REWRITING THE SPEECH OF ALCIBIADES: PLATONIC ECHOES OF EROTIC DESIRE IN KUNDERAS SYMPOSIUM

Zina Giannopoulou

Milan Kundera is among the most prolic and versatile of contemporary Czech writers. Born in Brno in 1929, he began his literary career as a poet, but soon gained a reputation as a lm-script author, essayist, and dramatist. Between 1959 and 1969 he composed a series of seven short stories, collectively known as Laughable Loves and the rst of his works to reach American readers, which pregures his inexhaustible fascination with the ironic depiction of erotic relationships and the ineffectual efforts of individuals to outwit fate.1 The Symposium, the collections fourth story, is a ve-act ironic parody of Platos homonymous dialogue, in which the author dramatizes the nature of erotic desire. Like its philosophic antecedent, the story is primarily a drama of ideas. Talk occupies the foreground, while a single event, Elisabets questionable suicide attempt, occurs in the background and is brought forward for commentary. The conversation, which occupies three men and two women, occurs during an improvised party in a hospital staff room. Dr. Havel, a modern Don Juan, and the nurse Elisabet are both on duty, and are joined by three colleagues: the Chief Physician, a bald, aging, and happily married philanderer; the woman doctor, his attractive young mistress; and the handsome, self-absorbed intern Flajsman. Prior to Elisabets action, the characters engage in witty banter on love and death in a licentious atmosphere charged with erotic tension. The sex-starved nurse desires both Dr. Havel and Flajsman, but her sexual charms have no effect on either man, while the intern is interested in the woman doctor, who in the fourth act makes
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES , Vol. 43, No. 3, 2006.

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a pass at Dr. Havel. Halfway through, Elisabet attempts to achieve sexual provocation by performing a mock striptease but, having failed to attract the desired attention, leaves the room a scorned woman after she has unwittingly swallowed a dose of sleeping pills administered by Dr. Havel instead of the pep pill she asked for. Her unconsious, naked body is later found by Flajsman in a room reeking of exhaust fumes of gas, and the rest of the story is spent mostly in endless speculations about the nature of her act. Flajsmans own explanation of Elisabets death, as a desperate attempt, on her part, to end her feelings of unrequited love for him leads him to confess his love for the recovering nurse. No account of Elisabets attempt, however, is ever proclaimed accurate, each one offering a partial and subjective explanation of the motives behind a completely inscrutable event. In this brief overview of the story, various elements reminiscent of Platos Symposium become apparent, the most central of them being the theoretical exploration of erotic love from a multiplicity of perspectives and the admixture of myth (Dr. Havels references to the legend of Don Juan), poetry (Flajsmans sentimental views on love), and specious reasoning (the participants endless, and mostly hollow, mental exercises). While these afnities between Platos dialogue and Kunderas story have been noted, they have never been systematically examined. The literary connection with Plato has either been remarked on in passing or altogether ignored.2 In this essay I undertake to remedy this scholarly neglect by exploring the thematic and formal associations between Alcibiades speech in Platos Symposium and the most fully developed interaction in Kunderas story, that between Elisabet and Flajsman. In the rst part of the essay, I suggest that Elisabet may be shown to be comparable to Socrates, while Alcibiades shares some interesting afnities with Flajsman. These characterological commonalities, I argue, cluster mainly around two conceptual polarities, aggressive/passive eroticism and physical/spiritual beauty, and have important ethical ramications for the lives of the individuals manifesting them: they shape their understanding of self and others and color their moral choices and actions. In the second part of the essay, I explore the socio-political implications of subjectivity. While Plato uses univocality to question the truthfulness of Alcibiades account, in Kunderas hands subjectivity helps to convey an ironic stance toward reality that effectively undermines the arbitrary social and moral stability of political totalitarianism. In a conventional Athenian pederastic relationship, the younger partner is not held to experience sexual desire but is expected to submit to the advances of his older lover out of a feeling of mingled gratitude, esteem,

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and affection. The senior partner/lover has a monopoly on eros, while the junior partner/beloved is expected to feel friendship for him and to use the erotic relationto the extent that an actual intercrural contact occurredas a means of acquiring intellectual and social benets. Should the beloved display a desire to be subjected to a passive role in intercourse, he is liable to incur the censure of his fellow citizens for shamelessness and perversion, and even to risk losing his civil rights.3

I. Eroticism, Beauty, and Their Moral Ramications Kunderas story begins with a close look at Elisabets unbridled sexuality, her tenacious desire to be esh and nothing but esh (110). She is a nurse with an ugly face but a beautiful body and is somewhat advanced in years. Elisabet, having drunk more than she should, is openly irtatious with Dr. Havel, a man of an admittedly indiscriminate sexuality who, however, consistently rebuffs her. As the narrative progresses, it becomes apparent that the real object of her erotic desire is the intern Flajsman, a very handsome young man who is also indifferent to her. Cursed with an ugly face, Elisabet tries everything she can to excite her male colleagues by forcing attention to her body; the sexually experienced Dr. Havel often refers to her breasts and behind as her two most prominent erotic features. But as these are hidden under her pale-blue state uniform, their full erotic appeal can at best be inferred, surmised, or rather imagined. There is thus something inherently paradoxical, and tragic, about the nurses in-your-face-sexuality: the fact that her erotic appeal is inextricably bound to the body would naturally suggest that its force is decoded, as it were, immediately and completely; and yet, this understanding of her sexual power is decient in that it fails to be informed by the true bodily beauty that sustains it, and that lies underneath her clothes. The tension in Elisabets sexuality is best illustrated by her dance and mock striptease in the second act. Both performances are meant to direct the onlookers attention to the beauty of her body, which is now put centerstage. By interrupting the physicians theoretical expositions on love with a sexually evocative dance and striptease, in which she engages fully clothed, the nurse is transformed from a passive recipient of Dr. Havels indignant admonitions (1101) to an active provocatrice of her erotic fate. The sheer pleasure she takes in executing her sensual movements is for her an act of

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living: Look at me! I am alive, at least! Im not dying! For the time being Im still alive! Im alive! (126). At the same time, however, she is also reduced to a gazed-at object, a beautiful female body whose sexual force is measured by its ability to arouse those who behold it. Despite her earnest attempts to provoke, however, she fails to elicit the intended reaction from her audience: they all look at her either apathetically or scornfully. Her desire to have her body publicly appreciated is inevitably thwarted by the mere impossibility of its true, i.e. naked, beauty being publicly displayed. Such a display occurs later, in the private enclosure of the nurses small staff room, where Elisabets unconscious body is discovered by Flajsman after her questionable suicide attempt. But even then its beauty arrests his attention only for an instant, his own experience of shock wholly consuming him (1378). In her pursuit of sexual attention, Elisabet shares some interesting similarities with the picture of Socrates painted by Alcibiades in Platos Symposium. Like him, she is the older and active lover whose facial ugliness seems incapable of deecting the erotic gaze of those with whom she comes into contact, although it still fails to elicit from them palpable reactions of sexual interest. Her erotic power nds a ready analogue in Socrates satyr-like qualities which cause him to be crazy about boys ) and to follow them around in a perpetual ( daze ( ) (216d23).4 Moreover, Elisabet is surrounded by doctors, professionals of a socio-economic status higher than hers, just as Socrates, the shoeless philosopher who roams the streets of Athens, seeks to justify morally the life of individuals who, like his fellow symposiasts, enjoy great public success.5 Finally, her true physical beauty is hidden from public view and requires interpersonal intimacy in order to become manifest, just as Socrates beauty lies inside him and emerges only during dialectical contact with his interlocutors. Alcibiades description of Socrates as a Silenus-like gure which, once opened up, turns out to have statues of gods inside it, brings out eloquently this disparity between a publicly accessible appearance and a private, hidden essence, a visibly ugly exterior and an invisibly beautiful interior. These similarities notwithstanding, there are important differences between the two characters that should not go unnoticed. On the one hand, Elisabets exclusive concern with the body and its pleasures is evident not only in her acts of sexual provocation but also in her inability to stay sober (110, 124). On the other hand, Socrates sole preoccupation with the improvement of the soul underlies both his interest in young men and his moderate drinking. His physical sobriety, a natural concomitant of his mental lucidity, is mentioned three times in the Symposium, once by Eryximachus

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(176c35) and twice by Alcibiades (214a45, 220a15). Although the two texts foreground different aspects of the human personality, both suggest that beauty, in its physical and spiritual manifestations, is elusive and can best be appreciated in the context of a private relationship.6 When we turn our attention to Kunderas delineation of Flajsman, Elisabets primary erotic interest, we nd in it distinct echoes of the character of the Platonic Alcibiades. Both individuals are young, beautiful, vain, and accustomed to being erotically pursued. During the account of his love affair with Socrates, Alcibiades twice refers to his own irresistible physical beauty, rst to justify the anticipation of his erotic victory over Socrates (217a56) [I had a lot of condence in my looks]and then to express utter disbelief at having failed to accomplish his goal (219c45) [He spurned my beauty, of which I was so proud, members of the jury]. While Alcibiades personal knowledge of his external attractiveness derives from the exercise of his physical vision, the awareness of the poor, slavish (215e57) state of his soul emerges from the strange and utterly irresistible persuasiveness Socrates words have on him. In describing the power of those words, Alcibiades conveys the impression that their speaker compels agreement by verbally manipulating his addressee (216a45) [he makes me agree that ...]; (216a8b2) [he has made me ... feel ashamed]. Alcibiades self-knowledge then appears to be bound up with visual and aural stimuli which he receives unreectively, without actively processing their content or evaluating their worth. His uncritical reliance on the information supplied by the senses also underlies his vague understanding of his lovers inner beauty: the fact, for example, that Socrates contains inside him golden images is ascertained ) (216e7), and his knowledge of them is so once at a glimpse ( imsy as to prevent his offering a thorough account of their nature. As if to undermine the validity of Alcibiades assessment of his psychic beauty, Socrates, with his characteristic self-irony, comments as follows on the epistemological limitations of visual perception informing the young mans judgment: [still, my dear boy, you should think twice, because you could be wrong, and I may be of no use to you. The minds sight becomes sharp only when the bodys eyes go past their primeand you are still a good long time away from that] (219a14). Endowed both with physical and mental sight,

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Socrates rst comments on Alcibiades remarkable good looks ( ) (218e3), only to depreciate them eventually through an unfavorable comparison with his own superior psychic beauty (218e3219a1).7 Out of the juxtaposition of two kinds of vision, Plato creates a contrast between, on the one hand, Alcibiades subjective, partial, and awed understanding of beauty, shaped by a sharp awareness of visible aesthetic qualities and a dim apprehension of invisible attributes, and, on the other hand, Socrates objective and infallible knowledge of it, which requires a rm grasp of both visible and invisible characteristics. Blind to the complexity of beauty and inordinately attached to his physical attractiveness, Alcibiades expects to acquire Socrates wisdom, as if it were simply an object to be possessed.8 In his role as the coy beloved, he relishes the moment ( ) (217b5), as he waits for Socrates to tell [him] whatever it is that lovers say when they nd themselves alone ( ) (217b45). This passivity, which, according to the dominant erotic ideology, is to be expected of the subservient beloved, informs his attitude even when the erotic roles are reversed and Alcibiades becomes the pursuing lover. His activity then consists solely in attempting to trap Socrates to spend the night with him, an initiative whose aggressive maleness is ultimately vitiated by its use of deception, a modus operandi which, according to the ancient Greeks patriarchal morality, is quintessentially female.9 Further evidence of his embracing (erotic) passivity is the description of his attachment to Socrates as enslavement ( ) (219e34; cf. also 217a12), his desire to act as the beloved in the relationship, even when he is supposed to be the lover (218c7d5), and his deference to Socrates superior knowledge (219a67).10 Alcibiades, it seems, is unable to think of love as a feeling that binds together two morally autonomous people, actively invested in each others welfare and equally interested in contributing to it. Socrates subtle chastisement, in the future, lets consider things together. Well always do what seems the best to the two of us ( ) (219a8b2), attacks Alcibiades understanding of eros as the selsh appropriation of the good, and replaces it with a collaborative and dynamic account of love as common search for the partners happiness. While Plato contrasts Alcibiades subjective awareness of beauty and erotic love with Socrates objective knowledge of it, Kundera foregrounds solely the notion of subjectivity by exacerbating his characters preoccupation with the self. Flajsman exhibits a slothful self-love characterized by a

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kind of inverted gaze, a look directed predominantly at himself: with self love the young intern would gaze peacefully into his own heart, overlooking the insignicant details of the outside world (116). Out of this heightened self-awareness a second self is constructeda doublewhich accompanies him everywhere, providing a pseudo-objective perspective on himself: instead of allowing others to look at him with potentially critical eyes, Flajsman creates a second set of eyes that always look upon him with approving benevolence (1212). By thus being the agent of two contrasting activities, those of seeing and being seen, the young intern becomes simultaneously the lover, who looks at the object of his affection with enchanted eyes, and the beloved, who is looked upon admiringly. Whereas his narcissism requires him to behave both as self-lover and self-beloved, in his relation to women Flajsman displays a self-indulgent passivity: it gratied him to await a love affair with his arms folded, so to speak. He believed that precisely this posture was bound to provoke both women and fate (1212). His erotic attitude toward the woman doctor, for example, consists in waiting for signals from her, which, though neutral, invariably acquire hidden erotic overtones and are seen as miraculously conrming his own self-centered imaginings (120). These fantasies are not entertained as attering, albeit implausible, scenarios but become naive certainties that inspire ill-aimed actions. Thus, the female doctors casual remark on the beauty of the night and her eeting look at Flajsman are viewed as indications that he should step outside in order for them to meet (121). And when, as he is leaning against a plane tree smoking, he hears light footsteps coming in his direction from the pavilion, he immediately assumes, quite wrongly, that they are the woman doctors, and says, I knew that you would come (122). Flajsmans excessive self-preoccupation affects crucially his moral outlook, especially his sense of social responsibility. The harmful effects of an involuntary action leave him indifferent because, as he says, [he is] not in a position to inuence it, and so [he is] not responsible for it (116). Concern for other peoples hurt feelings is thus appropriate only when the self wills and undertakes intentionally harmful actions against them. When others act in ways that Flajsman nds undesirable, their motives are so interpreted by him as to leave his self-image intact. Thus Klaras reluctance to sleep with him is seen not as downright rejection but as a manifestation of her feeling of shame, caused probably by a disease or a surgical scar that she wishes to hide (119). For Flajsman, then, visual perception of oneself crucially affects ones self-awareness and dealings with others. The world-view shaped by this valorization of sight is self-centered and, to a large extent, solipsistic:

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as the most beautiful individual in sight, Flajsman holds himself erotically superior to his male colleagues, and thinks that he can accurately divine the unspoken assumptions of their actions, since they must somehow be motivated by their less than perfect physical beauty (136). In the rst half of his story, then, Kundera presents us with two characters whose erotic disposition bears close resemblances with those of Socrates and Alcibiades in Platos Symposium. Elisabet shares Socrates physical ugliness and erotic aggressiveness, while Flajsman displays Alcibiades vanity and sexual passivity. The second half, marked by Elisabets abortive act of suicide, brings the nurse and the intern together in an encounter that further develops the cardinal Platonic distinction between physical and spiritual beauty, dramatized in the Symposium as a whole and in Alcibiades speech. Qua suicide, Elisabets action is a deliberate attempt to annihilate the self by means of violence done to the body. As she lies under the covers of her hospital bed, Elisabets physicality is restricted to the only visible part of her body, namely her ugly face. With her beautiful body out of sightindeed, incapacitatedthe nurse becomes the closest physical analogue to Socrates. And just as Socrates physical ugliness allows his mental beauty to shine forth, so Elisabets psychic qualities emerge when her physical beauty is undetectable: a previously indifferent or scornful Flajsman now notices her unsurpassable renement, devotion, and consideration, confesses his love for her, and even thinks of proposing marriage to her (1578). Flajsmans transformation from a vain character, enamored with himself, to one who notices and appreciates anothers inner beauty recalls themes explored in Platos Symposium. To begin with, Elisabets act causes Flajsman to reexamine his moral assumptions and to begin to appreciate the importance of psychic beauty. In a highly sentimental soliloquy, delivered after the discovery of the nurses unconscious body, the intern realizes for the rst time that physical ugliness can be accompanied by psychic nobility, and, more importantly, that the latters lasting worth makes the former appear insignicant: But what is beauty or ugliness compared with love? What is the ugliness of a face compared with an emotion in whose greatness the absolute itself is mirrored? (149). By expressly preferring internal to external beauty, Flajsman shows himself to be a more enlightened version of the Platonic Alcibiades. For although the latter prizes Socrates psychic beauty enough to wish to acquire it, he nowhere deems his own good looks inferior to the philosophers wisdom; if nothing else, he must think of them as equally worthy, if his desire to trade one for the other is an indication of their importance.11 Like another Flajsman, however,

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Socrates assesses the real worth of the two kinds of beauty, thereby pointing out the problematic nature of Alcibiades moral valuation:

[Dear Alcibiades, if you are right in what you say about me, you are already more accomplished than you think. If I really have in me the power to make you a better man, then you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description and makes your own remarkable good looks pale in comparison. But, then, is this a fair exchange that you propose? You seem to me to want more than your proper share: you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing itself, gold in exchange for bronze.] Alcibiades at, static view of beauty, as something he already has (physical) or wants to be given (spiritual), robs him of the ability actively to know the difference between the two manifestations of the concept and properly to evaluate them. Flajsman, on the other hand, deeply touched by Elisabets suicide, awakens to the splendor of psychic beauty, even if, as I shall show later, this awakening is nally proved to be ephemeral. In addition, the nurses act makes Flajsman realize that human happiness lies not in sexual intercourse but in the abstract pleasure to be had from the lovers knowledge that they exist and their gratitude for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist (158). Gratitude for the knowledge of the beloveds existence is an expression of the lovers spiritual gain from having loved such a worthy individual, while the experiencing of delight in her existence stems from a seless appreciation of the beauty and uniqueness of her life. Overwhelmed by these feelings, Flajsman tells Elisabet that it would be better if [they] remain as [they] are, since a man

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and a woman love each other all the more when they dont live together (158). Sexual sublimation is the interns recommendation for the preservation of love, a recommendation that bears distinct echoes to Diotimas conception of eros in Platos Symposium. By turning away from bodily pleasures and by glorifying the goodness of the soul, Flajsman is Kunderas version of the lover occupying the second rung of Diotimas scala amoris, the one who think[s] that the beauty of peoples souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies, so that if someone is decent in his soul, even though he is scarcely blooming in his body, our lover must be content to love and care for him and to seek to give birth to such ideas as will make young men better [

] (210b6c3). Flajsmans parturition of noble sentiments upon contact with Elisabets beautiful soul, and his implicit lack of interest in the human children born out of a sexual relationship with her, are signs of his having progressed from the lowest kind of love, that of beautiful bodies, to the one immediately above it, that of beautiful souls. Furthermore, Flajsmans cool appreciation of Elisabets psychic beauty colors his love for her with the kind of emotional detachment many have attributed to Platonic love. Gregory Vlastos, for example, has criticized Platonic love for being love for beautiful abstractions but not for particular people: What needs to be stressed most of all [...] is that Platos theory is not, and is not meant to be, about personal love for personsi.e., about the kind of love we can have for persons and cannot have for things or abstractions. What it is really about is love for place-holders of the predicate useful and beautiful.12 Diotimas account of the lovers ascent from the concrete and particular (body, soul) to the abstract and universal (laws, customs, Beauty itself )as a result of his realizing that the quality of beauty is the unifying element of all these disparate entitiesis reected in Flajsmans eagerness to leave behind Elisabets psychic beauty for whatever kind of beauty the future may bring. It is as if the nurse has been valuable to him only as a contingent instantiation of a praiseworthy quality, the desire to sacrice herself out of love for another, but quite dispensable as the specic bearer of that quality. Platos Alcibiades, however, is unable to resist the particularity of Socrates erotic magnetism: by attaching himself to Socrates alone, Alcibiades makes the mistake of supposing that his desire can be satised by the possession of the individual beloved. As David Halperin puts it, One stands in peril of mistaking the particular individual who instantiates beauty for the beauty he instantiates; one risks, in other words, interpreting ones response to incarnate

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beauty as a longing to possess the beautiful object (i.e. as a sexual impulse) rather than as a longing to (pro)create excellence by means of it.13 However, Socrates, on Alcibiades own admission, achieves the requisite distance by refusing to attach himself erotically to any one beloved. Finally, Elisabets suicide causes Flajsman to look at her rather than himself, sharpens his understanding of who she isthe nurse is no longer viewed as an aggregate of physical parts but as a whole, soulful human beingand leads him readily to acknowledge his sense of moral responsibility, as he realizes that he can be held accountable for the suffering he has unknowingly caused (141, 1489). Earlier in the story, the Chief Physician criticizes Flajsmans egotistical moral stance, thereby echoing Socrates intellectualist ethics: If a man were responsible only for what he is aware of, blockheads would be absolved in advance from any guilt whatever. Only, my dear Flajsman, a man is obliged to know. A man is responsible for his ignorance. Ignorance is a fault (117).14 Now the intern, touched by the nurses action, for which he deems himself responsible, reiterates these same views: Wasnt it actually possible to reduce himself only to the part of him that was conscious and intentional? Didnt what he had involuntarily caused also belong to the sphere of his personality? Who else but he could be responsible for that? (141).15 In Kunderas literary rendition of the Symposium, Elisabets suicide brings together two characters whose interaction seems to transcend the erotic impasse encountered by their philosophic predecessors. For whereas Alcibiades expects his mental progress to reect the self-indulgent passivity of his erotic practices and ultimately declines Socrates subtle invitation for a dynamic and collaborative intellectual activity, Flajsman is transformed, albeit temporarily, from an uncaring and self-engrossed person to a man capable of acute self-criticism and moral reection. But in a nal, brilliantly ironic twist, Kundera has his character meet Platos: for just as Alcibiades, being unable to withstand the feeling of shame that overcomes him upon conversing with Socrates, maintains his worthless public life by avoiding the philosophers elenctic tests, so Flajsman casts himself free from Elisabets company, thereby embracing afresh his earlier sexual mores. The thematization of the individuals ability to maintain a distance from the good he has hitherto desired is tightly interwoven with the authors broad epistemological presuppositions, as shown by their use of subjectivity, and, as I shall argue in the next section, foregrounds ideological commitments of vital importance to them.

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II. Formal Subjectivity, Truth, and Their Socio-Political Implications In Platos Symposium, subjectivity is not only a conceptual tool, used to dene Alcibiades understanding of beauty, but also a formal device signaling the predominantly monologic nature of his account.16 Although the occasional use of questions in his speech suggests the existence of an audience, the impression of interpersonal communication thus created is illusory: the questions are either rhetorical, their answers being already presupposed by the questions themselves, or are readily answered by the questioner.17 The univocality of the speech ensures that its contents are irrefutable: Alcibiades, experientially convinced of the truthfulness of his own beliefs, shuns dialogic interaction with his fellow symposiasts even with Socrates himself.18 He disdains the formers putative opinions on the grounds that, unlike him, none of [them] really understands [Socrates] [ ] (216c7d1), while he meets the latters imag] by ined offense at being called impudent, contemptuous, and vile [ ] willing to corroborate the validity threatening to bring witnesses [ of the accusations leveled at him (215b7). By disallowing external voices to shape Alcibiades subjective testimony of Socrates character and of their unsuccessful relationship, Plato shows how the young mans erotic stance affects, and is perhaps affected by, his perception of the truth. As I showed earlier, in his erotic pursuit Alcibiades refuses to engage with the object of his affection in a common discovery of the good, and is simply content to voice his own passive expectation of the future intellectual benets to be bestowed by his lover. Now it becomes apparent that his epistemic quest is equally one-sided, conducted on only one of the many possible paths that lead to truth, paths that are viewed by him as strictly parallel and are meant to be traversed by solitary travelers.19 And yet, telling the truth is something Alcibiades asserts, almost obsessively, at various junctures of his narrative (214e6, 215a6, 217b2, 217e4; cf. also 219c2d2). The veracity of these emphatic assertions, however, is compromised by two factors: his state of inebriation and his use of images and similes in describing Socrates unique personality. Unlike his soughtafter lover, the ever-sober philosopher whose drinking bouts fail to cloud his reasoning, Alcibiades arrives at the symposium drunk (212e34) and insists on drinking even more (213e7214a1). His appeal to the famous proverb there is truth in wine [ ] (217e34) notwithstanding, the claim to be able to use his already debilitated intellect to describe as complex and odd a person as Socrates seems implausible. Alcibiades himself is

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perfectly aware of the contrast between his own drunken ramblings and the others sober orations (214c78) and, although he proclaims his speech to be truthful, he does, quite cryptically, leave room in it for involuntary lies ] (214e11215a1). The listener of the speech [ is left questioning the reliability of this garrulous mans drunken eulogy, and may reasonably think that Alcibiades frequent claims to truth-telling are, after all, barely disguised attempts to overcompensate for a quality his account lacks. From a philosophical point of view, the tales heavy use of images or icons as appropriate vehicles for the description of Socrates casts further doubt on its truthfulness. Alcibiades compares his lover to a hollow statue of Silenuswith his ute or pipes in his hands, and brimming inside with tiny statues of the godsand to the satyr Marsyas, who would cast his spells on people by means of musical instruments. The former image is evoked in order to convey Socrates game of irony, the incongruity between his comic, unconventional exterior and serious, godlike interior (216d4217a2), as well as the divine essence of his arguments, contained in otherwise trivial and commonplace words (221d7222a6). The Marsyas metaphor captures the extraordinary effect of Socrates words on his audience, their ability to make them feel transported, ], even when completely possessed [ only a poor account of them is being offered (215d56). In proposing to speak through images that are gures of speech, Alcibiades contests the conclusion of Diotimas speech. For there the wise priestess declares that at the summit of the ascent the lover no longer gives birth to mere simulacra ) of virtue, but grasping hold of the truth that he perceives noeti( cally, conceives true excellence in his turn (212a37). Alcibiades gurative speech produces an approximation of the truth of Socrates soul, an image that both is and is not, because, although it communicates something readily observable about the philosophers psyche, the veridical character of the image itself is not subject to logical conrmation.20 The epistemic inferiority of the account, its deployment of likenesses rather than originals, is signaled by the speaker, who declares Socrates only most like ( ) the Silenus statue (215a7). It may also be viewed as symbolic of Alcibiades failure to make a lover out of Socrates: just as his image of the latter is a mere resemblance, leaving the philosophers soul hopelessly unaccounted for, so his desire to possess him is painfully thwarted (219c45). In the character of Alcibiades, then, the erotic life and the life of the intellect are inextricably connected, and Plato seems to suggest that similar strategies govern success and failure in both.

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While the univocality of Alcibiades tale reects its subjective approach to truth, in Kunderas Symposium, subjectivity, which permeates the very fabric of the narrative, is carried out by both dialogic communication and monologic self-expression. Unlike its philosophic antedecent, in which each one of the symposiasts constructs a lengthy speech in praise of eros and delivers it uninterruptedly, Kunderas story, at least in its rst half, creates short dialogic exchanges out of the interweaving of the characters thoughts and emotions. The pace here is quick, and humor and witticisms abound. Elisabets suicide, however, alters the formal development of the story: it is as if its inscrutability compels the physicians to undertake lengthy theoretical investigations on its possible nature and motives. Her unexpected act shatters their previously vacant intellectual improvisations on love and death, and forces them to consider in common the nature and ramications of this semi-real act of self-inicted death. Flajsman refuses to participate in their mental experiments, and instead chooses to ponder the signicance of the nurses action in isolation. Kundera consistently subverts his characters efforts to discover the truth concerning Elisabets abortive suicide. While for Plato dialectics, as a rigorous pursuit of knowledge, improves ones intellectual agility and promotes understanding, the Czech novelist ironizes truth by rendering it a moot point. This he achieves not only by frustrating the physicians attempts to reach agreement through dialogic interaction, or by showing the inefcacy of Flajsmans self-searching deliberations (141), but also by making the nature and motivations of the very act under scrutiny impossible to fathom. This achievement is all the more brilliant, if one considers that not even Elisabet can provide a valid explanation of her incomprehensible suicide attempt. As the Chief Physician tells the woman doctor, who reports to her male colleagues the nurses own explanation of the event as an accident, after she performed for us and scared us, dont be surprised that she put the blame on a pot. Dont forget that in this country would-be suicides are sent to an asylum for treatment. No one wants to go there (159). Once Elisabets voice has been effectively silenced, all that the reader is left with is a variety of speculations, none of which is ever privileged: the Chief Physicians, who thinks of her act as an empty demonstration of suicide, meant to spite Dr. Havel for having rejected her and to attract attention to her naked body (142); Dr. Havels, who refuses to accept sole responsibility for her action and suggests that she wanted them to envy death the possession of her beautiful body (1435); and the woman doctors, who calls her suicide a mere accident (146). Thus Elisabets body, and her handling of it, become signs for which each speaker seeks, in vain, to nd some meaning.21

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As for Flajsman, his refusal to contribute to his colleagues witty remarks, in which he sees the callousness of aging men and women, the cruelty of their mature years (139), combined with his need to experience and enjoy [the] agitation (139) caused by Elisabets action in some sort of youthful isolation, deprives him of the benet of their perspectives. And yet, given the elusive nature of the event, Flajsmans solitary voice offers as (un)reliable an explanation of what happened as that of anyone else. Perhaps in order to show that every opinion has equal plausibility but that none can authoritatively decipher the real nature of things, Kundera makes Flajsman the bearer of two mutually contradictory voices, thereby creating in his soul a dialectic of assertion and negation (140): one voice blames him for Elisabets action, the other acquits him of it. Despite the fact that he resolves this inner battle by adopting the moral imperative of the former voice, his resolution seems too simplistic and naive to account for the act of suicide, which, even on his own admission, does not have a simple cause, but, for the most part, a constellation of causes (140). But assuming that one is willing to go along with Flasjmans reasoning and posit the rejection of Elisabets sexual charm as the main cause of her suicide, it becomes difcult to see why the intern must shoulder the blame; after all, Elisabet irted openly not only with Flajsman but also with Dr. Havel (and to some extent with the Chief Physician), so that the blame is at best a collective one. In attempting to explain the motivation of Elisabets action a little later, Dr. Havel voices this same sentiment: You overestimate my role in this drama. Because its not about me. It wasnt only I who refused to go to bed with Elisabet. Nobody wanted to go to bed with Elisabet (143). Although Flajsmans eagerness to fault solely himself for what happened marks the beginning of a commendable moral transformation, it may be seen as a reection of his egocentricity rather than as an indication of his need accurately to assess the motives of someone elses action. Kunderas ironic perspective on truth, his systematic effort to deprive it of any xed, determinate content, is not merely a literary posture of decidedly poststructuralist echoes but signies his abhorrence of the kind of social and moral uniformity endorsed by the totalitarian politics of his time. As Liehm says, [the] members [of Kunderas generation] became writers at a time of the total relativization of all values, both national and social, and they themselves are to a certain extent constituent parts of a new absolute evil in the name of absolute good, they have been given to experience the relativization of absolute evil and the grotesqueness of absolute good.22 In the face of such radical reversal of values, ction becomes the stage for the imaginative enactment of a multiplicity of epistemological perspectives, all of

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which suggest partial ways of understanding reality without ever exhausting its meaning. In the words of Kundera himself: The novel teaches us to comprehend other peoples truth and the limitations of our own truth, it teaches us to comprehend the world as an opportunity for different interpretations. Hence the art of the novel is deeply non-ideological, for ideology always represents the world from a single point of view, from the point of a single truth, as an illustration of that truth. And hence the novel is as essential to our insanely ideological world as is bread.23 To which he later adds: If the novel has any message at all, this is it: All truth is hidden and from that you can draw your conclusions. No one can hold a monopoly on truth, but you can take hold of other mens truths and play with them in an endlessly comic teatrum mundi: this is the sole consolation for which you may hope.24 If, then, an ironic attitude toward ideological certainties and objective truths safeguards individual freedom and respects the deeply ambivalent nature of things, Flajsmans solitary reections may be seen as something more than simply another demonstration of his incurable narcissism. By breaking free from the old generations jaded morality and naive trust in the possibility of reaching comforting agreements, the young intern asserts his individuality, his inviolable right to determine the world as he pleases.25 A healthy skepticism thus supplants the old desperate clinging to collectively held convictions. But not even his subjective opinions are immune to the rule of ineluctable ambiguity that permeates everything in life: his awareness of a higher kind of love, one that is unaffected by considerations of physical beauty and whose sole measure is the willingness for self-sacrice, lasts only for a moment; once he rejoins the hospital ward and is again faced with the woman doctors mildly suggestive signals, he understood it perfectly. The thread of the romance was being resumed where it had been broken off yesterday (161).26 Kundera elsewhere comments thus on this sort of capricious turn-around, this moral insouciance: As soon as you grasp that the world which surrounds you is not worth taking seriously, you will reach dizzying conclusions. To speak the truth will become absurd. Why be candid with someone who is actually crazy, whom you cannot take seriously? Why tell the truth? Why be virtuous? Why take your work seriously? And why take yourself seriously in this meaningless worldthat would be the height of ridiculousness. The sense that the world cannot be taken seriouslyis

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an abyss. And the laughable loves are laughable stories, played out on the edge of that abyss.27 The individuals refusal to belong unconditionally in any relationship is a recurrent thematic motif in Kunderas literary oeuvre and, according to Herbert Eagle, testies to the authors belief that rigid love contracts, like dogmatic political ideologies, are ultimately destructive.28 By abandoning the moral universe created by his subjective reading of Elisabets act, a world of rare and hitherto unknown spiritual beauty, Flajsman embraces the known banality of his erotic life, now a far older and far stronger man. He has known a love as great as death [...] death that has been given him as a present: splendid and comforting death. (161). A total submission to this love, a daily existence steeped in the active memory and constant reliving of the magnitude of Elisabets gift, would shackle him to an ideology of good, which, just like many political ideologies, would inevitably entail its own negation. Flajsman chooses to forget the beauty of the nurses act, to laugh at its power to hold him captive to a potentially illusory truth, thereby exercising his right to choose what, from an absolutist moral point of view, is unpardonably wrong.29 His choice is founded on the belief that the good eventually becomes bad, and thus blind adherence to either moral principle is unjustiable; or, in the words of Bruce Donahue apropos the Laughable Loves, love is only sex, honesty is foolish, integrity is a waste of time; people are trapped in a world of cynicism, illusions, and insincerity.30 For Alcibiades and Flajsman, then, reality is fully conformable to the judging individuals viewpoint. But whereas in Platos Symposium epistemological subjectivism is meant to be rejected because it undermines the philosophic life, in Kunderas story it is gloried as a means of preserving personal freedom in a world of ux. Despite their different treatment of the notion of subjectivity, both Plato and Kundera use it to convey a message with distinctly socio-political connotations. By dramatizing the unsuccessful erotic liaison between Alcibiades, a gure of a highly public prole, and Socrates, the quiet philosopher who shuns politics, Plato shows that the asymmetrical, hierarchical erotic model adopted by the Athenians of his time clashes with the spirit of Socratic erotics/dialectics: the former requires that the beloved be the passive recipient of the lovers favors, while the latter presupposes the active involvement of both partners in the elenctic process. Whereas conventional erotic practices urge lover and beloved to look after their own self-interest, philosophical discourse aims to discover and serve the participants common interest, the emergence of the truth. Similarly, though from different ideological perspectives, Kundera uses the private

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occasion of a symposium, and the even more private incident of deathqua-suicide, to challenge the unquestionable validity of public speech. The woman doctor evinces what is perhaps the most radical condemnation of the validity of (public) speech in all Kunderas work in her response to Dr. Havel, who tries to nd some justication for Elisabets action lurking in her words: But Havel, [] as if you didnt know that ninety-nine percent of all statements are idle talk. Dont you yourself talk mostly for the sake of talking? (1478). Reality for Kundera is no longer an externally imposed social construct, fashioned and made legitimate by obscure political forces, but an individual act of free will, as capricious and amenable to change as the world it attempts to grasp. This is in line with a statement made by Dr. Havel, who calls his rejection of Elisabets sexual charms an act of caprice. He thus raises capriciousness to a philosophic level by calling it a scrap of freedom in a world of iron laws (96). Self-irony and levity are thus potent weapons against the seriously undertaken task by those in power to normalize, standardize, and make coherent the essentially arbitrary and paradoxical nature of reality.31

Conclusions In this essay I have argued that Kunderas depiction of the erotic relationship between Elisabet and Flajsman in the Symposium can be fruitfully read as a thematic and formal reconguration of Alcibiades account of his frustrated liaison with Socrates in Platos homonymous dialogue. Thematically, one nds in the modern retelling the same fascination with the nature and epistemological and ethical ramications of conceptual dichotomiessuch as aggressive/passive eroticism and physical/spiritual beautythat preoccupied Plato, not only in the Symposium but also throughout his life. Thus Elisabet partakes in Socrates physical ugliness and erotic aggressiveness, while Flajsman exhibits Alcibiades vanity and sexual passivity. Elisabets abortive suicide eliminates the body, thereby revealing her psychic beauty, the closest analogue to Socrates mental beauty. In the presence of Elisabets inner quality, Flajsman undergoes a temporary moral transformation. He realizes that his actions have social repercussions, for which he ought to assume moral responsibility, and recognizes the value of spiritual beauty, on account of which he is willing to engage in an asexual relationship with Elisabet.

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Formally, both Plato and Kundera embed their themes in subjective accounts, Alcibiades univocal eulogy of Socrates and Flajsmans self-centered mental reections respectively. But whereas the philosopher makes a negative use of subjectivity, aiming thereby to cast doubt on the veridicality of an account that excludes the voice of the interlocutor, the novelist views subjectivity positively, as signifying the inevitable epistemological and moral relativism that governs our world. Despite their different stances toward the meaning and value of truth, both authors, I have argued, convey a message with a distinctly socio-political avor. Plato juxtaposes the intellectual activity of Socratic dialectics, conducted in private gatherings and requiring intellectual reciprocity, with the socially accepted, asymmetrical model of sexual pederasty, which locks the two erotic partners in the xed, unalterable roles of the active/penetrative lover or the passive/penetrated beloved. Seen from this vantage point, Alcibiades seduction of Socrates fails, because it is an attempt to inltrate Socrates practice of a private and symmetrical intellectual exchange with the conceptual categories of a publicly endorsed, hierarchical erotic model. Kunderas deployment of subjectivity pits individual freedom against a political system of oppression and uniformity. By grounding his characters inability to decipher reality in the worlds lack of an objectively detectable meaning, he deprives them of the easy comfort afforded by metaphysical certainties and makes them the sole arbiters of their lifes goals and value. University of California, Irvine

Notes
1. Originally, Laughable Loves [Smesne lsky] linked a series of ten stories, issued in three separate notebooks (1963, 1965, 1968). Kundera completed the last story of the collection three days before the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which took place on 21 August 1968. The denitive Czech edition, the result of many authorial interventions, appeared in 1981, and comprised only seven stories. In its arrangement of the material in a sequence that develops the emotional contrast between laughter and seriousness, the collection anticipates the most common structural motif of Kunderas novels. 2. The collection of stories as a whole has received scanty scholarly attention, and the same applies to the Symposium. For a sensitive treatment of its content, with the briefest references to Platos work, see, among others, F. Misurella, Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs (University of South Carolina Press, 1993); and M. Nemcova Banerjee, Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera (Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). My summary of the storys plot derives, to some extent, from the chapters devoted to Kunderas Symposium in these two books. In light of this studys specic aim, I touch upon the storys broader themes only insofar as their treatment is pertinent to my interpretation. 3. For friendship as the proper response of a male beloved see, for example, Plato, Symposium 191e; Phaedrus 231e, 237c; Xenophon, Hiero 1.3238, 7.6; Symposium 8.16; Plutarch, Moralia 750de, 761a. The bibliography on the Greek institution of pederasty is vast. See, among

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others, K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge 1978); D.M. Halperin, Plato and Erotic Reciprocity, Classical Antiquity 5 (1986): 6080; R.J. Hoffman, Some Cultural Aspects of Greek Male Homosexuality, Journal of Homosexuality 5 (1980): 21726; and L.P. Wilkinson, Classical Approaches IV: Homosexuality, Encounter 51.3 (1978): 2131. 4. For a similar depiction of Socrates see Plato, Charmides 154c; Protagoras 309a; and Gorgias 481d. 5. Socrates low social standing is mentioned by Alcibiades at 220e as the reason for the philosopher having been denied the prize for valor in battle. 6. For an interpretation that traces the admixture of serious and comic elements in Socrates character to the genre of satyric drama see F.C.C. Shefeld, Alcibiades Speech: A Satyric Drama, Greece and Rome 48.2 (2001): 193209. 7. By preferring spiritual to physical beauty, Socrates illustrates the sentiment of the correct lover in Diotimas ascent who holds the beauty of the body in contempt and thinks it a small thing (210b). See R.G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge 1932) lx; K. Dover, Plato, Symposium (Cambridge 1980) 164; D. Scott, Socrates and Alcibiades in the Symposium, Hermathena 168 (2000): 2537; and C.J. Rowe, Plato, Symposium (Warminster 1998) 205. 8. Cf. R.B. Rutherford, The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation (Harvard, 1995) 198. 9. This lends independent validity to Wohls attribution of effeminacy to Alcibiades, which she connects with his tyrannical leanings. See V. Wohl, The Eros of Alcibiades, Classical Antiquity 18 (1999): 34985. 10. For a detailed examination of Alcibiades defying of traditional erotic and political categorizations see Wohl, Eros. 11. Wohl, Eros, 378, explains this trade as follows, Alcibiades shameless seductions would seem then to challenge [...] the sexual economy between erastes [=lover] and eromenos [=beloved]: he offers himself like a whore for a prize that has already been declared priceless. 12. Gregory Vlastos, The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato, Platonic Studies (Princeton, 1981) 26. 13. D. Halperin, Platonic Eros and What Men Call Love, Ancient Philosophy 5 (1985): 184. For the connections between Alcibiades slavish attachment to Socrates and a lovers slavish devotion to one man or practice, observable at the lower rungs of Diotimas ascent-passage, see E. Belore, Dialectic with the Reader in Platos Symposium, Maia 36 (1984): 147. 14. The same preoccupation with ignorance and guilt emerges elsewhere in Kunderas oeuvre, most prominently in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, especially in Litost, and in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, in his discussion of Oedipus and his acceptance of guilt. 15. Flasjmans retrospective self-examination, and the concomitant awareness of the motivations of his actions, is echoed in the thoughts of Klima, the main character in the rst story of the collection, entitled Nobody Will Laugh: We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and nd out what we have experienced and what meaning it has (5). 16. The only exception to this pattern is Alcibiades recollection of a dialogue that took place between himself and Socrates in the formers house (218c219b). Although the reader is not made to doubt the accuracy of the recollected conversation, the piece is essentially Alcibiades own version of the event, and thus only formally different from the rest of his account. 17. On four occasions Alcibiades invites Socrates to correct him, should he say anything untrue (214e, 217b, 219c, and 220e). But it would be a mistake, I think, if we were to construe Socrates silence as a sign of acquiescence to the truth of Alcibiades confessions. One may tell no lies and still fail to tell the whole truth. As I shall argue later, Alcibiades speech occupies the middle ground between truth and falsity, but a proper distinction of the two concepts would require a dialogic exchange of the kind prohibited by the essentially monologic form of Alcibiades encomium of Socrates. 18. Alcibiades subjectivity is not the only factor that compromises the truth. The reader is distanced from the reality of the account by the multi-layered indirect discourse in which the narrated events are cast. As Belore, Dialectic, 141, puts it, we must depend on Platos

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report of Apollodorus account of Aristodemus tale of Alcibiades story of what Socrates said and did. 19. R.G. Edmonds, III (Socrates the Beautiful: Role Reversal and Midwifery in Platos Symposium, Transactions of the American Philological Association 130 (2000): 26185) notices the direct correlation between Alcibiades erotic love and his attitude to truth, but articulates it differently: Alcibiades is unable to understand the dynamics of the Socratic eros, in which the beloved is not merely passive object but active midwife. Socrates by his refusal to act as [lover] and have sex with Alcibiades, by his adopting the role of [beloved], is encouraging Alcibiades to pursue the beauty of philosophy, to engage in dialectic (275). 20. For the ability of images to produce accounts that are both true and false see Plato, Sophist 240ac. For the soul itself as something that is and is not see Plato, Republic 477ab, 478e, 534a. S. Rosen, Platos Symposium (New Haven and London 1987) 295ff, observes the relevance of the Sophists discussion to Alcibiades image-making. For a more positive view of Alcibiades account, as telling a truth of its own, see M.C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge 1986) 185ff. 21. Note that the nal resolution to the mystery of Elisabets action is reached by the woman doctors arbitrary decision to call it a suicide: My dear gentlemen, [...] if it will make the world more beautiful for you and will save your souls, please lets agree that Elisabet did really want to commit suicide. Agreed? (160). 22. A. J. Liehm, Milan Kundera: Czech Writer, Czech Literature Since 1956: A Symposium, ed.W.E. Harkins and P.I. Trensky (Bohemica: New York, 1980): 44. 23. Liehm 47. 24. Liehm 48. 25. Cf. Roger Kimball, The Ambiguities of Milan Kundera, The New Criterion 4.5 (1986): 8: [Kunderas] ction abounds in explorations of what we might call intimacy in distress. The erotic lives of his characters become a theater in which a wounded individuality, half capitulating to forces inimical to it, struggles to preserve itself. 26. The validity of Flasjmans subjective views is further undermined by the fact that Kundera casts doubt on the sincerity of his characters appreciation of Elisabets action, when he has him think to himself toward the end of the story only a moment before Flajsman had been almost reproaching himself for having acted cunningly when he had settled everything with a bunch of roses and some nice words, but now he was glad that he hadnt rushed into anything (161). 27. Liehm 51. 28. H. Eagle, Genre and Paradigm in Milan Kunderas The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Language and Literary Theory, ed. B.A. Stolz, I.R. Titunik, I. Dolezel (University of Michigan Press, 1984): 262. 29. For Kunderas own distinction between the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, which conveys an unironic view of life, and the laughter of absolute skepticism, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, see Milan Kundera, Interview with Philip Roth, New York Times Book Review 30 (1980) 80. 30. Bruce Donahue, Laughter and Ironic Humor in the Fiction of Milan Kundera, Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 25.2 (1984) 72. Flajsmans deant assertion of his individual freedom may also be seen as voicing Elisabets right, against the Chief Physicians interpretation, to explain her action in any way she likes, even as an attempt to commit suicide. 31. For an unsympathetic treatment of Kunderas satirical view of reality see Kimball, Ambiguities, 9: satire has authority only to the extent that one can discern a credible alternative to the reality being satirized; otherwise it becomes indistinguishable from what it satirizes. And the truth is that Kunderas own aestheticism, his own rebellion against the reality of what he describes, robs his work of any such alternative. If, however, one sees Kunderas project as a rebellion against complacent political certainties and as a literary project that calls for a rehabilitation of the notion that human truths are inescapably tentative, one may be able to justify his aversion to positing any credible alternatives of the kind Kimball wishes for. Donahue, Laughter, 68, is closer to this interpretation, when he says: literature, by means of its exploration of the complexity of reality, exposes the fatuity of simplistic truths.