The Angels
- Kundera now focuses on Gabrielle and Michelle, American girls studying abroad in France.
- The girls' teacher, Madame Raphael, assigns them an oral report on Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros.
- By the way, the girls—and their teacher—have the names of archangels.
- Back to the project, Michelle and Gabrielle are stumped. They have no idea why everyone in the play turns into rhinoceroses.
- Michelle figures out that the rhinoceros must be a symbol or sign for something—but the girls have to figure out the meaning.
- Gabrielle decides that the rhino horn must be a phallic symbol. Michelle doesn't understand why the women would also turn into rhinos if this is the case.
- Michelle finally comes up with an ingenious solution: the rhinos must be there for comedic purposes
- The girls are so pleased with themselves that they squeal with frightening laughter.
- Kundera goes on about the nature of laughter. He quotes a long passage from Annie Leclerc's Parole de femme about laughter. It's pretty, well, laughable. And Kundera intends it to be.
- Laughter, Leclerc says, is sensual—it's part of living life deeply. If you've heard of laughter yoga, you know what this is about. You don't have to be happy—you just fake it till you make it.
- Kundera sees Leclerc's ideas as an opposition to male sexuality (violent and fleeting) and an ode to the feminine (prolonged sensual pleasure, gentle).
- Leclerc sees all aspects of human existence—even the icky bits, like pooping—as sensual experiences that should give pleasure.
- Laughter is the height of pleasure, and a person doesn't really need a reason to laugh. You just have to feel joyful at being. Kundera says you only need to be without memory or desire.
- It's a great philosophy, maybe, but Kundera is aware that commerce has co-opted this philosophy of joy and turned it into a cliché. The real thing is all about people who are serious about their joie de vivre.
- Now, we turn back to Michelle and Gabrielle, who are engaging in some serious laughter as they gather supplies for their report on Rhinoceros.
- The girls are totally certain that Madame Raphael will love their work.
- Kundera tells a story about his own life after the Russian occupation of Bohemia in 1968. He's lost his job, and no one in his right mind will have anything to do with him—except for a young woman called R., who is willing to risk the wrath of the secret police to help a dissident like Kundera.
- R. works as an editor at a magazine for young people and offers Kundera the opportunity to write horoscopes in an astrology column. The author will remain anonymous, of course.
- R. will tell her bosses that the author is a nuclear physicist who dabbled in astrology but was too ashamed to attach his name to his work for fear of ridicule by his colleagues.
- Kundera doesn't get much pay, but things go so well that the editor-in-chief wants to pay him lots of money to write a horoscope specifically for him. But since that's not a very good Marxist thing to do, the chief wants to keep all of this on the DL.
- Kundera gets a good price for his work.
- R. tells Kundera about her boss's failings, and with that, he writes the horoscope. He words it in such a way that the chief sees doom in his future if he doesn't change his ways.
- R. reports that her boss has changed for the better after reading his horoscope and seems sad that his horoscope has essentially doomed him.
- Kundera challenges what we think we know about angels and Satan. He doesn't believe that angels are warriors for Good; he thinks that they are really around to protect "divine creation."
- The devil is around just to deny the meaning of divine creation. Kundera says that the world depends on a balance between the powers of the angels and the powers of the devil.
- Laughter belongs to the devil because laughter happens when the meaning of things is subverted.
- Kundera reaches way back to tell the story of the first time an angel heard the devil laughing. He didn't know what to make of it, but he could see that it was contagious.
- Since the angel understood that the laughter was somehow sacrilegious, he tried to stop it by mimicking it in a mocking way.
- Kundera says that the angel's laughter sounded a bit like Michelle and Gabrielle's laughter.
- So, while the devil meant to mock the absurdity of order, the angel's laughter rejoiced over how awesome the divine order of the universe really is.
- The devil seems to win this one, though, because he laughs even harder at the absurdity of a laughing angel.
- But since the different kinds of laughter are so similar, we have a hard time figuring out whether laughter itself is diabolical or divine. It's like a cosmic joke on humanity.
- Kundera describes a photograph in which a group of young protesters dance in a ring while armed soldiers look on. The circle in which they are dancing becomes like a magic ring that binds them together in their innocence.
- So, we have the police on one side (falsely united, predatory) and the protesters on the other (playing, dancing, holding hands in true unity).
- Kundera says that dancing in a ring is ancient magic.
- Madame Raphael, who is looking at this picture, obviously thinks so. She dreams of dancing in a ring, being accepted by a group of people—any group, really—to be one with.
- Madame has tried to be one with lots of groups of people, but she's most interested in bonding with her students in this way.
- Gabrielle and Michelle are reading Rhinoceros out loud in their room, debating about Ionesco's theory about how many paws on a cat could be real.
- Neither of the girls can understand it, so they decide Ionesco's going for comedy. It's just meant to be funny—or maybe "absurd," if they're using their vocab.
- The girls laugh at their own cleverness and at Ionesco's general weirdness. And Madame Raphael, who is wandering through the town, seems to hear their laughter.
- It seems to Madame Raphael that somewhere nearby, people are laughing, creating their own magic ring dance—yet another one to which she hasn't been invited.
- Kundera shares his own ring dance experience, way back in 1948 when the Communists first took over in his country.
- Kundera joined in the dancing of the other Communist students whenever there was a reason to celebrate, like anniversaries or the hangings of dissenters.
- But Kundera isn't part of that dance for long since he decides to speak out against the Communists. He's kicked out of the party.
- Kundera is saddened by this turn of events because he realizes that once you're out of a circle, there's no getting back into it. It closes right up, and there are no breaks to let you back in.
- Kundera describes being cut loose from the magic circle as a free fall, a feeling like waiting to be smashed to death at the end of it all. Meanwhile, he'd love to be back in the circle because that's human nature.
- While Kundera is on the outs, he witnesses something amazing. It's the day after Milada Horakova and Zavis Kalandra were hanged, and there's dancing in the streets.
- Kundera wanders through the dancing. He tells us that Kalandra had been friends with André Breton and Paul Éluard, but Éluard refused to write in Kalandra's defense.
- Éluard is wrapped up in his theoretical understanding of Communism, thinking it is all about brotherhood and happiness, sunshine and buttercups. He doesn't understand the cold, hard reality of life in Czechoslovakia.
- Kundera realizes that he's not part of the circle dancing. He's really more closely related to the gallows—and that's just depressing.
- Kundera sees Éluard dancing in front of him, reciting poetry. And finally, in their ecstasy, Éluard and his fellow dancers stomp hard on the ground and lift off into the sky.
- The flying dancers occupy the same sky as the smoke from the crematorium incinerating Kalandra and Horakova, but Éluard and his followers are oblivious.
- Yet Kundera doesn't resent these people. He wishes he could be one with them, but he realizes that he's falling while they rise.
- Here's one way to come down from the euphoria of the great Communist ring dance: the Russian crackdown that saw tens of thousands denounced as enemies of the state.
- Kundera is one of these enemies of the state, and he's writing that astrology column anonymously to keep from starving to death.
- Kundera gets a letter from R. saying that they've been discovered. He has to meet her secretly at a friend's apartment to discuss what to do.
- When Kundera gets to the apartment and rings the bell, nobody answers. After wandering around a bit, he returns and tries again. He hears the sound of a toilet flushing inside and understands.
- R. is there waiting for him, but her nervous stomach keeps her running to the bathroom—and so she's unable to open the door for him.
- When Kundera finally meets R., she explains that she's been interrogated by the secret police. She dodges them for the most part, but they already know.
- The secret police ask R. if she knows Kundera. They tell her to stop lying about the nuclear physicist and the astrology column.
- Confident that she hasn't violated any law, R. tells the policemen the truth. They tell her that she's not supposed to work with an enemy of the state.
- R. has to sign a statement, and then she's set free. But her editor-in-chief fires her two days later. And now, she can't get a job anywhere, not even at places that had offered her one before.
- Kundera assures R. that they can't know about the tidy sum he's gotten from the editor-in-chief for casting his horoscope. (The chief would never let that leak out.)
- R. laughs at this statement, and Kundera is pleased. She is the only one in that time who could properly laugh at the irony of the situation since they have to be so secretive about it.
- R. and Kundera work out a strategy for answering the secret police at future interrogations, but R. can't control her urge to go to the bathroom—and she's embarrassed by it.
- Michelle and Gabrielle finally get to give their presentation on Rhinoceros. They're standing in front of the class with homemade paper rhinoceros horns over their noses. They laugh.
- Madame Raphael is pleased and laughs that scary laugh with them. Their classmates are kind of embarrassed for them.
- But there's one student who feels differently. Her name is Sarah, and Kundera tells us that she's Jewish.
- Sarah had asked to borrow the girls' notes one day, and they refused. Since then, she's been waiting for revenge.
- While the girls read their analysis of the play, Sarah walks up and gives Michelle a great kick in the butt—and then does the same to Gabrielle.
- The girls start to cry. Madame Raphael thinks it's part of the presentation. She begins to laugh, and Michelle and Gabrielle think that she's laughing at them. The tears fall faster.
- But Madame thinks that the girls' convulsions are a dance—and she's so ready to be part of a dance. While she spazzes with laughter, she gets up and grabs the girls by their hands.
- All are in tears (from laughter, from sadness), but Madame Raphael begins to dance. The three turn in a ring on the floor, and the girls go from crying to laughing.
- The rest of the class is kind of horrified, but it doesn't matter to the three dancers. They're totally into the pleasure of their little dance.
- Soon, the dancers are floating above the ground. The ceiling opens to let them float up into the sky. Remember, the girls still have their rhino horns on.
- Madame Raphael, Michelle, and Gabrielle disappear into the heavens, three archangels laughing their heads off.
- It's back to Kundera and R. in the borrowed apartment. Kundera realizes that he can't be around people without hurting them. He realizes that it's time to leave his country.
- Kundera reflects on his "relationship" with R. Up until now, he's had no sexual thoughts of her whatsoever; he's only considered her intelligence and professionalism. Honest.
- But now, as R. is being tormented and laid bare by the secret police, Kundera is aroused in the most bizarre way. In fact, he wants to rape R. We can't make this stuff up.
- It all has something to do with her hidden self: behind her intellect, her position, and her polished clothing, there's a woman with lots of feelings. All the feels.
- Kundera thinks that the only way to get at the essence of R. is to take that essence by violence. Um.
- Yeah, anyway, the more R. seems to be suffering, the more Kundera wants to rape her. Yet there's a part of him that realizes this is a no-go (thankfully) because it's absurd and wrong.
- Kundera leaves but can't shake that desire to rape R. for a while. He understands that it's incomprehensible—but he's going to try to explain it to himself, anyway.
- Kundera feels that perhaps his desire to rape R. has to do with wanting to catch her as she falls from grace.
- Kundera feels that he's falling farther, too—away from that splendid ring dance of his country, to a place where angel laughter will torment him.
- Kundera feels like he's kin to Sarah, the girl who tried to kick at the absurdity of Michelle and Gabrielle but got one-upped in the end.