The road not taken

Posted in ARTS to Pretentious Book Reviews by Lindy Wheatley on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 10:00 am

A person might leave their homeland for many reasons, economic opportunity or political persecution being chief among them. Disillusionment and a guest professorship at the University in Rennes at Bretagne, France led writer Milan Kundera to leave his native Czechoslovakia in 1975. They revoked his citizenship while we was gone.

At the end of 1967, Czechoslovakia was a Warsaw Pact nation under the red thumb of the U.S.S.R. In January of 1968, moderate Communist party members had finally accrued enough political clout and friends in high places to effect change through party elections. Thus Alexander Dubček became party leader and instituted sweeping reform measures that relaxed the party's grip on citizens' civil liberties, such as they were, and lifted restrictions on the media, speech and travel. This reform movement came to be known as the Prague Spring.

This ideological laxity lasted for seven months. Determining that the Czechs had deviated too far from hard-line Communist dogma toward Western democracy, the Soviet Union intervened. They sent tanks and over 200,000 troops into the sovereign nation to reclaim control and preserve the socialist system. Kundera played a large role in the Prague Spring reformation, which led to his dismissal from a teaching position and the banning of his books from Czechoslovakian libraries after the movement's failure.

His 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was set during this turbulent time in Czech history, mostly during the "normalization" period of the 1970s, when the Soviets rolled back the liberal reforms by imprisoning dissidents and reinstating censorship rules and government socialization. The political turmoil of this time has little to do with the novel's plot line, however. There is no plot. The civil unrest just serves as the backdrop for a philosophical discussion on two main ideas: eternal recurrence and the concept of lightness and weight as polar opposites.

Philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche posited that, if we consider time to be infinite, eternal recurrence is the idea that only a finite number of states or choices exist and that they must eventually occur again. However, since humans have only one lifetime, they can make their decisions only once and can never really know if their choices were the right ones because they can't wait around for a do-over. In Kundera's novel, this is known as the unbearable lightness of being.

The other theme is lightness versus weight. Just as good and evil or light and dark are opposites, they carry with them a value, positive or negative. Which one is weight? It means burdensome, but can also mean seriousness or responsibility. Lightness may bring to mind absolute freedom, but there is also a possible state of insignificance.  

Kundera uses the novel's four major characters to illustrate a spectrum of lightness and weight. The two characters most focused on, Tomas and Tereza, are on opposite sides of the spectrum near the center. Tomas is an award-winning surgeon, divorced, and living the carefree existence of a bachelor. His formulaic womanizing is prolific and continues even after he meets and marries innocent Tereza. After some time together, she knows that he takes every opportunity to cheat on her, yet when she confronts him, Tomas either vehemently denies it or shrugs his shoulders as if to say 'You knew this before you married me.'

Tereza is a heavy character, but not entirely. Ever faithful, she bears the burden of being the pedestal on which their love stands. Tomas is a character that is mostly light. He sincerely loves Tereza, but sees no need to put an end to his sexual escapades because he believes that sex and love have nothing to do with each other.

 "Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation but in the desire for shared sleep."

One of his many mistresses is an artist named Sabine. Her character is completely light. She rejects the Socialist Realism of art encouraged by the Communist regime as kitschy because it casts a romantic idealism on life under socialism instead of the repressive reality. She loves no one, thus she is completely free of the burden that comes with the responsibility of someone else's feelings. Her polar opposite is a married man named Franz with whom she has an affair. He is an extremely weighty character, loyal and dependent on the routine of mainstream society and completely tied down with responsibilities to the people in his life. He embraces kitsch in all its manifestations.

Kundera takes every opportunity to break into the story for a comment, to pose a new theory or otherwise hijack the reader's train of thought. He does not use his characters to drive a plot but as plastic army men, setting up situations to illustrate a point or build a bridge from one philosophical digression to another. He writes a six-page diatribe on God's digestive tract and the inevitability of divine shit. Then he tags base on the question of lightness and weight, like an obsessive compulsive tapping a doorknob six times before he leaves a room. Another essay involves Stalin's son, Yakov, and his suicide by barbed-wire electrocution in a German prisoner of war camp. Amongst Tomas and Tereza's relationship problems, Franz's love of parades and Sabine's bowler, Kundera explains how world history is similar to a human life.

"There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end as surely as Tomas's life, never to be repeated...History is as light as an individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow."

So it was written, so it is done. Tomas, Tereza and Franz die. Milan Kundera remains in France to this day and Czechoslovakia no longer exists. It won its freedom from Soviet control during the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Now it exists as two countries: Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is not the sort of book you take to the beach or keep in the bathroom to read on the toilet. While the chapters are short, the novel is mind-bending and heavy, so requires an iron force of will to complete. Best to read it during this lifetime. It's hard to say if you'll get another chance.

Rating: 3 of 5