Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Book of Imitation and Desire
The Book of Imitation and Desire
The Book of
Imitation and Desire
Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard
N E W Y OR K • L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
www.bloomsbury.com
EISBN: 978-1-4411-9546-3
â•…â•…
â•…
Foreword ix
Author’s Preface xii
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)
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. This, 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.
“Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women” 3
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 world-
famous 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:
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:
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
6 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
“Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women” 7
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.
2
“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
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
Into the Labyrinth of Values 11
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 infinitely 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)
12 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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,
Into the Labyrinth of Values 13
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
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)
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
Into the Labyrinth of Values 15
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 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,
16 The Book of Imitation and Desire
. . . 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)
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
18 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
20 The Book of Imitation and Desire
(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 first. 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
Into the Labyrinth of Values 21
Metamorphoses of Kristyna
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 high-
heeled 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)
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.
24 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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)
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 filled 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 fill 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.
26 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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.
Into the Labyrinth of Values 27
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 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
Into the Labyrinth of Values 29
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
30 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 skirt-
chaser 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,
shifting 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
Into the Labyrinth of Values 31
“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.
3
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
34 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 fixed
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)
From Imitation to Rivalry 35
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
From Imitation to Rivalry 37
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.
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.
38 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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,
From Imitation to Rivalry 39
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
40 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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:
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 eighteenth-
century 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 first-
person novel meets the girl he desires in the Tuileries Garden. He wants to
attract her attention but she greets him with sheer indifference:
From Imitation to Rivalry 41
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 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 defiling 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
44 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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.
This first, 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 first 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. This 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 finds 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)
From Imitation to Rivalry 45
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:
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 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)
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.
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)
From Imitation to Rivalry 49
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 first 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
50 The Book of Imitation and Desire
. . . 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:
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?
52 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 first encounter with Paul
in the context of her relationship with Agnes. The history of that sibling
relationship explains why Laura finds 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.
From Imitation to Rivalry 53
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
54 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 infiltrate 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,
filling 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
From Imitation to Rivalry 55
or an object that stands in for the rival and absorbs the violence that the
adversaries would otherwise inflict 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 empty-
handed:
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)
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)
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
From Imitation to Rivalry 57
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:
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:
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
From Imitation to Rivalry 59
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.
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,
From Imitation to Rivalry 61
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.
4
Strategies of revelation
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 filtering 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 first-
to 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
The Model as Obstacle 65
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
66 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
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 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.”
The Model as Obstacle 69
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 profile 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
70 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 fixation 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:
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
The Model as Obstacle 71
. . . 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:
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
The Model as Obstacle 73
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
74 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 fills his head and only his
head, desire as cerebral fascination, as idée fixe, mystical madness, the
certainty that this body, and no other, is the one fated to fulfill 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 predefined 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.
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
The Model as Obstacle 75
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.
76 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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.
The Model as Obstacle 77
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.
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:
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:
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
The Model as Obstacle 79
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
82 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 filmmaker 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.
5
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:
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,
Jealousy and its Metaphors 85
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)
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:
86 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)
. . . 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.
88 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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)
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:
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.
90 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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)
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)
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)
Jealousy and its Metaphors 93
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. This 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 defines 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
final analysis, then, Kundera’s phenomenology of jealousy reveals this
emotion as intensely painful, circular, and relentless; in other words, as
infernal.
94 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
Jealousy and its Metaphors 95
aroused, and he tore off the girl’s underpants and entered her” (270). This
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 France 6, 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
96 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 fool-
proof, 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
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:
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:
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:
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)
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)
Jealousy and its Metaphors 101
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 first 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:
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
Jealousy and its Metaphors 103
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.
6
Sex as theater
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. This 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:
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:
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
108 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
The Quadrille of Desire 109
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 fulfillment 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 fixed 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
110 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
The Quadrille of Desire 111
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)
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 fulfillment of a wish.” Here,
the dream is neither a fulfillment 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:
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
The Quadrille of Desire 113
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)
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, stifling 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.
116 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 fixation 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:
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 film.
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
The Quadrille of Desire 117
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
118 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 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)
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)
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 softly” (112). Unfortunately for him, Sabina
120 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
124 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 fill the role of the symmetrical imitative
At the Heart of the Labyrinth 127
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)
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
130 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
At the Heart of the Labyrinth 131
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 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
132 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
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)
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
134 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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.
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
At the Heart of the Labyrinth 135
In The Joke, Marketa models her attitude toward the soon-to-be outlawed
Ludvik on the Soviet film 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 film
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
136 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 film 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 filmmaker could aspire,
just as the ancient playwright aimed to arouse fear and pity.
At the Heart of the Labyrinth 137
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:
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:
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
At the Heart of the Labyrinth 139
in a sinister, Disneyized reality very much like the one of Soviet cinema or
today’s mind-numbing Hollywood blockbusters.
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
142 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 ill-
defined 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.
8
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
144 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 shifting according to the
external pressures of the hour.
Repudiating the Model 145
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
146 The Book of Imitation and 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)
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)
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
148 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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)
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
Repudiating the Model 151
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
152 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 fulfillment. 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
Repudiating the Model 153
conclusions are bound to be banal since they all quite literally repeat
the same thing.8
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 fill.
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
156 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 filled 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
Repudiating the Model 157
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
158 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 first 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 first glance, we find 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. This gives Kundera’s idea a regrettably philosophical
flavor: the “lyrical” individual remains self-involved while the mature,
Repudiating the Model 159
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:
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
Repudiating the Model 161
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 fifties 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:
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
Repudiating the Model 163
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
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.
Repudiating the Model 165
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 filth 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 film with a happy ending that they can watch from afar. Images
166 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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. Through the porthole he saw, far off in the sky,
a low wooden fence and a brick house with a slender fir 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
Repudiating the Model 167
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.
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
170 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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)
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
172 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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 Jean-
Michel 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 half-
hidden 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.
Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman
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
Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman 177
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:
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.
Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman 181
“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 profile 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
184 Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works
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 flights 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
Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works 185
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
186 Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works
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
fifth 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.
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
version of The Joke, as well as an adaptation of his own short story, “I,
lamentable God.”
4 Guy Scarpetta, afterword to Kundera ou La mémoire du désir, by Eva Le
Grand (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan), 1995.
5 René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism,
1953–2005 (ed.), Robert Doran (Stanford: Stanford Press, 2008a), 36.
6 Crébillon fils, Les Egarements du cœur et de l’esprit (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993).
7 René Girard, “Le jeu des secrets interdits,” Le Nouvel Observateur,
November 21, 1986, 102.
8 Ibid., 102.
9 See Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009).
10 David Lodge, The Year of Henry James, The Story of a Novel (London:
Penguin Group, 2007), 1.
11 Ibid., 13–14.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 15.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
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).
Notes 193
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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
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.
Bibliography
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 fils. 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.
196 Bibliography
McDonald, Brian. “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.
Meltzoff, Andrew. “Imitation, gaze, and intentions.” In Mimesis and Science:
Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and
Religion, ed. Scott Garrels, 55–74. East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 2011.
Merrill, Trevor Cribben. “The labyrinth of values: triangular desire in Milan
Kundera’s Dr. Havel after twenty years.” Heliopolis, VIII, 1 (2010): 111–23.
O’Brien, John. Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections. New
York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1995.
O’Brien, Michael J., Bentley, Alex, and Earls, Mark. I’ll Have What She’s
Having: Mapping Social Behavior. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.
Oughourlian, Jean-Michel. The Puppet of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
— The Genesis of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb. East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 2009.
— Psychopolitics: Conversations with Trevor Cribben Merrill, trans. Trevor
Cribben Merrill. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012.
Pochoda, Elizabeth. Introduction to The Farewell Party, by Milan Kundera,
ix–xiv. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Proust, Marcel. Time Regained, trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto &
Windus, 1951.
Ricard, François. “The fallen idyll: a rereading of Milan Kundera,” trans. Jane
Everett, Review of Contemporary Fiction, New York, IX–2, 1989: 17–26.
—“Mortalité d’Agnès.” Afterword to l’Immortalité, by Milan Kundera. Paris:
Gallimard Folio, 1993.
—“Le regard des amants.” Afterword to L’identité, by Milan Kundera. Paris:
Gallimard Folio, 2000.
— Agnes’s Final Afternoon: An Essay on the Work of Milan Kundera, trans.
Aaron Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2004.
— Preface to Oeuvre, by Milan Kundera, ix–xviii. Paris: Éditions Gallimard,
2011.
Rinaldi, Angelo. “Peu et Prou.” L’Express, January 26, 1995: 61.
Rizzante, Massimo. “L’art de la fugue.” Le magazine littéraire, April 2011: 68.
Roth, Philip. Introduction to Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
— “Afterword: A talk with the author.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
by Milan Kundera, 229–37. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Sarraute, Nathalie. The Age of Suspicion. New York: George Braziller, 1990.
Scarpetta, Guy. Afterword to Kundera ou La mémoire du désir, by Eva Le
Grand. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1995.
198 Bibliography