that Kundera follows an "esthetic of the palimpsest." The word "palimpsest" is particularly apt. In the Middle Ages, because writing materials were so scarce, scribes would often wash the writing off a piece of parchment and use the parchment again and again. With new techniques of reading, contemporary scholars are able to read each level of the manuscript. Thus, while a manuscript will appear to be of a particular text, in reality there are many texts hidden behind the apparent one. Sabina's paintings then call to mind the notion of the palimpsest, the idea that there are other meanings hiding behind the apparent ones.

What Sabina accidentally discovers points to the essential problem of realistic representative art. It is dishonest in an insidious way. "Realistic" painting is not real; rather, it covers, hides, tricks the viewer through artifice to believe that what he or she sees is truth. For example, an artist will use the idea of perspective to create what seems to be a three-dimensional world. Thus, one object might appear to be farther away from the viewer than another object. In reality, both objects are exactly the same distance from the viewer. Modernist painters rebelled against realistic art for just this reason. In a very famous painting (The Treason of Pictures), the artist Rene Magritte painted a picture of a pipe with the words below it, "This is not a pipe." At first, this seems silly to the viewer: of course it is a pipe! Anyone would recognize it as such. At second thought, however, the viewer must admit that, no, what he or she is seeing is a picture, not a pipe at all. Thus, even the most realistic of paintings hides a host of other possible meanings behind its surface.

If painting is unable to depict the truth, what then of photography? Does it not faithfully capture the moment, preserving what really happened in the past? Kundera also explores this question in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, using Tereza's photography of the 1968 Soviet invasion as his example. He seems to be telling his reader that photographs do offer a way of revealing the truth of a situation. He writes,

All previous crimes of the Russian Empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles. . . . remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications. Not so the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which both stills and motion pictures are stored in archives throughout the world.

Kundera continues by describing the bravery of the Czech photographers, and their awareness of their responsibility of preserving this moment for the future. Nevertheless, later in the book Kundera reveals that even photographs are much more complicated than they might first appear. They serve to cover complexity rather than reveal it. Many chapters after the invasion, Tereza realizes that photographs of the invasion are being used by the new repressive regime to identify the dissidents and thus provide evidence for their punishment. What this reveals is the irrelevance of intention in the creation of an image. The truth the Czech photographers intend to preserve is not the same truth the government derives from the photos. All the good intentions in the world cannot change the fact that these same photographs become the primary means through which people are betrayed.

How then should a reader approach The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Sabina's paintings and Tereza's photographs reveal that Kundera's intentions for his novel are probably irrelevant. They also suggest that the smooth surface of the love story hides and distorts what happens beneath that story. Like a drip of red paint, Kundera's authorial intrusions constantly remind readers that the book in front of them is a book, not reality.

It would be comforting to stop here, to simply acknowledge that Kundera is warning his audience to look past the superficial kitsch of culture to ask the essential questions of existence. Deconstruction is not a comfortable theory, however, in that it reveals that all representation is just representation, not truth. In the case of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera provides so many levels that the reader thinks he or she must finally have arrived at meaning, if nowhere else than in the authorial intrusion, in which Kundera speaks directly to the reader. But is this Kundera speaking to the reader? Or is it yet just another representation, a representation of Kundera written by Kundera nearly two decades ago? And what of Sabina's paintings? Certainly the reader believes that the world revealed in the crack is the truth. But again, even the world behind the surface of Sabina's paintings is still more representation. Even more unsettling is this: Sabina's paintings do not exist in reality, no matter how clearly the reader envisions them. The surface painting and the painting below the surface are not paintings at all but black ink on white paper, words on the page, just as Magritte's pipe is not a pipe and Sabina's bowler hat is not a bowler hat. Kundera playfully reminds his reader with this enigmatic symbol that all representation is just representation, and, as it attempts to reveal, it necessarily conceals.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, Critical Essay on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in Novels for Students, Gale, 2003.

Milan Kundera is a major contemporary French/Czech writer who has succeeded in communicating the East European experience of life under totalitarian communism to a wide international public. Most recently, he has used his experience of life both in the East and in the West for commenting on contemporary Western civilization. Milan Kundera's knowledge of life in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule has led him to important insights regarding the human condition of people living both in the East and in the West. Since Kundera moved to France in 1975, he has become an author of considerable international renown.

In Czechoslovakia after World War II, Kundera was a member of the young, idealist communist generation who were trying to bring about a "paradise on Earth," a communist utopia. It was not until their middle age that they realised that the communist regime had abused their idealism and that they had brought their nation into subjugation. This realisation resulted in a feeling of guilt which Milan Kundera has been trying to exorcise by his literary work in which, especially after leaving for the West, he has been able, by contrasting the Western and the East European experience, to elucidate important aspects of contemporary human existence. Kundera's mature work serves as a warning: the author argues that human perception is flawed and that human beings fall prey to false interpretations of reality. The primary impulse for this cognitive scepticism is undoubtedly Kundera's traumatic experience of his younger years when he uncritically supported communist ideology. While he lived in Czechoslovakia, Kundera was always in the forefront of indigenous public debate on cultural issues. In the 1950s, he published lyrical poetry which while conforming to the demands of official communist literary style of "socialist realism" highlighted the importance of individual personal experience. Later, Kundera came to abhor lyricism and sentimentality.

In his own words, he "found himself" as a writer when, in the mid-1960s, he wrote short stories, later gathered in Laughable Loves. These are miniature dramas of intimate human relationships. Most of these short stories are based on bittersweet anecdotes which deal with sexual relations of two or three characters. Kundera believes that looking at people through the prism of erotic relationships reveals much about human nature. Sex and love-making is an important instrument for Kundera which enables him to delve into the minds of his characters in all his mature works.

Many Czech critics regard Kundera's first novel, Zert (The Joke) as his finest achievement. Here Kundera develops for the first time his most important theme: the warning that it is impossible to understand and control reality. The novel is a story of a young communist student, Ludvík Jahn, who, out of frustration that he cannot get a female-fellow student into bed, sends her a postcard in which he mocks her political beliefs. The postcard is intercepted and Ludvík is punished by being expelled from university and sent to work in the mines. Throughout his later life, Ludvík bears a grudge against all his former fellow students who voted for his expulsion. He plans an intricate revenge. However, it is impossible to enter the same river twice and Ludvík's plan misfires: although he prides himself on his intellectual capacity, his perception of reality is just as flawed as the perception of the "emotional" and "lyrical" women whom he despises. The structure of the novel is pluralist and polyphonic: the author compares and contrasts the testimonies of a number of different protagonists, thus forcing the reader to come to the conclusion that reality is unknowable. Most Western critics saw The Joke primarily as a criticism of Stalinist communism, yet Kundera rightly rejected such a simplistic interpretation.

Kundera further developed his writing style particularly in his novels Kniha smíchu a za-pomneni (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), which made his name in the West in the 1980s. He argues that he has invented a new method of writing a novel. His major works written since the 1980s consist of a series of texts which are bound together by a number of salient themes rather than by the narrative itself. These themes are examined and analysed by means of variations, like in a musical composition.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a major theme when analysing people's insufficiences in perceiving reality, is forgetting. One of the main characters of the novel, Czech emigré Tamina, who leads a meaningless and isolated existence in France, is trying desperately and unsuccessfully to reconstruct her life in Czechoslovakia with her now dead husband. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a work which was hailed in the West as a masterpiece, Kundera's preoccupations with insufficiencies of perception, lyricism, privacy and misunderstanding are re-examined in a polyphonic structure with a more traditional narrative line. It is a story of two Czech emigrés, Tomáš and Tereza who return to communist Czechoslovakia on an impulse and suffer the consequences.

In his later works, Kundera deals with various frustrating features of human behaviour, and again returns to the themes of privacy, individuality, perception and herd behaviour. Immortality, "a novel of debate," is—among other things—a strong criticism of contemporary, superficial, Western civilisation in which commercial media and advertising images rule supreme and reduce everything to manipulated, meaningless drivel. Kundera here stands in awe over the mystery and authenticity of life and protests with all his might against its trite, con-sumerist simplification.

Source: Jan Culik, "Kundera, Milan," in Reference Guide to World Literature, 3d ed., edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, Vol. 1, St. James Press, 2003, pp. 572-74.

Milan Kundera's development as a writer has been strongly influenced by historical events. During World War II and in the brief, dynamic years which followed he was committed to the Communist cause; he later justified his enthusiasm with the explanation, "Communism enthralled me in much the way Stravinsky, Picasso and Surrealism had. It promised a great, miraculous metamorphosis, a totally new and different world" (New York Times Book Review). But in the 1960s, while still a member of the Communist Party, he became uneasy about its actual practice, including the policy concerning censorship. Kundera was one of a number of writers who refused to make changes in the articles they wrote and so ran the risk of remaining unpublished, but who eventually won greater freedom in the material which they did succeed in publishing.

The predominant theme in Kundera's writing is that of identity: not simply the identity of the inner self, but with whom and with what a person identifies his or her self. In the work Kundera completed while living in Czechoslovakia this theme has three strands: identification with (or commitment to) an ideology; identification with (or desire for) an idealised self-image; and identification with a history and a tradition.

In the mid-1950s Kundera was known to the Czech reading public as a poet, author of three collections: Clovek zahrada širá (Man: A Broad Garden), Poslední máj (The Last May), and Monology (Monologues). Poslední máj is particularly remarkable as an apparent sanctification of the Communist journalist Julius Fucik, who was executed by the Nazis.

Kundera's first published fiction, the short stories Smesne lásky (Laughable Loves), deal with the idealised self-image. The characters in the stories pride themselves on being able to manipulate the world around them and live out their self-images. In reality, however, they have no control over their lives; they can be humiliated by a simple chain of events or by another victim of chance. These hedonists are very different from the subject of Kundera's first full-scale work, Umeni románu: cesta Vladislava Vancury za velkou epikou (The Art of the Novel: Vladislav Vancura's Road in Search of the Great Epic). (This is a different book from his 1987 work, L'Art du roman). Vancura had been a member of the pre-war avant-garde, a writer and a Communist, who was executed by the Nazis at the end of the war. Kundera placed Vancura's work in the context of the world novel: of Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Anatole France. Vancura, both in his commitment to Communism and his place in European culture, represented the antithesis of the ephemeral subjects of Laughable Loves.

Kundera's first play, Majitelé klicg (The Owners of the Keys), also presents a contrast between material comfort and a commitment to history. The setting is a provincial town during the German occupation; the (positive) hero has to decide whether he will rejoin the (Communist) resistance—a decision which will mean the betrayal of his wife and her petit bourgeois parents to the Nazis. However, although the play was effective in dramatic terms, its content was conventional Socialist Realism. More significant was Kundera's first novel, Zert (The Joke), which tells the story of Communism in Czechoslovakia between the years 1948 and 1965. Through the experiences of its characters it traces the loss of idealism, the hopeless reliance on hollow images. Paradoxically, the character who remains inwardly most loyal to Communist ideals also values the folk traditions of the country's past.

Before August 1968, the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague had commissioned a play from Kundera which was produced there in May 1969. Ptákovina (Cock-a-Doodle-Do) is set in a school staffed by cringing or sadistic teachers; the action is triggered by a crude practical joke played by the headmaster that eventually rebounds on him. The theme of the play is moral degradation in a society which has lost its values. Jakub a pán (Jacques and His Master), on the other hand, was written as an "homage to Diderot," a variation on Diderot's Jacques le fataliste. Kundera later claimed that when he wrote it, he saw the shadow of encroaching Asian hordes falling across the western world, and felt that he was trying to hold on to the disappearing civilisation of Diderot's world.

The subject of the novel La Vie est ailleurs (Life Is Elsewhere) is the degeneration which brought the West close to disintegration. The young poet, Jaromil—a precocious surrealist and Party hack poet—thinks of himself as an intellectual descendant of Arthur Rimbaud; to Kundera, he is a forerunner of the pretentious students revolting in the streets of Paris in May 1968. In La Valse aux adieux (The Farewell Party) the theme is death. The action follows five days in the life of a popular jazz trumpeter who tries to persuade a young nurse to abort the child which she claims is his; it is a picture of a society in the grip of a life-denying force which seeks to suppress and condemn every natural, irrational or "mystical" experience.

In July 1967, during the run-up to the Prague Spring, Kundera, together with Ivan Klíma, Václav Havel, and Ludvík Vaculík (qq.v.), made a speech at the Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union which was regarded by Party functionaries as a political outrage. Kundera appealed to writers to consider the role of literature in the wider context of Czech history. He described how the writers of the 19th century had helped to shape Czechoslovakia's destiny, and asked whether today's writers were prepared to let the decline into provincialism and officially sanctioned vandalism continue.

In Spring 1970, 18 months after the Russian occupation, the Communists embarked on a systematic humiliation of those considered to be in any way responsible. Early in 1970 Kundera lost his lectureship in world literature at the Prague Film Academy. At this time he did not expect to be published again in Czechoslovakia in his lifetime, and in 1975 accepted the post of Professor of comparative literature at the University of Rennes in France. Soon afterwards he was notified of the confiscation of his Czechoslovak citizenship. Ironically, the exile and the loss of his nationality led him to reassess his position, and to consider himself as a European rather than a Czechoslovak writer.

It was in France that Kundera wrote the two novels that enhanced his international fame—Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and L'Insoutenable Légéreté de l’être (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). In these novels he abandons continuous narrative for a structure which resembles film collage. He juxtaposes one narrative with another, moves backward and forward in time, fictionalises historical characters, and treats fictional characters as real by bringing them into dialogue with the author-narrator. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the central character is Tamina, an exiled Czech working as a waitress in a provincial French town, who tries to remember her dead husband and to regain the diary and letters she left behind in Prague. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera contrasts the fate of two exiles, Tereza and Sabina: the one drawn back to her homeland and her death; the other who floats free and drifts to America. The novel weaves a web of chance encounters, uncertainties, and betrayals, both political and personal. The third member of the triangle is Tomas, husband of Tereza and lover of (among many other women) Sabina. Tomas is a surgeon who returns with Tereza to "normalised" Prague where, harassed by the secret police, he becomes a window cleaner. He and Tereza take "the only escape open to them," life in the countryside, where those who no longer have anything to lose have nothing to fear. They die together, when the weight of Tomas's badly main-tained truck crushes their bodies into the earth. Sabina, abandoning one lover in Geneva on her way to Paris, with a final destination of America, is aware of emptiness all around her: "Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excite-ment and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country and love were gone—what was left to betray?"

The theme of identity powerfully re-emerges in Kundera's most recent novel, L 'Immortalité (Immortality). It is not the immortal soul that Kundera is thinking of, but earthly immortality; as Laura says: "After all, we want to leave something behind!" only to be challenged by her sister Agnes's "sceptical astonishment." Although Agnes's life forms the axis of the novel, around it revolve other stories, fantasies, and feuilletons. Central to the theme is the story of Bettina von Arnim, who created her own immortality out of two or three meetings and an exchange of letters with Goethe. The structure of Immortality is built on echo and reflection, gesture and memory. Kundera contrasts the reality experienced by his grandmother in her Moravian village community with the "reality" seen by the average Parisian businessman on his evening TV news. immortality is not in the roles we create for ourselves, the images we set up for posterity, but in the continuity of life and the fragile survival of our culture.

History is for Kundera the land and its traditions, which have shaped lives for generations. His exile from his country has shaped his awareness of the disintegration of European society. In his writing he tries to recapture and hold on to the last remnants of a vanishing western civilisation.

Source: Barbara Day, "Kundera, Milan," in Contemporary World Writers, 2d ed., edited by Tracy Chevalier, St. James Press, 1993, pp. 301-03.

When he was twelve, she suddenly found herself alone, abandoned by Franz's father. The boy suspected something serious had happened, but his mother muted the drama with mild, insipid words so as not to upset him. The day his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that she was wearing a different shoe on each foot. He was in a quandry: he wanted to point out her mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes fixed on her feet. It was then that he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.

This passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being illustrates well Milan Kundera's art of storytelling—its concreteness, its finesse—and brings us closer to understanding the secret due to which, in his last novel, the pleasure of reading is continuously rekindled. Among so many writers of novels, Kundera is a true novelist in the sense that the characters' stories are his first interest: private stories, stories, above all, of couples, in their singularity and unpredictability. His manner of storytelling progresses by successive waves (most of the action develops within the first thirty pages; the conclusion is already announced halfway through; every story is completed and illuminated layer by layer) and by means of digressions and remarks that transform the private problem into a universal problem and, thereby, one that is ours. But this overall development, rather than increasing the seriousness of the situation, functions as an ironic filter lightening its pathos. Among Kundera's readers, there will be those taken more with the goings-on and those (I, for example) more with the digressions. But even these become the tale. Like his eighteenth-century masters Sterne and Diderot, Kundera makes of his extemporaneous reflections almost a diary of his thoughts and moods.

The universal-existential problematic also involves that which, given that we are dealing with Czechoslovakia, cannot be forgotten even for a minute: that ensemble of shame and folly that once was called history and that now can only be called the cursed misfortune of being born in one country rather than another. But Kundera, making of this not "the problem" but merely one more complication of life's inconveniences, eliminates that dutiful, distancing respect that every literature of the oppressed rouses within us, the undeserving privileged, thereby involving us in the daily despair of Communist regimes much more than if he were to appeal to pathos.

The nucleus of the book resides in a truth as simple as it is ineludible: It is impossible to act according to experience because every situation we face is unique and presents itself to us for the first time. "Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not."

Kundera links this fundamental axiom with corollaries not as solid: the lightness of living for him resides in the fact that things only happen once, fleetingly, and it is therefore as if they had not happened. Weight, instead, is to be found in the "eternal recurrence" hypothesized by Nietzsche: every fact becomes dreadful if we know that it will repeat itself infinitely. But (I would object) if the "eternal recurrence"—the possible meaning of which has never been agreed upon—is the return of the same, a unique and unrepeatable life is precisely equal to a life infinitely repeated: every act is irrevocable, non-modifiable for eternity. If the "eternal recurrence" is, instead, a repetition of rhythms, patterns, structures, hieroglyphics of fate that leave room for infinite little variants in detail, then one could consider the possible as an ensemble of statistical fluctuations in which every event would not exclude better or worse alternatives and the finality of every gesture would end up lightened.

Lightness of living, for Kundera, is that which is opposed to irrevocability, to exclusive univocity: as much in love (the Prague doctor Tomas likes to practice only "erotic friendships" avoiding passionate involvements and conjugal cohabitation) as in politics (this is not explicitly said, but the tongue hits where the tooth hurts, and the tooth is, naturally, the impossibility of Eastern Europe's changing—or at least alleviating—a destiny it never dreamed of choosing).

But Tomas ends up taking in and marrying Tereza, a waitress in a country restaurant, out of "compassion." Not just that: after the Russian invasion of '68, Tomas succeeds in escaping from Prague and emigrating to Switzerland with Tereza who, after a few months, is overcome by a nostalgia that manifests itself as a vertigo of weakness over the weakness of her country without hope, and she returns. Here it is then that Tomas, who would have every reason, ideal and practical, to remain in Zurich, also decides to return to Prague, despite an awareness that he is entrapping himself, and to face persecutions and humiliations (he will no longer be able to practice medicine and will end up a window washer).

Why does he do it? Because, despite his professing the ideal of the lightness of living, and despite the practical example of his relationship with his friend, the painter Sabina, he has always suspected that truth lies in the opposing idea, in weight, in necessity. "Es muss sein!" / "It must be" says the last movement of Beethoven's last quartet. And Tereza, love nourished by compassion, love not chosen but imposed by fate, assumes in his eyes the meaning of this burden of the ineluctable, of the "Es muss sein!"

We come to know a little later (and here is how the digressions form almost a parallel novel) that the pretext that led Beethoven to write "Es muss sein!" was in no way sublime, but a banal story of loaned money to be repaid, just as the fate that had brought Tereza into Tomas's life was only a series of fortuitous coincidences.

In reality, this novel dedicated to lightness speaks to us above all of constraint: the web of public and private constraints that envelops people, that exercises its weight over every human relationship (and does not even spare those that Tomas would consider passing couchages). Even the Don Juanism, on which Kundera gives us a page of original definitions, has entirely other than "light" motivations: whether it be when it answers to a "lyrical obsession," which is to say it seeks among many women the unique and ideal woman, or when it is motivated by an "epic obsession," which is to say it seeks a universal knowledge in diversity.

Among the parallel stories, the most notable is that of Sabina and Franz. Sabina, as the representative of lightness and the bearer of the meanings of the book, is more persuasive than the character with whom she is contrasted, that is, Tereza. (I would say that Tereza does not succeed in having the "weight" necessary to justify a decision as self-destructive as that of Tomas.) It is through Sabina that lightness is shown to be a "semantic river," that is to say, a web of associations and images and words on which is based her amorous agreement with Tomas, a complicity that Tomas cannot find again with Tereza, or Sabina with Franz. Franz, the Swiss scientist, is the Western progressive intellectual, as can be seen by he who, from Eastern Europe, considers him with the impassive objectivity of the ethnologist studying the customs of an inhabitant of the antipodes. The vertigo of indetermination that has sustained the leftist passions of the last twenty years is indicated by Kundera with the maximum of precision compatible with so elusive an object: "The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point." What characterizes the Western left, according to Kundera, is what he calls the Grand March, which develops with the same vagueness of purpose and emotion:

. . . yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba—and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimensionless dot.

In accordance with the agonized imperatives of Franz's sense of duty, Kundera brings us to the threshold of the most monstrous hell generated by ideological abstractions become reality, Cambodia, and describes an international humanitarian march in pages that are a masterpiece of political satire.

At the opposite extreme of Franz, his temporary partner Sabina, by virtue of her lucid mind, acts as the author's mouthpiece, establishing comparisons and contrasts and parallels between the experience of the Communist society in which she grew up and the Western experience. One of the pivotal bases for these comparisons is the category of kitsch. Kundera explores kitsch in the sense of edulcorated, edifying, "Victorian" representation, and he thinks naturally of "socialist realism" and of political propaganda, the hypocritical mask of all horrors. Sabina, who, having established herself in the United States, loves New York for what there is there of "non-intentional beauty," "beauty by error," is upset when she sees American kitsch, Coca-Cola-like publicity, surface to remind her of the radiant images of virtue and health in which she grew up. But Kundera justly specifies:

Kitsch is the aesthetic idea of all politicians and all political parties and movements. 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 ... But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

The step that remains to be taken is to free oneself of the fear of kitsch, once having saved oneself from its totalitarianism, and to be able to see it as an element among others, an image that quickly loses its own mystifying power to conserve only the color of passing time, evidence of mediocrity or of yesterday's naïveté. This is what seems to me to happen to Sabina, in whose story we can recognize a spiritual itinerary of reconciliation with the world. At the sight, typical of the American idyll, of windows lit in a white clapboard house on a lawn, Sabina is surprised by an emotional realization. And nothing remains but for her to conclude: "No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition."

A much sadder conclusion is that of the story of Tereza and Tomas; but here, through the death of a dog, and the obliteration of their own selves in a lost site in the country, there is almost an absorption into the cycle of nature, into an idea of the world that not only does not have man at its center, but that is absolutely not made for man.

My objections to Kundera are twofold; one terminological and one metaphysical. The terminological concerns the category of kitsch within which Kundera takes into consideration only one among many meanings. But the kitsch that claims to represent the most audacious and "cursed" broad-mindedness with facile and banal effects is also part of the bad taste of mass culture. Indeed, it is less dangerous than the other, but it must be taken into account to avoid our believing it an antidote. For example, to see the absolute contrast with kitsch in the image of a naked woman wearing a man's bowler hat does not seem to me totally convincing.

The metaphysical objection takes us farther. It regards the "categorical agreement with being," an attitude that, for Kundera, is the basis of kitsch as an aesthetic ideal. "The line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation" resides in the fact that adherence imposes the illusion of a world in which defecation does not exist because, according to Kundera, s— t is absolute metaphysical negativity. I would object that for pantheists and for the constipated (I belong to one of these two categories, though I will not specify which) defecation is one of the greatest proofs of the generosity of the universe (of nature or providence or necessity or what have you). That s—t is to be considered of value and not worthless is for me a matter of principle.

From this some fundamental consequences derive. In order not to fall either into vague sentiments of a universal redemption that end up by producing monstrous police states or into generalized and temperamental pseudo-rebellions that are resolved in sheepish obedience, it is necessary to recognize how things are, whether we like them or not, both within the realm of the great, against which it is useless to struggle, and that of the small, which can be modified by our will. I believe then that a certain degree of agreement with the existent (s—t included) is necessary precisely because it is incompatible with the kitsch that Kundera justly detests.

Source: Italo Calvino, "On Kundera," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 1989, pp. 53-57.

Like most novelists of the present time Kundera is a theorist of his art, not only weaving ideas about it into the texture of the fiction he is inventing, but making the invention itself, and the characters produced by it, determined by his conception of where fiction can end and begin. From a casual sentence or two when we are getting on towards the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being we discover that the hero and heroine (conventional terms which carry an unusual emphasis in this novel) were (or are to be) killed in a driving accident shortly after the novel ends.

The confusion of tenses—were they killed, or are they to be killed?—shows the novelist drawing attention to a deliberate formal confusion: what is inside the fiction and what is outside it? The confusion can only be formal, of course, for anything mentioned in a novel belongs to that novel and nowhere else. The effect is none the less potent, how potent we can see if we imagine, for instance, that Henry James were to casually inform us, in What Maisie Knew, that something Maisie didn't know was that she would die of a chill and fever a few weeks after her story ends. James knew, as he put it in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, that "relations stop nowhere" and that the artists problem is to "draw the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so." The death of Roderick Hudson, as of Daisie Miller, indicates that the case under artistic examination has been closed, a conclusion or a diagnosis reached. But Maisie's case is just beginning; she has just acquired the knowledge to live in the world in which she will have to live, and a secret confidence in her own status as a moral judge. She is like James, entering upon living as James entered upon writing. The formal specification of her story, its drawn circle, includes her survival in a world which both she and her author can deal with.

Maisie was, but also is to be. By covering all tenses she has got outside the domination of time, as most novel characters do, including those whose existence is terminated inside the book, as a completion of its effect. Kundera has sought to combine the time-dominated bathos of contingent living and dying with the extra-temporal status normally assumed in novel characters. It is a curious paradox of the novel genre that we assume its characters live for ever, either by dying in it—a sure passport to immortality granted to Little Nell or Madame Bovary—or by surviving the novel, like Little Dorrit or Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, into some reassuringly permanent limbo of non-fiction. Kundera tries to get his hero and heroine outside the novel, but not into this aftermath world. By killing them off outside it he suggests they have never been in it, although their story has been told as if they were.

Like everything to do with the novel the device is hardly new. When Milton's Satan flies up out of Chaos he hits an air pocket. "Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops," and "still had been falling" if the blast from a convenient volcano hadn't sent him back up again. Briefly the reader toys with the notion that the fallen Archangel might have been still going down, like a receding galaxy, at the moment when he reads these words, or when their first readers read them, or when they are read in time to come. In The Old Wives' Tale Arnold Bennett tells us that the papers Sophia secretes at the back of the top shelf of a hotel wardrobe may, for all he knows, still be there. By putting us momentarily outside it such touches of course confirm the fictiveness of the tale, its truth—that is to say—as a tale.

But Kundera uses the device for a different purpose, a more dialectical one. For all its high-spirited vivacity (Kundera is a great admirer of Sterne) this masterpiece among his novels could not have been written by an Englishman, still less by a Frenchman. It is deeply, centrally European from the meeting-place of the Teutonic and Slav tradition, the tradition of Nietzsche in the spirit, and of Kafka's city of Prague, where neither Kafka nor Kundera can now be published. Kafka's heroes do not live in the world of fiction, and yet The Castle is one of the most completely realized fictional worlds that the art can show. Kundera sets about creating this paradox even more deliberately.

What is lightness of being? It is the normal state of consciousness, the condition in which we pass our time, a perpetual state of "once only" from which no story can develop and no identity be shaped, no happening acquire significance. It is the state referred to by the German proverb which says Einmal ist keinmal—one time is no time at all. Sexually speaking the state of lightness is a state of endless promiscuity, in which each sensation is abolished by its successor, each individual by the next one. The libertine speaks the truth in saying "it means nothing," that no importance or meaning can be attached to any of his goings on. They cannot be set up in a moral frame, the determined frame of an observed life.

Kundera does not set the actual or hypothetical present against the determined or storied past, as Milton and Arnold Bennett do in the examples I have given. He keeps everything in the present, but makes an antithesis between lightness of being, the non-fictional state in which all is forgiven because all is without meaning, and the weighted determined condition of life, story, or destiny which cannot be avoided or denied. Sex belongs to the first, love to the second. And, like the sophisticated technician of fictiveness that he is, Kundera suggests that two now time-honored ways of presenting the consciousness in fiction slot neatly into his antithesis: the sequential and determined narrative of the classic novelist, and the perpetually present envelope of awareness, which receives nothing but impressions. Inside his novel the technique of Balzac and Trollope confronts that of Virginia Woolf and Robbe-Grillet: the guidelines of concentration they set up for the reader become in Kundera a means of philosophic demonstration and debate, philosophy being contextualized as fiction by the nature of the antithesis itself. Doris Lessing did something similar in The Golden Notebook, creating an antithesis between novel creation and notebook creation, but her work is so humorless and laborious, that it fails either to delight the reader or to move him.

Naturally Kundera's hero and heroine themselves embody the antithesis he sets up. Tomas is a Prague surgeon, an insatiable womanizer, a once convinced communist who now has no belief at all in political or social solutions. Tereza, the heroine, is a waitress whom he happens to meet casually in a small town and who falls in love with him. Lightness encounters weight; consciousness meets destiny; the undefined casualness of being comes up against the experience of fictional definition. Being a modern novelist Kundera is not slow to point out the fictional provenance and function of two such characters, and to suggest in what sense they are characters.

It would be senseless for author to try to convince reader that his characters had actually lived. They were not born of a mother's womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying 'Einmal ist keinmal.' Tereza was born of the rumbling of a stomach.

Of course neither character is real, but each represents a different kind of fictiveness. With great ingenuity Kundera makes use of his own highly contemporary proclamation of the fictiveness of all fiction to suggest that from this very fact can be demonstrated important truths about the nature of reality. From the antithesis of two fictive characters emerges an unexpected synthesis, with a new power to move and to convince us.

Tereza is born of the rumblings of a stomach— her own. She was overcome with shame because of the noise it made when Tomas first made love to her. In the excitement of traveling to meet him she had forgotten to eat anything, and she could do nothing about it. Neither of them can do anything about what is happening to them. Tomas, indeed, tries to continue his old life as if nothing has happened. He continues to make love to other women, to a circle of mistresses all of whom live as if everything was abolished as soon as it occurred. At night his hair smells of them, even though he has been careful to wash the rest of himself, and Tereza suffers from unbearable jealousy, which is not a weightless phenomenon.

Tomas, still light and adaptive, still living in the Einmal, gets a good job as a surgeon in Zurich, but his habits continue, and Tereza leaves him, goes back to Prague. This should be the moment at which lightness reasserts itself; Tomas might have been a prosperous and promiscuous surgeon in Zurich; or he might have emigrated to America, as one of his weightless mistresses, Sabina, has done, and lived in the "once only" limbo of modern fiction. But his destiny is the other sort of novel, and Tereza, who "could never learn lightness."

Realizing he cannot live without Tereza he too returns to Prague, just in time for the Russian invasion. He loses his hospital job, becomes a window-cleaner, then a driver on a collective farm. With their dog, Karenin, he and Tereza stay together. They make love in order to sleep together (he has never been able to sleep with a woman before, only to make love to her). The dog, Karenin, of course reminds us of Tolstoy's novel, one of Kundera's many pointed jokes about the fictional form. In Anna Karenina the love of Vronsky and Anna can be seen, and by Tolstoy no doubt was seen, as representing what Kundera calls lightness of being. Tolstoy contrasts the weight and destiny of life, the things that matter, Kitty and Dolly and Levin and their children, with the sterile passion of Vronsky and Anna, their bogus menage. Kundera breaks this mould by making the union of Tomas and Tereza deliberately sterile, and by representing the weight between them in the name and person of their big dog, to whom they become increasingly attached, and who at last dies painfully of cancer. It is typical of Kundera's novel that what might be irritatingly knowing—the dog's name and the text it points to—is converted into the most directly, almost unbearably, moving sequence in the book.

Their helplessness, the death of their dog, their own death, news of which reaches us before the novel's tranquil ending—all emphasize the timeless nature of human life, suffering, destiny. Hero and heroine come to live as characters in an old-fashioned fiction might do, but the way in which their death is contrived outside its tranquillity reminds us of the unexpected ending of King Lear, when the calm of tragedy is dispelled by the wholly gratuitous death of Cordelia, and the abrupt extinction of Lear himself, wracked by delight at the illusion that she may still be alive.

What is so striking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the way in which Kundera has succeeded in making so schematic, even diagrammatic, a novel so unexpectedly human and moving. In this respect it has something in common with Lionel Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey, which has in some ways a remarkably similar analytic pattern. Trilling also separates the weight of living from the lightness, associating the latter with the world of politics and ideology and the former with love and death, and the individual's acceptance of them as determinants of his being. Trilling quotes with admiration E. M. Forster's statement that "Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him." The idea of death, like that of love, is incompatible with lightness of being.

And incompatible too with the new versions of Marxist man. One of the most effective satiric ploys in the novel, developing out of the way such satire is used in Kundera's previous novels and stories like The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is the relation between the political and social pretenses of a Marxist country like Czechoslovakia, and the new frivolous and negative attitudes towards them. The only escape from the congealed political kitsch of the regime is into the lightness of total irresponsibility. Kundera shows how the regime corrupts totally the private consciousness of the citizens; and this is more frightening and more desolating than the more simple-minded way (for it was not based upon his own actual experience) in which Orwell had seen opposition to Big Brother being inexorably destroyed until every dissident had learned to love Big Brother. That is a naive prediction of what happens, as is in its own way Trilling's more contemplative image of human privacy and dignity becoming disillusioned by the way the claims on Marxism push them aside. What really happens is for Kundera less dramatic, more depressingly banal. Communism in practice cannot conquer the private life, but makes it light and meaningless, weightless and cynical.

This, Kundera implies, is the final damnation of a frozen ideology. It destroys the instinctive and almost unconscious decencies and weighty rhythms which men and women have always lived by. No wonder Solzhenitsyn has claimed that there is no answer to Marxism except in other and more traditional kinds of spiritual authoritarianism, the old authority of Russian church and state. More empirically, Kundera shows what happens to the citizens of a country for whom total cynicism is the only defense against the hypocritical pretense of the regime that all are joyfully taking part in the grand march towards the gleaming heights of socialism. In the eastern bloc these ideals are now nothing but political kitsch, and kitsch, as Kundera observes, has become "the aesthetic ideal of all politicians." "The Brotherhood of Man will only be possible on a basis of kitsch."

Sabina, an artist and one of Tomas' many lovers, personifies the individual who has been spiritually destroyed by the only way she can oppose the regime. She also destroys another lover, Franz, who loves her in the old-fashioned way and feels weighty emotions like jealousy, fidelity, despair, connubial devotion—emotions that fill Sabina with disgust because she logically but fatally identifies them with the propaganda of a communist regime. For her, weightlessness is the only answer, the only way out. Her life-style must express subversion of kitsch.

It amuses Kundera to display the ironies that arise from this. The authorities responsible for art have trained Sabina in the Socialist Realist manner, but she soon learned to practice a subterfuge which in the end became her own highly personal and original style, and which makes her rich and successful when she gets away to America. She produced a nice kitschy composition—children running on sunlit grass or happy workers handling girders—but then with the aid of a few apparently random drops of paint she evoked, as it were, in and beneath the scene a wholly unintelligible reality, a meaningless and therefore liberating lightness of being.

But of course the bogus, the congealed weight of a communist regime, a regime which spawns kitsch everywhere, has called up its oppositional counterpart in the west. Sabina is disgusted to find that her admirers in America mount an exhibition showing her name and a blurb against a tasteful background of barbed wire, and other corny symbols of oppression. This is ideological kitsch by other means, and Sabina protests that it is not communism itself that she dislikes so much but the horrible aesthetic falsity it brings with it. True communist reality—persecution, suspicion, shortages of all kinds—she finds quite honest and tolerable. What she can't bear is its false idealism, its films, its art, its pretenses. Kundera himself, we may remember, was a professor of film technology before his escape to the west, and his pupils at that time produced a new wave in the Czech cinema.

Sabina, then, is in a subtle but profound sense wholly corrupted by her experience of communism, from which she cannot escape, even in the west. She is condemned to perpetual lightness of being, condemned to a rejection of all values, because every value seems to her compromised with and covered by the slime of ideological falsity. Were she a character in a Dostoevsky novel she would commit suicide. Being in a Kundera novel she merely shrugs it off, and goes on living in the only way she can; but the situation, the dialectic, is decidedly a Slavic one, and reminds us of the kind of tradition in which Kundera is writing. He is too expert a craftsman to make the pattern too clear. But the deepest irony in his book is that Tereza and Tomas unwittingly save themselves by returning to the oppression of Prague, which means disgrace, alienation, and finally a random death: while Sabina, for whom emigration means merely an accentuation of her former lifestyle, means success, affluence and as many lovers as she wants, remains a hollow shell of frivolity, a ghostly bubble. What she calls kitsch is not mocked; it wins out in the end, because in its horrible way it can still represent the enduring values of the human race, the Tol-stoyan truths of what men live by.

Of course Kundera is very careful not to let all this become too visible. It is the merest implication in his novel, if that. There is a deep moral about suffering and love, but it is overlaid with something much more acceptable to the sophistication of contemporary and international novel-reading sensibility. Kundera's escape from the world of Socialist Realism, and its moral and aesthetic premises, is as complete and whole-hearted as Sabina's; all his writing shows a determination to be as brilliant and as frivolous as any author in the west. The point is obvious if we compare him with Solzhenitsyn, who has simply used the traditional methods of Socialist Realism for a purpose very different from that on which they are employed in their homeland. Solzhenitsyn remains a traditional Russian writer, while Kundera has reasserted for himself a complete European birthright, brought up to date and furnished with all the devices of modernist fiction. It remains to be seen whether his fiction is not too man-made, created by the fashion of the time and disappearing with it.

While both Kundera and Solzhenitsyn are wholly opposed to the state socialism of the eastern bloc, it is because they are technically such very different writers that their "messages" are also so different. Solzhenitsyn opposes communism with an ideal of Russian Christian orthodoxy which is equally authoritarian. Kundera is more intellectual, more metaphysical, more unexpected. He makes no simple East/West distinction, but transforms the symptoms and consequences of communist ideology into our overall modern consciousness, into consciousness as the novel today can present it. He reminds us that self-consciousness—"lightness of being"—is a permanent feature of the human state; and has always been opposed, since the days of the Greek philosopher Parmenides, to the determined aspect of our lives, to love, death, suffering, weight. His novel makes effective play with this ancient opposition by putting it in the framework of all that arises, ideologically speaking, from today's opposition between East and West.

In so doing Kundera reminds us too that the development of the novel form itself shows the same opposition. The novel is both the expression of ever-increasing self-consciousness and its antithesis or antidote. In so far as we have "lightness of being" we have neither future nor past, neither story nor character. Because in terms of lightness Einmal ist keinmal, all the bloody events of man's history "have turned into mere words, theories and discussions, frightening no one." They have turned into the light material of the modern novel. But the novel is also its own antidote because we escape lightness by representing ourselves in the weight of plotted and determined fictions. In Cartesian formula we think up characters: therefore we exist. And on the same basis we think up history, stories, morals; erecting them on the grave weight of human necessity, love, death, birth, etc.

By trying to make things ideologically, and thus spuriously "heavy," by emphasizing the Brotherhood of man and so forth, communism has only succeeded in making the consciousness of its subjects lighter, more cynical, more indifferent to everything except pleasure and advantage. Where fiction is concerned the instrument of the communist state is Socialist Realism, which produces its dead artificial kinds of weight, responsibilities, loyalties, moralities. The novelist can oppose the state, as Solzhenitsyn has done, by using its own method against it, by making Socialist Realism serve a different though equally "serious" moral outlook. Or it can be opposed by means of fantasy and irresponsibility, as Russian dissident writers— Sinyavsky, Dovlatov, Aksyonov—have lately been doing, and as Kundera has done in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The drawback of this method is that you may throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. By opposing lightness and humor to communist weight the novelist may himself become merely light and frivolous. The dialectical scheme of Kundera's novel recognizes and avoids this danger, but does so much more than dialecti-cally. Tereza and Tomas and their fated meeting, their clinging together in adversity, their dog's death, their own death, are deeply and unexpectedly moving, as moving as life and death in some old-fashioned novel, like War and Peace, or The Old Wives' Tale.

Source: John Bayley, "Fictive Lightness, Fictive Weight," in Salmagundi, No. 73, Winter 1987, pp. 84-92.