Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

The loss of paradise, we read in Life Is Elsewhere, only allows us to distinguish beauty from ugliness, not good from evil. Adam and Eve know themselves to be ugly or beautiful, not evil or good. Poetry is next to history, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be invited into history by the poet who confuses the violent idyll of the revolution with the serene tragedy of poetry. Jaromil’s problem is Kundera’s problem: to discover the invisible avenues that depart from history and then lead to realities we had hardly suspected, hardly imagined, whose modern doors were opened by Franz Kafka.

Coleridge imagined a history told not before or after, above or under, time but in a way next to time, alongside time — the companion and indispensable complement of time. The avenue toward this reality, which completes and makes immediate reality have a sense, is to be found on an extraordinary level in Kundera’s novel, where, truly, life is to be found. The opening toward that place where life is (the internal utopia of this novel) has its locus in each and every one of the words which tell us that what we accept as reality is not fully existent because it does not realize that its sister reality, its possible reality, is there beside it, waiting to be seen. More, waiting to be dreamed.

Like Buñuel’s films, like Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, Kundera’s novel only exists fully if we can open the windows of the dream it contains. A mystery named Xavier is the protagonist of the dream, which is a dream of the dream, a dream within the dream, a dream whose effects linger while a new dream — the son, the brother, the father of the previous dream — peeks out from it. In this epidemic of dreams, which infect each other, Xavier is the poet that Jaromil could have been, that Jaromil is because he existed next to him, or that perhaps Jaromil will be in the dream of death.

The important thing is that in this dream within a dream — this dream of Russian dolls, similar to the infinitely oracular time of Tristram Shandy —everything happens for the first time. Thus, everything occurring outside the dream is a repetition. History, Marx said, first appears as tragedy; its repetition is a farce. Kundera draws us into a history that denies all rights to tragedy and to farce in order to consecrate itself perpetually in the idyll.

When the idyll evaporates and the poet becomes an informer, we are authorized to look for the poet elsewhere: his name is Xavier; he lives in a dream; and there history (not the dream) is a farce, a joke, a comedy. The dream contains this farce because history has expelled it with horror from its deceitful idyll. The dream admits it temporarily, hoping that history will not repeat itself. This shall be the moment in which history ceases to be a farce and can become the place where life can be. Meanwhile, life and the poet are elsewhere, and there they openly reveal the farcical nature of history.

The chapters devoted to Xavier beg the question: Does the poet not exist? And answer with these words: No, the poet is simply elsewhere. And this place where the poet is, but where the poet acts history as a farce, is a comical dream, which, by the way, reveals the vast influence of Milan Kundera as the master of the modern Czech filmmakers. In the seamless passage from one dream to another, history appears as a tearless farce. The melodrama of Balzac’s La Grande Bretèche is represented by the Marx Brothers, who, as everyone knows, are the fathers of the Marx Sisters, the “Little Daisies” of anarchy in socialism imagined by the filmmaker Vera Chytilova. The perverse dream of the movies is the nightmare and the ambition of Jaromil to be seen by all, to feel “all eyes turned toward him.” In the cinema and in the theater, all the others — the world — see us. The undoubted terror of German Expressionist film consists precisely in this possibility of always being seen by another, much as Fritz Lang’s Mabuse incessantly sees us from his cell in the madhouse or as Peter Lorre, the vampire of Dusseldorf in M, is seen by the thousand eyes of a mendicant night.

That which has been seen by all cannot have any pretenses to originality or, for that matter, virginity. Represented as oneiric theater and rewritten as impossible novel, history always appears as a farce. But if it be only a farce, this is a tragedy — such is the sense of the joke in Kundera. In a world deprived of humor, the joke can only be the refusal of the universe: “a sock in the statue of Apollo,” a policeman locked forever in a closet, walled in like a character from Edgar Allan Poe played by Harold Lloyd. Jokes, humor, are exceptional and liberating: they reveal the farce; they mock the law; they essay freedom. Because of this, the law denounces the joke as a crime.

Dura Lex

In both Ks, Kafka and Kundera, a hermetic legality rules. Liberty is no longer possible because liberty is already perfect. Such is the solemn reality of the law. There is no paradox in this statement. Freedom supposes a certain vision of things; it holds the minimal possibility of giving a sense to the world.

But in the world of the penal laws of Kafka and of the scientific socialism of Kundera this is no longer possible. The world already has a sense and this sense is given by the law, says Kafka. And Kundera adds: The world of scientific socialism already has a sense, and revolutionary law, which is nothing but objectified history, common and idyllic, gives it to the world. It is useless to search for another meaning. You insist? Then you will be eliminated in the name of the law, the revolution, and history.

Given this premise, authentic freedom becomes a self-destructive enterprise. The person who defends himself only hurts himself: Joseph K in The Trial, the land measurer in The Castle, all of Kundera’s jokers. Jaromil, on the other hand, not only does not defend himself; he doesn’t even offer passive resistance. He enthusiastically joins the political idyll, which is his poetic idyll transformed into historical action. Poetry converts into a farce when it identifies itself with the historical idyll: the subversive poetical act then consists of not taking this history or this law seriously. The poetic act becomes a joke. The leading character of The Joke, Ludvik Khan, sends a postcard to his sweetheart, a young communist, serious and jealous, who seems to love ideology more than Ludvik. Since Ludvik does not conceive love without humor, he sends her a postcard with the following message:

Optimism is the opium of the people!

Long live Trotsky!

signed Ludvik

The joke costs Ludvik his freedom. “But, comrades, it was only a joke,” he tries to explain before being sent to a work camp as a coal miner. Yet humor must be paid with humor. The totalitarian state learns to laugh at its victims and perpetrates its own jokes. Is it not a joke that Dubček, for example, should be a trolley-car inspector in Slovakia? If the state is the author of the jokes, it is because it would not leave even this freedom to the citizens, and then the citizens, much as the protagonist of Kundera’s story “Edward and God,” can exclaim that “life is very sad when one can take nothing seriously.”

Such is the final irony of the historic idyll: its ponderous solemnity and its interminable enthusiasm end by devouring everything, even the subversive jokes. Laughter is crushed when the joke is codified by the perfection of the law, which from that moment also says: “This is funny and now you must laugh.” I believe there is no image of totalitarianism more terrifying than this one created by Milan Kundera: totalitarianism over laughter, the incorporation of humor into the law, the transformation of the victims into objects of official humor, prescribed and inscribed in vast fantastic constructions, which, like the prison landscapes of Piranesi or the labyrinthine tribunals of Kafka, pretend to control destinies.