Excerpts

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I did not enjoy The Joke. I finished it today and felt the word fatigue weighing down on me like a millstone. Betrayal--that's what this book is about, the betrayal of individual by comrades, of culture by ideology, of woman by man and vice versa, of tragedy by comedy, of soul by body...

"Franz was riding Sabina and had betrayed his wife; Sabina was riding Franz and had betrayed Franz" (Lightness, p. 117). I suppose that there are a set of themes, of leitmotifs, that connect the dots of an author's progression, and now I know that betrayal haunted Kundera's. E said that to invoke God is to appropriate divine authority for self-serving human actions. Kostka is the illustration of his point--the religious man whose acts of self-sacrifice are also his means of escape from responsibility, from impending moral downfall. In a sense, he leaves his family, then Lucie, in order to save his own soul.

In some ways, Kostka reminds me of Joseph. Joseph also fled to escape destruction. For this, he suffered the wrath of an adulteress and her jealous husband. But Kostka escaped unscathed. Furthermore, Joseph never yielded to temptation, but Kostka had already fallen. But Kostka's anguish over the duality, or should I say duplicity, of his actions must be a sign of something. "Make yourself heard, God, louder, louder! In this chaos of confused voices I cannot seem to hear You." He has come to the shocked realization of his own "delusions" about himself, of the betrayal that took place of his religious ideals by base motives. Yes, perhaps Luvik has lived his life in a living hell because of his hatred, but Kostka's pain is also hellish--it is the pain of ingrained, irreversible, and unwanted hypocrisy. Once again, I think of Paul crying "For what I will do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do." But this also is why Kostka is not lost--his acknowledgment of what he is, and his faith in a God who forgives.

"For people by themselves don't know how to forgive, and it is not even in their power. They lack the power to annihilate a sin that has been committed. This exceeds a man's strength. Divesting a sin of its validity, undoing it, erasing it out of time, in other words making it into nothing, is a mysterious and supernatural feat. Only God, because He is exempt from earthly laws, because He is free, because He can work miracles, may wash away sin, transform it into nothing, forgive it. Man can forgive man only insofar as he founds himself on God's forgiveness" (Joke, p.234-235). This is Kostka's salvation; in spite of the depth of his sin, in spite of his condemnation of a man who is no worse than himself, his faith in God's forgiveness is his righteousness, and the righteousness of God is His ability to forgive those who ask for it...

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...Love is merely the steadfast beat of cardiac muscle, the regularity and miraculous coordination which bears with patience the convulsions of a body "in love," pumping softly vitamins and blood cells and leukocytes to the fingers and toes and brain where damage is being done. Love ensures that life can go on, and it is grand by that merit. So, love goes unnoticed by those lovers who have not understood what it is from which they take their name, by those suffering the heady intoxication of "possibilities" and "that evening when you and I..." and "shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
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