All seven parts of Kundera’s novel defy our conventional notions about the form of the novel, as they are held together polyphonically by two dominant themes, “laughter†and “forgetting,†returning to them in umpteen variations. Eroticism, though liberally spattered, is not a dominant theme of this novel, but, as Kundera explained to Philip Roth,“I have the feeling that a scene of physical love generates an extremely sharp light which suddenly reveals the essence of characters and sums up their life situation†(p.236).
So what we have in Ismat-Faroshi and Laughter and Forgetting are experiences of two different women: one a prostitute, the other a married but widowed woman. What is common between the two experiences is the subjects’ total state of apathy during lovemaking. Even as they go through the motions—because the livelihood of one depends on it, while the other sees no other way to get hold of her diaries so redolent with the memory of her dead husband—each denies herself any pleasure from the act by subtly turning off her sense of touch, her ability to feel and reciprocate, in what one might describe as a self-induced semi-comatose state. Instead, each subverts the whole meaning of the act, one by counting she-goats, the other by going through all those many vacations taken with a husband who is no more.
In short, neither heart nor soul is involved in the act being performed on their bodies. On his first diplomatic assignment in Rangoon (Burma), Pablo Neruda, according to the reconstructed fictionalized biography of the poet by Roberto Ampuero, [6] used to round up a bunch of whores for something like an orgy. The whores went wild with sexual pleasure inside the undulating mosquito net, but the poet was never sure about their response and found it terribly frustrating. “’It sounds exciting’, the poet said, but in truth it’s not so much in the end. I only entered their bodies, never their souls. Understand? I always succumbed like an exhausted castaway before the unconquerable walls of those graceful, mysterious women†(p.51). In other words, the soul was missing, with the noticeable difference that while the Burmese whores seemed to enjoy what they were doing, Manto’s vashiya and Kundera’s Tamina did not.
Paradoxically, but no less poignantly, it is “love†that has determined their identical response of apathy, their sensual paralysis. For one it is a love longed-for, shimmering somewhere in some hopefully not-too-distant future when the right man will come her way; for the other, it is a love which circumstances have chosen to snatch away from her. It is not as though the ability to love, and to enjoy lovemaking with a man she loves,never existed. Tamina knows that the demands of her flesh will make it impossible to go on without a mate, whom she may grow to love some day. The vashiya also knows that she will find a man with whom what she now does for a living will assume a different meaning, an utterly satisfying flavor.
I see Manto in the court asking the judge in all his disarming innocence and perplexity: “Your Honor, where is there any obscenity in all this?â€
