The Feminist Book Club 2/2

14.11.2024

Milan Kundera: Šala (Žert, 1967)

This is the author's first novel, published in 1967, which received a wide and even canonical reception, but also many critical feminist readings. With this novel, we have touched on important questions about the coding of male and female characters in a political novel and the relationship of the love story to other plot lines.

While reading The Joke, we also recalled Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and the difference between two kinds of laughter, the primal one that belongs to the devil and the joy that belongs to the angel, and we wondered what kind of laughter Ludvik's fateful joke elicits. We subjected this canonical political novel to a thorough feminist critique, as many of its readings have overlooked the political implications of the relationship between the novel's male and female characters. We have analyzed Ludvik's relationship with the women and the narrative strategy in which one of them, Helena, assumes the role of the narrator. We have also linked the question of the relationship between the private and the public to the problem of gender relations as one of the critical points of the critique of totalitarianism that characterizes Kundera's work.