The Joke by Milan Kundera

First published:Zert, 1967 (English translation, 1969, revised 1982)

Type of work: Comic realism

Time of work: 1947-1965

Locale: Czechoslovakia

Principal Characters:

• Ludvik Jahn, the protagonist, whose anti-Party joke earns for him six years of hard labor
• Marketa, his girlfriend and fellow student, to whom he sends the joke
• Pavel Zemanek, another fellow student, Party Chairman of the Division of Natural Sciences
• Helena, another student, later Zemanek’s wife and a feature reporter for radio
• Lucie Sebetka, an angelic young woman, Ludvik’s girlfriend during part of his imprisonment
• Kostka, Ludvik’s Christian friend, a university lecturer and later a hospital virologist
• Jaroslav, Ludvik’s hometown friend, a devotee of Moravian folklore

The Novel

Set in Communist Czechoslovakia, The Joke relates the serious consequences of a frivolous message that a university student sends his girlfriend by postcard: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.” The Joke is divided into seven parts, with each part narrated in the first person by one of the main characters except for part 7, which is narrated alternately by three characters.

Parts 1 and 2, both brief and set in 1965, show Ludvik Jahn and Helena preparing for their rendezvous in Ludvik’s unnamed Moravian hometown. The rendezvous is the result of an elaborate plot whereby Ludvik plans to take revenge on his enemy Pavel Zemanek by seducing Helena, Zemanek’s wife. Part 3, narrated by Ludvik, shows his motives for seeking revenge, describing the highly politicized school years after the February, 1948, Communist revolution and recounting the story of the notorious postcard. Although a Communist student leader himself, Ludvik sends the joking message to Marketa, his naive girlfriend, when they are separated during the summer of 1949—he with an agricultural brigade, she at an ideological training session. Mocking what Marketa is being taught, Ludvik means simply to shock her as a joke, but the effect is far greater than he intended. The message is intercepted by the Communists, who, led by Zemanek (supposedly a friend), oust Ludvik from the Party and from the university. The Party’s wrath, however, is still not sated. Soon Ludvik is drafted into the military and assigned to a group with black insignia (that is, a penal unit).

Ludvik does his national service at Ostrava, where a typical day consists of work in the coal mines followed by indoctrination, punitive tasks, and bedtime. Provided they behave, the soldier-prisoners are allowed out of the guarded, fenced-in camp one day each month. Usually they go on a wild spree together, but one time when Ludvik is by himself, he meets the shy Lucie Sebetka, a factory worker. They fall in love, and she begins appearing at the camp fence daily with flowers for him. Their relationship provides the emotional support that Ludvik and apparently also Lucie deeply need, but Lucie refuses to have sex with him, even after Ludvik goes to considerable trouble and takes serious risks to arrange their trysts. Finally Ludvik resorts to force, which Lucie resists ferociously and successfully. In frustration, Ludvik screams at her to get out, but Lucie leaves town entirely. Then, realizing what he has lost, Ludvik goes AWOL to find her, gets caught, and has ten months of jail added to his time. When his military service ends, lest more hard time be added, he volunteers for three more years in the mines as a civilian worker.

Part 4, narrated by Jaroslav, Ludvik’s hometown friend, is an interlude from the main action, replete with discussions of Moravian folk music and folk celebrations. This part traces Jaroslav’s relationships with Ludvik, his wife Vlasta, and his son Vladimir. All these relationships have been deteriorating, paralleling the Communist government’s once-enthusiastic but now-declining support of Moravian folklore, as epitomized in the upcoming event, the annual Ride of the Kings, which this year (1965) Jaroslav has had to organize almost single-handedly in the face of uncooperative authorities.

Part 5, narrated by Ludvik, returns to the main action with a vengeance. Helena meets Ludvik in his hometown, and Ludvik proceeds with his revenge plot. He recounts in detail how he plies her with drink and seduces her in a monumental sex scene. Yet his satisfaction is short-lived. As soon as the seduction ends, Helena, now drunkenly maudlin, tells him that she and Zemanek have been estranged for years and continue to live together only for the sake of their daughter. Thus Ludvik’s elaborate revenge is meaningless: He has succeeded only in becoming romantically entangled with Helena, whom he decides that he detests.

If Ludvik has won Helena, he has forever lost the loving Lucie. This fact is driven home in part 6, which, narrated by Ludvik’s Christian friend Kostka, again recounts past events, particularly Lucie’s flight from Ostrava. She fled all the way to western Bohemia, where Kostka, himself expelled form a university teaching post for his Christian beliefs, was working on a collective farm. There, living in the woods like a fairy, stealing the farmers’ milk and eating food set out by children, Lucie becomes a subject of local folklore. Finally captured by kindly authorities, she is put to work on the collective farm and rehabilitated by Kostka. Yet her life, too, is blighted: She eventually marries a man who is unfaithful and beats her. They settle in Ludvik’s hometown, where Lucie works in a barbershop, and Ludvik in 1965 at first fails to recognize her when she shaves him.

The novel comes to a climax in part 7, set on the day of the 1965 Ride of the Kings. Zemanek appears at the festival with his attractive young girlfriend, Miss Broz. After Helena privately tells him how things stand between her and Ludvik and offers a divorce, Zemanek—obviously pleased to get rid of her so easily—is smug and congratulatory toward Ludvik, whom he hails as an old friend. In return, Ludvik can only suffer his unvented frustration. Time and change have cheated him of his hatred, which has dissipated, and meanwhile Zemanek has become a liberal critic of the regime, a person who shares Ludvik’s own views. Ludvik’s only recourse is to be honest with Helena and tell her that he does not want to see her again. In shock, Helena tries to kill herself by swallowing what she thinks is a bottle of analgesics, but they are actually laxatives. She is thoroughly purged of any romantic feelings toward Ludvik.

The sorrowful Ludvik wanders down by the river, where he comes across the equally sorrowful Jaroslav lying in the grass. Earlier in the day, Jaroslav was duped by his wife and son into thinking that the son was playing the role of the disguised king in the Ride of the Kings, when actually young Vladimir had left for the motorcycle races. In despair, Jaroslav broke all the kitchen china and furniture into a heap in front of his wife. Now he is on his way with his violin to perform in the traditional cimbalom band. Ludvik, a clarinetist, joins him, and before a tavern crowd they play music together as in the old days. Playing the music lifts Ludvik emotionally, but it brings the realization that he and his friends have led devastated lives. Then even the music ends when Jaroslav has a heart attack during the performance. He will recover, but he will always be a diminished, if not a devastated, man.

The Characters

Although The Joke centers on the story of Ludvik, the novel could be subtitled “Ludvik and His Friends.” In a highly complex novelistic structure, the stories of Ludvik’s friends weave in and out of his story, supplementing and complementing it. All of their stories, as Ludvik realizes at the end, tend to reinforce—sometimes comically, sometimes sadly—a sense of loss or “devastation.”

Ludvik’s life comes apart with the foolish joke and its horrendous consequences—ejection from the Party and the university; the wasted years in the military penal unit, prison itself, and the mines; and the difficulties of returning to civilian life in the Communist society that suspects him. The worst consequence is the effect of his experiences on Ludvik himself, on his character and on his personality. A dedicated and joking fellow, he becomes a stunted, shallow, and suspicious person, unable to maintain any solid beliefs or relationships. He provides a prime example of the division between body and soul that Milan Kundera maintains is the theme of the novel. In effect, he has lost his soul, reducing love to sex (with Lucie) and sex to revenge (with Helena). Hope appears, however, in the understanding of himself that he finally reaches.

Some of the other main characters could almost be considered symbolic of aspects of Ludvik. The angelic Lucie and the Christian Kostka represent the soul that Ludvik has lost—the possibilities for love and belief. Lucie herself exemplifies the other side of the body/soul division. As a result of belonging to a youth gang that treated her as a sexual plaything, raping her repeatedly, Lucie cannot tolerate sex. It is significant that Kostka, not Ludvik, reintroduces her to sex (and thereby becomes guilt-ridden himself). The brokenhearted Jaroslav is identified with Ludvik’s cultural roots: “Jaroslav too (more than anyone, actually) represented the devastated values of my life....” Like Ludvik also, Jaroslav is the object of some rather dark, mordant, ironic humor.

Much of the lightness in The Joke comes from contrasting or minor characters. Obviously contrasting with Ludvik, and eventually arousing Ludvik’s jealous admiration, is the opportunistic Zemanek, a type apparently found in all political systems, able to ride each new tide to popularity. The raucous, heavy-breathing Helena just as obviously contrasts with Lucie; both are female types found in later Kundera novels. Like these contrasting characters, the numerous minor characters in The Joke are typed; for example, those in Ludvik’s penal unit could substitute for characters in a television situation comedy.

Critical Context

With its complex but controlled structure, cast of characters, and symbolism, The Joke is an impressive first novel, reflecting Kundera’s experience as a writer of poetry, plays, criticism, and short stories. Before writing novels, Kundera was also a professor of film studies in Prague—indeed, an inspirer of Czech New Wave cinema—and this experience too can be seen in the cinematographic quality of The Joke, particularly in the final section set against the Ride of the Kings festival. In most of these features, as well as in its humor and irony, The Joke hints of Kundera’s later masterpieces, Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Kundera protested the first English translation of The Joke, which included rearranged and omitted text. For example, a large portion of mate-rial on Moravian folk music, so important to the novel’s symbolism, was cut. (In the liberal Czechoslovakia of 1967, the novel was published uncensored.) American scholar Michael Henry Heim, who also translated The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published a new English translation of The Joke in 1982 that Kundera approved.

Bibliography

The Atlantic. CCLI, January, 1983, p. 104.

Donahue, Bruce. “Laughter and Ironic Humor in the Fiction of Milan Kundera,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. XXV (Winter, 1984), pp. 67-76.

Harkins, William E., and Paul I. Trensky, eds. Czech Literature Since 1956: A Symposium, 1980.

Kundera, Milan. Preface to The Joke, 1982. Translated by Michael Henry Heim.

Library Journal. CVII, November 1, 1982, p. 2109.

Lodge, David. “Milan Kundera and the Idea of the Author in Modern Criticism,” in Critical Quarterly. XXVI (Spring/Summer, 1984), pp. 105-121.

National Review. XXXV, January 21, 1983, p. 59.

The New Republic. CLXXXVIII, February 14, 1983, p. 30.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, October 24, 1982, p. 3.

The New Yorker. LIX, February 21, 1983, p. 126.

Newsweek. C, November 8, 1982, p. 87.

Podhoretz, Norman. “An Open Letter to Milan Kundera,” in Commentary. LXXVIII (October, 1984), pp. 34-39.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXII, September 10, 1982, p. 66.