The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Jan and Edwige are a couple. Jan is disturbed by Edwige’s silence when they have sex. Normally talkative, she becomes mute and expressionless once she removes her clothes. Her face offers no clues to her feelings. Jan considers asking her directly what she likes, and he even tries to provoke her with lurid words, but Edwige is agreeable to everything and gives nothing back. Frustrated, Jan decides to stop having sex with her, but this proves impossible for him.

The narrator then digresses to consider the blackbird—a rural bird that, in the 19th century, migrated into cities. To the narrator, this was a betrayal of nature far more significant than human conflicts. Such transformations in the natural order outweigh political quarrels, though history teaches to notice only the latter.

Jan is 45 and is preparing to leave for the United States. He is unusually entangled in this fling with Edwige. His favorite book at the moment is Daphnis and Chloe, the tale of two adolescents who know only innocent desire and are thrilled by embraces rather than sex. This ideal of innocence fascinates him. The narrator then introduces Hanna, a young actress who, while chatting with Jan, draws circles on the table as if enclosing herself in a sphere of magic. Hanna has suffered a “nervous breakdown” because her son has run away, and no word has reached her of his whereabouts. She also speaks of Jan’s friend, Passer, who is ill with cancer. Passer is unable to have sex after a major operation, yet he is admired by all for his cheerfulness.

Passer is connected to the Clevis family, who are introduced while they are watching a television debate about topless sunbathing. The panelists—including a psychoanalyst, a Marxist, and a Christian—argue in predictable ways, usually about the innocence of children. Some believe parents should simply be nude in front of their children. The Clevises themselves are progressive in outlook and disdain prudishness, but they embrace only those progressive ideas that appear both fashionable and nonconformist. When Jan visits, Papa Clevis argues that only breasts should be shown on the proviso that they are attractive, assuming Jan, a known “womanizer,” will agree. But the teenage daughter scolds him, asking why should ugly men show their bellies if women cannot bare their breasts regardless of shape. The parents beam with pride at their daughter’s spirit, even when her language seems beyond her years. Papa then shifts the subject back to Passer, praising his fortitude and urging Jan to see him before he dies. He mentions how Passer took Hanna mushroom hunting near the Clevis house.

The theme of Daphnis and Chloe returns. Their innocent arousal reminds Jan of a demanding lover he once had, whose insatiability made him think of Hertz, an eccentric opera director notorious for humiliating his singers with bizarre exercises. His tendency to “insert pencils into their rectums” was particularly notorious (278). Scandal destroyed Hertz’s career, but his obsession led Jan to opera, where he imagined singers naked, aroused not directly by them but by Hertz’s arousal as a kind of secondary desire.

Jan’s circle of friends includes Barbara, who hosts orgies. Since he is about to leave for America, he agrees to attend one as “discretion no longer matters” (281). This turns his thoughts toward the idea of borders—not only political boundaries but unseen ones in life and sexuality. He recalls a beloved girlfriend who confessed she had a weak will to live, which to him seemed like standing near a border between vitality and despair. The narrator also shares a theory of erotic biographies, divided into two lists: women one has slept with, and women who got away. There are also women who reciprocated interest but remained unreachable on the other side of the border. Jan recalls a woman on a train, who was younger and unimpressed by his charms. Her gaze reversed the power dynamic. Though she invited him home, he refused, sensing she lay “on the other side of the border” (285).

The narrator extends this to the concept of the gaze. Much has been said of the male gaze, but he says the female gaze can also objectify, turning the man into a thing. At Barbara’s orgies, Jan’s friend, Pascal, experienced this inversion, as he was forced to perform on command for undressing women and he was rejected when he failed. Jan considers this poetic justice, though he himself feels the shift in power as he ages.

Jan’s discussions with Edwige turn darker. He claims that men rape and women castrate and that women’s frequent use of the word “no” in sex is less refusal than a ritual that transforms the act into a mini-rape. Edwige rejects this and argues for inventing a new sexuality, even suggesting that sex is simply a sign of friendship. That night, they abstain. Jan surprisingly feels content. He recalls another affair nearly ruined by laughter, when a married lover smiled as they undressed, threatening to expose the absurdity of their passion. He salvaged it by pushing forward, suppressing laughter, which he saw as a border capable of destroying desire.

Jan eventually visits Passer, who is nearing death but remains spirited. Passer has fallen in love with Hanna, becoming “mad over a madly beautiful woman” (293). Jan tries to comfort him with philosophical talk about death’s nearness, but Passer dismisses such evasions. His tolerance shames Jan. The narrator reflects that the border Jan contemplates is not a single threshold to be crossed but something always near, revealed through repetition. Jan himself defines life as a maximum dose of repetitions, marked by laughter at the borderlines of experience.

Passer dies, and his funeral brings together the characters. The ceremony is disrupted when a late speaker addresses the dead man just as the gravediggers lower the coffin. A gust of wind carries Papa Clevis’s hat into the grave, and the mourners, trying to suppress their laughter, break down at the sight of “a coffin with a hat on it” (303), looking as though it dressed for the occasion.

At Barbara’s house, further orgies unfold, with young women bullied to split according to a stopwatch and couples split apart by Barbara’s choreography. Jan and a friend are paired with strangers, but they cannot stop laughing at the absurd spectacle, echoing the funeral. Barbara rages, accusing them of ruining the ritual. She expels Jan.

Before leaving for the United States, Jan and Edwige travel to the seaside. It is a nude beach, and Edwige is at ease while Jan is not. Surrounded by naked bodies, he feels the border once again, haunted by images of Jews stripped before execution during the Holocaust. To Edwige, all bodies are beautiful; to Jan, they are meaningless. He thinks of Daphnis and Chloe again, longing for a world of innocent desire before the weight of fulfillment. Edwige interprets this as nostalgia for the pre-Christian era and proclaims they are on Daphnis’s Island. Others on the beach join in, weaving theories of a new liberation. Yet as the narrator closes the scene, he sees only their absurd nakedness, drained of meaning, suspended on the far side of the border as their genitals stare “stupidly and sadly at the yellow sand” (312).