HUMOUR, HEGEMONY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS: A GRAMSCIAN READING OF MILAN KUNDERA’S THE JOKE

Abstract

The Joke was published in the dying years of Stalinist orthodoxy in Czechoslovakia, offering a wide range of irony, dark humor, and narrative polyphony to reveal how the dominant political structures control consciousness, force conformity, and punish dissent. The comic discourse and the political power intersect in Kundera's text, creating a fruitful ground for an analysis of ideology. This study examines the use of humor in the novel as a mode of communist resistance and as a means of diagnosis that illuminates the instability and coercive nature of communist hegemony in the context of the Cold War in Czechoslovakia, using Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony and struggle for cultural consciousness. The study is qualitative and employs textual analysis grounded in Gramscian cultural theory, supplemented by secondary theoretical frameworks from cultural materialism, literary sociology, and critical discourse analysis. The results show that the novel functions as both a tool of resistance and an indicator of ideological weakness. The ironic postcard the protagonist Ludvík writes is an unplanned yet significant gesture of counter-hegemonic speech, with an unequal impact that reveals the performative fragility of dominant ideological consent. The findings of this study suggest that Kundera's comic mode is a form of ‘war of position’ in which subaltern consciousness challenges hegemonic narratives at the level of everyday cultural life. Humor is no trivial matter but rather a place of struggle within hegemonic discourse, revealing its internal tensions and potentially generating other forms of feeling and collective memory.

JEL Classification Code: Z10, Z13, Z18.