Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Milan Kundera (Review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

This novel begins with a myth. Suppose that every act we committed in our life on earth was destined to be repeated, not just once, but in an endless series of cycles. In that case everything we did, trivial and grand, from minor sin to major goodness, would be invested with a momentous importance simply because of its permanence in the scheme of things. Every act of kindness, selfishness, deceit, self-regard would be etched on existence for ever. And, consequently, we would think twice, thrice, many times, before acting — our lives would be weighted down with import and significance, with unbearable responsibility.

But if, on the other hand, life is instead merely an endless linear flow of time, then every act, every moment, is at once unique and lost for ever — gone in an instant, never to return. The upshot of this theory is that life becomes an affair of utter insignificance, a droll succession of inconsequences — living (Being) is frivolous, transitory, light.

Kundera introduces these two opposing notions at the outset of this — his fifth and best — novel and throughout further opposes their two related qualities of lightness and weight. Which is better (I paraphrase drastically) — a life lived burdened by the weight of responsibility? Or a life lived unfettered by duty and moral injunction: a life of perfect, airy freedom?

This dilemma summarizes what I take to be the essence of this complicated and thoughtful novel. In a typically Kunderan manner, these questions emerge from a disjointed and rambling blend of wry philosophical speculation and fiction. Kundera himself discourses on and redefines a variety of subjects and categories (including vertigo, dreaming, nudity, betrayal, noses, abroad and WCs, among others) while, fictionally, the choices are dramatized in the lives of a pair of couples — Tomas and Tereza and Franz and Sabina — each of whom represents, in varying degrees, one or other aspect of the polarity of lightness and weight. Franz and Sabina have their roles to play in the enacting of ideas, but the central couple is Tomas and Tereza.

Tomas is a successful surgeon and philanderer who, by a series of chances, ends up one day in a provincial hotel where he attracts, inadvertently, the love of a waitress — Tereza. On impulse Tereza follows him to Prague where they become lovers and soon fall in love. Even after they are married, however, Tomas continues to sleep around, but his life has changed more than domestically with the arrival of Tereza, for Tereza is afflicted with “weight”—a sense of the unbearable responsibility of being. And Tomas, one might expect, is lightness personified. But soon he finds — like it or not — that his soaring irresponsibility begins to be tethered: he gains — metaphysically speaking — weight.

He renounces a prosperous career as a surgeon in Zurich to follow Tereza back to Prague after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. There, his career charts a steep decline owing to an ill-timed political article he has written. From top surgeon he descends to local GP, and from there to window cleaner. Ultimately, Tereza persuades him to leave the city and they go to work on a farm in the country where, before they die in a car smash, they find their own brand of happiness and Tomas — or so I take it — shoulders the burdens of responsibility and contentedly renounces “lightness.”

“Weight,” as Kundera defines it, is to do with love, compassion and a true sense of the absurd dictates of chance and contingency. “Lightness” is to do with sex, frivolity and irresponsibility. In the novel Kundera debates and counterposes the reasons for and the consequences of choosing one or the other. The dialectic is urbanely, wittily and cleverly orchestrated. One senses too — and Kundera encourages us to think so — that the conflict is a highly individual one (“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities”) born out of his own personality and his experience at the hands of the malign and bizarre forces of recent European history.

In a significant sense, then, The Unbearable Lightness of Being can be described as an intensely moral book which, for all its superficial postmodernist totems (paraded fictiveness, blatant authorial intervention, disdain of basic narrative convention), would satisfy the most stringent and traditional imperatives of Leavisite “relevance” and “value.” For, in the novel, Kundera is really attempting to answer the key questions of how we should live our lives, given the sordid, perplexed and fraught nature of the human condition, and of the place of Love in a world seemingly compromised by corruption, self-delusion and evil.

His answer is dramatized — most movingly — in the death from cancer of Tomas and Tereza’s dog Karenin (the name is no accident). The animal’s slow, puzzled, wracked demise becomes a focus for all those traditional verities — compassion, understanding, disinterested love — so opposed to “lightness” and all it stands for. On the penultimate page of the novel Tereza apologizes for the way she has literally and metaphorically brought him down. “Haven’t you noticed I’ve been happy here?” Tomas says.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being is of course a far more complex notion than this review can convey. It’s not, for example, to be confused with earnestness or commitment, and has nothing to do with political ideology (an elaborate disquisition on the phenomenon of “kitsch” denies weight to the passionate idealists of both East and West, Left and Right). It seems to be, to simplify once again, a steadfastly ironic facing up to all the sadness of the human condition, coupled with an awareness of the value of the modest and fleeting moments of happiness it can also provide (Tomas’s declaration occurs on the last night of his and Tereza’s life). The modish succés fou of this book does it a huge disservice: this is a clever, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating, occasionally flawed novel, but its central concerns are perennially valuable and humane.

1984