96
PARTISAN REVIEW
in Diderot's original, imagination and memory are more interesting
than their counterparts, but in Kundera's play the crucial absence of
the narrator's voice flattens the action on the level of the present and
imparts greater depth - and fragility - to the events at the rear of the
stage . In dramatizing the importance of the human mind and its
ability to conceptualize experience, Kundera has borrowed from
structuralism, which he calls one of the greatest impulses of modern
culture, as well as from Beckett and Diderot.
But here, as frequently happens in Beckett's world, the minds
of Kundera's characters, comic and energetic though they may be,
have little to work with. After Jacques, by a quirk of fate, has been
saved from hanging and he and his master have been reunited ("even
the worst of poets would not be able to invent a more joyous ending
to his awful poem!" exclaims Jacques), Kundera presents a resolution
that is not as rich as Diderot's, but is in keeping with the streamlined,
minimalist proportions he has given the rest of his play. Jacques asks
his master to lead him forward, and their final dialogue becomes a
comment on the relativity of human thinking:
Master: I'd like to, but .. . forward-where is it?
Jacques: I'm going to reveal a grand secret. A centuries old trick
of humanity . Forward is-everywhere .
Having written the play in 1971, while he still lived in Prague,
Kundera expressed in it the humor and intelligence that he found in
Diderot's original, but his modest variation contributes a twentieth
century sense of despair. Trapped by a distrust of feeling that he
strongly argues is the cause of history's human-made disasters, Kun–
dera portrays the world as drably lit and with little potential for hu–
man comfort.
It
is a theme that he has returned to continually, and
in "Edward and God," the last story in
Laughable Loves,
which he
wrote shortly before and, as he says, in the same spirit as
Jacques et
son Maitre,
Kundera treats the problem more succinctly. Edward,
like many of Kundera's characters, is disillusioned with the world.
However, his brother has found peace by leaving the Communist
Party, retiring to the country and, like Voltaire's Candide, tending
his garden . Edward's brother also prides himself on his directness,
and he disapproves when Edward tells him how he has recently won
a woman's affections by pretending to be religious. They discuss the
