This article was originally published in the TLS of May 25, 1984.
Graham Greene, when described as a Catholic novelist, is apt to say that he is
rather a novelist who happens to be a Catholic. Milan Kundera, who was
expelled from the Czech Communist Party in 1950, reinstated in 1956,
expelled again in 1970 and finally forced into exile, has been insisting for
many years that he is not a “dissident novelist” but a novelist who happens
to be a Czech at a time of peculiarly tragic and poignant political
experience for his country. Though he writes, inevitably, about that
experience, he is offended by a political reading of his work. In an
interview with Kundera published in the latest issue of Granta Ian McEwan
asked him why.
Because it is a bad reading. Everything you think is important in the book
you’ve written is ignored. Such a reading sees only one aspect: the
denunciation of a communist regime. That doesn’t mean I like communist
regimes; I detest them. But I detest them as a citizen: as a writer I don’t
say what I say in order to denounce a regime.
Kundera repudiates the sentimental Western attitude which sometimes takes the
form of a perverse envy that persecution automatically confers a special
value and authenticity on writing from Eastern Europe. There is a character
in his latest novel who has a Czech emigre mistress called Sabina, a
painter:
Franz greatly admired Sabina’s country. Whenever she told him about herself
and her friends from home, Franz heard the words ‘prison’, ‘persecution’
‘enemy’, ‘tanks’, ‘emigration’, ‘pamphlets’, ‘banned books’, ‘banned
exhibitions’, and he felt a curious mixture of envy and nostalgia . . . .
the trouble was that Sabina had no love for that drama. The words . . . were
ugly without the slightest trace of romance. The only word that evoked in
her a sweet nostalgic memory of her homeland was the word ‘cemetery’.
Sabina finds a biography of herself in an exhibition catalogue that reads like
the life of a saint or martyr:
She protested but they did not understand her.
Do you mean that modern art isn’t persecuted under Communism?
‘My enemy is kitsch, not Communism!’ she replied, infuriated.
From that time on she began to insert mystifications in her biography and by
the time she got to America she even managed to disguise the fact that she
was Czech.
Milan Kundera has never, of course, tried to disguise his Czech nationality,
but he has inserted mystifications into his later fiction in order to elude
reductively ideological interpretation. His marvellous first novel The Joke
(1967), written in Czechoslovakia, for Czechoslovakians, did not need that
protection. A novel constructed on classic modernist lines, it uses temporal
rearrangement of the narrative line and shifting limited viewpoints to
retard but not ultimately to frustrate our understanding of its complex
plot. The Joke cunningly interweaves sexual with political intrigue,
betrayal and disillusionment, and maintains a miraculous balance between
comedy and pathos, irony and compassion. Not surprisingly it became a cult
book of the Prague Spring of 1968, and probably only Czech readers can fully
appreciate its subtleties. Certainly Kundera felt that its huge
international success partly sustained by the wave of sympathy for
Czechoslovakia under Russian occupation vulgarized its message.
His first response seems to have been to eliminate overt reference to politics
in subsequent fiction. The Farewell Party (1976) for instance is an erotic
black comedy almost indistinguishable in content from a British or American
novel in the same genre. With The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)
English language version 1980) Kundera let politics and his personal
experience of political oppression flood back into his fiction, but
protected against simplistic political readings by a postmodernist
technique. This novel is full of gaps, discontinuities, unanswered questions
— what the deconstructionist rhetoricians call aporias. It tells seven
separate stories, only two of which concern the same character, but all of
them linked by the voice of the authorial narrator, who comments, confesses
and digresses in a transparently autobiographical fashion, rather
reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. And just as Vonnegut
combined parodic science fiction with realistic and documentary modes of
writing, so Kundera uses the technique of magic realism (now especially
associated with Latin American writing, though Kundera would say he learned
it from Kafka) whereby some extreme human situation takes the form of a
grotesque image or action that is logically impossible but conceptually
fitting and aesthetically satisfying. Thus, at one point in The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting, political demonstrators dancing in a ring are so
exalted by the afflatus of ideological togetherness that they rise into the
air and float away from the disenfranchised author-narrator like an airborne
wreath.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is rather more conventional in form than its
predecessor. Fantastic events in the magic realist mode are naturalized as
dreams; the story, though episodic, concerns a single set of interrelated
characters. Its continuity with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is most
marked in its emphasis on leitmotif and authorial commentary, and it makes
very clear that, although Kundera writes about people ineluctably
entrammelled in politics, he is not a political novelist. He is rather a
metaphysical novelist, that epithet used to evoke the English metaphysical
poets as well as the technical philosophical sense: a writer who
investigates with a bold combination of abstraction sensuality and wit the
problematic interrelationship of sex, love, death and the ultimate mystery
of being itself.
According to the author-narrator, the difference between those who do or do
not believe in a divine creator is less important than “the line separating
those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom)
from those who accept it without reservation”. In the latter category are
all ideologues, whether of the Left or the Right, whether Communist or
anti-Communist (for no one who attributes absolute importance to political
struggle can afford to doubt being); in the former category are the novelist
and the kind of people he is interested in — men and women for whom the
treacherous ground of being is desire.
Milan Kundera has always been fascinated by the Don Juan figure, but The
Unbearable Lightness of Being is his most elaborate and exhaustive treatment
of the theme to date. The chief male character, Tomas, is a Czech surgeon, a
divorce, a womanizer (an “epic” womanizer, Kundera explains in one of his
whimsical typologies, “one who desires to possess the endless variety of the
objective female world”, as distinct from the “lyrical” womanizer who seeks
his “own subjective and unchanging dream of all women”). Tomas has invented
something he calls “erotic friendship” as a means of enjoying many
mistresses without being responsible for any one of them. This works very
well until a simple waitress called Tereza, whom he picks up in the
restaurant of a country town, makes him the gift of her total love. Tomas is
unable to resist this love and reciprocates, but his Don Juan self goes on
philandering. To Tomas sex and love are quite distinct, but to Tereza his
infidelities are deeply wounding.
Then the crisis of 1968 and the Russian occupation shake up their lives.
Tomas, who has imprudently published an anti-Party article in a newspaper,
accepts the offer of a job in Zurich, and Tereza accompanies him, hoping
that exile will solve the problems of their relationship. But he goes on
betraying her, sometimes with Sabina, who has also emigrated to Switzerland
(and who starts a liaison of her own with the liberal academic, Franz).
Tereza, convinced that she is only making Tomas miserable, returns to
Czechoslovakia. Tomas, at first relieved, soon finds that he cannot live
without Tereza and follows her. Both know that there is no chance of getting
out of Czechoslovakia again. The black marks on Tomas’s political record
catch up with him. He is demoted from surgeon to GP, then he is expelled
from the medical profession and becomes a window-cleaner. This occupation
affords endless opportunities for erotic adventure, and thus exacerbates the
old problem with Tereza. She persuades him to move to the country, where he
drives, not very efficiently, a pick-up truck, and they enjoy a life of
modest contentment with their much loved mongrel bitch the anomalously named
Karenin.
Sabina, meanwhile, has ditched Franz at the very moment when he leaves his
wife for her, but the political romanticism Sabina had inspired leads him to
join a demonstration in Thailand. The demonstration is a fiasco; Franz is
mugged on the streets of Bangkok and dies from his injuries. Sabina goes to
Paris, then to the United States, where in due course she learns that Tomas
and Tereza have been killed in an accident in Tomas badly maintained truck.
Since they were on their way to a cheap hotel where they regularly spent
weekends, she concludes that they were happy.
As usual with Kundera, a summary of the plot is very different from the plot
as experienced in the text. We share Sabina’s news about out the deaths of
Tomas and Tereza, for instance, long before we come to the narrative of
their life in the country, and the novel actually ends with the first of
their visits to the hotel in the neighbouring town, their simple pleasure in
the excursion poignantly overshadowed by the reader’s knowledge of their
future fate. Shifting focalization presents the same incident to us more
than once. The novel is divided into seven parts, and the titles of the
parts that belong to Tomas and Tereza, “Lightness and Weight” and “Soul and
Body” respectively, are leitmotifs on which Kundera plays many variations.
Lightness and weight is one of the fundamental oppositions of the physical
world, or our conceptualization of it. Parmenides ascribed a positive value
to weight, a negative value to lightness, but Kundera finds “the
lightness/weight opposition . . . the most mysterious, the most ambiguous of
all”. This presumably is the consequence of living in a post-Christian age
of moral relativity; also an age of unprecedented social and geographical
mobility for the individual, in spite of all the repressive machinery of
power politics. Freedom — freedom to pursue happiness in one’s own way — is
the ultimate value of modern culture, and freedom is surely “light” rather
than heavy. Burdens are heavy. But then, as Kundera reminds us, so is the
weight of a man’s body on a woman’s in the act of love. (Not, apparently,
the other way round: Kundera’s view of sexuality is undeniably macho.) “The
heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most
intense fulfilment.” The carefree philandering which Tomas enjoys is
associated with lightness, his compassion for Tereza’s needs with heaviness.
When she leaves him in Zurich for a couple of days,
he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths of the
future. On Monday he was hit by a weight the likes of which he had never
known. The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared with it.
For there is nothing heavier than compassion.
This feeling is what leads him to follow Tereza back into Czechoslovakia at
the cost of his career and ultimately his life. “He died as Tristan not as
Don Juan”, is Sabina’s epitaph on him. As for Tereza, she is by nature
committed to heaviness: “she took things too seriously, turning everything
into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance
of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness!” Her problem,
her leitmotif, is a dualistic split between soul and body. She sees her soul
as trapped inside a material body that all too often reminds her of her
mother, a coarse, resentful woman who made Tereza’s adolescence a misery by
her immodest speech and behaviour.
Thus although the characters’ lives are shaped by political events, they are
not determined by them. Tereza and Tomas return to Czechoslovakia for
emotional, not ideological reasons. He refuses to retract his article not as
a courageous act of political defiance, but more out of bloody-mindedness
and complicated feelings about his son, who is involved in the dissident
movement. He allows himself to sink in the social scale from surgeon to
window-cleaner cleaner partly because he secretly longs to be free from
responsibility, “to make heavy go light”. His and Tereza’s eventual deaths
are accidental — not the regime’s fault, but Tomas’s own. They are
meaningless deaths — like Franz’s. The death on which the narrative dwells
with most detail and emotional intensity is that of the dog Karenin.
Sabina lives more consistently by the code of lightness than Tomas, but her
repeated jilting of lovers, her restless movement from one place, one
relationship, to another, is seen as compulsive behaviour, punishing the
repressive father of her childhood. She leaves Franz “simply because she
felt like leaving him”. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge
on her? No, hers was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to
her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness being.”
This mysterious phrase which gives the novel its title seems to be very much
associated with the state of exile, since Sabina, unlike Tomas and Tereza,
never returns to Czechoslovakia. And since Sabina is an artist, whose views
on art often echo Kundera’s, one cannot help wondering whether the
“unbearable lightness of being” does not express some anxiety of the
novelist himself about the effect of exile on his own work. “The characters
in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities”, he writes, “each one has
crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.” In the case of Tomas and
Tereza it is a real, not a metaphorical border, and Kundera sometimes seems
to be straining to see or imagine what it is like on the other side.
The point came up in the conversation with McEwan, who asked, “Exile then, is
not a form of ‘unbearable lightness’?” To which Kundera replied, “Lightness,
yes, perhaps, but more bearable than unbearable”. Empirically this is
obviously true. There is no way in which Kundera could practise his art in
contemporary Czechoslovakia, while in his adopted France he is accepted and
respected as an important modern writer. Nevertheless, there is a
“lightness” about this new novel that an unsympathetic reader might describe
as slightness, or thinness. The characters are rather perfunctorily drawn,
with very few details of dress, physical appearance, domestic decor, etc.
The absence of such solidity of specification is of course a familiar
feature of one kind of postmodernist fiction but in a book of such length
and leisurely pace the reader cannot help hankering for it. What we get in
its place is the “metaphysical” commentary of the authorial voice —
speculations and generalizations about love and death and desire which
sometimes hover on the edge of the banal, if they do not actually fall into
it. “What is flirtation? One might say that it is behaviour leading another
to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that
possibility from being a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of
sexual intercourse without a guarantee.” Perhaps that sounds more profound
in Czech — or French — than it does in English, but it is not a strikingly
original thought in any language.
The English-speaking world was slow to recognize what a remarkable writer
Milan Kundera is, partly because the first English translation of The Joke
was a very bad one (a new authorized translation was published by Faber in
1983 and is now available in a Penguin edition). By a familiar irony it
seems likely that The Unbearable Lightness of Being will get much more
attention here than any of Kundera’s previous novels, although it is not his
best. It is less gripping than The Joke, less surprising than The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting. New readers should start with those books rather
than with this one; but readers who are already acquainted with Kundera’s
oeuvre will find much to admire and enjoy in The Unbearable Lightness of
Being. Part of it can be sampled together with two fine essays by Kundera
(one on Kafka and the other on the disappearance of central Europe as a
cultural entity) in the current issue of Granta.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Translated by Michael Henry Heim
314pp Faber £9 0571 13209X
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