54 pages • 1 hour read
Milan KunderaThe Joke
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Folk Music and Traditions
Throughout The Joke, the characters reference the folk traditions of Czechoslovakia, particularly folk music. Folk music symbolizes a desire to connect to the past, which is complicated by the forward-thinking nature of post-revolutionary society. The communist regime strives to create a more equal society in which traditional institutions and class structures are replaced with something more equitable and egalitarian. At the same time, however, the citizens feel a desire to connect to their pre-revolutionary past. The Party actively attempts to connect to this cultural past, funding people like Jaroslav to maintain and modernize folk traditions. This effort symbolizes a desire by the state to create a continuation of Czechoslovakian society. The new post-revolutionary world is not born in a vacuum. Deliberately, the state positions the new regime as a development and evolution of what came before. However, achieving that goal requires inventing an artificial past to support the Party’s historical narrative. The folk traditions of Czechoslovakia such as the Ride of the Kings and folk music are stripped of religious or capitalist ideas and reimagined for the new, post-revolutionary world. The Ride of the Kings, for example, introduces themes of class equality into a ceremony that originally centered around socially stratified feudal characters, an inherently absurd premise. Likewise, the folk music played by Jaroslav’s band is rewritten to celebrate folk heroes with importance to the new regime, such as people who died fighting fascism in World War II.
These attempts to link the traditions of the Czechoslovakian past to the communist present are not always successful. During one of their conversations, Ludvik reluctantly tells Jaroslav that he is not impressed with his band’s attempts to modernize traditional folk music. According to Ludvik, the new songs are ideologically unsound. Rather than create authentic music in the folk tradition, the post-revolutionary musicians have created a parody of the past. As Ludvik explains, none of the farmers or working-class people who popularized traditional folk songs would ever sing the modern creations. Instead, Jaroslav and his bandmates have created a parody of the imagined working-class experience. Their bourgeois songs lack the authenticity of traditional music; they cannot recapture the soul of the songs that endured hundreds of years of repetition and evolution. Jaroslav and the band, much like the regime itself, create an artificial past and attempt to retroactively apply it to the broader cultural experience. When Ludvik worries that he has been too critical of the regime, he asks Jaroslav to forget everything he has said. His fear alerts Jaroslav to the symbolic artificiality of the post-revolutionary society.
Despite Ludvik’s criticisms, he is still able to find meaning in the inauthentic folk songs that he plays with Jaroslav. The concert at the end of the novel is a symbolic rebirth for Ludvik. After his encounters with Zemanek and Helena, he is distraught. He is more alienated from society than he has ever been. When he finds Jaroslav in the field, however, he sees a chance to reclaim his connection with life. The men play the inauthentic folk songs, and though their audience is indifferent, the act of playing the music binds them together. The songs may be symbolically divorced from their working-class past, but the act of playing the music in a communal setting invests the songs with a brand-new authentic communal spirit.
The Black Insignia
After Ludvik is expelled from the Party, he must perform his national service. Since he has been thrown out of the Party for political reasons, he is not permitted to join the military, and he and many others are sent to the labor camp. They work in mines for the benefit of the state, though they are paid and ostensibly free. Each of these men bears the black insignia, a patch on their clothing that signifies that they are laborers on national service rather than enlisted in the military. In a practical sense, the black insignia is a symbol of their political exile. They are driven to the fringes of society for crimes against the ideology of the state, not necessarily the laws of the state. Ludvik’s postcard, for example, contained a joke that did not break the law but was deemed ideologically unsound. The black insignia represents his ideological crime; since he wears this symbol, everyone else in society can quickly determine that he has been deemed politically suspect. The black insignia is a physical representation of the state’s condemnation.
The black insignia has a deeper metaphorical meaning for the men in the labor camp. Rather than the social homogeny of the university where Ludvik spent many of his formative years, the labor camp is home to people from many different backgrounds. There are people like Alexej, who still believe in the Party, while most of the other men are politically opposed to the Party or simply disinterested in politics. The black insignia becomes a symbol of the unity of state persecution. The varied backgrounds of the men who bear the black insignia symbolize the complexities of life under a totalitarian regime. Political opposition is not necessary for the men to be condemned by the state; even supporters of the state and people who simply do not care about politics wear the same exact logo. As such, the black insignia symbolizes the contrast between the permissible and the impermissible in the state, the former of which is heterodox and uniform, while the latter is varied. If the socialist project of Czechoslovakia sought to create unity, then the black insignia provides an ironic version of unity by bringing together disparate people under the same symbolic punishment. Thus, the black insignia is the ultimate symbol of Totalitarianism as Absurdity. In its attempt to stigmatize dissidence, the totalitarian regime has created a new form of solidarity rooted in dissent.
The black insignia stays with the men long after they have been released from their service. Even though he returns to mainstream society, Ludvik never truly abandons the bitterness and regret that marked his time in the camp. These emotions hang over him for the rest of his life, a symbolic black insignia that makes his past evident to the rest of the characters. The young, optimistic Ludvik is gone; the contemporary Ludvik still bears the mark of the black insignia and the bitterness that comes with it. In this sense, the black insignia functions as a broader social symbol of the lasting damage done by the political alienation imposed on the men of the labor camp. It represents the generation of men who were exiled to the periphery of society and not permitted to return, whose lives are now lived under the cloud of regret. Ludvik is one of these disillusioned men, someone who lives with a symbolic black insignia fastened to his chest at all times.
The Party
The Party is the term used to refer to the communist regime in post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia. Many of the characters in The Joke are either members or former members of the Party; regardless of their membership, every character feels their lives are governed by the regime. The Party is a complicated symbol for the young Czechoslovakians. Depending on the period of time or the character in question, the Party can be a threat, a promise, or a tarnished ideal.
Ludvik’s fate shows how the Party can represent a threat. He writes an innocuous joke to his girlfriend, which is misinterpreted by a political machine not built to comprehend the subtle nuance of an ironic comment. The Party punishes Ludvik for this joke, transforming his life in an instant because he refuses to adhere to strict social expectations that are never explicitly written down. Ludvik breaks an unwritten rule, and, for the rest of his life, he must live in the shadow of the Party’s punishment. The power to punish symbolizes the strength and the threat of the Party. It operates beyond the confines of traditional social interaction, posing a new and little-understood capacity to dominate realms of social existence that were once private. A joke on a postcard is enough for the Party to deem one man to be beyond the political pale. The threat of the Party is so new and abstract that even members such as Ludvik do not know when they are transgressing and have little recourse to atone for any mistakes they make. The Party is everywhere, and its demands are unknowable and lasting. The most overarching example of Totalitarianism as Absurdity, the Party symbolizes a new and dangerous threat to the lives of the very people who defend it.
Beyond the Party as a threat, however, the Party also represents a political promise. In the early days of the revolution, men such as Ludvik, Zemanek, and Alexej are firm believers in a better future. To them, the Party represents a form of political optimism that has not yet been tarnished. Alexej is so committed to the Party that he is willing to betray his own father to win its approval. Before his punishment, Ludvik is similarly optimistic about the Party, and Zemanek never loses his optimism. Since the Party’s machinations are so ill-defined, the characters can project their own meanings onto the powerful institution. While the reader may regard the Party as a threat (since Ludvik is introduced after he has been punished by it), many of the characters view it as a symbol of the brave new world of the socialist future. In the abstract, the Party embodies a bright future for Czechoslovakia. Exactly because it is so ill-defined and nebulous, the characters can find their own symbolic interpretation. This optimism is sometimes betrayed, as in the cases of Ludvik and Alexej, but the Party’s status as a symbol of a bright political future lingers on.
Ludvik accepts the nuances of the Party as a political symbol. He realizes that bitterness has clouded his life while the Party’s political project has not manifested. The Party parallels Ludvik’s life journey, an optimistic youth savaged by the practicalities of the real world. Ludvik’s optimism has been tarnished and darkened, just as the Party has been compromised from within over the decades. The folk traditions that were once well funded are now struggling, producing nothing but artificial echoes of a better era. Despite this, Ludvik finds meaning in playing the songs. The Party and the people may have symbolically lost their optimism, but meaning can still be found through authentic social interaction.
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