Sunday Pages: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

A novel by Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera, the great Czech-born French novelist, died this past July at the age of 94.

His father was a prominent musician who ran the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, and for a while, it seemed like Milan would follow in his footsteps. But 1929 was a bad time to be born in Czechoslovakia. Kundera entered the world during the progressive, democratic First Czechoslovak Republic. He was four years old when the Nazis took control of Germany, Central Europe’s hegemonic power post World War One, leaving his small country the lone democracy in the region. He was nine during the Sudetenland crisis, nine and a half when Chamberlain promised “peace in our time,” a month shy of ten when the Czech government collapsed and became a Nazi rump state (the very Third Reich-sounding Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), and ten and a half when Hitler invaded Poland.

After the war, his country had the misfortune of being “liberated” by the Soviets, which merely transferred the Czech lands from the yoke of one homicidal madman to another. As a student, Kundera was an ardent Communist—the underlying concept of “we should all share resources so there is no want” is more appealing to young people with artistic tendencies than the zero-sum nastiness of unbridled capitalism—but he soon realized that the Marxist paradise he was promised did not, and could never, exist.

Kundera was not an activist in the way we understand the term. The more overtly political Czech writer of international renown was the playwright Václav Havel, and the two men did not get along, famously arguing about the efficacy of political protest. They were the Biggie and Tupac of the Czech literary scene. Their point of contention is summed up neatly by Benjamin Herman in his essay, “The Debate That Won’t Die: Havel And Kundera On Whether Protest Is Worthwhile”:

Does waging a public protest against a much more powerful oppressor serve any purpose if it is certain that the protest will (1) fail to attain its stated goal and (2) hurt the protester and his family? And if failure is certain, isn’t it possible that the protester’s primary motive is actually to make himself look heroic?

No, Kundera concludes. Havel calls bullshit on Kundera’s “pseudo-critical illusionism.” Kundera then accuses Havel of “moral exhibitionism.” (Havel wound up serving as the first president of the Czech Republic, which probably awards him the win in this particular debate.)

But Kundera chafed nonetheless under Communist rule, as brutal and soul-crushing as it was banal and stupid. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1950. His books were banned in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, the ever-so-brief attempt by Czechoslovakia to stand up to Russian tyranny. At the urging of his friend, the French publisher Claude Gallimard, he moved to France in 1975. Four years later, Czechoslovakia revoked his citizenship. He lived the rest of his long life in Paris, an eminent writer in reluctant exile.

I didn’t know any of this when I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being—Kundera’s best-known work, published in 1984, when he was 53—in 1992. I was a sophomore in college, an English major, and it was a novel that was fashionable, probably because the film had come out a few years prior.

What do I remember about that first encounter with The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Not much. The protagonist was a womanizing doctor-turned-window washer. There were philosophical flourishes. And there was the sexy woman in the bowler hat—the anachronistic haberdasherian fashion accessory that graces almost every cover of every edition of the book. The mental image I cooked up of Sabina in her lingerie and that hat was seared into my 19-year-old brain, an icon (in the Byzantine and not the social media sense) of literary eroticism.

I also remember this remarkable passage, which I still think about whenever I am high up in a Ferris wheel or an skyscraper’s observation deck:

Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts us and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

I had intended to write about Kundera right after he died, so I am more than half a year late. But I knew that to do his memory any justice, I had first to re-read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Would I, at age 51, find more in it than I did at 19?

The answer is a resounding Absolutně. For all the aforementioned philosophical flourishes so appealing to a college humanities student—the musings about eternal recurrence; the Parmenides catalog of opposites that give the novel theme and structure—this is a book about middle-aged people navigating long-term relationships, experiencing the highs and lows of love and marriage, reconciling their flaws, and making impulsive decisions that alter the course of their histories. Kundera is not a character in the book (he is all the characters!), but he is unquestionably its narrator, its Creator, and he is full of wit and wisdom and fascinating takes on all manner of things—things that, as a sophomore in college, were either outside my limited purview, way over my head, or both.

The Parmenides catalog of opposites, for example. Kundera is concerned with which, in the heavy/light polarity, is positive and which is negative. Parmenides says lightness is positive. Is it? From this recurrent discussion the title is realized:

And Sabina—what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

There are lovely meditations on love and loving, such as this one regarding Tomas, the philandering brain surgeon, and his eventual second wife, the younger Tereza:

His adventure with Tereza began at the exact point where his adventures with other women left off. It took place on the other side of the imperative that pushed him into conquest after conquest. He had no desire to uncover anything in Tereza. She had come to him uncovered. He had made love to her before he could grab for the imaginary scalpel he used to open the prostrate body of the world. Before he could start wondering what she would be like when they made love, he loved her.

Their love story did not begin until afterward: she fell ill and he was unable to send her home as he had the others. Kneeling by her as she lay sleeping in his bed, he realized that someone had sent her downstream in a bull rush basket. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with the metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Are metaphors inherently dangerous? I don’t know, but it’s a fun idea to consider.

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I don’t always agree with Kundera’s assessment of things. In many ways he is progressive and libertine for someone born when he was, but sometimes there is an old-fashioned misogynistic view that creeps in. Take the bowler hat. He has provided us with an iconic erotic image, as I’ve said, but his explanation for why the contrast of bowler hat and lingerie is sexy is, in my opinion, wildly wrong. He argues that the hat on Sabina’s head is a symbol of “violence” against her, an assault on her womanhood bordering on rape, that denies, violates, and ridicules her femininity. And, like, that’s not it at all! The long-out-of-style men’s hat is sexy when worn by Sabina, I believe, because, despite being a “hard masculine” object, the bowler fails to contain her sex appeal. It’s like trying to stop a locomotive with some patriotic bunting. Wearing the hat is not a joke or a humiliation, as Kundera suggests; it is a symbol of the erotic power she exudes. It says: See? Not even this ridiculous hat once worn by my grandfather can stem my sex appeal. And because the bowler fails to stem the sexiness, it enhances it. At least, that’s how I see it.

But the biggest takeaway, on this second read, is that these are characters living, or trying to live, under a dictatorship that is both petty and oppressive. There is a scene involving Tomas being interrogated by the secret police for something trivial and dumb that happened ages ago. That part did not stick with College Me at all. In 1992, a few years after the Velvet Revolution, tyrannical governments seemed like an artifact from the past: a hunk of chipped stone found in some boring museum, a tool used by primitive man that would never be relevant again. Prague was the first city in Continental Europe that I visited. That was in 1998, well after the American expats had discovered the place, but still in time for beer—pivo, the best on earth—to cost just 18 cents a half-litre. One night I bought a round for the entire bar, because I’d always wanted to do that. The bill was less than ten dollars.

In 2024, alas, petty, oppressive dictatorships are again on the rise—not just in Europe, but here, in the United States. One of the questions without an answer Kundera explores in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is whether it is better to flee from such odious autocracies or stay to resist them, even if that means loss of station, prison, or death. How many of us would have made the choice Alexei Navalny made? Not me, I don’t think.

Reading through especially Part Six of the novel, titled “The Grand March,” I found myself musing about, and gaining more insight into, MAGA—what it is, what it means, what it might have in store for us:

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Artlessness

My friend LB has said, and I agree, that the MAGA movement is characterized by its artlessness. There is a certain style, for sure. Kundera would call it “MAGA kitsch.” Red hat, white shirt, red tie, blue suit, gold toilet. Ostentation of decor, and of plastic surgery. The movement is led by failed artists, people who, like Hitler, wanted to make their name in some or other art form, failed miserably, and transmuted that failure into vengefulness. For the last eight years Trump has collected these hateful, damaged misfits, the Stephen Millers of the world, and in a second term would deploy them to deleterious effect on the rest of us.

About Sabina, the painter in the bowler hat, Kundera writes:

At the time, she had thought that only in the Communist world could such musical barbarism reign supreme. Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.

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Rallies

Still, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, MAGA zombies turn up at rallies, listening to Dear Leader ramble and rant. Here is Kundera, again writing about Sabina:

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.

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Kitsch

Kundera devotes half a section of the novel explaining what “kitsch” really means. In short, it is an idealized fantasy world in which defecation does not exist. There is no excrement, nothing bad. Nobody poops. Shit—symbolizing the reality of life, and also therefore true creativity—is a theme in this section of the book.

Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be faithful and multiply.”

In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.

And, a few paragraphs later:

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all questions are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.

MAGA kitsch, then, is a byproduct of the fairy tale the True Believers tell themselves: that Trump is here to save us, and to save the children; that the Deep State is against him, as well as the globalists, and George Soros, and Big Pharma, and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce; that Joe Biden is the head of a crime family; that Trump sacrificed his wealth to give back to the people he loves so well; and so on. Once questioned, this world immediately falls apart. The avatar of MAGA kitsch is a rendering of Trump and Jesus, or Trump as Jesus.

And, finally…

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Death Cult

Once again, it is Sabina who is the oracle:

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina’s distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

Perhaps that veiled longing for death explains the MAGA reluctance to wear masks, to get vaccinated, to ban automatic weapons, to accept the results of democratic elections.

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Is life a one-shot-deal, a dress rehearsal that doubles as the sole performance of the play? Or does everything recur in a cycle of eternal return, the Nietzschean concept that inspired Kundera’s novel? Is time linear, or is it, as True Detective tells us, a flat circle? Is fascist takeover thus inevitable? Is that why 2024 feels so significant historically? Does that explain our collective dread? Or can humankind evolve—break out of the cycle, the Yeatsian gyre, the swirling drain of the toilet of the totalitarian kitsch gulag? Is unbearable lightness a good thing or a bad thing?

Although this does not answer these questions, I’ll give Kundera the last word: “[T]here is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

The echoes may fade, but they never die.

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ICYMI

The Five 8 “neat” this week:

I was a guest on The Weekend Show, Anthony Davis’s program on the Meidas Touch network:

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Photo credit: poster of the movie.