The Book of Imitation and Desire

The Book of Imitation and Desire
The Book of
Imitation and Desire
Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard
Trevor Cribben Merrill
N E W Y OR K • L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
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© Trevor Cribben Merrill, 2013
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Merrill, Trevor Cribben.
The book of imitation and desire : reading Milan Kundera with René Girard /
Trevor Cribben Merrill.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-1865-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)â•… 1.â•‡ Kundera, Milan–Criticism
and interpretation.â•… 2.â•‡ Imitation in literature.â•… 3.â•‡ Desire in literature.â•… I.â•‡ Title.
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It could be said that I am playing at something that Martin lives. Sometimes
I have the feeling that the whole of my polygamous life is a consequence of
my imitation of other men; although I am not denying that I have taken a
liking for this imitation.
Milan Kundera, “The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire”
Contents
Foreword ix
Author’s Preface xii
1 “Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women” 1
2 Into the Labyrinth of Values 9

The transfiguration of the object 9
Metamorphoses of Kristyna 21
“An imitation of feeling” 26
3 From Imitation to Rivalry 33

The shift from admiration to envy 33
Deceit, desire, and the plight of the aging Don Juan 37
Rivalry and the transfiguration of the object 43
“The younger sister imitated the elder” 48
Publish or perish 56
4 The Model as Obstacle 63

Strategies of revelation 63
The art of polyphonic comparison 68
A little theory of resentment 74
Litost in the underground 77
5 Jealousy and its Metaphors 83

The game gone awry 83
The metaphors of jealousy 89
“A test that gauged her susceptibility to seduction” 94
6 The Quadrille of Desire 105

Sex as theater 105
Acute rivalry and homosexual attraction 116
The geometry of sadomasochism 118
viii Contents
7 At the Heart of the Labyrinth 123

“The thousand-headed dragon” 123
“The cement of their brotherhood” 126
The two temptations 131
“The absolute denial of shit” 134
First time as tragedy, second time as farce 139
8 Repudiating the Model 143

Eduard’s smile 143
From hatred to compassion 148
Karenin’s smile 152
The birth of a novelist 157
Liberating exiles 163
9 Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel 169
Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman 175

Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works 183
Notes 189
Bibliography 195
Index 199
Foreword by Andrew McKenna
In a letter from prison Dietrich Bonhoffer complains about books “whose

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

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

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

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

of literature.” For some time after I discovered them in college, I admired
Kundera’s novels so passionately that I wished more than anything that
I had written them myself. I have come to realize since that the aesthetic
pleasure and sheer sport to be had from, as Girard puts it, formalizing the
“implicit or already half-explicit systems” in those novels is more rewarding
than would be the tedious exercise of rewriting them à la Pierre Menard. As
Proust observes in Time Regained, “one can only recreate what one loves by
repudiating it.”
Many people have contributed to this book in one way or another, and
I owe thanks to them all. Benoît and Emmanuelle Chantre generously
supported the research that gave rise to this project. Jean-Michel
Oughourlian imparted his knowledge of mimetic theory and his love of
a good laugh during our many work sessions. His wife, Helen, was a kind
and welcoming hostess. Eric Gans read through the early drafts of this
project; his expert guidance and insights shaped later versions. François
Ricard offered invaluable comments and advice. Milan Kundera also read
the manuscript and shared his feedback over the course of unforgettable
conversations. In my search for a publisher I had the good fortune to
happen upon Haaris Naqvi, my editor at Bloomsbury, who has been a
patient and sensitive guide through the labyrinth of publication. Andrew
McKenna’s shrewd comments and encouraging words spurred me on as I
completed my revisions. I am grateful to him for agreeing to enrich this
essay with his foreword. Karen Gorton, Haley Malm, S. Morrow Pettigrew,
and Joshua Stein read the manuscript and helped me to clarify my ideas
and strengthen my arguments. The time and energy they devoted to this
task resulted in substantial improvements—I alone am responsible for the
flaws that remain.
I also owe thanks to Sorcha Cribben-Merrill, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Scott
Garrels, Bill Johnsen, Jimmy Kaltreider, Efrain Kristal (whose illuminating
lectures on Dante inspired the nine-part structure of this book), and
Domenico Palumbo for their support and assistance, and to Susan Merrill
for her help in choosing the title. My father, Richard Merrill, came up with
the original idea for the triangular motif that (strikingly reimagined by
Bloomsbury’s designer) graces the cover of this book. He also created the
elegant diagram in Chapter 2, which displays his characteristic flair as an
illustrator. Finally, my wife, Caroline, assisted me in more ways than I can
count. In Paris, as I worked on the first draft, she submitted with good grace
to the inconveniences of life in our tiny apartment under the eaves. Without
her efficiency, good humor, and moral support, this project would never
have come to fruition.
1
“Women Look for Men Who Have

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

aphorism worthy of La Rochefoucauld. It concisely defines a phenomenon
that pervades Kundera’s oeuvre, one that his readers have for the most part
ignored.
2 The Book of Imitation and Desire
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
In short, Kundera’s aphorism tells us that our desires are influenced by

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

and even to the bald official conducting the poll as hedonists. This,
however, is a self-delusion. Their comedy act. Nowadays hedonists no
longer exist. . . . No matter what they say, if they had a real choice to
make, all of them, I repeat, all of them would prefer to stroll with her
down the avenue. Because all of them are eager for admiration and not
for pleasure. For appearance and not reality. (385)
The structure of Avenarius’s thought experiment echoes the aforementioned

imitative aphorism point by point. Here, however, we see the triangle from
a new perspective. The focus rests squarely on the man, who relies on the
crowd’s admiring looks to give his fragile ego a boost. The pseudo-hedonist
dangles a famous beauty beneath the gazes of his peers so that their envy
will glance off her and ricochet in his direction. Rather than obeying
the dictates of his sexual urges, contemporary man (like the women in
the aphorism above) behaves as a homo mimeticus. He wishes to benefit
second-hand from the luster of the famous actress rather than to experience
her body firsthand. To express this idea aphoristically, we might say: “A
man wants a beautiful woman not for what she can do for him, but for what
she can do for his image.”
Even when Kundera’s protagonists do enter the bedroom, they take
little pleasure in each other. Rivalry, not sensuality, prevails. Elsewhere in
Immortality, Kundera offers a comic description of coitus envisioned as a
struggle between two unhappy antagonists, each intent on outperforming
the other, neither deriving the slightest enjoyment from the sexual act:
. . . he had no chance to decide whether or not he was excited or whether

he was experiencing anything that could be called pleasure.
She didn’t think about pleasure or excitement, either. . . . And her sex,
moving up and down, turned into a machine of war which she set in
motion and controlled. . . .
These exhausting gymnastics on the couch and on the carpet, with both
of them bathed in perspiration, both of them out of breath, resembled
in pantomime a merciless fight in which she attacked and he defended
himself. . . . (169)
The idea of sex as a weapon is nothing new. We need only think of Madame
de Merteuil, the cold-hearted seductress from the eighteenth-century
novel Dangerous Liaisons, who uses her charms to lure and deceive. In
spite of their thirst for power, however, Merteuil and her male counterpart,
Valmont, derive physical satisfaction from going to bed with their conquests.
Their aims are nefarious, the destination is tragic, but the journey itself is
a pleasant one.
In Immortality, by contrast, as in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
resentment, envy, and jealousy have chased pleasure into the wings
and occupied center stage. Kundera holds up a revealing mirror to
our contemporary era of pseudo-hedonism. Shattering the pieties of
the sexual revolution, he points again and again to the subordination
of concrete pleasures and common sense to the laughable illusions of
imitative desire.
Readers familiar with the work of René Girard may fear that by the
time I have finished with Kundera, he will have been Girardized, stuffed
into a neat, ready-made package, wrapped up and tied with a bow. I hope
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
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
Into the Labyrinth of Values
The transfiguration of the object
In The Western Canon, his 1995 survey of literary masterpieces, Harold

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

Kundera’s most famous and highly regarded book (and, by extension, the
author’s whole oeuvre) to a portrait of the Communist period in Prague.
In doing so, he alludes to a common criticism of Kundera’s novels, namely
that their most avid readers are ingenuous college students who, enchanted
by the author’s erotic preoccupations and “philosophical” depth, set off on
their European tours with his books as guides.
Bloom delivers the verdict with his usual high-handedness. Yet he raises
legitimate questions about literary value. What ingredient enables a work
to transcend the historical moment in which it was written? And why is the
allusion to the Kundera craze among college students so damning?
The first question is hard to answer. And, in any event, it would be futile
to make predictions about the way posterity will judge Kundera’s novels,
especially given that most prognostications of this sort amount to attempts
(à la Bloom’s Western Canon) at generating self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second question seems to me at once more intriguing and less fraught.
Bloom’s reference to Cervantes provides a possible answer. Don Quixote
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)
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,
cosmopolitan attitudes as his own. “It’s terrible,” he exclaims, “to see the
world through their myopic eyes!” (224).
Although he succeeds in extricating himself from his reliance on
the villagers and their opinions, the journalist remains as deluded and
dependent as ever. He has done nothing more than exchange his former
model for a new one; it is now through Havel’s eyes that he wishes to see.
What René Girard describes in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel as the
triangular structure of desire begins to take shape. The journalist occupies
one corner of the triangle as the subject, the imitator. Havel stands at the
apex as the master, the model of desire. Whatever object he desires or
appears to desire will also look desirable to the journalist (Figure 2.1).
The triangle, of course, is nothing but a metaphor that expresses the
nonlinear geometry of desire, a structural model that changes in shape
and size according to the distance between mediator and imitator. It has
no existence in reality. “The real structures,” as Girard points out in Deceit,
Desire, and the Novel, “are intersubjective.”6 Moreover, the metaphor works
Figure 2.1 “The Triangle of Desire” © Richard Merrill 2012

better in some instances than in others (when a single individual serves as

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

athlete or the watch endorsed by a legendary movie star seem endowed with
supernatural properties. Advertisers would have us believe that anyone who
acquires those sneakers or that watch (or their mass-produced replicas) will
also come into possession of the superpowers. By the same token, drinking
Havel’s favorite vintage or sleeping with a woman of whom he approves is,
for the journalist, a way of imbibing his charisma and potency, his “mojo.”
Havel’s approval acts as a touchstone: the imitator can only desire a girl if
she enters the model’s radiant sphere of influence, where she becomes the
means of communing with him.
Without the inspiration afforded by his master’s antecedent desire, the
journalist lacks the inner resources to love his girlfriend. He has so little
confidence in himself and his own perceptions that he never bothers to
wonder whether he derives any pleasure from the girl’s company, whether
she excites him or makes him laugh. He discounts that sort of concrete, first-
hand evidence because it comes from an untrustworthy source: himself.
Instead of relying on his five senses and his own powers of discernment, he
outsources the act of judgment to Havel, the high-powered “expert”:
The young man really did not know what his girl was like, he wasn’t
able to pass judgment on the degree of her beauty and attractiveness.
[. . .] But precisely because what concerned him was the judgment of
others, he had not dared to rely on his own eyes; until now, on the
contrary, he had considered it sufficient to listen to the voice of general
opinion and to accept it. But what was the voice of general opinion
against the voice of a master and an expert? (217–18)
The journalist never considers the possibility that a renowned authority

could be fallible. In a bad mood because some local women have rejected
him, the doctor decides to amuse himself at his young friend’s expense.
Although the girlfriend is young and pretty, Havel implies to his disciple
that she has failed to pass muster. Without going so far as to put his advice
into words, he hints that the journalist would be remiss if he failed to pursue
a local woman named Frantiska instead. She is a middle-aged mother so
plain and unremarkable that when the doctor mentions her name, the
journalist confesses that it has never occurred to him to “look at her as a
woman” (225). According to Havel, however, Frantiska possesses a sort of
beauty that is altogether more alluring and sophisticated than the vulgar
shapeliness the young man has favored up till now:
“. . . the ordinary taste of a small town creates a false ideal of beauty,

which is essentially unerotic, even antierotic. Whereas genuine,
explosive erotic magic remains unnoticed by those with such taste.
There are women all around us who would be capable of leading a man
to the most dizzying heights of sensual adventure, and no one here
sees them . . . Tell me, my dear editor . . . have you ever noticed that
Frantiska is an extraordinary woman?” (224–5)
The aging Don Juan plays upon his admirer’s snobbery (we can almost see
him kissing his fingertips in sensual delectation as he describes Frantiska)
and the journalist falls for the hoax because, like the rest of us, he tends to
disbelieve his own eyes and to mistake the foolishness pitched to him by
someone else for a nugget of pure wisdom. To remove any lingering doubts,
Havel strengthens his case with the aid of triangular advertising: he tells the
journalist that any of his friends “would give all their worldly goods” (225)
for an opportunity to spend just one night with Frantiska. And to complete
the sales pitch he praises her legs with great fervor:
“But have you noticed how she walks?” continued Havel. “Have you
ever noticed that her legs literally speak when she walks? My dear
editor, if you heard what her legs were saying, you would blush, even
though I know you’re a hell of a libertine.” (225)
Seduced by this description (and no doubt flattered to hear Havel call him
a libertine), the journalist realizes how foolish he has been and thanks
the erotic expert for having opened his eyes to the truth. To put it kindly,
Frantiska is no longer in the first bloom of youth. The editor, however, is

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

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

the scene at the beginning of the first volume of Don Quixote in which the
Knight of the Sorrowful Figure arrives at a country inn:
At the door there happened to be two young women, the kind they
call ladies of easy virtue, who were on their way to Sevilla with some
muledrivers who had decided to stop at the inn that night, and since
everything our adventurer thought, saw, or imagined seemed to happen
according to what he had read, as soon as he saw the inn it appeared
to him to be a castle complete with four towers and spires of gleaming
silver, not to mention a drawbridge and deep motal and all the other
details depicted on such castles [. . .] . . . he rode toward the door of the
inn and saw the two profligate wenches standing there, and he thought
they were two fair damsels or two gracious ladies taking their ease at
the entrance to the castle.9
Here, it is not windmills that are mistaken for giants but prostitutes that are
mistaken for high-born ladies. Cervantes chooses women at the lowest end
of the social scale not because he wants us to laugh at their expense but in
order to point up his hero’s madness. The wider the distance between the
women’s actual standing and their perceived value, the more obvious Don
Quixote’s misapprehension of the world and the more delightfully comical
the scene. Kundera likewise exaggerates the gap between reality and illusion
for the purpose of generating comic effects. It is hard to say whether the
story is funny because he is deliberately trying to illustrate the triumph
of imitative suggestion over personal impression, or whether he succeeds
in showing us how imitation works simply because he has a funny story
in mind and wants us to savor its most comic features. In either case, the
story’s humor is inseparable from its insights into the human condition.
Our tendency as human beings is to hold the more embarrassing parts of
our inner lives at arm’s length, where we need not own up to them. In an age
of crumbling taboos, sexual braggadocio has become socially acceptable, at
least in some contexts, but most of us refrain from speaking openly about
our own envy, jealousy, and snobbery (other people’s envy is, of course,
always fair game). The novelist’s art lies in describing those embarrassing
secrets from the inside, in such a clear, recognizable way that we cannot
help but see ourselves in the description and acknowledge its accuracy.
In other words, the little comedy reveals a profound anthropological
truth not despite but because of its silliness. The author caricatures
imitative desire by exaggerating the most typical features of the journalist’s
snobbish personality and eliminating everything else, a bit like a cartoonist
accentuating a characteristic cleft in some politician’s chin or making an

already long nose still longer.
Kundera pulls off the mask of dignity behind which we conceal our secret
debt to others. In bringing us face to face with our intimately familiar yet
repressed triangular snobbery, he holds up a concave mirror in which we at
once recognize and refuse to recognize ourselves. This mingled recognition
and refusal—the feeling that if we do not dig in our heels the “self” to which
we cling might slip away—results in a liberating catharsis called laughter,
signaling that the description has hit home even as we release the unbearable
tension it creates in us.
“Dr. Havel” obliges us to look at Kundera’s work from a new angle. No
longer can we place our author exclusively in the tradition of the great
Central European writers—Musil, Broch, Kafka—whom he claims as his
own predecessors. Nor can we see him merely as the successor of Diderot
and Sterne, unless we recognize that Sterne saw himself as a purveyor of
what he called “Cervantick wit.” It is Cervantes who is the great forerunner
in this early story, which holds if not the key then at least a key to unlocking
the significance of Kundera’s work, both for the literature of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries and in the context of the entire history of the
novel.
And we need not stop there. In this early text, the author goes beyond
mere narrative illustration and formulates the principle that governs the
behavior of his characters. In enumerating the benefits that the journalist
hopes to derive from having Havel check out his girlfriend, Kundera
writes:
. . . if the master voiced his approval . . . [. . .] the girl would mean

more to the young man than before, and the pleasure he experienced
in her presence would change from fictional to real (for the young
man occasionally realized that the world in which he lived was for
him a labyrinth of values, whose worth he only quite dimly surmised;
therefore he knew that illusory values could become real values only
when they were endorsed). (210)
This passage emphasizes the total subordination of the physical to the

metaphysical. Nothing could be more concrete and presumably immune
to the distortions of snobbery than pleasure, which after all is a sensation
easily verified and hard to mistake for its opposite. Yet we see here that
second-hand influence triumphs over even the first-hand experience of
pleasure, for that pleasure would remain “fictional,” in other words unreal,
intangible, impossible to experience as such, unless Havel gave the thumbs
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
(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
dignity, “Dr. Havel” disabuses us of the idea that it is exclusively a person’s

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

telling example of imitative desire and its transfiguring power. The passages
I have in mind can be found in Part Five of The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, in which a young poet invites his mistress, a butcher’s wife from
the provinces, to spend the weekend with him in Prague.
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)
Kristyna appears beautiful in the student’s provincial hometown and

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

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

Kristyna in its radiance. The allurements of the big city threatened the
relationship between the young lover and his mistress. Now Goethe’s warm
words have resuscitated the student’s desire and aroused in him a desperate
yearning for her.
It is perhaps no accident that of all the episodes in Kundera’s novels,
this one in particular radiates good-natured humor and charm. The events
it describes are bathed in the author’s nostalgia for his native land and his
youthful days in Prague. In the end, the spirit of masculine camaraderie
trumps the snobbery of invidious comparison. And the ruses employed
in these passages stem from fundamentally benevolent intentions. Havel,
too, was a magician whose wand transformed frogs into princesses. But he
performed his black magic with a sardonic humor verging on malice. The
poets appear to us through the golden mists of Kundera’s memories. Unlike
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.
“An imitation of feeling”
Eva Le Grand’s Kundera, or, The Memory of Desire surveys the author’s work
in a series of lucid, free-flowing variations. Since the word “desire” occurs
in the very title of the book, it would seem natural to turn to Le Grand
for a definition of desire as portrayed in Kundera’s novels. For Le Grand,
the author’s master theme is “kitsch,” understood not just as an aesthetic
but also and indeed primarily as an existential category. In her conception,
kitsch is an attitude of delusion or denial that bears a strong resemblance
to the kind of transfiguring desire I have been examining. She defines it
as the faculty for substituting “dreams of a better world (paradise lost as
bright future) for reality,” for “misrepresenting what is real as an idyllic and
ecstatic vision of the world to which we sacrifice without scruple all ethical
and critical awareness.”12
On one level, it’s hard to argue with this definition. After all, it squares
with commonsense folk wisdom: we see what we want to see or, as an old
proverb has it, we think the moon is made of green cheese. In other words,
when we desire something without cause, this is because we have allowed
our wishful thinking to interfere with our perception. Our dreams, wishes,
and desires (“dreams of a better world”) make things appear otherwise
than they really are (“misrepresenting what is real”).
Le Grand emphasizes that the illusion does not cling to objects themselves
but she never quite explains where it comes from or what produces it. And
since we cannot blame the world itself—in Le Grand’s terms, “what is
real”—we must conclude that the mirage originates within the subject. In
her view, Kundera’s novels reverse that subjective error, undoing the spell
that shrouds reality and revealing the objective world to us once more. She
sees Kundera (rightly so) as a demolisher of illusions and his novels as a
means of demystifying the twentieth century’s most pernicious myths,
both personal and political. François Ricard takes a similar approach: “. . .
reading a novel by Kundera is always an experience of disillusionment.”13
Le Grand’s definition of desire as it functions in Kundera’s novels
applies nicely to “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years.” The young journalist
“misrepresents what is real,” taking an unattractive woman for an alluring
one. His judgment paralyzed, he has no scruples about “sacrificing” his
pretty girlfriend to Havel’s plan, despite his qualms and the substitute’s
lack of beauty. Moreover, Le Grand adds an ethical dimension to our
understanding of the story, raising issues of responsibility and reminding us
that actions performed in a deluded state may cause harm and suffering.
In short, she traces a faithful picture of desire as it appears in the text.

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

herself. To his mind the difference between amorous undressing and
ordinary undressing consisted precisely in the woman being undressed
by the man.
This idea had not been instilled in him by experience, but by literature
and its suggestive phrases: “he knew how to disrobe a woman”; “he
impatiently tore off her dress.” He could not imagine physical love
without a prologue of confused and eager gestures to undo buttons,
pull down zippers, lift up sweaters. (268)
The word “suggestive” should be understood in two senses. The sentences

in the books Jaromil reads possess an arousing, erotic charge and they also
suggest to the young man the right way of behaving with a woman. From
Jaromil’s Bovaryesque vantage point, the prelude to his lovemaking with the
young girl lacks frenzied passion. The real-life scene fails to correspond to the
imaginary ones conjured up by dimestore novels. Jaromil’s determination to
unbutton the girl’s dress stems not from any actual, urgent physical longing
for her. He is neither overcome by passion nor blinded by lust. Rather, he
wants to be overcome by passion and blinded by lust.
The episode recalls Kundera’s analysis of homo sentimentalis in
Immortality:
It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our

will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel (decide to feel,
just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer
feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly
called hysteria. That’s why homo sentimentalis (a person who has raised
feeling to a value) is in reality identical to homo hystericus. (219)
The hysteric’s idée fixe comes to him or her from afar: Don Quixote decides
to love Dulcinea because he is attempting to live out the narrative trajectory
suggested to him by his favorite romances of chivalry. The feeling of extreme
passion has become a value for him because it is (or is believed to be) a
value for the model. He does not experience his imitation as such, however.
Rather, he sincerely believes in the authenticity of his feeling, just as the
journalist in “Dr. Havel” no doubt believes in the intense erotic desire that
overwhelms him in the presence of the wrinkled Frantiska, not realizing
that this desire comes to him from Havel.
Though on some level his imitation is more deliberate than the journalist’s,
Jaromil, too, believes sincerely and wholeheartedly in the conception of love
that he has picked up from books. The disagreeable sensation he experiences
at the idea that his girlfriend should undress herself is in itself authentic,
to the extent that he truly does feel it. As Kundera writes in Immortality,
the critique of homo sentimentalis should not make us think that “a person
who imitates feeling does not feel. An actor playing the role of old King
Lear stands on the stage and faces the audience full of the real sadness of
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
To my knowledge, only one reader has thoroughly explored the

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

and free of stubbornness. Moreover, the suffering that befalls the Knight
of the Sorrowful Figure is largely physical. The beatings that he and his
squire endure, like the harm that he inflicts on himself to demonstrate the
immensity of his love for Dulcinea, are typical of a pre-modern, Hegelian
world of physical violence. By contrast, the suffering the journalist must
endure, a kind of torment unique to the modern, democratic ethos, is
primarily interior and psychological. It takes the form of humiliation,
resentment, and envy.
In Kundera’s novel Farewell Waltz, another character from the provinces
is portrayed as envious of visitors from the big city. The nurse Ruzena,
Kundera writes, feels unhappy because she envies the sophisticated women
who come to take the cure: “Envy: These women came here directly from
husbands and lovers, from a world she imagined teeming with a thousand
possibilities inaccessible to her, even though she had prettier breasts, longer
legs, and more regular features” (37). The provincial universe is situated
between the regime of benign external mediation and the hellish regions of
internal (or infernal) mediation2 located nearer the center of the labyrinth
of values. Admiration shifts toward envy as the model comes closer, as the
big city makes contact with the countryside, pollinating the provincial buds
and causing new forms of desire to blossom. This shift appears clearly in
the way the geographical proximity of the man Ruzena desires (a famous
trumpeter) affects her mood: “When he was far away, she had been full of
energetic combativeness, but now that she felt his presence, her courage
failed her” (39). The distant model instills energy and fighting spirit; the
proximate one drains the imitator of her energy and deprives her of her
emotional resources.
Envy also plays a role in Life Is Elsewhere, in which Jaromil imitates his
former classmate, now a policeman: “he envied his old classmate’s manly
job, his secrecy, and his wife, and also that he had to keep secrets from her
and that she had to accept this; he envied his real life, whose cruel beauty
(and beautiful cruelty) always outstripped him . . . he envied his real life,
which he himself had not yet entered” (294). The passage echoes Kundera’s
brief theory of imitative desire in “Dr. Havel,” in which “apparent” values
can only become “real” when they have been endorsed by someone else.
Like the journalist in that story, Jaromil sees the world his classmate
occupies as more real than his own and dreams of belonging to it. The
passage could stand as a warning to academics, who often speak of the
“real” world, as opposed to the ivory tower of the university. Is the world
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
the reader, asks rhetorical questions, and so on. The Dostoevskyan novel
“shows” imitative desire; the Kunderian novel “tells” it. The story unfolds
on stage, so to speak, but we are face to face with the narrator who, once in
a while, steps aside, draws back the curtain, and allows us to have a glimpse
of the action.
This technical procedure gives the author license to analyze, meditate
over, and reflect upon each action. For example, the journalist comes up
with the idea of having Havel evaluate the beauty of his girlfriend. The idea
is born of his tipsiness and his desperate wish to have something to say.
He remains unaware of its wider implications. Instead, it is the narrator
who explains just what advantages the journalist might hope to derive from
his request. He enumerates this “triple advantage” in the manner of a list,
briefly analyzing each element. The result is an eighteenth-century-style
conte combined with Sartrean-style phenomenological analysis, a mixture
of old-fashioned telling and meditative elucidation.
Deceit, desire, and the plight of the aging Don Juan
In the first of the two interlocking plots in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,”
the journalist kneels down before the judgment of his master. Havel, on
the other hand, seems to escape the most humiliating ordeals of desire. He
never plays the role of the schoolboy trembling beneath the severe gaze of
his teacher. His wife—young, beautiful, and famous—adores him as much
as the journalist does. Yet we should not imagine that Havel eludes the
author’s irony. The Don Juan is no more self-sufficient than his disciple,
who relied on others to find out “how much he was worth” (203). As the
foregoing reflections on “internal mediation” suggested, Havel’s self-esteem
is a towering edifice supported by two very fragile stilts: the admiration of
his disciple, and the desire of the girls he manages to seduce.
Kundera goes to some lengths to show that Havel’s self-love depends
on the interest that others take in him. At the first encounter with the
journalist, who seeks him out, he believes, for an interview, Havel is secretly
delighted with the attention, though he pretends not to be. Then, upon
learning that the editor wants to interview not him but his famous actress
wife, Havel is wounded and gives the young man a cold response. After
the journalist’s departure, he looks at himself in the mirror, and his face
“[doesn’t] please him” (202): he sees himself as ugly because the journalist
prefers someone else to him. In other words, Havel is both the imitator and
the object of desire: he desires himself through the journalist, who serves
as his model.
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,
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
the journalist. Only our fascination with the seducer character, whom we
take more seriously than his young disciple, prevents us from laughing at
the former metamorphosis in the same way as we laugh at the second.
In his foreword to Le Grand’s essay on Kundera, Guy Scarpetta mourns
the passing of the eighteenth-century libertine’s “magnificent sovereignty.”
The so-called libertines of the twentieth century never succeeded in
recapturing this “true freedom.”4 Like Scarpetta, Kundera looks upon
the contemporary seducer with a skeptical eye: “Don Juan was a master,
while the [contemporary libertine] is a slave” (133). The modern woman
is no longer a passive object of desire; she has fought for and acquired the
freedom to grant to whomever she chooses what virtue once required her to
withhold. This means that we need no longer congratulate the seducer on
having overcome her resistance, and that when she rejects him, he no longer
has any readily available means of saving face. Over the centuries, women
have become increasingly active and dangerous threats to masculine erotic
supremacy. As René Girard writes, the libertine desires absolute freedom
and his insecurity results from this outsized ambition:
Modern vanity dreads nothing more than sheer indifference. The

modern egotist is almost convinced that he is God. As such he should be
invulnerable to all and all should be vulnerable to him . . . Confronted
by an indifferent woman the modern seducer immediately suspects,
with angoisse in his heart, that she, and not he, is the Divinity.5
The shift from the journalist’s to Havel’s mode of desiring represents what
Michel Houellebecq would call an “extension du domaine de la lutte,” an
“expansion of the war game.” Havel’s model stands much closer, spiritually
speaking, than does the journalist’s, for Havel, deprived of his youthful
virility, divested of his legendary reputation, finds that the erotic playing
field has been leveled; henceforth, he moves in a world of equals, on the
same plane as the women whose self-love mediates his desire. In such a
world, rejection is deeply humiliating.
Havel’s situation is inseparable from a specific era. The 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:
My unknown beauty had not even noticed me. Her disdain surprised
and pained me. Vanity made me think that I did not deserve it [. . .] I
thought I had been mistaken; and, unable to think badly of myself for
long, I imagined that modesty alone had forced her into doing what
she had done.6
Crébillon’s hero does not (at least in this passage) experience the hellish
after-effects of rejection. He manages to persuade himself that the young
woman’s indifference reflects her modesty rather than true disdain. Havel,
on the other hand, in virtue of his historical situation (society no longer
requires women to repel male advances), can attribute his failure to nothing
but genuine lack of interest. He is therefore forced to resent the rejection,
which floods him with noxious feelings.
All of those noxious feelings flourish in the labyrinth of values. In the
Communist world described by Kundera, qualitative differences—the
class system—have been abolished by decree of the regime. As a result,
the imitative process reaches a new stage. In his short text on Kundera,
René Girard writes:
The games of love and chance described by Marivaux are already

programmed, in the novelistic sense, but they are not yet Kafkaesque
[. . .] As the program without an author gains ground, existence and
being become tragic without losing their novelistic lightness, that
lightness which becomes unbearable in the Kunderian sense.7
In the eighteenth century, imitative desire is still “an aristocratic pastime

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

boudoir that unfold in a post-World War II décor of devastated values.
These stories treat historical events with great parsimony. The most
important landmarks of modern Czech history make their appearance:
World War II (the aviator in Life Is Elsewhere); the 1948 coup and the
beginning of Communist rule (Life Is Elsewhere); the political trials of the
early years of Stalinism (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting); the death
of Stalin (“Eduard and God”); the thaw leading up to the Prague Spring
and the subsequent Russian invasion, the purges of “normalization”
(The Unbearable Lightness of Being); and finally the Velvet Revolution
(Ignorance). Yet Kundera tends to foreground the private dilemmas of
individuals and to attack history in glancing fashion, making transversal
cuts into events according to their influence on the lives of his characters.
The sociological or historical implications of this or that moment in the
Czech drama matter less to our author than the way in which history
exposes the essence of human nature. Communism is a limit case
that pushes the boundaries of human possibilities to new extremes.
Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Kirilov conceived an audacious praxis by
which to test and ground their ideas about superhumanity. These figures
possess a tragic grandeur that Kundera’s characters lack. Raskolnikov
took his “idea” seriously; Kundera’s characters no longer even have an
idea. They can do no more than act out a laughable comedy in which they
themselves have long since ceased to believe.
Havel is an excellent example of the post-tragic seducer, mere “collector”
rather than full-fledged Don Juan. A canny manipulator of imitative
desire, his awareness is on par with that of the novelist himself. But his
ruses, reminiscent of advertising, mark him as a bourgeois rather than
an aristocratic libertine. The aristocrat overcomes the resistance of his
conquests with professions of eternal love. Even in the eighteenth century,
when the language of passion begins to wear thin and serves mostly as an
alibi for sexual desire, refusing to employ it means almost certain failure.
Havel, on the contrary, must convince his conquests that he does not
love them, or rather that he is loved by someone else. He is no hedonist;
sensual pleasure interests him far less than metaphysical gratification. Or,
as a character in “Symposium,” another early Kundera short story, puts
it, “Eroticism is not only a desire for the body, but to an equal extent the
desire for honor. The partner you’ve won, who cares about you and loves
you, becomes your mirror, the measure of your importance and your
merits” (112).
Rivalry and the transfiguration of the object
The link between honor and eroticism becomes even more apparent in The
Joke, Kundera’s first novel, which hinges on a revenge plot. Ludvik Jahn has
returned to his Moravian hometown for the purpose of sleeping with Helena,
a television journalist who is married to Pavel Zemanek, an acquaintance of
Ludvik’s from his student days. By 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
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)
In this extraordinary passage, the object of desire very clearly plays second
fiddle to the Other, the model who determines Ludvik’s choice and through
whom he vicariously desires Helena. Even as Ludvik takes possession of
Helena’s body, Zemanek takes possession of Ludvik’s soul, until the two
souls become indistinguishable. The hated rival is at once radically alien
and utterly like the self. Helena’s body, meanwhile, has no significance apart
from its role as a link between Ludvik and Zemanek. It acts as a sort of
sacrament that makes communion between the two rivals possible.
Soon after this hateful fusion of souls, the sexual act becomes an act
of violence. Having broken through into the secret recesses of Zemanek’s
soul, Ludvik wants to lay waste to what he has found there. He seeks to
give Helena orgasm after orgasm, not because he cares for her and wishes
to bring her pleasure, but so as to have the same experience that Zemanek
has had, to see her in the same naked, unadulterated light as her husband.
The third party continues to preside over their coupling like an absent god.
Ludvik’s only purpose is to tear the object away from his enemy:
. . . my soul commanded me to persevere; to drive her from pleasure to

pleasure; to change her body’s position so that nothing should remain
hidden or concealed from the glance of the absent third; no, to grant
her no respite, to repeat the convulsion again and again, the convulsion
in which she is real and exact, in which she feigns nothing, by which
she is engraved in the memory of the absent third like a stamp, a seal, a
cipher, a sign. And thus to steal the secret cipher! to steal the royal seal!
To rob Pavel Zemanek’s secret chamber; to ransack it, make a shambles
of it! (195)
The violence of Ludvik’s intentions finally manifests itself in sadistic

form. He beats Helena repeatedly, wrenching from her still more cries of
pleasure. When she tearfully declares her love for him in the aftermath
of their lovemaking, Ludvik is content to question her about Zemanek:
“hadn’t she herself told me her husband had been the great love of her life?”
(198). Ludvik reacts with surprise when Helena tells him that he bears “a
certain resemblance” (199) to his enemy. He treats this idea as the height
of absurdity, yet the reader cannot help feeling that Helena’s confused
attempts to explain her intuition convey a fundamental truth about the
relationship between the two men. This becomes clearer when Ludvik learns
to his dismay that Helena and Zemanek have been separated for three years.
His act of vengeance has missed the target. The blow he aimed at his rival
bounces back at him. He has accomplished nothing, apart from causing a
woman in whom he has no interest to fall in love with him.
Yet does he really have no interest in her? Before she revealed to him that
she and Zemanek, although still officially married, had agreed to separate
three years before, Ludvik was undeniably interested. If there remained any
doubt about the source of his interest or about the imitative mechanism at its
origin, the following passages dispel it once and for all. After her revelation,
Helena loses the power to excite Ludvik. Her body, no longer illuminated
by its attachment to the rival, metamorphoses into a flawed object without
charm:
But now I saw her nudity in a new light; it was nudity denuded, denuded
of the power to excite that until now had eliminated all the faults of age
in which the whole history and present of Helena’s marriage seemed
to be concentrated and that had therefore fascinated me. Now that she
stood before me bare, without a husband or any bonds to him, utterly
herself, her physical unloveliness lost all its power to excite and it too
became only itself: a simple unloveliness. (200)
Helena’s body appeared to him transfigured by her relationship with

Zemanek and it was for that reason that it succeeded in captivating
him. The absence of these conjugal ties leaves her doubly naked: without
clothing and also without the mantle of erotic attraction draped over her
by the mediator of desire. Her physical flaws suddenly stand out and rather
than arousing perverse excitement in him, they merely turn him off. The
evident disappointment of this passage returns a few paragraphs later: “the
body was here, a body I had stolen from no one, in which I’d vanquished
no one, destroyed no one, a body abandoned, deserted by its spouse”
(201). Zemanek, the model–rival, hovered over the coupling bodies. Now
he is conspicuous by his absence, which accentuates Ludvik’s post-coital
disenchantment. The sentence seeks to make us feel the void left behind
by the god’s departure. Meanwhile, the verbs “stolen,” “vanquished,” and
“destroyed” suggest Ludvik’s triple motive, each one another step in the
escalation of vengeance. The first verb focuses on the object: one steals
something. The second verb, however, shifts to the someone who is defeated.
The final verb expresses Ludvik’s desire not only to vanquish but also to
annihilate his rival. In these three verbs we can observe the metamorphosis
of rivalry, which bears first on possessions, is gradually transformed into a
face-off between mutually obsessed antagonists, and ends in an explosion
of destructive hatred. These verbs also follow the progression of the act of
love: Ludvik’s caresses gradually became slaps, and those slaps blows that
leave red welts on Helena’s body.
Helena leaves the borrowed apartment. The next day, Ludvik runs into
none other than Zemanek, who has come to the local folk festival with
his attractive girlfriend, Miss Broz. Helena’s affirmations about the odd
resemblance between the two men become more plausible when we learn
that Zemanek has begun to play the dissident’s part at the university and
that he and Ludvik are now (at least in theory) on the same side. Meanwhile,
Kundera does everything possible to underscore the mingled dislike and
admiration that make up Ludvik’s feelings toward Zemanek: “I contemplated
Miss Broz and found her to my sorrow a handsome and likeable young
woman; I felt envious regret that she wasn’t mine” (277). Having just read
about the way in which Zemanek’s attachment or nonattachment to Helena
was capable of rendering her body either exciting or uninteresting, it is hard
not to associate this last triangle with the preceding one. If Ludvik wishes
that Miss Broz could belong to him, this can only mean that she belongs
to Zemanek. Taken out of context this sentence does not truly break with
the romantic, linear conception of desire. But Ludvik’s “envious regret”
suggests the lurking influence of the rival, while in the context of what
has come before there can be little doubt as to the ambivalent, imitative
origins of Ludvik’s interest in Zemanek’s girlfriend. When Zemanek and
his companion finally leave, Kundera suggests the primacy of the model by
the order in which he mentions the members of the departing couple:
They left. I couldn’t tear my eyes off them: Zemanek walking erect, his
blond head proudly (victoriously) held high, the brunette at his side;
even from the back she was beautiful, she walked lightly, I liked her; I
liked her almost painfully, because her departing beauty showed me its
icy indifference. . . . (283)
The victorious pride of Zemanek’s regal posture testifies to Ludvik’s

adversarial relationship with him. Only after playing over his erstwhile rival
does Ludvik’s gaze linger on the brunette. Once more, the desire he feels for
the girl is coupled with an unpleasant feeling. This time it is the girl’s glacial
indifference (the necessary corollary of her interest in Zemanek) that causes
him pain.
This reading of The Joke confirms it as one of the most powerful of
Kundera’s novels. As in “Dr. Havel,” as in The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, the object is transfigured by the mediator. In this case, however,
the transfiguration is even more intense, because it occurs as the result of
exacerbated rivalry between equals rather than in the vaudevillesque mode
of a merry prank. Just as in “Dr. Havel,” Kundera does everything possible
to evoke the triangularity of the relationship among Ludvik, Helena,
and Zemanek. Though the textual evidence may not be strong enough to
constitute decisive proof, it looks like he slyly underscores the similarity
between the two rivals by making Helena his mouthpiece. Ludvik himself
dismisses the idea as ridiculous, but the facts of the story and the emphatic
insistence of the hero’s protestations suggest otherwise.
“The younger sister imitated the elder”
We are working our way gradually up the rungs of a ladder leading from
the least to the most psychologically damaging manifestations of triangular
desire. The closer the model draws to the disciple, the more intense are
the competitive energies unleashed by their interaction. Havel and the
journalist have a teacher–student relationship. The young man respects
Havel too much to consider him a rival. Accordingly, the older man’s
good fortune arouses in him nothing more than some fleeting moments of
rancor. Ludvik looks to Zemanek first as a friend and later as a despicable
enemy. He cultivates sustained feelings of hatred where the journalist gives
in merely to a quick burst of envy.
In Immortality, Kundera’s longest and most formally ambitious novel,
the model has drawn still closer to the imitator and their desires are even
more inextricably intertwined than those of the two friends in The Joke.
The plot centers on a love triangle, two of whose vertices are occupied by
siblings. Agnes is married to Paul. After Agnes’s death, Paul marries Agnes’s
younger sister, Laura.
The two sisters are linked from the beginning of the story (and from
their girlhood, before Paul enters the picture) by a gesture. One of Agnes’s
childhood memories involves a secretary from the university where her
father used to teach. This woman used to pay her father visits, and the young
Agnes is intrigued by their relationship. While spying on them through the
window, she sees the secretary waving goodbye:
the secretary turned, smiled, and lifted her arm in the air in an
unexpected gesture, easy and flowing. It was an unforgettable moment:
the sandy path sparkled in the rays of the sun like a golden stream and
on both sides of the gate jasmine bushes were blooming. It was as if the
upward gesture wished to show the golden piece of earth the direction
of flight, while the white jasmine bushes were already beginning to
turn into wings. (40)
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
parents naively and without embarrassment; adults pridefully refrain

from imitating their peers in too obvious a manner: Agnes’s distrust of
all gestures, awakened by her sister’s innocent copycat behavior, should be
understood as a characteristically adult distrust of imitation itself.
The third part of the novel (entitled “Fighting”) takes up the theme of
imitation once again, this time focusing more narrowly on the relationship
between Agnes and her younger sister. Here, Kundera links imitation
explicitly to rivalry, and more particularly (as the part’s title implies) to the
amorous struggle between Agnes and her young sister for the affections of
Agnes’s husband, Paul.
The story resumes where it left off at the end of the first part. Agnes used
her special gesture whenever she said goodbye to a boyfriend. Little Laura
hid behind a bush and waited for her sister to come home:
. . . she wanted to see the kiss and to watch her sister walk to the front
door. She waited for the moment when Agnes turned round and
lifted her arm in the air. This movement conjured up a misty idea
of love which Laura knew nothing about but which would always
remain connected in her mind with the image of her attractive,
gentle sister. (101)
Agnes is Laura’s model of desire. Laura crouches unseen behind a bush and
vicariously learns what it is to love by watching her older sister. Already, the
triangular geometry of sibling rivalry is apparent. Agnes and her boyfriend
occupy two of the vertices of this triangle, and little Laura the third. The
model, Agnes, designates what is desirable. The younger sister, imitating
her model’s desire, should be drawn to whatever man her older sister brings
home.
Just as he did in “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” Kundera explicitly
characterizes the relationship between the two sisters as imitative. The
story of the gesture is what makes it possible to understand the sibling
relationship, which is defined entirely by imitation:
When Agnes caught Laura borrowing her gesture in order to wave

to her friends, it upset her and, as we know, ever since then she took
leave of her lovers soberly and without outward display. In this short
history of a gesture we can recognize the mechanism determining
the relationship of the two sisters: the younger one imitated the elder,
reached out her arm towards her, but at the last moment Agnes would
always escape. (101)
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?
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.
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
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
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)
We can understand Agnes’s subsequent decision to go into a voluntary exile

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

in which Tomas, boxed in by two members of the opposition who want him
to sign a petition, feels like a chess player whose pieces are paralyzed and
who cannot escape defeat. In the short story “The Hitchhiking Game,” the
metaphor of the chess pieces trapped on the board suggests an implacable
pattern of action and reaction, a form of relationship that transcends the

individual will of each player. Here, the chess metaphor renders neither
resignation nor rivalry. Agnes, too, will concede defeat in a manner of
speaking. The image of the castling king, however, is ultimately a liberating,
hopeful one. Agnes wishes to escape from the fatigue caused by her imitative
rivalry with her sister. Her exile, which inspired François Ricard to write
an essay from the perspective of her final afternoon, culminates in her
death. Before the accident that takes her life, however, she has a mystical
experience that must be regarded as one of the most mysterious scenes in
all of Kundera’s fiction. This experience liberates her from the wearying
competition with her sister and puts her in touch with a form of what René
Girard calls vertical transcendence. I will explore this moment in the next-
to-last chapter.
Publish or perish
When Agnes breaks her sister’s sunglasses, this signals a shift from a world
in which rivals quarrel over tangible things to one in which competition
has become its own raison d’être. As in the potlatch, in which chieftains vie
with one another to see who can destroy the most possessions, the object is
sacrificed on the altar of one-upmanship: it is better to be someone than to
have something.
Nowhere does the judgment of one’s peers carry greater weight than in the
universe of writers, which Kundera explores in the fourth part of The Book
of Laughter and Forgetting. His reflections on what he calls “graphomania”
aim mostly at novelists, but they apply equally well to graduate students
and university professors, who place boundless faith in triangular “peer
reviewing” and enshrine imitative rivalry in the form of a professional
credo: “publish or perish.”
Kundera defines graphomania as follows: “Graphomania is not a mania
to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself
or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of
unknown readers)” (127). This idea takes on a deeper significance when one
considers that under the Communist regime, authors often faced the choice
between publishing state-approved books for a wide readership or sharing
their works in small, secret gatherings. For Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere,
Sartrean littérature engagée becomes the path to glory. With the support
of a former classmate who belongs to the state police, he participates in
officially sponsored readings that give him exposure he would not otherwise
have enjoyed. Similarly, in Slowness, Kundera contrasts the exhibitionism

and vanity of modern politicians with the discreet anonymity under which
Vivant Denon published his libertine tale No Tomorrow.
Already, in Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera had addressed the question of
the over-proliferation of literature. Jaromil goes to a publishing house and
speaks with an editor who tells him that he receives poetry submissions at
the rate of 12 new authors per day, which makes 4,380 new poets per year:
“. . . keep writing,” said the editor. “I’m certain that sooner or

later we’re going to be exporting poets. Other countries export
technicians, engineers, wheat, or coal, but our main resource is
lyrical poets. Czech lyrical poets are going to establish lyrical poetry
in developing countries. In exchange for our poets we’ll get coconuts
and bananas.” (291)
The editor’s words suggest the grand scale of what is happening. As literature
is integrated into the global economy, the mania for writing books spreads
from the prosperous European states to Africa and South America. In
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera formulates this idea more
explicitly. He suggests that the graphomania epidemic flourishes most
virulently in countries where the satisfaction of basic needs has created a
surplus of free-floating desires:
Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic

proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic
conditions:
1. an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote

themselves to useless activities;
2. a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general
isolation of individuals;
3. the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life.
(From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France,
where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-
one times higher than in Israel . . . ). (127)
The increase in general well-being conspires with the breakdown of

communities and the absence of great events to create an ideal incubatory
environment in which the virus can proliferate. Individuals in peaceful,
wealthy countries need struggle neither for survival nor material subsistence.
Freed of the necessity to sacrifice their personal desires to the higher cause
of the group, they “catch” their hunger for literary fame from one another,
as one might catch a cold. The contagion propagates according to a pattern
of feedback reciprocity:
. . . by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds

graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and
worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people
to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the
writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by
his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter
through from outside. (127–8)
This is one of the “terminal paradoxes” that Kundera associates with the end
of the Modern Period: the dissemination of books and the rise of literacy
first promoted communication; now it leads to mutual misunderstanding,
even to solipsism.
These changes not only spell disaster for literary culture as a whole but
they also poison the lives of individual authors, who must contend not
only with the “anguish of the blank page” but also (and above all) with one
another. In his essay The Year of Henry James, the novelist David Lodge
recounts his bitter personal experience of writing and publishing a novel
based on the life of Henry James at the same time that two other notable
authors also published novels based on James’s life. He notes that “the
proliferation in the last few decades of literary prizes . . . has intensified
and institutionalized the element of competition in writing and publishing
fiction—a development which may have been good for the Novel, inasmuch
as it has increased public interest in literary fiction, but not for the
equanimity of novelists . . .”10 In the literary world, emphasis has shifted
from the novels themselves (the object) to the invidious ranking of novelists
(the model–rival). Literature, like love and business, becomes another arena
in which the combat for metaphysical supremacy is waged.
The competition intensifies still more when two or more writers publish
a book on the same subject: “Writers are always uncomfortable when they
find themselves in this situation, because it threatens to detract from the
originality of their work—originality being a highly valued quality in
modern literary culture.”11 In some admirable passages of self-disclosure,
Lodge divulges the rationale behind his writerly ethic of dissimulation: “I
am usually secretive about my work-in-progress [. . .] Perhaps I am afraid
that some other writer might ‘steal my idea’ if I were to broadcast it widely.”12
Lodge’s confession echoes what Girard says about asceticism-for-desire in
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: “Every desire that is revealed can arouse or
increase a rival’s desire; thus it is necessary to conceal desire in order to gain

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

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

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

same reality, but at a different moment in its evolution. Each new stage in
the imitative process accentuates the distinctive traits of the preceding
one, in the way that a caricature brings out the features of a face. Proustian
snobbery caricatures Stendhalian vanity and Dostoevskyan “underground”
desire (despite the fact that Dostoevsky is chronologically prior to Proust)
in turn caricatures Proustian snobbery. The closer the “mediator” or model
of desire draws to the subject, the more cartoonishly exaggerated the effects
of mediation: the relatively light games of love and chance played by Julien
Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black give
way to the heavier, more crushing agonies of the Proustian narrator or the
Dostoevskyan underground man.
If Girard is right about the way the novel captures desire, a time should
come when the phenomenon becomes too obvious to need revealing. In
our era of stock market bubbles and reality television, mimetic desire
has ballooned into a parody of itself. That is why I have been arguing
that Kundera is not so much the latest in a line of revealers as he is the
caricaturist of imitation. An analogy from the history of painting may
help to clarify what I mean. It might be said that Kundera’s novels stand in
relation to Diderot’s or Stendhal’s as a Picasso stands in relation to a canvas
by Velázquez. If Picasso’s “Las Meninas” series is placed next to Velázquez’s
original, it is possible to identify many common features, but what Picasso’s
interpretation leaves out is just as important as what it includes: everything
becomes foreground; not one square inch of the canvas has less importance
than the rest.
The same goes for Kundera’s work. Looking back with nostalgia to the
freewheeling novels of Rabelais, Sterne, and Diderot, Kundera invents
his stories with insolent disregard for the nineteenth-century plausibility
imperative. Instead of portraying the world in a literal, photographic way,
he writes exaggerated, cartoonlike tales. His fiction deals with many of the
same problems as, say, Stendhal’s does (the problem of vanity as an obstacle
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
repulsion and attraction.2 As he paces up and down in front of the usher’s

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

unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully
witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as
agitated as a schoolboy. (33)
Like Dostoevsky, Kundera sees this mimetic multiplicity as a side-effect of

the Enlightenment project, which tries to uproot irrational belief but ends
up causing its proliferation, as he notes in The Art of the Novel:
In the course of the Modern Era, Cartesian rationality has corroded,

one after the other, all the values inherited from the Middle Ages. But
just when reason wins a total victory, pure irrationality [. . .] seizes the
world stage, because there is no longer any generally accepted value
system to block its path. (10)
In terms of this study’s guiding themes, the above insight might be

reformulated as follows: paradoxically, instead of ushering in a world of
peace and harmony, as its adherents believed it would, the Cartesian dream
of self-sufficiency ended up giving rise to the alienation of exacerbated
triangular desire. With each step it took along the road of progress, humanity
moved a little deeper into the labyrinth of values. Communism heralds the
end of what Kundera, in Part Six of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, calls
the “grand march” of utopian thinking. Liquidating the class system was
supposed to be the final solution to the bourgeois problem of mediation,
but it just made everything worse. Dialectical materialism places too much
emphasis on the object of desire; it fails to see that envy and jealousy divide
people against one another more fiercely still than the unequal distribution
of wealth.
In order to grasp this trajectory as a whole, Kundera draws a much
larger existential map than his predecessors, in search of a context for
the phenomena he is witnessing in the Central European “laboratory of
twilight”5 and the Western society of the spectacle. One of his technical
innovations consists in bringing together multiple historical periods within
the same narrative space. The particular moment at which he is writing
leads him
to broaden the time issue beyond the Proustian problem of personal

memory to the enigma of collective time, the time of Europe, Europe
looking back on its own past, weighing up its history like an old man
seeing his whole life in a single moment. Whence the desire to overstep
the temporal limits of an individual life, to which the novel had hitherto
been confined, and to insert in its space several historical periods. (16)
Kundera situated Don Juan in the large historical context in “Symposium”

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

several contrasting movements. With Immortality, I took this form as
far as it could possibly go. Thereafter, it was a choice between closing
up shop and trying something new. When I wrote Slowness, I was

immediately elsewhere. From the art of the sonata I shifted to the art
of the fugue: a shorter format, a single, indivisible block, with the same
themes and motifs ceaselessly present and ceaselessly varied.6
Massimo Rizzante has noted the resemblances between Kundera’s novelistic

compositions and the elements of the musical fugue: first comes the theme,
which is taken up by another voice, and then echoed once more, this time
in its own inverted mirror image, by the counter-theme. At the end of his
article on Kundera’s art of the fugue, Rizzante offers an intriguing insight
into the link between form and content:
Kundera shows that man is dialogue, that he cannot help imitating

others, those who have preceded him and also his contemporaries.
Just as in the fugue, each voice imitates the other, responds to it and
prolongs it. All participate in the great polyphonic game of human
existence.7
For Rizzante, the imitative form of the fugue speaks eloquently of human
interaction as intertwined and reciprocal. I would add that the fugue offers
an excellent means of juxtaposing different time periods. In Slowness, using
polyphony allows Kundera to switch back and forth between the aristocratic
past and the democratic present, drawing the same motifs through both
temporal spaces so that the reader can hear the novel’s themes resonating
differently in each century.
The art of polyphonic comparison
The novel deploys two plot lines simultaneously. The first is set in the present,
in which the acceleration of history has spun people, events, and stories
into a confusing whirlpool. It tells of a failed seduction in a restored Old
Regime chateau, which has recently been transformed into an international
conference center. The second plot line unfolds in counterpoint to the first
and recounts a sensual night of love in the same chateau two centuries before.
This second narrative line, drawn from No Tomorrow, an eighteenth-century
tale by Vivant Denon, embodies the pleasures of slowness.
The French Revolution swallowed up a certain frivolous, seductive way of
being, epitomized by the nonchalance of the grand seigneur. In its aftermath
(to use Stendhal’s terminology), “morose vanity” supplants “happy vanity.”
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
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:
He means to show off his body to the feeble intellectuals of this

sophisticated, overcultivated, and ultimately perfidious country [. . .]
He imagines his body parading around the pool, showing the French
that there exists one utterly fundamental value, bodily perfection,
the perfection he personally can boast and that none of them has
any idea of. (94)
The Czech émigré views the inhabitants of his new country as a unified bloc
of hostile judges. He may despise them, but he still wants to make a good
impression. They occupy his thoughts and dictate his actions even as he tries
to regain the upper hand. Should he manage to wow the French onlookers
with his physique, he will nonetheless owe to them whatever satisfaction he

derives from his feat. This farcical text provides insight into the émigré’s
condition and may even serve, as my former professor Karen von Kunes
once speculated, as a piece of indirect authorial self-satire.
Meanwhile, Immaculata, a television journalist, is also humiliated by
the holier-than-thou Berck, who rebuffs her during an interview at the
conference, where he is to be decorated as an honorary entomologist. She
later parades through the hotel in a white dress to make Berck realize how
indifferent she is to him. She has
. . . a vague but strong wish to not let herself be driven from the scene; to
pass again through the precincts of her humiliation; to not consent to
her defeat; and if defeat there is, to transform it into great theater, in the
course of which she will set her wounded beauty shining and deploy
her rebellious pride. (105)
In both cases, the loser attempts to recover his or her dignity by asserting
the same unassailable superiority displayed by the fortunate winner.
These characters’ movements, thoughts, and feelings are engendered and
controlled by the model–obstacle (the crowd of French intellectuals at the
conference; Berck).
This pattern also holds true for Vincent. “The contemporary libertine
is a slave,” declared Havel, and Vincent is a mere caricature of Havel, who
is already a caricature of Don Juan. Like Dostoevsky’s underground man,
Vincent cannot forget his rival’s jeering face: “the image of the man in the
three-piece suit is still stuck like a splinter in his soul, he cannot rid himself
of it” (85). His subsequent actions are a series of failed attempts to extirpate
this splinter. The mediator has, so to speak, “gotten under his skin.”
As the night draws to a close, he finds himself poolside with the pretty
secretary, who has invited him to spend the night with her. Sensual pleasure
awaits him upstairs in his hotel room. Except that Vincent is so intent on
acting like a lecherous libertine that he forgets to be one. He tackles Julie
and threatens to have his way with her in public, shouting obscenities at the
top of his lungs. But his thoughts turn toward the imaginary audience for
whom he is performing rather than toward her available body:
True, the amphitheater is empty, but even though it is empty, the

audience, imagined and imaginary, potential and virtual, is there, is
with them [. . .] It is for them that Vincent is shouting his words, it is
their admiration, their approval he hopes to win. (118)
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
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
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.
A little theory of resentment
Most novelists describe an apple falling from a tree. Kundera first presents
us with the law of universal gravitation, and then describes the apple’s fall.
Marcel Proust’s approach is similar to Kundera’s in that he, too, adduces
the general law that accounts for his character’s behavior. In Proust’s case,
however, the law comes second. It is there to shed light on the character’s
actions a posteriori. Early in Time Regained, the narrator mentions that
Monsieur Bontemps has become a Dreyfusard. How is it that a stance
once so unpopular has become normal, even admirable? Proust provides
an explanation: “In society (and this social phenomenon is only the
application of a much more general psychological law) whether novelties
are reprehensible or not, they only excite consternation until they have been
assimilated and defended by reassuring elements.”10 This is but one example

chosen almost at random among many others, but it suffices to show the
order of things in Proustian narration.
Kundera inverts that order. In Part Five of The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, “Litost,” he introduces a character called Kristyna. The part’s first
chapter is entitled: “Who is Kristyna?” There follows a rather conventional
enumeration of Kristyna’s traits and qualities: she is 30, has a child, is
married to a butcher, and is involved in a long-term extramarital liaison
with a local auto mechanic. Here we are in the familiar realm of Balzacian
realism, even if the details furnished by the narrator are far less abundant
than they would be in Old Goriot or Lost Illusions.
In the next chapter, however, we leave this familiar realm and enter a
specifically Kunderian narrative space. We are already aware that Kristyna
is involved with a young man known simply as “the student.” The reader
expects the following chapter to introduce the student in the same manner
as Kristyna. But instead of describing the student’s appearance, his past, his
family, or any of his other attributes, Kundera begins with a Czech word:
“Litost.” The word, he claims, is untranslatable, and so he proceeds by a
series of examples. The student (we still know nothing about him) and a
girlfriend of his (presumably not Kristyna) are swimming together. She
is an expert swimmer but delicately refrains from displaying her superior
athletic prowess until the very end of their swim, when she suddenly races
ahead:
The student made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water.
Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He
recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in exercise and friends and spent
under the constant gaze of his mother’s overfond eye, and fell into
despair about himself and his life. (166–7)
His misery manifests itself in the desire to get even. He slaps the girl,
reproaching her for having put her life in danger by swimming alone in
dangerous waters, and, when she bursts into tears, finds that his litost has
gone away. This anecdote serves not to introduce the student, but rather the
concept-word litost. We are in the realm of what Kundera defines in The Art
of the Novel as “a specifically novelistic essay” (80), an ironic digression that
seeks to explore rather than prove a carefully argued point. Like Musil and
Broch, who seek to “marshal around the story all the means . . . that could
illuminate man’s being; could make of the novel the supreme intellectual
synthesis” (16), but in a more fully realized way, Kundera brings thought
and reflection into the realm of the novel.
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.
At the very end of the little chapter, Kundera finally describes the student
and his relationship with Kristyna. And only at the moment of transition
between the analysis of litost and the return to conventional storytelling do
we find the obtrusive Kunderian narrator intervening in the text to orient
the reader. The narrator’s presence is made necessary by the author’s highly
synthetic technique, which leaves out the usual transitions and markers.
He is there to suture the realm of the novelistic essay to the narrative realm
proper.
Litost in the underground
In his introduction to Jacques and his Master, Kundera makes known his
distaste for the excessively sentimental emotional climate of Dostoevsky’s
fiction. He proclaims his preference for Tolstoy and though he occasionally
expresses admiration for the author of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s
influence on his work appears minimal. All the same, we have seen how
“Dr. Havel” operates according to the same “bawd-and-cuckold” principle
as Dostoevsky’s Eternal Husband, albeit in a lighter, vaudevillesque mode.
Now I would like to propose a similar comparison between two episodes in
Life Is Elsewhere and another classic Dostoevsky short story, “Notes from
the Underground.”
The second part of “Notes from the Underground,” “A Propos of the
Wet Snow,” recounts an episode from the narrator’s youth. Like Kundera’s
Jaromil, the underground man has an overdeveloped lyrical side and
cultivates his appreciation of “the sublime and the beautiful.” One night,
he enters a tavern and encounters an arrogant officer who treats him with
infuriating disdain:
I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking

up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and
without a word—without a warning or explanation—moved me from
where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had
not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his
having moved me without noticing me.
. . . I had been treated like a fly. This officer was over six foot, while I was
a spindly little fellow. But the quarrel was in my hands. I had only to
protest and I certainly would have been thrown out of the window. But
I changed my mind and preferred to beat a resentful retreat.11
For two full years the underground man nourishes his resentment,
observing the officer in the street and acquiring information about him. He
plans to provoke the fellow into a duel but also harbors intense feelings of
admiration that coexist with his hatred:
At last I determined to challenge my enemy to a duel. I composed a

splendid, charming letter to him, imploring him to apologize to me,
and hinting rather plainly at a duel in case of refusal.12
He longs to become the officer’s friend and dreams of “improving his

mind”13 with his culture and of being shielded by the officer’s superior
rank. His letter displays the ambivalence characteristic of imitative rivalry.
The underground man adores his model (thus his hope of being reconciled
with him and becoming his friend) and at the same time, in his pride, he
feels compelled to defy him, and therefore mixes some threats into his
blandishments so as to maintain his dignity and signal his readiness to take
revenge.
Life Is Elsewhere reproduces these two situations, yet it does so in reverse
order: first, the “underground” letter; next, the physical confrontation.
Jaromil has written a letter to an illustrious poet and waits anxiously for his
reply. None is forthcoming and Jaromil longs more than ever for someone
to wrench him from his “nothingness” (205). Finally, he decides that he
must get the poet’s attention somehow, but “not by means of a letter, but by a
gesture laden with poetry” (206). He cuts 20 telephone receivers from public
phone booths, puts them in a box, and takes the box to the post office. He
initially interprets the gesture as “a fantastic plea that he was addressing to a
great poet so that he would respond to him [. . .] a gift to him of the longing
for his voice” (208). But an encounter with an old classmate, now a member
of the police, leads him to change his interpretation of the gift:
. . . the conversation with his old classmate right afterward . . . gave

his poetic act an opposite meaning: it was no longer a gift and a plea;
not at all; he was proudly returning to the poet his fruitless wait; the
receivers with severed wires were the severed heads of his veneration,
and Jaromil was sending them to the poet with contempt, like a
Turkish sultan returning to a Christian commander the severed heads
of Crusaders. (208–9)
Jaromil’s gesture thus holds the potential for two contrasting (though not
mutually exclusive) interpretations, just like the underground man’s letter
to the officer. It is both an imploring appeal and a sarcastic declaration
of war. Kundera separates the two moments, imputing Jaromil’s abrupt

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

proof of his weakness and servility. He would get even with this dear
master, this old idiot, this bald-headed Théodore de Banville! A year
later he would cruelly ridicule all his work, all the hyacinths and
languid lilies that fill his verse, sending his sarcasms in a letter like a
registered slap in the face. (228)
Having overextended himself in his own eyes, Rimbaud feels compelled

to recover his dignity by striking out at the once-beloved master. Fulsome
admiration leads to the recoil of hatred.
We see here the characteristic two-stroke mechanism of litost as defined

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

characters are condemned to wander. When we first penetrated into the
labyrinth, the world of familiar markers and signposts was not far behind
us. “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years” and the episode of Kristyna and the
student in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting gave us the agreeable feeling
of wandering in a forest dappled with sunlight. As we went deeper into the
labyrinth, the boughs of the trees closed in around us. Light could no longer
shine in through the interstices, and the games of desire lost their farcical,
vaudevillesque quality. In The Joke and Immortality, the labyrinth became a
place of erotic competition and anguish. The model was transformed once
and for all into a rival.
In Slowness, Life Is Elsewhere, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
the labyrinth became an even more disorienting place, a hall of mirrors
where politicians, poets, and intellectuals jousted for visibility beneath the
omnipresent eye of television or surveillance cameras. The model became
an existential obstacle, a human stumbling block as fascinating as it was
insurmountable. The characters stopped taking any interest in sex as such
and succumbed to the imitative imperative, letting their litost control
them.
From there, events begin to take on a hellish cast. As Jaromil dies,
Kundera speaks of “the realm of the dead” (413) and writes that “fever’s fire
licks at his body” (413). In the chapters that follow, we will go even farther
toward the center of the labyrinth and imitative desire will become more
hellish still. Dreams will play a greater part in the narrative, first in Identity,
and then in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the sexual act itself
takes on the triangular character noted by Martine Boyer-Weinmann in her
study of Kundera.
The purpose of this chapter is to focus on a theme that has received
less than the attention it deserves, given its importance in Kundera’s
fiction: jealousy. Girard writes that human interactions have a tendency to
“program themselves.”1 Kundera’s treatment of jealousy confirms this idea.
In his novels, jealousy frequently occurs as the result of a role play gone
awry. What begins as a lighthearted game metamorphoses into mutual
mistrust. The combat escalates until it takes on a life of its own. The players
want to put a stop to the game yet seem incapable of halting its ineluctable
development.
The theme of the role play gone awry first appears in “The Hitchhiking
Game,” the third story in Laughable Loves. A man in his late 20s and his
modest, younger girlfriend have embarked on a vacation trip. The girl is
anxious, insecure: “He knew that she loved him and that she was jealous.
Jealousy isn’t a pleasant trait, but if it isn’t overdone (and if it’s combined with
modesty), apart from its inconvenience there’s even something touching
about it” (80). What the young man most likes about her is a quality of
“purity” (80). Here Kundera lays the groundwork for the misunderstanding
to come, for the girlfriend deplores her own straightlaced ways, which
stand as evidence of her failure to keep up with the times: “She knew that
her modesty was ridiculous and old-fashioned . . . She often longed to feel
free and easy about her body, the way most women around her did” (81).
Moreover, she is full of suspicions and fears that her boyfriend will leave her
one day for a more sexually provocative woman:
. . . it often occurred to her that other women (those who weren’t

anxious) were more attractive and seductive, and that the young man,
who did not conceal the fact that he knew this kind of woman well,
would someday leave her for a woman like that. (82)
At a rest stop, the young woman disappears into the bushes to relieve
herself. When she returns to the car, she flirtatiously pretends to be a
hitch-hiker. The man plays along and treats her as if she were a stranger.
With a flirtatiousness equal to her own, he invites her to step into the car,
and she accepts with coquettish gratitude. From there, their banter takes
them further and further from themselves. Each partner in the game begins
to appear in a new light. The young woman wants to step into the role of the
seductive other women that she imagines her boyfriend to prefer. She thinks
that playing that role will liberate her from her anxiety and make him more
interested in her. Instead, the game (like so many enterprises undertaken by
Kundera’s characters) takes on a meaning opposite the one intended.
At the same time that the young woman plays the role of the seductress,
she observes her boyfriend with her own eyes, as if she were peeking out
at him from behind a mask. The two-person game has become triangular.
Now there is the boyfriend, the pretty hitchhiker, and the girlfriend, who,
Jealousy and its Metaphors 85
as if she were having an out-of-body experience, observes the scene as it

unfolds, an invisible spectator. What she sees wounds her:
At these words the girl looked up at him and found that he looked
exactly as she imagined him in her most agonizing hours of jealousy.
She was alarmed at how he was flattering her and flirting with her (an
unknown hitchhiker), and how seductive he was. (85)
One metamorphosis engenders another. First, the young woman was

transformed. Now, the young man begins to appear otherwise than he
usually does. In response to her seductive demeanor, he has begun to treat
her with a flirtatiousness she has never known him to display. Far from
making him less attractive in her eyes, this makes him more alluring than
ever. Such is the transfiguring power of imitative desire. Oddly enough, the
girl desires her boyfriend through the phantom hitch-hiker whose role she
herself is playing. She simultaneously plays the roles of imitator and model.
By her (imaginary but increasingly real) presence, the coquettish woman
she is pretending to be transforms her boyfriend into a virile misogynist.
The young man “began to play the tough guy who treats women to the
coarser aspects of his masculinity” (87). This, however, is no more than
an act:
. . . he had never resembled a heartless tough guy, because he had

never demonstrated either a particularly strong will or ruthlessness.
However, if he did not resemble such a man, nonetheless he had longed
to at one time. . . . And this childish desire quickly took advantage of
the opportunity to embody itself in the proffered role. (88)
To whom or what is the role proffered? To the young man? Or to his childish
desire? The structure of the sentence seems to suggest the latter as the more
likely alternative. In other words, desire has taken charge: it seizes the
occasion, acting with a will of its own. And this desire is clearly imitative
to the extent that the young man wishes to resemble a hard, unscrupulous,
satanic character.
His girlfriend finds the game liberating. It takes her out of herself, and
that self, writes Kundera, is identical with her jealousy (“. . . she herself
was, above all, the epitome of jealousy” (88)). She, too, wishes to transform
herself into someone else. Kundera portrays her as a Madame Bovary, a
bit like Jaromil from Life Is Elsewhere, who is also mediated by dimestore
novels:
The girl could forget herself and give herself up to her role.
Her role? What was her role? It was a role out of trashy literature. . . . She
was an artful seductress, cleverly knowing how to use her charms. The
girl slipped into this silly romantic part with an ease that astonished
her. (88)
The role of the seductress has been suggested to her by a stereotyped

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

puts it, translated into her friend and rival Hermia:
Sickness is catching; O, were favour so,

Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go;
My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,
My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody.
Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,
The rest I’d give to be to you translated
O, teach me how you look, and with what art
You sway the motion of Demetrius’s heart.2
As Jean-Michel Oughourlian notes in his analysis of the play in The Puppet

of Desire, Helena’s desire settles on the various visible and audible attributes
of her model: the tone of voice, the coquettish glance, the way of talking.3
These characteristics form the iceberg tip of Hermia’s being. In adopting
them, Helena hopes to capture her friend’s ineffable essence and make it
her own. Similarly, the young woman in “The Hitchhiking Game” wishes
to acquire the qualities and attributes of her imaginary model, the one she
thinks her boyfriend prefers to her. She tries to catch this model’s being the
way Helena tries to catch Hermia’s.
The young woman’s metamorphosis occurs in stages. At first, it affects
only the surface of her personality. She aspires, however, as we have seen,
to be utterly transformed, to give herself, as it were, a complete existential
makeover. Little by little, as she grows into her role, she begins to absorb the
foreign being at ever deeper levels of her self:
. . . now sitting face-to-face with her, he realized that it wasn’t just the
words that were turning her into a stranger, but that she had completely
changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and
that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled a type of woman he knew
all too well and who inspired some aversion in him. (93)
In becoming the kind of woman that her boyfriend finds slightly off-putting
and vulgar, she awakens the least tender part of him, the part drawn almost
against his will to immodest, sexually confident women. We are confronted
with a literal possession, a total transformation that leaves none of the
former self behind. The young woman’s very way of gesturing has been
altered, just as Laura’s was altered by her imitation of her older sister in
Immortality.
The young man and his girlfriend stop for dinner. At the beginning of the
story, she blushed with embarrassment when her boyfriend compelled her
to tell him that she was going into the bushes to urinate. In the restaurant,
she announces with brash confidence that she is going “to piss” (95). The
metamorphosis is complete: “. . . now she was the hitchhiker, the woman
without a destiny” (97). Kundera stresses the triangular, voyeuristic nature
of the game. The young man cannot shake the feeling that his girlfriend is
betraying him with someone else. And he, too, is jealous:
. . . the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown
driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the
hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting; he saw his
girl seducing a strange man, and he had the bitter privilege of being
present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what
she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him,
when she would cheat on him); he had the paradoxical honor of being
himself the pretext of her unfaithfulness. (98)
Strikingly, it is the young man who simultaneously plays the roles of

seducer and cuckold in this triangular melodrama. He is relegated to the
passenger’s position; meanwhile, the rival he has conjured out of thin air
slides into the driver’s seat. The game, writes Kundera, is “a trap for the
players” (99). It deprives them of their autonomy: “. . . in a game there lurks
a lack of freedom” (99). The author compares the two players to pieces on
a chessboard or a sports team on the field: “the more extreme the game
became, the more it would be a game” (99)—in other words, the more the
naked reciprocity of imitative interaction would supersede the individual
wills of the players, transforming even their attempts to leave the playing
field into moves demanding retaliation.
At the conclusion of the story, the partners push the game to the
outermost limit, surrendering to the roles imposed on them by the move–
countermove pattern of their playacting. The young man takes the woman
to their room and there he treats her as if she were a prostitute. Here, too,
everything he knows comes to him second-hand, by imitation: “. . . the
young man had never had a whore, and the ideas he had about them came
from literature and hearsay” (103). He orders the girl to stand on a little
table, which functions as a substitute for the piano in his mental image of a
prostitute dancing on a piano. The profanation of the idol is complete. All
love and tenderness have departed their relationship. Their bodies join on
the bed. All that remains is the young man’s cruelty and the young woman’s
realization that never before has she known such intense sexual pleasure
(which, however, she cannot savor because of the horror her situation
inspires in her). When their lovemaking is finally over, the young woman
sobs in the darkness, repeating again and again: “I’m me, I’m me . . .” (106).
What went wrong? Where did the game stop being playfully flirtatious
and turn into an exchange of hateful reprisals? It is difficult to say. At the
beginning, all was in place for a romantic getaway. Even the role play, when
it first started, seemed the flirtatious prelude to an evening of merry, sensual
delights. But somewhere along the way things began to go awry despite the
best intentions of both parties. The car in which the two protagonists (soon
to become antagonists) are isolated cuts them off from the outside world
and from all influences aside from each other. There is nothing and nobody,
no referee, no outside force to put a stop to the infernal logic of the game
once it starts to play itself out.
The story can be read most fruitfully as a meditation on the blurry
boundaries of human identity, the malleable, shifting nature of the self,
which, in the reciprocal feedback of the game, gradually loses its coherence
and becomes fuzzy, smeared, double:
He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression

the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at
two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on
the other with one showing through the other . . . everything was in the girl
. . . her soul was terrifyingly amorphous [. . .] The impression that certain
outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion. (100–1)
The singularity of identity gives way to undifferentiation. The beloved

resembles all women and no longer has a definite, unique personality. Her
sobbed “I am me” suggests that she is doing her best to retrieve the self
left behind when she began to be transformed into (to be possessed by) the
flirtatious hitch-hiker. At the beginning of the story, there remained a gap
between the self that reflected and observed and the self that played the role
of the hitch-hiker. By the end, however, the reflective, observing self has
disappeared. There is no longer any gap between the actor and her role. And
when the boundaries between self and other are effaced, identity oscillates,
wavers, and finally shatters completely.
The metaphors of jealousy
I will revisit the theme of jealousy and eroding identity shortly in the
novel Identity, which gathers all of the themes I have been discussing so far
and presents them with utmost clarity. First, however, a detour by way of
Farewell Waltz.
The novel introduces two jealous characters: Kamila, the wife of a

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

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

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

tasks, and her distraction gives Kundera the opportunity to invent yet
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)
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.
“A test that gauged her susceptibility to seduction”
In Life Is Elsewhere, Jaromil gets jealous because his red-headed girlfriend

confesses that when she goes to the doctor she is obliged to undress in front
of him. The girl, inspired no doubt by the age-old fantasy of “playing doctor,”
flirtatiously acts out her medical visit for Jaromil’s benefit. She wants to
pretend that he is the doctor and she his docile patient. Jaromil, however,
does not feel like playing. He experiences the helpless sensation (which also
afflicted the young man in “The Hitchhiking Game”) of being the invisible
cuckold observing his beloved in the act of infidelity:
He thought that the doctor probably touched the redhead’s breasts

like this when he listened to the sounds in her chest behind the closed,
mysterious doors of the examining room. He raised his head, looked
at the naked girl, and felt a sharp pain, for he was seeing her just as
another man, the doctor, saw her. He quickly placed both his hands on
the redhead’s chest (not the doctor’s way but his own) so as to put an
end to this painful game. (269)
As in “The Hitchhiking Game,” however, at the moment one partner wishes

to put a stop to the game, the other one interprets the gesture as a new
move. The self-programming tendency of human relationships transcends
individual intentions. The reciprocity of the moves takes on a life of its
own:
The redhead complained: “Now, now, Doctor, what are you doing?
You’re not allowed to do that!” Jaromil flared up: he saw what his
girlfriend’s face expressed when a stranger’s hands were touching
hers; he saw that she was complaining frivolously, and he wanted to
hit her. (270)
Where there is jealousy, eroticism never lags far behind. Jaromil hates his
girlfriend just as the driver hated the hitchhiker. He wants to inflict violence
on her. At the same time, the presence of a third party, even if that third
party is nothing but a phantom presence called into being by the game,
illuminates the beloved’s body and renders it intensely desirable. The same
laws of imitative desire that caused Laura to fall instantly in love with her
sister’s husband lead Jaromil to perceive his girlfriend’s body as infinitely
attractive in the brilliant rays of jealousy that the imaginary third party
shines on it: “but at that very moment he realized that he had become
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
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
I can only nod approvingly at Boyer-Weinmann’s mention of mimetic

rivalry, not to mention her use of the word “value,” which recalls the
“labyrinth of values” into which we penetrated with “Dr. Havel After
Twenty Years.” The rivalry in this novel, however, which realizes a
potential left untapped in “Dr. Havel,” stems neither from the desire to
spice up a bland conjugal life nor from Jean-Marc’s narcissistic urge to

try out his powers as a seducer. In the position of strength, he has no
doubts (at least not yet) about Chantal’s love for him. Nor does he seem
overly concerned about her declining levels of sexual energy. Rather, he
aims at boosting her self-esteem, staving off the aging process that made
her seem so worryingly melancholy during their weekend in Normandy.
His first letters respectfully praise Chantal’s charms without resorting to
off-putting innuendo.
In other words, the scandal of Kundera’s plot resides in the absence of any
initial perversity. Jean-Marc’s intentions are generous and do him credit. He
errs only in his failure to take the uncontrollability of the imitative process
into consideration.
Through the mouth of another character, the cynical and provocative
ad agency guru Leroy, Kundera addresses his central theme of eroticism,
confirming once again the contradiction of an era which sees itself as hedonist
but in truth takes little enjoyment in lovemaking: “I want to alert you. Only a
very small minority really enjoys sex,” says Leroy (50). And he adds: “. . . while
everyone may covet the erotic life, everyone also hates it, as the source of their
troubles, their frustrations, their yearnings, their complexes, their sufferings”
(51). The novel hinges on this contradiction at the heart of our sex lives, which
promise immense satisfactions but frequently yield disappointments. Rather
than a means to freedom, eroticism appears in this novel as an infernal trap.
The characters experience nothing but torment, doubt, and unhappiness
as a result of the virtual love triangle created by Jean-Marc’s anonymous
letters. By contrast, their peaceful life together, before the implementation
of Jean-Marc’s scheme (and again at the end of the novel, when the delirium
of the game gives way to a tender bedtime conjugal scene), gives them both a
sense of fulfillment, what Ricard calls “this blessed repose.”10
Jean-Marc’s letters make no demands on Chantal. In eloquent, poetic
language, they express a discreet, almost respectful desire. As Kundera
writes, “These were letters not of seduction but of admiration” (71). Then
they shift tone and become more frankly erotic, and Chantal begins to
perform the scenes they suggest to her. At her anonymous admirer’s behest,
she dons a red nightgown that Jean-Marc gave to her. And as she and
Jean-Marc make love, she imagines someone looking on: “. . . suddenly she
has the sense that someone is there in the room observing them with an
insane concentration, she sees his face, the face of [the one] who imposed
the red gown on her, who imposed this act of love on her, and picturing him,
she cries out in climax” (73). The observer acts as a human version of that
immemorial erotic prop, the mirror, which reflects the lovers’ desire back
at them and puts them in the position of voyeuristic spectators of their own
copulation. Just as the strangeness of the game lit up the beloved’s body in
“The Hitchhiking Game” and made it seem new and exciting, the imaginary
stranger’s face, focused intently on the coupling bodies, redoubles Chantal’s
excitement. She and Jean-Marc have entered the labyrinth of desire.
I already touched briefly upon Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac while
analyzing “Dr. Havel.” Now there is no need to evoke the classic text:
Kundera has done so in my place: “As he wrote the second letter, he said to
himself: I’m becoming Cyrano; Cyrano: the man who declares himself to
the woman he loves from behind the mask of another man; who, relieved
of his own name, sees the explosion of his suddenly liberated eloquence”
(97). In Rostand’s play, there is little discussion of jealousy. Noble generosity
prevails as Christian and Cyrano outdo each other in self-sacrificing
politeness, like two gentlemen who refuse to be the first to pass through
a doorway. Yet, in his preface to one edition of the play, Patrick Besnier
is keen-eyed enough to discern the outline of an imitative triangle behind
their indestructible friendship:
. . . the presence of Christian is necessary for Roxane to be desirable—a

classic scheme of amorous rivalry in which love hesitates between the
rival and the object of the rivalry (unconsciously, Rostand accounts for
the homosexuality of the historical Cyrano).11
The reference to the imitative genesis of homosexuality is promising, and

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

charms, he described her body to her. He tried to note each part—face,
nose, eyes, neck, legs—to make her proud of it again. He was happy to
see that she dressed with greater pleasure, that she was more cheerful.
. . . (97)
The story could end here. Chantal could fall back into Jean-Marc’s
arms, radiant and sexy. Such a conclusion, however, would obscure the
ambivalent nature of his scheme, which becomes apparent at the end of the
same paragraph. Jean-Marc perceives Chantal’s renewed happiness with
pleasure, and congratulates himself on the success of his plan, “. . . but at the
same time his success stung him: before, she had not liked to wear the red
beads around her neck, even when he asked her to; and now it was another
man she was obeying” (97). The phantom Jean-Marc, Cyrano, has more
influence over Chantal than does Jean-Marc himself. For the first time, he
begins to imagine the possibility that Chantal wishes to betray him. The
generous, good-hearted desire to bolster Chantal’s flagging self-confidence
has generated adversarial tension. Jean-Marc imitates the imaginary desire
of an imaginary model and this redoubles his interest in his partner, even
as he suspects her of planning to deceive him:
Cyrano cannot live without jealousy [. . .] If a man writes letters to a

woman, his point is to prepare the ground for approaching her later to
seduce her. And if the woman keeps those letters secret, it is because
she wants today’s discretion to protect tomorrow’s adventure. And
if she saves them besides, it means she is prepared to see that future
adventure as a love affair. (97–8)
Little by little, the significance of Jean-Marc’s act shifts. It begins to resemble

more and more the dubious erotic stratagem described by Boyer-Weinmann
above. That Jean-Marc did not set out to satisfy his own vanity or to
spice up his sex life with Chantal by introducing an imaginary rival only
heightens the irony. Kundera suggests that even the most generous and
well-meaning plans harbor a hidden, destructive potential. The reader
has no trouble believing that the flirtatious role play described in “The
Hitchhiking Game” could go terribly wrong. The youth and insecurity of
the protagonists and the desire of both to be transformed into more alluring
versions of themselves added additional perils to the inherent imprudence
of the game. Here, however, Jean-Marc has no intention of playing with fire,
and the self-programming nature of imitative desire alone accounts for the
unexpected turn of events.
The unity of Kundera’s oeuvre appears in the resemblances that link this
short novel to the stories of Laughable Loves. That unity is also apparent in
the larger context of European literary history. Reading Kundera as I am
doing illuminates many similarities between his novels and the great works
of Western literature. I compared “Dr. Havel” to Dostoevsky’s Eternal
Husband. In the case of Identity, the interpolated novella “The Man Who
Was Recklessly Curious” from Don Quixote is an equally valid reference
point. In Cervantes’ novella, Anselmo asks his best friend Lotario to test his
new bride, the beautiful Camila:
. . . the desire that plagues me is my wondering if Camila, my wife, is as

good and perfect as I think she is, and I cannot learn the truth except
by testing her so that the test reveals the worth of her virtue, as fire
shows the worth of gold. Because it seems to me, dear friend, that a
woman is not virtuous if she is not solicited . . . 12
Similarly, in Kundera’s novel, Jean-Marc, less deliberately than Anselmo

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

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

jealousy he had experienced standing at the open wardrobe and asking
himself the theoretical question about Chantal’s capacity to betray him,
but jealousy as he had known it in his youth, jealousy that pierces the
body, that wounds it, that is unbearable. He imagines Chantal giving
herself to other men, submissive and devoted, and he can no longer
contain himself. (153)
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
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
The Quadrille of Desire
Sex as theater
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is Kundera’s best-loved novel. Both general

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

authority, which he had never doubted, reassuring himself that he was
his friend and disciple. This thought gave him the strength to join the
debate and to repeat the ideas he had heard during his visits to the
painter’s studio. The fact that he was making use of ideas that were not
his own is much less remarkable than the fact that he was expressing
them in a voice that was not his own. He himself was a bit surprised to
notice that the voice coming from his mouth resembled the painter’s,
and that this voice also induced his hands to make the painter’s gestures
The Quadrille of Desire 107
[. . .] he soon found this borrowing reassuring and protective; he hid

behind this mask as if behind a shield; he stopped feeling shy and self-
conscious. (154)
Jaromil’s surprise indicates that the forces at play transcend his individual
will. The painter has taken possession of the young man, and his genius
dwells within him just as Havel’s genius dwelled within the journalist in
“Dr. Havel.” Jaromil’s hands move like those of a puppet (recall that in
Immortality, Kundera declares that we do not use gestures but rather that
“gestures make use of us”).
If at first Jaromil seeks protection and reassurance from his borrowing
of the painter’s persona, he soon begins to resent his influence. He knows
the man’s way of thinking by heart, which is to say that he has thoroughly
absorbed not only his way of talking and gesturing, but also his very
being. And precisely because he can anticipate his mentor’s words and has
managed to model himself on the older man, he senses that his resemblance
to the painter lowers him in the gaze of others.
A decisive encounter takes place in the painter’s studio. Once again,
an audience is present. This time, rather than copying him, Jaromil has a
sudden urge to contradict the painter:
Jaromil would not have found it difficult to elaborate on the painter’s

idea, the logic of which he knew very well, but he was loathe to appear
here in the role of the touching pupil, the obedient, praiseworthy boy.
He was overcome by the desire to rebel. (199)
Strange to say, however, even as he rebels against the painter, even as he goes
from disciple to adversary, he continues to imitate his master:
Only one thing unsettled him from his very first words on: once again
he was hearing the painter’s distinctive, authoritative tone in his own
voice, and he was unable to prevent his right hand from describing in the
air the painter’s characteristic gestures. It was actually a strange debate
between the painter and the painter, between the man painter and the
child painter, between the painter and his rebellious shadow. Jaromil was
aware of this, and he felt even more humiliated; thus his formulations
became more and more harsh, so as to revenge himself on the painter,
who had imprisoned him in his gestures and his voice. (200)
Kundera shows the way discipleship shades into revolt. The more aware
Jaromil becomes of his failure to break away from the painter, the more
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
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
their liaisons, he holds his numerous mistresses at arm’s length, in accord

with his belief that he can only be himself as a bachelor. Divorced, estranged
from his son and his own parents, who sided against him in the aftermath
of the separation, he aspires to a sort of freedom beyond all familial and
erotic ties.
Strangely, however, his womanizing is far from the pleasure-giving
libertinage recounted by a Diderot or a Vivant Denon. Though out of regard
for Tereza he tries to stop making appointments with his mistresses, he
discovers that he cannot help himself: “He lacked the strength to control
his taste for other women” (21).
Tomas is a compulsive womanizer. Philandering is for him an imperative,
an “es muss sein,” as Kundera puts it, that is to say a force of which he is
not the master. The “it must be” of desire drives him into the arms of one
woman after another. His mistresses are not quite interchangeable sex
objects. In each of them he seeks a new sliver of carnal knowledge, like
a collector gathering specimens. But they are singular only in a limited
sense, insofar as all together they stand for variety or multiplicity (only
his arrangement with Sabina embodies the friendship with no emotional
strings attached that is Tomas’s ideal). Nor do these women even manage to
gratify him sexually. Just as Laura and Bernard make love without feeling
any enjoyment in Immortality, Tomas derives little satisfaction from his
liaisons:
But was it still a matter of pleasure? Even as he set out to visit another
woman, he found her distasteful and promised himself he would not
see her again [. . .]. He was caught in a trap: even on his way to see them,
he found them distasteful, but one day without them and he was back
on the phone, eager to make contact. (21–2)
The word addiction would not be excessive. We see the familiar, Tantalus-like
imitative pattern emerge here in the sexual realm. No sooner has Tomas
brought the cup of sensuality to his lips than it inspires him with disgust and
he no longer has the desire to drink. Once the cup is taken away, however,
he begins to thirst and reaches for it once more. In its repetitive circularity,
this is a properly infernal pattern.
Tereza’s jealousy also takes on an infernal cast. There can be no doubt
that, as it was for Proust and Dostoevsky, the enigma of jealousy is one of
Kundera’s chief preoccupations. In Life Is Elsewhere and Farewell Waltz, he
provided a quasi-phenomenological analysis of the jealous consciousness.
Here, he uses an original technical procedure to render the sufferings of
jealousy more palpable: the dream narrative, which gives him more poetic
latitude than in his prior descriptions of the triangular sickness.
Her first jealous dream is inspired by a letter she has found in which
Tomas writes to Sabina of an erotic fantasy. The scene’s masochistic timbre
is conveyed by Tereza’s act of self-mutilation:
The two of them and Sabina had been in a big room together. There was
a bed in the middle of the room. It was like a platform in the theater.
Tomas ordered her to stand in the corner while he made love to Sabina.
The sight of it caused Tereza intolerable suffering. Hoping to alleviate
the pain in her heart by pains of the flesh, she jabbed needles under
fingernails. (15–16)
This is precisely what we do when we think about masochism: we emphasize

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

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

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

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

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

stands for the insurmountable obstacle of Karel’s indifference to her. He
flees and she tries to entrap him with her sexual generosity. Given its
ambivalent effects on the couple’s relationship, we have cause to regard
her generous impulses with some suspicion, all the more so because the
Sisyphean metaphor comes in the context of acute rivalry:
The two women were kissing and embracing each other in front of him
but never for a moment ceased to be rivals vigilantly watching to see
which one he was more attentive to, which one he was more tender with
. . . First his mistress burst into tears right in the midst of lovemaking,
and then Marketa shut herself into a deep silence. (55)
Caught between the two women, Karel “saw himself as Sisyphus” (57). In
other words, both spouses feel as if they are pushing a boulder up a hill:
“Yes, as the years went by, man and wife became twins, with the same
vocabulary, the same ideas, the same destiny. Each had given the gift of Eva
to the other, each to make the other happy” (57). And, as in previous sex
scenes, the triangularity of desire makes sexual pleasure impossible: “Even
when she was with Eva, whom she loved very much and of whom she was
not jealous, the presence of the man she loved too well weighed heavy on
her, 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.
Acute rivalry and homosexual attraction
The imitative reading sheds light on the gradual shift in the significance
of Tereza’s nightmares. The masochistic dream in which Tereza watched
Tomas coupling with Sabina on a kind of stage soon takes on new, erotic
meaning. Tereza is no longer the victim but rather an aroused voyeur: “As
time passed, the image lost some of its original cruelty and began to excite
Tereza. She would whisper the details to him while they made love” (62).
She fantasizes about joining him in his couplings with Sabina. Increasingly
fascinated by the idea, she attempts to get closer to her rival: “Oh, to be the
alter ego of his polygamous life! . . . she could not get it out of her head, and
tried to cultivate her friendship with Sabina. Tereza began by offering to do
a series of photographs of Sabina” (62). Girard writes: “homosexuality, in
literary works, is often the eroticizing of mimetic rivalry.”5 What holds true
for Dostoevsky’s characters (whose acute jealousy goes hand in hand with
latent homosexual attraction toward the rival) also goes for Kundera’s. The
individual’s 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:
If we recognized that the sexual appetite can be affected by the interplay

of mimetic interferences, we have no reason to stop at ‘sadism’ and
‘masochism’ in our critique of false psychiatric labels. Let us grant that
the subject can no longer obtain sexual satisfaction without involving
the violence of the model or a simulation of that violence—and that the
instinctual structures we have inherited from animals, in the sexual
domain, can allow themselves to be inflected by the mimetic game. We
then have to ask ourselves if these cases of interference are not likely
to have a still more decisive effect and give rise to at least some of the
forms of homosexuality.6
Just as snobbery can interfere with our instinctive need for food and drink
(leading us to prefer an expensive brand of bottled water, for example, or to
eat for purposes that have little or nothing to do with biological subsistence),
imitative desire sculpts the sexual instinct. This is obvious in the case of
pornography, which inspires sexual desire by example. By a sort of erotic
telepathy, observing copulation produces arousal in the observer. Tereza’s
whispered fantasies are a kind of home-made, imaginary pornographic 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
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
Tomas and Franz stripping and taking photographs of each other in the
nude as the two women do to appreciate the strength of the taboos that
continue to surround male homoeroticism. To get a laugh, contemporary
culture often riffs on the awkwardness of ambivalent masculine friendships.
Novelists tend to broach the theme in a more lyrical mode, though Benoît
Duteurtre’s 1996 novel Gaieté Parisienne (which one might render as Gay
Paree) is a sharp satire of the Parisian gay community—and, in its wistful
humor, a very “Kunderian” take on modern life in general.
The geometry of sadomasochism
The sexual relationships between Tomas and Sabina, and between Sabina
and Franz, illustrate the way in which the laws of desire manifest themselves
in the erotic sphere. Excitement is predicated on domination or submission,
most often the latter. Tomas, for example, humiliates Sabina by stripping
her, putting a ridiculous hat on her head, and placing her in front of a
mirror:
When they looked at each other in the mirror that time, all she saw
for the first few seconds was a comic situation. But suddenly the comic
became veiled by excitement: the bowler hat no longer signified a joke;
it signified violence; violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a
woman. [. . .] The lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity, while
the hard masculine hat denied it, violated and ridiculed it. [. . .] . . . what
they both saw was far from good clean fun [. . .]; it was humiliation. But
instead of spurning it, she proudly, provocatively played it for all it was
worth, as if submitting of her own will to public rape.” (86–7)
Besides making an interesting parallel between the comic and sexual

violence (both involve humiliation), this passage illustrates the power of
erotic estrangement. In Kundera’s novels, the secret goal of erotic props and
role plays is an abasement that illuminates the lover’s body in the harsh light
of unfamiliarity. Just as the participants in the hitchhiking game wish to
be transformed into what they are not, Sabina, who in other respects is the
embodiment of female strength, slips into a role that takes her out of herself
and places her in the weak position, publicly humiliated and violated.
This passage confirms once again the theatrical nature of so-called
sexual perversion. The masochist is a caricature of the worshipful imitator
crouching at the model’s feet, while the sadist parodies the mediator as
ferocious ruler reigning supreme over his cowering subjects. The passage
also explains why Sabina and Franz are not sexually compatible. Franz
has no theatrical instinct, no desire to “play,” to enter the imaginary world
of sadomasochistic eroticism. When Sabina tries to play the bowler-hat
game with him, he doesn’t understand what she wants. Franz reminds us
of someone who has stumbled into an audition by mistake and doesn’t
understand what to do with the script in his hands.
Kundera situates the couple’s dysfunctional erotic life in the context of
a lexicon of “words misunderstood.” This technique allows him to abandon
linear narration and attack directly the misunderstanding that springs
from the mismatched worldviews of his two protagonists:
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their
lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together
and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Tereza exchanged the motif
of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and
Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and
every motif, every object, every word means something different to
each of them. (88–9)
By introducing the dictionary of words misunderstood with an erotic

encounter that never gains momentum, Kundera suggests that the
miscommunication between Sabina and Franz is rooted in their differing
attitudes toward sexuality. Franz’s lack of irony makes it difficult for him
to imagine simulating violence—striking his mistress, for example—even
as part of an erotic game. He is very muscular but thinks of his strength
as a means of keeping Sabina safe from harm rather than of dominating
her: “You never have to be afraid,” he said. “I can protect you no matter
what. I used to be a judo champion” (111). In short, Franz is not as sick with
metaphysical desire as Sabina, who compares him unfavorably to Tomas:
Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it

comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he’s weak. [. . .]
Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her,
as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth
on it naked. [. . .] There are things that can be accomplished only by
violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence. (111)
Sabina invites him to treat her violently: “‘Why don’t you ever use your
strength on me?’ she said” (112). But Franz refuses: “‘Because love means
renouncing strength,’ said Franz softly” (112). Unfortunately for him, Sabina
cannot become sexually excited without the stimulant of violence: “Sabina

realized two things: first, that Franz’s words were noble and just; second, that
they disqualified him from her love life” (112). While Sabina sees Tomas as
a “monster,” the words that Franz conjures in her mind all reflect the Swiss
professor’s virtue and moral rectitude: “goodness”; “Franz was the best man
she had ever had . . . he was intelligent . . . he was handsome and good” (116).
She speaks also of his “kindheartedness” (116). The literal-minded gaze
that he turns on the world springs from a good-hearted, unironic desire to
remain noble and just.
Kundera implies that Franz may still be attached to his mother,
like Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere: “His mother and the Platonic ideal of
womanhood were one and the same” (90). Or again: “Franz often spoke
about his mother to Sabina . . . he assumed that Sabina would be charmed
by his ability to be faithful” (91). Sabina becomes a replacement, a new
maternal figure standing in for the original.
Later in the novel, Kundera describes Franz as a dreamer who keeps
Sabina always in his thoughts, even when he has gone to the Cambodian
border with a group of protesters: “He traveled to the borders of Cambodia
only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her
eyes fixed on him in a long stare” (270). She is his invisible, distant mediator,
a replacement God as omniscient as the original. Sabina, on the other
hand, has broken free of the paternal circle. While Franz remains eternally
faithful to his mother, she rebels against her father, who detests Picasso,
and becomes interested in cubism: “After completing school, she went off
to Prague with the euphoric feeling that now at least she could betray her
home” (91).
For Sabina, then, physical love and violence go hand in hand: she dreams
of being humiliated by Tomas, fantasizes about him watching her as she
defecates. Just as Vincent, in Slowness, is mesmerized by the obstacle in his
intellectual life, so is Sabina thrall to men capable of cruelty in her erotic life.
She is drawn to the ones who treat her with rough lack of consideration and
turned off by the proverbial nice guy whose kindness gives her no model to
jumpstart her attraction.
In her case, sexual arousal is no more spontaneous than are other
forms of desire. When she and Tomas make love, a mirror reflects the
image of their coupling bodies back to them. At once observers and objects
of observation, their lust is reflected and redoubled, obeying the same
triangular laws as metaphysical desire. Excitement is predicated on the
model’s presence, which illuminates the lover’s body and make it strange,
new, and desirable.
Does Kundera intend to illustrate the laws of imitative desire? Has

he deliberately sketched out this rigorous geometry of repulsion and
attraction? In the early short story “Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” he
explicitly conceptualized and defined the imitative principle. The same was
certainly true in Immortality. Here, it looks like the patterns emerge not as
the result of the author’s deliberate design but rather as a side-effect. This
is one of the secrets of the novelistic mode of discovery: it is not always
the intent to reveal imitative desire that results in its revelation. Rather, the
novelist seeks to make contact with the reality of a “situation,” with “being.”
As he or she explores the concrete realm of human interaction, the imitative
structures emerge like the lines on a piece of tracing paper that one holds to
a headstone and rubs with a pencil.
7
At the Heart of the Labyrinth
“The thousand-headed dragon”
We have wound our way from the outer corridors of the labyrinth of values
into the somber regions where jealousy, masochism, and violent eroticism
prevail. We have seen the various ways in which imitation transfigures the
world, gently at first, sprinkling glitter over the object of desire, and then
more insistently. Finally, the self-programming game takes over, pushing
reality aside, establishing itself as a substitute pseudo-reality. Now, following
the Ariadne’s thread of imitative desire, we have arrived at the heart of the
labyrinth of values.
For the majority of this study I have focused on imitation as an individual,
small-scale problem. I analyzed the way in which Kundera describes the
interaction among two or three or at most four characters. These characters
end up in a few basic situations: the candid disciple influenced by an admired
mentor; the model transformed into a rival; the role-play gone wrong; and
so on. Now I would like to explore the way Kundera depicts the shift from
these private situations to a broader form of imitative conflict that engulfs
whole groups and leads inexorably to violence.
The totalitarian world described by Kundera can be looked upon
simultaneously as a regression and a limit case for modern societies, a
future toward which all of them tend in principle if not in reality. The novels
unfold in Communist Czechoslovakia or in Western Europe, which were
separated for much of Kundera’s lifetime by the Iron Curtain. Despite this
separation, however, the author rejects the idea that the two worlds are in
absolute opposition:
From the political or economic point of view, perhaps. But for a novelist
the point of departure is the individual’s concrete life; and from this
point of view, the resemblance between the two worlds is just as striking.
When I saw the first low-income housing projects in Czechoslovakia I
believed I was seeing the very essence of the Communist horror! In
the barbarism of speakers screaming musical stupidities everywhere, I
detected the will to transform individuals into a group of cretins united
by a single, externally-imposed noise. Only later did I understand that

Communism was showing me the common features of the modern
world in the form of a hyperbolic caricature.1
As I write these words I am sitting in the cafeteria at a major American art

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

heard in the speeches of Communist orators, but he had been
rather repelled by them, just as he was repelled by all stereotypical
language . . . Yes, it was strange: in a moment of excitement (thus
At the Heart of the Labyrinth 125
at a moment when an individual acts spontaneously and reveals

his true self), Jaromil abandoned his language and chose to be a
medium for someone else. (171)
Jaromil becomes an imitator at the moment of the most intense feeling.

Kundera underscores the fundamental imitative paradox: the inner life
(our feelings, passions, moods) is mysteriously and inextricably linked
to the outer world. A spontaneous outburst of anger transforms Jaromil
into a stereotyped duplicate: “it seemed to him that he was part of a
thousand-headed crowd, one of the heads of the thousand-headed dragon
of a people on the march” (171). His membership in the crowd makes him
strong: to get back at his uncle (who gives his nephew a slap in the face),
Jaromil declares his intention of joining the Communist party.
In this way, private squabbles lead to large-scale historical events (even
ones as derisory as the 1948 coup). Even as Jaromil’s resentment toward
his uncle motivates his adhesion to the pseudo-revolution, youthful anger
toward fathers, uncles, and other authority figures produces similar results
across the land. The “thousand-headed dragon” grows ever stronger as each
of its heads becomes in turn the “medium” of a force that transcends the
individual and gives life meaning and direction. Paul Dumouchel writes:
. . . the eruption of private conflicts, jealousy, and personal rivalries

within the context of political violence, as well as during civil wars,
social upheavals, ethnic strife, and even state repression, is neither
an accident nor an anomaly, but one of the fundamental aspects of
political conflicts. The exploitation of violence to private ends indicates
the failure of the mechanism of transference . . . 2
Dumouchel sees the voluntary transfer of responsibility for violence to a

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

collective coitus, farcical in the first case and nightmarish in the second.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting likewise ends with an orgy. And in
Ignorance, Kundera returns to the imitative quadrille structure of The
Unbearable Lightness. The book ends with Gustav in bed with his wife’s
mother even as his wife has an intense sexual encounter with a near stranger
in a hotel room. The discreet incest motif places the novel’s climax in the
same category as similar scenes in previous books. These endings dissolve
the cultural boundaries that normally organize human life. They obscurely
recall the rites and festivals of ancient tribes.
What I see occurring in Kundera’s novels, then, is a collective movement
that sweeps up all of the isolated dueling couples and harnesses their
negative energies. The next act in the drama is also the last one, for as René
Girard has shown in Violence and the Sacred, the ultimate stage in the
evolution of imitative desire is the clustering of hatreds against a scapegoat.
This implies in turn that the final frontier of novelistic exploration is the
enigma of human sacrifice.
“The cement of their brotherhood”
In the sixth part of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tamina finds
herself on an island of children, an outsider in a sinister, infantilizing world.
The scenario recalls the plot of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, in which
the adult narrator finds himself back in school, reliving adolescence against
his will. However, where Gombrowicz describes the world of the “modern
schoolgirl” with grotesque humor, Kundera gives his fable a dreamlike
quality that accentuates the horror of his heroine’s plight.
At first, bigger, stronger, and more sexually developed than the children,
Tamina plays the role of the queen, as if the prerogative of the future
victim were to preside over her persecutors until the day of her execution.
The children wash her and pleasure her (the theme of the orgy makes an
appearance once again). All seems well, though the specter of rivalry hovers
nearby: “. . . among Tamina’s lovers there was a growing hostility between
those who felt they were her favorites and those who felt rejected. And all
these resentments began to turn against Tamina . . .” (251).
To forestall the nascent ill will, she participates in the children’s games,
which pit two teams (hers is the “Squirrels”) against each other. Because
she is the biggest and strongest, her team invariably wins. The two sides
squaring off against each other fill the role of the symmetrical imitative
doubles, each team an almost indistinguishable copy of the other. We may

recall the dialectic of the game gone awry, a favorite narrative device of
Kundera’s, which appeared in “The Hitch-hiking Game” and Identity. What
begins as a pleasant form of entertainment soon takes on a life of its own.
The players lose control and the back-and-forth exchange of moves leads to
an escalation, with the result that instead of the players using the game for
their own ends (as a means of amusement and pleasure), the means become
an end in themselves, and it is the game that uses the players, taking them
in directions they never intended to go.
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the game-gone-awry structure
recurs at a higher order of magnitude. This time, it involves multiple players.
The quasi-ritualistic nature of the competition, with its rules, protocol,
and animal totems, increases the uncanny resemblance to certain archaic
ceremonies.
Too lucid to become truly invested in these absurd competitions, Tamina
refuses to take them seriously. This is a grave mistake in the world of children,
who look upon their pastimes with the same seriousness as a primitive
tribe might look upon its sacred rituals. In this context of exacerbated
competition, imitative desire has conferred tremendous importance on
what should be a totally insignificant outcome. Winning becomes a solemn
duty. When the other side accuses her of cheating, Tamina doesn’t bother
to argue, and, scandalized by her apathy, her teammates accuse her: “The
Squirrels are furious, shouting at Tamina that she is a traitor, and a boy
shoves her so violently she nearly falls. She tries to hit back, and this is a
signal for them to pounce on her” (252–3).
Tamina has refused to adhere to the group’s highest value: the importance
of the organized imitative rivalries in which it ceaselessly engages. The
others can only regard her disinterest in all that they find most interesting
as an unbearable provocation (anyone who doubts the plausibility of her
situation need only imagine what unpleasant consequences might ensue
were she to sit down in the hometown section at a contemporary sporting
event—an important soccer match, say—wearing the colors of the visiting
side).
At the first sign of resistance, the crowd, responding to her counterattack,
comes together with extraordinary swiftness and throws itself upon her in
unison. She fights, but despite her superior strength they soon outnumber
her: “a flying stone strikes her brow and Tamina staggers and clutches her
bleeding head as the children move aside” (253). The children now form a
single group, a unified coalition. The teams have merged into one crowd; or,
rather, there are still two teams, but one of them is composed of Tamina,
and the other of all the children.
Rather than put her to death, the children are content to take aim at her
from afar.
The next day, she stands in the dormitory, surrounded by her tormentors.
The persecution continues, unfolding with the same half-ritualized
formality of the games, as if choosing a scapegoat were but another stage in
a pre-established series of steps:
She is the center of attention. A voice from a corner shouts “Tits, tits!,”
then all the others join in and Tamina hears the shout become a chant:
“Tits, tits, tits . . .”
What until recently had been her pride and weapon—the black hair
of her groin, her beautiful breasts—were now the target of abuse. In
the children’s eyes, her adulthood had turned into a monstrosity: her
breasts were as absurd as tumors, her hairy groin bestial. (253)
Kundera describes the reversal typical of the scapegoat polarization. The

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

historical period and in doing so gives Kundera access to the most ancient
strata of human culture. Tamina’s story displays the semantic density of an
archetype and at the same time a dispassionate eye for telling detail worthy
of an ethnological report. From this standpoint, the tour de force that is
“The Angels” underscores once again the fundamental link between form
and content: had Kundera not discovered a technique enabling the seamless
fusion of dream and reality, he would have been incapable of depicting
collective violence with such concentrated power.
The children’s shouts of victory signal the end of one phase of the game
and the beginning of a new one. Unlike most sporting events, this one has
a unique property: everyone truly is a winner. All shout for joy together.
Of course, Tamina is the exception to this general rule. Yet, because she is
now powerless to fight back, she poses no threat. The violence perpetrated
against her will generate no reprisals. She has soaked up the group’s hatred
like a superabsorbent sponge.
In the initial stage of the game, the volleyball moving back and forth
over the net symbolizes the give-and-take of vengeful exchange. This
reciprocity persists after Tamina’s capture, but it has lost its competitive
edge, become unselfish: rather than batting the ball back and forth, the
children now generously share possession of the object. They partake in the
capture together and the opposition between the two rival teams dissolves
in the victim’s blood and tears:
Tamina is trapped in a tangle of nets, the strings ripping into her skin,
and the children are pointing to her blood, tears, and grimaces of pain.
They are generously offering her to one another. She has become the
cement of their brotherhood. (255)
Tamina is a gift given to the whole group. If at first she was a source of
scandal and dissension, now, in her role as victim, she repairs the group’s
inner divisions and binds its members firmly together. An animal metaphor
illuminates the perspective of the persecutors: “Humans do not revolt against
the killing of calves in slaughterhouses. Calves are outside human law, just
as Tamina is outside the children’s law” (255). It would be inaccurate to say
that the children who torment Tamina act out of wicked motives. Like the
butchers who kill cows in a slaughterhouse, they display no special malice
toward their victim and feel neither guilt nor hatred. Indeed, it is Tamina
who hates them, while they feel only a great, collective joy: “Their desire to
hurt is positive and cheerful, a desire that can rightly be called joy. They
want to hurt anyone beyond their world’s border only in order to exalt their
own world and its law” (255). It is over and against Tamina that the group
reinforces its system of values. She is at once the guilty party and the fount
of the law. Indeed, until after her capture, there was no mention of the law,
as if the law came into existence with the designation of the outlaw, the
scapegoating process giving birth to both at once.
Meanwhile, the effervescence of joyous emotions marks the transition
from a first, negative transference to a second, positive one. The whole
drama pivots on the moment of collective persecution. The descent into
generalized rivalry never really comes to an end. Instead, the cascading
accusations organize the crowd in such a way that the rivalry benefits the
greatest number. The very force that tears the social fabric into shreds ends
up weaving it back together again. The crowd’s exclamations of joy drown
out the victim’s helpless cries.
This moment of communal ebullience recalls the practice of
commemorating generative violence with an annual festival, which
enshrines the victim as the group’s benefactor, the vital source of health,
happiness, and bountiful harvests. We may object that Kundera, in his effort
to avoid the cliché of the innocent martyr put to death by hateful persecutors,
strains to some extent for paradox. However, if one considers the nature of
the act that has just taken place, the words “cheerful” and “joy” and the
verb “exalt” look quite appropriate. The group has miraculously achieved
internal harmony at the very moment strife threatened to engulf it. At once
troublemaker and savior, Tamina has turned the crowd of children against
her the better to heal its internal divisions. What could be more worthy of
celebration than this happy outcome?
The two temptations
“The Angels” realizes the highest vocation of modern art. Like Stravinsky’s
“Rite of Spring,” it is a myth turned inside out, a stunning and disturbing
meditation on what Kundera calls “evil’s scandalous beauty” in Testaments
Betrayed (92). The naked presence of evil in a work of art should not be
regarded as evidence of that work’s moral failing. Rather, it should be
taken as a sign that the work has succeeded in resisting the moralizing
temptation. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera deplores the scolding tone
of Adorno’s music criticism, which attempts to reduce Stravinsky’s art to
an expression of dehumanizing violence. But when he composed “The Rite
of Spring,” Stravinsky sought less to express than to offer an unsparing
portrayal of human sacrifice as a scandalous reality of archaic culture. The
Don Quixotes of music criticism take sides with the victim and break lances
against the crowd, while the Nietzschean aesthetes celebrate the lynching
and revel in the triumphant unleashing of primitive energies. Stravinsky
does neither. He rejects the perspective of the crowd and its abominable
act, but also declines to use the victim’s position as a pretext for the kind of
moral indignation that answers violence with more violence.
It requires an unerring sense of balance to walk the line between these
two, equally insufficient perspectives. In an article that points out the
connection between Girard and Kundera, Thomas F. Bertonneau argues that
Kundera’s novels portray the scapegoat mechanism from the nonmythical
vantage point of the victim:
I note that The Joke especially has the form of a persecution narrative; or
rather, it is a Passion-narrative that reveals how persecution operates,
how a joke can become, in the eyes of the persecutors, a criminal offense.
But in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, virtue also becomes outcast,
and the protagonist, the doctor, again reenacts the Passion [. . .] In a
manner of speaking, Kundera even links artistic insight to persecution
and shows how this is especially the case in the twentieth century.3
Bertonneau argues that Kundera has his own version of “scapegoat

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

my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised
his hand to approve my expulsion not only from the Party but (and this
I had not expected) from the university as well. (47)
Ludvik is the personification of virtue outcast, and the unanimity of the

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

Zemanek, the one responsible for his expulsion from the university.
His hatred for Zemanek makes it possible for him to maintain a fragile
equilibrium. Without a targeted human enemy, his existence would lose its
stability as surely as collective life would lose whatever semblance of stability
it retains without the Ludviks against whom savvy political manipulators
like Zemanek mobilize the group’s resentful energies.
When he meets Zemanek at the end of the novel, Ludvik realizes that he
would be unable to accept an apology from his nemesis because his hatred
of Zemanek plays too important a role in his existence:
How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him ? How
would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance?
How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would
suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him
counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How
would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I
explain to him that I needed to hate him? (272)
Ludvik speaks for himself but he also speaks for the group, which needs
enemies to keep inner strife at bay: hatred is the negative force that makes
existence possible in the chaotic labyrinth of values. Only by hating someone
can Ludvik live with the misfortune of his expulsion from the Party in his
youth. His hatred organizes his life and gives it meaning; he stores up his
malevolent energy in anticipation of the moment when it will be discharged
in an act of retribution.
In his portrayal of Ludvik, Kundera successfully navigates between the
twin temptations to which I alluded above. On the one hand, he avoids
imitating the group’s perspective and alleging Ludvik’s guilt (several of
Kundera’s characters, including Ludvik himself at the time of his expulsion
from the party—“I reproached myself on every possible score and in the
end came to accept the necessity for some kind of punishment” (46)—but
also the young Alexej, identify with the persecuting power and voluntarily
accuse themselves). And on the other, he resists imitating Ludvik’s
revenge-structured perspective and painting his hero in self-justifying,
innocent hues.
Neither approach would have yielded fruitful results. Had Kundera
created a one-dimensional, positive hero, he would have falsified the essence
of Ludvik’s predicament, which lies in the arbitrary nature of political
persecution. The political power singles Ludvik out for expulsion from
the group not because of his exceptional, Christ-like purity (this would
be the romantic perspective, exemplified by the Rousseau of Reveries of a
Solitary Walker) but rather for no real reason whatsoever, other than the
silly postcard’s three blasphemous sentences denouncing optimism as the
opium of the masses and praising Trotsky; his destiny appears not so much
tragic as absurd.
“The absolute denial of shit”
Archaic religion retold the story of its own foundations as myth, exonerating
the group at the victim’s expense. Likewise, the utopian political project
calls for a means of veiling the reality of group violence, an art not only of
distortion and denial but also of hope and promise, which is to the show
trial what ancient myth was to “the machine for making gods.”5
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
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.
The not entirely metaphorical “shit” metaphor works on many levels. For
example, Kundera equates excrement with the human victims of show trials
and persecutions: “In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank
used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse” (252). Just as animals
define the limits of their territory by urinating or defecating, human groups
mark their borders with cadavers. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
the cadaver is a mere insect, a blood-sucking parasite unwilling to fall in
line with the kitsch idyll: “. . . everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue,
and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black
dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a
flea” (11).
Expelled from the group, evil resides in the space beyond the border;
troublemakers can only work their way into the community from the
outside:
[Sabina’s] professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory

of socialist art: Soviet society had made such progress that the basic
conflict was no longer between good and evil but between good and
better. So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could exist
only “on the other side” (in America, for instance), and only from
there, from the outside, as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it
penetrate the world of “good and better.” (252)
This passage recalls once again the plot of Court of Honor, in which
Americans lay their hands on the miracle drug formula, threatening to
wrest credit for the discovery away from the Soviet scientific community.
Kundera’s analysis of government oppression does what no sociological
or historical approach to the issue can: it grasps totalitarianism from an
aesthetic vantage point. This is utterly original and stands as one of the
author’s great achievements. It may also explain why the kitsch vision
disturbs him far more than totalitarianism’s actual, historical incarnation.
For instance, Sabina detests the saccharine innocence of Soviet cinema,
which many interpreters view as embodying the Communist ideal:
Sabina always rebelled against that interpretation. Whenever she

imagined the world of Soviet kitsch becoming a reality, she felt a
shiver run down her back. She would unhesitatingly prefer life in a
real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat queues.
Life in the real Communist world was still livable. In the world of the
Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would
have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week. (253)
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
in a sinister, Disneyized reality very much like the one of Soviet cinema or
today’s mind-numbing Hollywood blockbusters.
First time as tragedy, second time as farce
The modern, political version of the ancient mechanism described by

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

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

who, at first a bystander, comes to the aid of the vigilantes and tries to
restrain the dog: “The soul of the crowd, which formerly identified with
the miserable persecuted ones, today identifies with the misery of the
persecutors. Because to hunt men in our century is to hunt the privileged:
those who read books or own a dog” (109). Attitudes toward persecution
have evolved over time. Our growing awareness of social inequalities as
unjust rather than inevitable has caused our concern to shift from one kind
of victim to another. The shouts of the miserable multitudes drown out the
child’s sobs and the dog’s howls. The victims belong to the so-called one
percent, and so the persecutors act from what appears to them (if not to the
little boy) as a justified desire for equality; they tear the dog away from its
young owner with the virtuous feeling that they are righting a wrong. In
this way, violence justifies itself as a means of repairing earlier instances of
oppression and persecution.
Kundera’s novel rejects that hangman’s perspective. The narrator
identifies stubbornly with “the miserable persecuted ones” against the
mob’s righteous indignation. As the phrase “the soul of the crowd” implies,
the members of the mob have lost their individual identity and merged with
one another to form a new, collective self. They act as one, with a common
purpose and vision. This idea recalls the “thousand-headed dragon” to
which, as we saw above, Jaromil swears allegiance in Life Is Elsewhere. The
dragon image, however, possesses a certain terrible power, abominable
though it may be. In Farewell Waltz, whatever tragic grandeur the drama
once possessed has devolved into absurd self-parody:
Jakub thought that in his country things were getting neither better
nor worse but only more and more ridiculous: he had once been victim
of a hunt for humans, and yesterday he witnessed a hunt for dogs
that was like the same old play with a new cast. Pensioners took the
roles of examining magistrates and prison guards, and the parts of
the imprisoned political figures were played by a boxer, a mutt, and a
dachshund. (150)
History stages the political tragedy as farce the second time around. The
group seeks to uproot evil at the source so as to emerge from the labyrinth
of values into a world of crystal clarity. However, each time the mechanism
is triggered, its cathartic power of expulsion decreases. In The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, the septic tank image evokes a malfunctioning scapegoat
mechanism, a katharsis gone mad, resulting in a vertiginous multiplication
of victims, while in Farewell Waltz repetitive cycles of vengeance blur the
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
Repudiating the Model
Eduard’s smile
Imitative desire transfigures the object. That is perhaps the central lesson of
Kundera’s fiction and also of this book. In its own way, the mob of children
that persecutes Tamina is as deluded as the journalist in “Dr. Havel” or
Ludvik in The Joke. It views its own violence as justified by the grave threat
the victim (whom the crowd perceives as a monster) poses to public order
and safety. Of the many transfigurations wrought by desire, this is the
supreme one. The members of the “thousand-headed dragon” are more
deeply immersed in illusion, more alienated from themselves and from
reality, than any of the other characters in Kundera’s fictional world.
In “Dr. Havel,” virtually everyone except the journalist is aware of
Frantiska’s lack of beauty. Likewise, in the Kristyna episode of The Book and
Laughter and Forgetting, illusion is quarantined, limited to a single person.
From there, it spreads. It infects couples (Agnes and Laura in Immortality;
Jean-Marc and Chantal in Identity) and pairs of couples (the four main
characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being). And in the sections of The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting that recount Tamina’s journey to the island
of children, illusion has become unanimous, omnipresent.
The illusion extends to almost every part of the world that Kundera’s
novels describe. There are some areas, however, that it cannot reach. There
are moments, mostly at the conclusion, when the characters, like alpinists
looking down on a mist-covered landscape from atop a high peak, achieve
a perspective that is as free of illusion as the novelist’s own vision. A few,
privileged heroes leave triangular desire behind. They live through an
experience of radical disillusionment that reverses the mediator’s spell and
shows the object in its naked state once more, without for all that abolishing
the “memory of desire” to which Eva LeGrand refers in the title of her book
on Kundera.
The hero who both sees the world clearly and remembers what it was
like to misapprehend it is the equal of the novelist. To become a novelist,
it is necessary to have once been deluded. The novelist is someone who first
perceived Frantiska as a beauty and later realized both that she was not
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
He soon goes about seducing the directress, convinced that he can

wriggle his way out of the awkward situation at school. Meanwhile,
Alice has heard about Eduard’s re-education at the hands of the school
committee. Believing him a martyr, she decides to give herself to him. And
so he eventually manages to possess both women.
But what should have been a stunning victory ends in defeat. Eduard
is taken aback by the ease with which the devout Catholic abandons her
chastity. He is equally dismayed by the way the directress, in the heat of
passion, abandons her Marxist convictions and, at his demand, kneels
before him and prays.
As the story’s conclusion approaches, his dismay leads to self-recognition.
Eduard has no convictions, apart from the smug certainty that, in a world
where other people stick firmly (and foolishly) to their beliefs, he alone
blithely switches back and forth from conviction to conviction. He derives
his feeling of superiority from his ability to deceive those one-dimensional
creatures. Then he discovers that Alice and the teacher are themselves
conformists rather than true believers: “. . . and suddenly it seemed to him
that, in fact, all the people he had met in town were only ink lines spreading
on a blotter, beings with interchangeable attitudes, beings without firm
substance” (284).
In what sense, precisely, are the people around Eduard interchangeable
copies of one another? Totalitarianism is fundamentally schismatic and
double. Deep down, atheist and believer have identical motives. They
regard each other with hostility, and this is the determining factor in their
respective beliefs. Negativity precedes and engenders positive conviction.
The religiosity of Alice, like the substitute religion of the Marxists, is based
on negating the Other, the mimetic double. It is an ideologization of religion
rather than the thing itself:
Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to

be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her
papa’s shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how
should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging
her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice
had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe
in God. (249)
The spirit of vengeance rules in the totalitarian world. The true divinities
are neither Marxist nor Christian but are instead rivals transfigured
by hatred. In this universe of false transcendence, it is little wonder that
Eduard, who is more lucid than the people around him, can take nothing
and nobody seriously. He laughs inwardly at Alice and at the directress

and his nonseriousness elevates him above them, or so he thinks. Then he
realizes that he has been slavishly copying them all along. As a result of this
realization, he experiences a downfall that abruptly and brutally alters the
way he understands his own relationship to imitative desire:
. . . but what was worse, what was far worse (it struck him next), was that
he himself was only a shadow of all these shadow-characters; for he had
been exhausting his own brain only to adjust to them and imitate them
and yet, even if he imitated them with an internal laugh, not taking
them seriously, even if he made an effort to mock them secretly (and so
to justify his effort to adapt), it didn’t alter the case, for even malicious
imitation remains imitation, even a shadow that mocks remains a
shadow, a secondary thing, derivative and wretched. (284–5)
Eduard recognizes his likeness to others, abolishing the distinction between

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

The first unfolds beneath the eyes of others, before whom one must keep
up appearances. In Girardian terms, this is the world of imitative desire.
The second mode of existence represents the antithesis of the first and
transcends it. This is “vertical transcendence,” pure desire liberated from
contingent pseudo-essences.
Eduard is in church, sadly reflecting on the nonexistence of God, when
he is suddenly and unexpectedly visited by the very absolute he despaired
of encountering:
. . . Eduard is sitting in a wooden pew and feeling sad at the thought

that God does not exist. But just at this moment his sadness is so
great that suddenly from its depth emerges the genuine living face of
God! Look! It’s true! Eduard is smiling! He is smiling, and his smile
is happy. (287)
At the very moment he had given up hope, Eduard finds his way out of the
labyrinth and comes face to face with authentic transcendence, as opposed to
the deviated transcendence of compulsive imitation. Though the narrator’s
tone is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there is no cause for dismissing the
ending as a mere ironic flourish. The church setting is significant, as it was
there that Eduard imitated Alice and her fellow Catholics. After having had
the dispiriting realization that he is nothing but an imitator of the people
around him, who are themselves but imitators of one another, Eduard
(who is alone in church this time, with nobody around him to mimic)
experiences serene happiness born of divorce from the world of superficial
appearances.
The conclusion of “Eduard and God” marks the first time in the
collection that a character becomes aware of imitating unworthy models.
Kundera initially published the stories in Laughable Loves in three separate
notebooks. He later collected them for publication and shuffled their order,
eventually removing three of the ten original texts.1 I think he placed
“Eduard and God” last for a reason. The mystical moment at the story’s
conclusion can be read as an instance of “time regained,” or, as Girard would

say, a “novelistic conversion.” The structure of the experience resembles the
creative metamorphosis described in the last volume of Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time. Despite its predominantly comic mode, the story even imparts a
frisson of Proustian bliss. The way Eduard’s smile emerges from the depths
of his sadness mirrors in miniature the death and resurrection pattern
found in Time Regained: a sense of futility comes just before happiness and
illumination.
That smile returns, much later in Kundera’s oeuvre, on the lips of the
dying dog, Karenin. Eduard’s mystical (yet nonserious) encounter with
God is echoed in the quasi-Proustian recollections of Karel in The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting and again in the full-fledged mystical experience
recounted in the fifth part of Immortality, in which death and exile coincide
with deliverance.
From hatred to compassion
The renunciation of triangular desire entails a shift in one’s relationships

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

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

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

Helena. He describes their relationship in language that evokes stoning, as if
the adulterous wife were herself the missile with which Ludvik was to have
destroyed his rival: “. . . she was innocent with respect to me and I had acted
vilely, having turned her into a mere object, into a stone I had tried (and
failed) to throw at someone else” (283). For someone who remains under the
mediator’s spell, Ludvik understands his own situation extremely well. This
implies that while Zemanek’s influence may still be operative, it is rapidly
waning. In other words, there is a better explanation for Ludvik’s resurgent
love for his hometown, as well as for his willingness to join the cimbalon
band. Like a piece of music that modulates from a minor to a major key,
rivalry has begun to give way to friendship. Ludvik is in the process of
repudiating his model, and the effects are already making themselves felt:
No, it was not only Zemanek’s mockery that had made it possible for me
to regain my love for the world of folk costumes, songs, and cimbalom
bands; I could love it because this morning I had found it . . . in its
forlornness and in its abandonment. (311)
The world of folk music once served political ends. Now, it is nothing but
a vestige of its former self, a vestige of a vestige. Left by the wayside, it has
become a refuge at the very heart of the labyrinth of desire, an island of
peace and beauty amidst encroaching ugliness, like the chateau in Slowness
or the forget-me-not that Agnes holds in her hands at the end of Immortality.
Ludvik recognizes that he has been attached to Zemanek, who acted as
his model–rival. The “No, it was not only Zemanek’s mockery . . .” that he
pronounces represents a liberating moment of detachment, not only from
the man he vowed to destroy but also from the man who made that vow, the
vengeful Ludvik consumed by hatred.
Of course, there is no such thing as existence without mediation. When
one mediator is renounced it is replaced by another. The only question is:
which one? At the end of Kundera’s novels there is often a serene, peaceful
presence that assumes the role of the new guide. In “Eduard and God,” it
is the smile of God, which beams forth in the silence and solitude of the
empty church. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as we will see shortly,
the presence of friendly animals infuses the conclusion with innocent
sweetness. Here, it is the band leader who becomes a positive model,
instilling his energy in the rest of the group:
Jaroslav became the soul of us all, and I was amazed at what an excellent
musician this big fellow was, belonging as he did (he especially) to the
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
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
characterizes it as “the Idyll of innocence” and he crowns it with a capital

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

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

render it powerless. It attempts to sterilize it by calling it a banality. We
should not deny that banality but loudly proclaim it. [. . .] Novelistic
conclusions are bound to be banal since they all quite literally repeat
the same thing.8
What lies beyond the comic or tragic misunderstandings of desire?

Kundera’s novels provide an answer: repose; the end of self-centeredness
and the acquisition of wisdom; reconciliation with others and with the
past. This hard-earned repose comes in the final part of The Unbearable
Lightness, which is a sort of pastoral imbued with the innocence and purity
of animals: a dying dog (Tereza’s pet, Karenin, who has cancer) as well as a
pig, Mephisto, who belongs to one of the villagers.
Tomas-Oedipus has left Thebes and arrived in Colonus. The joking of the
locals and the dog’s moving smile contrast with the jealousy, vertigo, and
unhappiness that haunted the couple before their departure from Prague.
The community in which men and animals live in harmony stands opposed
to the dog massacres organized by the decaying regime. Karenin embodies
this harmony, which is as far from sentimentality as it is from insensitivity.
The smile that lingers on the dead dog’s lips evokes a mixture of rest and
happiness, tranquility and discreet joy.
Karenin’s agony reveals the link between death and deliverance. A
passage near the end of the novel shows this clearly. The vet has operated
on Karenin and at home he has not quite come out of his anesthesia. Tomas
and Tereza put him to bed and then go to bed themselves:
At three o’clock that morning, he suddenly woke them up, wagging his
tail and climbing all over them, cuddling up to them, unable to have
his 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
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
with. The characters must be sufficiently embedded in illusion, and their

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

what of the author? In an interview, Girard suggests that the character’s
conversion becomes conceivable only after the novelist himself experiences
a transformation:
The novelist engages in reflection and comes to sense that his whole
life has been based upon illusion. The character in a novel then
experiences a conversion that involves a recognition that he is like
those he despises. But this experience of the character is in reality a
reflection of what has happened to the novelist. It is what makes him
able to write the novel [. . .]10
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,
“epic” consciousness turns outward to grasp the true nature of the

objective world.
What is missing from Hegel’s reflections on poetry is of course the
model. Neither the romantic poet nor the philosopher (we need only recall
Heidegger’s ideas about “authenticity”) makes room for himself in the cage
he constructs for others. Only the novelist succeeds in demolishing the
abstract barriers between himself and his enemies by recognizing that he,
too, is inauthentic since at a deep level he is just like them. As an author of
fiction, Kundera belongs in the pantheon of greats; as a forger of concepts, he
is sometimes beholden to ways of thinking that deny the model’s presence.
This means that we must use the narrative substance of Kundera’s fiction to
shed light on his idea of lyricism rather than the reverse.
At the conclusion of The Joke, Ludvik realizes that he never gave Lucie
the love she needed because he remained too wrapped up in himself:
A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the
time, that stupid lyrical age, when man is too great a riddle to himself
to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people
(no matter how dear) are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to
find his own emotions, his own worth. (251) (my emphasis)
The subtle triangularity in this passage recalls the journalist in “Dr. Havel”
who is “slavishly dependent on the people with whom he came in contact. It
was in their sight and judgment that he timidly found out what he was like and
how much he was worth (203) (my emphasis). These passages suggest that
the lyrical individual looks to others as judges who mediate his self-esteem.
In other words, implicit in the idea of self-absorbed lyricism is the idea of
other-absorbed imitation. This other-absorption brings no understanding
or insight into the other’s life or predicament, nor does self-absorption
result in any revelatory introspection. The character remains as deluded
about others as he is about himself.
In Life Is Elsewhere (which Kundera originally wanted to call The Lyrical
Age), we find the same link between amour-propre and surreptitious
fascination with others. Jaromil, the lyrical soul par excellence, imitates
virtually everyone around him, from the authoritative voice and gestures
of his painter mentor to his former classmate, the virile policeman, and
the famous poet. He wants to look virile, hard, and confident, and he is in
despair because of his receding chin:
This chin worried him a lot; he had read in a famous passage by

Schopenhauer that a receding chin is a particularly repulsive feature
because it is precisely his prominent chin that distinguishes man from

ape. But then he came across a photo of Rilke and saw that Rilke, too,
had a receding chin, and this gave him priceless comfort. (127)
Here, lyrical self-concern is one with the quixotic desire to look like
someone else. As implied by the countless moments he spends studying his
reflection in shop windows and the mirror, Jaromil’s self-love is weak and
needs constant reinforcement. The poor fellow cannot live in peace without
the reassuring precedent of a famous poet’s chin.
One of Kundera’s contributions to our understanding of imitation, then,
involves pointing out that young people, whose adolescent personalities
have yet to crystallize, are especially vulnerable to influence. Youth is not
only the lyrical age but also the imitative age, as Kundera notes in The Joke:
“The young can’t help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust
by life in to a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown.
They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models—those that are in fashion,
that suit, that please—and enact them” (87). There are many models to
choose from. The boy commander in the labor camp wants to look tough
for the other men, who are older and more experienced than him: “what
he had read and heard offered him a ready-made mask: the cold-blooded
hero of cheap thrillers, the young man with nerves of steel who outwits
the criminal gang, the man of few words, calm, cool, with a dry wit and
confidence in himself and the might of his own muscles” (87). The students
who interrogated Ludvik at the university “were above all boys covering
their incomplete faces with the mask they admired most, the mask of the
hard, ascetic revolutionary” (87). As for Marketa, she “modeled herself after
the female savior in some B movie” (87), and Ludvik himself runs “back and
forth among several roles” (87).
At the moment the “anti-lyric” metamorphosis occurs, the budding
novelist emerges abruptly from the mists and discovers a fresh, lucid point
of view. Kundera describes the transformation as follows in The Curtain, his
third book of essays: “The anti-lyric conversion is a fundamental experience
in the curriculum vitae of the novelist: separated from himself, he suddenly
sees that self from a distance, astonished to find that he is not the person
he thought he was” (91). The novelist’s surprise stems from the fact that
he was self-deluded until the moment of his conversion, much like the
character in a novel. Don Quixote, for example, thinks he is a great knight.
At the end of his life, he wakes up and sees himself as he really is (or was
until then), as Alonso Quijada, a gentleman obsessed with stories of knight
errantry.13 Similarly, the boy commander could one day realize that he was
imitating cheap thrillers and Marketa could see that she was modeling her
life on a character in a movie—and both would be “astonished,” the one to

discover that he wasn’t really a tough guy, the other to find that she wasn’t
an idealized female savior.
Another important point: when the novelist tears through “the curtain
of pre-interpretation” (92), he not only acquires a new vision of himself
but also greater understanding of others and their self-deception: “After
that experience, he will know that nobody is the person he thinks he
is, that his misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts
on people . . . the soft gleam of the comical” (91). This clairvoyance
corresponds to what Girard says above about the novelist’s recognition
that “he is like those he despises.” The experience of conversion leads the
author to see everyone (himself included) haloed by “a tender gleam of
irony,” as Kundera puts it later in the passage. This tender irony is the
novelist’s “precious reward” (91).
There are, of course, some important differences between Kundera’s
vision and Girard’s notion of novelistic conversion. For Kundera, youth is
the imitative age par excellence, and the conversion thus takes place around
the age of 30, marking the shift from adolescence to maturity. For Girard,
the conversion happens at no specific age. Dostoevsky is in his mid-40s
when he finally writes the books in which he surpasses himself. What’s
more, for Girard, the conversion is fundamentally religious, or at least has
ethical implications, as his emphasis on repentence implies. However, he
does distinguish between “minimal” conversions, which have a religious
shape but don’t actually convert the author to Christianity (Flaubert),
and “maximal” conversions, in which the author becomes religious
(Dostoevsky).14 Apart from using the word conversion, Kundera doesn’t
place any special emphasis on religion.
These distinctions are noteworthy, and they may well reflect something
deeper than mere diverging sensibilities. For my purposes, however, the
differences matter less than the similarities. What interests me is how novels
get written, and from this vantage point the Girardian and Kunderian
approaches have a great deal in common: both help us to see that making
good literature, while it requires skilful technique, also takes something
that no creative writing course can teach, something irreducible to a recipe
or magic formula, a great change that may be eagerly awaited but over
which the author has at most only partial control. Thanks to this change,
the author becomes aware that he is imprisoned in a pseudo-religion and
repudiates the ersatz God he has been unconsciously worshiping.
How did the “anti-lyric conversion” play itself out in Kundera’s own
career? Kvetoslav Chvatik writes that during his adolescence and young
adulthood, “Kundera wrote poems, essays, and plays that today no longer
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:
I wrote my first “laughable love,” I, Lamentable God, in 1958. At the time

I was writing my play The Keeper of the Keys, which was pure torture,
and during a break, as a diverting respite, I wrote the first short story
of my life, in a day or two, with lightness and pleasure. Only after some
reflection did I realize that this lightness and this pleasure signified
not that the short story, because it wasn’t blessed with the sweat of my
brow, was something insignificant or marginal but to the contrary, that
for the first time I had found myself, as they say, that I had found my
tone, the ironic distance with regard to the world and my life, in short,
my vocation as a novelist (my emphasis).18
The opposition between the two distinct modes of writing comes through
clearly in this description. On the one hand, the young author is having
an excruciating time of it while writing a play; on the other, he dashes off
a short story in a day or two with a sensation of “lightness” and “pleasure.”
It is only with time that he realizes that suffering provides no guarantee of
authenticity. What he took at first for a mere diversion comes to look like
the authentic direction for his literary endeavors (and this precisely because
the short story is a game and a diversion) while the arduous task of writing
his play appears secondary and unimportant by comparison.
There is in this short narrative of creative self-discovery a radical shift
in perspective, but one that comes only belatedly. Kundera also stresses the
notion of distance. He who looks ironically at his own life and at the world
is no longer identical with the person he was before. A gap has opened up
between the self that writes and the self that is written: the “lyrical” self
(the self that is built on a foundation of copied desires) falls away like an
abandoned chrysalis; the novelist looks back on it as if it belonged to a
stranger.
I cannot help remarking on the similarity between (1) this
autobiographical passage; (2) the passage quoted above from The Curtain
on the novelist’s conversion; and (3) the account Kundera gives of the birth
of his first French novel:
I was again writing some essays in French. The latest was to deal with
Choderlos Laclos, with Vivant Denon. After writing a few pages, I felt
as if I were being strangled by boredom. I couldn’t stand the seriousness
of my lucubrations. To liberate and amuse myself, I transformed this
essay into a big joke. Thus in 1995 was born Slowness, my lightest novel,
in which there is not a single serious word.19
In all three instances, humor, lightness, and pleasure go hand in hand with
the decisive moment of literary creation.
Liberating exiles
Kundera seems well aware of the resemblance between his conclusions

and those of his great predecessors. In Immortality, Agnes and Laura are
enmeshed in rivalry. Agnes wishes to escape. She dreams of “castling,” as
in chess. By going to Switzerland she can leave the world of fighting behind,
eluding her younger sister, who views her as both a model and a rival. More
than a mere change of address, however, Agnes’s journey (which, like Tomas
and Tereza’s exile, will come to an abrupt end when she dies in a car crash) is
an exit from the world, comparable to Fabrice’s retreat to the Charterhouse
of Parma at the end of Stendhal’s novel:
Agnes recalled a sentence from Stendhal’s novel: ‘Il se retira à la

chartreuse de Parme.’ Fabrice left; he retired to the Charterhouse of
Parma. No charterhouse is mentioned anywhere else in the novel
and yet the single sentence on the last page is so important that
Stendhal used it for the title; because the real goal of all of Fabrice’s
adventures was the charterhouse; a place secluded from people and
the world. (287)
Through Agnes, Kundera makes the connection between his conclusion

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

on which the universe falls like warm rain. (287–8)
These moments, at the very end of Agnes’s life, radiate the same mingled
happiness and melancholy (for we, the readers, already know that Agnes is
going to die) found in “Eduard and God” and The Unbearable Lightness of
Being. Here, however, the sense of liberation comes with a mystical intensity
born of total communion with nature and the universe. The quiet enclosure
of the car in which Agnes is driving toward Switzerland and the empty
highway form a serene background for the description of the experience.
What I called the two panels of the diptych are present, but in a radical way.
The scene describes the renunciation not merely of lyrical self-centeredness
but of something even deeper.
In this passage, Kundera equates the individual ego with dirtiness,
suffering, and unhappiness. The self is “painful” because of its ties to other
selves that fascinate and reject it. Being, on the other hand, means detachment
from suffering, in other words from the vicious circle of emulation, from
the 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
of a joyful homecoming, people rushing to greet her with tears streaming

down their cheeks, laughter and reminiscence, well up in her. It is this happy
ending, the “kitsch” ending, that the novelist reveals as a lie. Irena finds
only misunderstandings, some comic, some tragic, in her old home city.
Kundera questions the possibility of finding a safe haven. For Irena,
uprooted by history, no home is home. She can feel at ease in neither her
adopted country nor her homeland. The refuge she seeks eludes her. But it
does not elude everyone. If there is a supreme value in Kundera’s universe,
perhaps it is attachment to and respect for loved ones dead and gone. At the
end of the book, the novel’s other protagonist, Josef, a disabused exile, soars
through a starry night sky in an airplane, away from the Czech Republic,
toward the home where he lived happily with his late wife. Her memory has
become the origin, the thing he clings to, the sole value remaining:
He climbed into a taxi and left for the airport. It was evening already.
The plane took off toward a dark sky, then burrowed into clouds.
After a few minutes the sky opened out, peaceful and friendly,
strewn with stars. 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
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
cases, however, the result stems from the novelist’s capacity for allowing the
internal logic of his narrative to override his self-justifying intentions.
What Kundera describes above, however, is a sort of reversal, in which
the other becomes likeable and the self becomes less likeable, without
any true synthesis taking place. This should not surprise us, given that
the conclusion of the novel bears no trace of any such creative, synthetic
moment. Kundera manages to overturn and reverse the gap between Self
and Other without quite abolishing it.
By the same token, Jaromil, at the end of Life Is Elsewhere, remains other,
trapped in the role of the precociously talented monster. His death is sterile;
there seems to be no way to redeem such an existence, no way to rescue the
character from the abominable act of betrayal that, despite his poetic talent,
tends to define his life, turning him into an emblem of the hated lyrical
age. Kundera’s attitude toward Jaromil resembles Ludvik’s anger toward his
former self, or Josef’s decision to tear up the pages of his youthful diary in
Ignorance. The novel brilliantly illuminates the lyrical age, but its relentless
description of Jaromil’s youthful vanity offers no way out.
In the final part of The Art of the Novel, Kundera reveals the ties between
his experience as a novelist and Tolstoy’s:
When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a
most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved
and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not
believe that Tolstoy revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would
say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another
voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to
what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist
listens for that superpersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels
are always a little more intelligent than their authors. (158)
This notion of a wisdom that surpasses personal moral condemnation

brings me back, one last time, to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the
fifth part of the novel, Tomas comes up with the idea for an article in which
he compares the leaders of the Communist Party to Oedipus. The country
is caught up in the giddy freedom of the Prague Spring. The crimes of the
regime have come to light. But the leaders shrink from taking responsibility
for them, claiming ignorance. Tomas concludes that they are probably
telling the truth; most of them didn’t know about the atrocities. In his view,
however, this does not excuse them. Didn’t Oedipus put out his eyes even
though he was unaware of committing murder and incest?
Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel 171
When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner

purity, he said to himself, As a result of your “not knowing,” this country
has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that
you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done?
How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes,
you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes! (177)
Tomas’s letter is one of many articles about the guilt of those involved
in the political trials during the first years of Communism. It is part of a
trend, a backlash against the country’s political class. Tomas speaks for the
outraged citizens of his country who, through his editorial, may vicariously
vent their anger at the Communists’ denial of responsibility. At the time of
its publication, he already dislikes the letter. The editors make so many cuts
that the complexity of his initial idea is lost. And the moral indignation in
his position is evident.
Later, Tomas loses his job when the Russian invasion puts an end to
the climate of freedom in which the article was written. In an ironic twist,
Kundera suggests that Tomas’s editorial may have been the last straw that
convinced the Russians to crack down on the Czechs. Tomas is portrayed as
an unwitting Oedipus, bringing the “plague” of Russian tanks:
When Tomas’s letter appeared, they shouted: See what things have
come to! Now they’re telling us publicly to put our eyes out!
Two or three months later the Russians decided that free speech was
inadmissible in their gubernia, and in a single night they occupied
Tomas’s country with their army. (178–9)
Some years later, having returned from Zurich and been forced into
resigning from his job at the hospital, Tomas is working as a window-washer.
His son and another man, both members of the opposition, ask him to sign
a petition against the regime, and they invoke his article. Tomas hesitates,
and then retracts the editorial: “I wasn’t out to punish anyone . . . Punishing
people who don’t know what they’ve done is barbaric. The myth of Oedipus
is a beautiful one, but to treat it like this . . .” (218). He decides not to sign
the petition, realizing that any display of solidarity with the opposition
will do harm to Tereza because it will bring the police to their door.
The Oedipal story has come full circle. At first Tomas saw the
Communists who proclaimed their innocence as guilty. His letter to the
editor hurls an accusation, one that has now rebounded against him. In
condemning his own article, Tomas puts himself symbolically in the place
of Oedipus the King, the investigating magistrate who discovered that he

was the perpetrator. In these passages, Kundera uses free indirect discourse
to record Tomas’s inner debates, giving them an intimate tone that brings
both reader and novelist very close to the main character.
Part Five of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a miniature novel in
itself, a variation on the most famous ancient myth. Kundera’s version
retains the dramatic irony of the Sophoclean drama while demystifying
and relativizing the Greek perspective on guilt. His hero goes beyond the
Manicheism of both Communist and dissident ideology. His decision to
place Tereza’s well-being above abstract political and ideological positions
recalls Camus’s famous outburst: “I believe in justice, but I’ll defend my
mother before justice.”
The episode can be read as a parable on literary creation. Girard compares
the novelist’s renunciation to the Oedipus story: “The novelist recognizes
that he is guilty of the sin of which he is accusing his mediator. The curse
which Oedipus hurls at Others falls on his own head.”3 In Life Is Elsewhere,
lyrical poetry functions to exalt the self; it is a means of taking revenge on
reality. Disgusted at his own timidity, Jaromil writes a poem as a means of
overcoming his self-loathing and feeling strong again: “down below he had
felt his palms become sweaty with fear and his breath speed up; but here,
up high in the poem, he was above his paltriness; [. . .] he was no longer
subordinate to his experience, his experience was subordinate to what he
had written” (74–5). Literature can either serve resentment or divulge its
presence. The novelist can create a flattering surrogate, as Jaromil does in
Life Is Elsewhere with his alter ego Xavier or as Proust did in Jean Santeuil,
the unfinished precursor to In Search of Lost Time; or he can revise the
initial romantic perspective and reveal the lie as such, pointing to the model
at the source of his desire. He can relive the Oedipus story, as Tomas does.
In The Curtain, Kundera compares the novelist’s self-discovery to
Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. The comparison taps into the
deepest layers of the European experience. It seeks to make clear that the
transformation is real and lasting, that it changes everything: “If I imagine
the genesis of the novelist as an archetypal tale, a ‘myth,’ that genesis looks
to me like a conversion story; Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born
from the ruins of his lyrical world” (89). Like Tomas in The Unbearable
Lightness, Paul is a crowd-following persecutor who has become aware of
his own crowd-following and persecuting tendencies.
The reader can follow the novelist down the path of conversion. Kundera’s
novels take us into a world where the power of suggestion trumps personal
taste and perception and where models tend to become rivals and obstacles.
By exploring that world, we follow in the author’s footsteps and learn to
Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel 173
recognize in ourselves the imitative tendencies of his characters. Copying

the model’s desire distorts our perception, leading us to become fascinated
by objects without intrinsic worth. It follows that when we “break up,” so
to speak, with the model, when we detach ourselves from the double with
whom we are engaged in a struggle as bitter as it is absurd, we are able to see
the world a little more clearly. We may even manage on occasion to assess
things at their actual worth for us instead of at the worth we believe the
model ascribes to them.
For Kundera, as for Proust, a successful novel (and, I would add, a
successful work of literary criticism) allows the reader to see into himself, an
idea that bears some resemblance to the overused but not inapt observation
that certain books “read us” even as we read them. Proust, affirms Kundera,
wrote In Search of Lost Time to give his readers insight into their own lives.
And he cites Time Regained:
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s

work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so
he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this
book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the
proof of the book’s truth. (95–6)
Kundera concludes: “Those lines of Proust’s define not only the meaning of
the Proustian novel; they define the meaning of the very art of the novel”
(96). In keeping with this essay’s main idea, and inspired by my friend 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
In the course of manuscript revisions, I came across Elif Batuman’s The

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

anything for you. All I can do is make you miserable.” He paused and
started patting his pockets, looking for his cigarettes. (274)
176 Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman
Batuman’s disenchantment with Girardianism mirrors her frustration with

Matej, who has the last word, both intellectually and amorously, but seems
to lack compassion and, despite his hyper-lucidity, true self-awareness. As
she describes him, he has a nasty case of the mimetic virus. Fatally attracted
to unavailable women, he makes a habit of breaking up couples: “I knew
of at least two extremely smart and attractive women who were in love
with Matej,” writes Batuman. “Both were dating other men, whom Matej
befriended. He then behaved very flirtatiously with the women” (268). Later,
we learn that he once developed a dangerous passion for “a girl who was
obsessed with a Slovenian disc jockey. He had pursued the girl desperately,
determined to tear her away from the DJ, regardless of whether he had to
annihilate himself in the process” (272). Ensconced behind his turntable
with throngs of cheering clubbers dancing to the tracks he chooses (or so
I imagine him), the DJ, a mediator by profession, jerks Matej’s strings in
a way that is by now familiar to readers of this book (the initials DJ, as
Batuman herself notes, can also stand for Don Juan).
In short, Matej seems incapable of desiring without the interference
afforded by a model–rival. Batuman sprinkles obvious clues to his
weakness throughout her text, perhaps to make her readers understand
that, as with so many theoreticians, Matej is himself the best illustration
of his ideas. In this instance, fluency in Girardian theory appears as a last-
ditch attempt to maintain the illusion of personal autonomy. Matej has not
so much embraced a system of thought as armed himself with a superior
deconstructive weapon, for as Girard observes in Deceit, Desire, and the
Novel, debunkers like to keep a step ahead of everyone else:
Not a single desire escapes the demystifier who is patiently occupied in

constructing on top of all the dead myths the greatest myth of all, that
of his own detachment. He alone, it seems, never desires. In short it is a
question of convincing Others and especially of convincing oneself that
one is completely and divinely autonomous [. . .] lucidity and blindness
increase side by side. Henceforth the truth is so brilliantly clear that it
has to be taken into account if only in order to escape it. (270–1)
Matej embodies the way in which theory sometimes aggravates the very
problems it is supposed to clear up, though Batuman sees Professor Girard
himself as the true source of the mischief: “It wasn’t just mimetic sickness
that we had, my classmates and I, but the idea of mimetic sickness, and we
had learned it from him” (267).
She concludes that the fatal flaw in mimetic theory lies in its vision of
love as something “shameful, vain, the opposite of generous” (274). She sees
herself as a character in Demons, perhaps as Lizaveta Nikolaevna, devoted

body and soul to her beloved and ready to sacrifice everything, even her
virtue. But rather than finding consolation in the idea that “the drive to
commit generous errors” (274) is an antidote to self-absorption, she must
confront her Matej-inspired fears that what she is experiencing merely
proves her inability to surmount romantic delusions:
In the final analysis, this is what was so hurtful about Girardianism:

it made love totally worthless. The curiosity and empathy engendered
by love, which I found so valuable, were redescribed as flaws of human
nature. (274)
Adopting an all-or-nothing view, she comes to see Girard’s simultaneous

emphasis on literature and renunciation as contradictory: either you remain
in and of the world, or else you reject narrative altogether. Nobody who
takes the ideas in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel seriously has any business
in a comp lit program, studying books that only repeat what Girard has
already taught them about the futility of desire. Better to turn one’s back on
the intrigue and ambition that propel stories forward and enter a monastery
(a solution that Matej eventually adopts).
I think Batuman misreads Girard when she interprets the idea of mimetic
desire as a blanket condemnation of love in all its forms. Obsession, no
matter how “self-sacrificing” or “generous” it may seem to the one obsessed,
differs from love. The former is humorless and painful. It transfigures the
object, while true passion, contrary to what Stendhal wrote in On Love,
entails no such crystallization: the Matej with whom Batuman falls in love
is a mirage.
But that is a minor point. And, in any event, Batuman has encircled
her position with landmines. Anyone foolish enough to accuse her of
employing romantic notions of self-sacrifice to justify her fixation on Matej
is liable to see that accusation blow up in his face. To lecture her on the finer
points of the mimetic theory would be merely to repeat Matej’s error. He
thought that explaining the obsessive behaviors of his friends in Girardian
terms would help them to put their “ontological sickness” in perspective. In
reality, of course, his insistence on diagnosing those around him is itself a
symptom of the disease that consumes him. In trying to cure others, Matej
unwittingly testifies to his own servitude.
Frustration with the fallacy that “knowing thyself” can bring
emancipation from mimetic bondage is, I suspect, a driving force behind
Batuman’s critique. Upon first meeting Matej, she notes the power of
his charismatic personality: “It was an elemental power, like weather or
electricity. Recognizing it had no effect on your physical response” (268).

In other words, sometimes self-awareness is not enough. You can no more
learn to stop obsessing over someone by embracing an intellectual theory,
even a sound one, than you can learn to drive a car by reading the owner’s
manual.
Old-fashioned geographical distance is a better cure. Matej and Batuman
part for the summer, and, writes Batuman, “I managed to stop thinking
about him” (276). But they resume their old ways come autumn, staying
up late every night to talk about Proust. Eventually, they end up in bed
together.
Their unhealthily ambivalent friendship recalls another episode in The
Possessed, in which Batuman describes the interwoven itineraries of two
Turkish travelers—the Russian author Pushkin and a nobleman who is also
named Pushkin: “Pushkin and Count Pushkin decide to travel together, but
argue and part company. Pushkin will have no part in Count Pushkin’s plan
to cross a snowy mountain pass in a britska pulled by eighteen emaciated
Ossetian bulls. Their courses diverge . . . but they meet again in Tiflis. They
can’t escape each other” (90).
Batuman finds absurd the idea of a resemblance between herself and
Matej: “What did it mean to say we were the same, when all our experiences
and beliefs were different” (274)? He is from Croatia, she isn’t; he believes in
Jesus, she doesn’t. But on another level, they are uncannily alike: Matej is
obsessed with Girardian theory; so is Batuman. He begins reading Proust;
so does Batuman. He dates Batuman’s friends; she dates one of his best
friends, whom she lectures on Girardian theory much in the way Matej
lectured her.
Batuman relates that as a child, Matej “used to lock himself in the
bathroom, desperately searching in the mirror for differences between
his face and that of his father, whom even at that time he resembled to
a remarkable degree; he would invariably find the differences . . .” (283).
Her text accomplishes a similar feat: though every page testifies to the
remarkable resemblance between herself and Matej, she invariably finds
the differences. For if she let those differences vanish, if she allowed the
imitative circuit to be completed, she would have to acknowledge that Matej
is right: “You and I are very similar—we’re exactly the same,” he tells her at
one point (274). “Matej, c’est moi!” Those words are, I think, the only ones
she refrains from uttering.
In Girard’s theory, Batuman writes, “there is in fact no such thing as
human autonomy or authenticity” (263). I would add that, although our
desires never spring to life spontaneously, once we’re aware of that reality
we can at least choose, or try to choose, the models we imitate. Free will
does exist.
Batuman describes the circle’s encounter with Matej in almost fatalistic
terms, as if nobody could help becoming his slave. And it’s true that resisting
the lure of a Stavrogin or a Matej may seem like a superhuman feat, especially
to someone in the throes of an unhappy obsession. In the end, however, as
she herself proves, it is possible. The “demonic period” (279) having drawn
to a close, she moves to Twin Peaks, cutting her ties with her classmates.
When one of Matej’s former conquests invites her to a going-away party
for him, she declines: “‘I know you guys still aren’t speaking, but it seems
absurd not to invite you,’ Keren wrote. I didn’t go to the party” (280).
It is ostensibly Matej who experiences a “deathlike conversion” (281) when
he leaves the world of desire for a monastery on an island in the Adriatic, a
choice that arouses contradictory feelings of bewilderment, revulsion, and
admiration in his former classmates. But the last chapter of The Possessed
is as much the story of Batuman’s conversion as of Matej’s. She, too, finds a
safe haven, on the windswept heights of Twin Peaks; she, too, renounces her
mediator, choosing to keep her distance from the Byronic seducer rather
than attend the going-away party:
. . . giant clouds rushed across the street as if in a hurry to get somewhere,

occasionally revealing dramatic views of the city. The others all made
fun of me for moving there—Ilan called it Wuthering Heights—but I
didn’t care. I barely saw any of them anyway, once I stopped talking to
Matej. (279)
Of course, renting an apartment in a (relatively) remote San Francisco

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

gripped by the feeling that I had encountered a kindred spirit of sorts.
For despite her open skepticism about its Christian thrust and claims to
universality, Batuman’s personal engagement with mimetic theory struck
me as truer to Girard’s project than perhaps even she suspected. Although
her insistence on “the illusory and pernicious quality of mimetic desire”
(264) makes little room for positive imitation, she takes for granted that a
novel’s greatness is measured not by its freedom from “technical flaws” (261)
but by its purchase on reality. In summoning personal experience to prove
the worth of Demons, she shatters our image of the critic as an armchair
detective who operates at a safe distance from literature: “I was sucked in,
deeper than I ever expected” (23). She won her profound understanding
of Dostoevsky’s fiction at the cost of months in the grip of obsession. Her
narrative illustrates not only the dangers of living life through books but
also the benefits that accrue when (and if) you emerge on the other side.
Appendix: A Brief Overview of
Kundera’s Life and Works
“The Franco-Czech novelist and critic was born in Brno and has lived in
France, his second homeland, since 1975.” So reads the terse biographical
note on the back cover of Encounter. Notoriously discreet about his personal
life, Kundera mistrusts journalists and biographers. He hasn’t given an
interview in decades, and I’ve been told that when he returns to his native
land he does so under an assumed name.
Transparency is today’s watchword, and some view Kundera’s efforts
to keep a low 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
nonpolitical vantage point. In Life Is Elsewhere, for instance, revolutionary

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

the middle of my life, my wife and I emigrated to France. This is the
most decisive event of my entire existence, and it is the key to my work
and my life.
He authored the works for which he is most famous, The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in what he calls his
“second homeland.” Written in his adopted tongue, Kundera’s “French
Cycle”—the novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance—disappointed those
who preferred their author wreathed in the pathos of the émigré, but
they also displayed an exquisite formal mastery and an increasingly sure
French style.
Many readers took him to task for his decision to write in French. Czechs
saw the switch as a betrayal, and I remember reading some unkind remarks
186 Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works
on the style of Identity in a book by Philippe Sollers. In both France and

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

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

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

Racine’s aesthetic formulation of mimetic desire,” Contagion: Journal of
Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 1 (Spring 1994), 53.
11 Sam Sommers, Situations Matter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), 184.
12 Eva Le Grand, Kundera or The Memory of Desire, trans. Lin Burman
(Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1999), 10.
13 François Ricard, preface to Oeuvre, by Milan Kundera (Paris: Éditions
Gallimard, 2011), xvi.
14 Ibid., xvi.
15 François Ricard, Agnes’s Final Afternoon (New York: Harper Perennial,
2004).
16 John O’Brien, Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995).
17 Maria Nemcova Banerjee, Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan
Kundera (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 67.
18 France Culture, November 11, 1989, “Tout arrive,” conversation between
Milan Kundera and René Girard, http://yrol.free.fr/LITTERA/GIRARD/
entretien.htm.
Chapter 3
1 Some parts of my analysis of “Dr. Havel” appeared in a different form in

my article “The labyrinth of values: Triangular desire in Milan Kundera’s
Dr. Havel After Twenty Years,” Heliopolis, VIII, 1 (2010), 111–23.
2 External and internal mediation are terms that Girard coins in Deceit, Desire,
and the Novel to distinguish between two fundamental modes of imitation.
In external mediation, the model is, precisely, external to the disciple’s
sphere of action. A respectful spiritual distance is maintained between them.
The imitator (let’s call him Josh) would never dream of coveting the same
possessions as his authority figure or social superior (we’ll call him David)
whom he openly venerates, and their relationship is therefore untroubled
by conflict. In internal mediation, by contrast, Josh operates on the same
spiritual plane as David. Now the disciple feels authorized to relate to the
model, whom he imitates surreptitiously, on equal terms: they have become
peers. With no laws or taboos to stop him, Josh may end up pursuing the
same goals as David, in which case he begins to view David as an obstacle to
the fulfillment of the very desires the latter has inspired in him. David in turn
is likely to perceive Josh as an unwelcome interloper or usurper. Soon each
party simultaneously excites and imitates the other’s desire, each standing in
the way of its realization by the other, like two pedestrians who, in trying to
give way, end up repeatedly bumping into each other.
3 Kundera has written two major plays: The Keeper of the Keys and Jacques
and his Master and, as a screenwriter, he authored the script for the film
Notes 191
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
1 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 3.

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

net.au/ebooks03/0300691.txt.
11 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Constance
Garnett (New York: MacMillan Company, 1918), 87.
12 Ibid., 88.
13 Ibid., 89.
Chapter 5
1 Girard, “Le Jeu des secrets interdits,” 102.

2 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ed.), Cedric Watts
(London: Wordsworth Editions, 2002), Act I, scene 1.
3 Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire, 164–5.
4 Elizabeth Pochoda, introduction to The Farewell Party, by Milan Kundera
(New York: Penguin, 1986), xiii.
5 Andrew Meltzoff, “Imitation, gaze, and intentions,” in Mimesis and
Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of
Culture and Religion (ed.), Scott Garrels (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 2011), 62.
6 Angelo Rinaldi, “Peu et Prou,” L’Express, January 26, 1995; Philippe
Sollers, L’Année du tigre: journal de l’année 1998 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1999).
7 François Ricard, “Le regard des amants,” afterword to L’identité, by Milan
Kundera (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2000), 215.
8 Ibid., 215.
9 Martine Boyer-Weinmann, Lire Milan Kundera (Paris: Armand Colin,
2009), 84.
10 François Ricard, afterword to L´Identité, by Milan Kundera (Paris:
Gallimard Folio, 2000), 218.
11 Patrick Besnier, preface to Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand
(Paris: Gallimard, 1983).
12 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (London:
Vintage Books, 2005), 275.
13 Ricard, afterword, 218.
14 See Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, Part IV.
15 Ibid., 122.
16 François Ricard, afterword, 214–15.
Chapter 6
1 Hervé Aubron, “Le Kitsch universel,” Le Magazine littéraire, April 2011, 83.
2 See Jean-Michel Oughourlian, Psychopolitics: Conversations with Trevor
Cribben Merrill (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012).
Notes 193
3 Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 226.

4 See Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial.
5 René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans.
Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1987), 346.
6 Ibid., 335.
Chapter 7
1 Milan Kundera, “Diabolum,” in Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera,

trans. Bernard Lotholary (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1995), 245.
2 Paul Dumouchel, Le Sacrifice inutile: essai sur la violence politique (Paris:
Flammarion, 2011), 14.
3 Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Two footnotes: On the double necessity of Girard
and Gans,” Anthropoetics II, June 1996, www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/
AP0201/bert.htm.
4 Ibid.
5 The phrase is from Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where
it was pointed out to me by my friend Benoît Chantre.
6 Philip Roth, “Afterword: A talk with the author,” in The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera (New York: Penguin, 1987), 232.
7 See Oughourlian, Psychopolitics.
Chapter 8
1 See François Ricard’s “Biographie de l’oeuvre” in Œuvre, v. I, by Milan

Kundera (Paris: Editions Gallimard, La Pléiade, 2011), 1408–9.
2 François Ricard, “L’Idylle et l’idylle,” afterword to L’insoutenable légèreté
de l’être (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1989), 457–8. “The fallen idyll: A
rereading of Milan Kundera,” trans. Jane Everett, Review of Contemporary
Fiction, New York, IX–2, 1989, 17–26.
3 Ricard, afterword, 458–9.
4 Ibid., 462.
5 Ibid., 470.
6 Ibid., 471.
7 Ibid., 472.
8 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 307–8.
9 Ibid., 290.
10 Brian McDonald, “Violence and the lamb slain: An interview with René
Girard,” Touchstone Magazine, December 2003, www.touchstonemag.
com/archives/article.php?id=16–10–040-i.
11 Ibid.
194 Notes
12 Ibid.
13 Cesáreo Bandera, The Humble Story of Don Quixote, Reflections on the
Birth of the Modern Novel (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of
America Press, 2006).
14 See René Girard, “The mimetic desire of Paolo and Francesca” in To
Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
15 Chvatik, Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, 38.
16 Ibid., 39.
17 Ibid., 49.
18 From the “Note de l’auteur pour la première édition tchèque de Risibles
amour après la libération du pays de l’occupation russe,” in Chvatik, Le
Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera.
19 “Entretien avec Antoine Gallimard,” cited in Milan Kundera, Oeuvre II
(Paris: Gallimard Éditions, La Pléiade, 2011), 1201.
20 François Ricard, “Mortalité d’Agnes,” afterword to Immortalité, by Milan
Kundera (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1993), 535.
21 Jonathan Livernois, “Gamineries,” L’Atelier du Roman no. 46, June 2006,
46–53.
22 Chvatik, Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, 251.
Chapter 9
1 Bandera, The Humble Story of Don Quixote.

2 Milan Kundera, “Entretien avec Normand Biron,” Liberté no. 121, 1979,
www.erudit.org/culture/liberte1026896/liberte1448919/60129ac.pdf.
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
— Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005,

ed. Robert Doran. Stanford: Stanford Press, 2008a.
— with Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Castro Rocha, João Cezar de. Evolution
and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture. London: Continuum,
2008b.
Kundera, Milan. “Entretien avec Normand Biron.” Liberté 121 (1979), www.
erudit.org/culture/liberte1026896/liberte1448919/60129ac.pdf.
— Preface to Life Is Elsewhere. New York: Penguin, 1987, v–vii.
— Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992a.
— The Joke, definitive version fully revised by the author. New York:
HarperCollins, 1992b.
— The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
—“Diabolum,” in Le Monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, trans. Bernard
Lotholary. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1995.
— Slowness, trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996a.
— Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1996b.
— The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1996c.
—“La Frontière invisible” (interview with Guy Scarpetta). Le Nouvel
observateur, January 15, 1998a: 96–8.
— Identity, trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998b.
— Farewell Waltz, trans. Aaron Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998c.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1999a.
— Laughable Loves, trans. Suzanne Rappaport, revised Aaron Asher and
Milan Kundera. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999b.
— Life Is Elsewhere, trans. Aaron Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000.
— Ignorance, trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2002.
— The Curtain, trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006.
— Encounter, trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2010.
— Œuvre, vols 1 and 2. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, La Pléiade, 2011.
Le Grand, Eva. Kundera or The Memory of Desire, trans. Lin Burman.
Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1999.
Lépine, Jacques-Jude. “Phaedra’s labyrinth as the paradigm of passion:
Racine’s aesthetic formulation of mimetic desire.” Contagion : Journal of
Violence, Mimesis and Culture, vol. 1 (Spring 1994): 42–62.
Livernois, Jonathan. “Gamineries.” L’Atelier du Roman, 46 (June 2006): 46–53.
Lodge, David. The Year of Henry James, The Story of a Novel. London: Penguin
Group, 2007.
Bibliography 197
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
— L’âge d’or du roman. Paris: Grasset, 1996.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Cedric Watts.
London: Wordsworth Editions, 2002.
Shenkar, Oded. Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a
Strategic Edge. Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010.
Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. New York: Anchor Books,
2006.
Sollers, Philippe. L’Année du tigre: journal de l’année 1998. Paris: Le Seuil,
1999.
Sommers, Sam. Situations Matter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011.
Index
addiction 92–3, 110 see also feeling

Amadis of Gaul 10, 16, 33 envy 4, 5, 17, 34–6, 48, 60, 66, 158
Aristophanes 52
see also Plato feeling 27–9
see also emotion
Balzac, Honoré de 60, 69, 75, 105, Foucault, Michel 6
130, 154 freedom 40
Banville, Théodore 79–80
Barthes, Roland 6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10,
beauty 2, 16, 29, 153 60, 67
Bloom, Harold 9–11 graphomania 56–8, 60–1
Broch, Hermann 18, 19, 31, 75, 93
hedonism 3–5, 12, 42, 70, 97, 115
catharsis 18, 136, 138, 141
Cervantes, Miguel de 9–11, 17, 18, 20, Jakobson, Roman 6
33, 36, 64, 65, 100, 169
Chekhov, Anton 60 Kafka, Franz 18, 33, 41, 60, 65–6, 113,
Coleridge, Samuel 10 132, 154
Communism 41, 42, 66, 124, 133, 171 Kakutani, Michiko 72
conversion 29, 148, 154, 157, 158, 160, Kenobi, Obi-Wan 29
161, 163, 165, 167, 172 Keroac, Jack 11
Crébillon fils 40–, 73 kitsch 135–9
Cyrano de Bergerac 16, 25, 98–100, 116
Laclos, Choderlos de 163
Dangerous Liasons 5 laughter 18, 138
Denon, Vivant 57, 68, 110, 163 litost 75–7, 80–2, 83, 92
Diderot, Denis 18, 63, 69, 110 Lodge, David 58–9
disillusionment 26, 143, 152 lyricism 81, 158–9
Don Juan 10, 11, 12, 15, 21, 30, 36, 37,
38, 40, 42, 67, 71, 154, 156 Mann, Thomas 31
Don Quixote 100 Mao Zedong 139
Don Quixote 9–11, 16, 17, 28, 33, 35, Meltzoff, Andrew 91
93, 151, 160, 169 Molière 10, 20
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 30, 36, 37, 42, 63, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 10
65, 66, 71, 77, 79–81, 110, 116, Mukařovský, Jan 6
117, 148, 152, 161, 169 Musil, Robert 18, 31, 75, 93
dreams 83, 111–14, 129–30
Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 73, 105, 109,
emotion 20, 34, 136 132, 154
200 Index
Oedipus 170–2 Sade, Marquis de 69, 70

Ortega y Gasset, José 10 Saul 172
see also Paul
Paul 172 Shakespeare, William 86–7
see also Saul Simeon Stylites 109
Picasso, Pablo 63, 120 Sommers, Sam 20
Plato 52 Stendhal 30, 63, 68, 148, 163–4
Proust, Marcel 30, 54, 63, 65, 67, 74–5, Sterne, Laurence 18, 63
93, 110, 148, 158, 172, 173 Stravinsky, Igor 131–2
Racine, Jean 19 Tolstoy, Leo 77, 155, 170

ressentiment 70, 76 totalitarianism 65, 113, 137, 145
Rimbaud, Arthur 67, 79, 80 Tristan 156
Roth, Philip 10, 11, 93, 138
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 134 Vančura, Vladislav 6
Velázquez, Diego 63
sacrifice 54, 126–31

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The Book of Imitation and Desire

Trevor Cribben Merrill

175 Fifth Avenue 50 Bedford Square

First published 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

1 “Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women” 1

2 Into the Labyrinth of Values 9

3 From Imitation to Rivalry 33

4 The Model as Obstacle 63

5 Jealousy and its Metaphors 83

6 The Quadrille of Desire 105

7 At the Heart of the Labyrinth 123

8 Repudiating the Model 143

9 Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel 169

Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman 175

In a letter from prison Dietrich Bonhoffer complains about books “whose

This cannot fail to lead to ironic consequences, especially in our

Merrill furthermore connects Kundera’s basic insights with noteworthy

In one of his short stories, Milan Kundera describes a group of characters

I share René Girard’s view that literary interpretation is “the continuation

“Women Look for Men Who Have

With cruel simplicity, this passage sums up a fundamental insight in an

In short, Kundera’s aphorism tells us that our desires are influenced by

. . . all of them would want to appear to themselves, to their wives

The structure of Avenarius’s thought experiment echoes the aforementioned

. . . he had no chance to decide whether or not he was excited or whether

Into the Labyrinth of Values

The transfiguration of the object

In The Western Canon, his 1995 survey of literary masterpieces, Harold

It would be hard to imagine a more dismissive appraisal. Bloom reduces

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

better in some instances than in others (when a single individual serves as

By virtue of their proximity to the model, the sneakers worn by a famous

The journalist never considers the possibility that a renowned authority

“. . . the ordinary taste of a small town creates a false ideal of beauty,

Frantiska is no longer in the first bloom of youth. The editor, however, is

Rather than downplaying or dissimulating the imitative genesis of illusion,

outside of Cervantes, Kundera’s acknowledged master. The story recalls

accentuating a characteristic cleft in some politician’s chin or making an

. . . if the master voiced his approval . . . [. . .] the girl would mean

This passage emphasizes the total subordination of the physical to the

dignity, “Dr. Havel” disabuses us of the idea that it is exclusively a person’s

Before moving on to the question of rivalry, I would like to give another

Kristyna appears beautiful in the student’s provincial hometown and

At the gathering of the poets, the student speaks out in defense of

The metamorphosis is complete; the shimmering cloak of words enwraps

“An imitation of feeling”

In short, she traces a faithful picture of desire as it appears in the text.

. . . it was utterly unpleasant to him that the girl wanted to undress

The word “suggestive” should be understood in two senses. The sentences

It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our

To my knowledge, only one reader has thoroughly explored the

From Imitation to Rivalry

The shift from admiration to envy

Don Quixote’s desire is, broadly speaking, benign because it is aspirational

Deceit, desire, and the plight of the aging Don Juan

Modern vanity dreads nothing more than sheer indifference. The

The games of love and chance described by Marivaux are already

In the eighteenth century, imitative desire is still “an aristocratic pastime

Kundera writes eighteenth-century-style stories of philosophy in the

Rivalry and the transfiguration of the object

1 “Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women” 1

2 Into the Labyrinth of Values 9

3 From Imitation to Rivalry 33

4 The Model as Obstacle 63

5 Jealousy and its Metaphors 83

6 The Quadrille of Desire 105

7 At the Heart of the Labyrinth 123

8 Repudiating the Model 143

9 Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel 169

Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman 175