“Love Is a Losing Game”: Textual Games in Milan Kundera's “The Hitchhiking Game”

Abstract

SummaryA couple who indulge in a tongue-in-cheek game of pretence soon discover that role-play can, in fact, reveal more about themselves – their real selves – and their partner, than it conceals. What begins on a whim as an indulgent and innocent bit of sport soon spirals out of control to threaten the dynamics of the couple's relationship, increasingly hampering their ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy. The authors of this article contend that Milan Kundera's “The Hitchhiking Game”, one of seven short stories in the anthology Laughable Loves (1974), benefits from being read in terms of Roger Caillois's (1967) taxonomy of games and play, which differentiates between competition, chance, mimicry and vertigo in respect of players’ attitudes towards play. This theory is expanded by Wolfgang Iser (1993), who relates these four categories to the analysis of texts, introducing the concept of textual games. Employing the mimicry—chance binary seems particularly apt for this story as it highlights the unlimited potential for sustained illusion, as opposed to the limitations imposed by the finite nature of the text and the characters’ eventual disillusionment. In this tale of erotic love, the laughter hinted at in the title of the anthology is revealed to be rather wry, personal identity is shown to be ambiguous, and love often appears to be tainted by uncertainty.