The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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Longing for Paradise: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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SOURCE: “Longing for Paradise: The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” in Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs, University of South Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 105-33.

[In the following essay, Misurella provides an overview of the narrative structure, major themes, characters, and recurring motifs in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]

That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The ending of The Farewell Party, almost theatrical with its closing emphasis on lights, shadows, and the players walking off the platform into the dark, may remind some readers of the end of The Tempest, where Shakespeare, through the character of Prospero, is said to bid farewell to his art. In certain ways the ending of The Farewell Party is also a good-bye of sorts: to Czechoslovakia and, according to Peter Kussi, one of Kundera's translators, to Kundera's former style of writing fiction. After this novel he will no longer wear the mask of an anonymous third-person narrator. Instead, Kundera will step forward into the new world as himself, a created, fictional self to be sure, a raconteur, telling stories of the old world as well as the new. That narrative stance begins with the opening paragraphs of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, continues into The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and reaches for a new subject and sensibility in Immortality, Kundera's first completely Western novel. By the end of The Farewell Party Kundera has become like Shakespeare's Prospero, as well as his own character Jakub: Having made his peace (perhaps under false, or painful, circumstances), he is ready to go home, not to Czechoslovakia, but to France, the center of European culture in the Modern Era. With that move he will finally realize for himself the potential for Czech literature that he voiced at the Fourth Writers’ Congress in 1967: to move beyond provincialism, to transcend borders instead of guarding them, and to make European culture, not just Czechoslovakia, one of its central targets of concern.

Along with the move to France would come Kundera's new realization of the role the narrative voice could have in his fiction. The character with that voice, an invented Kundera, would be intelligent and rational, like Jakub and Ludvik, but with flaws and weaknesses not usual in narrative personae, especially third-person ones standing in for authors. He would lack knowledge, insight, and power, standing equal with, not superior to, the other characters and the reader. Despite obvious intelligence, despite his acknowledged authorship of the events each novel tells (in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, remember, Kundera confesses that he invented Tamina, a character with a name “no woman has ever had before”), he will not have complete control. Instead, he will puzzle over life as his characters do; and he will, like the reader, try to make sense of the complex personalities, actions, and fates of the characters he creates. In effect, Kundera's concept of the narrator after The Farewell Party can be compared to an eighteenth-century deist's concept of God: a clockmaker who sets the world in motion and then, no longer involved, sits back to watch, with a mixture of interest, happiness, and fear, whatever happens next.

In that manner Kundera's personal narrative voice implies human limitations and constantly reminds the audience of a blurred line, or border, that tradition has erected to separate fact from fiction. He can wonder at the actions and antics of the world he sets in motion, musing with the reader over probable outcomes, possible meanings, particular alternatives in parabatic passages (a technique discussed more fully in chapter three) that are at once comic, human, and philosophical, reflecting Kundera's playful yet serious attempt to understand the world we live in through the model of the world he imagines in his story. Storytelling becomes an act of philosophic inquiry, therefore, an attempt, as Kundera has said about novels in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to understand “human life in the trap the world has become.” That approach makes the act of narration at least as important as the story itself, turning the aesthetic and thematic spotlight of the novel onto the narrator's mind and voice as well as the characters’ actions and fates. Giving himself the role of raconteur, Kundera encourages his readers to understand in the way he does: by sympathizing with the characters, identifying with their experiences and emotions while never losing sight of their true ontological nature. They are people who exist as compilations of words and thoughts—fictions, in other words—who do not die, feel pain, or cry real tears, yet provoke allied feelings in us and, by extension, help the narrator and his reader to better understand the world. Such a technique encourages Kundera's audience to maintain objectivity while urging greater intellectual involvement in his characters’ lives. With that goal in mind, a notable aesthetic advance over the impersonal approach practiced in many modern experimental novels, the reader may better appreciate the narrative voices in the novels following The Farewell Party. They are voices that, as Peter Kussi has pointed out, essentially take Kundera's career as a novelist in a new direction.

“LIGHTNESS AND WEIGHT”

When he begins The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a joke about his country's history (Vladimir Clementis's hat photographed on Gottwald's head), Kundera does so to set the tone of his new novel. It will be historical, philosophic, filled with tragic, often true, events, but at the same time ironic in tone and manner, its power derived from the sense of play in the narrator's thought and tone. In one parabatic passage after another Kundera will undercut our identification with the characters of the story, work to dilute purely political interpretations, and attempt to reason with us about the historical and philosophical meanings of events. Meanwhile, he will move the stories of his fictional characters forward so that we are never quite sure, as we read, whether his interpretations will prove themselves correct or not.

He broadens the narrative perspective enormously in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, moving from the relatively narrow confines of twentieth-century Czech history, striking though it may be, to the broader, more airy philosophic issues he originally touched upon in the first “Angels” section of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where he discusses the necessity of balance between good and evil in human life. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being he opens with a comment on Nietzsche and his “mad myth” of eternal return: that all things we experience happen again, not once but infinitely. This idea adds great weight to experience, Kundera tells us, but the inverse also applies: If things happen only once, as we in fact experience them, no matter how serious, tragic, or painful they are, they have no weight and therefore no meaning. From that perspective Kundera can ask the reader to consider a monumental event such as the French Revolution in the same light as a war between two fourteenth-century African kingdoms. The stories of both contain great human suffering and pain, yet we can pass over the horror of such times, even glorify some awful aspects of them (Kundera points to the French historians’ admiration for Robespierre, whose inclination to behead his enemies made him one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in European history) simply because they occur only once.

Proceeding by association, as he did so frequently in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera introduces an autobiographical anecdote. A short while ago, he tells us, he leafed through a book about Adolf Hitler and, instead of experiencing the horror of those times, found himself nostalgic for his youth. Several members of his family died in German concentration camps, but their suffering is minuscule compared to the loss he felt for his boyhood in the 1930s. Puzzled by that, Kundera goes on to make a point about the transitory nature of our experience; because it happens once, “everything is pardoned in advance … everything cynically permitted.” But while doing that, he also levels himself with the reader and the characters in his story, saying that all of us, even the narrator, have limitations and no one, including the invented Kundera who “speaks” the words of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, can know or understand everything. As a result, this parabatic introduction to the novel has a clear effect: It reminds us once again that we are reading fiction, not fact; it shows a narrator reaching out to his audience on a very human level, as if his listeners (or readers) were a company of thoughtful friends; it encourages us to speculate, along with Kundera himself, on the meaning and nature of his characters’ lives in the context of real experience; and it urges us to escape, not from the world, but into it through an imagined one, the world of the narrator's story. That story functions as a model, and through it Kundera asks us to think about the meaning of human life as he does, in the context of his characters’ suffering.

After another parabatic essay on lightness and weight, during which he mentions the division that Parmenides (a Greek philosopher in the sixth century before Christ) made between positive and negative poles, much as Kundera divided the world between angels and devils in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he goes on to ask which is positive in the division of things between lightness and weight. Parmenides made lightness positive, but like a good rationalist Kundera does not accept that judgment, calling the lightness/weight division the “most ambiguous” one in human life. This philosophic review completed, Kundera continues his discussion as a novelist normally would, through the more concrete forms of characters, action, and fate.

He opens chapter three of this section by introducing Tomas as a character he has thought about for years but has come to “see,” or imagine, clearly only during his reflections on the myth of eternal return and the values of lightness and weight. In a scene that Kundera says is a key to his character's life, he sees Tomas staring out his window at a wall, thinking about Tereza. He works as a surgeon in Prague, she as a waitress in a small provincial town. After spending an hour with her some three weeks before this thoughtful moment. Tomas finds himself uncharacteristically wanting her in his life and, more intriguing since it implies a sense of real emotional weight and extra burden, pictures himself dying at her side. He doubts the validity of these feelings, annoyed with himself for not knowing what he wants until he realizes that, experiencing life just once, all human beings find it impossible to know what they want. Dismissing his quandary as nothing, Tomas goes about his business without making a decision until Tereza calls him to say that she has just arrived in Prague.

Tomas agrees to meet her at his apartment the next evening. Thirty-six hours later she enters with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina under her arm and, after they make love, Tereza fulfills Tomas's greatest fears: She has no hotel room, so she will have to stay with him, and she has left her bag, a suitcase Tomas imagines as containing her whole life, at the train station. Conceiving of her as a child who, like Moses, has drifted in a basket downstream to enter his life by fate (and chance). Tomas spends nights in his office while Tereza sleeps in his apartment alone. When he finally spends the whole night with her, he feels she has offered her life to him and he cannot let her go. Kundera reflects on the abandoned child as a motif of civilization's important myths, mentioning Oedipus as well as Moses, and ends the chapter with a comment on the “danger” of metaphors. They are not to be trifled with; they can give birth to love, in a sense making the language of life more weighty than the experience.

Kundera provides some background on Tomas's life. Divorced, he has a son whom he has not seen in years, principally because his former wife made meetings difficult and demanded gifts and money in exchange for time with the boy. As a result, Tomas has no family ties, his parents having become sympathetic to his former wife because he gave up his son, and he has developed a series of erotic friendships with women, the most important being an artist named Sabina, who provide him company with no obligations. The rule of threes applies: Tomas sees women three nights in a row and then never again, or he continues their friendship for years but only for meetings at least three weeks apart. Most important, until Tereza brings her suitcase full of fate into his life, he has never slept overnight with any of them. Tomas decides that love asserts itself not in the desire for sex, which might include any number of partners, but shared sleep (or death), which applies to only one. Extending Kundera's rumination on lightness and weight, we can place the desire for sex (Eros) on the side of lightness and the desire for love (shared sleep and death—or its personification, Thanatos) on the side of weight. Lightness implies movement and energy; weight implies stillness and falling. In an interesting combination of those two themes Tomas lives on both sides of the balance by means of his two principal lovers: Sabina, the artist with whom he shares sex and no obligations, and Tereza, with whom he shares love and a desire for rest. Like Klima in The Farewell Party, he is both a conservative husband and a rake, a romantic lover as well as a libertine, Everyman as well as Don Juan, one who lives life under the swell of pears as well as the roar of tanks. And once again the world of pears carries the greater weight, the greater emotional significance.

Giving in to his fate, and hers, after two years, Tomas marries Tereza and gives her a puppy, a mongrel with a German shepherd body and a Saint Bernard head whom they call Karenin, after the dull but faithful husband in the book Tereza carried into Tomas's life. The dog takes to Tereza immediately, becoming child and husband to her in an Oedipus Rex motif that Kundera will call upon frequently in the novel. The dog also frees Tomas somewhat since he cannot, as he admits, cope with Tereza alone, and it provides an orderly pattern to their daily lives. Tomas still carries on affairs with Sabina and other women, and so Tereza cannot be happy with him until, as Kundera explains, the Russian tanks roll into Prague in August 1968. A staff photographer for a magazine now, she enters the historical moment to record it with pictures that she hands over to Western media. Tomas perceives her to be truly happy for the first time since he has known her, and when she urges that they emigrate to Switzerland after Alexander Dubcek's public humiliation at the hands of Soviet officers, he agrees to go, realizing that despite marriage, Karenin, and his own modest efforts at loving her, Tereza has not been happy with him. He accepts an offer from a hospital in Zurich, and they leave Prague for what seems like a new beginning to life.

But Sabina has gone into exile too, and, although she lives in Geneva rather than Zurich, she and Tomas manage to see each other, affairs without obligation being Tomas's “life-support system.” Aware of his continued meetings with other women, Tereza takes Karenin and leaves Switzerland for Prague again, just a half year after their arrival. She leaves Tomas a note, blaming herself for not being strong enough or mature enough to live abroad. Staggered, but happy at first, Tomas revels in his renewed freedom and lightness until three days later the compassion that drew him to her in the first place reasserts itself: “Russian tanks were nothing compared with it.” When Tomas tells the director of the Swiss hospital that he must return to Prague, Kundera refers to the famous Es muss sein (It must be) theme in Ludwig van Beethoven's last quartet, a phrase that Beethoven introduced as the “difficult” or “weighty” resolution of fate. Following that fate, Tomas leaves Switzerland, and as he drives toward the Czech border, Kundera adds a touch of musical humor to lighten the melancholy note of Tomas's imminent imprisonment. Speaking in his narrative persona, he imagines a cartoon-figure Beethoven, “gloomy, shock-headed,” leading a firemen's brass band in a march to the usually somber Es muss sein theme. Tomas himself wonders if it really must be—if he has no choice, in other words—but because he cannot test the possible results of either returning to Prague or remaining in exile, he follows his emotions and crosses the border irrevocably. At their apartment in Prague, instead of falling into Tereza's arms, he stands apart and imagines the two of them outdoors, in the snow, shivering. They have not spoken for days, but we learn in the next section, mainly about Tereza's experiences, that she shares this imagined experience with him.

The section ends with Tomas in bed beside Tereza, tortured by the fact that he has returned to Prague despite himself. Thinking about their marriage, he calculates that six chance occurrences, each potentially yielding a different result, brought them together seven years before and became his fate. The story of their love could easily have been otherwise, he concludes, and so could the story of his fate. Tomas lies awake in bed while Tereza snores, his stomach churning because of difficult thoughts.

“SOUL AND BODY”

Kundera begins the second section of the novel with a parabatic introduction that picks up the theme of the rumbling stomach that closed the previous section. Saying that an author should not even attempt to convince the reader that his characters once existed, he tells us that the German adage he quoted earlier, “Einmal ist keinmal” (What happens but once might as well not have happened at all), gave birth to Tomas. He goes on to say that a rumbling stomach gave birth to Tereza and explores the dichotomy between the two characters by returning to the story of Tereza's entrance into Tomas's apartment. She had not eaten since getting on the train in the morning, and that bodily neglect created the hunger that led the compassionate Tomas to take her into his arms, and life, moments after she arrives. So if cultural voices heard through the words and philosophy of an adage speak for Tomas, then the “ventral voices” of the body speak for Tereza. Appropriately, we may say that the world of the mind and the soul gave birth to Tomas, while the world of the body and heart gave birth to Tereza.

Kundera continues the analysis of his two characters with a philosophic discussion. Saying that the “fundamental human experience” of body and soul duality (growing out of a rumbling stomach) gave birth to Tereza, he describes in four very moving paragraphs the progression of humanity's understanding of itself from fear and amazement over the body's separation from the imagined seer, thinker, and believer trapped inside it, through the scientific understanding of the physical self as a collection of technological instruments (the nose, for instance, is a nozzle on a hose taking air into the body), and finally to a linguistic appraisal where naming body parts gives an illusion of understanding and unity. In actuality, Kundera says, the essential mystery of duality remains until a crisis of love (manifested by Tereza's rumbling stomach) exposes the fiction of such scientific thinking.

But we see a third pattern to this human confusion over identity that Tereza represents in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and that is personal history, a theme that Kundera treated thoroughly in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Here we learn that part of the mystery of Tereza's self, the difficult part, stems from her mother. In a comment that suggests an interpretation without the usual authorial insistence, Kundera says that he “sometimes” feels that Tereza's life merely continues her mother's, as if there were a human fate or theme that crosses the border of generations, fulfilling itself in spite of individual attempts to resist. Tereza's mother, Kundera tells us (and we know this is a fiction, because he has reminded us how the character of Tereza evolved), was a beautiful, vain young woman of the provinces who gave birth to Tereza as a result of a chance pregnancy, settled into an embittered marriage with Tereza's father, and when she noticed signs of age on her face, took up with another man. Downcast, Tereza's father began to speak openly about the faults of the political system, was arrested, tried, and sentenced, and died after a short time in jail. The mother moved in with her lover, gave birth to three more children, and, further embittered by her aging body, sought revenge on her daughter, whom she regards as a “fateful second … named Tereza” that has ruined her life. Left alone by an increasingly unfaithful husband, Tereza's mother turned coarse and cynical. Removing Tereza from school so the young girl could take a job, she forces her daughter to tend the children and do housework as well, shaming her with gross displays of her overweight, aging body as well as its “ventral” functions. Yet Tereza aspired for a better life, “something higher,” not anchored to the body. She had been the brightest student in her class at school, and now even while working and tending children, she reads constantly—thus the copy of Anna Karenina under her arm in Prague—and perceives life with Tomas as a step upward. A surgeon, he views the body objectively, understanding its mechanical parts both inside and out, and yet has the compassion to respond to the emotions it displays. And he too reads. The first time she sees him in the restaurant, he has a book open in front of him. The fact that Tereza hears a Beethoven composition on the radio while serving Tomas confirms her sense of him as representing a higher destiny in her life.

So escape from provincial life for Tereza leads to “fate” in the person of Tomas surrounded by literature, Beethoven, and a journey to Prague. If Tomas reads the events around their love as a scientist obsessed with the mathematics of catastrophe and chance, Tereza reads the same events as an aesthetician obsessed with the search for form. When Tomas speaks to her in the restaurant, Tereza feels the soul within her body ascend “through her blood vessels and pores to show itself to him” in a blush that unifies body and soul. When Tomas thinks of the six coincidences that brought him to Tereza, his stomach rumbles to assert its separation from the internal calculator of the odds. Both characters feel their soul's assertion in the body. Tereza's inclinations make her perceive the event as magical, unforgettable, unifying; Tomas, on the other hand, perceives the event scientifically, in terms of accident, with the stomach's rumble affirming body and soul separation. We can say, therefore, that just as Tereza needs Tomas to ascend to a higher level of living, so Tomas needs Tereza to assert unity, beauty, and form in his life. Unlike Freud, Kundera the narrator speaks of an aesthetic dimension to human psychology. People compose their lives, he says, “like music,” seeking form, following “laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

But even though Tereza possesses unity of body and soul, we soon learn of another division in her experience, the one between night and day, between the life of dreams and the life of reality. Kundera describes Tereza's dreams during her years with Tomas and analyzes them as expressions of an inner search for identity. The most prominent dream has feminist connotations, featuring Tomas in a basket hanging over a pool, forcing naked women to march around the pool while they sing and do occasional kneebends. If one of the women does a poor kneebend, Tomas shoots her. She falls into the water while the rest continue marching and singing. The horror of the dream begins before the first shot, the narrator tells us, commencing immediately with the vision of the naked women and Tereza among them. Nakedness levels the women, especially before Tomas's critical eyes, obliterating their individuality in the same way that nakedness denies the individuality of the sad characters on the nude beach in the final episode of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and as it denies individuality among the naked women at the baths in The Farewell Party. Tereza's dream is a variation on a theme Kundera has touched upon several times, but here he develops it in greater, almost martial, detail. A poor kneebend takes a woman out of lockstep, individualizing her before the background of regimen, and the shot Tomas fires not only confirms but erases that uniqueness as a flaw. The fall into the pool, accompanied by shouts of joy from the marching women, renders her “sameness absolute” and, the narrator says, makes futile Tereza's attempt to make her body “unique, irreplaceable” to Tomas.

The dream also becomes Tereza's way of telling Tomas that his affairs with other women deny her individuality, making her the same as they are, even though she reasons during the day that she is, in fact, different and special. Torn by the contrast between her reasonable daytime self and her nightly terrors, she also exposes an impossible division in Tomas's life. He fears that Tereza wants to die, and the fear fills him with guilt. He cannot be both Don Juan and Everyman, libertine and husband. His compassion, a sign of his longing for unity, will not allow it, and at some point he will have to choose. But in certain respects, as with the adult character among adolescents in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, Tomas really cannot choose because outside forces, such as chance, social roles, and destiny, make the choices for him. Thus, Tomas's retreat from Geneva to Prague, an act of individual compassion, also represents a surrender to unity and fate, or what Kundera might call fate's long aesthetic curve—from Tereza's mother's destiny, to Tereza's and now his. What's more, the shape of the curve, beautiful though it may be, turns downward, like the plunge of the naked women in Tereza's dream. So it is attractive, powerful, dangerous. No wonder Tomas's stomach rumbles while he lies beside his wife in Prague that night.

The aesthetic dimensions of destiny, its shapeliness and form, lead directly to Sabina, the third important character in this novel and the other important woman in Tomas's life. A painter, she appeals to Tomas's need for beauty, as Tereza does, but not to his need for unity, allowing him the freedom of his Don Juan impulses, placing no claims on him, having other lovers and pursuing her career as an artist by herself. When Tereza first comes to Prague to live with Tomas, Sabina helps her find a job developing and printing photographs on the staff of a magazine. She also instructs Tereza on the principles of graphic art, and Tereza, talented and ambitious, responds rapidly, becoming skilled with the camera, and is soon promoted to staff photographer. But while the two women talk about principles of art, we learn of a technique in Sabina's work that illustrates her own divided vision. All Sabina's paintings, Tereza discovers, illustrate a convergence of two views, one on the surface plane, “an intelligible lie,” Sabina calls it, and another, beneath the surface, which she calls “the unintelligible truth.” Developing this technique by way of an accidental drip of paint on a realistic paining she did as a student, Sabina has expanded it to encompass a vision controlling all her paintings, exposing the socially (or politically) approved version of life's meaning to the criticism of the mysteries of reality, likely less formed, more chaotic, and certainly less comforting to the ordinary citizen. Her openness to these absurd, threatening views derive from the spontaneity of her artistic nature, and in one very important scene that spontaneity and openness to dual vision play off her relationship with Tereza.

In another variation on the theme of nakedness and individual identity, Tereza visits Sabina's studio to do a series of photographs of her. They discuss Sabina's paintings at first, then, after an hour of taking shots, Tereza asks Sabina to pose in the nude. A gulp, a glass of wine, and a conversation about a bowler hat belonging to Sabina's grandfather follows. Again, we must think of Clementis's hat on the head of Gottwald and Papa Clevis's hat sliding into Passer's grave in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Both provide humorous touches for solemn situations, both relate to moral borders, both remind the reader of memory and loss, especially lost individuality. In this variation Kundera has Sabina keep the hat on a model head usually meant for wigs, and he reports with humble, arresting details what she tells Tereza about its former owner. Her grandfather was mayor of a small town; he left just two things behind, the bowler hat and a photograph of himself with other dignitaries standing on a platform for some unknown ceremony. With that sketch of her past completed Sabina enters the bathroom to disrobe.

The scene that follows, short, not very graphic, but memorable because of its latent sexuality, becomes more powerful because of the hat preceding it and the horror of the Russian invasion that Kundera introduces immediately afterward. These elements provide a double exposure in words like those Sabina reveals on canvas. But within that double exposure Kundera places another. The camera, he says, is Tereza's eye to see as well as a veil to hide behind. She can observe a portion of Tomas's life by photographing Sabina, and she hides a part of her own by being the photographer. But then Sabina heightens the situation by issuing Tomas's command to “Strip,” a seduction technique with which they are both familiar. Sabina takes the camera as Tereza disrobes. In a variation on the Narcissus myth that we have seen before (“Mother” in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and the last scene of Life Is Elsewhere), the two women, wife and mistress, become united in their nakedness. Reflecting Tereza's dream, they lose their individuality even as they temporarily and without his presence unify Tomas's life. Their laughter and embarrassment, however, show how impossible that unity would be on a permanent basis. After Sabina takes a couple of pictures, both women laugh at themselves and then get dressed.

From the theme of nakedness and loss of individual identity Kundera moves to loss of national identity by opening the next chapter with the invasion of Russian tanks in August 1968, and the fact that of all the crimes by Russia against its neighbors, the one against Czechoslovakia was the most photographed. Czech cameramen, he says, knew they were the best equipped to record this act of national violence for history. Tereza joins them, passing her undeveloped rolls of film to Western journalists who smuggled them across the border. When she goes to Zurich with Tomas, however, she tries to sell some fifty prints she has left over from the days of the invasion and finds editors no longer interested. They have forgotten the invasion, much as the world might forget the mythical fourteenth-century African war Kundera mentions in the opening paragraphs of the book. One editor is more interested in printing photographs of naked families on a nude beach. Underlining the similarity between lost individuality and national shame, Kundera has Tereza, reminded of her mother's shameless nudity around the house, tell the editor that her pictures of Czechs among the Russian tanks are the same as those of the naked families. Shame, vulnerability, and obscenity are the key similarities here, with loss of identity, public and private, the paramount theme.

Kundera goes on to show us that Tereza's photographs grew out of passion, not for the art of photography, but over her anger at the invasion and the shame it brought to her country. Other subjects do not inspire her. With no need for money, she has little incentive to pursue photography. As a result she feels weak, limited, and when she receives a phone call for Tomas from a woman with a German accent, she feels her weakness doubly exposed by jealousy and decides to return to Czechoslovakia, the country of the weak. Kundera calls her return an example of Tereza's vertigo, which he defines as the “heady, insuperable longing to fall” and “the intoxication of the weak.” Tomas, strong, yet too weak to resist her or his compassion for her, then follows her back, as we know. By the end of the second section, a variation on the ending of the first section, Tomas has finally fallen asleep as he lies beside Tereza. She awakens shortly afterward, concerned that he has changed his destiny for her. Something fundamental has altered in this variation. Now Tereza feels responsible for Tomas's life and fate. In the country of the weak, she has become the strong partner in her marriage (much like Kamila Klima at the end of The Farewell Party). But, despite the burden of responsibility for Tomas that she now fears, the last paragraph of “Soul and Body” shows a heartened Tereza. She remembers that the church clock struck six just before Tomas walked into the apartment, just as, back in her village some years before, the clock had struck six as she began talking to Tomas after work. Seeing this numerical coincidence as meaningful, Tereza feels confident again because beauty and form have returned to the love of her life.

“WORDS MISUNDERSTOOD”

Kundera does five new things in this third, critical, section of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He introduces an important new character, Franz; he turns the focal point of the narrative on Sabina to provide us with yet another variation of viewpoints on his themes (telling us, by the way, that Tereza and Tomas have died in an automobile accident); he introduces an Oedipus motif that has lain dormant in his references to Anna Karenina throughout the first two sections (let us not forget that Anna, already in love with Vronski after meeting him at a dance, refers to him as “that officer boy”); he moves the story and his characterization forward by means of a clever narrative technique, “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words”; and, finally, he provides a variation on his thematic linkage of public and private concerns, elements of Tereza's dream being further developed through Franz's political liberalism and the idea of the European Grand March.

The section opens with a description of Geneva and the relationship of Franz and Sabina. Franz works at the university, a professor of philosophy who has spent his life “marching in step”; that is, doing the right thing, with a home, a wife, and a child, supporting the right liberal causes, lecturing, publishing papers, achieving enormous success no matter what he does. In his affair with Sabina he wants to continue that march of correctness, and he works to keep his love for her separate from his family life. As Kundera describes him, he accomplishes this separation out of guilt for having married someone other than Sabina, and we come to see that Franz bears a heavy burden of responsibility toward women that limits his freedom and establishes his thematic position within the quartet of lovers now situated at the center of the novel. We learn that, because he felt responsible for his mother's misery after her husband left her, Franz behaves weakly, dutifully, like a good son, toward women, seeking his mother in every woman he loves. With that situation Kundera lays bare the Oedipus theme that I see, along with the four lovers, at the heart of the novel. To this point he has pursued the Oedipus theme by means of Tomas and Tereza, with Tereza gradually gaining ascendance in her marriage to Tomas; he has referred to the theme obliquely with Tereza's dream about marching in step (Oedipus's lame foot, from being tied to a stake and abandoned in the woods as an infant, is a sign of his inability to march correctly, or in step); and he continues in this “Words Misunderstood” dictionary by exploring the characters of Franz and Sabina in pointedly Oedipal ways.

Kundera contrasts the two couples in other ways as well, founding a consideration of their characters on the “marching in step” motif that clearly signifies obeying authority, or at least following the rules of the social game. Tereza must march in step, for instance, in order not to be like her mother, while Sabina absolutely cannot. On the other hand, Tomas can't march in step despite his compassion for Tereza, but Franz absolutely must despite his love for Sabina. In fact, Franz's allegiance to what Kundera calls Europe's Grand March, ultimately leading to his death from a violent blow he receives while defending himself in Bangkok, Thailand, is a variation on the theme of Tereza's nightmare—we can see the Grand March as the public, historical version of Tereza's women marching in step. Drawing a further comparison, and another variation on the theme, we can say that in this novel the Grand March compares to the circular dances Kundera described in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; it joins hands (and feet), isolating individuals; it asserts the historically “light” world of tanks over the “heavier” world of pears. As narrator, Kundera says, “It never occurred to [Franz] that … the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival—in other words, a dream.”

Kundera explores other motifs of the Oedipus myth in this section, but none more clearly than the idea of blindness. In Sophocles's play, Oedipus, seeking the murderer who has caused the plague in Thebes, consults the blind soothsayer, Tiresias, who experienced life as both a man and a woman and was struck blind by the gods because they were jealous of his knowledge. Ironically, when Oedipus finally discovers that he has caused the plague by killing his father and having children with his mother, he plunges his mother's brooches into his eyes, striking himself blind, choosing punishment for the truth rather than acceptance of the horror the truth contains.

Kundera plays on the idea of chosen blindness in this section, first, in describing Franz's closed eyes while he makes love to Sabina, underlining his blindness to the Oedipal nature of their love. Less obvious, perhaps, is the idea of linguistic blindness, when Kundera offers the dictionary of misunderstood words to explore the gulf of differing visions and experience dividing Franz and Sabina. As a result of this dictionary, really an exploration of attitudes regarding basic life situations, we can also reflect on the differences between Tomas and Tereza that Kundera has explored in the first two sections of the book and from there make comparisons with Franz and Sabina. If Tomas analyzes his return to Tereza as a result of chance occurrences, Tereza perceives it in light of beauty and form (“the birds of fortuity” twittering around her shoulders at the end of part two); if Franz closes his eyes while making love in order to float in the heady space of oblivion, Sabina keeps her eyes open and likes the light of day in order to see—and understand. If Franz sees the private life of books (his world of pears) as false, Sabina sees public life (the world of tanks) as flawed and, in her paintings, attempts to cut through that surface to find an internal meaning. Similarly, if Tomas, as a compassionate surgeon or as a libertine Don Juan, seeks the truth by entering the privacy of other bodies, Tereza has sought it in public through photographing tanks.

Kundera incorporates an aesthetic dimension into his use of blindness by developing Sabina's thoughts about chance and intention in art. First, during a visit to New York with Franz, she sees European cities representing planned, intentional beauty, while America, at least the America she experiences in New York, represents accidental beauty or, as she says, “beauty by mistake.” Still, she feels attracted by the city (Franz merely feels homesick), and Kundera further explores the relationship between the aesthetics of chance and intention in the story he tells about the emergence of Sabina's painting style. She discovered her double-layered vision by accident as a student, having painted a realistic scene and, by mistake, dripped some paint from her brush onto the canvas. Perceiving that line of drops metaphorically, she saw them as an incision in the canvas and worked to open the incision further until she laid back the surface plane, revealing another, opposing scene, a second level of reality that belied the first.

That breaking through, by means of a mistake or accident, to another vision of reality mimics exactly the experience of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex. At the beginning of the play the audience sees the proud, commanding, public figure of Oedipus; but gradually as Sophocles, an aesthetic surgeon cutting through layer after layer of meaning along the way, moves the plot forward by means of accident, mistaken belief, and then full, ironic display, we come to see a second Oedipus hidden beneath the first: the blind, vulnerable child, as man, stumbling into the future, more susceptible to accident than ever before. The image Sophocles unearths at the end of the play is powerful, disturbing, yet the audience perceives it, in the context of tragic form, as beautiful. Thus we might say that Sophocles, attracted by the randomness he saw in the myth of Oedipus's experience, wrote a controlled, meaningful dissection of his character, a laying back of the public for the private self, combining a history of life's accidents with his own artistic vision. Similarly, Sabina creates meaning, intrigued by the shapely form of paint drops on her canvas. Comparing life to art (and a scientist to a painter), if Tomas, because of his compassion, fails to overcome chance in his life with Tereza, Sabina's artistic objectivity allows her to take advantage of it, pursuing accident further into meaning. Many people read Tomas, because of his intelligence and womanizing traits, as the Kundera surrogate in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But very clearly Sabina functions as the author's persona. Her views on accident, art and society, public and private values, match those Kundera has expressed, and the linkage between her artistic methods and those we perceive of Sophocles in Oedipus Rex makes the comparison doubly appropriate, especially when we remember Kundera's beginnings as a playwright and poet.

Kundera explores the Oedipus theme throughout this third section, finally using the motif overtly as an explanation of the demise of love between Franz and Sabina. Before going to Rome with Sabina, Franz tells his wife, Marie-Claude, of his affair, which has been going on for nine months. When Sabina finds out, she regards the public knowledge of their love as a burden, feeling she must now play the role of Sabina the mistress rather than be herself. This public role functions as preordained behavior, as if it were written in a script, providing another example of Witold Gombrowicz's aesthetic in Kundera's work.

For Sabina the former privacy of her affair with Franz contained more meaning, more possibility for accident and life, making her time with Franz susceptible to chance and, important for her, choice. Immediately after describing the change in Sabina's attitude, Kundera provides several Oedipal images that haunt the ending of their love. Of course, the nine-month length of the affair has obvious significance; in a sense, a new Franz has to be born. But then, in Rome, Sabina turns off the light in their hotel room when they make love, leaving them both in the dark, or “blind,” but with a difference: for Sabina darkness means the “refusal to see,” or choice not to; for Franz it means infinity, space without borders, experience without distinctions. Kundera reports Sabina as sickened: “The idea that he was a mature man below and a suckling infant above, that she was therefore having intercourse with a baby, bordered on the disgusting.” Immediately after that chapter Kundera moves to Franz's thoughts of his mother, this time as he returns home contemplating the image of her in his wife.

Kundera continues to use the Oedipus motif thereafter, but with some changes. When Sabina leaves Franz, he finds himself abandoned, Marie-Claude having declared their marriage finished, and he moves into his own apartment. Soon he buys his own desk, hires carpenters to build bookshelves and decorate his apartment, and Kundera describes him as grown up at last. He begins an affair with one of his students. Thus, Kundera presents an inverted image of the Oedipus theme, a variation that, because of their difference in age, we can see as a second layer of the one Sophocles dramatized. But Sabina, though physically absent, has not really left Franz's private world. He thinks of her frequently, conceiving of her as a golden footprint in his life, so that his memory of her is a form of beauty whose shape is yet another variation of the marching in step part of the Oedipus theme.

In the following chapter Kundera switches to Sabina. We find her in Paris now, free but depressed with the burden of the unbearable lightness of her existence. She has spent her life betraying, she thinks, first her father, then her party and her country, and now, without Franz or Tomas, she feels she has nothing more to betray. Moreover, Sabina wonders what purpose her life serves. Is the unbearable lightness of being her one true goal? While thinking those things (after four years in Geneva, three in Paris, Kundera notes), she receives a letter from Tomas's son, Simon, (a name we learn in part six), telling of the deaths of Tomas and Tereza. Simon thinks of Sabina as his father's closest friend, she learns. Moved, she walks to a cemetery, where she wonders at the vanity of the tombstones, some in the form of chapels and houses. Sabina feels depressed by the sight of the stones because to her they mean the living refuse to let the dead get out. Remembering her father's grave with flowers and a tree, their roots yielding a path of escape for the dead, she notes that in Montparnasse Cemetery she sees stone only, and therefore no means of escape, the weight the dead bear being the very antithesis of her life. She pictures Tomas as if he were in one of her double-layered paintings: Don Juan in the foreground but Tristan in the layer of truth beneath the opening. Kundera describes the scene in the painting as like a stage set, reminding us of the double vision of Oedipus Rex, both statesman and the wanderer burdened with guilt. As a result of these reflections, Sabina misses Franz and realizes she will have to move on in order to maintain the freedom, and lightness, of her existence.

At that point Kundera closes the “Words Misunderstood” section by rounding out the story of Franz. Although loving the woman he lives with, he becomes passionate about the plight of Central European countries because of Sabina. He attends lectures and conferences, closing his eyes, Kundera says, in blissful remembrance of his former love. In the dark about Sabina's fate, as well as her emotions and politics, he still shares her search for destiny. Unlike him, however, she wanders, open to chance—and choice—while he follows the drumbeat of Europe's Grand March.

“SOUL AND BODY”

In his essay “The Structural Study of Myth,” the French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss compares variations on the myth of Oedipus as they are found in several contexts, including his study of origin stories among tribes of Pueblo Indians in North America and the Oedipus complex of Freudian psychology. Comparing specific elements of the myth such as names of characters, slaying of monsters, and deviations within blood relationships, Lévi-Strauss concludes that the Oedipus story holds in opposition two theories about humanity's origins: whether mankind sprang from the earth like a plant (alluded to when the infant Oedipus is tied to the stake in the forest) or whether humanity is born of itself (so Oedipus begets children by his mother). By contrasting those two origins without necessarily resolving the contradictions, the Oedipus myth offers opposing views of human essence: Animal or vegetable is one set of essential possibilities; born from earth or elsewhere is another. So the Oedipus story raises fundamental philosophical as well as biological questions about the essence of humanity. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera raises similar concerns, developing the theme of human essence in “Soul and Body” that he treated in another variation in the second section of the novel, also entitled “Soul and Body” and also about Tereza's search for identity.

Along with the philosophical themes of identity and essence, the section raises the political-social issues of privacy and spying, with the modern world likened to a concentration camp, a comparison developed by Kundera to link the political imprisonment of his country by Russia to his ideas about the imprisonment of modern man caused by the pervasive influence and intrusion of the mass media. In Kundera's fiction privacy and isolation make up, in a Parmenides-like social opposition, positive and negative poles of twentieth-century life: one, privacy, is a route to self-definition and possible fulfillment; the other, isolation, is a form of impotence before large historical and social forces. The threatening of either, but particularly privacy, as we have seen in The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, and The Farewell Party, diminishes our humanity by increasing the effect of the other. As Kundera says “A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.”

In “Soul and Body” Kundera makes spying the political and social motif of these two human conditions, and he begins by describing Tereza sniffing Tomas's hair while he sleeps for the odor of other women. Generalizing the condition, he also describes Tomas and Tereza listening to the radio and hearing broadcasts by the secret police of Czech dissidents’ conversations. Apparently the Czech police tried to embarrass dissidents through these broadcasts, their ordinary conversation reducing them from heroic status by exposing their petty concerns and ambitions. Thus, the secret police publicized privacy, according to Kundera, and he compares the political act to the private again when he calls to mind Tereza's mother. He ties her behavior to her daughter's by describing her as “sniffing” out Tereza's diary and reading it at the dinner table while everyone laughed. On her way to a health spa, Tereza looks at Old Town Hall in Prague, left in shambles after World War II and not yet rebuilt. The scene reminds her of her mother parading her nakedness before her family to show, especially to Tereza, the true misery of the human condition, and she reflects that Prague under the Communist government has done the same thing with its buildings. In that way, she thinks, by exposing its private misery, the whole world becomes a concentration camp.

At the same time, through Kundera's narration we do a bit of spying on our own. We observe Tereza at the health club and in her home, struggling with her identity by looking at her body in the mirror, wondering if she would still be Tereza if she had a different body, a different nose. In the absence of a rational answer Tereza's emotions make a statement for her. Having smelled another woman's presence in Tomas's hair, she cannot control her jealousy, feeling that her body has failed her, as if it were the essence of her identity. She tries to dismiss the notion, but the “hidden seer” inside her provides yet another reaction, and statement, by means of a dream. She dreams of Tomas taking her to a park with red, yellow, and blue benches in it. The park lies at the foot of Petrin Hill in Prague, and Tomas, sitting on one of the benches, tells her she will find what she wants if she walks to the top of the hill. Tereza does and when she reaches the top, she finds men who fulfill people's wishes to die. Carrying rifles, the men escort them through a forest until they find a tree they like. There, the men blindfold them, stand them by the tree, and shoot them. This dream is a variation of the one Tereza had earlier, of course, the element of choice replacing the missed kneebend as a sign of individuality deserving of death. But the dream is also a variation on the Oedipus story, the tree comparable to the stake Oedipus is tied to as an infant, and the blindfold a clear variation on his blindness as a mature man. And Tereza's character has changed as well, her stronger inner character illuminating her dream by allowing her the right of refusal. While in her former dream Tomas had absolute authority over life and death, here she must take responsibility herself. When the men tell her the rules, saying she must have walked up the hill of her own free will and that she herself must choose to die, she tells them someone else made the choice, and they respond by freeing her, saying they cannot kill her under those conditions.

Kundera renders another variation on the Oedipus theme in the next few chapters, when Tereza decides to test herself by going to the apartment of a customer she serves in the bar where she works. She tells herself that Tomas sends her to the man (called “the engineer”), but clearly she wants to try other possibilities, perhaps test her independence, perhaps experience sex without love, which is Tomas's explanation of his affairs outside their marriage. In any case, when she enters the engineer's apartment, she feels great confusion and doubt. But the shelves of books on the walls overcome her hesitancy (she has always thought books imply a higher kind of life). She spots a copy of Oedipus Rex and, remembering that Tomas had given her a copy of the play, responds to the engineer when he embraces her. As they undress, however, her soul, Kundera says, resists, even though she feels her body's excitement. Looking at a birthmark just above her public hair, she perceives it as her soul's mark on her body, and as the engineer physically enters her, Tereza's soul and body respond in self-contradictory ways. While her sexual excitement mounts, she swings her fists and spits in the engineer's face.

If we think of Josef Stalin's definition of the writer as “an engineer of human souls,” we can see this scene as Tereza's rejection of manipulation, not only by the engineer but by the teller of her story as well. In that light, the various games, sexual, philosophic, and narrative, that Kundera plays throughout The Unbearable Lightness of Being come together at this moment, with Tereza rebelling against the man she has sex with, her fate, and the narrator of her fate (Kundera, the object of characters’ disdain in Jacques and His Master), in order to affirm her soul, her self, and her own version of her destiny. Through the rest of the novel she gradually, sometimes painfully, gains increased independence and strength as her soul asserts its power against her body and the world around her.

Continuing with that theme, the following chapter contains one of those poetic meditations on a taboo that unite the philosophic with the comic in a typically Kundera way. While Tereza sits in the water closet of the engineer's apartment, Kundera compares the toilet to a white water lily floating on a Venice of defecation, the very image, with its emphasis on beauty and spirit on top of physical waste, bringing together the themes of this section of the novel, Tereza's life, and the Oedipus myth. Becoming absolute body, she voids her bowels and leaves the water closet ready to throw her arms around the engineer in desperation, the way she threw her arms around the tree in her dream, until she hears the engineer's voice and feels her soul reject him. She leaves the apartment immediately. On her walk with Karenin not long afterward, Tereza finds a crow buried up to its head by two young boys. She frees it from the dirt, takes it home, and, laying it on a bed of cloths, stares at the bird as if it were a “reflection of her own fate,” that is, soul weighed down by body, or spirit coming from, and limited by, the earth in a variation of the Oedipus theme as Claude Lévi-Strauss interprets it. Completing the motif of soul and body, Tereza keeps “vigil over a dying sister,” but when she steps away for a moment to eat (that is to feed the body), she returns to find the crow has died.

The section ends with Tereza and Tomas driving to a country spa they went to some years before and discovering that the names of streets and buildings have been changed to commemorate Russian, rather than Czech, history. On the public, political side of the soul and body theme, we perceive that the Russian names indicate two things for Czechoslovakia: the privacy of its land, or body, has been violated, while its history and language, its soul, have been forced to flee. Parallel to this public experience we see Tereza in some private ones. She realizes that the engineer probably worked for the secret police and that they may have photographed her in bed with the man in order to compromise her and force her to spy. In the final chapter, written as if it were real, although it just as well could be a dream, Tereza walks down to the Vltava River and sees park benches floating by in the water. Remembering that she first spoke in a flirtatious way to Tomas while he sat on a park bench, and that he sat on a bench in her dream when he told her to walk to her death on Petrin Hill, we can see this experience as a sign of Tereza's past, like her country's, flowing away. “What she saw was a farewell,” Kundera says.

Not completely negative, the dream bids farewell to a part of herself. Something inside Tereza has changed because of her experiences with the engineer, the crow, and Tomas. In addition, a literary inversion has occurred: Vronski no longer controls Anna; Oedipus no longer dominates Jocasta. Since Tomas plays no role in this dream experience, we can say it shows Tereza no longer lives within his power.

“LIGHTNESS AND WEIGHT”

This part of the novel returns to Tomas and his perceptions, showing him as much weaker and less weighty than he has been up to this point, an ironic narrative change since the story of this section consists primarily of Tomas's professional and psychological descent, a situation requiring some symbolic weight.

Kundera begins with the story of Tomas's essay about Oedipus's acceptance of guilt for the crimes that destroyed Thebes, although he in fact spent his entire life trying to avoid his fate. Comparing Oedipus to his countrymen, Tomas asks, How could all those people working in the government before Dubcek came to power look on the results of their acts and not feel guilty? He writes an essay, submits it to a journal and has it printed, in abbreviated, oversimplified form, on the “Letters to the Editor” page. The abbreviation offends Tomas, but he says nothing, mainly because he does not regard the issue as important. But after the Russian invasion, the Husak regime, governing Czechoslovakia in place of Dubcek, uses the essay as a reason to attack him after he returns to Prague.

Tomas's friend, the chief surgeon at the hospital, a job Tomas would probably step into upon his friend's retirement, asks Tomas to retract the letter in order to preserve his position. At first Tomas perceives the issue as completely unimportant, but in a classic manifestation of Aristotelian hubris he says he cannot make a retraction. He would be ashamed if he did. When the chief surgeon tells him that he would not have to publish a retraction but would simply need to write a note for the government saying he holds nothing against them, Tomas agrees to think it over; but the pitying, commiserating looks of his colleagues signal that they know his situation, and he refuses to write the note. Dismissed against the chief surgeon's better judgment, Tomas becomes a medical functionary dispensing aspirin at a clinic outside of Prague until he meets a man from the Ministry of the Interior who flatters him and tries to elicit information about the editors of the journal that had printed his essay. Tomas names no one, but the man again encourages Tomas to retract the Oedipus essay. He provides a model letter to be published that is more servile and false than the one the chief surgeon had suggested. Tempted, but only momentarily, Tomas promises to think over a possible statement of his own but ultimately refuses, resigning his post and becoming a window washer because he knows that in that lowly position the regime will forget about him and his letter.

In a parabatic comment following this incident, Kundera contemplates the forces in Tomas's life, saying that although Tomas himself interpreted his life's events in terms of chance, Kundera perceives necessity, or Es muss sein, in his commitment to medicine, which occurred as a result of compassion and a “deep inner desire” to know that led him to surgery. Making the best of his new work as a window washer, Tomas sees himself as on vacation from his career and resumes his former libertine life, taking advantage of sixteen hours a day without Tereza. Kundera links this libertinism with Tomas's desire to know the individuality of his lovers, seeking the “millionth part dissimilarity” that separates one woman from another and gives a clue to her I (just as Tereza seeks the clue to her I by staring at her image in the mirror and by imagining herself with a longer nose). So Tomas's pursuit of women does not stem from a wish for pleasure, Kundera tells us, as much as it comes from his wish to possess the world. Such a wish lies very close to the comic desire of Dr. Skreta in The Farewell Party, who seeks to populate the world with his illegitimate children. But either wish—Skreta's or Tomas's more serious, philosophic one—must be recognized as impossible and a sign of unreasonable human ambition.

Tomas's pride remains politically neutral, however, and Kundera demonstrates it at work in other directions, not just against governmental intrusion. On one job, when Tomas enters an apartment to wash windows, he finds he knows the people. They are his son, Simon, and the editor of the journal that published his essay on Oedipus. Simon has renounced his mother and her politics and idolizes his father from afar. He and the editor are circulating a petition requesting amnesty for political prisoners in Czechoslovakia, and they have arranged this meeting with Tomas in order to obtain his signature. Tomas, reluctant at first because he thinks the government authorities will use the petition as an excuse to lengthen prisoners’ jail terms, almost signs because his son's presence embarrasses him. But before he picks up the pen, Simon compliments the essay on Oedipus, and as they discuss it, Tomas wonders aloud why he wrote it in the first place. He recalls Tereza who, upon entering his life, made him think of abandoned children such as Romulus, Moses, Oedipus, and he remembers that those thoughts prompted the article. Then he envisions Tereza again in a mythlike image of her holding the injured crow against her breast, and, with that picture of her kindness in mind, he refuses his son's political and moral call. He must do nothing to hurt her, he thinks. So when Simon says it is Tomas's duty to sign the petition, he replies that to dig a crow out of the ground is more important. Immediately, he feels a dark, heady excitement, like vertigo, similar to the emotions he felt upon refusing to retract his Oedipus essay. We can call it the emotional and physical equivalent of the downward spiral of his fate. Tomas realizes his career will suffer further, but he also knows he must follow his preferences. He has crossed a watershed once again, and Kundera underlines the occasion by disclosing that later, when the government publishes a slanderous attack on the signers of the petition, Tomas looks at a wall across from his apartment and tries to remember why he did not sign. That moment brings the reader back to the beginning of the novel and Kundera's original conception of Tomas and what we might call the original image of this novel: man facing a wall and trying to understand.

After a meditation about the history of man on earth being a tale of inexperience and lightness—“Einmal ist Keinmal” (What happens once might as well not have happened at all)—Kundera performs a different variation on the Oedipus theme with another of Tereza's dreams, this one given in her narration. Buried alive, like the crow she saved, Tereza waits until Tomas comes to see her every week. Knocking on the grave to awaken her, he tries to remove the dirt from her eyes after she sits up, but she tells him her eyes are holes, like the eyes of Oedipus after he puts them out. Tomas suggests another month's rest in the grave, but Tereza understands that suggestion as his bid to have a longer time free of her. Miserable as he listens to the dream, Tomas holds her and gradually soothes Tereza to sleep. Imagining himself entering the dream in order to calm her, he comes to a highly personal, torturous understanding of death: Tereza living in nightmares, he not able to bring her back from sleep.

In the following series of passages mixing public and private misery, Kundera narrates the next great step in Tomas's fateful downward spiral. He attends a funeral, seeing the mourners filmed by police and, back home, becomes physically ill with a stomach ailment as he tells Tereza about it. They both say how spiritually and physically ugly Prague has become, and Tereza suggests they move to the country to escape it. Tomas agrees, although he realizes that a rural life will effectively end his pursuit of women. But if he could give up surgery, he realizes, he can certainly give up women, the other necessity of his life. Completing the role reversal hinted at in the progress of Tereza's dreams, she comforts him as he tries to sleep despite his stomachache.

In a parabatic meditation that follows, Kundera discusses the difference between love and sex, calling sex a mechanism invented by God to amuse himself, while love, he says, remains a human trait, something beyond our Es muss sein. In a dream Tomas meets a woman who, in a bland and undefined way, seems perfect for him. If he were to live in paradise, he thinks, he would have to live with her; in fact, she would be what Kundera calls the Es muss sein of his love. Tomas ponders the conflicting demands of two classical myths of necessity—the one from Plato's Symposium about the lover compulsively seeking his other half, and the biblical one about the abandoned child who, like Moses, comes floating into one's life in need of care. Awake from the dream, Tomas realizes that he would abandon the perfect other half of himself for Tereza no matter how many times the choice arose. Beyond experiment, his love and his compassion would force him to follow her. As he thinks of these things, Tereza stirs and half in a dream asks what he is staring at. In fact, Tomas looks at Tereza, but he tells her they are in a plane and he is gazing at the stars. Satisfied, she sleeps again, an accident of stars having become his fate, his constellation, his astrological destiny. It is a lovely moment, resonating with romance and poetic lightness, but we must not forget that they fly in a plane and, even in a dream, what goes up must inevitably, humanly, return to earth again.

“THE GRAND MARCH”

Almost entirely parabatic, “The Grand March” concerns Kundera's discussion of kitsch and his playful use of the term as a metaphor for certain kinds of ideas, social causes, and memories. Primarily he discusses the lies we tell ourselves about life and its meaning, especially as we try to deny the limitations and demands of the body to follow higher, “lighter” principles, or ideals. As a result, the “Grand March” of Europe that Kundera relates to kitsch, referring to the history of political and social events that have motivated human beings to band together in a group (or form circular dances, as in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), becomes a metaphor for social and intellectual exclusion banning individuals as well as individualistic thinking. As a political formula the Grand March requires good intentions (it is the “march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward”), along with narrowness of perception, an unwillingness to accept alternate views of reality, and a need to see things only in optimistic terms. Needless to say, in aesthetic and moral matters kitsch requires similar limitations. So Kundera, keeping to his image of the commode as a white lily floating above a sewer, opens the “Grand March” segment with a story about the bowel habits of Stalin's son, Yakov, and the embarrassment over them that led to his suicide in a concentration camp during World War II. Referring to Yakov Stalin's death as the “sole metaphysical” one of the war (apparently because it was due to his soul's shame over the behavior of the body), Kundera uses the suicide as a foundation for a broad philosophic discussion, eventually centering on kitsch, a system of values that he defines as an “absolute denial of shit,” allowing us to praise life and, in a religious sense, express our “categorical agreement” with God's creation.

In his discussion Kundera targets theologians generally, followers of social causes on the right and the left, and, most of all, politicians and media personalities in search of attention as he develops the subject of kitsch along with the background of Franz's participation in an international protest march to Cambodia. Referring to kitsch as the realm where the “dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme” over reason, Kundera fills the “Grand March” section of the novel with events that belie its optimistic title. In addition to Yakov Stalin's death at the beginning, we learn about Franz's useless, violent murder in Bangkok after the march accomplishes nothing but a few publicity photos, the accident that kills Tomas and Tereza, and Sabina's aging, lonely trek westward to California where, resigned to her rootless end, she draws up a will asking to be cremated and have her ashes tossed to the winds.

By contrast, we read of the triumph of Marie-Claude, Franz's estranged wife, who welcomes her husband's return and plays the grieving, forgiving widow before a credulous Parisian society. The section ends with an ironic coupling of kitschy epitaphs: Of his father, Tomas, the religious Simon writes, “He wanted the kingdom of God on earth,” while Marie-Claude composes for Franz, “A return after long wanderings.”

In a world that reduces complex events to simple, catchy images—Beethoven's frown of genius, a photo of an actress (or politician) lovingly embracing an Asian child—such epitaphs carry the ring of appropriateness, but certainly not truth. In a civilization that obsessively denies death and the waste of the body, Kundera tells us, kitsch is an oasis in the desert of memory, a brief, illusory rest stop on the journey we all take toward oblivion.

“KARENIN'S SMILE”

In this novel, as well as in Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera explores storytelling as a function of self-definition; personality becomes a manifestation of storytelling (rather than vice versa) and, by extension, the character of humanity in general becomes an expression of the stories of ancient myth and their residual variations in the practices, ideas, and stories of modern life. Thus, the classical theatrical device of parabasis influences Kundera's form, while structuralism in general, with particular reference to Lévi-Strauss's “The Structural Study of Myth,” underpins the intellectual, thematic content. As a result The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains playful commentary on human behavior through such devices as “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words” (Part Three), encyclopedic definitions and discussions of philosophic ideas (Part One) and cultural concepts such as kitsch and the Grand March (Part Six).

Having taken care of human concerns (while disposing, briefly and casually, of the lives and destinies of the four major characters), Kundera moves to animal life in the final section and writes about it in a way that loses none of the seriousness or wit of the previous pages. In so doing, he hints at an animal's conception of man (the cow parasite, as Tereza imagines it) and discusses from that point of view the injustice in man's biblical claim to dominion over animals. As a result, the major emotional event—and climax—of this section becomes the illness and death of Karenin, Tereza's dog, while in a turnabout of the usual narrative logic Kundera merely hints at the tragic accident ending Tomas and Tereza's existence.

He performs this inversion for several reasons. First, he provides a happy ending to the love story of Tomas and Tereza, having put their deaths somewhere off in the distant, unknowable future; second, he subverts the man-centered notion of existence by investing importance and emotion in the loss of an animal; and, third, through Karenin he confronts the fragility of bodily existence and the inability of the human mind to accept death of the body as an end for the mind and spirit as well.

At the same time Karenin embodies some of the thematic notions of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, alternately living as male and female, like the soothsayer Tiresias in the Oedipus myth. In addition to those mythic variations, Kundera humanizes the dog's ordinary, daily character, portraying him as a happy and central part of village life. Also, while narrating Karenin's death, Kundera elevates our conception of him to rather noble heights: (1) we see him diseased with cancer, operated on, and then revived, waking in the middle of the night with full joy at having been reborn; (2) we are moved that Karenin, apparently in pain, still walks with Tereza and Tomas to make them happy; (3) we witness his continued decline and can contrast Tereza's tearful sense of loss with the local farm woman's pragmatic attitude about animals; and (4) we sympathize, with a bit of ironic distance, when Tomas and Tereza argue about Karenin's death in the same way they would a human's.

To be sure, Kundera places some larger intellectual context around Karenin's death, discussing in extended passages of parabasis human beings and their relation to animals. He writes about Descartes's naming of humanity as “master and proprietor over nature,” coupling it with the fact, as we have read already in The Farewell Party, that after the Russian invasion, Czech Communists, in an act of civic kitsch, ordered all stray dogs killed in order to keep streets clean. After that litany of human egocentrism and cruelty, Kundera says, “Mankind's true moral test … consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.” He continues in that vein, commenting that he loves Tereza when he thinks of her with Karenin, because she reminds him of the time Nietzsche threw his arms around the neck of a beaten horse. In their sympathy for animals both Tereza and Nietzsche step aside from the road mankind normally follows in yet another Grand March toward progress, toward some unknown but eagerly anticipated future.

From that comment, with its implied criticism of change, Kundera meditates on an opposite obsession, the idyll, a perfect, unchanging condition that he defines as monotony breeding happiness instead of boredom. Humans, who live in the hope of improving life's conditions, need change; yet at the same time they long for stasis, a preeminent condition in one of the envisioned ends of human life: paradise, or heaven.

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man,” Kundera says, using that sentence as a transition to discuss the life that Tomas and Tereza lead after abandoning Prague for the country. Karenin, completely at home there, revels in daily repetition, and Tereza realizes that, now more used to repetition herself, she could tolerate her mother more easily here than in Prague simply because she would no longer want to improve her and would no longer fear being like her. But even in the country this idyll evolves. Karenin's cancer returns, and in a moving, delicately written scene Tomas puts him to death with an injection. Burying him in their garden beneath two apple trees, Tomas and Tereza give Karenin an epitaph that reflects a dream Tereza had about the dog: “Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to two rolls and a bee.” The two rolls refer to the game Tomas and Karenin repeated each idyllic morning of their country life, the bee to the inevitable yet dreaded idyll, the sting of death.

The emotional climax of the novel reached (and with the emotion of the death of Tomas and Tereza denied us), Kundera winds his story down, preparing for a dissonant ending with a veneer of resolution and harmony. After Karenin's burial Tereza dreams of death in a recapitulation of most of the dreams in the novel: Tomas receives a letter summoning him to the airfield of a neighboring town. Horrified, she leaves for the airfield with him; they board a plane, fly through clouds for a short while, and land. As they descend from the plane, two hooded men with rifles await them. One raises his rifle and aims. Tomas slumps over, dead; Tereza, ready to fling herself on top of him, sees that Tomas's body is shrinking before her eyes. In quick order, he transforms into a rabbit, the men chase and catch it, returning it to Tereza. She finds herself walking through Prague, where she reaches the apartment she lived in as a child with her parents. She enters, taking the rabbit to the room she occupied as a girl. There a lamp burns, as if awaiting her. On the lamp sits a butterfly, its wings outspread, with two large eyes painted on them. “Tereza knew she was at her goal,” Kundera says, underlining the idea of repetition in her return. But she has progressed personally as well, at least in her dreams, for she has Tomas under control and can love him better (“Better, not bigger”) because she thinks the “love of man and woman is a priori inferior” to love between humans and animals. Lying on the bed, Tereza presses the rabbit to her, and we see in the childish, fairy tale image another variation of the Oedipus theme.

In the final chapter of the book Tereza sees Tomas as an aging man and, with a tinge of regret and guilt at the change, feels responsible. Her weakness, “aggressive” weakness, Kundera calls it has destroyed his strength, effectively turning him into a rabbit. They descended from the heights of his profession, Tereza thinks, to make him prove his love. But that night, at a country dance some distance from their home, while Tereza voices her doubts, Tomas reassures her by saying that he, no longer Don Juan but Everyman, feels happy. More important, perhaps, he also feels “free, free of all missions” at last. In their room that night, the last that they will spend together since we know they will die next day on the road homeward, they see a butterfly ascend from the lampshade and hear the sounds of music from the dance hall beneath them. Another lovely moment: The spirit ascends while the music of death sounds from below.

The moth in flight is lightness weighed down by death; the music is heaviness, or fate, lifted by art. If we perceive the music as form, we can interpret the moth as content. Art and nature: they comprise the possibilities as well as the limits, as Kundera sees them, of the joys and sadness of the human condition.

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