Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

context

Milan Kundera is a dissident Czech writer. He was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1929. In 1975, he emigrated to France, where he has since lived in exile.

Kundera was influenced by two western European intellectual movements of the 20th C.: existentialism and poststructuralism. But he is also grounded in the tradition of dissident writers of eastern Europe in the 1950s, such as Boris Pasternak or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or for that matter in the tradition of Russian novelists of 19th-century tsarist Russia. He suffered the plight of spiritual exiles whose inspiration comes from adversity.

Kundera's novel explores timeless issues about what it is to be human, but in the context of an oppressive Communist society, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. It is a counterpoint to the bildungsroman, the 19th-century novel about the struggles of coming of age and seeking one's destiny. Kundera's novel, by contrast, considers the predicament of young adults who have arrived at their destiny, the promised land of the "classless society," and find it wanting.

the critique of "kitsch" as a sustaining theme of the novel

Kundera's novel is humanist and anti-utopian. Both of these perspectives are implicit in his critique of kitsch.

Kitsch is a sentimental aesthetic representation of the world that denies its existential realities. It depicts the present world as if it were a paradise. What characterizes this paradise is its lightness, whereas the real world is characterized by its heaviness. The paradise of kitsch is a place where there is no hardship, no struggle, no sweat, no disagreements among people, no concrete relationships with which to cope. In other words, it is a place where there is no existential suffering. It is an imaginary world whereas the life world is tangible, a harmonious world whereas the life world is full of discord, an immaculate world whereas the life world is messy. In the land of kitsch, there is no need for critical thought, since all problems have already been resolved.

Communist kitsch

For earlier generations that had believed in the perfectibility of society, kitsch was tolerable because it was portrayed as a lost Eden in the past or a paradise projected into the future. As for this coming of heaven on high or heaven on earth, one was free to take it or leave it.

But Communist kitsch was less tolerable because it presented a fantasy of a paradise that had already arrived. Czechoslovakia of the 1960s, like Soviet states throughout eastern Europe, was presented by Communist image-makers as the "fatherland of workers" whose coming Marx had prophesied. The kitsch of paradise gained was far more oppressive than that of paradise sought because it covered over the real problems of life with a tissue of lies: everyone in the society is a "worker," and workers are happy; workers are satisfied; workers are full of benign thoughts. In its kitsch, Communist society was a paradise of grinning idiots who had given themselves to the power of positive thinking.

The greatest threat to such a society is critical thought. The abiding concern of the image-makers of Communist society, therefore, was that someone might challenge their representation of reality. Hence they needed a secret police to watch people and to record their expressions of disbelief in the myth of paradise gained.

It is in this context that Kundera explores the nature of repression in modern Communist society. Its instrument was terror, based upon a psychology of intimidation.

Only rarely was such terror brutal, as it had been during the days of Stalin in the 1940s and 1950s. One such instance in the novel is the crushing of popular protest in Prague in August 1968 by the Red army. Alexander Dubcek, then prime minister of Czechoslovakia, was called to Moscow to admit the errors of his liberalizing reforms during the "Prague spring" of 1968, and he returned home humiliated, parroting Soviet kitsch as the price for the retreat of the Red army.

But usually terror came in a more benign guise. It was the subtle work of ruining reputations through veiled threats communicated indirectly. In the face of such blackmail, most people conformed to expectations.

Kundera's character Tomas, by contrast, refused to conform. He would not repudiate the article that he had written about the Sophoclean tragedy, Oedipus king, published in the back pages of a newspaper and long since forgotten by everyone save the secret police. Writers, even obscure and seemingly inconsequential ones, are suspect because they subvert the hegemony of kitsch.

Accordingly, Thomas loses his prestigious job as a surgeon and must do menial work as a window washer. The Communist regime would rather relegate its best and brightest to such tasks than brook intellectual insubordination. Western kitsch

Kundera wishes to show that kitsch is not just a problem of Communist societies. The West has its kitsch as well.

Kundera explores the nature of Western kitsch through the character Franz.

Western kitsch is not as oppressive as that of Communist society because its image makers still project their fantasies into the future. In the West, we are still making the long march toward paradise. In this cause, Franz goes to the Thai-Cambodian border to shout slogans about violations of human rights through a megaphone into a jungle in which listeners are invisible, indeed hypothetical. In fact, this discourse is actually directed at the media --- the photographers and journalists who accompany the marchers. The marchers are left-wing intellectuals, mostly university professors and actresses. Franz never returns from Thailand. He dies not for the ideological cause for which he had journeyed there. Rather he suffers a meaningless death at the hands of muggers in Bangkok after the march. Kundera's point is that to give oneself to kitsch for either side in the Cold War is a dehumanizing process, for it means giving up one's human identity for an abstract, ideological one. His critique of kitsch might be viewed from two perspectives: the poststructuralist perspective - The power of kitsch in the modern world has been enhanced by the revolution in electronic communication. In our postmodern society, discourse has taken on a reality of its own. What counts in our society are appearances. In our public identity, our private one is easily obliterated. Increasingly, political power turns on the capacity to make and publicize images.

the existential perspective - how does one affirm one's human identity in a society that would cover it over with a panoply of abstractions? East or West, it is a culture that values appearances. We are urged to conform to society's expectations about what we should do and say. But what about our own responsibility for our actions?

This is the urgent question that Tomas raised in his essay about Oedipus, the king who suffered for a crime he unwittingly committed. The point of the Greek tragedy, and the point Tomas would reaffirm, is that we are responsible for our own actions. In the face of the kitsch that begs us to surrender our freedom, our sense of dignity as human beings urges us to exercise it. To accept responsibility for oneself is to affirm one's humanity. Tomas therefore refuses to recant. It is at once the mark of his greatness as a human being and his vulnerability in a conformist society. the weight of responsible choices

The issue of responsibility is at the heart of the dilemmas facing Kundera's four major characters: Tomas, Tereza, Franz, and Sabina.

They face two kinds of responsibility, which they may take heavily or lightly:

/ \ 1) vocation 2) interpersonal relations

| |

responsibility for themselves responsibility for others

as for vocation:

Tomas, the surgeon, and Sabina, the painter, take their vocations seriously. They are doers. We may characterize their sense of responsibility as heavy.

Tereza, the photographer, and Franz, the professor, take their vocations lightly. They are observers. Their sense of responsibility is light.

 as for interpersonal relations, the pattern is reversed: Tereza and Franz are searching for commitment. Their sense of responsibility for their relationships is heavy.

Tomas and Sabina prefer personal independence. Epic philanderers, they take their personal relationships lightly.

 The ironical turn of Kundera's novel is that the responsibilities of each of the characters turns into its opposite: Thomas is deeply committed to his work as a surgeon. In the operations he performs he probes the problems of life. But in the end he gives up that vocation and takes on the heavy responsibility for Tereza. He chooses to remain in Czechoslovakia, even though he might have better pursued his career in the West.

Sabina, too, is serious about her work. An artist, she paints over life's hidden problems on her canvasses. A feminist, she is enviable in her independence. She flees her native land for California, a place renowned for the lightness of personal relationships. But she finds the lightness of her life there unbearable, especially after she learns of the deaths of her old friends, Tomas and Tereza.

Tereza is initially enthralled with Tomas and totally devoted to him. In the end, however, her dog Karenin displaces him as the object of her affections. Meanwhile, her photographs of the Red army occupation of Prague receive serious attention in showing the Western world the repression there.

Franz is a deeply interior man, moved by his inner fantasies. Yet in the end he dies while championing an ideological cause about which he does not deeply care.

 Kundera does not judge his characters for the choices they make. Rather he exposes their existential aloneness. Tomas gives up his profession to preserve his personal integrity. He becomes a window washer, who looks in on the lives of the conformists of Communist society. He is quickly forgotten by his former associates.

Franz gives up his life for the memory of an imaginary dialogue with his ex-lover Sabina, who has since forgotten him.

 Post-structuralist bricolage - deconstructing the kitsch of memory

Kundera would concede that each of his characters makes an authentic choice, but each will be remembered in a different way. The lives they led would be invested with unrelated meaning as they were transformed into lives remembered.

Herein Kundera introduces the theme of "bricolage": turning old forms to serve new purposes.

He abords the subject with reference to Beethoven's famous "Muss es sein? Es muss sein" motif. Beethoven coined the phrase as a joke to insist that a friend repay a loan. Then he turned it into a jingle: "Es muss sein, ja ja ja ja!" The jingle eventually took on a solemn air in his last quartet, Opus 135. Thus a joke became a jingle, then serious music, and finally for Tomas a metaphysical truth about historical necessity. The linguistic form stays the same; but its meaning changes. Initially light, it becomes heavy. Note the bricolage on the meaning of the lives of Tomas and Franz, as recorded in the epitaphs written on their tombstones: Tomas: "He wanted the kingdom of God on earth" This was written by his son Simon, who barely knew him, and who himself moved between the kitsch of the "freedom fighter" and that of the traditional religious devotee. Franz: "A Return after long wanderings" This inscription was written by his estranged wife who sympathized neither with his lost love nor his lost cause. The Idyll of Tomas and Tereza in the country: paradise regained?

Tomas and Tereza spend their last few years together on a rural collective farm. Paradise in the beginning was the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve lived in harmony with animals and the land. Here it is the place at which Tomas and Tereza take refuge when they are banished from the land of kitsch.

Tereza asks Tomas to go to live with her in the country. Ironically, they go to a collective farm in a countryside whose landmarks have been renamed for Russian places. Yet it is in its way a rural paradise, a place from which the young have fled to seek their fortunes in the city. A paradise abandoned, Tomas and Tereza find work and friendship there.

Yet even in this pleasant setting there is suffering, of which the lingering death from cancer of their dog Karenin is a symbol. It foretells the death of Tomas and Tereza, who die under strange circumstances. They are crushed by a truck that Tomas was driving, but we do not know how.

As to what their deaths might mean, Kundera leaves us with two images:

Tereza's nightmare, in which the secret police come and fly them to nowhere for execution. Spared, she is then sent home to her aging grandparents. We may imagine her alone and terrified.

the last night of Tereza and Tomas among friends in a country inn. We may imagine them together and happy.

 At the hour of their death, where is the boundary between the fantasy and the reality of their lives?

conclusion

Kundera's Unbearable Lightness is an existential novel set in a postmodern world. It is a setting in which the connections of the characters with their life circumstances are more fragile than were those of their ancestors.

citizen with nation - connections with society

parent with child - connections with kin

personal identity - connections with self

 Kundera suggests that in our times we discover our identity closer to the borders between reality and fantasy, the lifeworld and textuality, the concrete and the abstract, the heavy and the light.

But life's possibilities are still a calculus of places on the trajectory of our life span, situated between the serious and the frivolous, as they were for the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. We have no fixed identity, of the sort that the image makers of kitsch would give us.

Nor can we find our identity in repetition. Kundera invokes Heraclitus, who taught that one can never step into the same river twice. In this life, we continually want to see ourselves as in a mirror, replicated in our lovers and parents, in the future as in the past. Yet one cannot grasp the mirror image. It is unbearably light, whereas life is concrete and heavy. Each tiny action we take seals our fate.