The Joke (Milan Kundera)

This is a nearly random one-shot novel that was referenced in one of Mark Steyn's National Review columns.  No association with anything else-- except, when I see well-read people refer to something, I feel like I should know what they're talking about.

For the first half of the book, I was viewing it as a terrifying illustration of the operation of a Communist state-- the point that Steyn was making.  But the introduction warned against treating it as a political novel.  The introduction was right.  By the end, I viewed it much more as an exploration of different viewpoints of life in general, and the paradoxes of filtering reality through our own subjective consciousness. 

It's also a good thing that I read the book in under 48 hours.  The shifting-narrator structure wouldn't have made sense otherwise, and I never would have caught on to the reemergence of characters from their fleeting mentions in prior narrations.  It felt like an episode of LOST at times.  Very effective.

Bullet points:

• Much romantic life-- at least each individual side of an unrequited love-- is a struggle to impose a coherent narrative on what is objectively unconnected events and actions.


• In a related way, the political project of Communism is the imposition of control of control and coherence on what is necessarily (because it depends on the actions of independent agents) a series of isolated social interactions.  In the same way the lover is seeking bliss, the Communist seeks to achieve social perfection.


• This involves the replacement of organic culture with a simulation instead-- a simulation designed toward the imagined utopia of the future.  It is believed that the artificial imitation can do the job of culture just as well as the genuine article, as long as it is simply successfully inserted into the correct social position.


• This is most notable-- and off-putting-- when religious ceremonies are stamped out in favor of Party social rituals.  The actions are drained of their content, leaving only a shell of an empty formalism.


• Perhaps the most drastic imposition is forced labor camps, designed to simulate acts of penance against a controlling moral authority.


• I was greatly impressed by the plot twists sprinkled throughout the story-- especially the revelation that Ludvik was pursuing Helena purely as revenge against his enemy Zemanek.  Hidden very well until the last name was suddenly mentioned.  It's also possible that Ludvik was originally marked for special attention by the Party at school because of his defense of Kostka's religiosity.  The only one that didn't work for me organically in the story was Lucie's relationship with Kostka after Ludvik's relationship with her ended  It was simply too coincidental that those two characters' paths would cross separately from their prior relationships with Ludvik.


• I would have enjoyed a chapter narrated by Zemanek, covering his perspective of Ludvik's trial, and the gradual lessening of his intense devotion to Party.


• I enjoyed the explanation that the next generation at the school was entirely uninterested in the battles fought by the prior classes and their devotion to the Party.  Another instance of an attempt to impose an overarching logic onto a reality that simply refuses to support our aims.  This was also illustrated well by Jaroslav's son blowing off the folk ceremony.


• Ludvik's final identification of the "mistakes" that controlled his life was also interesting.  What we call "errors" can only be so against a backdrop of correct actions-- defined in reference to the logic we're trying to impose or extract from the world.  But from the perspective of History, all events are simply events.  The "errors" are the history-- and there is nothing else.


• And this is the theme of the book: that the world does not react to our grand designs for it.
  

Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs).  Both are false faiths.  In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.  The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting.  No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten.