The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is a novel about the ambivalences of life, the dual nature of things, the randomness of life, and kitsch of politics, religion, and people’s choices. The book starts by Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return, Kundera suggests that we only live once, therefore we are ignorant of the value or drastic consequences of our choices simply because we have not lived another life, we don’t have other repeated experiences to compare our choices with, that we have no way of knowing what is meaningful or not since we only have to make one choice, walk one path, and thus reducing the possible turns our life might take either for good or bad. Life is a chess game, once you start playing, there is no turning back.
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory or test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not.
we cannot know what to want, because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives, nor perfect it in our lives to come
Kundera, unlike Albert Camus, perceives the meaninglessness of the universe as unbearable. Lightness rings the bells of positivity, but in terms of existence it is painful. Kundera in different passages keeps making comparisons between the human and the nonhuman experiences , how we are tormented by our consciousness. The novel is full of dualities, soul and body, privacy and publicity, love and sex, lightness and heaviness.
The Unbearable lightness of being is a novel, so we have the talk about the literary aspect of it. Kundera’s novel reminds me a lot of 1984 by George Orwell, it is set up in a world full of crisis, the 80s in a communist Czech invaded by the Soviets, in a world where there is no room for freedom of speech, nor for privacy under strict surveillance system. But Kundera chose four worn down characters, four of them seeking acceptance, lightness, adventure, and sex. Kundera is giving us a grotesque peek in the era through dreamy characters, heavy characters, and light characters.
These four characters represent the pillars of society, Tomas the surgeon, Tereza the photo journalist, Sabina the artist, and Franz the intellectual, but they’re disappointed and distrustful when it comes to politics, love, and sexuality. All of them are trying to escape a world into a lighter or heavier one, for Tereza she is yearning for a world where she doesn’t feel objectified, where she doesn’t feel like a pile of meat, a world free of her mother and infidelities, but infidelities and betrayal are at the core of the artistic and sexual life of Sabina, who betrayed her destiny and her history that is loaded with restrictions, and ideals, her betrayals make her life light. For Tomas life is a random collection of fortuities, and coincidences, for him love and sex are two separate things one for pleasure and the other to discover, and to reveal the “I” of his partners, but for Franz sex is a sacred thing, he believes only by being public can one live in truth, he is so romantic about demonstrations and parades, they represent for him what is real.
These four characters come to know each other by random circumstances, they lose contact in random circumstances, and they die in random circumstances, so random and human they are.
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is more of a philosophical novel, that a literary novel. One of the interesting things I got from the novel is the notion of kitsch. Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word, it excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. Kundera playfully expressed his opinions about politics, and social movements using this notion of Kitsch. Totalitarian kitsch that denies people their individualism, their artistic creativity, their sexual orientations, and their equal rights.
Tomas is disappointed both at the soviet union kitsch, and the editor and the comrades kitsch. Both of them wanted to misuse his words, both of them have death lurking behind, both of them wanted him to sign things he didn’t right.
For Sabina, her life was full of kitsch, first communism kitsch, and later on in her artistic life. A lot of artists dealt with censorship in that era, a lot of them had been called degenerate, they were harshly attacked.
By kitsch, Kundera claims that everything is just a dream, a fantasy, and only true theoretically. His characters are apolitical, not in the sense that they’re ignorant, but consciously apolitical.
The things that give our lives meaning have ridiculous roots. For Tomas and Tereza, their love is what makes their lives meaningful, but looking back at how they came to love each others we find that it was just a coincidence, Beethoven, room number six, the dog waking up at six. They could have fallen in love with a million other possible people. Even Sabina came to be an artist in a ridiculous way.
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