The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A long time ago, while still studying Czech, I decided to devote half my master’s thesis to this venerable Franco-Czech writer, an announcement met with sharp criticism from a few other burgeoning scholars, all of whom were women.  They could not quite believe that I, ostensibly an open–minded fellow if a bit carefree, was going to allot a considerable amount of time to such a “sexist.”  “I cannot stand him,” said one particularly disgusted student who happened to attend a few of my classes, “I simply cannot stand him.”  Her small, pretty nose twitched as she said this (the sign of true contempt), but she never explained why she found his oeuvre so intolerable.  Yet I understood why then, and the matter is even clearer to me now in re–examining his most famous novel.

Waves of politics and philosophy undulate through The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but at the core swims a young couple, Tomas and Tereza, who are trying to make sense of that most human condition of all, morality.  They are joined in their quest by two more main characters: Sabina, who is Tomas’s lover, and Franz, who is also Sabina’s lover.  The four live in awareness of one another, but perhaps not in acceptance, and each embodies, with his or her profession, one field of human knowledge.  Franz is a university professor and the most distant from the incredible ecstasy of art; he finds solace in politicized protests and sewn–on labels such as “dissident,” “immigrant,” and “radical change.”  Tomas is a physician and an inveterate rake, but his aesthetic sense perseveres through bouts of wanton behavior and even justifies his emotional immaturity in a German aphorism.  Tomas is clearly superior to Franz in every way, and the reader cannot but smirk when Franz feels burdened by his Philistine wife and bourgeois existence, while Tomas continues to enjoy whatever skirt he can crawl his way under.  Sabina and Tereza, meanwhile, are slabs from the same quarry.  They even pursue variants of the same vocation: Sabina is a painter and Tereza a professional photographer.  They are the pictures for Tomas’s captions, the film for his voiceover.  And both of them adore Tomas for his alleged strength and freedom of spirit, yet acknowledge that these traits only cloak a fear to commit, a fear to love completely and absolutely, and that most primal of male anxieties, the fear of giving up all the earth’s women to receive, in return, only one.  How can one woman possibly compensate for the plenitude of all the rest?  In a way, this is the novel’s essential question.  One may do well to substitute “life” or “soul” for “woman” and ask the question again.                

If all this seems vague and meandering, think of it as a symphony.  After all, that is how Kundera, the son of a well–known Czech musicologist, loves to characterize his works.  He himself once studied composition, and musical references, liner notes, and tidbits of musical history are scattered throughout his writings.  He is particularly fond of the granddaddy of bombast, and a famous quote from the musical genius is repeated throughout the novel.   The plot, if one may call it that, is furnished by the events of the Prague Spring and its aftermath.  The historical happenings are as meaningless for the characters as stage props.  They may stumble and injure themselves on them, even mortally, but nothing can ingress their substance, because the substance of each of them (except, arguably, that of Franz) is entirely outside of any plot or material life.  Someone at one point or another must have already dubbed The Unbearable Lightness of Being a “waltz of souls,” or something to that effect.  If no one has, then I will be happy to use that designation.

On the back cover of the first English version of the novel (translated by this renowned Slavist), one reviewer calls Kundera “an intellectual heavyweight,” which, in my humble opinion, he most certainly is.  But the philosophy in the novel is threadbare, and can be whittled down to the simple statement: if our decisions have no consequences because they repeat infinitely, are we freer or more enslaved?  The question is worth asking, and a topic for students of ethics.  But more important is whether one life, or soul, or woman (which, if she is loved completely and absolutely, can be a life or soul) can matter in the face of churning time.  These characters, called in some places “Kundera's quartet,” represent science, academe, art, and journalism (Tereza’s photographs inevitably chronicle the tumult of 1968), with Soviet tanks providing the military segment.  They become the polyphony of Czech society itself, although it doesn’t need to be Czechoslovakia or 1968  for us to get the idea.  Woven between and among things they could not possibly impact or control, they are both triumphant and trampled underfoot.  They both sublimate and disintegrate, and sometimes it is hard to predict exactly how the fates will turn given all the decisions that have to be made along the way.  A constant pendulum between light and heavy, which may explain the oxymoron of the novel’s title.
             
What then of Kundera the “sexist”?  If you are familiar with Kundera’s ten works of prose fiction, you know that he likely sides with the Don Juans of life, perhaps being one himself, although that needn’t concern us here.  It is women, however, that he sees differently.  He believes, or will have us believe, that women were more liberated before the sexual revolution because they retained their mystique.  Does anyone, he might ask, ever compose odes to a woman’s beauty any more?  Can love for a woman in Western society ever be separated from enjoying her womanhood without inducing mockery?  In a way, such discourse is an oversimplification, because the liberation of women over the last hundred years has to do with much more than sex.  But Kundera is steadfast in his portrayals of modern women: he sees them as equals, yet society certainly does not.  He gives them as much intelligence and fortitude as his male characters then watches them fail.  Whether this makes him a sadist, a sexist, or someone who yearns for the days when women and love could be safely placed above lascivious urges, is a matter of perspective.  Sabina and Tereza are the true heroes of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  They are braver and smarter than everyone else in the novel, but society expects less talent and more prudence on their part.  And so they fail.  And had they succeeded, they might have spared us a lot of nose–twitching.

Cosmos

There was an oppressive profusion of possible links and clues.  How many sentences can be composed with the twenty–six letters of the alphabet?  How many meanings could be deduced from these hundreds of weeds, clumps of earth, and other details?

It was, I believe, Robbe-Grillet who said that the nouveau roman movement of the 1950s (and, by extension, the modern novel) was simply an attempt to take the detective novel seriously.  The product of this manifesto are books such as this recent masterpiece.  Modern readers no longer have any patience for the vaguely connected reflections of the artist and crave a throbbing plot and explanations as complete as a jigsaw, which, I can say without fear of perjury, is a desire that afflicts every one of us from time to time.  Things must fit together, not just fall apart.  And yet sometimes, as in Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos, there is too much fitting.   

Herein lies Witold’s problem (Witold is also the name of the protagonist): he and his fellow traveler Fuchs have come across a hanged sparrow, “too high for it to have been done by anyone but an adult.”  Witold’s subsequent attempts to explain this occurrence leads him to suspect everything and everyone. “In spite of myself,” he says, “I started working out shapes and relationships ... what attracted me about these things was one thing’s being behind another.”  Thus begin the makings of the reluctant sleuth: an otherwise uninformed narrator hurled willy–nilly into the realm of crime and uncertainty, a plot quite in keeping with detective fiction conventions.  “Looking at one point masks everything else,” he continues, “when we stare at a single point on a map we are quite aware that others elude us,” because apart from that point perhaps, “everything is happening on the same level.”  This is of course the antithesis of what a detective is supposed to be doing: that is, configuring a “sort of pattern” within all that he sees, “a kind of confused message [which] could be divined in the series of events.”  “How many ‘almosts’ had I not come across?” laments Witold, who concludes that “there is a sort of excess about reality, and after a certain point it can become intolerable” — an admission not terribly distant from the “ineluctable modality of the visible” that Stephen Dedalus comes to accept.

Witold’s bizarre decision to hang Lena’s cat is important for three reasons.  First, Witold mocks the evil precedent of the bastard son and eventual parricide Smerdyakov, who, as a boy, hanged cats and likely tortured other animals (Witold himself is not evil, despite his action).  Second, our narrator is now a murderer, and the motive for the crime appears to be rather extraordinary.  In Witold’s case, “strangling her [Lena’s] beloved cat had brought me closer to her.”  But the third reason is a linguistic one: the cat’s murder denotes an attempt on Witold’s part to speak Lena’s “language.”  In other words, it has a similar and comparative value to the hanging of the sparrow and might therefore, in relation to this first hanging, signify something of greater importance to Lena (this argument will be familiar to certain linguists).  If what the dead sparrow signifies to Witold were different than what it signified to Lena, one might assume that the linguistic unit of a “hanged sparrow” did not share a common definition for both persons; there appears to be, however, an agreed definition of the linguistic unit “hanged cat.”  Should there “always [be] the same act of hanging, though the object changes”  — and we have several hangings in the novel (the sparrow, allegedly the chicken, a piece of wood, the cat, and, finally, Louis) — then Witold’s concatenation of these events would be based mostly on the fact that they are all hangings and not simply murders, thus supporting this value definition. 

While a reconciliation of the various hangings in Cosmos is logical, we realize that, at the same time, these are separate occurrences (the sparrow, for example, was not hanged several times).  For that reason, Witold seems to find himself caught between linguistic units, since

I [Witold] felt myself to be suspended between those two poles [the dead bird and the ‘hanged’ piece of wood], so to speak, and our sitting together at the table under the lamp here seemed to have a special significance ‘in relation to’ the bird and the bit of wood .... they were two futilities and we were in between them.  

They are ‘futilities’ because “each and every object is a huge army, an inexhaustible host”: each person’s interpretation is bound to vary, if only minutely at times.  The point is such a basic linguistic premise that it almost appears ridiculous to return to it continuously.  But Gombrowicz is well aware of  this convention of (good) detective fiction, where all the necessary events or facts are present within its pages, and simply require ordering and comprehension.  The reader feels cheated when, upon finally reaching the much–desired solution, he finds that a key facet of that solution lurked in certain events and facts to which he had not been made privy.

If there is an ontology in the novel, it is that the sleuth’s task is to bypass the obvious, to avoid the sententious rebuff “one is what one is” and to assume that “there was always something behind everything.”  Yet the number of possible links is practically infinite, so even if we “have spotted one sign ... how many more [which] we had not spotted might be concealed in the natural order of things?"  Which makes “had it really no relation to me? Who could tell?” more than just a plausible epigraph to Cosmos, but a lovely conundrum that modern literature is finally learning to answer rather than avoid.

Kira

Back in the golden days of necromancers and exorcists, a certain subsection of people was thought to be steered by unspeakable things.  They would rave and rant, act irresponsibly and unpredictably, and smash apart relationships, families, homes, and dreams.  Having successfully isolated themselves from everyone else, including those who loved them and wished them only happiness, they (collectively termed “the possessed”) would then almost invariably turn towards bolder violations of the law.  Idle hands are the Devil’s work, the Devil made me do it, I was not myself, and so forth.  And because we cannot possibly match wits with Old Nick, many of them met horrible deaths at the hands of inquisitors, mobs, and other enforcement teams.  Now it is believed that no demons were ever involved.  Brain damage and syphilis have replaced Beelzebub and succubus, and while these poor people (now known as “the mentally ill”) have not become any less helpless, society at large has become more empowered.  Lock up them in a sanitarium, apply copious amounts of uppers and downers in some secret binary combination, scare them straight with pictures of ink blots, and discharge them back into the world benumbed but docile.  Surely, they are many who are helped by modern science’s tools and techniques, but many others (American streets are often their residence) are set free of everything except themselves.  As a rule, they have only one or two goals in mind.  But these goals are necessarily unattainable, because they and their goals are so far from one another as to be in different worlds.  That they try nonetheless to achieve these aims, at whatever the cost, has become one of the most famous definitions of insanity.

Ole Christian Madsen’s Kira is about a woman (Stine Stengade), a young vibrant mother and wife, who is coming home.  We learn very early on where she spent the last year, and why her two little boys cannot possibly understand.  Her tall, handsome, praying mantis of a husband Mads (Lars Mikkelsen) is all too eager to have her back, perhaps because he wants to move on from some other part of his life, perhaps because he is tired of answering his children’s questions, but also because he really does love her.  He treats her to an old–fashioned hero’s welcome, as if she had been in a war and returned home decorated and revered.  Things turn predictably sour and the excuses and embarrassment, the sudden end to an otherwise civilized gathering, all of it comes rushing back.  And when Kira, with the utmost sincerity, threatens the life of their young and pretty au pair, we know why Mads looks and acts like a man of infinite burdens.  There is, of course, more to this story.  Kira is half-Swedish, and that Swedish half has little to do with his family now, preferring the company of frivolous women and cold drinks.  The chasm between father and daughter has widened to such a point that everyone – including, most unforgivably, Mads himself – sees Kira as the one at fault (after all, Kira’s father is morose, selfish and fractious, but at least he’s perfectly sane).  As such, Mads treats Kira like a delinquent and grounds her.  And just like a recalcitrant teenager, she then proceeds to doll herself up, wander into a bar, and take up conversation with a cynical Swede who is convinced that he will never again have a one night stand with a beautiful woman.  The next day, Kira calls Mads from Malmö to inform him that the Swede was wrong.

After a brief period of mourning and accusations, an uneasy truce is reached.  The upshot is that Mads needs to hold a business dinner and Kira wants to organize it.  All she wants is to be a good mother and wife, and that is precisely the one thing she is most incapable of doing.  She organizes it and Mads holds his breath, although by now he probably has been holding it for years.  Which brings us to the last part of the film, so remarkable and right in every way that I am loath to reveal anything.  I will just say that Kira writes a big, bold letter – as if, in fact, she were writing on an asylum wall – to her husband and is asked by a stranger whether she is mad.  The self-awareness of being mad is, we are told, impossible for the truly mad, but Kira’s response and subsequent behavior are quite interesting.  From here, a very good reason emerges for her illness (her father, bless his soul, has nothing to do with it); and, indeed, the usual English title is Kira’s reason: a love story.  The original Danish, however, is simply A love story, which is far more accurate.

The Dead

He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the head of his hearers .... they would think he was airing his superior education.

How likely are those gathered for Christmas dinner in this famous tale to comprehend Gabriel Conroy's postprandial speech?  In his opinion, not at all.  How can he talk about something which doesn't interest him to people who are so obviously not on his cloudy plateau of learning?  What could he possibly do or say that would put both him and his audience at ease?  Since they have nothing in common, he will either betray his own truth or the truth of those around him.  But Gabriel's day is governed by untruth and the harsh odor of an undying passion, and no aspect of his existence is left sacred or undisturbed.  Until his wife's confession he remains, however, the only true orator in the story; that will change with mention of the curious immortal Michael Furey.

Gabriel believed, or at least was willing to say, that "literature was above politics" (a quote repeatedly attributed to Joyce himself), and for that splendid reason, kept his name and newspaper column unassociated and this important principle unuttered.  With Miss Ivors, for example, he "could not risk a grandiose phrase" because it would presumably come off as insincere.  His love for literature naturally propels him towards the richer European traditions and their languages, and, subsequently, he resents what he sees as Irish parochialism and the insufficiency of being monoglot.  Like Joyce, he is  tired of simply being Irish, and deposits truth in distant, foreign lands.  The term "West Briton" stems from his work at The Daily Express, but the fact that Miss Ivors reiterates it following his praise of Europe and disparagement of Ireland shows her keen psychology: she will not accord him his desired status, that of a "European."  He fears he might never escape this despicable parochialism.  When Gretta asks him "what words" he had had with Miss Ivors, he responds: "no words ... no words ... only she wanted me to go for a trip to the west of Ireland."  Gabriel's tribute to his aunts is perhaps fake, or perhaps he takes pains to mention nothing save their so-called 'admirable' qualities.  Otherwise, they were "only two ignorant old women."  After the spinster Julia's rendition of "Arrayed for the Bridal," Gabriel seizes her hand in congratulatory ecstasy, "shaking it where words failed him," and offers compliments on her performance:

I never heard your voice as it is to-night.  Now!  Would you believe that now?  That's the truth.  Upon my word and honour that's the truth.

The truth is that he couldn't care less about his batty aunts' modest capabilities, and it is no coincidence that his speech is directly preceded by the story of the monks of Mount Melleray.  These monks never speak because they seek to atone "for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world."  Hardly an original concept, this "outside world" of "sins" and lies, and an inner world of truth, silentium est aureum, and so forth.  And Gabriel, unlike his creator, is hardly an original.

The speech itself is laden with pious observations.  "We are living in a sceptical and ... thought-tormented age," Gabriel says, then adds that the past days, "might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days."  He has just held forth on "genuine warm-hearted courteous  Irish hospitality," and fearlessly so; his truth has nothing to do with custom, it is in fact the shunning thereof, the break with the expected that evokes his anti-patriotism.  The "thought-tormented age," the present climate of doubt and revolt, does not dovetail with the romantic quirks he reveals near the narrative's end, where his speech becomes an almost purely rhetorical construct tinged with vindictiveness towards those who might dare question his interpretation of values.  When he mentions "those dead and gone, great ones whose fame the world will not let willingly die," he is taken to mean the idols of his aunts and their generation.  But he is really thinking of his own masters, such as Browning.  As he does to the living, Gabriel accords to the dead a certain hierarchy, what can be loosely termed an aesthetic index, by which he measures those around him.  And so he would never imagine a scene like the story's ultimate, because Michael Furey is supposed to be lost in oblivion.  Someone like Michael Furey, or any trivial, rustic aspect of life cannot possibly be true.  "Unless he tells a lie," this simple or parochial emphasis on true things (a predilection for honesty in contrast to the current "sceptical" times), could very well summarize the falseness in Gabriel's discourse.

The Lass of Aughrim dominates the last third of the story, but initially Gabriel reminisces about his love for Gretta.  His passionate letters contain quotes such as, "why is it that words like these seem to me dull and cold?  Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"  The truest part of Gabriel in The Dead comprises his tender inner thoughts that invariably flow towards his wife, and, if one allows Gabriel's voice or at least a great part of his consciousness to seep through Joyce's lines, the discourse in these pages is lyrical and strong.  His inability or unwillingness to verbalize his relationship with his wife provides two effects: he retains his luster within him, and he fails to understand Gretta's own passion.  While he fretted about his speech, "the indelicate clacking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his," and yet Michael Furey is unquestionably "delicate."  Gretta turns out to be "country cute" as Gabriel's mother had warned him, and this "overeducated"  Irishman now sees himself as

a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts ... a pitiable fatuous fellow.

His own repository of truth, his wife, proves itself to some extent a lie, and its cause is a part of culture he has hitherto denounced openly.  The immortal power of the silent dead, and their famous equation with the living in the story's final line, indicates the vacuity of bold and learned words when compared to the few, small and perhaps simple passions, much like those of a child, that linger forever in memory.

Amsterdam

Goethe famously claimed to have read this book in five and a half hours, a whole morning. When asked whether authoring a great novel or a great poem would be more satisfying, a renowned critic opted for verse because he could sit down with a glass of scotch in his study and finish the deed between dinner and bed.  And while each of us must decide his own threshold of sustained artistic pleasure, with our poor attention span constantly assailed by news bytes masquerading as watersheds, its natural length seems to be about two and a half to three hours.  There is something inherently sumptuous about a literary work that can be read and enjoyed in the same time as an opera, play, or artistic film.  A major asset of the 1998 Booker Prize winner is precisely this feeling of round edges.  The circle, beginning with two bad men and excessive ambition, will certainly be completed.  Since the only reference to the Dutch city involves a very controversial procedure, even the news–bitten reader understands that death awaits one of the co–protagonists, who in no small irony begin their fatidic march at the funeral of a shared lover.

Several years past their forties, Clive and Vernon are long–time friends and not unremittingly bad.  But too many of their own concerns clutter their living space.  Clive can barely leave his privileged residence to mingle with the rabble, and has to turn to the whims of nature to inspire himself to Europe's next great symphony (reminiscent of the central motif, literally and figuratively, of this film).  Vernon on the other hand is a gambler of souls, making money off reputations and what readers of his tabloid could possibly be led to believe.  Snippets of boardroom banter reveal that he is neither respected nor feared by his staff, and that his life has been wasted on the petty faults of the famous.  A clear dichotomy between the artist and the huckster, except that our dear composer is an unrepentant boor and snob (there is an excellent passage in which he "dares" to think of himself as a "genius").  He is also, like his yellow newsman chum, sentimentally attached to the late and lovely Molly Lane.  Funerals of lovers, especially those loved in a distant past, are convenient moments to mull over the deceased's infidelities, promiscuity and forks in the road.  Molly's husband George, unpleasantly aware that no fewer than three mourners had prior enjoyment of his companion, sets the two friends upon the third, an MP of rising importance and unaccountable physical repulsiveness.  What did Molly see in him? They both stare and frown and shake their heads as all boys do when they see a pretty girl with anything less than an Adonis.  Ah, but George knows what.  And he has the pictures to prove it.

It is here that George, McEwan, and the reader wisely lean back and watch the spectacle run its course.  Each of our protagonists is a misanthrope (a surly and unproductive Clive is even shrouded in "misanthropic gloom" on a train ride): Vernon has to make his readers hate celebrities in order to get them to read about their hatefulness, and ends up hating everyone except Molly (he has always, it should be said, hated himself), while Clive hates people because they were not assigned the honor of composing the symphony of Europe and all they do is prevent him from fulfilling his destiny.  In time, hate becomes the mantra for the entire novel, and we know that hate is only rewarded in one way.  And if it isn't, then we have just wasted our expectations on one of most uniformly detestable casts of characters in recent memory.  What follows is both perfectly predictable and perfectly preposterous.  Considering the "moral choices" that the two men make (a point given emphasis in most blurbs on the novel), the results merit no questioning.  Just deserts could not be stamped more clearly on their lurching backs.  About two–thirds through Amsterdam, Molly vanishes into a corner of both her former lovers' minds to remain beautiful and haunting forever and ever.  With her go the youth and youthful frivolity of two souls whose idea of facing adulthood is watching a grown man squirm.