Weighting for Kundera
DePietro, Thomas
MEMORY & EXTINCTION THOMAS DePIETRO T OTALITARIANISM, for all the efforts of political theorists to define it, remains as slippery a term as ever, a concept that usually explains either too much...
...The only answers are possibilities, the novelist replies, and he relies on character and event, with all their inherent contradictions, as much as on philosophical speculation, to tell us what those possibilities, in each case, are...
...the issues he confronts - - the bearing of time, choice, and being -- transcend time and place...
...Kundera mentions one fact time and again in his fiction, and most recently in the New York Review essay to which I have referred...
...On the one hand he feels the weight of moral reason: one should always raise a voice for the silenced...
...The Party, like all monolithic systems of government, undermines the very distinctions that (for us) sustain collective sanity...
...T HE "WEAK" Tereza, on the other hand, brings ballast to her shared tale with Tomas...
...Commonweal: 300...
...Tomas does not know it at the moment, but he is poised for the choice of weight or lightness...
...But in a world that assaults truth and reality, how do we expose lies...
...We artists are olives," said Joyce, "squeeze US...
...Censorship," writes Borges, "is the mother of metaphor...
...What does it mean to live in the truth...
...When he finally catches her off-guard, her legs parted expectantly in mid-air, he notices: "they suddenly looked like the raised arms of a soldier surrendering to a gun pointed at him...
...The heresy of heresies was common sense...
...Is creation acceptable or unacceptable...
...In contrast, Orwell's book reads like an illustrated thesis...
...As Orwell elaborates: "Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy...
...Nevertheless, it is kitsch, a simplistic political vision, that deludes Franz and renders him weightless...
...Moments before the photograph was snapped, Clementis had given Gottwald his fur cap to protect him from the snow...
...Orwell envisages in 1984 a word where power seems to exist for its own sake, where moral and political nihilism reign supreme, where humanity has indeed become superfluous...
...I s there any answer to such a question...
...Nonetheless fragile empires: "when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away...
...What is weakness, genuine strength, darkness, and light...
...in fact, it's probable...
...Like so many of Kundera's Don Juans, Tomas finds in his private, erotic life the freedom and power he so lacks in the public sphere...
...Her story, of a woman who tries to remember the simplest things, represents all the previous and subsequent tangle of tales in Kundera's grand fictional project...
...From his first novel, The Joke (Penguin, $5.95, 267 pp...
...Ra...
...Tomas, who continues to conquer through sex, discovers its illusory power when it is momentarily turned against him...
...He is Kundera's central trope, his figure of a person or people effaced by deliberate or unwitting amnesia, and hence on the way to disembodiment just as truly as if sent to a gas chamber...
...They dissolve into air, with the lightness Tomas finds in his soulless infidelities...
...The testimony of literature on this topic, however, the evidence submitted by a wealth of poets and novelists -- from Czeslaw Milosz to Garcia Marquez to J.M...
...Not quite forgotten, we're summarized in facile epitaphs, our lives robbed of dimension and distinction...
...Down the memory hole...
...The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground...
...K undera in fact welcomes heavy burdens, for against them our lives stand out "in all their splendid lightness...
...But he cannot make her happy...
...Tereza's quiet sufferings pose a challenge greater than politics...
...Who can forget the lengthy, undigested and, I suspect, often unread chunks of Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism which intrude on what little action there is in f984...
...Think of the fluid master/slave relation explored so profoundly in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians...
...No, Kundera explains in one of his typically taut disquisitions, kitsch comes in more than the totalitarian brand...
...stren[ ictim and victimizer, 18 May 1984:299 hunter and hunted: the roles change without warning...
...Individuals, groups of people, nations: along with their histories, all become superfluous...
...Kitsch is a folding screen set, up to curtain off death...
...In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine...
...Tomas refuses to sign, allowing uncertainty to translate into inaction...
...it's outstanding in its own right - - a series of, yes, variations, many of which can only enhance our appreciation of Kundera's increasingly demanding art...
...In his finest work, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, immediately after he reflects on its structure, Kundera calls our attention to the book's central figure, the Czechoslovakian exile Tamina...
...Although The Book of Laughter and Forgetting begins straightforwardly enough in the black humor of Czechoslovakian reality, it soon veers in and out of a variety of stories and genres: fantasy, aatobiography, criticism, and history...
...As Kundera reminds us earlier in the book, "loves are like empires...
...She refuses to submit to her new lover Franz's romantic misunderstanding of her exile, and to the aesthetic implied in his banalizing of her life...
...What then does kitsch mean for those who bear burdens...
...kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence...
...Tomas's son from a former marriage, a dreamy idealist like Franz, inscribes his father's gravestone: HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH...
...Consider the title of this new book, Unbearable Lightness: a paradox buried in an enigma...
...Its lunction...
...American kitsch...
...But this story, more than Orwell's, acknowledges the contradictions and ambiguities - - and therefore the pulse of life - - behind the scenes of totalitarian darkness...
...What is our responsibility to time...
...The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become...
...These are our burdens, the existential questions that never change but need to be asked anew...
...What astonishes even the casual reader of recent world literature is this: writers from countries as unlike as Poland, Colombia, South Africa, and Czechoslovakia all perceive at the core of contemporary experience (and not just in countries we call "totalitarian") the paradox embodied in the title of Milan Kundera's new novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: a weightlessness that threatens to crush the life out of us...
...Part of Tomas's perplexity, Kundera lets us infer, is because the soul of man under socialism, the soul of this man in Communist Czechoslovakia, cannot guide his emotions, tied up as they are by the invading hand of politics...
...As a character then, Tomas - - like Tereza his lover, like the lovers Sabina and Franz - - is "born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about...
...it is endemic to our age...
...The breakdown in 1984 is complete: reality is unreal...
...And this points to the paradoxical advance of Kundera's lustrous art over the killingly prosaic world of Orwell...
...When History, the story of the Grand March, overwhelms history, the messier tale with a small h, humanity has become superfluous...
...Down the memory hole...
...she returns to the scene of her primal victimization and all her subsequent ones...
...Kundera asks in his prologue...
...he sees him "standing at a window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do...
...In fact, that hollow feeling in her stomach comes from the unbearable absence of weight...
...Later in the book, Tamina reappears, seduced by the promise of a world in which she can "forget her forgetting" - - the malady not simply of the Communist world but of the Americanized West as well...
...It is typical of Kundera's post-Orwellian sensibility that he answers few of these questions...
...What is the human need of richness, beauty...
...Kundera offers us a series of situations which bear witness not only to the disappearance of his beloved homeland, but also to the moral and social amnesia that pervades our time in both the East and the West...
...The smile on his face was the smile Communist statesmen beamed from the height of their reviewing stand to the identically smiling citizens in the parade below...
...We've come full circle...
...In a world full of beautiful lies, "kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word...
...MEMORY & EXTINCTION THOMAS DePIETRO T OTALITARIANISM, for all the efforts of political theorists to define it, remains as slippery a term as ever, a concept that usually explains either too much or too little...
...In all oppressive countries...
...When the Soviet henchman, Gustav Husak, came to power after the Prague Spring was crushed, he fired one hundred and forty-five historians from Czech universities...
...By comparison Kundera penetrates the modern pol!tical consciousness with a refracted style reminiscent of his acknowledged literary masters, Kafka, Broch, Musil, and Havek, the great modernists of Central Europe, all of whom, in one way or another, have meditated on the "possible end of European humanity...
...g UNDERA FIRST sees Tomas in an image, in a sentence, in a situation...
...But even the carefully orchestrated events of The Farewell Party, like the studied philosophical asides in his new book, draw us into a labyrinth of personal, political, and finally ontological questions...
...It's been wiped out, the body of things and people handed over to time's erosion...
...For a while, her at6mized social life in the West takes on new purpose as a result: she must find a courier to fetch her personal archive...
...Kundera tempers this cruel theme - - his cyncism here reaches its nadir - - with an unmistakable empathy for Franz's idiotic goodness...
...In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example, one of the main characters, Tomas, a kind of dissident in spite of himself, is asked to sign a petition protesting the treatment of political prisoners...
...Klement Gottwald stands on a Prague balcony, flanked by Comrade Clementis, and proclaims the birth of Communist Czechoslovakia...
...This reflexive moment captures Kundera's theme: the eclipse of memory and the consequent erosion of being, of substance...
...For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit...
...What impresses us finally is that, like all the great literature in the struggle of memory against forgetting, it is the incidents, aphorisms, characters, and places in this novel which embed these questions in our consciousness no less strongly than the evil which provokes them: the ever-present threat of extinction...
...It is an imagination that penetrates the victimizer as well as the victim and often finds the two symbiotic, as if inflections of a single mind...
...His immediate crisis seems simple: should he summon to Prague the childlike waitress Tereza whom he met by chance in a provincial cafd...
...In this novel of ideas, Orwell discovers terror in ideas, especially in the slogans and pronouncements of the Party...
...he thought they were beggars, or as political kitsch would have it, "third-world victims in need of his help...
...What then shall we choose...
...On the other hand the petition might play into the government's hands as a justification for more persecution...
...But it is the children's booming guitar music, the kind of elementary music Kundera elsewhere finds inherently idiotic and symptomatic of profound cultural decay, that finally prompts Tamina's attempted escape...
...Franz, abandoned by Sabina, resPm'~s his "Grand March," that example of political kitsch in wlalch mankind joins in the rhetoric of "brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness...
...Why the crisis anyway...
...But it is not the inwardness we associate with those postmodern writers who retreat from the world around them only to celebrate their vitiated sensibilities...
...It takes him to his senseless death, beaten by thugs in Bangkok...
...As her life with him recedes in time, she realizes that in order to hold onto her own soul ("the sum total of her being") she needs to retrieve the notebooks and letters left behind during her hasty departure from Czechoslovakia...
...For all its burning compassion, extraordinary intelligence, and dazzling artistry, The Unbearable Lightness of Being leaves us with many questions, questions about love and death, about love and transcendence...
...He expresses this European tragedy through his generically disparate stories, which are linked, with one exception - - The Farewell Party (Penguin, $5.95, 209 pp...
...At the same time, however, many events in Kundera's novels suggest that life is subject to constant change, not eternal recurrence, and that meaning (and judgmen0 depends entirely on context...
...But then kitsch pursues us all in death...
...Her "anachronistic" love, so reminiscent of Tamina's love for her dead husband, carries weight...
...But there's the rub: that hat remains on Gottwald's head, an obscure remin ~ an officially forgot18 May 1984:297 ten man...
...Not here though, for Kundera clearly wants us to believe, despite the sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in the Nietzschean premise that opens the book: that if events are to have any meaning, they must happen more than once, and that this eternal return is, in Nietzsche's words, "the heaviest of burdens...
...The novelist in Kundera resists the tug of what can only be deemed another kind of kitsch: knee-jerk caricature...
...Though Tomas wins the battle, he loses the war, for he's still victim to a greater force: Tereza's jealousy...
...truth is false...
...Four years later, in 1952, Clementis was hanged for treason and immediately airbrushed from the photograph and history...
...Their love-making soon proclaims war...
...His failure links itself in time and meaning to his country's failed promise: both reveal themselves in August 1968 as the Russian tanks invade Prague...
...We think inevitably of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's incantatory villages, wiped clean out of time...
...But ~eakness an...
...Anything is THOMAS De PIETRO has published reviews and articles in The Nation, In These Times and other journals...
...But there's no escape for Tomas...
...Midway through The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera pauses to reveal his intended design: "This entire book is a novel in the form of variations...
...He, the womanizer, who has designed his life so "that no woman could move in with a suitcase"7 A chaste hour in the country, a ten-day visit to Prague (during which she had the flu): for the eminent surgeon, Tomas, these events add up to "an inexplicable love" that goes against his principles...
...Everyday, he rewrites history, robbing it of any possible meaning...
...And to see it as such doesn't diminish its achievement for, as I have suggested earlier, Kundera frequently invites us to discover the unity in his overarching literary design...
...to his new book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Harper & Row, $15.95,314 pp...
...Nineteen eighty-four finds many of us reading (or at least buying) a political novel that succeeds like no other (to use Irving Howe's words) "in rendering the essential quality of totalitarianism...
...in seven-part structures like so many variations on a musical theme...
...But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body...
...And yet, modern political life, whether by its steady assault on our everyday sense of reality or by its more explicitly evil potential for genocide, provides fuel for the writer's moral imagination -- at least for those writers who face up to it and are burdened with the label "political...
...And when she arrives, this paradise where reality is unreal turns out to be an island of children who repeatedly insult, beat, and rape her...
...We are meant to be sympathetic...
...Back in Prague, no longer allowed to practice medicine, he meets his sexual match while on his job washing windows...
...A LL CZECHS knew this primal scene from the countless copies of a photograph reproduced on posters and in schoolbooks and museums...
...In fact, the novel embodies these very complexities...
...I T GOES without saying, however, that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is more than a lengthy epilogue to a masterpiece...
...The basic event of the book," Kundera tells us elsewhere, "is the story of totalitarianism...
...Tereza and Tomas meet equally unheroic deaths when their truck crashes deep in the countryside to which they have long ago repaired...
...the novel asks...
...She occupies his poetic memory - - the sphere not simply of sex but of love - - "like a despot" and exterminates all thoughts of other women...
...He is currently working on a novel and a study of American literary radicalism...
...his art resides in his capacity to put us inside characters for whom these questions are matters of life and death...
...Listening to a demoralized, defeated Duhcek stuttering, gasping for breath on the radio, Tereza, like Tamina before her, resigns herself to the company of the weak...
...She begins her journey there "as in a fairy tale, as in a dream (no, it is a fairy tale, it is a dream...
...Her brief exile with Tomas in Switzerland provides no salvation...
...We usually welcome lightness, like laughter, like forgetting...
...At that moment an image of the senator standing on a reviewing stand in a Prague square flashed through Sabina's mind...
...Coetzee and Milan Kundera -- brings us back to the issues which occasioned the political science inquiry in the first place...
...Or of the' unadorned moment in history which introduces us to the otherwise magical The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera (Harper & Row, $14.95, Penguin $5.95, 267 pp...
...When he gives her "his standard 'Strip!' command," she fails to comply but counter-commands, "No, you first...
...Before she swims to her death, Kundera explains, It is the little things of no weight,at all that are making Tamina nauseous...
...When Sabina cries, "My enemy is kitsch, not Communism," then, she seems to speak for Kundera who continuously shows us what both tfivializ~';-'a and absolutism mean...
...One of Tomas's former mistresses, she floats higher and higher -- compelled by the sentence of her identifying image, one of repeated betrayal.As a disillusioned artist in exile, she views the West with the cool eye of the cynic...
...In this world," Kundera writes at the start of his novel, "everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted...
...Or is it hysteria...
...A simple example: the Party might announce "that two and two made five," and one "would have to believe it...
...And just as one extreme may at any moment turn into its Commonweal: 298 Ote~ opposite, so this perfect buoyancy has become a terrifying burden of buoyancy . . . Given the echo of this scene in its title, Kundera's latest novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, can be considered an extended gloss on Tamina's death...
...Sabina, traveling further West, betraying the prosaic Franz, finds herself in America with a senator, who comments on his four children running through the grass, "Now, that's what I call happiness...
...But when all prospects fall through, a disgusted Tamina retreats into silence, the only adequate rejoinder to the cacophonous interrogations of contemporary life...
...Winston must consign to memory boles -- the pneumatic shafts leading to an enormous furnace -- any evidence of an historical past that doesn't conform to current Party policy...
...in sum, unbearable weightlessness...
...The novel is, of course, 1984, and because many of its recent critics waste their time measuring the deliberately extreme, imaginary state of Oceania against past and present governments, they tend to ignore OrweU's genuine insight into the language and imagery of oppression...
...The phrase comes from Kundera's recent essay, "The Tragedy of Central Europe," published in The New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984...
...Weighting for Kundera I I possible" in Oceania...
...Kitsch is no longer kitsch, however, when exposed as a lie...
...As in Orwell's Oceania or Garcia Marquez's Macondo, past civilization no longer guides us or provides standards...
...Writing from exile, as he has for the last nine years, Kundera's skeptical eye here turns further inward...
...There is little of this kind of weight in Sabina's life...
...I f a "human life occurs only once," we are here told, how can one measure the outcome of a discrete action...
...Not merely the main character in this work, Tamina is the "main audience, and all the other stories are variations on her story and come together in her life as in a mirror...
...The son's religious fervor, however sincere, reduces his father's life to a cautionary tale, a moral lesson that misinterprets years of anguished uncertainty...
...Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant...
...The individual parts follow each other like individual stretches of a journey leading toward a theme, a thought, a single situation, the sense of which shades into the distance...
...And the forgotten man, what is he...
...It might well stand for Kundera's entire work translated into English...
...Weight or lightness...
...It takes him to the border of Thailand, after the Vietnarnese occupation of Cambodia, where a well-intentioned group of celebrities hoping to bring medical supplies into ravaged Cambodia face the "stunning silence" of indifference...
...Kindera refuses to acquiesce, to settle into a complacency where answers come easy...
...He subjects the "free world's" contradictions to equally fierce scrutiny...
...Waiting tables in a drab caf6 somewhere in Western Europe, Tamina desperately clings to memories of her dead husband, with whom she had left Prague illegally in 1968, after the Soviet invasion...
...But facts as trifling as Clementis's hat stubbornly resist the kind of total manipulation that so successfully alters reality in Orwell's' fiction...
...For that aesthetic - - the simplifying power of kitsch - - threatens to flatten the world, not just Eastern Europe where social realism means portraits of smiling statesmen and happy workers at May Day parades, but the West as well...
...no cold-war scold he...
...to assuage her pain, he marries her...
...To my mind, the most horrifying aphorism in 1984 is not the inscription on the Ministry of Troth (WAR IS PEACE/FREEDOM IS SLAVERY/IGNORANCE IS $TRENGT[-I), hut the slogan which Winston Smith enacts each day on his job: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past...
...The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
