The Totalitarian Turnstile

...As Jan Benes writes, "For someone who has gotten himself on the other side of normal'ty, whether by becoming a brilliant sculptor or a brilliant swindler . . . individual consciousness of having passed beyond a known boundary remains in him as long as he is still conscious that he exists, that somewhere some other life also exists...

...Vojda and Havranek suddenly realize that the ideals of Socialist justice both had believed in so ardently have somehow become perversely reified...

...Those wishing to understand the downfall of Aleksandr Dubcek's liberal Czech regime will find Kundera's The Joke superficially attractive...

...after years of living with Zemanek she will settle for anything, even Ludvik...

...It is a suprisingly reactionary denouement, but by the time I had reached this part of the book it came as no surprise...

...It is Jan Benes' Second Breath that gives us the more profound illustration of what Paul Goodman has recently called "the entrenched world-wide system of corrupt power...

...But no such order exists...

...But the Knight has staked his authority (and his authoritativeness) on Tomschin's culpability, and the system has not given him the emotional equipment to admit having made a mistake...

...The camp commandant offers him his freedom (how familiar fh;s sounds) in return for the destruction of the letter, but Havranek refuses: ". . . he could not leave Vojda where he was, because of a whole complex of unwritten, incomprehensible, and unnamed principles of decency...

...And Zemanek has his own mistress, a racy longhaired type, and couldn't care less about Helena...

...So the ex-pilot and the Communist attempt confrontation politics in the midst of the prison camp...

...Most of the men scrupulously doff their caps, for the totalitarian mind thrives on memories of a blemished reputation, and "small gray, inconspicious, insignificant, and forgettable little mice are destined to survive the cat...

...Perhaps even he would have been decent if there had been an order telling him to be...

...and that emotional freedom and emotional maturity are identical—these are the ideas informing Jan Benes' novel...

...The last section of the book contains a marvelous reversal of expectation...

...To get back at everyone (including the reader), Kundera arranges for Ludvik to sadistically ravage the bovine Helena...

...Kundera stuffs this episode with schmaltzy poetry and schmaltzier philosophizing ("love's retrospective tendency to turn its own beginnings into myth") that makes one wonder whether he has somehow managed to spend a few months with Durrell in Alexandria...

...The book ends in a crescendo of schmaltz both literal and symbolic: We are taken to a village folk festival where the simple integrity of folk culture and Lucie (although one of the fragmented consciousnesses, I forget which, has revealed the truth about her sordid past) is held up as a remedy for the ills that beset modern man...

...That modern life is a tightrope-walk over the twin abyss of fanaticism and dogmatism...

...We find the Knight, wearing civilian clothes, sitting in a tavern outside the camp, waiting for the bus that will transport him to another assignment...

...A right guaranteed by law...

...Jan Benes achieves a subtlety of intention and a grimly lyrical consistency of tone...

...Kostka is properly existential, bemoaning the disappearance of the gods, etc., but it is in the context of his ultimately orthodox Christianity that we are presented with the final meaning of Kundera's "joke": "Laughter is a rust corroding everything...

...Benes, who reported his "Impressions of America" in The New Leader of December 8 following a brief visit to the United States, is full of surprises...

...Not even the notion of such a choice, however, has penetrated the mind of Milan Kundsra, whose novel, The Joke, is only superficially concerned with the problem of bureaucratic repression...

...Vojda is himself thrown into solitary for his defense of the bootless Tomschin...

...But dissent, always an unwelcome visitor, suddenly materializes...

...Here is where Kundera's second joke is supposed to flash out lightning-like upon the astonished audience...

...Havranek wri'es a letter to the Interior Ministry demanding to have the case reviewed...

...Gorky and Babel are two of the guiding spirits of his style, which might be described as "Socialist Realism-with-a-vengeance"—the vengeance being directed against those hard-line Party hacks who purvey the customary Socialist Realism...

...For Helena (horror of horrors) enjoys being slapped around, enjoys being degraded by Ludvik...

...Unlike Vojda, Havranek is up for parole if he keeps on the Knight's good side...

...I will not apologize for or complain about the translation of these grand sentences: There are moments in literature when considerations of style are rather irrelevant...

...Thus Second Breath opens with the prisoners spending their days working in a nearby coal mine, and returning at night through a clanking turnstile watched over by guards...

...is aghast to discover an unlikely plot...

...This rotten core of modernity, this false laughter masking a deep-set fear of the workings of the spontaneous passionate self, is probably the greatest barrier to the moral philosophy necessary to salvage our almost unmanageable technological world...

...Words from the encyclopedia...

...But the singular edge of Second Breath reflects the influence of a third figure: the allegorical realist of Prague, that great avatar of "rootless cosmopolitanism," Kafka...

...He only needed to release the pedal with which he controlled the lock of the turnstile, and the rushing man would bang his head on the bars, which suddenly stopped turning...

...Words whose true worth we do not know...

...Milan Kundera's novel oscillates unhappily between black humor and maudlin subjectivity, thus vitiating his attempt to comprehend the latent (and sometimes manifest) totalitarianism of our age...

...Next episode: Ludvik reappears, years older, a successful engineer, wiser and more cynical...

...I must acknowledge that Kundera has succeeded rather well, and is on the way to becoming either the Durrell or the Nabokov of Czechoslovakia...

...in other words, a real sw"nger...

...that the attempt to overthrow political repression should not result in the destruction of the age-old ordering devices established to control the animal in man...

...The commandant was on a different wave length, on a different track...

...But this was not to be the case: Kundera cou'd not resist making an antimartyr of the hero of his anti-novel...

...Benes observes: ". . . it was probable that they would never see one another again...

...so, Havranek and Vojda decide to confront the Knight with the'r right of appeal to an outside agency...

...The camp, incidentally, had been taken over from the Nazis, who used it during the War to imprison Russian captives...

...Havranek's strategy has been successful...

...A farther shore, a place the boats sail to...

...the truth of human decency is grounded in uncertainty, not in dogma...

...nor do Kundera's cynical effects produce any more illumination than that of a lightning bug...

...Vojda and Tomschin are taken out of solitary, and Havranek is allowed to return to an outside world that will seem more meaningful and complexly precious...

...Where there is more courage, more sense of responsibility, there is always more truth...

...but jokes finally cast their flickering illumination upon only the countenance of the humorist, however black his humor...

...I should mention that Lucie, by this time, has left the scene and has run off with Kostka, Ludvik's saintly Christian friend...

...During his stay in a labor camp, Ludvik forms a romantic attachment with a sweet but inarticulate thing named Lucie...

...But true liberation from a dangerous and inhuman authority is inseparable from political freedom...

...For a world that should still have some chance left and as few frames as possible...

...In every hut hung a copy of the camp regulations and a list of the rights and duties of prisoners...

...Of some confrontation...

...Or perhaps, I shudder to suggest, both...

...The deadly mechanized turnstile is suddenly ripped away, not by the outpourings of feeling (for even fascists have feelings) that Milan Kundera values so highly, but by the reasoned and strategic advocacy of human equality and the right to publicly assert one's own thoughts about the purposes of human life...

...Only a handful of modern thinkers and artists are as aware as Benes seems to be of the inescapable choice forcing itself into the consciousness of mankind...

...They decide (and in fact have no other choice) to resuscitate the humanistic ideals that subsist, at least theoretically, under the metallic incrustation of bureaucratic thought: "It was their right to have an interview with the prosecutor...

...The Knight, fortified by a squad of storm troopers, pays Vojda a vis;t with the hope of exacting an "agreement" from him, but a mild wrestling match ensues, resulting in a senseless beating—the scene is an excellent portrayal of the stunted and malevolent childishness that lies at the root of the facist mentality...

...His prison camp, in particular, is an allegory of modern existence, and a tribute to the "crime" of Kafka's hero, Joseph K. Benes' message is that we must all commit that crime—the refusal to bow before a corrupt dogma—and become rootless cosmopolitans...

...Nonetheless, they would live in the knowledge of one another, the knowledge that somewhere on this earth is a man who we know is our man...

...The predicament of Havranek, the ex-pilot, is a parable for the modern liberal...

...Enter Helena, the pro-Party wife of Zemanek, the bureaucrat who was responsible for punishing our hero for his Trotskyite postcard...

...Solidarity, laws, justice—all sorts of tricks can be played w'th all this...

...The beating goads Havranek into action: "It was not only a question of justice...

...It was their duty to take their hats off to a guard, and if anyone forgot, the sergeant in the gatehouse reminded him in no uncertain terms...

...Our only alternatives, he suggests, are the mushroom cloud and the totalitarian turnstile of a modern technology wholly devoid of moral standards...

...The recognition of one's own individuality and the individuality of others: This is the crime of Joseph K., and this is the key to a full and more complex humanity...

...Ludvik, his hip hero, is put in jail for sending a jokingly pro-Trotsky postcard to his Stalinist girlfriend Marketa (an act Trotsky would probably have considered quite stupid...

...Tomschin's boots, it developed, were being repaired...

...At first I was terrified that Kundera might try to make a martyr of Ludvik, despite the cubist tiresomeness of his predicament...

...If Kundera were a Russian he probably wou'd have invented an Antiterra long before Nabokov...

...What was at stake was a feeling of life that still had some chance left beyond the frame it had been forced into...

...Supermen do not like to free their prisoners (or to pull out of their unjust wars): It ruins the image...

...Yet both refuse to embrace the nihilism that has become fashionable on either side of the Iron Curtain...

...Reaction in our age seems to take on many strange forms, and the most fashionably funny or witty types of modernism are merely the tenacious skin concealing a very rotten and very old-fashioned fruit...

...The elements of this "joke" seem more akin to Westport than to Prague...

...Vojda, an apparently docile young Communist who had been imprisoned for causing an auto accident while drunk, has joined forces with an old ex-pilot named Havranek, their purpose being to free another prisoner, Tomschin, who was thrown into solitary confinement for forgetting to wear his boots during a roll call...

...the authorities have been forced to disown the idiotic brutality of one of their prize underlings...

...Reviewed by JOHN W. HUGHES Both of these young novelists from Czechoslovakia try to show us the rabid banality of evil in its quintessential contemporary locale, the prison camp...

...The ultimate truth about reactionaries of the esthetic or ecstatic type is that they are helpless pawns in the midst of a struggle they can only dimly understand...

...The camp lieutenant, who has a "Prussian-cropped head" and has been nicknamed the Knight (as in chess) because of his "literalmindedness...

...Ludvik gets violently amorous one night, and the next dav Lucie is gone...

...Benes' novel is relevant both to the recent denunciations of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, and to the creeping Agnewism in the United States that would brand all dissenters with the stigma of traitorhood...

...Human truth must first be established...

...Kundera is far more interested in trying to write an Authentic Modern Novel, with fragmented-consciousness techniques, clever cinematic flashbacks, a sadistic and permissive sexiness, and all the rest of the Western avant-garde trappings...