A review by dessuarez
The Joke by Milan Kundera

5.0

There are plenty of ways to read a novel, especially one written by a famous (sometimes infamous) postmodernist writer; here’s how I’m reading this: essentially, it’s about meaning-making and personal identity in a totalitarian society where an all-encompassing system of meaning is strictly enforced. It is existential, basically.

I have to define that because there are plenty of things in the book that irked me — Helena’s humiliating fate bothered me, Lucie’s muteness frustrated me — I am not excusing it exactly; I think that for a polyphonic novel, it would not have hurt his design to give Lucie narratorial power; I think that at the very least Helena could have been afforded more pages for her narrative; and I can’t help but compare Kundera’s polyphony with, say, Faulkner’s where it is used to give a voice to those traditionally denied one — but for the purposes of this discussion I am claiming all of this a part of Kundera’s design. Not a justification of the sexism, just a larger message wherein these sexist representations exist.

And having gotten all of that out of my system, I can say: holy shit. This was so powerful. For as long as I remember being conscious, I have problematized the essence of who I am. What does it mean to be “me”? This was hard enough in a country with a (loosely enforced) bill of rights, but can you imagine having to come up with a self-definition in a totalitarian regime where the very process of meaning-making is policed?

I had a glimpse in Orwell, but this was much more effective because it’s polyphonic. Each of the 4 narrators are trying to place themselves inside a society that is starkly different to their initially long-held beliefs, and you can read how each of them are trying to renegotiate their systems of meaning in order to create a sort of continuity with the totalitarian meaning system that has become dogma. The process is interesting to read because, more than just condemn totalitarianism, Kundera also asks: what is the difference, really, between Historical Materialism, God, the human mind? Coherence is comforting, so we seek it wherever possible, but it’s not necessarily achievable. Life is, by nature, incoherent. Absurd — to use Camus’s words. The more we try to make sense of it, the less we will actually have time to do things that are more important, like being, and feeling, and hanging out with friends, and falling in love.

And so I go back to Lucie. The mute protagonist. The biggest joke is on her. First, she existed only in Ludvik’s delusions as a symbolic escape from communist-defined history which has chewed up and regurgitated his life as he knew it, filling him with misery and vengeance from which he desperately needs a relief. Then, after revealing the real history of her life in Kostka’s narration, Lucie finally exercises autonomy by urging Kostka to make love to her (this is a massive step considering she is a victim of so much abuse), but Kostka’s Christian meaning system prevents him from pursuing it any further…

What I’m saying is that if our narrators weren’t so obsessed with trying to make life mean something, specifically something that is somehow consistent with the totalitarian dogma, then they would have been able to save Lucie from her ill fate of being married to a brute who constantly abuses her. Likewise, Jaroslav would have been able to form a better relationship with his son. Similarly, Helena would have actually been able to find love in that younger boy if she didn’t equate losing both of her party-coded lovers with her life “splitting apart”.

Cause here’s the thing with trying to find coherence within a larger meaning system (whether religion or communism, what have you), ultimately, we do it so we don’t have to be responsible for what’s happening around us. We should be responsible for what’s happening around us. That’s the real meaning of autonomy — the real antithesis of totalitarianism.

IN CONCLUSION, and I learned this the hard way, often the problem of our existence is precisely what prevents us from existing. Fuck if I know what my life means or even who I am, but seeing other people is not as hard. They’re real in a way that my existential brain will not allow myself to be.