The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Part VII Summary

The Border

• We have another set of characters here: Jan (guy) and Edwige (girl).
• Jan has a problem. Whenever he makes love with Edwige, he can't read her face. It's a blank.
• And though Edwige is normally a chatty Cathy, once her clothes come off, she's totally silent. Jan can't ask Edwige what she's thinking—and he doesn't know what to do about it.
• Jan thinks that talking dirty to Edwige might elicit a response. Or perhaps he could just ask her what she likes.
• But Edwige is very obliging and likes everything.
• Jan thinks of bodies making love as an unreeling of an old-school film. The emotions of this sexual drama, to his way of thinking, should be projected on the lady's face.
• But with Edwige, the film canisters are empty, and the drama never shows.
• Jan decides he just has to stop having sex with Edwige: he's gonna friend zone her. But he realizes that this is easier said than done.
• Making love with Edwige is almost like an involuntary action for Jan.
• Kundera introduces the blackbird to us. He thinks about how it became a city bird somewhere around the 19th century. (That's during the Industrial Revolution. Coincidence? We think not.)
• Kundera says that this change (or invasion) is much more important than any human-on-human hostility. When the relationships in nature change, it's far more serious.
• It's as though the blackbirds betrayed their own nature to hang out with the humans. They crossed a line.
• Most of us wouldn't think twice about the blackbird migration because we're too focused on other events in history that we are told are more important. We're just lemmings like that.
• Anyway, back to Jan. We get a little more backstory there: he's 45, his fling with Edwige was out of the ordinary for him, and he is going to the United States to work.
• Also, Jan's current favorite read is Daphnis and Chloe, a second-century boy-meets-girl novel.
• Daphnis and Chloe are super young, right on the edge of adolescence. They don't really know anything of sexual desire or the realities of sex. Hugging is still the bestest.
• And this innocence is the thing that draws Jan to the work.
• Kundera introduces a young and beautiful actress named Hanna. She is sitting in her chair, chatting away to Jan, tracing a circle with her thumb on the table next to her.
• Kundera thinks of this as a magic circle that she's drawing around herself, to focus all attention on her.
• Hanna's going through a hard time. She's had a breakdown because her son (living with her ex) has run away. There's been no word from or about him.
• Hanna mentions to Jan that she's met a friend of his called Passer. Passer has cancer, but he doesn't seem to know or acknowledge it.
• Passer has also had to have a serious operation that has left him unable to have sex again. Hanna met him after he had recovered and was visiting mutual friends, the Clevises.
• Hanna, like everyone else, loves Passer. She went out mushroom hunting with him at the Clevises' house. Everyone was amazed at his ability even to walk after such an illness.
• On to the Clevises. We first meet them as they're watching a TV debate about whether or not people should be allowed to continue to sunbathe topless on the beaches of Europe.
• The debate panel includes a psychoanalyst, a Marxist, and a Christian. We know it sounds like the start of a joke, but it's not.
• As you can imagine, each of the panelists gives a pretty stereotypical answer that conforms to their ideologies.
• The common argument? Tops should be worn to preserve the innocence of children.
• However, some people believe that parents should walk around naked to get their kids used to it.
• The Clevises (mom, dad, and 14-year-old daughter) are progressives and therefore hate tops at beaches. Jan visits them just at the moment that they are debating among themselves.
• Kundera observes that the Clevises' brand of progressive thinking is peculiar. They will only adopt progressive ideas that both feel nonconformist and have a chance of becoming popular. They don't go in for excessively liberal ideas; they only want the "best progressive ideas."
• Papa Clevis wants to include Jan in the debate and says that all breasts should be naked as long as they are beautiful. He says this because he thinks that Jan is a womanizer—and that this will make him comfortable.
• But the Clevis daughter attacks: why is it okay for ugly, fat men to show off their bellies if women can't bare whatever kinds of breasts they have?
• Mama Clevis is super proud of her girl. And so is Papa, even though he said the offensive thing to begin with.
• The daughter continues her attack. She says that men should just back off the debate since women don't bare their breasts for men's pleasure.
• This makes everyone a little uncomfortable. After all, the daughter is only 14. Should she really be talking about women as sex objects? Should she even be aware of these issues?
• Papa Clevis changes the subject to talk about Passer. Everybody admires his tenacity in the face of illness and disability.
• Papa Clevis tells the story of Hanna taking Passer mushroom hunting. Passer returned happy but near death's door with fatigue. He had to go to the hospital.
• Papa Clevis tells Jan that Passer is likely not long for this world and that he should go visit him if he wants to say goodbye.
• Back to Daphnis and Chloe. Jan observes that Daphnis is a prepubescent dude who's all good with sexual arousal (without sexual climax).
• Jan remembers a chick he hooked up with a year ago. She was the opposite—and to top things off, she was super demanding in bed—and could never be satisfied.
• For some reason, this woman reminds Jan of someone called Hertz, who was an opera director in Central Europe.
• Hertz was a bit odd in his technique with his female singers: he made them strip straight down to their birthday suits, and then he'd place a pencil somewhere in their bodies—hey, you'll have to read it to find out where—to "help them with their posture."
• Sure, Hertz.
• Of course, Hertz's unorthodox methods got him in trouble, and he was cast out of the opera company.
• But the scandal did make Jan curious about opera. He would go and imagine the singers naked. Jan was fascinated by the fact that he was aroused because Hertz was aroused. Like secondary arousal. Hmm.
• Kundera introduces us to more of Jan's "interesting" friends. This time, it's Barbara, a woman who holds orgies at her house. Barbara demands that Jan attend one of these, and soon.
• Since Jan is preparing to leave for the United States, he thinks, "Why the heck not?" He knows he won't be coming back and doesn't really have to worry about his reputation.
• And besides, there will be naked people there.
• All of this gets Jan to thinking about the concept of crossing borders. Sure, there's the physical border that he's about to cross. But there's also another kind of border—although Jan can't name it.
• Jan thinks about yet another woman that he loved (his favorite, actually), who seemed to have very little will to live, even though she loved her life.
• Kundera says that this is a kind of borderline: between wanting to live and having a life of purpose and meaning, and just not. And as we live our lives, that border is way closer than we think it is.
• Kundera has a theory about men's love lives and their sexual reputations. There are two lists of women ("erotic biographies"): 1) actual notches in bedposts and 2) the ones who got away.
• There are also the women who reciprocate love or lust, but you can't hook up with them because they are "on the other side of border."
• Jan had this experience once with a woman he met on a train. She was younger than he was, and he'd met her somewhere before.
• Being the practiced womanizer that he was, Jan immediately tried to turn on the charm. But for some reason, he was off key. He just couldn't make the chemistry happen.
• No matter how hard he tried—and Jan pulls his best moves—he just knows he's not impressing this woman. In fact, he feels her gaze much more strongly influencing him.
• And when Jan realizes this, he loses his nerve. He sees himself the way the woman sees him, and it's not flattering.
• Despite all this, the young woman invites him to her home. But Jan refuses. Kundera says it's because she was not on the same side of the border as Jan.
• We're getting into "gazes" in this chapter. Kundera says we've heard an awful lot about the "male gaze": that assessing look from a man that turns a woman into an object of sexual desire.
• But that sword cuts both ways, at least according to Kundera. If the woman becomes an object, then she gazes on the man with the eyes of a thing. And that's cold.
• What kind of thing does she become? A hammer. Kundera chooses a hammer.
• As such, the hammer then turns the power relationship between itself and the carpenter on its head. Yeah, it's a weird metaphor. Hang in there.
• Jan finds himself on the losing side of this relationship more and more as he gets older. But he can't tell if it's because he's seeing women differently or if it's because women are acting to subvert the whole gaze-game thing.
• Nowhere is this role reversal as obvious as it is in Barbara's house. Jan listens to his friend Pascal complain about this situation.
• The last time Pascal visited Barbara, the girls undressed in front of him, on Barbara's command. Pascal was put off. The girls weren't doing this because they were aroused. To them, he was an object.
• Barbara told Pascal that he had to make love to these two women, and if he couldn't, um, get ready to do so in less than a minute, he would have to leave.
• Pascal couldn't take the pressure and quickly found himself outside on the sidewalk. Hammer, meet carpenter.
• But Jan doesn't really sympathize with Pascal, who has done worse things to women. He feels that Pascal has gotten his comeuppance.
• Jan tells Edwige about this whole situation, and then he insists that when women behave like men, it's far worse. It's a different kind of sexual violence.
• Men rape, says Jan, and women castrate. Somehow, rape is not such a bad thing to Jan. It's part of a fantasy, something erotic, in his opinion. (What?!)
• Edwige is not having of this, of course. She tells Jan that if all this is true, it's time to invent a new kind of sexuality.
• But Jan stupidly doesn't give up. He tells Edwige that he and his friends compared notes about what their lovers said the most during sexual encounters.
• Can you guess what it was? Jan says it was the word "no." And his theory is that a woman's "no" isn't really "no": it's just something that turns the sex act into a mini-rape. How enticing.
• Edwige isn't pleased with this theory. Yet Jan even more stupidly keeps trying to defend this exaltation of rape as part of the natural order of things.
• Jan worries that changing this concept (i.e., eroticism based on a rape fantasy) will make men impotent. Edwige snorts at him. He's truly an idiot.
• Edwige tells Jan—to his surprise—that sex is just not that important in the grand scheme of things. It's just a sign of friendship.
• So that night, Jan and Edwige do not make love. And somehow, Jan is more than okay with that.
• Jan remembers an affair he once had with a married woman. Their routine was always the same. Until, one day, it wasn't.
• When they were undressing, the woman smiled at Jan. And he could hardly keep himself from smiling back. He took that smile as an indication of how ridiculous the whole situation was. He felt that if they couldn't keep from laughing, they would ruin the possibility of future lovemaking completely.
• And this was another border: Jan and this woman were just steps away from crossing that line into invalidating their trysts by laughing at themselves.
• But Jan saves the day by taking action and moving things along, keeping the devil called laughter at bay.
• Jan finally goes to visit Passer, who is now at death's door. Still, his friend is full of spirit and energy.
• Though things look grim, the doctors still hold out hope for Passer—if only he can make it through the next couple of weeks.
• Passer talks to Jan about Hanna, for whom he's fallen head over heels, despite the fact that he is so close to death.
• Jan tries to comfort his friend by telling him that we're all really close to death, all the time. He tries to make the future (which Passer has no part in) look not so bright or interesting.
• But Passer won't have any part in that. In fact, he won't play into any of Jan's attempts to cheer him up with stupid jokes or wild proclamations about sex being turned into something silly.
• Passer just smiles at Jan with the tolerance of a good friend.
• Jan can't shake that image of the border. He tries to understand it better, and he believes it's because his time is winding down.
• Jan defines his allotted time as "the maximum dose of repetitions." Jan recalls a comedian who used repetition of everyday things to make his audience laugh.
• Jan believes that laughter accompanies border crossings, but he doesn't know what happens after the laughter fades.
• Kundera disagrees with Jan's idea that the border is something that crosses our lives at one point. He thinks instead that the border is always nearby. Whatever that border is, anyway.
• Kundera points to Jan's beloved girlfriend who talked about having a very thin will to live. It doesn't take much to push a human beyond that point.
• Jan thinks about the literal border, the one that separates his country from the free world. He and other expats cross that border and find no meaning when they look back over it.
• Kundera disagrees that the metaphysical border has little to do with repetitions. Repetitions make that border visible for us, but it doesn't exist because of them.
• Kundera tells us about an adolescent experience Jan had: dreaming of an alien creature that had a multitude of erogenous zones. Do we sense a theme here?
• The point of this dream? It shows that Jan—virgin Jan—was already underwhelmed by the female body. He knew that arousal had its limitations.
• And boom, right then, the border appears for Jan. And what is on the other side of it? The female body as object, a thing with no meaning at all.
• Spoiler alert: Passer dies. We now see his funeral, with all the unsavory characters we've met so far in this section.
• Everything goes well with the graveside ceremony until the end, when a belated speaker gets up to eulogize his dead friend.
• The gravediggers, however, are already lowering the coffin into the grave. They're not totally sure what to do at this point.
• This puts the speaker at a disadvantage. He'd written his entire speech as a direct address to Passer, who is now sitting at the bottom of the newly dug grave.
• It's an awkward situation. And it's made worse by gusts of wind that pick up Papa Clevis' hat and deposit it right at the edge of the grave.
• This is cringeworthy. What is Papa Clevis to do? He doesn't want to interrupt the speaker, who has already had his fair share of trouble to get through the speech.
• But here's the thing: that hat is totally going into that grave. And everyone there knows it and feels the tension. Nobody can focus on anything but that hat.
• So Papa Clevis tries to retrieve the hat, but the wind will have none of it. Long story short: the hat goes into the grave.
• Papa Clevis acts like it never happened, but the mourners can't pretend. And when the speaker goes to sprinkle dirt on top of Passer's coffin, all that nervousness lets out as laughter.
• It's because the mourners know that the speaker sees a hat sitting on top of Passer's coffin, as though the coffin dressed up just for the occasion.
• So the mourners have to stifle that laughter because, seriously, how inappropriate is that?
• It's a tough job, even for the widow and her family.
• And we head back to Barbara's house for some more sexual perversion. This time, there's a young girl Barbara is bullying into stripping in front of 20 or so people.
• And then things really start heating up. Barbara goes around the room breaking up couples who might be interested in doing only conventional things. This includes Jan.
• Jan winds up in conversation with a man who seems to be on his wavelength about the bizarre proceedings.
• The men comment on how the whole orgy is like an orchestrated dance. Barbara, of course, is the choreographer.
• And Barbara is exacting. She roots out a young couple and separates them, making them pair off with other people.
• Pretty soon, Barbara turns her attention to Jan and his friend. She sends Jan off with the girl who began the whole thing with her striptease, and she, uh, takes care of the friend herself.
• Jan can't help but notice that the two women are doing the same things with their partners—and he feels like an object rather than a person.
• When he looks over at his friend, Jan realizes that he's laughing. And it's all over for Jan from that point on. He can't stop laughing. Neither can his friend.
• Barbara is furious. She accuses the men of doing the same thing to her that happened at Passer's funeral. This is serious business.
• But Jan can't control himself. He's crying with laughter. Barbara kicks him out.
• Jan and Edwige take a final trip to the seaside, right before Jan leaves for the United States. They each have their own rooms.
• Jan and Edwige go to the beach together. It's a nude beach—a tiny detail that Jan doesn't seem to have known beforehand. Edwige is totally comfortable with this; Jan isn't.
• As Jan and Edwige walk around the beach, Kundera intrudes to comment on the amazing variety of boobs that they see. Jan sees the whole display as totally meaningless.
• Jan feels the border creeping up on him again. Probably because he can't keep the thought of naked Jews being sent to the gas chambers out of his head. Eek.
• Jan can't understand why that thought hit him just then, except that perhaps nakedness is the "uniform" of people on the other side of the border.
• Jan tries to communicate his discomfort to Edwige, but she misunderstands him. She only comments that all naked bodies are beautiful.
• The beach itself has a kind of isolated, pastoral quality about it. (There's a goat bleating somewhere out there.) Jan thinks of Daphnis' and Chloe's naked bodies.
• Daphnis' innocent arousal makes Jan want to go back to younger days, when he had only a vague notion of what it meant to be a sexual being.
• Jan wants desire without concern for fulfillment—so he says Daphnis' name out loud. Edwige is down with this because she thinks Jan is calling out to the pre-Christian era. She has no idea.
• But it doesn't even matter that Edwige and Jan operate on totally different wavelengths. Jan just goes with the flow, pretending to desire a purer mankind.
• Edwige gets carried away with the idea and declares that this island, where they are standing, must be Daphnis' Island. Jan thinks their hotel is on the other side of the border.
• Edwige is excited by this idea and shares it with some other naked people on the beach. They think that Jan is fantastically imaginative, and they develop their own theories about the end of civilization as we know it—a kind of liberation from the weight of tradition.
• But in the end, Kundera focuses on these people's naked bodies, which now seem absurd and sad.