Years ago, Kurt Gödel with his Incompleteness Theoremdestroyed the dreams of many mathematicians. He proved that mathematics cannot prove that every true statement is true and that every false statementis false. Basically, he proved that mathematics is limited. This is anexample of a statement that cannot be proved:
This statement is unprovable.
Kurt Gödel was born in Brünn, which is a city in the Czech Republic. It is the same city where Milan Kundera, the author of “The Joke,” was born. Milan Kundera calls his city ‘Brno,’ however. As it is pointed out somewhere in ‘The Joke,’ ethnic Germans were kicked out of Czechoslovakiaafter WW2. But that is another subject altogether.
‘The Joke’ will give you a pretty good idea of what life was like incommunism, and it is very readable.Below is a short summary and selected fragments.
A summary of the novel:
Ludvik is a young student, with a promising future, in then communist Czechoslovakia. He decides to court a nice friend of his, Marketa. Marketa seems to be a fine girl, she has only one problem: She is very serious. So seriousthat she does not understand jokes.
Marketa’s seriousness made her communist friends think that she needed some ideologicaltraining. Marketa did not quite understand why ‘the ends justify the means.’ She wassent to some sort of communist summer school to learn that. Away fromLudvik, Marketa writes to tell him that ‘the revolution in the West would not be short in coming.’ Angry that Marketa did not seem to miss him at all, Ludvik writes a postcard to her:
Optimism is opium for the people!
A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!
Long Live Trotsky!
Ludvik.
This postcard, which was meant to be a joke, became grounds for Ludvik’s expulsionfrom the communist Party (and from the University as well: his good friend Pavel Zemanek proposed that Ludvik be expelled from the University, and all his ‘friends’ raised their hands and voted to approve the expulsion). Ludvik ended up in a ‘black insignia’army unit. Soldiers of such a unit were not allowed to carry weapons. Untrustworthy, they worked in the mines instead. They had been declared enemies of the state. Needless to say, life became pretty tough for our Ludvik. Meaningless as well.He had remained without friends, and for a long time he did not go out of the barracks evenwhen he had permission to do so.
Things changed when he met Lucie Sebetka. He fell in love with her, without immediately realising it. When the time came (or so Ludvik thought) to have sex, Lucie resisted him. This increased his desire even more.Then she resisted him a second time, for no good reason, (or so Ludvik thought). Afterthat she disappeared, and no one knew where she had gone.
During the following years, Ludvik finished his ‘service’ and restarted his studies. His revengeful feelings made him go to bed with Helena, Pavel Zemanek’s wife. Ludvik had less luck than the Count of Monte Cristo, however. He had calculatedthat by sleeping with the Zemanek’s wife he would return a ‘favor’ to Zemanek.It turned out that Zemanek was separated fromhis wife. (Zemanek had a lover, a young and pretty student.) Ludvik then told Helena that he did not really love her. Helena decided to commitsuicide. Ludvik received her suicide note, went to save her, and discovered (I won’t tell you how :)) that the poison Helena had taken was in fact a handful of laxatives.
Ludvik also found out that the girl he had loved, the girl who was so pure in his memory, Lucie Sebetka, had been condemned for ‘immoral behavior’ before they met for the first time.She had been raped by a gang, repeatedly – hence her aversion towards sex. One of Ludvik’s friends who happened to be Christian and who happened to believe in God, had met Lucie after she disappeared, and with the words of God he healed Lucie’s disease. The proof of this healing was the fact that Lucie made love to this guy, who incidentally was married to someone else.
In the end, it becomes clear that the whole life, even the dreams were a big joke.
Selected fragments:
Here Ludvik recalls a time when he himself and Zemanek had made fun of Marketa.
“. . .
Another advantage was that Zemanek knew Marketa. The three of us were often together on various occasions during our student days; once (there was a largegroup of us) I made up a story about some dwarf tribes living in the Czech mountains,documenting it with quotes from an alleged scholarly paper devoted to the subject.Marketa was astonished that she had never heard them. That was no sursprise,I said. Bourgeois scholarship had deliberately concealed their existence,because they [the dwarfs] were bought and sold like slaves by capitalists.
But somebody ought to bring it out into the open! cried Marketa. Why doesn’t somebody write about it? It would make a really strong case against capitalism!
Perhaps the reason no one writes about it, I said pensively, is that the whole thingis rather delicate: the male dwarfs had extraordinary sexual capacities, which waswhy they were so much in demand and why our Republic secretly exported them forhard currency, especially to France, where they were hired by aging capitalist ladies as servants, though obviously used for different purposes altogether.
The others stifled their laughter, which was prompted not so much by the wittinessof my invention as by Marketa’s attentive expression, her passion for supporting (or opposing) the issue at hand; they bit their lips to keep from spoiling Marketa’spleasure at learning something new, and some of them (Zemanek in particular) joined in and endorsed my account of the dwarfs.
When Marketa asked what they looked like, I remember Zemanek telling her with a straight face that Professor Cechura, whom Marketa and the assembled company had the honorof seeing regularly on the lecture hall podium, was of dwarf descent, possibly on both sides but certainly on one.
. . . .”
This is an incident that happened when Ludvik wasstill in the army.
“. . .
During his first year of military service Cenek had done a large number of murals, which under the previous commanding officer had always received their due. As I’ve said before, Cenek was partial to the Hussite warriors and their leader Jan Zizka; to please his friends he always liked to throw in a few naked women, justifying them to the commanderas symbols of liberty to the motherland. The new commander, also wishing to make use of Cenek’s services, called him in and asked him to do something for the room where political instruction classes were given. He took the opportunity to tell him to forget about all those Zizkas and “pay more attention to the present,” to show the Red Armyand its alliance with our working class and also its role in the victory of socialism in February 1948. Cenek said “Will do!” and set to work; after several afternoons spent on the floor painting, he tacked up the large sheets of paper along the far wall of theroom. When we first saw the finished picture (it was a good five feet high and twenty-fivefeet long), we were dumbstruck: in the center stood a heroically posed, warmly clad Soviet soldier with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, a shaggy fur cap pulled down over his ears, and about eight naked women crowding around him. The two standing on either side were gazing up at him coquettishly; he had an arm around the shoulders of each and was laughing a jubilant laugh; the other women paid court to him, extending their arms to him or simply standing there (one was lying down), showing off their pretty figures.
Cenek took up a position in front of the picture (we were waiting for the political officer to arrive and had the room to ourselves) and gave us a talk that went something like this: Now, here to the right of the sergeant, that’s Alena, the first woman I ever had. I was sixteen at the time, and she was the wife of an officer, so she should feel right at home here. I’ve painted her the way she looked at the time, you can be sure she’s gonedownhill since, but even then she was on the plump side, right here (he pointed his finger)around the thighs. Because she was much more attractive from the rear, I’ve done anotherone of her here (he walked over to one end of the picture and pointed to a woman who, showing her bare behind to the audience, seemed to be leaving). You see that her royalrump is just a little oversized, but that’s the way we like them, isn’t it? And this one (he pointed to the girl on the sergeant’s left), this one is Lojzka, I was more experienced by the time I got her, she had small breasts (he pointed to them), and very pretty features (he pointed to them too), and she was in my year at school. And this is our model fromlive drawing class, I knew her by heart and so did all twenty of us guys, because she always used to stand in the middle of the classroom while we learned how to paint the human body, but none of us ever touched her, her mother was always there waiting at the end of the class to whisk her off, so she showed herself off to us, God bless her, with alldue propriety. Now, this one (he pointed to a woman lolling on a stylized divan), this onewas a whore from the word go, come up a little closer (we did) see that little mark onher belly? It’s a cigarette burn they say she got from a jealous woman she was having an affair with, because, yes, gentlemen, she liked it both ways, her sexuality was a real accordion, gentlemen, where you could find just about anything, we’d all be able to cram ourselves in there, just as we are, with our wives, our girlfriends, our kids, and our great-grandparents to boot.
Cenek was obviously approaching the climax of his statement when the politicalcommissar entered the room and told us to sit down.
. . . .”
And then Cenek explaining the contents of the picture to the commander:
“. . .
Here we have an allegorical representation of the significance of the Red Army for the struggle of our nation; here (he pointed to the sergeant) is the Red Army; at his side (he pointed to the officer’s wife) is symbolized the working class, and here on the other side (he pointed to his schoolmate) is the symbol of the month of February. These (he pointed to the other ladiesare the symbols of liberty, victory, here is the symbol of equality; and here (he pointedto the officer’s wife displaying her behind) we see the bourgeoisie making its exit from the stage of history.
. . . .”
In the fragment below, Ludvik is thinking about what to tell Helena:
“. . .
A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute,he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions.
. . . .”
