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!

Reading Lolita in Tehran

I haven't finished the article that I'm reading, and I'll probably keep reading it as I write. Just, you know, heads up.

So, when I wrote my last entry, I was completely unaware of the discussion surrounding Reading Lolita; I mentioned the book to Jesse last week and he said he had heard a lecture on it last year at a conference. I did a little more research about the allegations against Nafisi, namely, that she is a big neo-con imperialist and is undoing the work of postcolonialist theorists everywhere (I'm reading Hamid Dabashi's article Native informers and the making of the American empire). It is all very fascinating. Dabashi identifies Nafisi as a "native informer," a designation which carries with it the implication of treachery; Nafisi has, according to Dabashi, turned on her country by denouncing the Iranian revoluation and enthusiastically endoring the classic works of the Western canon, supporting the imperialist project of "White men saving brown women from brown men," quoting Spivak. Dabashi accuses Nafisi of "(1) systematically and unfailingly denigrating an entire culture of revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism; (2) doing so by blatantly advancing the presumed cultural foregrounding of a predatory empire; and (3) while at the very same time catering to the most retrograde and reactionary forces within the United States, waging an all out war against a pride of place by various immigrant communities and racialised minorities seeking curricular recognition on university campuses and in the American society at large." Quite the statement.

I find this fascinating not because of the argument it entails (passionate and largely predictable, with ample quotations from Orientalism), but because Nafisi, throughout Reading Lolita and in the brief statements cited in the Wikipedia article, wants to separate literature and politics, the public and the private. This, however, undercuts everything that makes Reading Lolita meaningful; Nafisi's literature class, which I was so excited about in the last post, is obviously only subversive if literature is intensely political-- being apolitical is not an effective counterpart to political injustice. The whole project of Reading Lolita seems to recognise this, even if Nafisi herself doesn't, and so occasional statements such as (following her account of a conversation with a friend about James' The Ambassadors) "[i]t seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the person or the private" (237) undercut what it is that makes Reading Lolita worth reading.

Anyway, I'm not interested in providing a passionate defense of either Nafisi or her book; maybe she is a big neo-con and maybe that does matter. At the moment I don't care enough to do all the research required to ascertain any of the "facts" of the matter; I feel as if both sides have valid points to make. Hamid Dabashi, the only critic I've read, overstates these arguments to the point where I find him a little bit difficult to take seriously, but one can easily read between the melodrama.

Conversation topics for another day: what makes a native informer? and how does the author/narrator function in the genre of memoir given the "death of the author", or can we not accept Barthes' proclamation in the case of a work like Nafisi's?

Reading Lolita In Tehran

Azar Nafisi's "memoir in books" has been on my reading list since the summer of 2008, when I read Lisa Adams and John Heath's Why We Read What We Read, which picks apart the Publishers Weekly and USA Today bestseller lists from the past 10 years (I think that ends up being 1996-2006; the book was published in 2007). It's a really fascinating book that more or less confirms what we all suspect-- most people are pretty happy to read shit. Reading Lolita in Tehran was far and away Adams and Heath's favourite book; from what I recall, it seemed to redeem the entire doubtless-depressing project for them. I found a copy at Aqua Books for $7 or so this spring and brought it with me with the 15 or 20 other titles to take up temporary residence at my summer sublet. Also, Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel is one of my favourite books of all time.

Reading Lolita in Tehran uses four sections to chronicle Nafisi's experiences a professor of American literature in revolutionary Iran. I'm a little less than halfway through, having finished the section on Lolita (which introduces Nafisi's intimate class of seven of her most studious female students who meet in her living room to study novels forbidden by the Iranian government) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in which Nafisi describes her first year of teaching at the University of Tehran during the early years of the revolution. 

 I'm really excited about the basic premise of the book-- namely, that literature, and the study of literature, can be a radically subversive enterprise. It's so easy even for me, as a literature major, to assume that studying literature is entertaining but ultimately self-serving and irrelevant. This notion probably won't cease to bother me-- there are, after all, people starving in the streets of my own city while I pay a lot of money to read books all day. However, studying liberal arts has taught me that the major movements of history, especially the revolutions, have their roots in philosophical, religious and literary texts. Reading Lolita in Tehran gives us two of these movements, or communities-- the Islamic Republic of Iran, shaped, formed and created by the doctrines of the Qu'ran, and Nafisi's class, informed by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. The consequences of reading these texts in the Islamic Republic of Iran are dire, and although we in North America rail against censorship as a violation of our innate right to free speech, the Iranian censors, in a way, take literature much more seriously than we possibly can in our easy-going environment-- great literature is explosive, life-changing, person-forming and very, very serious. The scene I read recently, in which Nafisi's first-year students at the University of Tehran hold a highly-charged mock trial of The Great Gatsby, while real trials sentencing intellectuals to public stoning are going on around them, is an amazingly dramatic illustration of this.