Horizon

"The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch."

So pronounced Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which, as I learned from this very good review, was appropriately published (in English) in 1984.

I've never been quite the admirer of this book that everyone expected me to be. It derails itself toward the end into an offhand, flat, almost fairytale style through which we are treated to a lame and systematically undermined tragedy (sounds cool, I admit, but it's not--regardless of how intentional it may have been). By the time the main characters grow old they have lost a lot of what made them characters in the first place, and eventually I could not shake an utter certainty that, for some reason, Kundera was filling up pages, trying to race to the end of the story out of some tired sense of narrative obligation.

Kundera is a very smart guy, and a good writer, but I've always thought that The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for all its good points, became famous for the wrong reasons. As Banville puts it:

Here was an avowedly "postmodern" novel in which the author withheld so many of the things we expect from a work of fiction, such as rounded characters - "It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived" - a tangible milieu, a well-paced plot, and in which there are extended passages of straightforward philosophical and political speculation, yet it became a worldwide bestseller, loved by the critics and the public alike.

A perfect example of the lightness of this novel. On the contrary, in at least the first half of the book the characters are indeed rounded and interesting, they do not float in a vaguely defined world (although certainly Kundera doesn't try very hard to help us define it), and there's nothing wrong with the plot. It's also in this part of the book that Kundera inserts his famous "postmodern" essays, comments on the characters in the voice of an omniscient author (himself), and offers the observation quoted above on the senselessness of inventing fictions to hide from the reader the fact that they are reading a book. (That's a question writers of fiction have been wrestling with for ever; the only thing that changes is how they choose to avoid answering it. In Kundera's case, the answer is just a shrug.)

And, in the first part of the novel, what is the result? These pomo trappings don't harm the sense of character or narrative at all. Certainly, when Kundera looks over his shoulder and tells you that his characters are fictions, his violation of "narrative decorum" could come as a shock. But does it really undermine his characters? Not for long; the characters (who, after all, aren't in on the joke), go along just as they have been, ignorant of their author's impish trick, and the readers, possessing brains that are phenomenally good at finding patterns in chaos (especially ones they are trained to look for), and, moreover, who knew all along that Kundera's characters were not real people but preferred to forget that fact, thanks very much, fall right back in line behind them.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is not really a postmodern novel overall, and what's more there's nothing essentially new in Kundera's shrug (or aesthetic postmodernism in general, but that's another post). But in spite of his posturings, the book, on the whole, manages to capture (and convincingly analyze) a side or two of human nature breathtakingly well, which is almost always the answer to critics who are so surprised when a novel they like gets popular.

Posted by Alan Hogue at May 5, 2004 11:21 AM