The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is at once beautiful and base, philosophical and depraved, epiphanic and mundane; in a word, it is quintessentially postmodern. It is the story of two women, two men, and a dog, as well as several other marginal characters, including a pet pig. Set in Czechoslovakia around the 1968 Prague Spring (with later moments set in Switzerland and even the US), it is the story of what Kundera calls “The Grand March” as much as it is the intimate story of a marriage based in love but punctuated by infidelity. Kundera’s novel deconstructs the fundamental dialectics of human existence: love and sex, loyalty and betrayal, authentic art and kitsch, and of course, the titular lightness and weight.
This novel includes soaringly beautiful prose that grasp at the philosophical truths at the heart of humanity; it also wades through the everyday reality of sexuality, desire and the physical human body. I found myself inspired by Kundera’s narrative interruptions, only to be utterly disgusted shortly thereafter by his characters’ base thoughts and actions. And, I believe, this is his project: to examine “the irreconcilable duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience” (40) while inching ever closer to “the sweet lightness of being” (30). Kundera’s prose echo that of James Joyce—one of my personal favorites for his language experimentation and honest telling of the human experience—as the narrative takes the reader to the bathroom with his characters in one scene only to contemplate the meaning of life in the next. Ultimately, I loved Kundera’s project. I reveled in his philosophical interruptions of the narrative as he contemplates meaning vs lightness. Embedded in a parenthetical paragraph, Kundera links true meaning with lightness:
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence (139).
How utterly postmodern to conclude that human existence can, in fact, only be described with unanswerable questions. If this is true, then Kundera’s novel holds up a mirror to human experience, as it asks many questions which cannot be answered.
Also inextricably linked in The Unbearable Lightness of Being are the individual’s life and that of a nation. Writing in exile, Kundera wishes to remind his reader that even history is light, temporary, airy, just as the life of any given person is: “History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow” (223). And his novel demonstrates, through the microcosm of Tomas’s life, the liberation found when one embraces lightness. Tomas explains to Tereza near the novel’s end: “‘Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And its’ a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions’” (313). In other words, the weight of one’s life, the meaning, is synthetic and when one recognizes the contrived nature of that meaning, one is free.
At the heart of Kundera’s novel is the question of what leads to human happiness. Is it desire? Is it love? Kundera’s novel describes four personalities who experience various levels of freedom (happiness?). He describes them by the gaze which they desire: the gaze of the public, the gaze of “many known eyes,” the gaze of a beloved, and the gaze of “the imaginary eyes of those who are not present” (270). They are respectively the politicians and celebrities, the hosts and hostesses of grand gatherings, the insular marital couple, (four) the dreamers and artists. In addition to desire (in the form of gaze), Kundera’s novel concludes that humans desire repetition. And yet, “[h]uman time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition” (298). But by the close of his novel, I would argue that his protagonists all find some level of truth or clarity. Each finds freedom from that which weighs upon them; they find lightness to embrace the life before them. Is this what makes lightness “unbearable”? That one cannot be happy and also light? Or is it only in lightness, freedom, that any of us have a chance to embrace the happiness of our lives? [Considering the subject, I feel justified in asking unanswerable questions here.]
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is definitely a book that will haunt my thoughts for many years to come. It is a book from which a line will float to the surface of my thoughts randomly, and I will find myself contemplating kitsch and art, for example, as I load the dishwasher or fold the laundry. And this, this mixing of the highbrow with the everyday, in the lives of his readers as well as his characters, is what makes Kundera novel such a postmodern masterpiece. In addition to considering the existential nature of human experience, I found this book fascinatingly educational about the Prague Spring and Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia (I realized how little I knew about that place and time). I encourage anyone willing to embrace the adventure of reading a postmodern classic to pick up this book and let its words simmer.
A Few Great Passages:
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come” (8).
“In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm” (47-48).
“Our dreams prove that to imagine—to dream about things that have happened—is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten” (59).
“In the light of the incredible, the soul for the first time saw the body as something other than banal; for the first time it looked on the body with fascination: all the body’s matchless, inimitable, unique qualities had suddenly come to the fore. This was not the most ordinary of bodies (as the soul had regarded it until then); this was the most extraordinary body” (155).
“As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about” (221).
“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it” (289).
Bibliography:
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1984.
