JACQUES AND HIS MASTER
Of course you can argue that the author’s dissident status makes everything he writes ipso facto political. Kundera concedes as much in the introduction to the play, where he explains how it came to be. Banned from publishing after the Soviet invasion, Kundera says he was approached by a director who “proposed that I write a stage adaptation, under his name, of Dostoyevski’s The Idiot.” Kundera refused, not simply because Dostoyevski was Russian, but because Dostoyevski’s writing reflects Russian irrationality: “a universe where everything turns to feeling; in other words, where feelings are promoted to the rank of value and of truth.”
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These stories are always being interrupted by other stories, arguments, theological disquisitions, and even alternate endings. I read somewhere that Diderot was inspired by Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, who said, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.” Kundera shares Sterne’s enthusiasm, too: Jacques and His Master never goes in a straight line when it can deviate somehow. Indeed, deviation becomes the point of the exercise, insofar as Jacques and the master realize that they themselves are fictional characters–stories telling stories–and try to come to grips with that knowledge. It’s all very modernist. Very existential. Very energetically, bracingly post-Renaissance. Dostoyevski would have been revolted.
