Intimate Motifs
[In the following review, Glastonbury finds that in The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera “defines his characters as ‘my own unrealized possibilities.’”]
This week, Milan Kundera has had as many Western journalists sitting at his feet in Paris as were formerly drawn to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. In consequence, the facts of his career, which began in Brno in 1929, have been well publicised: early membership of the Communist Party; expulsion; reinstatement; acclaim during ‘the Prague Spring’ for his satirical first novel The Joke; dismissal from his post at the National Film School following the Russian invasion; continued residence in Czechoslovakia during the ‘normalization’ period, despite the suppression of his books; finally, in 1975, his acceptance of a professorship at the University of Rennes.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he defines his characters as ‘my own unrealized possibilities … Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented'. In a time of peculiarly fateful choices—where, how and with whom to live?—he laments the inescapable singularity of any course of action. Unscripted, unrehearsed, unrepeatable, life is an improvisation from which it is always too late to learn.
But fiction, like film, permits unlimited replays and shifts of perspective—and the intersecting paths of Kundera's four protagonists ingeniously reveal recurrent episodes, dreams and images in different minds.
Franz, the Swiss philosopher, is forever at cross purposes with his adored painter, the exiled Sabine, so their romance is conveyed through a glossary of misunderstood words. Incompatible habits of thought, opposing tastes and divergent responses are subtly traced to the contrasting predispositions of their separate pasts. Tomas the brain surgeon, perplexed by the incongruity of his marriage to a waitress turned photographer, tries to distinguish the essential elements of his destiny—‘Es muss sein’—from the fortuitous. In vain. His impression that Tereza has drifted toward him like an abandoned infant borne on the stream reminds him of other such rescues, in myth and legend. This prompts a reference to Oedipus in a letter to the Press on the subject of national guilt, which costs him his job.
Questions of accident and design, intention and outcome, are the more vexed because private conversations may be officially recorded and a casual liaison turn out to have been engineered by the police. Kundera specialises in intricate patterns of causation and ironic reverses of fortune.
Lest the reader should consider these paradoxes schematic, the author meets the charge with a dextrous pre-emptive thrust. Art has no monopoly on symmetry, he argues, for human lives are composed like music. They take shape according to the significance we assign to random objects and encounters in our formative years. These intimate motifs can be shared in the opening sequences, continuing to resonate thereafter. Hence the enduring fascination for Tomas of Sabina's bowler hat, the secret token of her desire for humiliation.
The example is less felicitous than the idea, which neatly transposes into literature the autobiographical tradition developed by music by Smetana and Janacek. ‘The laws of beauty,’ elegiacally invoked here, belong chiefly to men like Tomas and Franz, who recoil from the coarse and the commonplace and whose intellectual pre-eminence is shown by their swift shedding of domestic encumbrances. ‘In practically no time, Tomas managed to rid himself of wife, son, mother and father.’ Compassion, even curiosity, are notably absent from the portrayal of these nameless extras, the former spouse, the bespectacled girlfriend, the bloated matron in the public baths. By the time Tomas and Tereza take up farming, only animals—a cow, a pig, a dog—seem worthy of attention and attachment. A prophet much honoured outside his own country, Kundera scorns the Grand March of collective hopes and, equally marketably, endows his hero (of course) with sexual omnipotence.
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