The Joke

“She goes under a different name now, but that’s who she is.”

Characters can change their names, but they cannot change the fundamental aspects of themselves. When Lucie shaves Ludvik in the barbershop, he recognizes something familiar in her. She looks different, acts different, and has a different name, but there is an immutable quality to her character that cannot be denied. The passage of time and the imposition of suffering cannot fundamentally alter a person’s character, even if they hope that it might.

“Men desire most what they consider inaccessible.”

Helena is keenly aware of her appeal to a man like Ludvik. Earlier in her narration, she confesses that she is not as slim or as attractive as she once was. Her unavailability rather than her aesthetic beauty is what makes her appealing to men. That Helena knows this suggests that she exploits it, yet her guilt regarding her husband and child hints at the internal tension in her character as she balances the desire to be desired with her responsibilities to her family.

“I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be.”

Ludvik’s narration takes on the tone of the students’ self-criticism sessions, in which he outlines and addresses his own faults. As an older man, however, Ludvik justifies one of the criticisms directed at him as the simple product of youth. His fluctuating identity was not malicious or intended to deceive. He, like many young people, simply did not know himself well enough to adopt a consistent persona. Rather than hypocrisy, he suffered from simply being young and naïve.

“The words sounded so terrifying in the small Party Secretariat office that they frightened me and I felt they had a destructive force I was powerless to counter.”

When his joke is placed into a new context, Ludvik is terrified by his own words. By recontextualizing his joke, the authorities completely obliterate the humor and irony of the words. Ludvik is overwhelmed by a dawning realization of the true nature of his government, one that alters the meaning of his supposedly innocent words and will not tolerate his ironic individualism. For such a dedicated young political mind, the realization that the authorities are not on his side is shocking.

“We were the disinherited with nothing more to look forward to in life, but we had money.”

The men working hard labor are in an ironic position. They have been politically exiled from the party and disinherited by the communist state, yet they are the only conscripts who earn money. Their peers who have stayed in the Party’s good graces earn less to do just as much work. Ludvik is richer than the soldiers, but he envies them because Party approval is worth more to him than money. The contrast is framed as an irreconcilable dichotomy in which people can have either the love of the Party or wages in their pocket. Ludvik has wages but would rather be in the Party, while many soldiers feel the opposite way.

“Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.”

Ludvik is an atheist. The “religious truth” of Lucie to him is in accordance with the joke he wrote on the postcard many years ago. He does not know the true Lucie, nor does he understand the complexities of her life. He loves the version of her that she shows to him, a public performance of identity that comforts and appeals to him, much like religion functions as a soothing opiate to the roiling masses under capitalism. There is no religion in Lucie’s truth, just as there is no truth in Ludvik’s religion. Instead, he finds comfort in the emotions that he convinces himself that he feels.

“The young can’t help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into 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.”

The public Performance of Identity is a theme in the novel, exploring the ways in which people project a hastily assembled version of themselves into the world and then struggle to maintain a consistent performance of this identity. The young are “incomplete,” so the fissures in their identities are more apparent. They do not know how to be fully grown, as they are not, but they attempt to perform their adulthood, nevertheless.

“So I described Lucie’s nakedness, which I’d never seen, our lovemaking, which I’d never known, and as I spoke, a precise, detailed picture of her quiet passion rose before my eyes.”

Ludvik invents lurid sexual descriptions of his encounters with Lucie for the benefit of his friends. The veracity of these encounters does not matter, as he is titillating himself as much as the other men. Ludvik and Lucie never have sex, but he paints a vivid portrait of her in his imagination. This portrait is a performance of a sexual identity he does not know, in which the truth is superseded by desire. Ludvik does not know Lucie in a sexual or a personal sense; vast swathes of her personality and history are unknown to him. As he fills in details about their imagined sex life, he fills in details of her personality with his desires and creates an imaginary version of Lucie with whom he can fall in love.

“And this year they were going to honor me.”

Jaroslav’s son, Vladimir, is being made the king in the Ride of the Kings as a reward to Jaroslav. At this point, Jaroslav has only considered this from his own perspective. His hard work in preserving folk traditions and in raising his son have come together, rewarding him with an important role for Vladimir to play. He does not consider whether Vladimir wants this. His selfish attitude craves reward after many years of languishing in increasing obscurity.

“Capitalism had destroyed this old collective life.”

Jaroslav’s reverence for the past is built on The Artificial Past. He is not a historian, but he frequently heralds the need to return to a better, simpler time before the rigors of capitalism and communism overtook Czechoslovakian society. The “old collective life” is propaganda, dredged from the past and deployed to men like Jaroslav to create an idea of Czechoslovakian history and culture that is unmoored from reality (141). The folk songs he plays are informed by contemporary pop music, and the festivals he organizes are interrupted by cars and buses; the old collective life is consigned to the past, if it ever existed at all. Jaroslav’s attempts to resurrect this old life are just parodic approximations.

“Vlasta was the poor servant girl, a figure from many folk songs!”

Jaroslav does not necessarily fall in love with Vlasta’s personality but rather with the way she adheres to a folkloric stereotype of the artificial past. Jaroslav is a lover of folk songs, so he falls in love with a girl who fits the archetype found in many such songs. Vlasta’s actual personality is irrelevant. His love for her moves beyond an individual performance of identity and into the realm of an individual publicly projecting an identity onto another person.

“Show me one collective farmer who sings your collective farm songs for pleasure.”

Having been chastened by his experience in the mines, Ludvik is direct with his criticism of Jaroslav’s folk music. The old folk songs, Ludvik believes, grew organically out of the social conditions of the farmers. Jaroslav’s songs are post-facto bourgeoise parodies of Czechoslovakian working-class traditions. None of the new songs are sung “for pleasure” because they are inherently artificial. Ludvik’s criticisms can be extended to many of the Party’s more romantic and nostalgic enterprises.

“I love her as a character in our common love story.”

Now that he has matured, Ludvik can recognize that there is a difference between Lucie the person and the Lucie he remembers. The woman with whom he fell in love is not actually Lucie; as revealed in Kostka’s chapter, there are large parts of her identity that she never revealed to Ludvik. Instead, Ludvik loved an idea of Lucie. He allowed himself to fall in love with her as though he were writing a story in which they were both characters. The Lucie whom Ludvik loves is a fictional creation.

“I carefully reexamined them, first with Zemanek’s eyes, then with my own.”

Ludvik desires to see Helena as her husband, Pavel Zemanek, sees her. His seduction of Helena is premised on revenge; he wants to hurt Pavel for his role in expelling Ludvik from the Party many years earlier. Ludvik has turned empathy into a weapon, trying to imagine the pain he can cause one person by playing on the emotions of another. He wields Helena as a stick with which to beat his old enemy and then delights in imagining Pavel’s reaction.

“But my unprecedented reply had abruptly excluded me from the sphere of their thinking, I had refused to play the role played at hundreds of meetings.”

Ludvik believes that his greatest crime was not the joke he wrote on the postcard but his refusal to publicly perform his deference to the Party. He refuses to play the role expected of him, acting defiantly when obedience is expected. His defiance is more intolerable than his joke, so he is stripped of his old identity as a result. Ludvik’s refusal to perform an identity means that he is denied an identity in the public sphere.

“We’re actually strangers.”

Helena tries to assure Ludvik with the truth about her marriage, and in doing so, she upsets him. Their tryst is built on Ludvik’s desire for revenge against Helena’s husband. She does not know this, mistaking Ludvik’s desire for revenge for love. Just as Zemanek and Helena are estranged, Ludvik and Helena are also strangers. They do not know each other, only the diminished, untruthful selves that they project into the world. The performance of identity is so filled with falsity that everyone in society becomes strangers to each other.

“I have grown so accustomed to his incorporeal presence that I found myself in some confusion yesterday when suddenly, after all these years, I met him as a real man of flesh and blood.”

In Ludvik’s absence, Kostka has conjured up an alternative version of him with whom he can hold debates in his mind. This imaginary version of Ludvik is not the real Ludvik; this version is an invention of Kostka’s, an artificial construct that is intended as an adversarial thought experiment more than a person. Just as Ludvik falls in love with an invented version of Lucie, Kostka develops a friendship with an imagined version of Ludvik.

“The girl became the children’s own pampered fairy.”

The children in the small town mirror their parents’ behavior. Since everyone is publicly performing identities that mask their real selves, these people invent and exaggerate their impressions of others. The children do not know the runaway Lucie; they turn her into their own folklore hero, a fairy-like figure rather than the tragic fugitive she is. The children are preparing themselves for a lifetime of inventing comfortable lies because the truth is uncomfortable or unavailable.

“As long as people can escape to the realm of fairy tales, they are full of nobility, compassion, and poetry.”

Kostka is one of the few characters who diagnoses the social tendency to escape into false realities rather than deal with unpleasant truths. He is as susceptible to this “realm of fairy tales” as everyone else, but he is self-aware enough to understand that the version of Ludvik he has in his head is not the authentic Ludvik. This invention, however, allows him to maintain his compassion, becoming an essential means of functioning in a strange and alienating society.

“Suddenly I was nostalgic for Prague.”

Ludvik’s nostalgia is a complicated matter. He often yearns for an artificial past to which he cannot return as a means of escaping his present. He cannot return to Prague at this moment, so the appeal of the city increases. Ludvik overemphasizes nostalgia as a means of escapism, often deluding himself into believing something that is not true but that appeals to him, nevertheless.

“The Ride of the Kings is a mysterious rite; no one knows what it means, what it wants to say, but just as Egyptian hieroglyphs are more beautiful to those who cannot read them (and perceive them as mere fanciful sketches).”

Ludvik grew up in a town that celebrates the Ride of the Kings, but he understands it as an inscrutable event. The tradition is not necessarily tied to one specific event in the past but a broader idea of tradition that appeals to the modern mind. This broad, unknowable past allows the modern audience to project whatever meaning onto the ceremony that suits them best. The entire ceremony becomes an act of deluded social indulgence, celebrating an illusory and unknowable artificial past that shares little in common between individuals.

“I stand in front of him, and I don’t know whether it is he or not.”

Jaroslav approaches the veiled king and cannot discern whether the boy behind the veil is his son. His lack of understanding reflects an issue faced by many characters throughout the novel. He looks at the king and wants to see his son inside, but he cannot be certain. Without the doubt planted in his mind, he would happily have accepted the identity of the king, but now he cannot be certain. The veiled king is a metaphor for the false identities that characters project onto each other.

“Humiliation without purpose, a humiliation without meaning, utterly unjust.”

Helena’s suicide attempt is another of fate’s cruel jokes. She is a victim not only of Ludvik’s selfish romantic machinations but also of the mislabeled pill bottle. The absurd nature of her situation means that her humiliation accomplishes nothing, adding a sense of injustice to her already bleak situation. Pavel will leave her, Jindra has seen her at her worst, and Ludvik never loved her. The situation caused by the pills is merely the culmination of a mounting emotional humiliation.