Kundera’s Existentialism

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the cult Kundera book, is a meditative rumination on melancholia, time, belonging, identity, love, art, freedom, choice, loss, politics, ideology, and the two modes of existence – 'light' and 'heavy'.

It is a rather unconventional novel with a brisk narrative style and a near satirical retelling of 1968 Prague Spring, with the unbridgeable rift between the 'true believer' communists stuck to the untainted past memory, and the 'sceptics' eager to break free into new brightness and cast themselves anew, severing the past knots that haunt them.

There are beautiful brief vignettes about the history of the Czechs from Jan Kuss to the era of Alexander Dubceck.

The novel opens with Kundera's interpretation of Nietzsche's 'Eternal Recurrence' and the drab weariness of existence – 'the heaviness', which signifies being tethered to some place, idea, history, culture, or any meta notion, transmitted or make-believe.

Play As it Lays

In her essay Comrade Laski CPUSA, Joan Didion talks about human disquiet and the need for ‘elaborate systems of belief’ or opioids, both ‘readily available such as intoxications and distractions, and elusive such as faith in history or god’.

The feathery lightness denotes blithe, unbonded, unattached ethical life. Though lightness often takes its toll in the yearning for a definitive belonging and attachment, even if superficial and schmaltzy rootedness of an emigre intellectual. And heaviness comes built with restlessness, anxiety, and uncertainty.

Through the vivid amorous drama between the four protagonists and their intersecting milieus, Kundera weaves a narrative of longing, desire, the absurdity and arbitrarineness of power, the ephemral nature of life, the tyrst with time, the paradise lost forever, and the impact of politics and history on the individual.

A compulsively womanizing chief surgeon in Prague voluntarily opts for demotion at a small clinic instead of recanting a letter to the editor published in 1968, which allegorically exhorts the communists to 'take their eyes out and wander like Oedipus near Thebes'.

Unable to escape the widening net of the state, and being coerced not just to disown views but to wax gushing tributes and glorious praise to the state and the party if he wants to regain his lost position and stature, he again pulls himself to the bottom of the ladder and opts to become a window cleaner.

But the de-classe proletariat earns him dissident fame, inures him from the state’s long arm, and gives him not just ample time to indulge in erotic pursuit. For the first time, he does something as just a way to eke out a living, without being heart-and-soul immersed into it – the principal difference between a job and vocation.

Pursuit of Meaning

Medicine was Tomas’s highest calling, his muse and metier, but there was a certain 'heaviness' with it because of not just the stakes being higher, but the abiding pressure to accomplish and excel. The almost mechanical occupation had him feel 'light' for almost the first time, without any stress to ponder about tomorrow.

Tomas is not a man who is confronting history, or who wants to go down in the recorded annals as one who sought to steer its course in a particular direction.

He's merely following his own instincts, impulses and conscience, while being perturbed by the forces around him, but resolutely aware that he can't alter it or put its wheels in motion. Yet his ringside view of things offers a window to the past.

The surrounding impacts his life choices, when finally he moves to the countryside to become a tractor driver at a collective farm.

End of the Tunnel

Kundera’s view of history, through Tomas, is suffused with a deep sadness and a grudging nod to Tolstoy: history is an inexorable process that men cannot influence. Yet men and their ordeals, defeats, and small triumphs is what colours the canvas of history.

With evocative prose and sublime philosophical depth, Kundera maps out human fraility and the need for metaphors, grand marches, belief, predictability and repetition ( what he calls the precondition for happiness).

The interchangeability between lightness and heaviness is left unexplored though.

The leftist intellectual Franz, who is always waiting for an epiphany of the fabled revolutionary spring, denotes ultimate heaviness. His lover Sabina, the painter, who switches places and people with ease, embodies total lightness.

The transmutation between the temporal and sacred, and the shape-shifting nature of ideologies, or ideas being vehicles of people's own will to power or mirror of their state of being, is shown in the epitaph of Tomas which reads ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth’.

Tomasz estranged son, a dissident turned catholic convert, identifies and finally reconciles with his father through this statement.

Tomas considers music the highest of the Dionysian art due to its ability to enthral and enrapture. The exuberant spontaneity of music and its fervid effect on the listener is the chaotic passion of life.

What begins with Nietzsche, ends with an artistic reconstruction of Schopenhaeur's 'In the end we will be ship wrecked'

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion