The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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Kundera and Jane Austen

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SOURCE: “Kundera and Jane Austen,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 58-64.

[In the following essay, Bayley draws comparisons between Jane Austen's novelistic departures in Northanger Abbey and Kundera's response to “kitsch” and his narrative innovations in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]

In The Art of the Novel Kundera speaks of his “disgust” with those who reduce a work of fiction to its ideas. Yes, but who watches the watchers, who preserves the critic from this primal fault, when the critic is also a novelist? It might seem that there is no answer to this question. Kundera is a writer very different from his admired Kafka, who has no “ideas,” who made a world of his own, a private world in which privacy had no existence; and who thus anticipated—as Kundera says—the society of totalitarianism and the concentration camp. Kafka knew nothing of such a society, and had no idea of prophesying it: his own world was both personal and obsessive, and yet it has become one that is public and accepted, universally recognized.

It is difficult to imagine such a process occurring with Kundera. Many if not most good novelists could indeed be described in the words that Mallarmé used about Poe. Time has changed them into their real selves. Posterity has revealed what they could not have known about their own creation. But could this apply to Kundera, remarkable novelist as he certainly is, or to the other contemporary novelists he admires—Broch, Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Calvino—novelists all concerned in their different ways with that twin activity Kundera himself has described: the “appeal of thought,” and “the appeal of play.” It is tacitly accepted in critical circles today that the ludic function of the novel produces a created equilibrium with its ideas, its thought content; that the two together somehow vouch for each other, canceling the charge of either frivolity or academicism. But if so, what is the reality about them that their authors do not know, and which future readers and critics will discover?

In this essay I shall investigate the question of whether Kundera has, so to speak, any future being as a novelist apart from what now declares itself with such vitality and lucidity in his novels, and in what he has himself written about them. What secret world might be left to declare itself to a coming generation? On the face of it, none, and yet the question is not so simple as that. Oddly enough the work that occurred to me in comparison with Kundera's here is one apparently as unlike his as possible. It seems likely that he has never read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: possibly nothing by Jane Austen at all. One can imagine him saying, like Conrad, if her novels were brought to his attention, that he could not see the point of them; and it is certainly the case that in his essays and interview discussions in The Art of the Novel he mentions no women novelists. There seems to me to be no male chauvinism in this: only an honest unawareness that women write novels, and write them, usually, in a different way from the male novel, which for Kundera is always, if it comes off, a “conquest of being.” That is of course a significant phrase. Kundera sees the novelist as successively annexing new areas of experience (Ulysses “undertakes” the immense theme of vulgarity) and the parallel with science, war, exploration, is obvious enough. As so often Kundera is paradoxical here. His disgust with ideas is also a disgust with male conquest by metaphysics. He quotes Heidegger: “Since reality consists in the uniformity of calculable reckoning, man too must enter monotonous uniformity in order to keep up with what is real. A man without a uniform today already gives the impression of being something unreal which no longer belongs.” In spite of Kundera's disgust male novelists must be, for him, men in uniform.

Nonetheless, Kundera as a novelist does overcome his own intellectual paradox. The example of Jane Austen's first, most youthful novel helps to show how. She began Northanger Abbey as a skit on the Gothic novel. Not on Mrs. Radcliffe, whom she greatly admired, but on that great novelist's imitators, who were springing up on all sides. Her simple recipe was to involve her young heroine in a commonplace social situation, which she, the heroine, would contrive to see as a “Gothic” one: with the consequence of social follies and misunderstandings. Intent on the development of her idea, Jane Austen did not see that her novel, would in time reveal something quite other from what she had planned: would reveal, indeed, an extraordinarily original image of the self, in relation to the fashions and distractions which she portrayed as creating it. Catherine Morland, her heroine, possesses a good nature and a capacity to love that overcomes all the social “Gothicism” that her author contrives to put in her way. Jane Austen's deliberate and secondary satire goes to show that respected social figures, like General Tilney, are in reality just as much ogres and monsters as the stereotype Catherine—her head stuffed with romances—conceives them to be. Jane Austen was deliberately showing that Gothic novels were far more realistic, in the society in which they were so successful, than their besotted and day-dreaming readers could possibly have supposed.

But beyond that she had done something she knew nothing of, which has secured a deserved immortality for that first slight novel, an immortality which would have come to pass even if she had written no later and more mature masterpieces. She has made a real person out of wholly artificial conventions and contrivances. Her heroine manages somehow to elude the successive tones of satire, amusement, delicate burlesque in which the novelist has presented her. The novel has escaped from ideas and purposes, from what we might now consider—following Kundera—to be the pattern of “thought” and “play.”

And it seems to me that something very similar is happening in Kundera's own best novels, particularly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The novel's true and distant meaning—its meaning, if not for “eternity” then at least for the following generations—lies in some other dimension than the schema propounded by its author, however much his own deliberate “conquest” of new reality may contribute to it. The Unbearable Lightness of Being not only subsumes the rich underside of Kundera's writing but may reveal an unexpected meaning beyond its schematic one. As Northanger Abbey takes the Gothic as its inspiration and starting—point—what Kundera would call “the already known,” from which the novelist must seek his or her new departure—so The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with the idea of kitsch.

The word is an old piece of Austrian slang which, as Kundera is at pains to explain in an analysis of it, signifies a peculiarly Central European concept of the vulgar-romantic, the facile, the sentimental, the false. Like the Russian poshlost, kitsch signifies a dimension of life which developed as a kind of popularization of the Romantic experience of the early nineteenth century; and in exploring and analyzing it Kundera gives it an extra political dimension. The Brotherhood of Man, that politically Romantic ideal, can only be achieved, he tells us, “on the basis of kitsch”; and kitsch is the chosen instrument of the Communist Party in their manipulation of social consciousness. All pictures of smiling sunburnt farmers, little girls in flowery meadows, contented old grannies—in a word, all advertisement, whether capitalist or communist, which takes an implacably rosy view of human possibility, is the groundwork or raw material of kitsch and its various social and artistic ramifications.

Kundera sees human consciousness, particularly under a communist regime, as besieged by kitsch: and the chief function of art today as having the duty to disown, denounce and replace it. This can be done by the novel in its ludic role and as the natural vessel not of negation but of skepticism—“consubstantial irony.” Irony is the natural enemy of kitsch, its antidote and opposite. But how should the novelist use irony? Kundera is as cunning about this as one would expect. Irony is the novel must be an invisible presence, not an aggressive weapon, as it is used by the satirist. Just by being a novel, in the true sense, the form can dissolve the kitsch universe.

But kitsch possesses a reassuring solidity and weight. That is why the lightness of being seems so intolerable when compelled to a confrontation with it. In Kundera's novel Sabina is the chief anti-kitsch partisan, and it is part of the book's invisible irony that this role destroys her. The “honesty” of communism—the drabness, the shortages, the food queues—she can tolerate, even approve; what she detests are its hypocritical pretences, its façade of a glittering socialist palace. She develops as an artist an unnerving technique for destroying her enemy through subtle kinds of distortion. Having been trained in a socialist art school she applies its precepts to her painting: but in every canvas representing a sheet-metal workers’ factory meeting, or happy schoolchildren at play, she contrives to insert some disturbing touch—a few blood-red dots, or a scrawny bird outline etched in black—which arrests and reverses the reassuringly kitschy expectations the audience has from the picture.

Sabina's tactic earns her fame abroad, when her pictures are smuggled out of the country and become known in the capitalist West. She herself emigrates and becomes successful and prosperous. But she is soon disgusted with the way in which her paintings are, as it were, turned back into kitsch for the benefit of a society which in its own way is just as hungry for it as the Soviets desire their own subjects to be. Her exhibitions are advertised by crafty photos of machine-gun watchtowers seen from below, or tasteful patterns of barbed wire surrounding the text of the announcement. She realizes that her enemy now possesses her, is inside her; and her gaiety and promiscuity cover a deep foundation of despair.

Sabina's predicament is, in a sense, that of the novelist himself. In his attack on the idea of kitsch Kundera has put himself in a decidedly tricky situation. For the idea of the separation between the two worlds—that of kitsch and non-kitsch—is as artificial and as constricting as any other “idea” to which Kundera hates the novel to be reduced. By attacking kitsch has he, like Sabina, fatally involved himself in it? Whereas Jane Austen could expand her whole universe of irony, and also of daily commonsense, by means of her play with the Gothic, Kundera has apparently boxed himself in by making too purely partisan an approach to that anti-world which confronts the novel—the world of kitsch.

This, however, is where the true future of his novel beckons. Jane Austen got her own truth out of the Gothic by naturalizing it in everyday life: Kundera gets his unexpected and “non-partisan” value from kitsch by an invisible accommodation with it, in terms of the art of his novel. This is done in terms of the “hero and heroine” (itself a pretty kitschy notion) of the novel—Tomas and Tereza.

Tomas is like the hero in a soap opera. But the reader does not think of this; nor, apparently, does the author. And Tereza is, of course, the right foil for a soap opera hero. Theirs is the real thing, true love, which will last as long as they live. He is redeemed from promiscuity and aimlessness by the love of a good woman. He sacrifices his career for her. They withdraw from the world to love in a cottage. But so brilliantly has Kundera deployed his ideology and set the scene that these things, in a sense so evident, even so obvious, seem wholly new and fresh, as if “true love” were being discovered in the novel for the first time. In fact, true love has indeed been realized and attained in the creation of the novel, but by the agency of its consciousness of kitsch, in the same way that an absolutely real young woman is established in Northanger Abbey through the medium of the Gothic novel and Jane Austen's use of it. Neither author, it seems to me, is fully, if at all, conscious of the operation, and there is a particular interest in the fact that Northanger Abbey (first titled Susan and then Catherine) was published only after Jane Austen's death, nearly twenty years after she had written it, and at a time when the inspiration she had received from the Gothic novel, and the use she had made of it, would have been much more apparent than when she first composed the work at the end of the eighteenth century.

To what extent is Kundera aware of the peculiar use he has made of kitsch in his novel? I doubt if he is, for the paradox involved depends on what he himself has called the novel's “radical autonomy.” Although Jane Austen was much better disposed towards the Gothic novel—particularly the novels of Ann Radcliffe—than Kundera can be assumed to feel about contemporary artistic and political kitsch, it is nonetheless kitsch in a metamorphosed form which triumphs in his novel, just as the Gothic reversed does in Jane Austen's. The Unbearable Lightness of Being could well have started out by being called Tereza, for it is Tereza who is both the counterpart to kitsch and its apotheosis.

As it happens, one of Kundera's own admired group of Central European novelists may have accidentally suggested to him a key aspect of Tereza. Kundera himself mentions the episode in Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke when the modern young Polish matron goes nonchalantly into the lavatory, drawing attention to the fact, because she regards such frankness as the modern and emancipated line to take. It is an exceedingly funny moment, but also a conscious and satiric one. If Kundera recalled it when writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being he certainly changed its significance. Tereza sitting on the toilet is of course an epitome of the helplessness of physical being—that heavy helplessness which draws Tomas inexorably towards her—but she is also, and by a piece of much more involuntary mystery, a figure of beatified kitsch. Out of Kundera's hatred for this concept, and for its domination of all political and aesthetic life in the Soviet bloc, there has unexpectedly emerged a particularly strange and satisfying case of the novel's radical autonomy: the emergence of something new in place of the “already known.” The invisible and consubstantial irony in the novel unites Tereza and Tomas, as it were, on the toilet seat, in all the saving helplessness of physical dependence. Kitsch has triumphed at the last, but in a transcendent, almost unrecognizable guise. Kundera has endorsed, and perhaps without meaning it, an epigrammatic saying of the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, that the novel exists to overcome kitsch. We could turn that around and say that the novel cannot exist without kitsch, whose function is to be transformed by the novel.

Like Catherine Morland, Tereza emerges as a character entirely clear and authentic from a background of literary artifice and guileful intention. As I have emphasized, it seems likely that neither author planned the character who emerged: Catherine and Tereza are not like James Joyce's Molly Bloom or Henry James's Isabel Archer. They are not portraits of ladies. And although Tereza “stands” for weight, the saving and inevitable burden of life, she is saved from any theoretical status as a character by the bizarre shadow of the kitsch that makes her both “ordinary” and admirable, while redeeming her from intellectual personification. Terezas are in a sense what every advertiser aims at, and every Reader's Digest-style priest (“the most unforgettable character I have met”) exhorts his flock to resemble. She is faithful, patient, long-suffering and kind, and uses (or would use if she had the opportunity and the resources) all the right consumer durables. Like Catherine Morland she is everybody's nice girl; and yet both in their contexts escape the label, become apparently unique individuals.

It is revealing to compare Tereza not only with her Polish counterpart in Ferdydurke, whose toilet-going activities are simply a way of satirizing what was then the modern cultural attitude, but with the haunting heroine of Robert Musil's novella Tonka. Tonka is a simple girl of the people who becomes the narrator's mistress, and in her speechless and undefining way is apparently loyal and faithful to him; but she contracts venereal disease while living with the narrator, and this can only mean that she has had relations during that time with some other man. The hero intuits—indeed knows—that what she says is both true and false, and from this experience in the realm of the erotic he deduces that everything in the world, and in human experience, can be both false and true at the same time. The narrator, and his author Musil, are in fact using Tonka as an example of thinking-about-the-world metaphysically, and especially in terms of erotic metaphysics. The mysterious Tonka, although she makes a deep appeal to the narrator-author, and—because the novella is unquestionably successful—to the reader as well, remains nonetheless a character perceived and manipulated by pure intelligence, not the unconscious work of creation that seems to have gone into Catherine, or into Tereza.

Kundera himself remarks that while most novelists invent or describe a character, Musil thinks a character. This is certainly true, and it remains the reason why Tonka is an aspect of erotic investigation, and hence, for Musil, of discovery about the nature of the world. But Tereza, no more than Anna Karenina, is not there for the purpose of adding a new dimension to our sense of human beings. She is simply there—an achievement more common among classic novelists of the nineteenth century than it is among novelists today. The type of the achievement remains alien to the modern writer. And the novelist of the former time could hardly have said himself how he brought it about. Henry James said of one of Balzac's female characters that it was not by knowing her that he loved her: he knew her by loving her. That gives an important clue to the process.

Tonka dies at the end of her story, seemingly of the complications of pregnancy attended by venereal disease. The significant thing is that she dies, just as the old-time heroine who had “gone wrong” used to die in the novels of the past. A Tonka who simply disappeared into urban limbo would not, oddly enough, have been so effective a vehicle for Musil to think with and through, in terms of his discovery that something may be simultaneously true and false. He needs the old-fashioned solution of death to round off, as it were, the modern problem. For Kundera the problem too comes first: comes, that is to say, before the character; and it seems likely that Kundera follows Musil not only in thinking the character, but in using an old convention to close down the situation which has explored the thought.

“To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, is to do pretty well.” So Jane Austen takes leave of her hero and heroine at the end of Northanger Abbey. She too is using the convention, but using it in such a way that it operates in the opposite sense to the one it states. From this the reader knows—if he cares, and the success of the story will have been to make him do so—that a pair of perfectly ordinary lives, with the usual ups and downs, joys and sorrows, are in prospect. As Musil wrote, the novel at its best kills kitsch, but does it by removing the distinction between kitsch and “reality.” Kundera completes his novel by means of a convention similar to Jane Austen's, though more radical: he tells us what happened after the novel is over, and in place of perfect “felicity” this is random death in a road accident. Just as Jane Austen's tone does not in fact mock, but rather enhances, the realities that have appeared in her story, so Kundera's ending serves to emphasize the contentment of Tomas and Tereza in their “togetherness.” Kitsch wins by losing; or, alternately, the novel wins by understanding the truth of kitsch. As an intellectual novelist Kundera is especially aware of two things: the novel's need to escape ideas on the one hand, and kitsch on the other. One of the major pleasures of reading him is to see how he does both. At the same time he shows us how the modern novelist's fear of ideas is intimately connected with his fear of kitsch. The novel needs both, but should also lose both in the telling, as the young Jane Austen lost both the Gothic novel and a satire on it in finding her own person, her own place.

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