“ Interaction of Love, History and Individual choice in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

My paper deals with intersection among love, history and individual choice in kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera’s themes are exile, identity, life beyond the border (art/ love / seriousness), history as continual return and the pleasure of a less important life. He takes up different human feelings and things and finds them opposite of what they appear to be. The ideal love turns out to be lust, lust into soul-searching, history into trifle and the serious into ridiculous, the sublime into the mundane and lofty mission into an excuse. In his novel of ideas which probes the plight of Czechoslovakia under the occupation of the former Soviet Union, the writer brings out the contradictions through the portraying of relations between Tomas-Tereza, Tomas-Sabina, Franz- Sabina etc.

History offers limited possibilities at a given point and human has to choose under the penalty of inactivity or inescapable end. The thin line fidelity and betrayal, conformism and individualism , Privacy and publicity, selfishness and objective attitude are taken up for critical scrutiny.

Milan Kundera is a novelist who has emerged from war-torn Europe and the totalitarian communism that crushed Czechoslovakia’s body and soul. His novels are not mere political tracts but attempts to unravel inescapable contradictions inherent in any human condition. He thinks that novel that doesn’t uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality. In his Art of Novel, he describes the intertwined history of novel and Europe. The route of the existential experience begins from a world of unlimited potential to the beginning of history, the dwindling of possibilities in the external world, the search for infinity in the human soul, its futility and into the domain of monstrous and unhelpful history .

Kundera’s themes are exile, identity, life beyond the border (art/ love / seriousness) history as continual return and the pleasure of a less important life. His novels take up different human feelings and things and find them opposite of what they appear to be. The ideal love turns out to be lust, lust into soul-searching, history into trifle and the serious into ridiculous, the sublime into the mundane and lofty mission into an excuse. In his novel, The unbearable Lightness of Being which is set in Czechoslovakia under the occupation of the former Soviet Union, the writer brings out the fact of a thing turning into its opposite.. He brings out the the contradictons of history, freedom and love through portraying of relations between Tomas-Tereza, Tomas-Sabina, Franz- Sabina etc. Jim Miller says that Kundera raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity.

Tereza is a girl who tries hard to please her mother who sees her guilty of robbing her freedom, ridicules her shyness about her body and does not allow her to lock herself in a bathroom to avoid the prurient interest of her step-father. Tereza has experienced a rupture with her mother who is domineering. She finds book and music as means of entering new world. She becomes a bar girl and falls in love with him by coincidences – Tomas, a book in his hands, Beethoven’s music etc. She wants to celebrate her uniqueness through her relationship with Tomas and does not mind his small infidelities in the beginning. She goes to Sabina’s studio, takes and gives some nude photographs. She even photographs Russian invasion and is advised to be independent by another woman photographer. She is like “her country , which stuttered, gasped for breath, could not speak”(71).

Kundera intersperses the history of Czechoslovakia with the fate of individual characters. Jan Prochazka, an émigré novelist’s private and casual remarks are made public by the spies and he is driven to illness and death. Tereza finds the world as a concentration camp where “the compete obliteration of privacy” takes place followed by brutality. In her home which is like a concentration camp for her, she stands before a mirror and ruminates whether her soul would survive if her body turned grotesque.

When Tereza smells Tomas’s acts if infidelity continue, she lives as a soul with him and sends her body in search of free love. Tomas sends her to climb Petrin Hill where people are shot to death out of their own choice . Tereza shrinks back from death in the last minute and fears that the strong Tomas would not forgive her cowardice or betrayal. She blames Tomas for telling her that “Love and sexuality have nothing in common “ ( 147). She starts an affair with an Engineer who traps her at the behest of the secret police in the form of a rescuer from her troubles in bar. She realizes that her betrayer is her body rather than her soul. She is afraid of her secret and the possible loss of love based on fidelity. “Loves are like empires . When the idea thy are founded on crumbles, they, too fade away”(164).

Tomas loses his job when he refuses to compromise over an article written by him, turns into a window washer rather than a betrayer. He is obsessed with the finding the uniqueness of every woman he meets not through her gait, culinary practice or artistic taste but through sexuality. In relation to a young woman he realizes that the chamber of his memory has no room for her who has been knocking at the gate. In case of Tereza, his love preceded without any necessity to uncover anything. The author-narrator says,

“love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory”(203).

Kundera writes that his characters are his “own unrealized possibilities’, He is attracted as well as repelled by them in an equal measure. He is fascinated by the border between love-mundaneness, betrayal- lack of will to reject it and the novel is not his confession but an investigation into the trap known as the world (215).

Tomas returns to Prague, listens to the nightmarish fears of Tereza regarding rejection by him and her ghostly face with holes in the place of eyes. He is profoundly moved and undisturbed by the fate of the planet or his country or his neighbors. To him love and sex are separable. He recalls the platonic myth that says that people are originally hermaphrodites until God split them into two and making love as the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”(233). He wonders whether he would not betray his ideal girl for the sake of Tereza.

Humans see fidelity and love as ideal and sex and infidelity as physical. Referring to the death of Yakov, Stalin’s son to escape censure over his dirt in a common latrine , the novelist sees it not as senseless as the deaths of the Germans and Russians in service of imperialism and Leader. Kundera sees shit and sexual love are related . He uses the term ‘Kitsch’ which means the complete denial of shit literally and figuratively and everything else that is seen as disgusting in life. The Soviet regime uses the gulag as a septic tank to dispose of its refuse. Totalitarian Kitsch discourages every show of individualism, every doubt and every irony.

Franz sees fidelity as a virtue and betrayal as a cardinal vice. Sabina sees betrayal as glamorous. Franz, the son of a Viennese mother –French father was a Swiss and appears as an epitome of Europe to Sabina. He finds music as freedom from words and find her more attractive by “superimposing the painful drama of her country on her person” (100).Sabina sees extremes as a hidden death wish in art and politics. Franz sees light as the Sun of righteousness and the flame of intellect. He and Sabina see darkness as the infinity and the refusal to see. She breaks from the fellow émigré politicals. The city of New York attracts her but repels Franz. Sabina his weakness is called goodness and his definition of love as renouncing of strength alienates her from him. While Franz sees truthful living as a public matter, she sees it as a private issue. Repelled by Franz’s need for mothering and to punish his intelligence, kindness and powerless strength, Sabina leaves for Paris. Until then her betrayals proved adventurous and what fell to her lot was not the burden but unbearable lightness of being”(118). Kundera queries “one could betray one’s parents, husband, country, love , but when parents, husband, country, and love are gone –what was left to betray? “(118) . When Sabina deserts him, Franz feel free and takes to a student-mistress.

Sabina’s kitsch of peaceful home takes her to a rich and old American couple in New York who provides a studio for her. The identity of kitsch lies in images, metaphors and vocabulary and it becomes powerless when its lies is found out. Franz , an idealist who lives for the imaginary eyes of the absentees seeks Sabina’s appreciation and joins a march to the Cambodian border to help the people, faces a cold reception and turns realistic. He gets mugged by miscreants, is flown home and dies in the hands of his first wife Marie- Claude whom he hates a lot.

Kundera criticizes that man takes his control over other creatures as his right and would not relish his slavery to an alien. Human’s possessiveness made him mechanical and insensitive to the lament of an animal or the grating of a wagon wheel. Our behavior is based on our needs and we are not sure about the share of emotions such as love, antipathy, charity or malice and the constant power play among humans. “Perhaps a man itched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize ( belatedly) to the cow” (278).

In the novel one also finds strange bond between the dog Karenin and Tomas-Tereza. Tereza gets angry when Tomas refers to her in the present perfect sense. Unlike a man, a dog does not become conscious of body-soul dichotomy. Tereza thinks that her love for Karenin that shows unconditional love is more than what she feel for Tomas. Lovelessness is due to unrealistic demands on the partner and the desire to change one’s partner. Tereza observes her husband Tomas reading letters from his son regularly and suspects him of infidelities. She regrets her mistake later on and for turning Tomas, a surgeon into a rustic by making him follow her from Zurich to Prague. an’s unhappiness is due to non -repeatability on linear time and missions taken up. Tomas says in the end of the novel , “Missions are stupid. I have no mission, No one has, And it’s terrific to realize you’re free, free of all missions (305).

Milan Kundera writes that human life occurs only once and in any given situation, we can take only one decision which is unique. History is akin to an individual’s life in this sense. There is only one history of the Czechs which will end one day and it is unrepeatable. In 1618, the Czech estates challenged the emperor in Vienna courageously, faced the thirty-year war and the near total destruction. After the Munich conference in 1938, the Czechs were made scapegoats to Hitler and their caution and capitulation led to their slavery. The Russian invasion in 1968 raised the death rate in the country, degradation of intellectuals and despair in body and soul of former Czechoslovakia. In the novel . Tomas thinks that the history of Europe or Czechs is unrepeatable. Is it as light as individual’s life ? Will mankind be wiser in its next life on another planet? An optimist believes in the less bloody history of mankind on planet number five.

Bob Corbett thinks that in a world of objective meaninglessness, one must fall into nihilism unless one’s acts recur eternally, thus giving our acts ‘weight., the weight of externally recurring choices…