The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
314 pages
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ISBN 978-0-06-093213-9
Recommended by: Peter (who read it because of a passing mention in High Fidelity), Mel (who bought it completely at random)



I feel like I shouldn't be writing this now, because I'm at work, but I have no idea what I should be doing right now.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I bought it this summer at McNally Robinson after looking high and low (i.e., at both The Neighbourhood and Aqua Books) and failing to find it secondhand. That is, I imagine, because it is so beautiful and striking and memorable that everyone keeps it on hand, hoping to one day read it again.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being's main character is Tomas, a serial womanizer who falls in love with Tereza, who serves him scotch at a bar one night, and eventually moves to Prague to find him. Tomas, however, does not see that he has to give up his sexual encounters with other women; Tereza does not like this, but tolerates it. As a result of the political situation in Prague in the late sixties, Tomas and Tereza move to Zurich, as has Tomas' favourite lover Sabina. Eventually, Tereza decides she has had enough of Tomas's infidelity; she moves back to Prague, but Tomas follows her. Tomas writes a supposedly incendiary letter to the editor of a popular magazine and as a result loses his medical license. For a while he takes up menial tasks, but eventually he and Tereza move to the country, where they are eventually killed in a car accident. Sabina learns of this accident in Zurich, where she is involved with an academic, Franz, whose romantic view of Sabina eventually leads her to abandon him. Franz is eventually killed after a mugging in Bangkok, having attended a protest there because he believes Sabina, formerly of a nation battered by injustice, would have wanted him to.

The plot is circular and non-chronological and takes the viewpoints of all of these characters throughout its meandering narrative; really, the plot is not that important. It reminded me a little of Roland Barthes' beautifully written The Pleasure of the Text (the interior design was even similar), which is written in sections of three-quarter pages or full pages, rarely more, and could in theory be read in any order the reader chose (like a philosophical choose-your-own-adventure, side note, that is a GREAT IDEA); this is exactly what Barthes means by "pleasurable reading." You could probably do the same with The Unbearable Lightness of Being and not be much the worse for wear.

Of course, though, philosophically speaking, Kundera's novel recalls not early post-structuralism but continental existentialism (not that there's an analytic existentialism), which is probably a big part of the reason I was so charmed by the novel. Existentialism was the first philosophical movement I was fascinated by, the first real philosophy I read-- I have no idea why, probably just because it was available-- and it is generally beautifully written and, I find, somewhat romantic. Kundera's lovers recall, to me, Sartre's illustration of the couple at a restaurant, his example of bad faith (a brief search on JSTOR turned up an article about Kundera's philosophy to Sartre's mauvaise foi; the idea is not entirely mine). And, of course, Nietzsche's eternal return; the weight, the burden of existence that Kundera sets out to disprove.

But I don't have anything very interesting to say about Kundera's philosophy of personal freedom, his aesthetics or his politics; I am fascinated by all of them and I think this novel is a wonderful synthesis of art, philosophy and politics; the sort of novel of which I wish more existed. I am, however, intrigued by how little has been written on Kundera's portrayal of women-- a Google search turned up one book, and the JSTOR search nothing at all. Which surprised me, because I feel like the women-- at least in Unbearable Lightness, admittedly the only book of his I have read-- are troublesome. Both Sabina and Tereza, both artists, both opposed to the Communist regime (in the eyes of others, at least), are described as obedient and submissive-- not only that, but they are actively aroused, sexually, by obedience, by humiliation, by placing themselves in an inferior position. This is why, apparently, Sabina can never be in love with Franz-- because he is incapable of humiliating her the way Tomas does. Tereza is actively afraid of humiliation, but, though she hates Tomas' womanizing, she tolerates it, believing her jealousy makes her the weaker partner.

Kundera's discussion on kitsch, shit, towards the end of the novel, is I think, if not exactly the same, at least closely related to discussions of the grotesque. I will use any opportunity at all to bring up my favourite theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, who makes the grotesque and bodily-est functions of the body a form of political subversion, a subversion of institutions that works well with Kundera's existential theories of personal freedom (a personal freedom embodied most fully probably by Tomas and Sabina). So that goes a little way to untangling Sabina's desires. Tereza is a little more difficult, and I am not quite sure I know how to feel about her; I would be very interested in reading this book I turned up on Google (although I have no idea who this scholar is or how recently this book was written), and in reading more of Kundera's work to see how this theme plays out-- is Kundera actually pointing out problems with representations of women, is he actually concerned with problematic gender politics, or is he, maybe, a little bit of a misogynist himself? I don't feel like I know enough to say.

This does bring to my mind something that I should maybe be more concerned about myself, which is the prevalence of male writers on my to-read lists. Of course, there are probably many more male writers out there than female ones, but I also tend to prefer a very masculine voice, and depictions of masculine sexuality, directed at women (and, oh yes, the sexuality of the characters depicted in this book, as in so many others, is definitely "at" women, not "with" them); I sympathise with the problems of middle-class male intellectuals, because these are my friends. And also-- perhaps women simply don't write as many books about the things I am interested in, which, right now, are politics, post-colonialism, magical realism (I think the only book I have read on this particular literary tangent that was written by a woman was Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and for the record, I think Roy is a fantastic human being and I look forward to reading more of hers.) In the end, I don't know. It bothers me, but possibly not enough.

Next: a valiant attempt to resume The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle!

Asides

Two short notes:

Firstly, on the title of this journal. It is more or less entirely a reference to this Pictures For Sad Children comic. I like the idea of a piece of art made out of pages from books; even moreso, I like the idea that every person is a collage or a papier mâché sculpture made from the pages of the texts that we've read and incorporated (incorporated-- embodied, made part of our selves). I think it would be very cool to make a sculpture like that. I've started including the names of the people who have recommended these books to me, because I like that image as well-- it is as if, in reading a book someone else has recommended to us, we take the pages from that book, with our friend's marginalia, and add them to the papier mâché sculpture that is our self, and so there is a beautiful continuity of words and texts linking us together as we read the books that our friends have read.

Also webcomics are the best.

Secondly, apparently there is a word for the type of books I described earlier as "sprawling" and "breathless." According to this Wikipedia article it is called hysterical realism, or, recherché postmodernism (I suppose the literal translation is "researched", or, "re-searched", postmodernism?), or literary maximalism. The article cites both Salman Rushdie and Dave Eggers as examples of hysterical realism, as well as certain passages of Kundera. Having read about half of one Kundera novel, I can't really comment on that, but sure, why not. Critic James Wood, writing about Zadie Smith's White Teeth, criticises hysterical realism for attempting to turn literature into social theory, for ""know[ing] a thousand things but... not know[ing] a single human being" and for depicting "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." I am not really sure I like hysterical realism aesthetically-- I prefer extremely understated, unadorned, straightforward prose-- but I am not sure that telling us how the world works rather than how someone felt about something is really a pitfall of a certain genre of literature. For one thing, I don't even think it's true; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, while incredibly self-conscious and, at times, painfully clever, is pretty much entirely about how Eggers feels about things; I would say an important feature of Midnight's Children is how Saleem Sinai feels about himself, being a fairly unreliable narrator and hence making the story as much or more about how he feels about the world rather than how it objectively works. Secondly, even if that were the case, is that a bad thing? I can't help feeling that telling us how the world works (whatever that means) makes literature more politically relevant than self-involved. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if literature isn't social theory, then there is no reason to read it.

UPDATE: So I have now read about three-quarters of the article, and I don't think it is very good. Knowing nothing about James Wood, I would peg him as a fairly conservative, old-fashioned literary critic. He claims his "hysterical realism" is not the same as magical realism, but I don't quite see the difference; given the claims he makes in this review, his argument is necessarily that the function of art is to be the mirror of life. Which makes art, ultimately, vanity.

Anyway, I discovered all of this at work yesterday while looking up Jonathan Franzen, who is a pretty big deal, but I don't think I'll put him on the list-- white North American male writing big sprawling novels about family? Doesn't sound like the sort of thing I'd enjoy. White Teeth, on the other hand...

Disgrace

My bus leaves in half an hour, so I probably won't do this justice. But I will do my best.

Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
Vintage, 2000
220 pages
ISBN 9780099289524
Recommended by: Jesse




I read this book more or less in one day. A weekday, even; I think it was Thursday last week. It's short, which helps, but it was also the style-- simple, minimalist, almost tense, spartan prose. A big change from the last two novels I read, which were sprawling, breathless, hugely complex (those adjectives mostly apply to Midnight's Children, but "breathless" certainly to the Eggers book as well). Not that Disgrace isn't complex; one of the most incredible things about it was its ability to suggest, with a few words, a dissertation's worth of material on an incredible variety of subjects-- evil, politics, gender-- anything. The simplicity and brevity of the novel makes its plot and subject matter more powerful, as if it were more concentrated.

Briefly: The first chunk of the book is a fairly classic story of a professor, David Lurie, in liberal arts (in this case, language studies, relocated to a technical university and dissatisfied) who has an affair with a student and is forced to resign from his position. Thus disgraced, he moves to his daughter's farm to take some time off, work on an opera about, fittingly, Byron's last days in Italy. The story hereafter is one that moves in opposite directions, towards Lurie's redemption, but also, in its depiction of a violent attack on Lurie and his daughter, of further disgrace and the exposition of the violence deeply ingrained in both human nature and post-apartheid South Africa.

I read this book largely because of a paper I want to write, or re-write. I mentioned my interest in speaking and silence earlier; it comes from a paper I wrote last year for a course in postmodern philosophy on Derrida and forgiveness. It was the last paper of my degree, I think; I was exhausted and did not do a very good job, but the topic has stayed with me. Derrida talks about South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the interview I used for the paper, and since then I have wanted to read Disgrace so I can use it in my discussion of speaking, silence and forgiveness.

Which I will think more carefully about when I get around to writing the paper. I hope I do; I'd like to redeem myself for doing such a poor job with a topic I'm so interested in.

The topic of speaking and silence first came up for me in studying Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Titus's daughter Lavinia is violently raped, and then has her tongue and her hands cut off so she is completely incapable of communicating the violence done to her. Silence is, of course, often associated with sexual abuse, and so poor Lavinia is the perfect image of this sort of violence. Silence, in this sense, also plays an important part in Disgrace; "Silence," says Coetzee, "is drawn over the body of the woman like a blanket." (I'll double check that when I get home.) Silence is not reserved, however, for sexual violence, but also for the systemic, political, racial violence that has left its scar on South Africa. I mentioned Salman Rushdie's tension between explicit explanation and circumlocution; Coetzee's prose is much more direct and lacks the room for that kind of back-and-forth; however, isn't the minimalism defined by the importance placed on negative space-- what is not said is just as important as what is said, and what is absent becomes remarkably present in its very absence. Coetzee hardly mentions racial violence, barely mentions race at all, never mentions apartheid directly, and yet it haunts the text, infecting every action and interaction. Silence here marks all kinds of violence; flags it, invisibly.

So hopefully I'll be able to investigate that more fully after doing more reading on the subject. Next time: reflections, possibly on gender, on Milan Kundera's very beautiful The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, or, what I probably thought about this thing I read last week

I guess the idea of writing this journal was to write my thoughts down before I forgot about them.

BUT. BUT. I am just blazing through my new and unread shelf! I am now on my third book post-Midnight's Children! I am incredible!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers
Vintage 2001
ISBN 978-0375725784






Ummmm, right, so, generally I hate memoirs and also books dealing with the "family" theme... which memoirs usually are, because everyone has a family. Somewhat. More or less because they're boring, but also because they're self-involved and useless as a genre. I mean, obviously there are exceptions and that's probably unfair, but the idea of writing a memoir, if you are not fucking, like, Gandhi or someone, is preposterous. As if anyone cares.

(Inconsistently, I love blogs and the entire idea of blogging. I have absolutely no philosophical integrity.)

Time to be intelligent. Family: another theme I dislike. I dislike the language of "family values" because of its obvious ties to conservative politics, and as an extension of that, I find (crappy) literature's obsession with family in general to be an example of essentialism, and thus conservativism, that makes this kind of literature philosophically, if not offensive, at least irritating. Family-oriented literature asks "How do we deal with what we are given?" Whereas the question I am more interested in asking is "How do we change what we are given to make it better for everyone?"-- thus making the radical change necessary for any sort of social justice possible. Just because something is "natural" does not make it good. This is a very common intellectual error that is completely unfounded.

That said, Dave Eggers' Pulitzer-prize nominated A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is both a memoir, and about family, which I didn't realise when I bought it. It is about Dave's life as a twenty-something raising his kid brother after both parents die of cancer within months-- one month?-- of each other.

It kind of reminded me of one of my favourite favourite albums of all time, The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, in that it is about family tragedy and California. Those are really the only real reasons, but also because of the joy that gets mingled in with the anger and bitterness-- I would not have described The Mountain Goats as anything but completely tragic before I saw them perform in May, but John Darnielle's performance at the Garrick Centre was so joyful, he hardly ever stopped smiling, even during songs like Woke Up New, objectively the saddest song from the saddest album in the history of indie rock-- which is saying something. Likewise, Eggers' sense of humour, along with his textbook postmodern self-awareness, makes an Oprah's-book-club-type tragedy much more than it could be.

(Disclaimer, there are some very good books in Oprah's book club. But you know what I mean. Stuff your mom reads and cries a little bit while reading.)

Other thoughts. I don't know. I generally liked it; I found the self-aware, postmodern discussions on the necessary violence in turning life to art fairly interesting and not nearly as irritating as stuff like that can be. I mean, you can't do stuff like that without a certain air of clever-assery, but I think Eggers' very funny list of themes and metaphors preceding the actual "text" did a lot to help that-- i.e., if you've got to be self-aware, at least be self-deprecating about it. And they were infrequent enough so as to actually be interesting, allowing the story to function on its own without the added metafictional layer. Which I remember someone saying was the particular strength of The French Lieutenant's Woman-- that it functioned equally well as a nineteenth-century novel and a twentieth century novel. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius reads equally well as a memoir and a postmodern treatise on the act writing. Or something.

Anyway, clearly I don't have much to say on this one, and I was going to do some actual work while I was here this evening, in order to make my 45-minute bus ride not completely irrelevant.

Next: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

Swallowing a world: Midnight's Children

FINALLY. Maybe I'll pick up a bottle of champagne on the way home.

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Vintage Canada 2006 (originally published 1981 by Jonathan Cape)
560 pages
ISBN 978-0676970654






All in all, it took me about two and a half months to read this book-- because I was busy, and because it is long and complex, and because I felt pretty ambivalent about it for a long time. It has suffered the inevitable consequences of being read over such a long time in an occasionally fairly lackadaisical manner-- in cafes, on buses, and so forth. I've forgotten things that have happened and how some things relate to others, and I'm sure this is a consequence of the manner in which I read it and also the nature of the book itself. However, at the end it won me over with a spectacular, sprawling, gigantic, breathless run-on sentence reminiscent of the last sentence of James Joyce's Ulysses. (No, I haven't read Ulysses. No, I am not going to. In this I unite my innate tendency to slack off with a protest against the elitist literary establishment and the tyranny of the Western canon. Mostly though, it's the slacking off.)

A brief and inadequate synopsis: Midnight's Children is the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947, the date India achieved independence. Saleem's life is inextricably (throughout the course of the novel anyway) tied to the life of the newly independent nation of India; the personal struggles of his life parallel the religious, political, economic struggles of his nation. The story itself is told orally, as he writes, to his peasant wife-to-be, Padma, who interrupts him constantly, question the veracity of the admittedly outrageous claims he is making, pointing out errors in his chronology, encouraging him to stop and rest. The couple articles I read before writing this emphasise this metafictional aspect of the novel, pointing out its relationship with Indian oral tradition and the 1001 Nights-- in which the narrative is of necessity shaped by the listener-- would not exist without the character of the one to whom the story is told. As the article in the Literary Encyclopedia points out, Padma's presence also somewhat prevents Saleem from characterising himself as a martyr in quite the way he would like to-- although his life has been "chained" to the life of India from the moment of his birth, Padma is "the physical reminder of those people in India who suffer the real pangs and vicissitudes of the Indian reality that Saleem is attempting to encapsulate in the story of his individual life."

As I read, I marked sections that seemed important; this is an old habit. According to this, these are the themes that most are as follows.

Firstly, the blurred distinction between fragmentation and unity, recalling for me David Hume's characterisation of the self-- that each of is the arena, the location, in which events take place, in which personalities pass through, and it is the sum total of these and not an inherent, unchangeable, essentialised self-ness that is what we mean when we talk about a "self." Or, famously, in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Saleem reflects, towards the end of the novel:

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything tha thappens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I”, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” (440, italics mine.)

And elsewhere:

“... I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, [Pakistan's] East and West Wings were separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past an present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and now.” (404)

Difference between nations, difference within the nation, difference within the self; is it not in the efforts to eradicate these differences that all kinds of violences have their roots?

Secondly, the tension between-- not speaking and silence, which is a particular interest of mine-- but between exposition and circumlocution. I knew the basic premise of the novel before I read and had been told, by the very nice man at McNally Robinson who complimented by taste in literature (I was also picking up Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being-- it is very hard to find either of those books secondhand) that Rushdie was quite difficult, and so I expected the parallels between Saleem's life and the life of the Indian nation to take a little bit of work to unearth. Not the case; throughout the narrative, Saleem/Rushdie makes completely explicit where the parallels exist and how they function. Metaphors and recurring themes are explained, for the benefit of Padma/the reader, I can only assume. (See, for example, page 459: "The problems of the magician's ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India..." and ensuing explanation, for one example.) However, Saleem is often very indirect, pointing readers toward a revelation by a series of questions at the end of which it is obvious what the answer is, but without every explicitly revealing it. This occurs when he follows his mother to the Pioneer Cafe to meet with, of course, Nadir Qasim; similarly, but not identical, when he eventually reveals the identity of the Widow whose role in his life he has hinted at throughout the course of the novel, he struggles, wishing to keep it a secret, talking around it, until he finally convinces himself that is a secret necessary to reveal.

I don't know how important this is-- if its primary purpose is to lend veracity to the supposedly oral character of the narrative, or it is something more. I remember Wittgenstein's "That about which we cannot speak we must consign to silence" (or something like that), and Nietzsche's "That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." And as well, the apophatic and cataphatic traditions in Christianity in regards to speaking about God-- simply, some things are too big, too important, too secret, too shameful, to put directly into words; we must, figuratively speaking, lower our gaze and only peek from under lowered lashes.

And with that, I finally put Rushdie back on the shelf and pick up the next one-- Daver Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I imagine sometime pretty soon I will post something about how much and why I dislike literature about family. Teaser: it's not just because it's boring!