves to demonstrate the fragility of love and identity.16 It also conveys the distortion of reality operated by the escalation of the imitative process and the oscillation of the “infernal seesaw.” The novel describes the imitative genesis of a dream world. Here, the transfiguring power of mimesis is limited not to a single woman (as it was in “Dr. Havel,” the Kristyna episode in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and even “The Hitchhiking Game”) but permeates the whole of reality, penetrating so deeply into the self that it undoes individual identity and erases memory. The center of the labyrinth of values is not far off.

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6

The Quadrille of Desire

Sex as theater The Unbearable Lightness of Being is Kundera’s best-loved novel. Both general readers and critics have applauded its mixture of philosophy (it begins with a meditation on Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, stating the book’s theme) and eroticism (the male protagonist, Tomas, is a great womanizer and the novel offers many intelligent and dramatically effective erotic scenes). In my view, however, the novel’s greatness, as well as its appeal, stems from neither philosophy nor sexuality. Instead, it is the ballet—or quadrille—of the four main characters and the interplay of their desires that captivate and move us. Those who focus on the novel’s philosophical themes—the essay on kitsch, the opposition between lightness and weight, Nietzsche and Parmenides—aim too high and miss the concrete interactions among the characters. Those who focus exclusively on the novel’s preoccupation with sexuality—the lovemaking between Tomas and Sabina, the encounter between Tereza and the anonymous engineer, the difference between the “libertine” and the “romantic” womanizer—aim too low and fail to recognize that metaphysical attraction trumps physical desire in this novel in which nonreciprocal passion is the rule and love is conceived as a “struggle” or a “hell.” Kundera’s masterwork is a veritable symphony of imitative interactions that trace the patterns of what I called totalitarian marivaudage earlier in this essay. Kundera’s vision of the novel leads critics to discount what Girard calls “little novelistic interactions” and accordingly draws attention away from the play of desire. There is, for instance, a tendency among his readers to accentuate the differences between the Kunderian polyphonic novel and the classical Balzacian realist novel. Kundera himself has contributed to this trend. In an interview with Christian Salmon in The Art of the Novel, he stresses that his novels are situated “outside the aesthetic of the novel normally termed psychological” (23). His audacious art of composition, in which essay, poetry, dream narrative, and straightforward storytelling

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are fused into a contrapuntal whole, satisfies his ambition to transform the novel into the “supreme intellectual synthesis.” This art of novelistic polyphony intermittently pushes the concrete description of human relationships into the background so as to give center stage to the existential theme. This makes reading Kundera’s novels a delicate affair. The critic who privileges the thematic or “philosophical” meditation over the “pure” novelistic material may fail to grasp Kundera’s geometry of desire. As I will attempt to show, however, it is in light of this geometry that his reflections on lightness and weight take on their fullest meaning. Immortality thematizes imitation, expressing the relationship between Agnes and her younger sister Laura in terms of triangular desire. The novelist follows the unfolding of the imitative cycle from beginning to end. But as the action progresses, the references to imitation become less frequent and eventually disappear altogether. Kundera first defines imitation as the “mechanism” that governs sibling relations. Later, as these relations become tinged with rivalry, he corrects his assessment: there is more than imitation at work. While it remains true that the younger sister imitates the older, she also corrects that model and alters its meaning. Th is should not be interpreted as the sign of an initial misdiagnosis. It is simply that as Laura grows up and draws closer to the model of desire, imitation ceases to appear as such. When the sister-model gives way to the sister-enemy (an almost perfect synonym, as I mentioned above, of the Girardian model– rival), when external mediation gives way to internal (or what I prefer to call infernal) mediation, peaceful mimesis goes underground and reemerges as rivalry. The more intense and competitive imitation becomes, the less it looks like imitation and the more it looks like conflict. In Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera illustrates this perfect continuity between imitation and rivalry. Jaromil attends a gathering of artists and intellectuals. Afraid of speaking up, he takes comfort in his relationship with his role model, a painter: To give himself courage, he thought of the painter and of his great authority, which he had never doubted, reassuring himself that he was his friend and disciple. This thought gave him the strength to join the debate and to repeat the ideas he had heard during his visits to the painter’s studio. The fact that he was making use of ideas that were not his own is much less remarkable than the fact that he was expressing them in a voice that was not his own. He himself was a bit surprised to notice that the voice coming from his mouth resembled the painter’s, and that this voice also induced his hands to make the painter’s gestures

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[. . .] he soon found this borrowing reassuring and protective; he hid behind this mask as if behind a shield; he stopped feeling shy and selfconscious. (154)

Jaromil’s surprise indicates that the forces at play transcend his individual will. The painter has taken possession of the young man, and his genius dwells within him just as Havel’s genius dwelled within the journalist in “Dr. Havel.” Jaromil’s hands move like those of a puppet (recall that in Immortality, Kundera declares that we do not use gestures but rather that “gestures make use of us”). If at first Jaromil seeks protection and reassurance from his borrowing of the painter’s persona, he soon begins to resent his influence. He knows the man’s way of thinking by heart, which is to say that he has thoroughly absorbed not only his way of talking and gesturing, but also his very being. And precisely because he can anticipate his mentor’s words and has managed to model himself on the older man, he senses that his resemblance to the painter lowers him in the gaze of others. A decisive encounter takes place in the painter’s studio. Once again, an audience is present. This time, rather than copying him, Jaromil has a sudden urge to contradict the painter: Jaromil would not have found it difficult to elaborate on the painter’s idea, the logic of which he knew very well, but he was loathe to appear here in the role of the touching pupil, the obedient, praiseworthy boy. He was overcome by the desire to rebel. (199)

Strange to say, however, even as he rebels against the painter, even as he goes from disciple to adversary, he continues to imitate his master: Only one thing unsettled him from his very first words on: once again he was hearing the painter’s distinctive, authoritative tone in his own voice, and he was unable to prevent his right hand from describing in the air the painter’s characteristic gestures. It was actually a strange debate between the painter and the painter, between the man painter and the child painter, between the painter and his rebellious shadow. Jaromil was aware of this, and he felt even more humiliated; thus his formulations became more and more harsh, so as to revenge himself on the painter, who had imprisoned him in his gestures and his voice. (200)

Kundera shows the way discipleship shades into revolt. The more aware Jaromil becomes of his failure to break away from the painter, the more

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he tries in vain to escape his influence. But his verbal attacks cannot free him from the imitative relationship in which he is imprisoned. Indeed, they signify that he is tied more securely than ever to the detested model who has changed into an obstacle. The benignly reciprocal teacher–student relationship morphs into the destructively reciprocal joust between two doubles. When conflict erupts, ostensible differences mask the adversaries’ underlying resemblance. As they become more and more alike, master and disciple get in each other’s way. Seeking to affirm their respective differences, they vehemently contradict each other. But their tug of war merely tightens the knots of reciprocal hatred that bind them together. This lesson should be kept in mind while reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The word “imitation” never appears in the novel. In other words, imitative desire is not thematized here as it is in the short story “Eduard and God” (which I will address in Chapter 8) or in Immortality. This absence of overt imitation shouldn’t fool us. The relationships among the four characters—Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, and Franz—remain governed by imitative dynamics. Instead of resemblance, however, we see nothing but antithesis, inequality: Tereza is weak, Tomas is strong; Sabina does not love Franz but Franz loves Sabina. It is precisely in these contrasts that the secret ties between the characters can be discerned. We have entered the world of double imitation and this means that the characters can no longer be divided into imitators and models. Instead, they are masters or slaves, winners or losers in the mutually mediated game of love and chance. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the “program without an author” veers off in one direction or another, leading to an equilibrium characterized by unequal power relations. A master dominates a slave and this inequality widens until it becomes its own caricature: the master’s mastery grows and the slave becomes ever more enslaved. The positions can always be suddenly inverted as they were in Identity but once one of the “players” has won, there is a good chance that this slight advantage will be self-compounding and lead to further victories. Kundera constructs The Unbearable Lightness on the ambiguous opposition between lightness and weight. I read these two poles as the two extreme outcomes of totalitarian marivaudage. The “light” characters (Tomas and his mistress, the painter Sabina) are masters while the “heavy” ones (Tereza and Sabina’s lover, Franz) are slaves. Tereza’s jealousy and Franz’s romanticism oppose and complement Tomas’s womanizing and Sabina’s serial betrayals. The character who suffers most from pathological imitative desire is Tereza. Kundera describes her as a girl from the provinces who “yearned for something higher, but in the small town there was nothing higher for

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her” (44). She dreams romantically of finding the One: “Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life” (54). There is, then, something Bovaryesque about this girl who dreams of a better life with Prince Charming. Hervé Aubron has pointed out the resemblance: “In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Emma Bovary’s shadow is lurking, bringing cultivation down to the level of mere seductive coquetry.”1 Tereza carries a book around with her everywhere the way the dandy carries his cane. Unlike Emma, however, she leaves the provinces and goes to live in Prague. She narrows the distance between herself and her dream. The result is exactly opposite to the one imagined. In Prague, rather than a Cinderella ending, she encounters the unhappiness of rivalry with other women. Eventually, she loses her inner equilibrium: “She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo” (61). Kundera links her dizziness to her aspirations: “Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect some day to suffer vertigo” (59). Tereza’s desire to leave the confines of her village, where she leads an unhappy life with her abusive mother, brings her to the city, crucible of ambition and rivalry. There, she comes face to face with her weakness. The eight-year-old girl’s dream of fulfi llment leads dialectically to the adult Tereza’s misery. Her vertigo is the psychosomatic expression of what Girard calls deviated transcendence. In Jacques and his Master, the Marquis speaks eloquently about one of Kundera’s favorite saints, Simeon Stylites (an allusion to Farewell Waltz, in which he is also discussed), who lived atop a column some fifteen meters high. The Marquis is asked if Saint Simeon ever experienced vertigo, and he replies that Simeon never did because he was always looking up, keeping his eyes fi xed on God. Tereza, by contrast, does not look up at God, but rather sideways, horizontally, at Tomas. As his supereminent position on the vertical column suggests, Saint Simeon is in the world but not of it; Tereza is both in and of the world. She is the “heaviest” of the characters and the weight of her jealous suspicion falls on Tomas: “Tomas saw her jealousy . . . as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death” (56). As for Tomas, he experiences the unsettling weightlessness of a world from which Christian eternity and Nietzschean circularity have been banished. As the story progresses, this insouciant lightness gradually comes to look more and more like a kind of enslavement. Tomas is not chained to any one woman, not even Tereza, whom he repeatedly betrays. Indeed, he takes great care to avoid what he thinks of as the “aggression” of love. Thanks to a system he has devised for spacing out

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their liaisons, he holds his numerous mistresses at arm’s length, in accord with his belief that he can only be himself as a bachelor. Divorced, estranged from his son and his own parents, who sided against him in the aftermath of the separation, he aspires to a sort of freedom beyond all familial and erotic ties. Strangely, however, his womanizing is far from the pleasure-giving libertinage recounted by a Diderot or a Vivant Denon. Though out of regard for Tereza he tries to stop making appointments with his mistresses, he discovers that he cannot help himself: “He lacked the strength to control his taste for other women” (21). Tomas is a compulsive womanizer. Philandering is for him an imperative, an “es muss sein,” as Kundera puts it, that is to say a force of which he is not the master. The “it must be” of desire drives him into the arms of one woman after another. His mistresses are not quite interchangeable sex objects. In each of them he seeks a new sliver of carnal knowledge, like a collector gathering specimens. But they are singular only in a limited sense, insofar as all together they stand for variety or multiplicity (only his arrangement with Sabina embodies the friendship with no emotional strings attached that is Tomas’s ideal). Nor do these women even manage to gratify him sexually. Just as Laura and Bernard make love without feeling any enjoyment in Immortality, Tomas derives little satisfaction from his liaisons: But was it still a matter of pleasure? Even as he set out to visit another woman, he found her distasteful and promised himself he would not see her again [. . .]. He was caught in a trap: even on his way to see them, he found them distasteful, but one day without them and he was back on the phone, eager to make contact. (21–2)

The word addiction would not be excessive. We see the familiar, Tantalus-like imitative pattern emerge here in the sexual realm. No sooner has Tomas brought the cup of sensuality to his lips than it inspires him with disgust and he no longer has the desire to drink. Once the cup is taken away, however, he begins to thirst and reaches for it once more. In its repetitive circularity, this is a properly infernal pattern. Tereza’s jealousy also takes on an infernal cast. There can be no doubt that, as it was for Proust and Dostoevsky, the enigma of jealousy is one of Kundera’s chief preoccupations. In Life Is Elsewhere and Farewell Waltz, he provided a quasi-phenomenological analysis of the jealous consciousness. Here, he uses an original technical procedure to render the sufferings of

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jealousy more palpable: the dream narrative, which gives him more poetic latitude than in his prior descriptions of the triangular sickness. Her first jealous dream is inspired by a letter she has found in which Tomas writes to Sabina of an erotic fantasy. The scene’s masochistic timbre is conveyed by Tereza’s act of self-mutilation: The two of them and Sabina had been in a big room together. There was a bed in the middle of the room. It was like a platform in the theater. Tomas ordered her to stand in the corner while he made love to Sabina. The sight of it caused Tereza intolerable suffering. Hoping to alleviate the pain in her heart by pains of the flesh, she jabbed needles under fingernails. (15–16)

This is precisely what we do when we think about masochism: we emphasize the physical at the expense of the metaphysical, ignoring the underlying causes of kinkiness. We fail to see that Tereza is glued to her model not because she enjoys suffering but because severe emotional and physical agony seem to be reliable indicators of a god who is truly divine. Masochism obeys a rigorous internal logic: the more desire learns about the disappointments provoked by possession, the more it seeks out rivals too formidable to overcome. The self-destructive behavior of the masochist follows from the wish to find an object at once close enough to make possession conceivable and far enough from reach to ensure that it will never lose its luster. Being crushed by an implacable enemy is, from the masochist’s viewpoint, infinitely preferable to acknowledging the futility of desire. Imagining the beloved’s body coupling with another is just as fascinating for Tereza as it was for the young man in Farewell Waltz or for Jean-Marc in Identity. Indeed, its fascination is proportional to the torment it causes. Tomas is in command. He does not ask politely; he orders. The comparison to the stage completes the tableau. This is a mise-en-scène of desire, in which every element adds to the excluded wife’s suffering. Tereza struggles to control her jealousy, and succeeds in mastering her emotions during the daylight hours. At night, however, she falls victim to what a Freudian might call “the return of the repressed”: “But her jealousy thus tamed by day burst forth all the more savagely in her dreams, each of which ended in a wail [Tomas] could silence only by waking her” (18). In these early dreams, Tereza’s suffering predominates, pushing their erotic significance to the background. There is no question but that the “wail” is a groan of pain rather than pleasure. The mixture of theatrical eroticism and painful self-mutilation offers, once again, a hypertrophied or caricatural expression of imitative desire. Tomas and his mistress form

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a miniature totality into which Tereza would like to penetrate and from which she is cruelly excluded. The triangular content of these erotic dreams, which borrow from Tomas’s fantasies and shape them for maximal effect, calls for a revision of the Freudian dictum, “A dream is the fulfi llment of a wish.” Here, the dream is neither a fulfi llment nor an expression of some primordial death instinct. Rather, it is a theater of desire in which the Freudian laws of displacement and conflation express a truth too flagrantly obvious to qualify as unconscious: For example, she repeatedly dreamed of cats jumping at her face and digging their claws into her skin. We need not look far for an interpretation: in Czech slang the word “cat” means a pretty woman. Tereza saw herself threatened by women, all women. All women were potential mistresses for Tomas, and she feared them all. (18)

Tereza’s dreams stage her rivalry with Tomas’s mistresses. The dreamwork transforms the competitive relationship to other women into eloquent (and transparent) metaphors. There is not one cat but many, a feline lynch mob. Like Chantal at the end of Identity, Tereza is the center of a circle of persecution. As in the equine metaphor in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” which expressed vacuity crossed with raw physical allure, the animals stand for an inhuman lack of empathy that heightens the dreamer’s terror. One wonders, indeed, if it is even necessary to speak of metaphor here: the dream language is a literal, almost simple-minded translation of the Czech word “ kočka.” The ease with which the dream can be interpreted reflects the near absence of an unconscious coding mechanism. The meaning is not latent but patent, as if, instead of charging an internal censor with enciphering some hidden meaning, Tereza’s subconscious was doing everything in its power to unveil the truth. Each new dream illuminates the ones that precede it. Their ultimate significance begins to emerge in the second dream cycle: “In another cycle she was being sent to her death” (18). Tereza walks around the edge of a covered pool, naked, with 20 other naked women. Tomas, suspended in a basket from the ceiling, is the executioner. He shouts orders at the women, who sing in unison and do knee-bends. Tomas punishes those who fail to do their calisthenics properly by shooting them with a revolver. Invisible behind the brim of a large hat, suspended above the others, he embodies total omnipotence and implacable cruelty. He surveys the scene beneath him from his primitive “panopticon,” unseen by those he kills one by one. The arbitrary death sentences he carries out mark him as a parody of the

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totalitarian dictator or even as a kind of cruel god. The dreams express something that would otherwise be impossible to articulate: not the actual role that Tomas plays in Tereza’s life, but the personal meaning his infidelities have for her. Even as the dreams express Tereza’s subjective experience, they can also be interpreted as an expression of the group’s political reality. Here, Kundera’s novel enters what might be called the psychopolitical realm. International relations mirror interpersonal ones.2 At the time of the Russian invasion, for example, Tereza identifies with her country’s weakness, while the hatred of the Czechs for the Russian invaders mimics her hatred of Tomas’s mistresses. This is another instance in which the novel gets a leg up on political theory. George Orwell, writes René Girard, “does not show the connection between individual desire and the collective structure. We sometimes get the impression from his books that the ‘system’ has been imposed from the outside on the innocent masses.”3 By contrast, Kundera shows the link between intimate situations and great historical events. In The Art of the Novel, he argues persuasively that Kafka succeeded in describing totalitarianism before its concrete historical manifestation because he had already experienced totalitarian relationships within his family circle. In his correspondence as well as in “The Judgment,” the totalitarian model of desire is the authoritarian father or else his fiancée, Felice.4 In Kafka’s novels, this model becomes an institution: the “trial,” the “castle.” For Kundera, the model–obstacle is not the father but the mother: Tereza’s mother walks around naked in her apartment and prevents her daughter from locking the bathroom door, taking obvious pleasure in her humiliation. On an intimate scale, this violation of the girl’s private life reproduces the methods of a totalitarian regime, which spies on and interrogates its citizens, publicly divulging their most private secrets, just as Tereza’s mother reads aloud passages from her daughter’s journal. Kundera sees the two domains as versions of the same existential situation at different scales. The third cycle of dreams takes place in the afterlife. Tereza finds herself in a sort of hell in which she is surrounded by strange women who speak to her with the familiarity of old friends (in the definitive French edition of Kundera’s novel, these women use the intimate “tu” form with Tereza) and with whom she will be obliged to stay forever. The Dantesque hell and the world of the concentration camp fuse together. The inappropriate familiarity of the women suggests an erosion of social boundaries. In languages such as French in which speakers may choose between the familiar and formal pronouns, “vous” opens up a distance of mutual respect. We might say that it

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corresponds to a realm of distant, peaceful relations (“external mediation,” to use the Girardian term), while “tu” signifies an intimacy that, when foisted upon strangers, feels improper, like a violation. This disregard for the codes of politeness suggests the unhealthily proximate relations (“internal mediation”) typical of imitative rivalry. Like the nude women circling the pool, Tereza’s companions in the afterlife are nude. Rather than acting as a sign of liberation from traditional mores, their nakedness takes on a sinister meaning. It reflects an erasure of distinctions, an abrogation of the most basic social codes: “Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation” (57). Kundera makes the absolute equality and resemblance among the women quite clear: “The women, overjoyed by their sameness, their lack of diversity, were, in fact, celebrating their imminent demise, which would render their sameness absolute” (57–8). What is the origin of this undifferentiation? At the moment Kundera seeks an explanation, we come back to the triangular geometry of desire: Tomas is responsible. By desiring other women, he has placed Tereza on the same plane as them, turning them into her rivals. Tomas “had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies” (58). For the woman who aspires to occupy a unique place in Tomas’s heart, these indiscriminate attentions necessarily arouse feelings of anguish and hatred. A few pages later, Tereza reflects on her unhappiness. She has decided to leave Zurich, where she and Tomas have emigrated, unable to bear his infidelities any longer and feeling herself drawn to her weak, occupied native country: “In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life hell” (75). The expression “made each other’s life hell” takes on all of its meaning only in light of the hellish dreams described in the preceding pages. The sentence’s grammatical reciprocity reflects the infernal back-and-forth of the imitative rapport. Tereza recognizes that “the fault lay not in themselves” (75), as if the mechanism at the origin of their misery transcended both members of the couple. She ascribes their unhappiness to the difference between them: “he was strong and she was weak” (75). However, strength and weakness are not absolute givens inscribed in the reality of things but relative poles that can easily be inverted (Tomas’s brief flash of jealousy upon watching Tereza dance with one of his young colleagues, his realization that he expects total fidelity of her, shows that such an inversion is in this case at least theoretically possible). Apparent differences mask the hidden reciprocity of totalitarian marivaudage. Tereza’s weakness feeds into Tomas’s strength and vice versa. And when she leaves him, he

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is temporarily weakened and follows her back to Prague, slave to his es muss sein, the categorical imperative of his love for her awakened by her show of self-sufficiency. The couple’s relationship unfolds like a ballet with imitative desire as the invisible choreographer. Hellish imagery appears elsewhere in Kundera’s oeuvre, and once again it accompanies the tensions between a jealous wife and her philandering husband. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Marketa offers her best friend to her husband as a sexual plaything: She introduced him to her best friend. She gave her to him as a gift. Solely for him and for his pleasure. And why did she do all that? Why did she give herself pain? Why like Sisyphus did she keep pushing her boulder uphill? Whatever she did, Karel was mentally absent. He made a date with someone else and always eluded her. (51–2)

Marketa displays the same masochistic tendencies as Tereza. The boulder stands for the insurmountable obstacle of Karel’s indifference to her. He flees and she tries to entrap him with her sexual generosity. Given its ambivalent effects on the couple’s relationship, we have cause to regard her generous impulses with some suspicion, all the more so because the Sisyphean metaphor comes in the context of acute rivalry: The two women were kissing and embracing each other in front of him but never for a moment ceased to be rivals vigilantly watching to see which one he was more attentive to, which one he was more tender with . . . First his mistress burst into tears right in the midst of lovemaking, and then Marketa shut herself into a deep silence. (55)

Caught between the two women, Karel “saw himself as Sisyphus” (57). In other words, both spouses feel as if they are pushing a boulder up a hill: “Yes, as the years went by, man and wife became twins, with the same vocabulary, the same ideas, the same destiny. Each had given the gift of Eva to the other, each to make the other happy” (57). And, as in previous sex scenes, the triangularity of desire makes sexual pleasure impossible: “Even when she was with Eva, whom she loved very much and of whom she was not jealous, the presence of the man she loved too well weighed heavy on her, stifl ing the pleasure of the senses” (69). Here, Kundera shows himself once again to be no apologist of hedonism but rather the melancholy prophet of a world in which rampant imitative desire has made hedonism impossible.

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Acute rivalry and homosexual attraction The imitative reading sheds light on the gradual shift in the significance of Tereza’s nightmares. The masochistic dream in which Tereza watched Tomas coupling with Sabina on a kind of stage soon takes on new, erotic meaning. Tereza is no longer the victim but rather an aroused voyeur: “As time passed, the image lost some of its original cruelty and began to excite Tereza. She would whisper the details to him while they made love” (62). She fantasizes about joining him in his couplings with Sabina. Increasingly fascinated by the idea, she attempts to get closer to her rival: “Oh, to be the alter ego of his polygamous life! . . . she could not get it out of her head, and tried to cultivate her friendship with Sabina. Tereza began by offering to do a series of photographs of Sabina” (62). Girard writes: “homosexuality, in literary works, is often the eroticizing of mimetic rivalry.”5 What holds true for Dostoevsky’s characters (whose acute jealousy goes hand in hand with latent homosexual attraction toward the rival) also goes for Kundera’s. The individual’s fi xation on the model–rival gives erotic content to jealous form; Sabina, the rival, becomes an object of homosexual attraction. Besnier’s analysis of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac already hinted at a link between rivalry and same-sex attraction. Girard elaborates: If we recognized that the sexual appetite can be affected by the interplay of mimetic interferences, we have no reason to stop at ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ in our critique of false psychiatric labels. Let us grant that the subject can no longer obtain sexual satisfaction without involving the violence of the model or a simulation of that violence—and that the instinctual structures we have inherited from animals, in the sexual domain, can allow themselves to be inflected by the mimetic game. We then have to ask ourselves if these cases of interference are not likely to have a still more decisive effect and give rise to at least some of the forms of homosexuality.6

Just as snobbery can interfere with our instinctive need for food and drink (leading us to prefer an expensive brand of bottled water, for example, or to eat for purposes that have little or nothing to do with biological subsistence), imitative desire sculpts the sexual instinct. This is obvious in the case of pornography, which inspires sexual desire by example. By a sort of erotic telepathy, observing copulation produces arousal in the observer. Tereza’s whispered fantasies are a kind of home-made, imaginary pornographic fi lm. The presence of the rival adds spice to her couplings with Tomas. Gradually, however, the object (Tomas) fades into the background, and the rival moves

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to center stage. It is worth noting, too, that Sabina is Tereza’s model twice over: not only does she inspire jealousy and arousal but she also teaches Tereza about photography and acts as her mentor. The encounter between wife and mistress takes place in Sabina’s studio. There is no hostility between the two women: Sabina welcomes Tereza with kind words and shows her some of her canvases. Tereza, who aspires to be a photographer, is impressed by Sabina’s paintings. Her fear of Tomas’s mistress metamorphoses into admiration, and then into sympathy. Here it may be worth recalling Freud’s diagnosis of Dostoevsky’s latent homosexuality: “sonderbar zärtlichen Verhalten gegen Liebesrivalen” (“The excessive tenderness for the rival in love”). Rather than diminishing her nascent sexual attraction, Tereza’s feelings of friendship seem to heighten it. She asks Sabina to strip so that she can take some nude photos. As she observes her erstwhile enemy through the lens, Kundera describes the act of taking a photograph as a voyeuristic exercise in seeing without being seen: “The camera served Tereza as both a mechanical eye through which to observe Tomas’s mistress and a veil by which to conceal her face from her” (65). Then, at Sabina’s behest, Tereza also undresses: “She was completely at the mercy of Tomas’s mistress. This beautiful submission intoxicated Tereza. She wished that the moments she stood naked opposite Sabina would never end” (66). Tereza the masochist longs to submit. Other women are her enemies (recall the scene in which the rainy streets of Prague become a battleground where umbrella-toting women call each other names as they jockey for position) and at the same time they fascinate and captivate her. She and Sabina get dressed again before anything can happen between them. Their encounter, however, should be understood in the context of the frequent female homosexuality in Kundera’s novels, which is real (as in the ménage à trois described in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) or imaginary (as in the homosexual kiss during the orgy scene in Identity). While the prevalence of female homosexuality may make us suspect that Kundera is bringing lustful male fantasies into being on the page, his treatment of sex has little in common with the voyeurism of pornography. The sex scenes he writes are by turns comic, grotesque, or tender. Their goal is not to generate arousal in the reader (such extra-aesthetic feelings have no place in a work of art), but rather to explore an area where the playacting that underlies human existence is apparent in highly concentrated form. Male homosexuality, for its part, seems to be absent from these pages. Friendship among men takes the form of an entirely masculine, heterosexually virile camaraderie, as in the short story “The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire” or the gang of friends in Slowness. We need only imagine

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Tomas and Franz stripping and taking photographs of each other in the nude as the two women do to appreciate the strength of the taboos that continue to surround male homoeroticism. To get a laugh, contemporary culture often riffs on the awkwardness of ambivalent masculine friendships. Novelists tend to broach the theme in a more lyrical mode, though Benoît Duteurtre’s 1996 novel Gaieté Parisienne (which one might render as Gay Paree) is a sharp satire of the Parisian gay community—and, in its wistful humor, a very “Kunderian” take on modern life in general.

The geometry of sadomasochism The sexual relationships between Tomas and Sabina, and between Sabina and Franz, illustrate the way in which the laws of desire manifest themselves in the erotic sphere. Excitement is predicated on domination or submission, most often the latter. Tomas, for example, humiliates Sabina by stripping her, putting a ridiculous hat on her head, and placing her in front of a mirror: When they looked at each other in the mirror that time, all she saw for the first few seconds was a comic situation. But suddenly the comic became veiled by excitement: the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence; violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman. [. . .] The lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity, while the hard masculine hat denied it, violated and ridiculed it. [. . .] . . . what they both saw was far from good clean fun [. . .]; it was humiliation. But instead of spurning it, she proudly, provocatively played it for all it was worth, as if submitting of her own will to public rape.” (86–7)

Besides making an interesting parallel between the comic and sexual violence (both involve humiliation), this passage illustrates the power of erotic estrangement. In Kundera’s novels, the secret goal of erotic props and role plays is an abasement that illuminates the lover’s body in the harsh light of unfamiliarity. Just as the participants in the hitchhiking game wish to be transformed into what they are not, Sabina, who in other respects is the embodiment of female strength, slips into a role that takes her out of herself and places her in the weak position, publicly humiliated and violated. This passage confirms once again the theatrical nature of so-called sexual perversion. The masochist is a caricature of the worshipful imitator crouching at the model’s feet, while the sadist parodies the mediator as

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ferocious ruler reigning supreme over his cowering subjects. The passage also explains why Sabina and Franz are not sexually compatible. Franz has no theatrical instinct, no desire to “play,” to enter the imaginary world of sadomasochistic eroticism. When Sabina tries to play the bowler-hat game with him, he doesn’t understand what she wants. Franz reminds us of someone who has stumbled into an audition by mistake and doesn’t understand what to do with the script in his hands. Kundera situates the couple’s dysfunctional erotic life in the context of a lexicon of “words misunderstood.” This technique allows him to abandon linear narration and attack directly the misunderstanding that springs from the mismatched worldviews of his two protagonists: While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Tereza exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. (88–9)

By introducing the dictionary of words misunderstood with an erotic encounter that never gains momentum, Kundera suggests that the miscommunication between Sabina and Franz is rooted in their differing attitudes toward sexuality. Franz’s lack of irony makes it difficult for him to imagine simulating violence—striking his mistress, for example—even as part of an erotic game. He is very muscular but thinks of his strength as a means of keeping Sabina safe from harm rather than of dominating her: “You never have to be afraid,” he said. “I can protect you no matter what. I used to be a judo champion” (111). In short, Franz is not as sick with metaphysical desire as Sabina, who compares him unfavorably to Tomas: Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he’s weak. [. . .] Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked. [. . .] There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence. (111)

Sabina invites him to treat her violently: “‘Why don’t you ever use your strength on me?’ she said” (112). But Franz refuses: “‘Because love means renouncing strength,’ said Franz soft ly” (112). Unfortunately for him, Sabina

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cannot become sexually excited without the stimulant of violence: “Sabina realized two things: first, that Franz’s words were noble and just; second, that they disqualified him from her love life” (112). While Sabina sees Tomas as a “monster,” the words that Franz conjures in her mind all reflect the Swiss professor’s virtue and moral rectitude: “goodness”; “Franz was the best man she had ever had . . . he was intelligent . . . he was handsome and good” (116). She speaks also of his “kindheartedness” (116). The literal-minded gaze that he turns on the world springs from a good-hearted, unironic desire to remain noble and just. Kundera implies that Franz may still be attached to his mother, like Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere: “His mother and the Platonic ideal of womanhood were one and the same” (90). Or again: “Franz often spoke about his mother to Sabina . . . he assumed that Sabina would be charmed by his ability to be faithful” (91). Sabina becomes a replacement, a new maternal figure standing in for the original. Later in the novel, Kundera describes Franz as a dreamer who keeps Sabina always in his thoughts, even when he has gone to the Cambodian border with a group of protesters: “He traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fi xed on him in a long stare” (270). She is his invisible, distant mediator, a replacement God as omniscient as the original. Sabina, on the other hand, has broken free of the paternal circle. While Franz remains eternally faithful to his mother, she rebels against her father, who detests Picasso, and becomes interested in cubism: “After completing school, she went off to Prague with the euphoric feeling that now at least she could betray her home” (91). For Sabina, then, physical love and violence go hand in hand: she dreams of being humiliated by Tomas, fantasizes about him watching her as she defecates. Just as Vincent, in Slowness, is mesmerized by the obstacle in his intellectual life, so is Sabina thrall to men capable of cruelty in her erotic life. She is drawn to the ones who treat her with rough lack of consideration and turned off by the proverbial nice guy whose kindness gives her no model to jumpstart her attraction. In her case, sexual arousal is no more spontaneous than are other forms of desire. When she and Tomas make love, a mirror reflects the image of their coupling bodies back to them. At once observers and objects of observation, their lust is reflected and redoubled, obeying the same triangular laws as metaphysical desire. Excitement is predicated on the model’s presence, which illuminates the lover’s body and make it strange, new, and desirable.

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Does Kundera intend to illustrate the laws of imitative desire? Has he deliberately sketched out this rigorous geometry of repulsion and attraction? In the early short story “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” he explicitly conceptualized and defined the imitative principle. The same was certainly true in Immortality. Here, it looks like the patterns emerge not as the result of the author’s deliberate design but rather as a side-effect. This is one of the secrets of the novelistic mode of discovery: it is not always the intent to reveal imitative desire that results in its revelation. Rather, the novelist seeks to make contact with the reality of a “situation,” with “being.” As he or she explores the concrete realm of human interaction, the imitative structures emerge like the lines on a piece of tracing paper that one holds to a headstone and rubs with a pencil.

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7

At the Heart of the Labyrinth

“The thousand-headed dragon” We have wound our way from the outer corridors of the labyrinth of values into the somber regions where jealousy, masochism, and violent eroticism prevail. We have seen the various ways in which imitation transfigures the world, gently at first, sprinkling glitter over the object of desire, and then more insistently. Finally, the self-programming game takes over, pushing reality aside, establishing itself as a substitute pseudo-reality. Now, following the Ariadne’s thread of imitative desire, we have arrived at the heart of the labyrinth of values. For the majority of this study I have focused on imitation as an individual, small-scale problem. I analyzed the way in which Kundera describes the interaction among two or three or at most four characters. These characters end up in a few basic situations: the candid disciple influenced by an admired mentor; the model transformed into a rival; the role-play gone wrong; and so on. Now I would like to explore the way Kundera depicts the shift from these private situations to a broader form of imitative conflict that engulfs whole groups and leads inexorably to violence. The totalitarian world described by Kundera can be looked upon simultaneously as a regression and a limit case for modern societies, a future toward which all of them tend in principle if not in reality. The novels unfold in Communist Czechoslovakia or in Western Europe, which were separated for much of Kundera’s lifetime by the Iron Curtain. Despite this separation, however, the author rejects the idea that the two worlds are in absolute opposition: From the political or economic point of view, perhaps. But for a novelist the point of departure is the individual’s concrete life; and from this point of view, the resemblance between the two worlds is just as striking. When I saw the first low-income housing projects in Czechoslovakia I believed I was seeing the very essence of the Communist horror! In the barbarism of speakers screaming musical stupidities everywhere, I detected the will to transform individuals into a group of cretins united

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by a single, externally-imposed noise. Only later did I understand that Communism was showing me the common features of the modern world in the form of a hyperbolic caricature.1

As I write these words I am sitting in the cafeteria at a major American art museum. Pop music issues relentlessly from speakers installed in the ceiling, obliging everyone to speak up if they want to be heard over the din. Decades before ambient music became commonplace in North America, however, it was already being pumped into Communist dormitories as a means of indoctrination. The Eastern bloc is a premonitory mirror in which the future of Western societies can be glimpsed. The vision is far from reassuring: the commune institutionalizes the leveling effects of self-programming imitative desire, giving birth not only to hideous architecture but also to dehumanizing uniformity. In the short text above, Kundera gives the impression that this uniformity is imposed from the outside. But as his novels show, this is only partly true. Revolutions have emergent properties. They spring up as the aggregate effect of many adversarial relationships occurring simultaneously. Gradually, as model and disciple draw closer together, desire creates little closed circuits, mimetic dynamos that generate ever more energy. When the tension builds up beyond a certain threshold, rivalry ceases to be a merely domestic affair. Political disorder and private squabbles tend to intermix. The local configurations are quite literally collectivized. In Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera illustrates the link between individual resentment and revolutionary politics. In doing so, he suggests how a cynical power can play upon private hatreds in order to give its premeditated takeover the air of a spontaneous uprising, and, in turn, how individuals use the political mechanism to their own, private ends. As the 1948 coup unfolds, Jaromil gets into an argument with his uncle, who dismisses the events as a mere putsch and mocks Jaromil for speaking of a revolution: “Fuck off with your revolution . . . It’s easy to make a revolution when you’ve got the army and the police and a certain big country behind you” (170). Jaromil reacts in anger: “. . . I always knew you were an exploiter and that the working class would wring your neck” (171). Kundera lingers over Jaromil’s anger in order to make clear the paradoxical tie between apparent spontaneity of feeling and absorption into the collectivity: . . . he used words frequently seen in the Communist press and heard in the speeches of Communist orators, but he had been rather repelled by them, just as he was repelled by all stereotypical language . . . Yes, it was strange: in a moment of excitement (thus

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at a moment when an individual acts spontaneously and reveals his true self), Jaromil abandoned his language and chose to be a medium for someone else. (171)

Jaromil becomes an imitator at the moment of the most intense feeling. Kundera underscores the fundamental imitative paradox: the inner life (our feelings, passions, moods) is mysteriously and inextricably linked to the outer world. A spontaneous outburst of anger transforms Jaromil into a stereotyped duplicate: “it seemed to him that he was part of a thousand-headed crowd, one of the heads of the thousand-headed dragon of a people on the march” (171). His membership in the crowd makes him strong: to get back at his uncle (who gives his nephew a slap in the face), Jaromil declares his intention of joining the Communist party. In this way, private squabbles lead to large-scale historical events (even ones as derisory as the 1948 coup). Even as Jaromil’s resentment toward his uncle motivates his adhesion to the pseudo-revolution, youthful anger toward fathers, uncles, and other authority figures produces similar results across the land. The “thousand-headed dragon” grows ever stronger as each of its heads becomes in turn the “medium” of a force that transcends the individual and gives life meaning and direction. Paul Dumouchel writes: . . . the eruption of private conflicts, jealousy, and personal rivalries within the context of political violence, as well as during civil wars, social upheavals, ethnic strife, and even state repression, is neither an accident nor an anomaly, but one of the fundamental aspects of political conflicts. The exploitation of violence to private ends indicates the failure of the mechanism of transference . . . 2

Dumouchel sees the voluntary transfer of responsibility for violence to a centralized authority as the constitutive founding moment of statehood and the defining step in the formation of the social contract. Each individual freely renounces his right to vengeful reprisals and confers on the state the responsibility for arbitrating private quarrels. In a revolutionary setting, however, the transfer of responsibility, rather than evacuating the private sphere of destructive reciprocity, becomes a weapon that private citizens use against one another: turning one’s enemies over to the police becomes the most effective means of getting revenge on an unfaithful spouse or a detested neighbor. We already witnessed this intermingling of private and public violence in The Joke, whose final part takes the form of an ever-accelerating fugue against the backdrop of the ancient festival of kings. We also saw the crowd

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emerge in Slowness and Identity, which conclude with orgiastic scenes of collective coitus, farcical in the first case and nightmarish in the second. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting likewise ends with an orgy. And in Ignorance, Kundera returns to the imitative quadrille structure of The Unbearable Lightness. The book ends with Gustav in bed with his wife’s mother even as his wife has an intense sexual encounter with a near stranger in a hotel room. The discreet incest motif places the novel’s climax in the same category as similar scenes in previous books. These endings dissolve the cultural boundaries that normally organize human life. They obscurely recall the rites and festivals of ancient tribes. What I see occurring in Kundera’s novels, then, is a collective movement that sweeps up all of the isolated dueling couples and harnesses their negative energies. The next act in the drama is also the last one, for as René Girard has shown in Violence and the Sacred, the ultimate stage in the evolution of imitative desire is the clustering of hatreds against a scapegoat. This implies in turn that the final frontier of novelistic exploration is the enigma of human sacrifice.

“The cement of their brotherhood” In the sixth part of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tamina finds herself on an island of children, an outsider in a sinister, infantilizing world. The scenario recalls the plot of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, in which the adult narrator finds himself back in school, reliving adolescence against his will. However, where Gombrowicz describes the world of the “modern schoolgirl” with grotesque humor, Kundera gives his fable a dreamlike quality that accentuates the horror of his heroine’s plight. At first, bigger, stronger, and more sexually developed than the children, Tamina plays the role of the queen, as if the prerogative of the future victim were to preside over her persecutors until the day of her execution. The children wash her and pleasure her (the theme of the orgy makes an appearance once again). All seems well, though the specter of rivalry hovers nearby: “. . . among Tamina’s lovers there was a growing hostility between those who felt they were her favorites and those who felt rejected. And all these resentments began to turn against Tamina . . .” (251). To forestall the nascent ill will, she participates in the children’s games, which pit two teams (hers is the “Squirrels”) against each other. Because she is the biggest and strongest, her team invariably wins. The two sides squaring off against each other fi ll the role of the symmetrical imitative

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doubles, each team an almost indistinguishable copy of the other. We may recall the dialectic of the game gone awry, a favorite narrative device of Kundera’s, which appeared in “The Hitch-hiking Game” and Identity. What begins as a pleasant form of entertainment soon takes on a life of its own. The players lose control and the back-and-forth exchange of moves leads to an escalation, with the result that instead of the players using the game for their own ends (as a means of amusement and pleasure), the means become an end in themselves, and it is the game that uses the players, taking them in directions they never intended to go. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the game-gone-awry structure recurs at a higher order of magnitude. This time, it involves multiple players. The quasi-ritualistic nature of the competition, with its rules, protocol, and animal totems, increases the uncanny resemblance to certain archaic ceremonies. Too lucid to become truly invested in these absurd competitions, Tamina refuses to take them seriously. This is a grave mistake in the world of children, who look upon their pastimes with the same seriousness as a primitive tribe might look upon its sacred rituals. In this context of exacerbated competition, imitative desire has conferred tremendous importance on what should be a totally insignificant outcome. Winning becomes a solemn duty. When the other side accuses her of cheating, Tamina doesn’t bother to argue, and, scandalized by her apathy, her teammates accuse her: “The Squirrels are furious, shouting at Tamina that she is a traitor, and a boy shoves her so violently she nearly falls. She tries to hit back, and this is a signal for them to pounce on her” (252–3). Tamina has refused to adhere to the group’s highest value: the importance of the organized imitative rivalries in which it ceaselessly engages. The others can only regard her disinterest in all that they find most interesting as an unbearable provocation (anyone who doubts the plausibility of her situation need only imagine what unpleasant consequences might ensue were she to sit down in the hometown section at a contemporary sporting event—an important soccer match, say—wearing the colors of the visiting side). At the first sign of resistance, the crowd, responding to her counterattack, comes together with extraordinary swift ness and throws itself upon her in unison. She fights, but despite her superior strength they soon outnumber her: “a flying stone strikes her brow and Tamina staggers and clutches her bleeding head as the children move aside” (253). The children now form a single group, a unified coalition. The teams have merged into one crowd; or, rather, there are still two teams, but one of them is composed of Tamina, and the other of all the children.

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Rather than put her to death, the children are content to take aim at her from afar. The next day, she stands in the dormitory, surrounded by her tormentors. The persecution continues, unfolding with the same half-ritualized formality of the games, as if choosing a scapegoat were but another stage in a pre-established series of steps: She is the center of attention. A voice from a corner shouts “Tits, tits!,” then all the others join in and Tamina hears the shout become a chant: “Tits, tits, tits . . .” What until recently had been her pride and weapon—the black hair of her groin, her beautiful breasts—were now the target of abuse. In the children’s eyes, her adulthood had turned into a monstrosity: her breasts were as absurd as tumors, her hairy groin bestial. (253)

Kundera describes the reversal typical of the scapegoat polarization. The transfiguration of desire cuts both ways. It can transform Tamina into a queen just as it transformed the provincial Kristyna into a queen in an earlier section of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. And when rivalry flares up, it can also transform her into a monster. Just as Christ rides into Jerusalem acclaimed by the crowd only to end up rejected and crucified, Tamina goes from universally adored to universally scorned. Between the woman Havel compares to a riding horse, the serpents Chantal sees in her nightmare, the inhuman creature that Tamina has become in the eyes of the children, and the Minotaur at the center of the Cretan labyrinth there is a difference not of essence but of degree: the transfiguration wrought by hatred and fear engenders beastly ugliness. The game continues, except that now the rules have changed. It has become a hunt, an all-against-one game. The children no longer see Tamina as a human being but as a beast. She bears the stereotypical marks of the victim: she is a foreigner who comes to the island from elsewhere; she is physically different from the children because of her sexual maturity; and she singles herself out by displaying her indifference to the ongoing competitions. It cannot be entirely an accident, then, that the crowd chooses her as its adversary. When the group’s simmering hostility comes to a boil, the slightest distinguishing feature may be enough to attract its attention. Moreover, Tamina (who before she becomes the victim lives with the children and is infantilized in much the same way as an animal might be domesticated ) is at once sufficiently like the other members of the group for the transference of violence to operate at her expense and sufficiently

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different to minimize the risk of contagion. Once she has defied them, the children have no trouble transferring the competitive energies generated by the sexual rivalries onto her. Tamina becomes the common antagonist shared by the entire group of children, who in ostracizing her proclaim their solidarity: “She was now at bay. They were pursuing her all over the island, throwing stones and pieces of wood at her. She ran away, she tried to hide, but wherever she went she heard them calling her name: “Tits, Tits, Tits, Tits . . .” (253). The children hurl sticks and stones but they also repeatedly call Tamina this crude name, and their cries reach her ears even when she is out of range of their projectiles. In making explicit reference to a taboo part of the female anatomy, the name overturns the usual prohibition against uncovering or naming a woman’s breasts, especially in such vulgar terms. The epithet marks Tamina as a grotesquely sexual being, and the children hurl it at her as a ritual curse, as if seeking to brand her as the source of all misfortune. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard makes reference to a Dinka tribal ritual in which “the paroxysm takes place not at the death of the victim, but in the course of the ritual curses pronounced before its death. One gets the impression that these curses are in themselves able to destroy the victim; that it is, as in tragedy, for all practical purposes killed by words” (103). Kundera’s narrative appears to describe the same process. Eventually, the children catch Tamina in the very nets that once served for their childish games of volleyball: “And now she is trapped, twisting and turning in a tangle of string as the howling children drag her along behind them” (254). These tangled nets signify the continuity between the organized competitions and the hunt. They also symbolize the confusion created by the breakdown of the island’s ritual framework, which proved incapable of channeling the group’s hostilities. The sacrificial infrastructure has been dismantled. Objects intended for one purpose have been turned to an entirely different one. Finally, the volleyball nets echo certain biblical passages such as Psalm 124, in which collective violence is likened to the “hunter’s net.” Indeed, we may regard Kundera’s novel as a sort of psalm, a drama of collective lynching recounted from the victim’s perspective. The Passion of Tamina sees Kundera forging his art of dream narrative, which he will later deploy in The Unbearable Lightness and Identity. In those novels, he uses dreams to explore the enigma of jealousy. Here, the dream allows him to condense motifs and elements that the realist novel would disperse amid the concrete details of an everyday décor. By shifting the action into an imaginary realm, Kundera manages to overcome the limits imposed by the nineteenth-century novel, which remains bound by the need for plausibility. Dream narrative does away with the necessity for

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Balzacian description. It divests the novel of its attachment to some specific historical period and in doing so gives Kundera access to the most ancient strata of human culture. Tamina’s story displays the semantic density of an archetype and at the same time a dispassionate eye for telling detail worthy of an ethnological report. From this standpoint, the tour de force that is “The Angels” underscores once again the fundamental link between form and content: had Kundera not discovered a technique enabling the seamless fusion of dream and reality, he would have been incapable of depicting collective violence with such concentrated power. The children’s shouts of victory signal the end of one phase of the game and the beginning of a new one. Unlike most sporting events, this one has a unique property: everyone truly is a winner. All shout for joy together. Of course, Tamina is the exception to this general rule. Yet, because she is now powerless to fight back, she poses no threat. The violence perpetrated against her will generate no reprisals. She has soaked up the group’s hatred like a superabsorbent sponge. In the initial stage of the game, the volleyball moving back and forth over the net symbolizes the give-and-take of vengeful exchange. This reciprocity persists after Tamina’s capture, but it has lost its competitive edge, become unselfish: rather than batting the ball back and forth, the children now generously share possession of the object. They partake in the capture together and the opposition between the two rival teams dissolves in the victim’s blood and tears: Tamina is trapped in a tangle of nets, the strings ripping into her skin, and the children are pointing to her blood, tears, and grimaces of pain. They are generously offering her to one another. She has become the cement of their brotherhood. (255)

Tamina is a gift given to the whole group. If at first she was a source of scandal and dissension, now, in her role as victim, she repairs the group’s inner divisions and binds its members firmly together. An animal metaphor illuminates the perspective of the persecutors: “Humans do not revolt against the killing of calves in slaughterhouses. Calves are outside human law, just as Tamina is outside the children’s law” (255). It would be inaccurate to say that the children who torment Tamina act out of wicked motives. Like the butchers who kill cows in a slaughterhouse, they display no special malice toward their victim and feel neither guilt nor hatred. Indeed, it is Tamina who hates them, while they feel only a great, collective joy: “Their desire to hurt is positive and cheerful, a desire that can rightly be called joy. They want to hurt anyone beyond their world’s border only in order to exalt their

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own world and its law” (255). It is over and against Tamina that the group reinforces its system of values. She is at once the guilty party and the fount of the law. Indeed, until after her capture, there was no mention of the law, as if the law came into existence with the designation of the outlaw, the scapegoating process giving birth to both at once. Meanwhile, the effervescence of joyous emotions marks the transition from a first, negative transference to a second, positive one. The whole drama pivots on the moment of collective persecution. The descent into generalized rivalry never really comes to an end. Instead, the cascading accusations organize the crowd in such a way that the rivalry benefits the greatest number. The very force that tears the social fabric into shreds ends up weaving it back together again. The crowd’s exclamations of joy drown out the victim’s helpless cries. This moment of communal ebullience recalls the practice of commemorating generative violence with an annual festival, which enshrines the victim as the group’s benefactor, the vital source of health, happiness, and bountiful harvests. We may object that Kundera, in his effort to avoid the cliché of the innocent martyr put to death by hateful persecutors, strains to some extent for paradox. However, if one considers the nature of the act that has just taken place, the words “cheerful” and “joy” and the verb “exalt” look quite appropriate. The group has miraculously achieved internal harmony at the very moment strife threatened to engulf it. At once troublemaker and savior, Tamina has turned the crowd of children against her the better to heal its internal divisions. What could be more worthy of celebration than this happy outcome?

The two temptations “The Angels” realizes the highest vocation of modern art. Like Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” it is a myth turned inside out, a stunning and disturbing meditation on what Kundera calls “evil’s scandalous beauty” in Testaments Betrayed (92). The naked presence of evil in a work of art should not be regarded as evidence of that work’s moral failing. Rather, it should be taken as a sign that the work has succeeded in resisting the moralizing temptation. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera deplores the scolding tone of Adorno’s music criticism, which attempts to reduce Stravinsky’s art to an expression of dehumanizing violence. But when he composed “The Rite of Spring,” Stravinsky sought less to express than to offer an unsparing portrayal of human sacrifice as a scandalous reality of archaic culture. The

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Don Quixotes of music criticism take sides with the victim and break lances against the crowd, while the Nietzschean aesthetes celebrate the lynching and revel in the triumphant unleashing of primitive energies. Stravinsky does neither. He rejects the perspective of the crowd and its abominable act, but also declines to use the victim’s position as a pretext for the kind of moral indignation that answers violence with more violence. It requires an unerring sense of balance to walk the line between these two, equally insufficient perspectives. In an article that points out the connection between Girard and Kundera, Thomas F. Bertonneau argues that Kundera’s novels portray the scapegoat mechanism from the nonmythical vantage point of the victim: I note that The Joke especially has the form of a persecution narrative; or rather, it is a Passion-narrative that reveals how persecution operates, how a joke can become, in the eyes of the persecutors, a criminal offense. But in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, virtue also becomes outcast, and the protagonist, the doctor, again reenacts the Passion [. . .] In a manner of speaking, Kundera even links artistic insight to persecution and shows how this is especially the case in the twentieth century.3

Bertonneau argues that Kundera has his own version of “scapegoat hermeneutics”: “Kundera’s name for the twentieth-century scapegoat mechanism is ‘the tribunal,’ a term he takes from Kafk a’s The Trial.”4 Bertonneau aptly points out the similarities between the structure of archaic religion as analyzed by Girard and the political trials of totalitarian states. However, his approach does come with a built-in risk. Lest we undo the deliberate ambiguities of Kundera’s fictional world, we should take care to understand The Joke or The Unbearable Lightness of Being as more than mere narratives of “virtue outcast.” In analyzing the political mechanism of expulsion, Kundera makes no claims about the extraordinary virtue of the victims. He shows, instead, that all human beings, persecutors and outcasts alike, share the need for a concrete, human scapegoat. In The Joke, Ludvik recalls his time in prison in the late 1940s: “The notorious political trials were brewing, and in many halls (of the Party, of justice, of the police) hands were unceasingly raised to strip the accused of confidence, honor, and freedom” (88). The passive voice deprives the hands of any guiding agent; they rise of their own accord, automatically, as if the intervention of their owners were superfluous. At his own pseudo-trial, Ludvik stands at the center of the labyrinth as expelled supplement, the expendable (but nonetheless indispensable) enemy against whom the group can reaffirm its values and solidify its ties:

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everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion not only from the Party but (and this I had not expected) from the university as well. (47)

Ludvik is the personification of virtue outcast, and the unanimity of the condemnation confirms his innocence. It would have been easy for Kundera to use the character and his fate as a means of denouncing the “horrors of Communism.” Fortunately for his readers, the novel eschews this facile solution. Not even the outcasts remain wholly pure. They, too, rely on scapegoats to compensate for the wrongs inflicted on them by their fellows. Indeed, it is through Ludvik’s experience as a persecutor (rather than as a victim) that Kundera reflects on the impossibility of rallying human beings against abstractions. Hatred can only be focused, channeled, and expelled cathartically against an enemy incarnate, in other words against another human being: Man, this being pining for equilibrium, balances the weight of the evil piled on his back with the weight of his hatred. But try directing your hatred at mere abstract principles, at injustice, fanaticism, cruelty, or, if you’ve managed to find the human principle itself hateful, then try hating mankind! Such hatreds are beyond human capacity, and so man, if he wishes to relieve his anger (aware as he is of its limited power) concentrates it on a single individual. (271)

Ludvik speaks from personal experience. He himself has a scapegoat: Zemanek, the one responsible for his expulsion from the university. His hatred for Zemanek makes it possible for him to maintain a fragile equilibrium. Without a targeted human enemy, his existence would lose its stability as surely as collective life would lose whatever semblance of stability it retains without the Ludviks against whom savvy political manipulators like Zemanek mobilize the group’s resentful energies. When he meets Zemanek at the end of the novel, Ludvik realizes that he would be unable to accept an apology from his nemesis because his hatred of Zemanek plays too important a role in his existence: How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him ? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How

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would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him? (272)

Ludvik speaks for himself but he also speaks for the group, which needs enemies to keep inner strife at bay: hatred is the negative force that makes existence possible in the chaotic labyrinth of values. Only by hating someone can Ludvik live with the misfortune of his expulsion from the Party in his youth. His hatred organizes his life and gives it meaning; he stores up his malevolent energy in anticipation of the moment when it will be discharged in an act of retribution. In his portrayal of Ludvik, Kundera successfully navigates between the twin temptations to which I alluded above. On the one hand, he avoids imitating the group’s perspective and alleging Ludvik’s guilt (several of Kundera’s characters, including Ludvik himself at the time of his expulsion from the party—“I reproached myself on every possible score and in the end came to accept the necessity for some kind of punishment” (46)—but also the young Alexej, identify with the persecuting power and voluntarily accuse themselves). And on the other, he resists imitating Ludvik’s revenge-structured perspective and painting his hero in self-justifying, innocent hues. Neither approach would have yielded fruitful results. Had Kundera created a one-dimensional, positive hero, he would have falsified the essence of Ludvik’s predicament, which lies in the arbitrary nature of political persecution. The political power singles Ludvik out for expulsion from the group not because of his exceptional, Christ-like purity (this would be the romantic perspective, exemplified by the Rousseau of Reveries of a Solitary Walker) but rather for no real reason whatsoever, other than the silly postcard’s three blasphemous sentences denouncing optimism as the opium of the masses and praising Trotsky; his destiny appears not so much tragic as absurd.

“The absolute denial of shit” Archaic religion retold the story of its own foundations as myth, exonerating the group at the victim’s expense. Likewise, the utopian political project calls for a means of veiling the reality of group violence, an art not only of distortion and denial but also of hope and promise, which is to the show trial what ancient myth was to “the machine for making gods.”5

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In The Joke, Marketa models her attitude toward the soon-to-be outlawed Ludvik on the Soviet fi lm Court of Honor, in which a Russian scientist hands the secret to a miracle drug over to foreign (American) colleagues, an act the honor court that tries him likens to treason. Life imitates art, in this case an art conceived with the purpose of celebrating the group’s vantage point over and against an individual’s supposed betrayal. The fi lm helps Marketa make sense of Ludvik’s situation and of her role, lending justification to what happens at the plenary meeting where friends and teachers vote his expulsion from the Party. Such films pave the way for acts of persecution that might otherwise arouse inconvenient misgivings. They legitimize behavior that looks abhorrent when seen through the Kunderian narrator’s eyes. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera weaves his thoughts on this humorless brand of art into the narrative, offering nonsystematic yet persuasive reflections on the theme of “kitsch” in counterpoint to the story of Franz’s demise. In its common usage, kitsch refers to an inferior kind of art that panders to sentimental tastes, turning away from any engagement with life’s unpleasant realities. Kundera expands on this idea by linking kitsch to politics and political movements, which coat their propaganda in the syrupy kitsch aesthetic, presenting a worldview so cozy and reassuring that nobody in his right mind could possibly find it objectionable. This, of course, justifies in advance any measures taken against the unbalanced individuals who, inexplicably, disagree with that soothing utopian vision. Kundera defines kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word” (248). He arrives at his definition by way of a theological argument, suggesting that man perceived excrement as disgusting only after the fall and the expulsion from Paradise: “man began to hide what shamed him” (247). He associates shit with sexual excitement (ancient theologians, he writes, deemed both incompatible with the very notion of Paradise). The attempt to create a utopia (paradise on earth) leads logically to the denial of shit, the presence of which would be a de facto refutation of the Communist idyll. Thus the aesthetic ideal of utopia’s architects can only be kitsch, for kitsch “excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence” (248). Most unacceptable of all is group violence, whose very existence kitsch ignores. In the United States, Sabina encounters an American senator who watches with a rhapsodic smile as four children play together on the lawn. “Now, that’s what I call happiness,” he declares, and Sabina finds it easy to imagine him as a Communist politician addressing a crowd in her native country. She wonders: “How did the senator know that children meant

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happiness ? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up” (250)? This is exactly what happens in an early episode from Life Is Elsewhere, in which the young Jaromil and a friend force another boy to undress and then flog him with nettles. Jaromil feels “a great feeling of fervent friendship for his companion” (28) and hatred for their victim. The senator’s contented words and smile deny the possibility that such violence could be lurking behind the idyllic tableau of youthful antics. For Kundera, this denial is the very precondition of universal harmony: “The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch” (251) (in light of the foregoing analysis, this assertion cannot fail to recall Tamina, who acted as the “cement” of brotherhood on the island of children). Kitsch expels the victim of mob violence from the picture, much in the way the censors airbrushed Vladimir Clementis from the photograph described in the first pages of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Moreover, it banishes the very idea that such violence could take place, as Kundera makes plain in the following, deeply ironic passage: “Timid lovers held hands on the movie screens, adultery was harshly repressed by citizens’ tribunals of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clementis swung like a bell ringing in the new dawn of humanity” (11–12). As the country wipes its eyes in the movie theaters, the Slánský show trial purges alleged conspirators and Jews, among them the Foreign Minister. This link between cinema and political persecution is a discreet thread running through many of Kundera’s reflections on the aesthetics of revolution. For example, he associates kitsch with the cathartic feelings aroused by a communal experience. Kitsch produces tears (whose function, it should be noted, is to wash away and expel foreign matter from the eye), expressing the emotion aroused by some stock situations: twittering birds, the motherland betrayed, children running in the grass, and so forth. The tears also flow, however, because everyone weeps together : “The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share [. . .] Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession [. . .] The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass!” (251). This description corresponds to the experience of moviegoers watching a fi lm like the aforementioned Court of Honor. Kitsch generates catharsis, but a soft catharsis without the astringent Greek emphasis on death and fate, an “Aww, isn’t that touching” moment that makes us turn to one another with misty eyes. In the Aristotelian poetics of Soviet cinema, updated for the contemporary era, the tear-jerking kitsch emotions would stand as the highest goal to which the Communist fi lmmaker could aspire, just as the ancient playwright aimed to arouse fear and pity.

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The not entirely metaphorical “shit” metaphor works on many levels. For example, Kundera equates excrement with the human victims of show trials and persecutions: “In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse” (252). Just as animals define the limits of their territory by urinating or defecating, human groups mark their borders with cadavers. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the cadaver is a mere insect, a blood-sucking parasite unwilling to fall in line with the kitsch idyll: “. . . everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea” (11). Expelled from the group, evil resides in the space beyond the border; troublemakers can only work their way into the community from the outside: [Sabina’s] professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory of socialist art: Soviet society had made such progress that the basic conflict was no longer between good and evil but between good and better. So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could exist only “on the other side” (in America, for instance), and only from there, from the outside, as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it penetrate the world of “good and better.” (252)

This passage recalls once again the plot of Court of Honor, in which Americans lay their hands on the miracle drug formula, threatening to wrest credit for the discovery away from the Soviet scientific community. Kundera’s analysis of government oppression does what no sociological or historical approach to the issue can: it grasps totalitarianism from an aesthetic vantage point. This is utterly original and stands as one of the author’s great achievements. It may also explain why the kitsch vision disturbs him far more than totalitarianism’s actual, historical incarnation. For instance, Sabina detests the saccharine innocence of Soviet cinema, which many interpreters view as embodying the Communist ideal: Sabina always rebelled against that interpretation. Whenever she imagined the world of Soviet kitsch becoming a reality, she felt a shiver run down her back. She would unhesitatingly prefer life in a real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat queues. Life in the real Communist world was still livable. In the world of the Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week. (253)

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Evil as such is not as unlivable as the denial of evil. All the same, it isn’t easy to explain Sabina’s horror. Kundera compares it to the horror Tereza felt in her dream of marching around the pool doing kneebends and being “forced to sing cheerful songs” (253). What’s missing in that world is any sort of complicity between Tereza and the other women: “She could not even give any of them a secret wink; they would immediately have pointed her out to the man standing in the basket above the pool, and he would have shot her dead” (253). It seems to me that the secret wink stands in for humor and joking in general. Like the tears produced by kitsch, laughter is also a shared experience, but one that establishes an instant telepathic current of understanding. “I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror,” remarks Kundera in an interview with Philip Roth. “I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled.”6 In the world of grinning idiots, there are broad smiles but no genuine humor to lighten the burden of living under otherwise unlivable conditions. Of course, we live today in a world of nervous, forced laughter, the “laughter of the angels,” as Kundera puts it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which rings out from sitcom laugh tracks, talkshow audiences, and the vocal cords of patients undergoing laughter therapy. This kind of mirthless laughter is triggered deliberately by imitative means: canned laughter elicits the audience’s guffaws; the talkshow audience members know what is expected of them and they laugh until they cry for the benefit of the cameras; the patients giggle, chuckle, and then break out into hysterical peals of laughter because laughter (like yawning) is contagious and soon bubbles up naturally once the pump has been primed. Every day, millions laugh without experiencing genuine hilarity, like the young student whom Kundera recalls from his days at the Prague Film School, whose laughter “feels like a copy among originals” and “who was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd” (Encounter, 20). Opposed to this consensus-building laughter is the sacrilegious “devil’s laughter” (87), which “has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness)” (86). If carried too far, this kind of laughter makes life seem meaningless and futile. It is therefore no less dangerous in its way than the beatific laughter of the angels. Yet without the devil’s laughter, which produces a salutary mini-catharsis, a mirthful explosion of precisely the sort that Kundera’s novels often trigger in us, where would we be? Probably

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in a sinister, Disneyized reality very much like the one of Soviet cinema or today’s mind-numbing Hollywood blockbusters.

First time as tragedy, second time as farce The modern, political version of the ancient mechanism described by Kundera makes cynical use of imitative energies (we need only think of Zemanek’s masterful manipulation of the crowd in The Joke). Th is cynicism is double-edged. Our ability to trigger the scapegoat mechanism at will implies a partial awareness that weakens the transference onto the designated victim and makes violent polarization more difficult to achieve. In Kundera’s novels, one sign that violence has lost its curative virtues is the citizens’ apathy. Once the initial revolutionary fervor has subsided, they no longer care enough one way or another to march in the May Day parades or condemn a neighbor to prison. In order to whet the public’s appetite for violence, the Communist regime must resort to organizing animal massacres. Like the “Four Pests Campaign” initiated by Mao Zedong in the late 1950s, which encouraged the Chinese population to eradicate sparrows, flies, rats, and mosquitos, and which ended up causing extensive ecological damage, the Czech animal massacres serve no concrete purpose other than mobilizing the population against a clearly defined enemy.7 In Farewell Waltz, a group of fanatical old men, among them Ruzena’s father, pursue dogs in a Czech village. Ruzena is sitting on a bench when she sees a minibus pull up to the sidewalk, followed by a truck. From the truck comes the sound of “dogs howling and barking” (102). Armed with nets mounted on the end of long rods, the men wear red bands around their arms to distinguish themselves as official agents of public order. They perform a series of quasi-military drills at a command from their leader: “the old gentlemen, like a squad of bizarre lancers, came to attention and then to at ease a few times. Then the man shouted another order, and the squad of old men headed into the park at a run” (102). Kundera describes the cruelty of the men. They “laughed loudly” (103) while dragging a captured mutt back to the truck. Then they wrench a dog from the arms of its owner, a sobbing boy: “Other old men rushed over to help Ruzena’s father and tear the dachshund out of the boy’s arms. The boy was crying, shouting, and grappling with them so that the old men had to twist his arms and put a hand over his mouth because his cries were attracting too much attention. . . .” (104).

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What to make of this sinister episode? Kundera lets his characters interpret the scene. Through Ruzena’s eyes, the dog hunt becomes a metaphor for her predicament. She is trapped between a man who loves her too much (Frantisek) and one who rejects her (Klima). She sees herself as the victim, and imagines that the men, as they try to trap the dogs, are in fact after her. Through Jakub’s more intelligent and experienced gaze, the scene takes on wider significance. The men’s violent, pseudo-military drills and tactics parody the political situation in his native land. Jakub manages to save one of the dogs, and, once he has brought the animal to safety, he reflects on the scene he has just witnessed: “The old men armed with long poles merged in his mind with prison guards, examining magistrates, and informers who spied on neighbors to see if they talked politics while shopping” (108). He wonders what is driving the men, and decides that it is “the desire for order” (108). This ostensible motive, however, is itself merely the camouflage for a deeper compulsion: “the desire for order is the virtuous pretext by which man’s hatred for man justifies its crimes” (109). Like an electric charge building in a thundercloud, hatred seeks an outlet, human in The Joke, animal in Farewell Waltz. The “positive” desire for a clean, orderly public space would not exist without an underlying “negative” impulse. In other words, the animal control deputies act not from civic pride or some other well-meaning, virtuous impulse, but rather from the desire to thwart others and take away their possessions. This implies in turn that “positive” values—youth, feeling, joy, brotherhood, transparency—are inseparable from the “negativity” of totalitarian repression: the tribunal, the show trial, ostracism, organized forgetting. Rallying around sacred ideals to justify their tactics, the vigilantes accuse their victims of having violated the group’s rules: “He ran on the grass!” cries one of the old men in the group of dog-hunters. “He ran in the playground, where it’s prohibited. He pissed in the kids’ sandbox!” (106). Positive values are defined over and against the victim, just as they were in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where hunting Tamina enabled the children to exalt their law and commune with one another. The reference to urination recalls Kundera’s definition of kitsch as the “denial of shit.” The old men act in the name of a kitsch image, in the name of children “running in the grass.” One of the vigilantes accuses Jakub: “Do you like dogs more than children?” he cries, confronting his interlocutor with the choice between joining the group of good citizens or becoming one of the enemy. His question is meaningless, since after all the only people doing harm to children, or rather to one very specific child, are the dog-chasers themselves.

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Jakub, however, is less troubled by the old men than he is by Ruzena, who, at first a bystander, comes to the aid of the vigilantes and tries to restrain the dog: “The soul of the crowd, which formerly identified with the miserable persecuted ones, today identifies with the misery of the persecutors. Because to hunt men in our century is to hunt the privileged: those who read books or own a dog” (109). Attitudes toward persecution have evolved over time. Our growing awareness of social inequalities as unjust rather than inevitable has caused our concern to shift from one kind of victim to another. The shouts of the miserable multitudes drown out the child’s sobs and the dog’s howls. The victims belong to the so-called one percent, and so the persecutors act from what appears to them (if not to the little boy) as a justified desire for equality; they tear the dog away from its young owner with the virtuous feeling that they are righting a wrong. In this way, violence justifies itself as a means of repairing earlier instances of oppression and persecution. Kundera’s novel rejects that hangman’s perspective. The narrator identifies stubbornly with “the miserable persecuted ones” against the mob’s righteous indignation. As the phrase “the soul of the crowd” implies, the members of the mob have lost their individual identity and merged with one another to form a new, collective self. They act as one, with a common purpose and vision. This idea recalls the “thousand-headed dragon” to which, as we saw above, Jaromil swears allegiance in Life Is Elsewhere. The dragon image, however, possesses a certain terrible power, abominable though it may be. In Farewell Waltz, whatever tragic grandeur the drama once possessed has devolved into absurd self-parody: Jakub thought that in his country things were getting neither better nor worse but only more and more ridiculous: he had once been victim of a hunt for humans, and yesterday he witnessed a hunt for dogs that was like the same old play with a new cast. Pensioners took the roles of examining magistrates and prison guards, and the parts of the imprisoned political figures were played by a boxer, a mutt, and a dachshund. (150)

History stages the political tragedy as farce the second time around. The group seeks to uproot evil at the source so as to emerge from the labyrinth of values into a world of crystal clarity. However, each time the mechanism is triggered, its cathartic power of expulsion decreases. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the septic tank image evokes a malfunctioning scapegoat mechanism, a katharsis gone mad, resulting in a vertiginous multiplication of victims, while in Farewell Waltz repetitive cycles of vengeance blur the

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distinctions between the guilty and the innocent: “It’s always the same kind of revenge,” Jakub tells Olga. “When they arrested your father, the prisons were full of people the revolution had sent there in the first wave of terror. The prisoners recognized him as a well-known Communist, and at the first chance they pounced on him and beat him unconscious. The guards watched, smiling sadistically” (87). Jakub has trouble distinguishing between persecutors and persecuted because the line separating the two groups is constantly shifting: hangmen become prisoners and prisoners become hangmen. Provided the border remains clear, scapegoating can generate a common front. But once it begins to blur, as it has for Jakub, values come to seem ambiguous, arbitrary. Everyone finds himself in a chaotic labyrinth. Perhaps this absence of stable values explains why Jakub, who murders Ruzena by an act of omission, feels no remorse for his crime: “Raskolnikov experienced his crime as a tragedy, and eventually he was overwhelmed by the weight of his act. Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him” (257). In a world where the enemy (evil personified) is illdefined or unidentifiable, the difference between right and wrong grows blurry: the labyrinth is not only a place of imitative desire but also of absolute moral relativity.

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Repudiating the Model

Eduard’s smile Imitative desire transfigures the object. That is perhaps the central lesson of Kundera’s fiction and also of this book. In its own way, the mob of children that persecutes Tamina is as deluded as the journalist in “Dr. Havel” or Ludvik in The Joke. It views its own violence as justified by the grave threat the victim (whom the crowd perceives as a monster) poses to public order and safety. Of the many transfigurations wrought by desire, this is the supreme one. The members of the “thousand-headed dragon” are more deeply immersed in illusion, more alienated from themselves and from reality, than any of the other characters in Kundera’s fictional world. In “Dr. Havel,” virtually everyone except the journalist is aware of Frantiska’s lack of beauty. Likewise, in the Kristyna episode of The Book and Laughter and Forgetting, illusion is quarantined, limited to a single person. From there, it spreads. It infects couples (Agnes and Laura in Immortality; Jean-Marc and Chantal in Identity) and pairs of couples (the four main characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being). And in the sections of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that recount Tamina’s journey to the island of children, illusion has become unanimous, omnipresent. The illusion extends to almost every part of the world that Kundera’s novels describe. There are some areas, however, that it cannot reach. There are moments, mostly at the conclusion, when the characters, like alpinists looking down on a mist-covered landscape from atop a high peak, achieve a perspective that is as free of illusion as the novelist’s own vision. A few, privileged heroes leave triangular desire behind. They live through an experience of radical disillusionment that reverses the mediator’s spell and shows the object in its naked state once more, without for all that abolishing the “memory of desire” to which Eva LeGrand refers in the title of her book on Kundera. The hero who both sees the world clearly and remembers what it was like to misapprehend it is the equal of the novelist. To become a novelist, it is necessary to have once been deluded. The novelist is someone who first perceived Frantiska as a beauty and later realized both that she was not

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one and why he once believed that she was. He sees retrospectively that his desires were suggested to him by the model, that they did not originate within him or stem from the object’s innate qualities. He understands the role played by the Havels and Zemaneks in his life. The first character in Kundera’s oeuvre to wake up from the mimetic trance is the protagonist in “Eduard and God,” the crowning story in Laughable Loves. Eduard is more intelligent and self-aware than the journalist from “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years.” Like the hapless journalist, however, he lacks existential roots. He knows neither what to believe nor to which group he belongs and seems happy to conform to his surroundings, whatever they may be. The story’s drama derives from his inability to keep overlapping contexts apart, so that the demands each makes on him cannot be reconciled. The first of these contexts is religious. Eduard is in love with Alice, who is Catholic. He accompanies her to church, and there he imitates the people around him: “with the others he sang a hymn whose tune was familiar, but to which he didn’t know the words. Instead of the prescribed words he chose only various vowels, and he always hit each note a fraction of a second behind the others, because he only dimly recollected even the tune” (247). When some old women kneel down to pray, Eduard “could not hold back a compelling desire to kneel too” (247). Alas, the female director of the school where Eduard is a teacher spots him as he is leaving church with Alice. A good Marxist, she disapproves, and questions Eduard the next morning. Though he finds an excuse (“I went to see the baroque interior of the cathedral” (250)) his ostentatious attempts to persuade Alice that he truly believes end up compromising him, and he is hauled before the school disciplinary committee. This is the second context, the Marxist one, to which Eduard conforms as easily as he does to the first. Surrounded by suspicious staff members and teachers, Eduard senses that for expediency’s sake he must pretend to confess everything. In a fine parody of the Stalinist show trial, he “admits” to believing in God. His confession awakens the female director’s indulgence. She takes a personal interest in his case and, he eventually realizes, wishes him to seduce her. Eduard stands somewhere between the young journalist who is lost in the labyrinth of values and Havel, the master of manipulation. He remains “infatuated with himself” (271) like the journalist, yet has the audacity to pull the wool over other people’s eyes. Displaying the bipolarity typical of double mediation, he behaves “with [. . .] vacillating youthful self-confidence (now deflated, then exaggerated) (260),” his mood shift ing according to the external pressures of the hour.

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He soon goes about seducing the directress, convinced that he can wriggle his way out of the awkward situation at school. Meanwhile, Alice has heard about Eduard’s re-education at the hands of the school committee. Believing him a martyr, she decides to give herself to him. And so he eventually manages to possess both women. But what should have been a stunning victory ends in defeat. Eduard is taken aback by the ease with which the devout Catholic abandons her chastity. He is equally dismayed by the way the directress, in the heat of passion, abandons her Marxist convictions and, at his demand, kneels before him and prays. As the story’s conclusion approaches, his dismay leads to self-recognition. Eduard has no convictions, apart from the smug certainty that, in a world where other people stick firmly (and foolishly) to their beliefs, he alone blithely switches back and forth from conviction to conviction. He derives his feeling of superiority from his ability to deceive those one-dimensional creatures. Then he discovers that Alice and the teacher are themselves conformists rather than true believers: “. . . and suddenly it seemed to him that, in fact, all the people he had met in town were only ink lines spreading on a blotter, beings with interchangeable attitudes, beings without firm substance” (284). In what sense, precisely, are the people around Eduard interchangeable copies of one another? Totalitarianism is fundamentally schismatic and double. Deep down, atheist and believer have identical motives. They regard each other with hostility, and this is the determining factor in their respective beliefs. Negativity precedes and engenders positive conviction. The religiosity of Alice, like the substitute religion of the Marxists, is based on negating the Other, the mimetic double. It is an ideologization of religion rather than the thing itself: Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa’s shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God. (249)

The spirit of vengeance rules in the totalitarian world. The true divinities are neither Marxist nor Christian but are instead rivals transfigured by hatred. In this universe of false transcendence, it is little wonder that Eduard, who is more lucid than the people around him, can take nothing

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and nobody seriously. He laughs inwardly at Alice and at the directress and his nonseriousness elevates him above them, or so he thinks. Then he realizes that he has been slavishly copying them all along. As a result of this realization, he experiences a downfall that abruptly and brutally alters the way he understands his own relationship to imitative desire: . . . but what was worse, what was far worse (it struck him next), was that he himself was only a shadow of all these shadow-characters; for he had been exhausting his own brain only to adjust to them and imitate them and yet, even if he imitated them with an internal laugh, not taking them seriously, even if he made an effort to mock them secretly (and so to justify his effort to adapt), it didn’t alter the case, for even malicious imitation remains imitation, even a shadow that mocks remains a shadow, a secondary thing, derivative and wretched. (284–5)

Eduard recognizes his likeness to others, abolishing the distinction between an abstract Self (immune to peer influence) and an equally abstract Herd (the “shadow-characters” that he met in town). He reinterprets his pious poses and fake sincerity, which first appeared to him as a clever coping strategy, as symptoms of derivative desire. In many ways, Eduard resembles the narrator of the collection’s first story, “Nobody Will Laugh,” who finds himself expelled from the school where he teaches art history. This earlier narrator believes, like Eduard, that he can control and manipulate others. In the first case, however, the concluding fall doesn’t change anything. The protagonist regards his fate with bemused, insouciant irony, and decides in the end that his situation is comical rather than tragic. His ability to laugh ruefully at his plight consoles him for what he has lost, but that is all. Kundera hints at the genesis of the ironic distance between narrator and protagonist, but the closing moments of his tale lack the gravity of a personal reckoning. In the later story, by contrast, Eduard is consumed by melancholy. The conclusion, in which he breaks up with Alice only to regret his decision, while not exactly tragic, presages the tragic love story of Ludvik and Lucie in The Joke. If, in the early stories, the reader appreciates the virtuosity and comic brio of an exceptionally talented young author, in this concluding tale it is already possible to detect the hand of the mature master. The story ends with an odd mystical epilogue. Several years have passed since Eduard’s adventures with Alice and the directress. Eduard has acquired the habit of sitting alone in church, not because he has become a believer but simply for the pleasure of solitude. There, he meditates nostalgically on the idea of God. For Eduard, God “is essence itself” (287). Eduard never

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succeeded in finding anything essential in his love life, his career, or his ideas, yet despite himself, he cannot help wishing that the absolute existed: And that is why Eduard longs for God, for God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be; for he alone constitutes (he alone, unique and nonexistent) the essential antithesis of the world, which is all the more existent for being unessential. (287)

The Sartrean philosophical vocabulary opposes two modes of existence. The first unfolds beneath the eyes of others, before whom one must keep up appearances. In Girardian terms, this is the world of imitative desire. The second mode of existence represents the antithesis of the first and transcends it. This is “vertical transcendence,” pure desire liberated from contingent pseudo-essences. Eduard is in church, sadly reflecting on the nonexistence of God, when he is suddenly and unexpectedly visited by the very absolute he despaired of encountering: . . . Eduard is sitting in a wooden pew and feeling sad at the thought that God does not exist. But just at this moment his sadness is so great that suddenly from its depth emerges the genuine living face of God! Look! It’s true! Eduard is smiling! He is smiling, and his smile is happy. (287)

At the very moment he had given up hope, Eduard finds his way out of the labyrinth and comes face to face with authentic transcendence, as opposed to the deviated transcendence of compulsive imitation. Though the narrator’s tone is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there is no cause for dismissing the ending as a mere ironic flourish. The church setting is significant, as it was there that Eduard imitated Alice and her fellow Catholics. After having had the dispiriting realization that he is nothing but an imitator of the people around him, who are themselves but imitators of one another, Eduard (who is alone in church this time, with nobody around him to mimic) experiences serene happiness born of divorce from the world of superficial appearances. The conclusion of “Eduard and God” marks the first time in the collection that a character becomes aware of imitating unworthy models. Kundera initially published the stories in Laughable Loves in three separate notebooks. He later collected them for publication and shuffled their order, eventually removing three of the ten original texts.1 I think he placed “Eduard and God” last for a reason. The mystical moment at the story’s

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conclusion can be read as an instance of “time regained,” or, as Girard would say, a “novelistic conversion.” The structure of the experience resembles the creative metamorphosis described in the last volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Despite its predominantly comic mode, the story even imparts a frisson of Proustian bliss. The way Eduard’s smile emerges from the depths of his sadness mirrors in miniature the death and resurrection pattern found in Time Regained: a sense of futility comes just before happiness and illumination. That smile returns, much later in Kundera’s oeuvre, on the lips of the dying dog, Karenin. Eduard’s mystical (yet nonserious) encounter with God is echoed in the quasi-Proustian recollections of Karel in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and again in the full-fledged mystical experience recounted in the fift h part of Immortality, in which death and exile coincide with deliverance.

From hatred to compassion The renunciation of triangular desire entails a shift in one’s relationships with others. The goal that motivated the hero’s striving comes to look like a mirage. When this happens, the world of desire collapses. All of the hero’s values are replaced by their opposites: hate gives way to love; revenge to compassion; and denial to remembrance. This change is beautifully illustrated in The Joke. Kundera’s critics and even the author himself resist the idea that Ludvik Jahn’s transformation could in any way resemble the redemptive conversions found in Dostoevsky or Stendhal. But if we turn to the textual evidence, we see that it does. As Girard affirms in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, all novelistic conclusions are fundamentally alike, and their unity is founded on the overcoming of pride and self-deception. The Joke ends with some fleeting minutes of communion. Ludvik’s project of seduction has miscarried and he finds himself at the village festival, with its folkloric trappings that remind him of his youth. There he takes up the clarinet and plays with the local band, whose members are his former childhood friends. Before a raucous crowd of revelers whose shouts drown out their performance, the amateur musicians play on, final bearers of a folk tradition destined for extinction. The scene is especially poignant because it echoes an earlier moment in the novel. Years before his plot to defile Helena, in the immediate aftermath of his expulsion from the university, Ludvik takes the train home. There he runs into his friend Jaroslav, who is about to be married and asks the

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excommunicated student to be his best man. At the wedding party, recalls Ludvik, “when Jaroslav asked me (as a sentimental reminder of the days when I had played in the band with him) to grab a clarinet and sit in with the other players, I refused” (47). Not only do memories of playing at Zemanek’s side in the May Day parades disgust him, but he cannot help noticing that while Jaroslav makes a show of embracing old folk customs he expurgates their biblical motifs, purely out of political correctness. Now, years later, Jaroslav again offers Ludvik a place in the band. The two friends have drifted apart but Ludvik realizes that whatever differences provoked their estrangement mean nothing. This time, he accepts the invitation. He places friendship before the abstraction of political differences. How to explain this odd behavior, which seems so out of character? At the very beginning of the book, Ludvik cynically described his mission of destruction and confessed to having wanted to carry it out in his hometown so as to avoid the suspicion that he was returning there “out of some maudlin attachment to things past” (3). By the novel’s end, however, he has ceased to regard his past with rancor, and the change amazes him as much as it does us: “What had suddenly destroyed the old barriers that for fifteen years had stopped me from looking back happily on my young days in the cimbalom band, stopped me from returning to my hometown with affection” (311)? Having begun to recognize the role that Zemanek played in his life, he speculates that his renewed interest in the old folk customs may stem from a wish to contradict his rival, who mocked them: Could it be because a few hours ago Zemanek had sneered at the Ride of the Kings? Was he perhaps the one who had made me dislike folk song, was it he who had now purified it again? Was I really only the other end of a compass needle of which he was the pointer? Was I really so degradingly dependent on him? (311)

Ludvik’s hatred of Zemanek is such that he compulsively imitates him but in a negative fashion. Instead of being drawn to what Zemanek likes, he desires precisely what his rival abhors and abhors what his rival likes. Eduard imitated the old women in church in a docile, humble fashion; he knelt and prayed after watching them do the same. Ludvik’s imitation is far more rebellious and prideful, but it remains an imitation nonetheless, and he knows it. Indeed, he has already recognized that his desire to possess Helena was wholly determined by his hatred for Zemanek. He sees, or at least half-sees, the degree to which he allowed his former friend to dominate his life.

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This new awareness is evident in the remorse he feels at having mistreated Helena. He describes their relationship in language that evokes stoning, as if the adulterous wife were herself the missile with which Ludvik was to have destroyed his rival: “. . . she was innocent with respect to me and I had acted vilely, having turned her into a mere object, into a stone I had tried (and failed) to throw at someone else” (283). For someone who remains under the mediator’s spell, Ludvik understands his own situation extremely well. This implies that while Zemanek’s influence may still be operative, it is rapidly waning. In other words, there is a better explanation for Ludvik’s resurgent love for his hometown, as well as for his willingness to join the cimbalon band. Like a piece of music that modulates from a minor to a major key, rivalry has begun to give way to friendship. Ludvik is in the process of repudiating his model, and the effects are already making themselves felt: No, it was not only Zemanek’s mockery that had made it possible for me to regain my love for the world of folk costumes, songs, and cimbalom bands; I could love it because this morning I had found it . . . in its forlornness and in its abandonment. (311)

The world of folk music once served political ends. Now, it is nothing but a vestige of its former self, a vestige of a vestige. Left by the wayside, it has become a refuge at the very heart of the labyrinth of desire, an island of peace and beauty amidst encroaching ugliness, like the chateau in Slowness or the forget-me-not that Agnes holds in her hands at the end of Immortality. Ludvik recognizes that he has been attached to Zemanek, who acted as his model–rival. The “No, it was not only Zemanek’s mockery . . .” that he pronounces represents a liberating moment of detachment, not only from the man he vowed to destroy but also from the man who made that vow, the vengeful Ludvik consumed by hatred. Of course, there is no such thing as existence without mediation. When one mediator is renounced it is replaced by another. The only question is: which one? At the end of Kundera’s novels there is often a serene, peaceful presence that assumes the role of the new guide. In “Eduard and God,” it is the smile of God, which beams forth in the silence and solitude of the empty church. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as we will see shortly, the presence of friendly animals infuses the conclusion with innocent sweetness. Here, it is the band leader who becomes a positive model, instilling his energy in the rest of the group: Jaroslav became the soul of us all, and I was amazed at what an excellent musician this big fellow was, belonging as he did (he especially) to the

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devastated values of my life; he had been taken from me, and I (to my detriment and to my shame) had let him go, although he had been perhaps my most faithful, guileless, and innocent friend. (314)

As the shouts of the revelers grow louder, the circle of musicians forms a “protective enclosure” (315) where the traditional folk songs still live, providing Ludvik with the fleeting sense that he has at last found a home, a place where contradictions are dissolved, where things retain their meaning and solidity. Alas, the reunion proves short-lived. Jaroslav turns pale and stops playing: he is having a heart attack. Kundera refuses to obey convention. He undoes the happy ending and undermines the hero’s reconciliation with the world by suggesting that his life will go on much as before. However, even the final calamity underscores how much Ludvik’s visit to his hometown has transformed him. As the novel draws to a close, the cynical avenger unexpectedly finds himself in the role of the compassionate caretaker: “ . . . I realized with a shock that my trip home, made in the hope of striking at the hated Zemanek, had ended with me holding my stricken friend in my arms” (317). Although the sense of loss that pervades the final pages counterbalances and perhaps even outweighs the consolation he achieves, Ludvik comes to understand that he failed the woman who loved him, rids himself of his hatred for Zemanek, and reunites with his old friends. He renounces his vengeful designs just as Don Quixote renounced knight errantry, and he rediscovers both solitude and companionship. Moreover, at the end of the novel he has acquired a perspective on his past that equals in lucidity the novelist’s own. His transformation makes the futility and meanness of revenge apparent to him. Were he to experience the urge to do so, he would now be ready to recount his adventures from this new vantage point. Beautiful as this ending is, however, I cannot help finding it forced in places. The various strands of the narrative converge in such a way that Ludvik must give up several illusions at once. Kundera moves from one to the next so skilfully that the impression of unity never falters. But the character’s transformation springs not so much from the action itself as from the narrator’s introspection. The author labors (and labors admirably) to make us feel Ludvik’s shift to a new way of relating to himself and to others. But the conclusion feels both long and (in spite of Kundera’s refusal to tie up everything neatly in a “happy ending”) somewhat conventional. Perhaps sensing this insufficiency, Kundera would not write another transformative ending for many years. Life Is Elsewhere ends with the hero’s death. Farewell Waltz ends conventionally, with the various loose ends of

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the plot neatly tied up, but it provides no conclusion in which hero and world are reconciled as they are (however briefly) in his first novel. Indeed, in Farewell Waltz, Kundera steers away from the Dostoevskyan solution of crime, punishment, and redemption. His hero feels no guilt in the wake of his crime, which resembles an impulsive and absurd acte gratuit. As for The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, its architecture, based on the musical variation form, deliberately fractures the unity of story. The absence of a main narrative line means that there is no central protagonist to experience an epiphany at the end of the novel, which closes on a note of melancholy irony. The characters in these novels wander in the labyrinth of values with no exit in sight. Only the authorial consciousness, looking down from above, speaks from a vantage point beyond the vicissitudes of desire. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, however, Kundera writes a liberating conclusion in the vein of “Eduard and God.” This time, not one but two characters find their way out of the labyrinth.

Karenin’s smile In his afterword to the French paperback edition, François Ricard writes that the seventh and final part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Karenin’s Smile,” dazzled and perplexed him. In his view, its “beauty and semantic plenitude” appear, at least at first glance, to be at odds with the “central tendency” of Kundera’s work toward the destruction of all idyllic illusions, especially those associated with politics and poetry: “I know of no other literary oeuvre that goes further, that pushes the art of disillusionment so far and that unveils to such an extent the fundamental deception that pervades our lives and thoughts.”2 By contrast, the main characters in The Unbearable Lightness achieve a peace and happiness located beyond the reach of the corrosive irony that is Kundera’s principal narrative mode. Ricard writes: “This was all the more incongruous in that the idyll comes just after the part entitled ‘The Grand March,’ which deals with shit and kitsch, and where the novelist’s irony is perhaps more radical than at any other point in his oeuvre.” Ricard is obliged to reconsider the initial view he had adopted of Kundera as a purely satanic, destructive, and ironic novelist, which although broadly accurate, left little room for the possibility of authentic fulfi llment. He concedes that “the writer of devastation is also the writer of the idyll.”3 Ricard goes on to distinguish between two kinds of idyll. One springs from a beatific, utopian attitude that dreams of humanity united. Ricard

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characterizes it as “the Idyll of innocence” and he crowns it with a capital “I.” The other, “the idyll of experience,” is seen precisely as a “negation”4 of the first, born of a “rupture” or, in the case of the main character in another novel, The Joke, a “revelation housed at the deepest level of failure, at the lowest point of his fall and of his exclusion.”5 This retreat from the noisy stage of History is not merely a distancing from the group but above all “a radical desolidarization by which all communication with it is put to an end and by which the group and its desire for the Idyll are annulled once and for all.”6 The “idyll of experience” is seen as a “movement of detachment by which the human being is separated from the Idyll and, in the state of abandonment where he is plunged by this solitude, discovers that which was hidden.” Then Ricard goes still further, correcting his initial formulation: “Or rather: rediscovers it. For beauty is not something toward which one goes but to which one comes back, into which one ‘falls again’—once one has achieved a break with the Idyll . . .”7 The hero breaks with his past, detaches himself from the world of illusion. In repudiating the Idyll he rediscovers an otherwise inaccessible form of beauty. Ricard’s reluctant revision of his initial point of view partakes in the very movement of detachment and correction that he ascribes to the idyll with a little “i.” Breaking with the widely held view that Kundera is an “elegant, cruel, and virile” writer, as an article in the French newspaper Libération once described him, it transcends nihilistic interpretations of his work. Such interpretations are valid up to a point. Beyond a certain threshold, however, relentless skepticism does little more than invert the most credulous forms of faith. Worse still, the debunking impulse paralyzes creativity. If Kundera were no more than a snickering skeptic, he would hold his characters at such a remove that they would appear as mere pretexts for satire, flat as paper cut-outs. His work would remain coolly detached instead of achieving that uncanny synthesis between distance and identification by which the novelist simultaneously understands and accepts his own shortcomings and those of others. Thus, even as Ricard acknowledges that his initial perspective fails to encompass the entirety of Kundera’s novelistic space, he reveals, or rediscovers, the hidden beauty that structures that space. As Ricard moves beyond his initial interpretation of Kundera he gains access to a new dimension of the novelist’s work and at the same time follows in Kundera’s footsteps, living through a creative rupture that allows him to identify more closely with the novelist. The interpreter who wishes to follow in Ricard’s footsteps, who wishes, in other words, to come as close as possible to the novelist’s perspective,

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must stop seeing Kundera as a pure anti-modern, a Nietzschean deaf to the voice of compassion and tenderness. For beyond the circularity of Don Juan’s eternal return, beyond the initial, “satanic” skepticism of a Ludvik Jahn or a Tomas, we find the hidden structuring principle of Kundera’s work. That principle, the source from which his work’s energy flows, is one with the pattern of rupture and desolidarization described by Ricard. Ricard is sufficiently aware of the parallels between his interpretation of Kundera’s masterpiece and René Girard’s notion of a “novelistic conversion” to evoke the latter in his essay Agnes’s Final Afternoon. But he turns away, at least in part, from the Girardian conception of the novel, wishing to underline the specifically “post-Hegelian” facets of Kundera’s work, which distinguish it from the vertical, hierarchized Balzacian novel of ambition and bring it closer to the horizontal, immanent world of Kafka. This distinction is legitimate, even fundamental. Kundera’s novels display a finely honed awareness of their own status as novels, and, moreover, as novels that come as the history of the novel is drawing to a close. Just as he sees Schoenberg as a fascinating epilogue to the history of Western music, Kundera can be situated in what he calls the “overtime” period of the novel, the period of “terminal paradoxes” in which Western culture accomplishes its own summing up. His novels follow the paths left unexplored over the genre’s history and gather them into a great synthesis, an “arch-novel,” to use the term he applies to Malaparte in The Curtain. To ignore its newness with respect to the nineteenth-century novel would be to diminish the contribution of Kundera’s work. His novels offer innovative thematic exploration (“kitsch”; “shit”; love as something nonserious, “laughable”) and unprecedented formal invention (working the essay into the novel while perfecting the art of narrative polyphony was an important achievement, certainly one of the richest literary innovations of the twentieth century). But there is no need to exaggerate this specificity beyond measure. Though he resists the story imperative, Kundera’s novels still tell stories; though he refrains from psychologizing, his characters still have motives and individual traits. We recognize his innovations as such because they emerge within a tradition. In other words, Kundera’s greatness lies not only in the parts of his work that distinguish him from the novel’s classical heritage but also in the most banal and familiar aspects: If error cannot destroy the unity of novelistic conclusions it tries to render it powerless. It attempts to sterilize it by calling it a banality. We should not deny that banality but loudly proclaim it. [. . .] Novelistic

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conclusions are bound to be banal since they all quite literally repeat the same thing.8

What lies beyond the comic or tragic misunderstandings of desire? Kundera’s novels provide an answer: repose; the end of self-centeredness and the acquisition of wisdom; reconciliation with others and with the past. This hard-earned repose comes in the final part of The Unbearable Lightness, which is a sort of pastoral imbued with the innocence and purity of animals: a dying dog (Tereza’s pet, Karenin, who has cancer) as well as a pig, Mephisto, who belongs to one of the villagers. Tomas-Oedipus has left Thebes and arrived in Colonus. The joking of the locals and the dog’s moving smile contrast with the jealousy, vertigo, and unhappiness that haunted the couple before their departure from Prague. The community in which men and animals live in harmony stands opposed to the dog massacres organized by the decaying regime. Karenin embodies this harmony, which is as far from sentimentality as it is from insensitivity. The smile that lingers on the dead dog’s lips evokes a mixture of rest and happiness, tranquility and discreet joy. Karenin’s agony reveals the link between death and deliverance. A passage near the end of the novel shows this clearly. The vet has operated on Karenin and at home he has not quite come out of his anesthesia. Tomas and Tereza put him to bed and then go to bed themselves: At three o’clock that morning, he suddenly woke them up, wagging his tail and climbing all over them, cuddling up to them, unable to have his fi ll. It was the first time he’d ever got them up, too! He had always waited until one of them woke up before he dared to jump on them. But when he suddenly came to in the middle of the night, he could not control himself. Who can tell what distances he covered on his way back? Who knows what phantoms he battled? And now that he was home with his dear ones, he felt compelled to share his overwhelming joy, a joy of return and rebirth. (285)

Like Anna Karenina herself in Tolstoy’s novel, Karenin dies, but his death is accompanied by a rebirth. The main characters, Tomas and Tereza, also die in the seventh and last part of the novel. But the closer they come to death, the happier they are. Tomas abandons his extramarital liaisons: “It occurred to him that his womanizing was also something of an ‘Es muss sein! ’—an imperative enslaving him. He longed for a holiday. But for an

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absolute holiday, a rest from all imperatives, from all ‘Es muss sein! ’” Tomas rejects the very illusion that romantic readers (remember those college students setting off to Prague with the book in their backpacks?) hold dear. He turns away from the narrative that guided him through life until this point. In ceasing to profess a libertine creed, he “clearly contradicts his former ideas.”9 As for Tereza, at first she suspects Tomas of pursuing his affairs, even in the countryside, by epistolary means. A letter from Sabina triggered her first jealous dream, and now it appears that the novel will end with a reprise of that early trauma and leave her trapped in the hellish circle of infidelity and jealousy. When she comes upon a letter that Tomas has negligently left in view, she examines it with great care: The address was written in an unfamiliar hand, but it was very neat and she guessed it to be a woman’s [. . .] she asked him nonchalantly whether the mail had come. “No,” said Tomas, and fi lled Tereza with despair, a despair all the worse for her having grown unaccustomed to it [. . .] the happiness of their two years in the country now seemed besmirched by lies. (294)

A few pages later, however, she learns that the letter came not from one of Tomas’s mistresses but from his estranged son. She then has a dream in which she imagines that Tomas has been changed into a rabbit: “What does it mean to turn into a rabbit? It means losing all strength. It means that one is no stronger than the other anymore” (313). Neither has the upper hand any longer. In other words, the spouses have stopped playing totalitarian games of love and chance, thus putting an end to futile torments. Existence has ceased to be unbearably light; it has also ceased to be unbearably heavy. Sabina states that Tomas has metamorphosed from Don Juan into Tristan. But this interpretation is insufficient. At the end of the novel, Tomas is neither a skirt-chaser nor a lovesick adulterer; he is a happy husband. He has renounced the imperatives that dominated his life, not only his surgeon’s God complex but also his compulsive womanizing, his obsessive desire: “Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. Nobody does. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions” (313). This exclamation unburdens Tereza of her guilt (she felt responsible for keeping Tomas from his vocation) and Tomas of the weight of his destiny. Happiness rather than disgrace awaits the couple beyond History and the impossible expectations of desire. A novelist’s capacity for rescuing his characters from the labyrinth of values corresponds to his ability to place them in this labyrinth to begin

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with. The characters must be sufficiently embedded in illusion, and their predicament defined with enough precision, for both author and reader to understand what would constitute an awakening to truth. Erring on either side of this middle ground makes it possible for the author to retain his illusions. If he buries the characters too deeply, they will never be rescued; the existential obstacle they face will crush them without hope of redemption, the novelist will discharge his sarcasm and bitterness on his creations, and they will become his scapegoats. If the characters are spared, on the other hand, they will never have any illusion to overcome. The novelistic journey will lack momentum; it will glide along sideways without ever descending into the infernal regions. It will never gather enough forward speed to emerge again on the other side. As the novelist manages to define his characters’ predicament more and more precisely, as he understands the hell in which he has plunged them better and better (since he himself is leaving it behind), he can set up the circumstances under which they could be rescued: Raskolnikov has committed a terrible crime, but implicit in this crime is the notion that confessing and making a clean breast of his guilt will bring him salvation. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the givens of the story open the way to a possible rescue: the inequality in the relationship between Tomas and Tereza, his compulsive womanizing and her jealousy, creates a disequilibrium that only the double renunciation of unhealthy obsession can repair. Posing the initial conditions under which the main character can overcome what holds him back is one of the novelist’s most difficult (and essential) balancing acts.

The birth of a novelist So far, we have witnessed characters moving beyond their obsessions. But what of the author? In an interview, Girard suggests that the character’s conversion becomes conceivable only after the novelist himself experiences a transformation: The novelist engages in reflection and comes to sense that his whole life has been based upon illusion. The character in a novel then experiences a conversion that involves a recognition that he is like those he despises. But this experience of the character is in reality a reflection of what has happened to the novelist. It is what makes him able to write the novel [. . .]10

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In Girard’s view, “the novelist writes the novel twice.”11 The first draft results from a misapprehension of his own imitative desire. His model–rival appears to him in the guise of a meddling interloper on the path to possessing the desired object, a nemesis bent on depriving him of his rightful possessions. He does not realize that it is because he is imitating the model, his identical double, that the latter appears to him in the guise of a wicked persecutor (in Jean Santeuil, for example, Proust constructs a narrative in which his real-life enemies, who unbeknown to him are also his models, are portrayed as insufferable snobs, while he himself—or the character who acts as his proxy in the text—is painted in rosy hues). For Girard, the novelist’s potential is measured not by the failed first draft but by whether he manages to see that it is a failure: “The first time, he finishes it, but unlike God after creating the world, he looks at his work and says, ‘It is bad!’ What is missing is something that must happen to the novelist himself. And when it happens, the novel is really viewed from a different perspective.”12 The novelist must go beyond the initial, one-sided interpretation. He has to see not only his enemies but also himself as an insufferable snob, the mirror image of his hated rival. From this new vantage point, the novelist sets about correcting the first narrative to reflect the understanding he has gained, acknowledging that everything he said or thought about his rival(s) also applies to him (in the Search, Proust rewrites certain sections of Jean Santeuil, owning up, via his protagonist, to the envy and snobbery he had attributed exclusively to his enemies in the earlier version). What Kundera calls the “anti-lyric conversion” in his essay The Curtain has much in common with Girard’s idea of a transformative experience that enables the novelist to see that his own (and not just other people’s) desire is mediated. The lyrical illusion may be regarded as Kundera’s version of the Girardian “romantic lie.” We must take care to draw the parallel accurately, however, because there are some subtle differences between the two. The French title of Girard’s fi rst book (Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque —“Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth”) sets up a clear opposition between romantic pretensions to absolute self-sufficiency and the novel’s claim that we experience the world with and through others. At fi rst glance, we fi nd no such opposition built into Kundera’s notion of “lyricism,” which owes so much to the philosophical tradition that it risks falling back into the very subject–object framework that his fiction effortlessly transcends. His use of the term is inspired by Hegel, who in his Aesthetics distinguishes between the subjective, emotional lyric, and the objective epic. Th is gives Kundera’s idea a regrettably philosophical flavor: the “lyrical” individual remains self-involved while the mature,

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“epic” consciousness turns outward to grasp the true nature of the objective world. What is missing from Hegel’s reflections on poetry is of course the model. Neither the romantic poet nor the philosopher (we need only recall Heidegger’s ideas about “authenticity”) makes room for himself in the cage he constructs for others. Only the novelist succeeds in demolishing the abstract barriers between himself and his enemies by recognizing that he, too, is inauthentic since at a deep level he is just like them. As an author of fiction, Kundera belongs in the pantheon of greats; as a forger of concepts, he is sometimes beholden to ways of thinking that deny the model’s presence. This means that we must use the narrative substance of Kundera’s fiction to shed light on his idea of lyricism rather than the reverse. At the conclusion of The Joke, Ludvik realizes that he never gave Lucie the love she needed because he remained too wrapped up in himself: A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrical age, when man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people (no matter how dear) are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth. (251) (my emphasis)

The subtle triangularity in this passage recalls the journalist in “Dr. Havel” who is “slavishly dependent on the people with whom he came in contact. It was in their sight and judgment that he timidly found out what he was like and how much he was worth (203) (my emphasis). These passages suggest that the lyrical individual looks to others as judges who mediate his self-esteem. In other words, implicit in the idea of self-absorbed lyricism is the idea of other-absorbed imitation. This other-absorption brings no understanding or insight into the other’s life or predicament, nor does self-absorption result in any revelatory introspection. The character remains as deluded about others as he is about himself. In Life Is Elsewhere (which Kundera originally wanted to call The Lyrical Age), we find the same link between amour-propre and surreptitious fascination with others. Jaromil, the lyrical soul par excellence, imitates virtually everyone around him, from the authoritative voice and gestures of his painter mentor to his former classmate, the virile policeman, and the famous poet. He wants to look virile, hard, and confident, and he is in despair because of his receding chin: This chin worried him a lot; he had read in a famous passage by Schopenhauer that a receding chin is a particularly repulsive feature

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because it is precisely his prominent chin that distinguishes man from ape. But then he came across a photo of Rilke and saw that Rilke, too, had a receding chin, and this gave him priceless comfort. (127)

Here, lyrical self-concern is one with the quixotic desire to look like someone else. As implied by the countless moments he spends studying his reflection in shop windows and the mirror, Jaromil’s self-love is weak and needs constant reinforcement. The poor fellow cannot live in peace without the reassuring precedent of a famous poet’s chin. One of Kundera’s contributions to our understanding of imitation, then, involves pointing out that young people, whose adolescent personalities have yet to crystallize, are especially vulnerable to influence. Youth is not only the lyrical age but also the imitative age, as Kundera notes in The Joke: “The young can’t help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life in to a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models—those that are in fashion, that suit, that please—and enact them” (87). There are many models to choose from. The boy commander in the labor camp wants to look tough for the other men, who are older and more experienced than him: “what he had read and heard offered him a ready-made mask: the cold-blooded hero of cheap thrillers, the young man with nerves of steel who outwits the criminal gang, the man of few words, calm, cool, with a dry wit and confidence in himself and the might of his own muscles” (87). The students who interrogated Ludvik at the university “were above all boys covering their incomplete faces with the mask they admired most, the mask of the hard, ascetic revolutionary” (87). As for Marketa, she “modeled herself after the female savior in some B movie” (87), and Ludvik himself runs “back and forth among several roles” (87). At the moment the “anti-lyric” metamorphosis occurs, the budding novelist emerges abruptly from the mists and discovers a fresh, lucid point of view. Kundera describes the transformation as follows in The Curtain, his third book of essays: “The anti-lyric conversion is a fundamental experience in the curriculum vitae of the novelist: separated from himself, he suddenly sees that self from a distance, astonished to find that he is not the person he thought he was” (91). The novelist’s surprise stems from the fact that he was self-deluded until the moment of his conversion, much like the character in a novel. Don Quixote, for example, thinks he is a great knight. At the end of his life, he wakes up and sees himself as he really is (or was until then), as Alonso Quijada, a gentleman obsessed with stories of knight errantry.13 Similarly, the boy commander could one day realize that he was imitating cheap thrillers and Marketa could see that she was modeling her

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life on a character in a movie—and both would be “astonished,” the one to discover that he wasn’t really a tough guy, the other to find that she wasn’t an idealized female savior. Another important point: when the novelist tears through “the curtain of pre-interpretation” (92), he not only acquires a new vision of himself but also greater understanding of others and their self-deception: “After that experience, he will know that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that his misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people . . . the soft gleam of the comical” (91). Th is clairvoyance corresponds to what Girard says above about the novelist’s recognition that “he is like those he despises.” The experience of conversion leads the author to see everyone (himself included) haloed by “a tender gleam of irony,” as Kundera puts it later in the passage. Th is tender irony is the novelist’s “precious reward” (91). There are, of course, some important differences between Kundera’s vision and Girard’s notion of novelistic conversion. For Kundera, youth is the imitative age par excellence, and the conversion thus takes place around the age of 30, marking the shift from adolescence to maturity. For Girard, the conversion happens at no specific age. Dostoevsky is in his mid-40s when he finally writes the books in which he surpasses himself. What’s more, for Girard, the conversion is fundamentally religious, or at least has ethical implications, as his emphasis on repentence implies. However, he does distinguish between “minimal” conversions, which have a religious shape but don’t actually convert the author to Christianity (Flaubert), and “maximal” conversions, in which the author becomes religious (Dostoevsky).14 Apart from using the word conversion, Kundera doesn’t place any special emphasis on religion. These distinctions are noteworthy, and they may well reflect something deeper than mere diverging sensibilities. For my purposes, however, the differences matter less than the similarities. What interests me is how novels get written, and from this vantage point the Girardian and Kunderian approaches have a great deal in common: both help us to see that making good literature, while it requires skilful technique, also takes something that no creative writing course can teach, something irreducible to a recipe or magic formula, a great change that may be eagerly awaited but over which the author has at most only partial control. Thanks to this change, the author becomes aware that he is imprisoned in a pseudo-religion and repudiates the ersatz God he has been unconsciously worshiping. How did the “anti-lyric conversion” play itself out in Kundera’s own career? Kvetoslav Chvatik writes that during his adolescence and young adulthood, “Kundera wrote poems, essays, and plays that today no longer

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have the least value in his eyes. In 1958, a first prose text inaugurates the cycle of Laughable Loves; this is the beginning of Kundera as a prose author.”15 A significant detail: Kundera no longer accords any importance to the writings that came before his first collection of short stories. Chvatik underscores this point on the next page: “Kundera is extremely critical of the portion of his literary oeuvre that saw the light of day at the end of the fift ies and the beginning of the sixties—poetry, essays, and plays.”16 The plurality of genres at which the young writer tries his hand suggests the quest for an artistic identity, one that remained elusively out of reach until Kundera began to write prose fiction: “only once he arrived at the novel did Kundera find his own authentic artistic language.”17 The novelist’s career unfolds in two parts, like a diptych. The first part represents illusion, puerility; the second begins where the first ends and contradicts it, embodying the new vision born from the ruins. The novel springs from a creative rupture in its author’s life. Kundera himself has described his shift from poet to novelist. In the preface to the first Czech edition of his short-story collection Laughable Loves after the liberation from the Russian occupation, he tells how he found his voice as a writer: I wrote my first “laughable love,” I, Lamentable God, in 1958. At the time I was writing my play The Keeper of the Keys, which was pure torture, and during a break, as a diverting respite, I wrote the first short story of my life, in a day or two, with lightness and pleasure. Only after some reflection did I realize that this lightness and this pleasure signified not that the short story, because it wasn’t blessed with the sweat of my brow, was something insignificant or marginal but to the contrary, that for the first time I had found myself, as they say, that I had found my tone, the ironic distance with regard to the world and my life, in short, my vocation as a novelist (my emphasis).18

The opposition between the two distinct modes of writing comes through clearly in this description. On the one hand, the young author is having an excruciating time of it while writing a play; on the other, he dashes off a short story in a day or two with a sensation of “lightness” and “pleasure.” It is only with time that he realizes that suffering provides no guarantee of authenticity. What he took at first for a mere diversion comes to look like the authentic direction for his literary endeavors (and this precisely because the short story is a game and a diversion) while the arduous task of writing his play appears secondary and unimportant by comparison. There is in this short narrative of creative self-discovery a radical shift in perspective, but one that comes only belatedly. Kundera also stresses the

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notion of distance. He who looks ironically at his own life and at the world is no longer identical with the person he was before. A gap has opened up between the self that writes and the self that is written: the “lyrical” self (the self that is built on a foundation of copied desires) falls away like an abandoned chrysalis; the novelist looks back on it as if it belonged to a stranger. I cannot help remarking on the similarity between (1) this autobiographical passage; (2) the passage quoted above from The Curtain on the novelist’s conversion; and (3) the account Kundera gives of the birth of his first French novel: I was again writing some essays in French. The latest was to deal with Choderlos Laclos, with Vivant Denon. After writing a few pages, I felt as if I were being strangled by boredom. I couldn’t stand the seriousness of my lucubrations. To liberate and amuse myself, I transformed this essay into a big joke. Thus in 1995 was born Slowness, my lightest novel, in which there is not a single serious word.19

In all three instances, humor, lightness, and pleasure go hand in hand with the decisive moment of literary creation.

Liberating exiles Kundera seems well aware of the resemblance between his conclusions and those of his great predecessors. In Immortality, Agnes and Laura are enmeshed in rivalry. Agnes wishes to escape. She dreams of “castling,” as in chess. By going to Switzerland she can leave the world of fighting behind, eluding her younger sister, who views her as both a model and a rival. More than a mere change of address, however, Agnes’s journey (which, like Tomas and Tereza’s exile, will come to an abrupt end when she dies in a car crash) is an exit from the world, comparable to Fabrice’s retreat to the Charterhouse of Parma at the end of Stendhal’s novel: Agnes recalled a sentence from Stendhal’s novel: ‘Il se retira à la chartreuse de Parme.’ Fabrice left ; he retired to the Charterhouse of Parma. No charterhouse is mentioned anywhere else in the novel and yet the single sentence on the last page is so important that Stendhal used it for the title; because the real goal of all of Fabrice’s adventures was the charterhouse; a place secluded from people and the world. (287)

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Through Agnes, Kundera makes the connection between his conclusion and Stendhal’s. He sees what Girard describes as the overarching unity of all novelistic conclusions. He deliberately and explicitly joins the royal line of novelists of genius who have overcome the romantic ideas of their era and who in unison proclaim the triangularity of desire. The solitude of the convent recalls Eduard’s happy solitude in the church where he discovers (with a smile) the living face of God. It recalls the isolated farming village to which Tomas and Tereza retire. Switzerland is Agnes’s charterhouse in a world where people no longer withdraw because no place is truly apart from the world: “The vision of a cloister. Agnes had been following this vision to Switzerland for seven years, following the vision of the charterhouse” (287). In “Eduard and God,” Kundera contrasted the contingent, unessential human world to the essential existence of God, who is content to be and has no need to appear. Eduard’s smile is prompted by his coming into unexpected contact with that essence. In Immortality, Agnes, too, communes with something more essential than the world of human beings. The passage deserves to be quoted at full length, for it is one of the summits of Kundera’s oeuvre: Agnes recalled the special moment she experienced on the day of her departure, when she took a final walk through the countryside. She reached the bank of a stream and lay down in the grass. She lay there for a long time and had the feeling that the stream was flowing into her, washing away all her pain and dirt: washing away her self. A special, unforgettable moment: she was forgetting her self, losing her self, she was without a self; and that was happiness. [. . .] What is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self. [. . .] . . . it is possible to imagine some primordial being that was present even before the Creator began to create, a being which was—and still is—beyond his influence. When she lay on the ground that day and the monotonous song of the stream flowed into her, cleansing her self, the dirt of the self, she participated in that primordial being which manifested itself in the voice of the fleeting time and the blue sky; she now knows that there is nothing more beautiful. The route she drove on to from the highway was quiet, and distant stars, infinitely distant stars, shone over it. Agnes drove on and thought: Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.

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But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain. (287–8)

These moments, at the very end of Agnes’s life, radiate the same mingled happiness and melancholy (for we, the readers, already know that Agnes is going to die) found in “Eduard and God” and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Here, however, the sense of liberation comes with a mystical intensity born of total communion with nature and the universe. The quiet enclosure of the car in which Agnes is driving toward Switzerland and the empty highway form a serene background for the description of the experience. What I called the two panels of the diptych are present, but in a radical way. The scene describes the renunciation not merely of lyrical self-centeredness but of something even deeper. In this passage, Kundera equates the individual ego with dirtiness, suffering, and unhappiness. The self is “painful” because of its ties to other selves that fascinate and reject it. Being, on the other hand, means detachment from suffering, in other words from the vicious circle of emulation, from the fi lth of toxic emotions like hatred, anger, and fear. The moment by the brook is one of purification, happiness, beauty, and liberation, even a sort of baptism, as Andrew McKenna pointed out to me. It is the synthesis of all the preceding conversions. Ricard interprets the moment as a transcendence of the desire for immortality: “Achieving peace does not mean being lifted above the world, nor does it mean retreating into the self. It means, simply, throwing down one’s arms and disappearing: consenting to be mortal.” He specifies that there is no suicidal wish lurking in Agnes’s mystical experience and he contrasts her desire to be divested of her self with the solipsism of Valéry’s Narcissus: “Agnes does not seek, as does Valéry’s Narcissus, to have it out with the river. She just wants it to keep flowing.”20 Given the hypothesis that I am pursuing, and in light of the very explicitly imitative nature of Agnes and Laura’s sibling rivalry, I interpret Agnes’s mystical experience as the ultimate and utter renunciation of triangular desire, an escape from the myriad twists and turns of the labyrinth of values and a return to calm, wholeness, and unity. Kundera’s final novel ends with another liberating exile, one that offers a fragile but poignant echo of the majestic mystical experience in Immortality. In Ignorance, a Czech woman is returning to her country for the first time since her emigration to France years before. The Velvet Revolution has just taken place and Irena is now free to come and go in her homeland. Her French friends urge her to move back to Prague, hoping to transform her life into a fi lm with a happy ending that they can watch from afar. Images

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of a joyful homecoming, people rushing to greet her with tears streaming down their cheeks, laughter and reminiscence, well up in her. It is this happy ending, the “kitsch” ending, that the novelist reveals as a lie. Irena finds only misunderstandings, some comic, some tragic, in her old home city. Kundera questions the possibility of finding a safe haven. For Irena, uprooted by history, no home is home. She can feel at ease in neither her adopted country nor her homeland. The refuge she seeks eludes her. But it does not elude everyone. If there is a supreme value in Kundera’s universe, perhaps it is attachment to and respect for loved ones dead and gone. At the end of the book, the novel’s other protagonist, Josef, a disabused exile, soars through a starry night sky in an airplane, away from the Czech Republic, toward the home where he lived happily with his late wife. Her memory has become the origin, the thing he clings to, the sole value remaining: He climbed into a taxi and left for the airport. It was evening already. The plane took off toward a dark sky, then burrowed into clouds. After a few minutes the sky opened out, peaceful and friendly, strewn with stars. Th rough the porthole he saw, far off in the sky, a low wooden fence and a brick house with a slender fi r tree like a lifted arm before it. (195)

The house he shared in exile with his wife has become his Ithaca. As he leaves the native land behind, the cloudy sky gives way to a clear one. The adjectives Kundera employs suggest the repose and happiness that awaits Josef back in Denmark. The stars recall the distant stars overhead as Agnes drove toward Switzerland and the stars that Tomas invented for Tereza, so that she would go back to sleep peacefully and have a beautiful dream: “Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out the round window of an airplane flying high above the stars” (240). There is something Dantesque about these stars: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle” (“And so we came forth and once again beheld the stars”). They contrast markedly with the infernal dream imagery in Identity or The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Indeed, Jonathan Livernois has shown how this ending gives the lie to Nancy Huston’s interpretation of the novelist as a “professor of despair.”21 Kundera is no beatific utopian, but neither is he a satanic nihilist. His novels demystify the former attitude just as they demystify the latter one. And his characters find happiness every time they manage to leave the world of desire behind. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the characters triumph over desire by leaving Prague. It is not that the country is such a wonderful place (Kundera stresses this: rather than the bucolic paradise that Tereza imagined, she and Tomas discover a Czech countryside where people sit around watching

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television and don’t even know their own neighbors). Rather, it is that the couple have left their demons behind. In Immortality, Agnes’s happiness coincides with the departure from France to Switzerland, a country that has a personal, subjective meaning for her as a place of refuge. And in Ignorance, the émigré’s happiness is situated outside his native country. Happiness and exile. Above, I attempted to show that the Girardian scheme applies to Kundera. The conversions in his works echo the conversion that granted him the ability to write his first short-story collection. Can this interpretation be taken further? Is it possible that the liberating exiles in Kundera’s novels correspond to an existential reality in the author’s biography? The author detests prying, biographical interpretations. I have no intention of investigating the relationship between his past and his oeuvre. That is why I will rely on his testimony to make my point for me. There exists a short text by Kundera in which the author states that his emigration to France is the key to his life and his work. There he writes: “In France, I experienced the unforgettable sensation of being reborn. After a break of six years, timidly, I came back to literature. My wife used to tell me: “France is your second homeland.”22 This rebirth in no way explains the liberating exiles in Kundera’s novels, but those exiles may explain his rebirth. The characters in Kundera’s novels experience a spiritual metamorphosis that happened to the author first, yet we should not look for the author’s shadow lurking behind the character. For it is only at the end, as the hour of death approaches, that the hero joins hands with his creator, who pulls him upward, out of the world of the novel.

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9

Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel

The novel takes the author in directions he never intended to go. A great novel is a satire gone wrong, one in which the author ends up accepting the character’s illusions as his own. What Cesareo Bandera writes about Cervantes probably holds true for Kundera: “Don Quixote records with great precision Cervantes’ progressive understanding and his victory over the first impulse to expose the madman to total ridicule.”1 In other words, a novel does not transcribe fully achieved transcendence; it is not the record of knowledge acquired and mastered before writing. It is a journey by which the author gradually comes to understand both himself and others: Jakub [in Farewell Waltz] is not a self-portrait. But it is true that his skepticism is closer to me, on a personal level, than the religious faith of his rival, Bertlef. All the same, in the course of writing my text, Jakub became progressively more problematic, and Bertlef more likeable. I wrote this novel against myself, so to speak. Besides, I think that’s how novels are written. If the novel is a success, it is necessarily more intelligent than its author. That is why many brilliant French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. Either the novel surpasses its author, or it is without value [. . .].2

This passage suggests that Farewell Waltz, despite its absence of a liberating conclusion, should be regarded as an especially successful novel, one that opened the way for the three major masterpieces to follow. In The Idiot, Dostoevsky tried and failed to draw a luminous portrait of saintliness in Prince Myshkin, who becomes compromised by his involvement in the novel’s amorous intrigues. In Farewell Waltz, Kundera succeeds in portraying a saint, perhaps for the same reason that Dostoevsky failed in his attempt. Bertlef brings happiness to everyone in the novel, whereas Myshkin sows misfortune with his perversely destructive “purity.” In both

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cases, however, the result stems from the novelist’s capacity for allowing the internal logic of his narrative to override his self-justifying intentions. What Kundera describes above, however, is a sort of reversal, in which the other becomes likeable and the self becomes less likeable, without any true synthesis taking place. This should not surprise us, given that the conclusion of the novel bears no trace of any such creative, synthetic moment. Kundera manages to overturn and reverse the gap between Self and Other without quite abolishing it. By the same token, Jaromil, at the end of Life Is Elsewhere, remains other, trapped in the role of the precociously talented monster. His death is sterile; there seems to be no way to redeem such an existence, no way to rescue the character from the abominable act of betrayal that, despite his poetic talent, tends to define his life, turning him into an emblem of the hated lyrical age. Kundera’s attitude toward Jaromil resembles Ludvik’s anger toward his former self, or Josef’s decision to tear up the pages of his youthful diary in Ignorance. The novel brilliantly illuminates the lyrical age, but its relentless description of Jaromil’s youthful vanity offers no way out. In the final part of The Art of the Novel, Kundera reveals the ties between his experience as a novelist and Tolstoy’s: When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that superpersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. (158)

This notion of a wisdom that surpasses personal moral condemnation brings me back, one last time, to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the fift h part of the novel, Tomas comes up with the idea for an article in which he compares the leaders of the Communist Party to Oedipus. The country is caught up in the giddy freedom of the Prague Spring. The crimes of the regime have come to light. But the leaders shrink from taking responsibility for them, claiming ignorance. Tomas concludes that they are probably telling the truth; most of them didn’t know about the atrocities. In his view, however, this does not excuse them. Didn’t Oedipus put out his eyes even though he was unaware of committing murder and incest?

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When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes! (177)

Tomas’s letter is one of many articles about the guilt of those involved in the political trials during the first years of Communism. It is part of a trend, a backlash against the country’s political class. Tomas speaks for the outraged citizens of his country who, through his editorial, may vicariously vent their anger at the Communists’ denial of responsibility. At the time of its publication, he already dislikes the letter. The editors make so many cuts that the complexity of his initial idea is lost. And the moral indignation in his position is evident. Later, Tomas loses his job when the Russian invasion puts an end to the climate of freedom in which the article was written. In an ironic twist, Kundera suggests that Tomas’s editorial may have been the last straw that convinced the Russians to crack down on the Czechs. Tomas is portrayed as an unwitting Oedipus, bringing the “plague” of Russian tanks: When Tomas’s letter appeared, they shouted: See what things have come to! Now they’re telling us publicly to put our eyes out! Two or three months later the Russians decided that free speech was inadmissible in their gubernia, and in a single night they occupied Tomas’s country with their army. (178–9)

Some years later, having returned from Zurich and been forced into resigning from his job at the hospital, Tomas is working as a window-washer. His son and another man, both members of the opposition, ask him to sign a petition against the regime, and they invoke his article. Tomas hesitates, and then retracts the editorial: “I wasn’t out to punish anyone . . . Punishing people who don’t know what they’ve done is barbaric. The myth of Oedipus is a beautiful one, but to treat it like this . . .” (218). He decides not to sign the petition, realizing that any display of solidarity with the opposition will do harm to Tereza because it will bring the police to their door. The Oedipal story has come full circle. At first Tomas saw the Communists who proclaimed their innocence as guilty. His letter to the editor hurls an accusation, one that has now rebounded against him. In condemning his own article, Tomas puts himself symbolically in the place

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of Oedipus the King, the investigating magistrate who discovered that he was the perpetrator. In these passages, Kundera uses free indirect discourse to record Tomas’s inner debates, giving them an intimate tone that brings both reader and novelist very close to the main character. Part Five of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a miniature novel in itself, a variation on the most famous ancient myth. Kundera’s version retains the dramatic irony of the Sophoclean drama while demystifying and relativizing the Greek perspective on guilt. His hero goes beyond the Manicheism of both Communist and dissident ideology. His decision to place Tereza’s well-being above abstract political and ideological positions recalls Camus’s famous outburst: “I believe in justice, but I’ll defend my mother before justice.” The episode can be read as a parable on literary creation. Girard compares the novelist’s renunciation to the Oedipus story: “The novelist recognizes that he is guilty of the sin of which he is accusing his mediator. The curse which Oedipus hurls at Others falls on his own head.”3 In Life Is Elsewhere, lyrical poetry functions to exalt the self; it is a means of taking revenge on reality. Disgusted at his own timidity, Jaromil writes a poem as a means of overcoming his self-loathing and feeling strong again: “down below he had felt his palms become sweaty with fear and his breath speed up; but here, up high in the poem, he was above his paltriness; [. . .] he was no longer subordinate to his experience, his experience was subordinate to what he had written” (74–5). Literature can either serve resentment or divulge its presence. The novelist can create a flattering surrogate, as Jaromil does in Life Is Elsewhere with his alter ego Xavier or as Proust did in Jean Santeuil, the unfinished precursor to In Search of Lost Time; or he can revise the initial romantic perspective and reveal the lie as such, pointing to the model at the source of his desire. He can relive the Oedipus story, as Tomas does. In The Curtain, Kundera compares the novelist’s self-discovery to Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. The comparison taps into the deepest layers of the European experience. It seeks to make clear that the transformation is real and lasting, that it changes everything: “If I imagine the genesis of the novelist as an archetypal tale, a ‘myth,’ that genesis looks to me like a conversion story; Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world” (89). Like Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness, Paul is a crowd-following persecutor who has become aware of his own crowd-following and persecuting tendencies. The reader can follow the novelist down the path of conversion. Kundera’s novels take us into a world where the power of suggestion trumps personal taste and perception and where models tend to become rivals and obstacles. By exploring that world, we follow in the author’s footsteps and learn to

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recognize in ourselves the imitative tendencies of his characters. Copying the model’s desire distorts our perception, leading us to become fascinated by objects without intrinsic worth. It follows that when we “break up,” so to speak, with the model, when we detach ourselves from the double with whom we are engaged in a struggle as bitter as it is absurd, we are able to see the world a little more clearly. We may even manage on occasion to assess things at their actual worth for us instead of at the worth we believe the model ascribes to them. For Kundera, as for Proust, a successful novel (and, I would add, a successful work of literary criticism) allows the reader to see into himself, an idea that bears some resemblance to the overused but not inapt observation that certain books “read us” even as we read them. Proust, affirms Kundera, wrote In Search of Lost Time to give his readers insight into their own lives. And he cites Time Regained: Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth. (95–6)

Kundera concludes: “Those lines of Proust’s define not only the meaning of the Proustian novel; they define the meaning of the very art of the novel” (96). In keeping with this essay’s main idea, and inspired by my friend JeanMichel Oughourlian, I like to imagine the novelistic optical instrument as a pair of “mimetic spectacles,” ones that allow us to make out the patterns of desire, much in the way that, in a heist movie, special goggles make it possible for burglars to see the crisscrossing laser beams protecting the crown jewels. The beginning of this book was an invitation to don those spectacles and to see what wearing them might reveal about Kundera’s fiction—and about ourselves. No sooner had we put them on than halfhidden lines of force appeared, structures that grew ever more complex as we worked our way through novel after novel. Now, at the end of our journey through the labyrinth of values, we emerge at last into the open, with what I hope is a greater appreciation for the intelligence and humor of Kundera’s novels, and a more acute understanding of that inseparable pair, imitation and desire.

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Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman

In the course of manuscript revisions, I came across Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,1 a brilliant defense and illustration of the literary essay. The book’s last chapter is a meditation on mimetic desire and the fraught relationship among life, literature, and theory. Batuman explains and handles Girard’s ideas with easy mastery, but she imputes to them a harmful, negative energy, going so far as to liken them to the nihilistic forces unleashed in Dostoevsky’s Demons. I think her tale of Girardian “possession” is even more complex than it looks at first glance. Like Plato making arbitrary use of the pharmakon to discredit the Sophists, Batuman weaves a tale of theory run amok with one hand—and undoes it with the other. The narrative unfolds during her days as a grad student in the comp lit department at Stanford, where she and several classmates fall under the spell of mimetic theory, though not without some reservations: “We were all fascinated by Girard’s theory, but it also irritated us” (273). Meanwhile, even as they study mimetic desire in the classroom, the group begins to act it out in real life, a turn of events that seems to increase Batuman’s irritation while simultaneously confirming her suspicions that Girard may be on to something. Matej, a Croatian grad student and fervent Girardian, plays the role of diabolical mediator. With his uncanny physical beauty and magnetic personality, he reduces his classmates to a trance-like state of submission. He is the one who initially convinces them to sign up for Girard’s seminar. Then he dismisses their objections to the theory as evidence of lingering “romantic individualist delusions” (273). The unhealthy fascination that Matej inspires in them seems to prove him right; the more they desire him, the more they have cause to acknowledge the theory’s explanatory power. Meanwhile, the emotional damage that he inflicts recalls the havoc wrought by that most glacially invulnerable of Dostoevskyan characters, the arrogant nobleman Stavrogin from Demons. One by one, those closest to Matej succumb to his mesmerizing charm. Relationships disintegrate. Egos shatter. Soon Batuman herself falls into the trap of obsession. She confronts Matej, only to receive a lecture on Girardian theory from him: “I can’t cure your metaphysical lack,” he told me irritably. “I can’t do anything for you. All I can do is make you miserable.” He paused and started patting his pockets, looking for his cigarettes. (274)

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Batuman’s disenchantment with Girardianism mirrors her frustration with Matej, who has the last word, both intellectually and amorously, but seems to lack compassion and, despite his hyper-lucidity, true self-awareness. As she describes him, he has a nasty case of the mimetic virus. Fatally attracted to unavailable women, he makes a habit of breaking up couples: “I knew of at least two extremely smart and attractive women who were in love with Matej,” writes Batuman. “Both were dating other men, whom Matej befriended. He then behaved very flirtatiously with the women” (268). Later, we learn that he once developed a dangerous passion for “a girl who was obsessed with a Slovenian disc jockey. He had pursued the girl desperately, determined to tear her away from the DJ, regardless of whether he had to annihilate himself in the process” (272). Ensconced behind his turntable with throngs of cheering clubbers dancing to the tracks he chooses (or so I imagine him), the DJ, a mediator by profession, jerks Matej’s strings in a way that is by now familiar to readers of this book (the initials DJ, as Batuman herself notes, can also stand for Don Juan). In short, Matej seems incapable of desiring without the interference afforded by a model–rival. Batuman sprinkles obvious clues to his weakness throughout her text, perhaps to make her readers understand that, as with so many theoreticians, Matej is himself the best illustration of his ideas. In this instance, fluency in Girardian theory appears as a lastditch attempt to maintain the illusion of personal autonomy. Matej has not so much embraced a system of thought as armed himself with a superior deconstructive weapon, for as Girard observes in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, debunkers like to keep a step ahead of everyone else: Not a single desire escapes the demystifier who is patiently occupied in constructing on top of all the dead myths the greatest myth of all, that of his own detachment. He alone, it seems, never desires. In short it is a question of convincing Others and especially of convincing oneself that one is completely and divinely autonomous [. . .] lucidity and blindness increase side by side. Henceforth the truth is so brilliantly clear that it has to be taken into account if only in order to escape it. (270–1)

Matej embodies the way in which theory sometimes aggravates the very problems it is supposed to clear up, though Batuman sees Professor Girard himself as the true source of the mischief: “It wasn’t just mimetic sickness that we had, my classmates and I, but the idea of mimetic sickness, and we had learned it from him” (267). She concludes that the fatal flaw in mimetic theory lies in its vision of love as something “shameful, vain, the opposite of generous” (274). She sees

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herself as a character in Demons, perhaps as Lizaveta Nikolaevna, devoted body and soul to her beloved and ready to sacrifice everything, even her virtue. But rather than finding consolation in the idea that “the drive to commit generous errors” (274) is an antidote to self-absorption, she must confront her Matej-inspired fears that what she is experiencing merely proves her inability to surmount romantic delusions: In the final analysis, this is what was so hurtful about Girardianism: it made love totally worthless. The curiosity and empathy engendered by love, which I found so valuable, were redescribed as flaws of human nature. (274)

Adopting an all-or-nothing view, she comes to see Girard’s simultaneous emphasis on literature and renunciation as contradictory: either you remain in and of the world, or else you reject narrative altogether. Nobody who takes the ideas in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel seriously has any business in a comp lit program, studying books that only repeat what Girard has already taught them about the futility of desire. Better to turn one’s back on the intrigue and ambition that propel stories forward and enter a monastery (a solution that Matej eventually adopts). I think Batuman misreads Girard when she interprets the idea of mimetic desire as a blanket condemnation of love in all its forms. Obsession, no matter how “self-sacrificing” or “generous” it may seem to the one obsessed, differs from love. The former is humorless and painful. It transfigures the object, while true passion, contrary to what Stendhal wrote in On Love, entails no such crystallization: the Matej with whom Batuman falls in love is a mirage. But that is a minor point. And, in any event, Batuman has encircled her position with landmines. Anyone foolish enough to accuse her of employing romantic notions of self-sacrifice to justify her fi xation on Matej is liable to see that accusation blow up in his face. To lecture her on the finer points of the mimetic theory would be merely to repeat Matej’s error. He thought that explaining the obsessive behaviors of his friends in Girardian terms would help them to put their “ontological sickness” in perspective. In reality, of course, his insistence on diagnosing those around him is itself a symptom of the disease that consumes him. In trying to cure others, Matej unwittingly testifies to his own servitude. Frustration with the fallacy that “knowing thyself” can bring emancipation from mimetic bondage is, I suspect, a driving force behind Batuman’s critique. Upon first meeting Matej, she notes the power of his charismatic personality: “It was an elemental power, like weather or

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electricity. Recognizing it had no effect on your physical response” (268). In other words, sometimes self-awareness is not enough. You can no more learn to stop obsessing over someone by embracing an intellectual theory, even a sound one, than you can learn to drive a car by reading the owner’s manual. Old-fashioned geographical distance is a better cure. Matej and Batuman part for the summer, and, writes Batuman, “I managed to stop thinking about him” (276). But they resume their old ways come autumn, staying up late every night to talk about Proust. Eventually, they end up in bed together. Their unhealthily ambivalent friendship recalls another episode in The Possessed, in which Batuman describes the interwoven itineraries of two Turkish travelers—the Russian author Pushkin and a nobleman who is also named Pushkin: “Pushkin and Count Pushkin decide to travel together, but argue and part company. Pushkin will have no part in Count Pushkin’s plan to cross a snowy mountain pass in a britska pulled by eighteen emaciated Ossetian bulls. Their courses diverge . . . but they meet again in Tiflis. They can’t escape each other” (90). Batuman finds absurd the idea of a resemblance between herself and Matej: “What did it mean to say we were the same, when all our experiences and beliefs were different” (274)? He is from Croatia, she isn’t; he believes in Jesus, she doesn’t. But on another level, they are uncannily alike: Matej is obsessed with Girardian theory; so is Batuman. He begins reading Proust; so does Batuman. He dates Batuman’s friends; she dates one of his best friends, whom she lectures on Girardian theory much in the way Matej lectured her. Batuman relates that as a child, Matej “used to lock himself in the bathroom, desperately searching in the mirror for differences between his face and that of his father, whom even at that time he resembled to a remarkable degree; he would invariably find the differences . . .” (283). Her text accomplishes a similar feat: though every page testifies to the remarkable resemblance between herself and Matej, she invariably finds the differences. For if she let those differences vanish, if she allowed the imitative circuit to be completed, she would have to acknowledge that Matej is right: “You and I are very similar—we’re exactly the same,” he tells her at one point (274). “Matej, c’est moi!” Those words are, I think, the only ones she refrains from uttering. In Girard’s theory, Batuman writes, “there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity” (263). I would add that, although our desires never spring to life spontaneously, once we’re aware of that reality

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we can at least choose, or try to choose, the models we imitate. Free will does exist. Batuman describes the circle’s encounter with Matej in almost fatalistic terms, as if nobody could help becoming his slave. And it’s true that resisting the lure of a Stavrogin or a Matej may seem like a superhuman feat, especially to someone in the throes of an unhappy obsession. In the end, however, as she herself proves, it is possible. The “demonic period” (279) having drawn to a close, she moves to Twin Peaks, cutting her ties with her classmates. When one of Matej’s former conquests invites her to a going-away party for him, she declines: “‘I know you guys still aren’t speaking, but it seems absurd not to invite you,’ Keren wrote. I didn’t go to the party” (280). It is ostensibly Matej who experiences a “deathlike conversion” (281) when he leaves the world of desire for a monastery on an island in the Adriatic, a choice that arouses contradictory feelings of bewilderment, revulsion, and admiration in his former classmates. But the last chapter of The Possessed is as much the story of Batuman’s conversion as of Matej’s. She, too, finds a safe haven, on the windswept heights of Twin Peaks; she, too, renounces her mediator, choosing to keep her distance from the Byronic seducer rather than attend the going-away party: . . . giant clouds rushed across the street as if in a hurry to get somewhere, occasionally revealing dramatic views of the city. The others all made fun of me for moving there—Ilan called it Wuthering Heights—but I didn’t care. I barely saw any of them anyway, once I stopped talking to Matej. (279)

Of course, renting an apartment in a (relatively) remote San Francisco neighborhood and avoiding one’s ex entails fewer sacrifices than taking a vow of silence and entering a monastic order. But though less radical, Batuman’s creative renunciation ultimately looks like the more authentic of the two. I was reminded of certain passages in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel in which Girard describes the serenity achieved by Stendhal’s Fabrice while imprisoned high in the Farnese Tower: “All these images of distance and elevation are the expression of a new and more detached vision, which is the creator’s own vision” (297). Matej, meanwhile, remains to the end an ambivalent character, as unsettling in the monk’s guise as in the role of the grad student Pied Piper. He somehow manages to make retiring from the world into a Napoleonic effort of the will. Though he appears to have “renounced narrative” (281),

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his dispatches from the monastery suggest that his ambition remains as outsized as ever: In the monastery I’m in charge of setting the tables and cleaning the dining hall. Until a few days ago I was the substitute, but now I’m already the main mess boy. You can see that, as usual, I make quick progress. . . . (282)

In the end, the notion that one could renounce narrative is itself a romantic fiction. For as Batuman points out, the stuff of narrative, at least in the novels of Stendhal and Dostoevsky (and, I would add, in those of Kundera), is mimetic desire itself. And since no human being can escape the necessity of mediation, positing a utopia beyond narrative is ultimately an empty gesture. We can never leave narrative behind; there is no such thing as an absolutely clean break with the world. All we can do is renounce a certain kind of narrative, so as to replace it with another kind. In her introductory chapter, Batuman hints intriguingly at her own process of renunciation: From Cervantes onward, the method of the novel has typically been imitation: the characters try to resemble the characters in the books they find meaningful. But what if you tried something different— what if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor? [. . .] What if you read Lost Illusions and . . . instead of living your own version of Lost Illusions, in order to someday write the same novel for twenty-first century America—what if you instead went to Balzac’s house and Madame Hanska’s estate . . . and then started writing? (25)

Thus did Batuman the wayward aspiring novelist become Batuman the brilliant author of a literary essay, one that has all the drive and structural complexity of a novel. The last chapter of The Possessed is, it seems to me, a blow-by-blow account of her metamorphosis. Matej’s grotesque, overly literal Girardianism occupies center stage in her reminiscence of grad school as mimetic inferno. Whether she realizes it or not, however, Batuman’s own retreat from the Stanford microcosm follows the Girardian story line point by point, though in a more fruitful and less spectacular way, enabling her to balance the twin requirements of worldliness and renunciation—to overcome, in other words, the very contradiction she identified at the heart of the Girardian enterprise.

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I read the concluding chapter of The Possessed with great excitement, gripped by the feeling that I had encountered a kindred spirit of sorts. For despite her open skepticism about its Christian thrust and claims to universality, Batuman’s personal engagement with mimetic theory struck me as truer to Girard’s project than perhaps even she suspected. Although her insistence on “the illusory and pernicious quality of mimetic desire” (264) makes little room for positive imitation, she takes for granted that a novel’s greatness is measured not by its freedom from “technical flaws” (261) but by its purchase on reality. In summoning personal experience to prove the worth of Demons, she shatters our image of the critic as an armchair detective who operates at a safe distance from literature: “I was sucked in, deeper than I ever expected” (23). She won her profound understanding of Dostoevsky’s fiction at the cost of months in the grip of obsession. Her narrative illustrates not only the dangers of living life through books but also the benefits that accrue when (and if) you emerge on the other side.

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Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works

“The Franco-Czech novelist and critic was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975.” So reads the terse biographical note on the back cover of Encounter. Notoriously discreet about his personal life, Kundera mistrusts journalists and biographers. He hasn’t given an interview in decades, and I’ve been told that when he returns to his native land he does so under an assumed name. Transparency is today’s watchword, and some view Kundera’s efforts to keep a low profi le with suspicion. But his reserve is best understood as a natural outgrowth of views put forth in The Art of the Novel, where he professes attachment to “nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes” (20), that is to say, to the novel as an art, an attitude, a stance. If Kundera adheres to an ethic of self-effacement inherited from Flaubert (“The man is nothing, the work—everything,” wrote the author of Madame Bovary in a letter to George Sand), his goal isn’t to shield his life from public scrutiny so much as to erect a firewall between his past and his oeuvre. In other words, Kundera’s caginess serves an aesthetic rather than censorial purpose. Novelists often use their own lives as material, but not always in the simple, one-to-one sense that many imagine. A perfidious sort of biographical criticism delights in flushing out the real-life model for such-and-such an incident or character, thereby undoing the author’s deliberate transpositions. To protect his books from these literary peeping Toms, a novelist has little choice but to draw the curtains, shrouding his life in mystery. In the interest of keeping those curtains drawn, I’ll highlight only the biographical facts that shed light on Kundera’s poetics, the first being that the author of The Joke was born on . . . April Fool’s Day. His father was a pianist and musicologist who studied with Janáček. No surprise, then, that in his early 20s Kundera devoted himself to composing music (he analyzes the formal architecture of an early piece in a dialogue with Christian Salmon in The Art of the Novel ). He also emerged as one of the leading Czech poets of his generation before shifting his focus to prose at about the age of 30. Those two early aesthetic influences—music and poetry—would later shape his approach to the novel. His distaste for romantic poses can be traced back to his “anti-lyric conversion,” but his novels nonetheless sink

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their roots in poetic, surrealist imagery. One need only recall the levitating circle dancers in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting or the dream-like encounter between the eighteenth century and the present in Slowness to see that Kundera never forgot the lessons he learned in his youth from Mayakovsky and Apollinaire. In his view, a good novel should possess the intensity and beauty of a poem while remaining resolutely anti-romantic. Meanwhile, drawing on his background as a musician and composer, Kundera has reshaped the novel along lines suggested by the work of Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. Instead of relying on detailed description and a smoothly linear plot structure, he favors jarring contrasts and multiple points of view. He brought the polyphonic form, which Broch had used to great effect in The Sleepwalkers, to an unprecedented level of perfection in Part Three of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, entitled “Angels,” where he weaves together fictional narrative, autobiographical fragment, literary analysis, historical fact, and magical realist fl ights of imagination. Unity is assured by a central theme or question (in this case, “What is an angel?”) rather than by the main storyline, and this frees the novelist to focus exclusively and uninterruptedly on the problems that fascinate him. Contemporary authors such as Benoît Duteurtre, Alain de Botton, and Adam Thirlwell have recognized the benefits of the Kunderian approach and have employed it with success in their own work. Few contemporary authors, if any, have seen their formal innovations adopted with such enthusiasm by the next generation. For years, however, Kundera’s émigré status thrust these aesthetic achievements into the background. In 1968, Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague, putting an end to the decade-long political thaw that Kundera would later describe as the happiest period in his life. When the new regime banned his books and had him removed from his teaching post, he earned his living by writing pseudonymous plays and even an astrology column. In 1975, the author left for France with his wife, Vera. The French welcomed Kundera with open arms, thinking him a model dissident. Perhaps the misunderstanding was inevitable: shocked by the Russian invasion, the Parisian intelligentisa hastened to express its solidarity with the Czech people. Kundera became a cause célèbre incarnate, his works a potent symbol in the Struggle Against Oppression. Upon its release in France in 1968, The Joke, hailed by Aragon, was read and understood as a denunciation of Stalinism. Life Is Elsewhere and Farewell Waltz received similar treatment. From the beginning, Kundera took an uncompromising stand against such interpretations: “Spare me your Stalinism, please,” he said. “The Joke is a love story!” Even when they do explore political issues, his books adopt a

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nonpolitical vantage point. In Life Is Elsewhere, for instance, revolutionary violence and lyrical poetry spring from the same youthful resentment, while Slowness examines politicians as “dancers” motivated by the aesthetic (rather than political) imperative to transform their lives into works of art. Kundera’s aversion to what he calls “political kitsch” sometimes rankles in a country so deeply attached to its revolutionary heritage. A few years ago, I spoke with a French woman who confessed that she no longer reads Kundera’s novels: “I liked that he was a dissident,” she said. “Now that the Berlin Wall has fallen, I find him much less interesting.” This attitude is, unfortunately, very common: “For Kundera, the nature of humanity is influenced or even altered by communism,” writes Jane Smiley in her essay Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. “One of the problems with this idea is that when communism vanishes, Kundera’s insights into humans under communism lose immediacy, too.”1 One might argue, however, that far from diminishing the relevance of Kundera’s insights, the end of Communism freed his novels at last from the straitjacket of political readings. His most loyal fans have understood all along that Kundera trains his spotlight on a given period not with an eye to historical or sociological documentation but rather for the purpose of revealing latent aspects of the human condition. In Life Is Elsewhere, for example, “Jaromil is not a product of communism. Communism only illuminated an otherwise hidden side, it released something which under different circumstances would merely have slumbered in peace.”2 For all his frustration with the French tendency to idealize rebellion, Kundera is a champion of French culture. As he wrote in a text entitled “There’s Such a Thing as Francophobia”: My experiences and tastes are those of a Central European [. . .] But in the middle of my life, my wife and I emigrated to France. This is the most decisive event of my entire existence, and it is the key to my work and my life.

He authored the works for which he is most famous, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in what he calls his “second homeland.” Written in his adopted tongue, Kundera’s “French Cycle”—the novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance—disappointed those who preferred their author wreathed in the pathos of the émigré, but they also displayed an exquisite formal mastery and an increasingly sure French style. Many readers took him to task for his decision to write in French. Czechs saw the switch as a betrayal, and I remember reading some unkind remarks

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on the style of Identity in a book by Philippe Sollers. In both France and the United States, the literary set too often assumes that a writer proves his worth by cultivating an inimitable style, as if literature could be reduced to a language game. Kundera labors to rid his prose of needless surface effects, and for his pains he is accused of having a poor ear. Neither lyrical nor minimalist, his way of writing “shows instead of showing off,” as Benoît Duteurtre put it. Kundera’s essay Encounter was issued in 2009 by his French publisher Gallimard to considerable critical fanfare. The release came in the wake of the so-called Kundera Affair, which generated a brief, planetary bout of media hysteria in October 2008. On the basis of a deposition unearthed in Communist archives, the author was accused of having denounced a Western spy to the local Czech police in his youth. Many journalists and editors ignored the presumption of innocence (“A great writer’s complicity in the face of Stalinism” read the subtitle of Norman Manea’s article in The New Republic) but prominent writers and historians came to the author’s defense, and the brouhaha died away. The irony, of course, is that Kundera became the victim of trends he critiques in his novels and essays: obsessive focus on the personal lives of authors at the expense of their work; the over-politicization of art; and the public’s love of scandal, fueled by a media indifferent to the individual’s privacy. In an era where technological progress, political and religious fanaticism, and a growing “misomusy” have put authors’ rights in danger as never before, Kundera has consistently defended the author’s exclusive and inalienable ownership of his work. Recently, at a Parisian soirée where intellectuals and writers gathered en masse, I heard an American novelist holding forth on a production of The Crucible, which he mocked because the director had followed Miller’s stage directions too closely. The recent decision to publish a version of A Farewell to Arms that includes 47 endings discarded by Hemingway evidences the same, scandalous disregard for the author’s wishes. It is against such betrayals that Kundera protests in his essays. In 2011, Kundera’s entire body of work was released in France in a two-volume, definitive edition by the Pléiade collection, enshrining his novels as contemporary classics. With the Communist period in Europe two decades behind us, assessment of Kundera’s contribution can now proceed along aesthetic rather than political lines. In Encounter, Kundera writes of Thomas Mann “laboring to get across the humor in his novels” (53). Alas, “the gravity of his situation hopelessly obscured the seductive smile of his books” (53). For years, Kundera’s politicized background likewise conferred an unwarranted solemnity on his work, which delights us today with its playfulness and irony. Far from being a handicap, that

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humor is the very quality that makes him worthy of comparison to the great classics—Cervantes, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Proust—with whom he rubs shoulders in this essay. When readers unfamiliar with Kundera’s books ask me for a recommendation, I often suggest Immortality, which I regard as an underappreciated masterpiece. Like Slowness, the novel interleaves two plots that take place in different historical periods. Agnes, the heroine, is extremely touching. And to accompany her, Kundera has created his largest and most fascinating cast of characters, including the lubricious Professor Avenarius, the radio presenter Bernard Bertrand, and Goethe, who converses in heaven with his friend Ernest Hemingway. In the novel’s fift h section (entitled “Chance”), the author deploys his art of novelistic polyphony with superb skill. His other masterwork is, of course, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The novel takes a more serious tone than even The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and yet its most tragic moments hover precariously on the brink of comedy. In Part Six, Kundera recounts the demise of Stalin’s third son, Yakov, who preferred death to performing latrine duty in a World War II prison camp. Yakov’s unhappy fate inspires an extended meditation on kitsch, which Kundera memorably defines as the “absolute negation of shit.” The novel’s denouement radiates calm and peace. Tomas and Tereza leave the city and find happiness in the countryside, among the animals and villagers. It’s a pastoral of heartbreaking beauty, because the reader knows in advance that the couple will die together in a car accident. The book’s last lines offer perhaps the best example of that very Kunderian mixture of happiness and melancholy. A sad but smiling gaze.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1 We may contrast the saccharine idealism of Hollywood with the subtle intelligence and humor displayed by Antonioni in the famous rock concert scene in Blow-Up, in which the protagonist hurls himself into the midst of a screaming crowd in order to seize the broken neck of an electric guitar, only to discard his prize moments later when he finds himself alone on the sidewalk. 2 See Oded Shenkar, Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010); and Michael J. O’Brien, Alex Bentley, and Mark Earls, I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behavior (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

Chapter 2 1 Harold Bloom (ed.), Milan Kundera (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publications, 2003), 1. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 See Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). W. H. Auden, originally commissioned to write the lyrics for the popular musical Man of La Mancha, was relieved of his duties when he insisted that Quixote explicitly reject his foolish quest at the conclusion. 4 Laughable Loves, trans. Suzanne Rappaport, revised Aaron Asher and Milan Kundera (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999). 5 Philip Roth, introduction to Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), xxi. 6 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 2. 7 According to my conversations with the author, however, Kundera read Girard only after his arrival in France in 1975, and the short-story collection in which this tale appears was published in 1968. 8 See Jean-Michel Oughourlian’s brilliant analysis of Rostand’s play in The Puppet of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 117–21. 9 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 26.

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10 Jacques-Jude Lépine, “Phaedra’s labyrinth as the paradigm of passion: Racine’s aesthetic formulation of mimetic desire,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 1 (Spring 1994), 53. 11 Sam Sommers, Situations Matter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), 184. 12 Eva Le Grand, Kundera or The Memory of Desire, trans. Lin Burman (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1999), 10. 13 François Ricard, preface to Oeuvre, by Milan Kundera (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2011), xvi. 14 Ibid., xvi. 15 François Ricard, Agnes’s Final Afternoon (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004). 16 John O’Brien, Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995). 17 Maria Nemcova Banerjee, Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 67. 18 France Culture, November 11, 1989, “Tout arrive,” conversation between Milan Kundera and René Girard, http://yrol.free.fr/LITTERA/GIRARD/ entretien.htm.

Chapter 3 1 Some parts of my analysis of “Dr. Havel” appeared in a different form in my article “The labyrinth of values: Triangular desire in Milan Kundera’s Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” Heliopolis, VIII, 1 (2010), 111–23. 2 External and internal mediation are terms that Girard coins in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel to distinguish between two fundamental modes of imitation. In external mediation, the model is, precisely, external to the disciple’s sphere of action. A respectful spiritual distance is maintained between them. The imitator (let’s call him Josh) would never dream of coveting the same possessions as his authority figure or social superior (we’ll call him David) whom he openly venerates, and their relationship is therefore untroubled by conflict. In internal mediation, by contrast, Josh operates on the same spiritual plane as David. Now the disciple feels authorized to relate to the model, whom he imitates surreptitiously, on equal terms: they have become peers. With no laws or taboos to stop him, Josh may end up pursuing the same goals as David, in which case he begins to view David as an obstacle to the fulfillment of the very desires the latter has inspired in him. David in turn is likely to perceive Josh as an unwelcome interloper or usurper. Soon each party simultaneously excites and imitates the other’s desire, each standing in the way of its realization by the other, like two pedestrians who, in trying to give way, end up repeatedly bumping into each other. 3 Kundera has written two major plays: The Keeper of the Keys and Jacques and his Master and, as a screenwriter, he authored the script for the film

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version of The Joke, as well as an adaptation of his own short story, “I, lamentable God.” Guy Scarpetta, afterword to Kundera ou La mémoire du désir, by Eva Le Grand (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan), 1995. René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005 (ed.), Robert Doran (Stanford: Stanford Press, 2008a), 36. Crébillon fi ls, Les Egarements du cœur et de l’esprit (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993). René Girard, “Le jeu des secrets interdits,” Le Nouvel Observateur, November 21, 1986, 102. Ibid., 102. See Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009). David Lodge, The Year of Henry James, The Story of a Novel (London: Penguin Group, 2007), 1. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid. Ibid., 15.

Chapter 4 1 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 3. 2 Nathalie Sarraute, L’ère du soupçon, Essais sur le roman (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1956), 28. English translation: The Age of Suspicion (New York: George Braziller, 1990). 3 In his essay on Kakfa’s letters to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Elias Canetti makes the connection between Kafka and Dostoevsky apparent by underlining the former’s preoccupation with the theme of humiliation (Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 80–4. 4 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 94. 5 The phrase appears in The Art of the Novel (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 125: “The destruction of the Hapsburg Empire, and then, after 1945, Austria’s cultural marginality and the political nonexistence of other countries, make Central Europe a promonitory mirror showing the possible fate of all of Europe. Central Europe: A laboratory of twilight.” 6 Milan Kundera, “La Frontière invisible” (interview with Guy Scarpetta), Le Nouvel observateur, January 15, 1998. 7 Massimo Rizzante, “L’art de la fugue,” Le magazine littéraire, April 2011 (507), 79. 8 Guy Scarpetta, L’âge d’or du roman (Paris: Grasset, 1996). 9 René Girard, with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture (London: Continuum, 2008b), 45.

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10 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Stephen Hudson, http://gutenberg. net.au/ebooks03/0300691.txt. 11 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: MacMillan Company, 1918), 87. 12 Ibid., 88. 13 Ibid., 89.

Chapter 5 1 Girard, “Le Jeu des secrets interdits,” 102. 2 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ed.), Cedric Watts (London: Wordsworth Editions, 2002), Act I, scene 1. 3 Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire, 164–5. 4 Elizabeth Pochoda, introduction to The Farewell Party, by Milan Kundera (New York: Penguin, 1986), xiii. 5 Andrew Meltzoff, “Imitation, gaze, and intentions,” in Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion (ed.), Scott Garrels (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 62. 6 Angelo Rinaldi, “Peu et Prou,” L’Express, January 26, 1995; Philippe Sollers, L’Année du tigre: journal de l’année 1998 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1999). 7 François Ricard, “Le regard des amants,” afterword to L’identité, by Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2000), 215. 8 Ibid., 215. 9 Martine Boyer-Weinmann, Lire Milan Kundera (Paris: Armand Colin, 2009), 84. 10 François Ricard, afterword to L´Identité, by Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2000), 218. 11 Patrick Besnier, preface to Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). 12 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 275. 13 Ricard, afterword, 218. 14 See Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, Part IV. 15 Ibid., 122. 16 François Ricard, afterword, 214–15.

Chapter 6 1 Hervé Aubron, “Le Kitsch universel,” Le Magazine littéraire, April 2011, 83. 2 See Jean-Michel Oughourlian, Psychopolitics: Conversations with Trevor Cribben Merrill (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012).

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3 Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 226. 4 See Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial. 5 René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 346. 6 Ibid., 335.

Chapter 7 1 Milan Kundera, “Diabolum,” in Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, trans. Bernard Lotholary (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1995), 245. 2 Paul Dumouchel, Le Sacrifice inutile: essai sur la violence politique (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), 14. 3 Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Two footnotes: On the double necessity of Girard and Gans,” Anthropoetics II, June 1996, www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ AP0201/bert.htm. 4 Ibid. 5 The phrase is from Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where it was pointed out to me by my friend Benoît Chantre. 6 Philip Roth, “Afterword: A talk with the author,” in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera (New York: Penguin, 1987), 232. 7 See Oughourlian, Psychopolitics.

Chapter 8 1 See François Ricard’s “Biographie de l’oeuvre” in Œuvre, v. I, by Milan Kundera (Paris: Editions Gallimard, La Pléiade, 2011), 1408–9. 2 François Ricard, “L’Idylle et l’idylle,” afterword to L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1989), 457–8. “The fallen idyll: A rereading of Milan Kundera,” trans. Jane Everett, Review of Contemporary Fiction, New York, IX–2, 1989, 17–26. 3 Ricard, afterword, 458–9. 4 Ibid., 462. 5 Ibid., 470. 6 Ibid., 471. 7 Ibid., 472. 8 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 307–8. 9 Ibid., 290. 10 Brian McDonald, “Violence and the lamb slain: An interview with René Girard,” Touchstone Magazine, December 2003, www.touchstonemag. com/archives/article.php?id=16–10–040-i. 11 Ibid.

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12 Ibid. 13 Cesáreo Bandera, The Humble Story of Don Quixote, Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006). 14 See René Girard, “The mimetic desire of Paolo and Francesca” in To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 15 Chvatik, Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, 38. 16 Ibid., 39. 17 Ibid., 49. 18 From the “Note de l’auteur pour la première édition tchèque de Risibles amour après la libération du pays de l’occupation russe,” in Chvatik, Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera. 19 “Entretien avec Antoine Gallimard,” cited in Milan Kundera, Oeuvre II (Paris: Gallimard Éditions, La Pléiade, 2011), 1201. 20 François Ricard, “Mortalité d’Agnes,” afterword to Immortalité, by Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1993), 535. 21 Jonathan Livernois, “Gamineries,” L’Atelier du Roman no. 46, June 2006, 46–53. 22 Chvatik, Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, 251.

Chapter 9 1 Bandera, The Humble Story of Don Quixote. 2 Milan Kundera, “Entretien avec Normand Biron,” Liberté no. 121, 1979, www.erudit.org/culture/liberte1026896/liberte1448919/60129ac.pdf. 3 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 299.

Postscript 1 Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

Appendix 1 Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 535. 2 Milan Kundera, preface to Life Is Elsewhere (New York: Penguin, 1987), vi.

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Aubron, Hervé. “Le Kitsch universel.” Le Magazine littéraire, April 2011: 84. Bandera, Cesáreo. The Humble Story of Don Quixote, Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Banerjee, Maria Nemcova. Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Bertonneau, Thomas F. “Two footnotes: On the double necessity of Girard and Gans.” Anthropoetics II, June 1996, www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/AP0201/ bert.htm. Besnier, Patrick. Preface to Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Bloom, Harold (ed.). Milan Kundera. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publications, 2003. Boyer-Weinmann, Martine. Lire Milan Kundera. Paris: Armand Colin, 2009. Canetti, Elias. Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman. London: Vintage Books, 2005. Close, Anthony. The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Crébillon fi ls. Les Egarements du cœur et de l’esprit. Paris: Le Seuil, 1993. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground, trans. Constance Garnett. New York: MacMillan Company, 1918. Dumouchel, Paul. Le Sacrifice inutile: essai sur la violence politique. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Gans, Eric. A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art. Aurora: The Davies Group, 2011. Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. — “Le jeu des secrets interdits.” Le Nouvel Observateur, November 21, 1986: 54–5. — Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. — To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

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Index addiction 92–3, 110 Amadis of Gaul 10, 16, 33 Aristophanes 52 see also Plato Balzac, Honoré de 60, 69, 75, 105, 130, 154 Banville, Théodore 79–80 Barthes, Roland 6 beauty 2, 16, 29, 153 Bloom, Harold 9–11 Broch, Hermann 18, 19, 31, 75, 93

see also feeling envy 4, 5, 17, 34–6, 48, 60, 66, 158 feeling 27–9 see also emotion Foucault, Michel 6 freedom 40 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 60, 67 graphomania 56–8, 60–1 hedonism 3–5, 12, 42, 70, 97, 115

catharsis 18, 136, 138, 141 Cervantes, Miguel de 9–11, 17, 18, 20, 33, 36, 64, 65, 100, 169 Chekhov, Anton 60 Coleridge, Samuel 10 Communism 41, 42, 66, 124, 133, 171 conversion 29, 148, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167, 172 Crébillon fils 40–, 73 Cyrano de Bergerac 16, 25, 98–100, 116 Dangerous Liasons 5 Denon, Vivant 57, 68, 110, 163 Diderot, Denis 18, 63, 69, 110 disillusionment 26, 143, 152 Don Juan 10, 11, 12, 15, 21, 30, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 67, 71, 154, 156 Don Quixote 100 Don Quixote 9–11, 16, 17, 28, 33, 35, 93, 151, 160, 169 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 30, 36, 37, 42, 63, 65, 66, 71, 77, 79–81, 110, 116, 117, 148, 152, 161, 169 dreams 83, 111–14, 129–30 emotion 20, 34, 136

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Jakobson, Roman 6 Kafka, Franz 18, 33, 41, 60, 65–6, 113, 132, 154 Kakutani, Michiko 72 Kenobi, Obi-Wan 29 Keroac, Jack 11 kitsch 135–9 Laclos, Choderlos de 163 laughter 18, 138 litost 75–7, 80–2, 83, 92 Lodge, David 58–9 lyricism 81, 158–9 Mann, Thomas 31 Mao Zedong 139 Meltzoff, Andrew 91 Molière 10, 20 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 10 Mukařovský, Jan 6 Musil, Robert 18, 31, 75, 93 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 73, 105, 109, 132, 154

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Oedipus 170–2 Ortega y Gasset, José 10 Paul 172 see also Saul Picasso, Pablo 63, 120 Plato 52 Proust, Marcel 30, 54, 63, 65, 67, 74–5, 93, 110, 148, 158, 172, 173 Racine, Jean 19 ressentiment 70, 76 Rimbaud, Arthur 67, 79, 80 Roth, Philip 10, 11, 93, 138 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 134

Sade, Marquis de 69, 70 Saul 172 see also Paul Shakespeare, William 86–7 Simeon Stylites 109 Sommers, Sam 20 Stendhal 30, 63, 68, 148, 163–4 Sterne, Laurence 18, 63 Stravinsky, Igor 131–2 Tolstoy, Leo 77, 155, 170 totalitarianism 65, 113, 137, 145 Tristan 156 Vančura, Vladislav 6 Velázquez, Diego 63

sacrifice 54, 126–31

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