The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Among those generous donors was a young woman named R. (Everything has since been laid bare, so in this
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And so, under an assumed name, I wrote a fine long article on astrology, then each month a brief and rather silly piece on each of the signs, with my own drawing of Taurus, Aries, Virgo, Pisces. The pay was pathetic and the task itself neither amusing nor remarkable. The only amusing thing about it all was my existence, the existence of a man erased from history, from literary histories, and from the telephone book, of a dead man now returned to life in an amazing reincarnation to preach the great truth of astrology to hundreds of thousands of young people in a socialist country.
One day, R. informed me that the editor in chief had been won over by the astrologer and wanted his horoscope cast. I was thrilled. This editor in chief, who had been put in charge of the magazine by the Russians, had spent half his life studying Marxism-Leninism in Prague and in Moscow!
"He was a bit ashamed to a|sk for this," R. told me with a smile. "He doesn't want it spread around that he believes in such medieval superstitions. But he's terribly tempted."
"That's great," I said with satisfaction. I knew the editor in chief. Besides being R.'s boss, he was a member of the party's supreme committee in charge of cadre and as such had ruined the lives of quite a few of my friends.
"He wants to remain totally anonymous. I have to give you his date of birth, but you must never know that it's his."
That amused me still more: "All the better!"
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"He'll give you a hundred crowns for casting his horoscope."
"A hundred crowns? That's what he thinks, that tightwad."
He ended up sending me a thousand crowns. I filled ten pages depicting his character and describing his past (about which I was well enough informed) and future. I labored at it for a whole week, often consulting with R. With a horoscope we can indeed wonderfully influence, even direct, people's behavior. We can advise them to do certain things and warn them against doing others, and induce them into humility by acquainting them with the disasters in their future.
The next time I saw R., a while later, we had a good laugh. She claimed the editor in chief had improved since reading his horoscope. He shouted less. He had begun to guard against the harshness the horoscope warned him about, was setting great store by the bit of kindness he was capable of, and in his often vacant gaze you could recognize the sadness of a man who realizes that the stars merely promise him suffering.
4 (On Two Kinds of Laughter)
To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy
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of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that.
Angels are partisans not of Good but of divine creation. The devil, on the other hand, is the one who refuses to grant any rational meaning to that divinely created world.
Dominion over the world, as we know, is divided between angels and devils. The good of the world, however, implies not that the angels have the advantage over the devils (as I believed when I was a child) but that the powers of the two sides are nearly in equilibrium. If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels' power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils' reign), we could not live either.
Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil's domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).
The first time an angel heard the devil's laughter, he was dumbfounded. That happened at a feast in a crowded room, where the devil's laughter, which is terribly contagious, spread from one person to another.
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The angel clearly understood that such laughter was directed against God and against the dignity of his works. He knew that he must react swiftly somehow, but felt weak and defenseless. Unable to come up with anything of his own, he aped his adversary. Opening his mouth, he emitted broken, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of his vocal range (a bit like the sound made on the street of a seaside town by Michelle and Gabrielle), but giving them an opposite meaning: whereas the devil's laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was.
Thus the angel and the devil faced each other and, mouths wide open, emitted nearly the same sounds, hut each one's noise expressed the absolute opposite of the other's. And seeing the angel laugh, the devil laughed all the more, all the harder, and all the more blatantly, because the laughing angel was infinitely comical.
Laughable laughter is disastrous. Even so, the angels have gained something from it. They have tricked us with a semantic imposture. Their imitation of laughter and (the devil's) original laughter are both called by the same name. Nowadays we don't even realize that the same external display serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.
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from the ancient depths of our memories. Madame Raphael, the teacher, clipped that photo from the magazine and gazed at it dreamily. She too wished to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a circle of men and women with whom she could hold hands in a ring dance, at first in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then in the Trotskyist Party, then in a Trotskyist splinter party, then in the movement against abortion (a child has a right to life!), then in the movement to legalize abortion (a woman has a right to her body!), then she looked for it in Marxists, in psychoanalysts, in structuralists, looked for it in Lenin, in Zen Buddhism, in Mao Tse-tung, among the followers of yoga, in the school of the nouveau roman, and finally she wishes at least to be in perfect harmony with her students, to be at one with them, meaning that she always compels them to think and say the same things she does, to merge with her into a single body and a single soul in the same circle and the same dance.
Her students Gabrielle and Michelle are now bent over the Ionesco play in their room at the residence hall. Michelle is reading from it aloud:
"'Logician, to the old gentleman: Get a sheet of paper and work it out. If you take two paws from two cats, how many paws does each cat have left?
"'Old gentleman, to the logician: There are several possible solutions. One cat might have four paws, the other one, two. There might be one cat with five paws and the other cat with one paw. By taking two of the
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5
A magazine photograph: a row of men in uniform, bearing rifles and in helmets with protective plastic visors, watch a group of young people in jeans and T-shirts, hand in hand in a ring, dance in front of them.
It is clearly an interlude before a clash with police guarding a nuclear power plant, a military training camp, the offices of a political party, or the windows of an embassy. The young people have taken advantage of a lull to form a circle and, to a simple, well-known tune, take two steps in place, one step forward, raise first the left leg and then the right.
I think I understand them: they have the impression that the circle they are describing on the ground is a magical circle uniting them like a ring. And their chests swell with an intense feeling of innocence: they are united not by marching, like soldiers or fascist formations, but by dancing, like children. What they are trying to spit in the cop
s' faces is their innocence.
That is how the photographer saw them, and he brought out an eloquent contrast: on one side, the police in the false unity (imposed, commanded) of the row, on the other, the young people in the true unity (sincere and natural) of the circle; on this side, the police in the sullen posture of lying in wait, and on that one, those who are delighting in play.
Dancing in a ring is magic; a ring dance speaks to us
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eight paws from the two cats we might have one cat with six paws. We might have one cat with no paws at all."
Michelle interrupts her own reading: "I don't get how you could take paws from a cat. Could he—would he—cut them off?"
"Michelle!" Gabrielle cries out.
"And I don't get how a cat can have six paws."
"Michelle!" Gabrielle again cries out.
"What?" asks Michelle.
"Did you forget? You're the one who said it!"
"What?" asks Michelle again.
"This dialogue is certainly intended to create a comic effect!"
"You're right," says Michelle, looking elatedly at Gabrielle. The two girls look inro each other's eyes, their lips quiver with something like pride, and finally their mouths let out some short, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of their vocal range. Then the same sounds again and again. "A forced laugh. A laughable laugh. A laugh so laughable they can do nothing but laugh. Then comes real laughter. Bursts of repeated, rushing, unbridled laughter, explosions of magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad. They laugh their laughter until the infinity of their laughter. ... 0 laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter ..."
Meanwhile Madame Raphael was forlornly roaming the streets of that small town on the Mediterranean coast. Suddenly she raised her head as if a fragment of melody carried on the wings of a breeze were reaching her from afar, or as if a distant scent had struck her
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nostrils. She stopped and heard within her skull the shriek of a rebellious void wanting to be filled. It seemed to her that somewhere nearby a flame of great laughter was blazing, that perhaps somewhere nearby people were holding hands and dancing in a ring . . . She stood this way for a while, looking around nervously, and then the mysterious music abruptly vanished (Michelle and Gabrielle had stopped laughing; suddenly they looked wearied by the prospect of a night devoid of love), and Madame Raphael, oddly anguished and unsatisfied, made her way home through the warm streets of the small coastal town.
6
I too once danced in a ring. It was in 1948. In my country, the Communists had taken power, the Socialist and democratic Christian ministers had taken refuge abroad, and I took other Communist students by the hands or shoulders and we took two steps in place, one step forward, raised the left leg to one side and then the right to the other, and we did this nearly every month, because we always had something to celebrate, an anniversary or some other event, old injustices were redressed, new injustices were perpetrated, factories were nationalized, thousands of people went to prison, medical care was
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free, tobacconists saw their shops confiscated, aged workers vacationed for the first time in expropriated villas, and on our faces we had the smile of happiness. Then one day I said something I should not have said, was expelled from the party, and had to leave the ring dance.
That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.
It was God knows what anniversary and the streets of Prague were once again filled with young people dancing in rings. I wandered among them, I came very close to them, but I was forbidden to enter any of their rings. It was June 1950, and Milada Horakova had been hanged the day before. She had been a Socialist deputy and the Communist tribunal had accused her of plotting against the state. Zavis Kalandra, a Czech surrealist and a friend of Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, was hanged at the same time. And the dancing young Czechs, knowing that the day before, in the same city, a woman and
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a surrealist had been swinging from the end of ropes, were dancing all the more frenetically, because their dance was a demonstration of their innocence, in shining contrast to the guilty darkness of the two who were hanged, those betrayers of the people and its hopes.
Andre Breton did not believe Kalandra had betrayed the people and its hopes, and in Paris he called on Eluard (in an open letter dated June 13, 1950) to protest the insane accusation and try to save their old friend. But Eluard was busy dancing in a gigantic ring between Paris, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Sofia, and Greece, between all the socialist countries and all the world's Communist parties, and everywhere he recited his beau-tiful poems about joy and brotherhood. After reading Breton's letter, he took two steps in place, then one step forward, he shook his head, refusing to defend a betrayer of the people (in the June 19, 1950 issue of the weekly Action), and started to recite in a metallic voice:
"We shall fill innocence
With the strength that so long
We lacked
We shall no longer be alone."
I wandered through the streets of Prague, rings of laughing, dancing Czechs swirled around me, and I knew that I did not belong to them but belonged to Kalandra, who had also come loose from the circular trajectory and had fallen, fallen, to end his fall in a condemned man's coffin, but even though I did not belong to them, I nonetheless watched the dancing with envy and yearning, unable to take my eyes off
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them. And that is when I saw him, right in front of me! He had his arms around their shoulders and along with them was singing two or three simple notes and raising his left leg to one side and then his right leg to the other. Yes, it was he, Prague's darling Eluard! And suddenly the people he was dancing with fell silent, continuing to move in absolute silence while he chanted to the stamping of their feet:
"We shall flee rest we shall flee sleep,
We shall outrun dawn and spring
And we shall shape days and seasons
To the measure of our dreams." And then everyone abruptly began again to sing the three or four simple notes, speeding up the steps of their dance. They were fleeing rest and sleep, outrunning time, and filling their innocence. They were all smiling, and Eluard leaned over a girl he had his arm around:
"A man possessed by peace is always smiling." And the girl started laughing and stamping her feet harder so that she rose a few centimeters above the pavement, pulling the others up after her, and a moment later not one of them was touching the ground, they were all taking two steps in place and one step forward without touching the ground, yes, they were soaring over Wenceslaus Square, their dancing ring resembled a great wreath flying off, and I ran on the ground below and looked up to see them, as they soared farther and farther away, raising the left leg to one side and then the right to the other, and there below them was Prague with its cafes full of poets and its prisons full of
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betrayers of the people, and from the crematorium where they were incinerating a Socialist deputy and a surrealist writer the smo
ke ascended to the heavens like a good omen, and I heard Eluard's metallic voice:
"Love is at work it is tireless."
And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
7
Eighteen years after his execution, Kalandra was totally rehabilitated, but some months later Russian tanks burst into Bohemia and soon tens of thousands of people were in turn accused of betraying the people and its hopes, some of them thrown into prison and most of them driven from their jobs, and two years later (twenty years, that is, after Eluard soared away over Wenceslaus Square), one of these newly accused (I myself) was writing an astrology column in an illus-trated Czech magazine for young people. A year after I wrote my last astrological article, on Sagittarius, I was visited by a young man I did not know. Without a word, he gave me an envelope. I tore it open and read