The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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The Character as Victim

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SOURCE: “The Character as Victim,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 468-82.

[In the following excerpt, Lesser offers a negative assessment of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]

What I understand by an author's love for his characters is a delight in their independent existence as other people, an attitude towards them which is analogous to our feelings towards those we love in life; and an intense interest in their personalities combined with a sort of detached solicitude, a respect for their freedom. This might be—indeed should be—a truism, but I suppose it to be one no longer. The writers whom we admire today do not appear to love their characters, and the critics who appraise their books show no sign of doing so either. For a writer or critic to show delight in a character would seem today rather naive, an old-fashioned response left over from the days of Dickens or Surtees. Characters, it seems, are no longer objects of affection.

—John Bayley, The Characters of Love

Among modern novelists, the prevailing idea appears to be that authors and their characters are in direct competition. What one side gains (in terms of verisimilitude, power, affection, fame, or whatever), the other loses. Of course, the author generally being in the dealer's seat, he can pretty much stack the deck to assure his own victory—if indeed victory consists of looking smarter, or nicer, or more lovable than one's characters. In the old days it was considered a victory if the author could eliminate himself as much as possible: “you become a nonentity, like Shakespeare,” said William Carlos Williams, describing the creation of great characters. But the last thing most modern authors want is to disappear from their novels, because then they might not get full credit. And credit appears to be what most of them are finally after—a critical pat on the had, an outpouring of readerly admiration, a place in the Modern Authors Hall of Fame. You can feel this in the very texture of their prose.

These authors will frequently argue that much as they might like to disappear, such conjuring tricks just aren't possible anymore. The whole game of literature has gotten too sophisticated, they will say; readers know they're reading a “text” and can't be fooled into thinking it's real life. But this can be disproved by a few obvious counter—examples: Norman Mailer, for instance, does one of the great disappearing acts of all time in The Executioner's Song, a novel which both creates a great character and comments on how the “fiction” was composed. Maybe it's just that writers have gotten lazier. It's much easier to trumpet out the difficulty of one's authorial task than to make a very difficult thing look easy (as Michael Jackson does when he dances, or Dickens does when he writes). And many modern novelists are simply not good enough—Bayley would say, not loving enough—to spend the world on their characters and have something left over for themselves. So the characters are the ones who consistently get shortchanged by the poverty of their authors’ imaginations.

I have been speaking of “these authors” as an undifferentiated mass, but obviously not all modern novelists suffer equally or similarly from such problems. In the recent season alone, for instance, there is quite a range in the degree to which authors triumph over characters. …

An instructive contrast to this first novel by an unknown writer [Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr] can be found in the recent work of a major novelist: Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This is a bad novel, I think, but it is a bad novel on a high level—extremely intelligent, quite witty, and very certain about its meanings. In fact, Kundera's novel is bad partly because its author knows too clearly and powerfully what he wants to say. Nobody else—in particular, none of the characters—has a chance to say otherwise. The prose has a coy way of suggesting that the novel is partly the product of accident, as when Kundera remarks about an earlier section: “There is something I failed to mention at the time.” But this author defers to no power beyond himself, and the novel's “accidental” deaths—of one character in a political demonstration, or of two others under a truck—all feel excessively contrived. You get the sense that it is easy, too easy, for Kundera to kill off his characters because they were never very much alive in the first place.

Kundera is well guarded against such criticism, in that he builds the answers to it into his novel. This is self-aware fiction of the latest variety, parrying with its right just where the critic is about to throw a left. Thus he counters the comments I've just made by saying in the midst of the novel: “But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? … The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.” Certainly this is egotism of a high order (can one only be fond of one's own faults?).

But it is also a lie: Kundera does not love all his characters equally, at least to the extent of giving them independent being. The only character in the novel who seems at all substantial is Tomas, a Czech doctor-turned-window-washer. The central fact about Tomas is that he is a tremendous womanizer (in a manner that is much more evocative of writers than doctors), and this promiscuity is clearly an object of intense enjoyment and delight for the author. Any gestures toward condemning Tomas that occur in the course of the novel are purely ritual ones. Kundera tells us that Tomas's wife, Tereza, is made desperately jealous by his behavior, and we are shown her jealousy and her pain in all its detail. But we can't really feel it. Even when we hear about Tereza's dreams or childhood anxieties, the stories have the ring of something told to the author, not something experienced by him. And this failure of empathy occasionally causes Kundera to misjudge the reader's reaction. Thus, following a tale of Tomas's infidelities and Tereza's discovery of them, Kundera says:

Anyone who has failed to benefit from the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter.

Who is kidding whom here? While we're in the process of coldly condemning, perhaps we might cast a brief glance at Tomas's own behavior—but no. Tomas's infidelities, like the desk drawers, are apparently sacred.

An important character in this novel is a female dog named Karenin. As Russian scholars and readers of Tolstoy will know, Karenin is a man's name. But for various reasons Tomas and Tereza do not want to name their dog Karenina, and she therefore becomes Karenin, after which point in the novel she is invariably referred to as “he.” Somehow this is indicative of Kundera's attitude toward his human characters, but in reverse: his female characters are really just outpourings of a masculine imagination, the results of his determination to give them female names. What they are in themselves does not interest him (though he would have us believe that it does—for this novelist wants full credit for empathy, for “compassion”).

The novel ends with, and gains its emotional clout from, the death of the dog Karenin—this from the writer who has just finished attacking “totalitarian kitsch,” the production of fake and sappy sentiments. Of course, the long discussion of kitsch may well be Kundera's vanguard action to defend his own kitschiness, another case of the “you can't fault me because I've already faulted myself” approach. But one has the feeling that Kundera's kitsch is the one thing he can't control. Even the use of words like “unbearable”—not only in the title, but throughout the novel—is the sign of a kitschy imagination, one that must resort to excess because it no longer responds to understatement.

There is a great deal of discussion about love in this book: love of a betraying husband for his betrayed wife, of a lover for his mistress, of an author for his character, of a master for his dog. Finally, the novel seems to assert that the latter is the only form of “unselfish” love, because a dog can't give us anything back. But as anyone who owns an animal knows, the love you bear your pets is likely to be the most selfish love of all, for an animal depends on you utterly and never violates your definition of its personality. Because an animal can't talk, you give it language and thought; because it only gives you back yourself, it makes you feel both powerful and unselfish, both loving and beloved. The mistake Kundera makes is to treat his characters like pets. He thinks what he feels for them is love, whereas it's merely an excess of self. If it were really love, we would be able to push aside that gigantic authorial face that looms out of the pages of Kundera's novel (and so much other recent fiction), and find behind it the tiny, human, flawed faces of real novelistic characters. But they aren't there. Behind that leering, all-obliterating mask is nothing.

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