I have been thinking seriously recently about setting up a reading club for writers in the area. One that would take in short story collections, novels and plays, poetry and biography, but perhaps also films. I have come to realise that I really must make a concerted effort to study more fiction and learn from the form of the stories and novels I most appreciate, to really think through structure and point of view. This has been an obsession over the last week or so and I have been thinking of the best way to go about finding a good group for this end, and of a way to organise and structure the group, but at the same time I have tried hard to narrow my focus to a single book, and to try to study it. To this end I think I should try to make a few notes on notable books and stories I read in an attempt to learn from them.

The Joke by Milan Kundera

Taking as long as I do to get through a book, and giving up on books as often as I do, getting sidetracked and distracted, I don’t often reread books, but this is one I have read now at least three times, and continue to get a lot from.

I reread the book this time in large part so I could try to study its multiple narrator structure, to see how the story is divided up, what effect this has on the pace of the novel, and how this division of labour works in terms of tone.

The novel has four narrators, three of whom appear several times. The first of these, in terms of both chronology and significance, is Ludvik, who is the main protagonist of the novel, providing the animus. The second is Helena, who becomes the victim of a plot of his which sees him returning to his home town. The last is Jaroslav who comes to assume a central role in the piece but who at first seems peripheral. And then there is Kostka, who remains tagged by his surname, and who perhaps indeed remains something of an enigma despite the one span of twenty short (one to two page) chapters in which he reveals to us and to Ludvik an insight into a character and events that reach right back into Ludvik’s life and which continue to exert their weight on one side of the scales in Ludvik’s psyche.

As far as tone goes, it is relatively easy to differentiate the voices. Ludvik’s voice is, for me, the one that stays with me. Indeed, I remember reading one time a review or critical piece in which the author commented that on rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that other work of genius by Kundera, he was surprised at how little he had remembered of the novel. This was an observation I had cause to make myself on rereading this book. I think that with Kundera, despite the craft and the verisimilitude of the plot, it is this voice that stays with the reader. It certainly is with me. And again, in spite of the authenticity and diversity of the narrative voices, it is a certain tone that comes over the most, and which stays in the mind. In The Joke, for me, this is Ludvik’s.

The author’s note to this Faber fifth edition of Kundera’s The Joke explains the history of the English translation. In it, Kundera, who in his writing on the novel frequently expresses exasperation at any transgress against authorial intent, even going so far as to state that the bulk of Kafka’s writings should have been burned rather than published by Max Brod, describes his impressions on reading through the fourth English edition:

…I had the increasingly strong impression that what I read was not my text: often the words were remote from what I had written; the syntax differed too; there was inaccuracy in all the reflective passages; irony had been transformed into satire; unusual turns of phrase had been obliterated; the distinctive voices of characters-narrators had been altered to the extent of altering their personalities (thus Ludvik, that thoughtful, melancholy intellectual, became vulgar and cynical). I was all the more unhappy because I did not believe that it was a matter of incompetence on the translator’s part, or of carelessness or ill will: no; in good conscious he produced the kind of translation that one might call translation-adaptation (adaptation to the tastes of the time and of the country for which it is intended, to the taste, in the final analysis, of the translator). Is this current, normal practice?) It’s possible. But unacceptable. Unacceptable to me.

It is very interesting to look at these differences. Novels and works of literature expose themselves to the risk of all kinds of mis-readings. Mis-readings which say a lot about the reader. In translation we have an excellent resource, because we see and can analyse a detailed and scrupulous mis-reading. And in precisely the way Kundera describes, this mis-reading is encoded with the tastes, beliefs and presumptions and morals of an age. Brod thought Kafka a saint and, against all available evidence, took his writings to be religious. In the fourth English translation of The Joke, which Kundera describes, Ludvik, for Kundera, becomes a vulgar cynic.

This is important for two reasons. Firstly, it underscores one of the themes of the novel, that so much that is so important to us in our lives, is essentially ephemeral; factors which have such an impact on our lives are so often incomprehensible for the next generation, or people from another culture. Ludvik was a product of a certain time and a certain place and as he realises at the end of the novel, everything that has been important to him and which has shaped him is utterly meaningless for the generation after his. The quandary for Michael Henry Heim, translator for that fourth edition, writing for the public of Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America, and trying to get into the head of an apostate communist, was unenviable. But I think it goes further that this. Call me a cynic, but I think there have not been so many thoughtful, melancholy intellectuals around in the West since around the time of that fourth edition, and there have been a surfeit of vulgar cynics. But more than this, I have at many times thought that thoughtful melancholic intellectuals are often taken, in these cynical times, to be cynics themselves.

Philip Roth once expressed, I think, something like envy for the fact that novels published in communist Czechoslovakia were guaranteed an avid and serious readership whilst writers in the West toiled and suffered for art nobody was prepared to esteem. We live in a superficial culture living off hits of pop music, film and TV. Nothing is sacred. It seems to most that all tastes are catered for by this surfeit and so those who reject it, reject the bulk of what is set out before us, who refuse to adjust their tastes and proclivities, to adopt the latest stance, whether it be a sullen post-ironic distance from everything or a willingness to do anything in the name of fun, are viewed as cynics.

For years I have been stalked by an idea for a story, Mall Quart D’Heur, in which this pressure to conform to lesser tastes results in, at the very least, a near-breakdown. The story came about after a trip to the mall, no doubt around Christmas time many years ago. The morning of that day saw me opening an old encylopedia my parents once bought second hand. I was looking up The Gold Period in Russian literature. I had been trying to read some classics. At the time, I think, I had recently finished Poor Folk by Dostoevsky and was impressed by the contrast between this world in which social inferiority was indicated by, among others things, unfamiliarity with high literature, and with the Sahara of the Bozarts I was living in. I was then summoned and taken down to Mardy Hell to do some shopping. It must have been that first holidays from University after all that reading of Manic Depressive critical thinking forums. The story had many phases and I haven’t read over the notes for years, but basically, it was set in a mall and concerned not a great deal more than the fifteen minutes of the title. It was to be a stream of consciousness, a manic depressive dialectic, a rumination on society and an individual’s place in it. The protagonist was myself. It isn’t always. And my thoughts were triggered by such things as picking up a book on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and wondering whether I should be talking myself out of delusions of grandeur if I believed myself capable of writing a novel of real importance, or if that, on the contrary, I would be diminishing my one shot not only at success, but at happiness. Triggered, too, by asking whether I should be trying to pursue literature at all costs, further marginalising myself from the people around me who ignored it, or whether I should in some way try to accomodate these philistines, accepting that these were the only people around. It was a debate about whether to fit in to what I so hated. Christmas was a part of this, since here was a festival that had once morphed from pagan times, and had since changed again and become a celebration of the capitalism I in so many ways so despised. I could not reject christmas, however much  I might object to  what has become little more than a cult surrounding shopping, because in doing so, I would labelled a cynic and might ultimately even become one with these stupid judgements fuelling  my latent misanthropy.

The short was only one of my ideas that concerned this existential travesty of being labelled a cynic, having one’s intellect valid to those around you only inasmuch as it is taken as case for the prosecution, and of being unable to live a full social life because of it. In a Hardware store in _______ and Scab City I walked around thinking of the pieces that were to form Rainy Days and Mondays, some of which were written by Ward O’Gara and the collective that had formed around him in the commune he had joined, Art Carbuncle, so named, ironically, after one of the artists of the duo they had used to listen to (self-consciously and semi-ironically), and one of Marx’s quotes about the bourgoisie coming to regret his carbuncles earned in the British Library. One such piece, written by Art Carbuncle, was about Madonna. Everybody loved her. She was discussed on Late Review. She was said to stand for strong women. To have done so much for female sexuality. I thought that above all else she was a fraud. Joni Mitchell never felt the need to reinvent herself. She was herself.

These stories came out of the frustration of being rejected and judged for rejecting much of the culture around me. I rejected not only Madonna but also Jerry Springer and his modern freak show which was almost universally loved either with or without irony. I could not watch American films nor turn off my suspicion of their propagandising tone to enjoy what little could be taken from them. I didn’t watch football, nor cricket, nor indeed much sport at all. I didn’t watch soaps or much TV. I viscerally hated reality shows. (I remember how angry and exasperated I was when I read one of the Guardian’s leading columnists comment on a television show in which a lad with what I considered to be a fake stutter was winning a singing competition, basically to the effect that this proved Britain’s democratic nature.) I held the world in contempt that I was being misread in this way when it was those around me who were indulging in these cynical shows, cynical newspapers, cynical films, and the cynical acts of self-serving celebrities.

For a long time I was defined by this anger inside me and this feeling that I did not fit in to this society. Defined in a way that is not wholly dissimilar from the way Ludvik himself was defined by his anger at an event that came to determine his formative years. With any luck it will be equally incomprehensible to the next generation.

Ludvik of course knows about his plans. Plans which, it gives little away, concern retribution. In the first page of the first chapter he talks of his “rancour” towards his past and his home town.

The joke of the title was one written on a postcard Ludvik wrote to a lover while she was at a socialist training camp soon after the communist takeover of the late forties. The tone of the card was set by the fact that he was missing her - nothing had yet happened between them - and by the fact that her correspondence with him was upbeat, positive about the training, and about the everything in the camp. Evidently she wasn’t missing him to the same degree. It was set too by the fact that Marketa, his lover, took everything at face value. Though intelligent she was naive and gullible. Ludvik and his friends routinely made fun of her.

The joke, of course, was not read with this is mind. It was misread, and augured ill for Ludvik. He was thrown out of the party, out of his university, and sent to work in the mines for his military service.

The bulk of the novel is taken up by Ludvik’s narrative. By his tone, but also by the fact that he continues to live in the past, and not only in the past but in that moment when all of his friends and colleagues from university voted, led by an old friend, Zemanek, to construe his private remarks as a betrayal of the party and their utopian future. This looking back is unsustainable, and in determining to exact revenge on Zemanek, he ensures that this will be revealed to him.

When Helena first takes her place in the novel the reader can only guess her involvement.

[To be updated]

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