SOURCE: “Kundera's Quartet (On The Unbearable Lightness of Being),” translated by John Anzalone, in Salmagundi, No. 73, Winter, 1987, pp. 109-18.

[In the following essay, Scarpetta examines the musical structure and dominant thematic motifs in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]

COMPOSITION

Milan Kundera's novel opens on an abstract reflection involving certain themes of Nietzsche and Parmenides; its final part, seemingly unrelated to the actions and situations of its characters, essentially concerns the slow death of a dog. Here are indications of an overt desire to destroy the classical notion of “novelistic development” (exposition, peripeteia, reboundings, knotting and denouement). In fact, everything happens as if, for Kundera, a sense of musical composition took on increasing autonomy in the face of plot's traditional necessities. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being there is no homogeneous, centered plot, but instead a calculated tangle of semi-independent story-lines. Musical terms like variation, interval, counterpoint and restatement come to mind to describe the structural devices the book employs. For example, Kundera is expert in the art of variation: the “events” affecting characters seem to depend on abstract, secret, haunting themes. The intersections of story-lines are closely-timed and fleeting suggesting the use of interval. Likewise, the novel seems to have been composed with the deliberate and generalized use of counterpoint, favoring the horizontal development of parallel narratives over their vertical condensation. Finally, as in musical restatement, an apparently gratuitous motif, such as that of Sabina's derby, or that of the photographs taken by Tereza during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, isolated from one sequence, can expand to become the principal motif of another. At the core of the novel, an emblem points to this compositional choice—it is that of Beethoven's last quartet, Opus 135, apparently summoned as a thematic device for the encounter between Tomas and Tereza—for the “muss es sein? es muss sein,”—but which serves in fact as the implicit, metaphoric reference to a formal structural principal.

LIBERTINAGE

The novel places in opposition romantic obsession, which seeks THE woman in every woman, and can only lead to disappointment, and the libertine obsession, whose donjuanism aims at the uniqueness of each woman, her “formula.” This basic line of demarcation in the novel's narrative fabric is responsible for splitting the characters into groups. Thus, Tereza represents the romantic partner, Sabina the licentious one. Franz seems the very soul of licentious ineptitude (his wife is “the incarnation of his mother”) and Sabina imagines him, during sex, as “a giant puppy nursing at her breast.” But the dividing line can also run across and divide a single character, such as Tomas, whose fate is precisely his failure to share himself between licentious and passionate love. As it happens, this libertinage, raised as a precarious possibility by the text, and constantly threatened by anything that adheres, in one way or another, is not simply a theme. It also functions as the novelistic device par excellence, that of the cold hard look, that of a radical non-adherence. It is also the device that rejects the illusion of an innocent, homogeneous nature, or of a “good community,” and immediately targets individual singularities. The character of Tomas suggests this, in the pride he feels, after an episode of debauchery, in “having cut a narrow strip of tissue out of the infinite fabric of the universe with his imaginary scalpel.” In other words, libertinage is first and foremost a matter of cutting and thus of language: it joins to the pleasure principle the practice of naming. Not just a part of the novel's content, it is one of the very resources of the writing itself.

ABSTRACTIONS

It is a common, particularly widespread prejudice to hold in immediate suspicion ideas and abstractions found anywhere in the fictional genre: the good novelist, we are told, owes it to himself to be the least “intellectual” possible (true, most novelists have no trouble meeting this criterium … ). The question is elsewhere. Let us say instead that the real means of appreciation lie first in the value of the ideas or abstractions the novelist proposes (judged according to a viewpoint internal to literature) and then in the way they appear and function within the fictional whole. From this perspective, one must distinguish between the roman a these, in which characters and action are artificially subordinated to a more or less explicit “idea,” and the integration of abstraction into the narrative. Such an integration, moreover, can take place according to a variety of modes: the montage of a series of philosophical sequences in a dialectic-setting context, as in Sade; the commentary of a narrator who is also a character, as in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, or of the main character, as in Musil's Man without Qualities, regarding the action or situations the text portrays; a combination of these two types of commentary, as in Dostoevsky; the inclusion of abstraction within the dialogue, as in Faulkner; a reflexive counterpoint, as in Broch's Sleepwalkers, or a fusion of intellectual register with lyrical flow, as in Broch's Death of Virgil. On this question Kundera's choice is most unusual: by a twist of his text, he seems—perhaps provocatively?—to accept the canons of the roman a these. He presents “ideas” before “illustrating” them, moves from general to specific and from concrete to abstract. Yet in another way he never stops perverting the device, by confronting it with another, strictly opposite device: the move from a fictional or historical case to the law that illustrates it. He multiplies theses, has them branch out from an original narrative situation. He intertwines concrete and abstract registers, even as he maintains the broadest possible separation between them: a fictional sequence is never the pure example of a general thesis, nor is a thesis ever the sole lesson to be found in a specific case; rather, each register preserves its autonomy within the score. In short, things occur as if the novelistic imagination (designated as such even in the exhibition of the methods used to develop characters) served him as the test of an always open thought process, one always capable of nuance and new beginnings. It is not of romans a these that one should speak, but rather of interrogative novels.

THE MATERNAL SPHERE

One of a number of possible subtitles for Kundera's novel, in opposition to Kafka's well-known expression, might be, “attempted escape from the maternal sphere.” The case of the four main characters provides illustration. On the masculine side, Franz is the most dependent on the maternal universe and at the same time the most inept at libertinage. He is also the most inclined to lyrical illusion, even in the political sphere. He longs for the “cortege,” for the “long march,” for participation in the “march of history.” Tomas, who has deliberately, even willfully (and symptomatically, following his divorce) broken with the values of the maternal universe, seems troubled by his role as father (his relationship with his son is based on equivocation). He barely escapes the classical oedipal conflict, which seeks a radical separation between sexuality and tenderness. He dreams of being able to love Tereza “without being burdened by aggressive sexual foolishness.” As for the women, Sabina never stops replaying symbolically her leaving of the maternal universe, according to a literally interminable principle of “betrayal,” as if the leaving could never be definitive, and had to be endlessly begun again. Finally, Tereza's relationship to her mother is presented as peculiarly traumatic. Her mother embodies “naturalism,” shamelessness, the denial of sin and the will to proclaim the innocence of the body even in its least appetizing aspects. Tereza thinks she can find a way out by a counter-investment in noble values such as music and reading, in her passionate love for Tomas: “She had come to live with him to escape the maternal universe where all bodies were the same.” But she remains caught in the trap of narcissism. She does not desire her partner, but rather “her own body, suddenly revealed” through him. In other words, she is basically caught in the maternal grip; even in her idealism, her need for dignity, she continues to be no more than the inverse extension of “her mother's grand, violent, self-destructive gesture.”

It is not surprising if, in this quartet, relationships can only be based on misunderstanding. Kundera goes so far as to elaborate the lexicon of Franz and Sabina's basic misunderstanding. Each never stops asking the other for exactly what the other can not give, and refuses what is offered. But what is most striking is surely how the degree of independence from the world of the mother coincides in each character with a greater or lesser capacity to resist the grasp of ideology. So, Tereza, exiled for a time after the Soviet invasion, ends up returning to Czechoslovakia, and Franz, the “mama's boy,” obstinately adheres to communal causes that allow him to blend in among the masses. It is as if Kundera were suggesting in a negative way that freedom from political illusion, along with the non-conformism it supposes, were intrinsically linked to a subjective aptitude for cutting the umbilical cord.

ARCHITECTONICS

The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains seven major divisions or parts. These “movements” do not correspond to either changes in register (as in The Death of Virgil) or to variations in point of view or in the instance of enunciation (as in The Sound and the Fury), but to focal differences. Each part is centered on one or two characters, caught from within and commented on from without. Thus, Parts 1 and 5 focus on Tomas, Parts 2, 4, and 7 on Tereza, Parts 3 and 6 on Sabina and Franz. The architectonic formula would thus be A- B- C- B- A- C- B. The process of multiple focus allows at one and the same time for: the displacement of discourse time with respect to narrative time (The death of Tomas and Tereza, which concludes the book, is mentioned in Part 3; again, there is neither suspense nor linear plot, but a game of combinations that dominates any chronology.); the exposition of several perceptions of the same event (An erotic encounter can thus be taken apart according to the differing “vision” each partner has of it.); and finally the authorization of a set of thematic variations and counterpoints. Moreover, it can be noted that the architectural center of the novel corresponds to a dream sequence, Tereza's dream-fantasy about the Mont-de-Pierre in Prague, which nothing in the discourse allows us to distinguish from a realist sequence—as if this indicated the vanishing point “out of the real,” towards the lightest zone that organizes structure.

THE SHIT VARIATIONS

One of Kundera's many mini-tales is devoted to Stalin's son. Convinced of his matchless destiny, at once son of the living God, and cursed for it, he was unable to bear the derision of his co-prisoners in a German prison camp, over the shit he left in the latrine after using it. He chose instead to commit suicide by throwing himself on the electrified barbed wire. “Stalin's son,” notes Kundera “gave his life for shit;” this was “the only metaphysical death amidst the universal stupidity of the war.” Kundera allows us to see that shit is the very sign of a metaphysical question, whose implications in theological and gnostic traditions he is not afraid to explore: that of the body and the soul, of the upper and lower, that of a humanity created “in the image of God” but needing to shit every day. How does one reconcile shit with the religious or secular ideologies for which man is essentially good and innocent, those ideologies of the “categorical agreement with being,” of which the author speaks elsewhere? What Kundera's “variations” on this theme suggest is that shit can only be thought of in metonymic relation to original sin, to the indelible stain of the species.

Here is yet another way of dividing the characters: there are those who, aware of the connection between shit and stain, reject shit and consider only “noble” values, like Tereza and Stalin's son. Stalin's son finds the evocation of his own shit an intolerable affront; Tereza's lyrical illusion during her first amorous encounter with Tomas is disturbed by the irrepressible gurgling of her stomach. Here a sometimes scatological irony is at work in the devaluation of idealization or of the obsession with purity. On the other hand, there are those who reject altogether the idea of original sin. They rehabilitate shit and wallow in it; they believe in the body's fundamental innocence, in nature; for them nudity is normal. Such characters, like Tereza's mother, whose “naturalism” leads her to burp and fart in public, are no less ridiculous than the others, only slightly more abject. But these two positions are essentially symmetrical and complementary: the first accepts sin but rejects shit, the second accepts shit but rejects sin. These are two masks for the same repression. The third attitude is libertine: it involves accepting both shit and the idea of sin, and maintaining upper and lower in their respective, hierarchical places. In short, it involves acknowledging that the consciousness of a stain is necessary, if only for the sake of transgressing that consciousness, for example in the erotic. Tomas and Sabina's eroticism does not exclude anality; Tomas finds that a woman's ass is the most “moving” part of her body, and is intensely aroused by the protruding anus of one of his partners. Sabina, during a discretely fetishistic scene (she has spiced up her nakedness with an incongruous derby), has an orgasm while imagining herself shitting in front of her lover. For these characters who are as far from puritanism as they are from pansexualism, from idealism as from naturalism, sexual pleasure presupposes the sense of sin.

EYE ON HISTORY

The characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being live through grave and tragic historical situations, foremost among them the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and “normalization” at the hands of the police. But the eye the novel casts on these situations is never directly political. Political scrutiny aims at the masses, at collective phenomena, at common measures and denominators; whereas the novelistic scrutiny plumbs the uniqueness of each case, and through it precisely that which escapes political reason. To quote Musil, the novelist's gaze participates in the “vivisector's” art. What does Kundera's novel bring into view? That “rationality,” “analyses,” or “judgments” count for very little in the decisions made by subjects faced with such situations; that the history of an individual is first a field of possibilities and virtualities (here too, we can think of Musil and his “probable man”) in which accidents and the most irrational subjective postures play a sometimes determining role in the achievement of a destiny (exiled in Zurich, if Tomas finally decides to return to Prague, it is in order to be faithful to a metaphor … ). How does the novelistic eye present “normalized” Czechoslovakia? Less as a universe of oppression, exciting our indignation, as would a purely militant vision, than as a grotesque world where “totalitarian kitsch” reigns, a rigged world in which common, everyday logic founders. It is a universe where, for example, the thousands of photos taken in Prague in 1968 to witness the militarily imposed Soviet order end up being used by that very order to identify those who oppose the regime; where it is useless to oppose “truth” to official lies, so long as truth itself can be manipulated, or turned aside to contribute to repression; a universe, in short, where there is no longer any logical link between an act's intentions and its effects.

It is quite interesting from the standpoint of an “esthetic look at the world” to determine the way Kundera uses the notion of kitsch in his novel. The term is common in central Europe, models of kitsch being visible in the Vienna Ring as well as in the castles of Louis of Bavaria, and generally refers to the triumph of stylistic artifice, to “the sentimental and deceptive embellishment of life.” For Hermann Broch, for example, kitsch embodied the “evil” principle in art and was linked to the separation of artistic values and the other political, moral or religious values of social life, that is, to the modern period's inability, since romanticism, to conceive of art other than as an autonomous and despiritualized sphere. Now, Kundera extends and exports the term. For him, kitsch is not simply an esthetic category, but also “an attitude, a world view,” that of institutionalized lying, of the divorce between social life and its official representations, of the distance between announced optimism and the distress of daily life, that of communism. What is most striking is that the extension of a “stylistic” notion into the political realm produces an effect of truth in depth, revealing an essential dimension of communism, one, precisely, that no purely “ideological” discourse had ever before really allowed us to grasp.

DISSIDENCE?

Perhaps what is most important is this: the “cold gaze of the true libertine” that Kundera also applies to political behavior tolerates no taboos, not even those demanded by the militant's version of the “good fight” against the totalitarian order. Anticonformist, acute, clinical, cruel, this “cold gaze” extracts ambiguous truths, truths that are embarrassing for all camps, truths that can not “serve.” One of these “truths” is that in the West there is a way of demonstrating against totalitarianism that rests upon the same subjective attitude (the enthusiasm of participating in the “long march” of history) that installed totalitarianism in the first place. Another is that the Soviet invasion of 1968 created a veritable intoxication in the Czech population, the paradoxical and troubling euphoria of a clear struggle that could be engaged in without second thoughts. Then there is the contradictory “fact” that a repressive situation, like that of Tomas, who loses his surgeon's position for political reasons and becomes a window washer, can be sexually more free, more favorable to libertinage, than a “normal position.” And finally there is the irrepressible “truth” that there exists at times a barely perceptible complicity (visible in the simple way one points one's index figure while speaking) between the attitudes of dissidents and of the communist authorities in power—or let us say the same way of appealing to the political superego. Paradoxical, scandalous and insubordinate, these “truths” are irreducible to any political conception whatsoever. Not that Kundera is not a dissident, but here too, he is beyond the strictly political sphere. Like any authentic writer, he is a dissident against all manner of conformism or communal illusion.

THE ABSENCE OF INNOCENCE

In a famous 1957 piece, Alain Robbe-Grillet catalogued “several outdated notions” regarding the novel, to wit: character, story, commitment (engagement), the opposition of form and content, and the latter's primacy. Clearly Kundera does not fit in this type of “progressive” esthetic logic, and does not submit to any of its dictates or decrees. In a novel like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example, there are characters that create the effect of emotional participation, even identification; there are “stories” trimmed of all classical narrative prestige; ideological, psychological and sexual “contents” that can not be reduced to simple pretexts (Kundera is obviously a writer for whom the “what to say” is just as important as the “how to say it”). And if it is clear that the problem of Sartrien or social realist commitment is radically foreign to him, his novel nonetheless possesses an undeniable ethical dimension: he analyses behaviors and values, denounces hypocrisy, and so forth.

But we must not conclude for all this that Kundera's art of the novel postulates an innocence for the genre, or emerges from the Balzacian “paradise lost” ironically invoked by Robbe-Grillet. There is no trace in Kundera's writing of any naturalization of nineteenth century codes. The elements decried as outdated by the theorists of the new novel are indeed present, but skewed, and treated in the second degree; they are not excluded or subverted, but to use one of Barthes’ terms, they are turned over. As for his characters, Kundera presents them to us as they are, as fictional beings, and goes so far as to indicate how, within the novel's creation, they were bit by bit conceived. His “stories” or his representations never function in a purely referential way; if there are themes, it is in the musical sense of the word, and their musical treatment is always perceptible. The novelist's art of composition is never effaced behind “realistic effects.” As for the ethical judgment the novel elicits, it is neither tacked on to the fiction, nor anterior or exterior to it. It emerges, as I again emphasize, from a “novelist's gaze,” and not from any outside conscience or ready-made analysis. This, no doubt, is the major interest of such a novelistic esthetic: the ability to conjugate representative effects from the classical novel with the “age of suspicion” introduced by modernity; the ability to claim the function of knowledge or of truth for the novel without, for all that, ceasing to assume and even demonstrate writing's artifices. In short, truth for Kundera is not the contrary of artifice, but rather its effect. In other words: if, in his novels, there is a “critique of innocence,” then it is not only the theme of the situations presented, but also a principle that affects writing itself as such.