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PARTISAN REVIEW
his characters' attempts to be significant, and in the cynicism with
which he overlays almost all portraits of human suffering. He has
been accused of not caring for his characters and of being morally
irresponsible. But he uses irony as a primary technique to control the
expression of his own feelings. "The more I think of it," he said in the
summer of 1982, "the more I think of myself as a man of the eigh–
teenth century." The comment may surprise some, but Kundera,
describing the eighteenth century as a time of political dislocation
and revolution, also speaks approvingly of its art. He admires the
sense of play in its musical variations, its improvisation in fictional
narrative, its humane emphasis on reason. Most of all he likes what
he refers to in one of his essays as the eighteenth century habit of
"doubt and clarity."
One of the more recent of Kundera's works to appear in Paris,
Jacques et son Maitre (Hommage
a
Denis Diderot)
is a play that furnishes
a clear way into the humor, techniques, and motivations behind
much of Kundera's work. It may also provide further clues about his
political thinking in general. As is well known, Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
inspired Diderot to write
Jacques Ie Fataliste.
Imitating
Sterne's pattern of digression, with its interruptions, false premises,
and asides, Diderot added further technical complications to his nar–
rative by giving it five distinct voices. Adapting to fiction the poly–
phonic structure of a fugue, Diderot interwove three tales of thwarted
love as told by four different speakers and made all of them depend
upon the whims, caprices, and false premises of a fifth speaker, the
book's narrator who, like Tristram, continually reminds the reader of
the arbitrary nature of the novel's events. With each speaker's voice
working in counterpoint to the other four, Diderot placed his basic
theme (and joke) in Jacques's mouth: "Everything that happens to us
down here, for good or ill, is written above."
Diderot, of course, is "above," as well as at the reader's elbow,
and the comedy of the novel plays on the ambiguity of the reference
in that phrase. Philosophically, it is a statement of determinism, but
aesthetically Jacques's comment also says something about the na–
ture of storytelling. For Kundera, who believes in the arbitrariness
of history, Diderot's narrative must have seemed a perfect vehicle for
his own writing. In his introduction to the printed version of
Jacques et
son Maitre
Kundera tells how the idea for the play occurred. As in
much of his work, history provided the catalyst. Shortly after the
Russian invasion of 1968, when Kundera had lost his university pro–
fessorship and could no longer publish in Czechoslovakia, a theater
