First up, there’s a kickstarter for a feminist SF anthology by Jef Smith that, if funded, will be edited by the VanderMeers. It’s up to three grand already, so if you’d like to check it out and might be interested in kicking in, you can find it here.
Also, I have two articles up at Gogol’s Overcoat, the first is on Don DeLillo’s debut, Americana, and the second on Philip Roth’s masterpiece, the National Book Award winning Sabbath’s Theatre.
Just a quick post to say I’ve posted an essay over on Gogol’s Overcoat, which contains some thoughts on Philip Roth’s Pulitzer prize winning novel, American Pastoral, You can find it here.
1. Tone – “S/He’s just being mean, why can’t s/he say it in a nicer way”.
2. Taste – “It is subjective, who is s/he to say Joyce is a better writer than Dan Brown.”
3. Argumentum ad hominem - “S/he is just jealous/a snob/vindictive”.
4. Populism – “Lots of people like him/her, so you must be wrong about them”.
5. Pedantry – “I think s/he was wrong about that thing, therefore every point is invalid!”
B-I-N-G-O!
Go West, through the heartland, through hardship, to stand beneath that perpetually blue sky and gaze out at the endless Pacific. And Go West they did, each for their own reasons. The first sought to map the continent, and they were followed by those looking for land of their own. Over the decades others followed, looking for gold, jobs, and fame. The same thing has always lead people out into the West, the promise of prosperity. California represents the real American dream, upward social mobility for every good capitalist. If you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, but make it in California and you’ll be a star.
At the heart of this American holy land lies Los Angeles, the city of Angels. A great beast (and it is a beast, make no mistake about that) that is an infant even by American history standards, swallowing everything into the sprawl as it grows. In its heyday, the glitz and glamour of a Hollywood Golden Age, beautiful people, Sunset Boulevard Mansions were all juxtaposed against Bunker Hill slums, wide-scale city corruption, and the plight of city’s immigrant population. Today, the movie business is still booming, as is the porn industry, and the blessed beautiful ones (now blissfully egalitarian if you have the money, thanks to the wonders of modern science and plastic surgery) can clothe themselves in the decadence of Rodeo, but the city still has its fair share of problems: gridlock, gangs, and pollution to name a few. If LA is the City of Angels, it always has had (and still has) its share of demons.
I’ve never been to LA, and I’m relatively sure that if I did, I’d probably hate it (although to be fair, these days I hate going outside in general), but there is something about the city that has always fascinated me. There are contradictory elements in all places, but it seems to me that in LA they are more pronounced, almost to a cartoony level. Over the next couples of months, I’ll be writing a lot about the history and the portrayal of California (with a focus on LA) across different mediums. From non-fiction classics like Carey McWilliams The Island on the Land and Norman Klein’s A History of Forgetting, to novels like Farewell My Lovely, Play it as it Lays, and The Big Nowhere, as well as some seminal films like Greed, Chinatown and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? If there is anything you’d particularly like to see, feel free to comment, but bear in mind I’ve probably thought of the more obvious stuff. I’d be particularly interested in lesser known work by African American and Chicano authors, as well as those by women.
I have been busy over the holidays so I haven’t had much time to read, but I did buy an iPad with my Christmas bonus, so I have been catching up on a lot of comics. I thought I’d spend a little time today talking about comics that I love, and that I’m excited about coming up in 2012.
Out Now
Demo
Demo is my favourite book of the last few years, to the extent that I own two original pages from volume two. I’ve been a fan of Becky Cloonan’s art for over ten years, since a friend in NYC introduced me to it, back when she was xeroxing her own copies of Social Unrest. I always knew she was going to be big, and it has been great to see her get better over the years and get the attention that she deserves. Brian Wood’s writing is very understated; each story in Demo is encompassed within a single issue. While there is always some unusual, sometimes supernatural, element to the plot, Wood’s writing is always about people. People in love, who suffer from loss or grief, have been abused, who cannot escape their pasts. It is refreshing to see in a medium where the narrative is obsessed with “things that happen” a comic that is more interested in the effects that events have on people. Combined with Cloonan’s breathtaking art, Demo really packs an emotional punch. I’d happily recommend anything that Wood has written to people, from his indie work like Local, to his Vertigo series’ DMZ and Northlanders. Becky is also getting back into showing that she has serious writing chops too, her self-published Wolves (available at her website) is highly recommended.
Casanova
I’ve been a big fan of Mike (Moorcock) since I was a teenager, so when I heard that one of the biggest influences on Casanova was Jerry Cornelius, I was pretty sure I was going to like it. Fraction’s comic has everything that you could want in a crime/spy science fiction comic: reality hopping, time travel, and gender bending, with copious amounts of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The master criminal, libertine, Casanova Quinn finds himself dragged from his own reality and forced to work as a double agent for both an insane super villain and his spymaster father. Fraction is a clever guy though, so underneath the super cool exterior is a story that is essentially about the psychological damaged inflicted on Quinn by the situation that he finds himself in. It also doesn’t hurt that the art, by those super-talented twins, Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, is absolutely gorgeous, updated from the original single spot colours with beautiful watercolours. If that doesn’t sell you, it has Burroughs and Pynchon references, how can you not like that?
Parker: The Hunter and Parker: The Outfit
I’m not a big superhero guy, but I read The New Frontier on the advice of a friend and I loved it. Darwyn Cooke’s art was fantastic, and really captured the feel of the comics of the late Golden era/early Silver era. As an Eisner fan, I also really enjoyed his work on The Sprit series that he did for DC a few years ago. Lately, he has been working on adapting four of Richard Stark’s (a pseudonym of the late crime writer Donald Westlake) Parker novels for IDW, the first of which, The Hunter and The Outfit, are out now. Stark novels all revolve around the exploits of Parker, a master thief and all round tough guy betrayed by his partner and his wife in The Hunter, and left for dead. Cooke’s adaptations are very faithful to the original novels (they remain set in the 60s), and unlike the many film adaptations, Westlake was so impressed that he allowed Cooke to use the name Parker. The art is fantastic; there are some really wonderful, ingenious panel layouts. The one that sticks in my head the most is in The Outfit, when Cooke uses Monopoly iconography (because characters are playing it) to advance a story about criminal undertakings. Cooke’s Parker is traditional hard boiled noir of the highest quality, and it pulls no punches.
Criminal
Sticking with noir, another comic I’m very fond of is Criminal, by the long time pair of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. While it is still a hard crime comic like Parker (and at times, perhaps almost nihilistic), Brubaker takes a more communal approach. Each Criminal arc is about a different person, who has his or her own reasons for doing the things that they do. Some are career criminals, some are forced against their will, others feel compelled by duty or revenge. In a sense, Brubaker’s choice to approach the narrative as a sort of longitudinal study by showing connections between his protagonists, not only in the present but also through the history of the city, illustrate how many of his characters are unable to escape the past. In Brubaker’s world, violent acts are causal effects that only lead to more violence. Phillips is a fantastic artist, and his work on Criminal is as good, if not better, than anything that he has ever done. I’d also be glad to recommend to anyone any of the books that the pair has worked on, from Sleeper and Incognito to their new ongoing, the Lovecraft inspired noir, Fatale.
Upcoming
Conan
I’m not the biggest Conan fan in the world. I read Howard’s stories a few years ago, and like a lot of his work, there is the problematic issue of some pretty ugly racism. I’ve read a few of Dark Horses Conan comics though, mostly because of Cary Nord’s great art (and of course, Frazetta’s old art is pretty amazing too). When I found out Wood and Cloonan were going to be doing Conan starting from February though, I got excited. Wood has proven what he can do with this style of comic with his Vikings based Northlanders, and the preview art has been amazing. You can see sample pages here and here.
Parker: The Score
The latest in Cooke’s Parker adaptations is due out in May, which sees Parker taking on his biggest heist yet, and with Parker’s luck, something is bound to go wrong.
The Firelight Isle
The latest project of Paul Duffield, who you may know from his work on FreakAngels with the mighty Warren Ellis. Even though the internet has been around for a long time now, we are still not really seeing the full possibilities that it provides for self/digital publishing. Ellis and Duffield pushed the boat out on FreakAngels, and now Paul is following it up with The Firelight Isle. While I admire his work on FreakAngels, I saw Paul talk about his Carl Sagan inspired science-fiction book Signal last year at Thrilling Wonder Stories, and was really impressed. For The Firelight Isle, he is interested in world building and creating a whole new culture, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he can do. You can find more information about the project here, as well as how to donate if you feel that way inclined.
Beyond Good and Evil
If possible (and no ‘if possible’ can be more crazy) you want to abolish suffering! And we? – it seems that we want it to be, if anything, worse and greater than before! Well-being in your sense of the word – that certainly is no goal, it seems to us to be an end! A condition that would immediately make people ludicrous and contemptible – make us wish their downfall! The discipline of suffering, great suffering – don’t you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date? The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of the great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted – has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
Despite his prominence in the twentieth century, Nietzsche wasn’t a very popular philosopher in his own time. While he was able to get his work published, it didn’t sell well, which lead to a falling out with his publisher, who was more interested in publishing anti-Semitic literature which was in vogue in Germany. As a result, Nietzsche had to pay for Beyond Good and Evil to be printed out of his own pocket, and owing to poor sales, didn’t recoup his expenses. Despite what the title suggests, it is not an ethical treatise (Nietzsche never wrote one as he considered himself a moral-historian as seen in On the Genealogy of Morals), but instead a collection of aphorisms on a number of subjects ranging from philosophy, religion, psychology, and art. Written in Nietzsche’s instantly recognizable hyperbolic style, he eschews the scholarly density and heavy use of jargon of the philosophic tradition that followed Kant, making him infinitely more readable then Schopenhauer, Hegel, et al. That isn’t to say reading Nietzsche doesn’t require effort, he is still dealing, as all philosophers do, with complex ideas, and is in dialogue with a great deal of sources, from Homer and Plato to Wagner and Goethe.
Nietzsche’s aim in Beyond Good and Evil, as the subtitle, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, suggests, is to proclaim the coming of a new type of philosopher. One who will stand beyond good and evil, with hammer in hand, and destroy the idols of Platonism and Judeo-Christianity (Platonism for the masses). He argues that Philosophers have long been engaged in shaping their philosophical theories to support what they already believe, and as a result their philosopher shows their inherent bias, “creating the world in [their] own image”. He rejects “Old Kant” and his synthetic a priori judgements (for those not well versed in Kantian: things that we know to be truth even though they cannot be proved by experience), and likens his faculty of faculties to being somewhat akin to opium. He also distains “the hermit” Spinoza’s attempts to turn philosophical judgements into a pseudo-mathematics, Descartes for presuming that the “thinking” presupposes the “I”, and Schopenhauer for presenting a view of will that he finds far too simplistic. As an anti-modernist, he also scoffs at the arrogance of scientists for believing that existence can be understood purely by atomics. The philosopher of the future, as heirs of Nietzsche, will reject dogmatism in the search for objective truth.
For Nietzsche, Judeo-Christianity is the worst thing that has happened to Europe. While he is willing to accept that it has had its uses, and perhaps that even Europe would not have survived without it, it is the morality that it has imposed on society that is holding mankind back. Philosophers are at fault, he argues, for refusing to acknowledge the real problem with morality, that in by accepting it as an a priori condition of humanity, they ignore the thousands of years in which man was essentially pre-moral. Our ideas of good and evil, as they stand today, came with Judeo-Christianity, and such ideas are something to be overcome. They serve as a sort of levelling, that serve only to bring us down into “the rabble” or “the herd”, as he refers to the unenlightened. Pity is his chief target, and he even goes as far as to state that it is through pity that we have allowed those to survive that ought not to have, echoing Thus Spake Zarathustra’s thoughts on how the overmann should not be forced to bow down to help the weak. Cruelty is an important part of life, both in absolute honesty, something Nietzsche believes is a virtue, and as an integral part of art, particularly tragedy. Religion has lead to a shift from what Nietzsche calls master morality to slave morality, (a purposely perverted twist on Hegel), something discussed at great length in The Genealogy of Morals. Like Zarathustra, who exclaims that the tablets are broken so we must make new ones, the philosopher of the future must break free from the shackles of value systems to form their own morality, judgements, and laws.
That isn’t to say that, like most of Nietzsche’s work, Beyond Good and Evil isn’t without its problems. His misogynist comments approach the level of parody, especially when he compares women to being like “cats”, and argues that enlightenment is the work of men, where as pregnancy is the work of women. His claims that the whole of Europe are laughing at female authors such as George Sand is also quite out there. He also says some rather odd things about nobility and breeding that is strange even for the nineteenth century. While certainly not defensible, it is still worth noting that Nietzsche did not believe in equality in principle, because he saw it as yet another form of levelling. For women to want to be like men was baffling for Nietzsche, who thought they should inspire to be different. His disclaimer beforehand that these are “[his] truths” only does little to mitigate the damage, but as Nietzschean scholars like Walter Kaufmann have noted, Nietzsche is often purposely contrary and offensive. At times, it becomes difficult to tell if he is telling the truth or playing a character. That being said, despite his flaws, Nietzsche remains perhaps the most important philosopher of the modern age, foreshadowing most of the themes that would make up the narrative of the twentieth century. He always believed that he was born too early, and with the hindsight of over a hundred years of history, we can see that he was correct in thinking so.
Waiting for the Barbarians
What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.
Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians has much in common with Dino Buzzati’s earlier novel, The Tartar Steppes. Both take place in a remote fort under the constant threat of phantom attack, and both demonstrate the fear that can dehumanise people. The protagonist of the novel is an unnamed aging magister, living out his days in peace in a frontier fort far from the centre of the Empire. His quiet life comes to an unfortunate end with the arrival of Colonel Joll, an officer of the Empire’s special forces, the Third Bureau. He is on a mission to investigate rumours that the barbarian tribes of the region are planning to unite against the Empire, despite the fact that the barbarians are rarely seen as they live a nomadic existence. Seeing the sadistic, sometimes even deadly, nature of Joll’s interrogative techniques, the magister takes pity on a barbarian girl blinded by Joll’s methods, which leads to disgrace and imprisonment on the grounds of treasons against the Empire.
The protagonist, having become an old man who only wants to live an uncomplicated life, is at odds with an Empire that seeks only to perpetuate itself, and career soldiers like Joll, willing to do anything in the name of imperialism. The brutal treatment of the barbarians, which he has seen to be a mostly passive group in his years of experience dealing with them, shocks him to the core. In his relationship with the barbarian girl, he sees himself as a ridiculous old fool. Each night he washes and anoints her body, but cannot seem to conjure up any sexual desire for her. The result of which is that she remains confused at what is expected at her, and he wonders if he is trying to take something from her like Joll did, albeit through a different method. When they eventually part, he wants her to stay, but she is unable to understand why. By the end of the novel, having been humiliated, starved, beaten, and eventually vindicated, he struggles to understand the meaning of everything that has happened. He feels like there is something that is right in front of him that he just cannot grasp.
The people of the town display the usual tendencies of the crowd when faced with a threat to their safety, bringing the worst out of them. In one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, Joll returns, barbarian prisoners in tow, with their hands clapped to their mouths by wire that runs through both the hands and the cheeks. The populace not only cheer for the soldiers to abuse the prisoners, but join in when asked. The protagonist, who cannot take seeing Joll corrupt the town in such a way, tries to protest but is brutally beaten for his attempt. When he is accused of treason, removed from his position and placed in a cell in the garrison, he is never tried or convicted. His enemies know that he has no power because the town has already turned on him. They have forgotten everything that he has done for them, instead whispering rumours about his conduct with the barbarian girl and his supposed treason. The Empire understands that humiliating your enemy and making him look ridiculous is far more useful that imprisonment or death. They only have to parade him around the grounds naked, and hang him from a tree in a woman’s dress for the entertainment of the citizens for his former subjects to despise him. Of course, when the soldiers abandoned the town, it is the magister that the remaining citizens once again turn to for help.
While written in the seventies, Waiting for the Barbarians still resonates strongly, because the central themes are ones that have been major ones in the narrative of the twenty-first century. When Joll arrives in his wire glasses with dark lenses, the newest fashion in the Empire, one can also see a CIA spook arriving on a flier for a little extra-ordinary rendition. The torture that occurs in the novel has never gone away, we have just a little more nuance about it now. The erosion of civil liberties in the name of security (and the terrorist act that leads to them, the destruction of facilities that leads to flooding of the crop fields), the ridicule and unlawful imprisonment of those who oppose imperialist thought, and the frenzy of a populace against a shadowy threat are all things that we still see on a day to day basis. Coetzee’s novel is visceral, all brutality, flesh and filth; it exposes the dark heart that lies not only in Empire, but also in its people, and as a result it remains a very unsettling thing to read.
The Kreutzer Sonata
Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can the first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted; play it then and do what the music has moved you to. Otherwise an awakening of energy and feeling unsuited both to the time and the place, to which no outlet is given, cannot but act harmfully. At any rate that piece had a terrible effect on me; it was if quite new feelings, new possibilities, of which I had then been unaware, had been revealed to me. “That’s how it is: not at all as I used to think and live, but that way,” something seemed to say within me. What this new thing was that had been revealed to me I could not explain to myself, but the consciousness of this new condition was very joyous. All those same people, including my wife and him, appeared in a new light.
In The Kreutzer Sonata, jealousy drives a man to kill his wife for her infidelity, but, as becomes apparent to his confession to the protagonist of the tale on a trial after his acquittal, he places the real blame on the nature of relationships. A former libertine of good social standing and relative wealth who decides to marry a poorer “pure” woman, he finds himself trapped in a marriage characterized by seething animosity. The first few years, although turbulent, are bearable because of the children, but after the doctor advises her not to have any more children, she regains a great deal of her former beauty which aggravates her husband’s jealous nature. When an immoral musician arrives and attempts to seduce his wife, his cordial nature to the pair almost goads them on, until, returning from a business trip early on suspicion of an affair, he catches them together and fatally stabs his wife.
It is always dangerous to examine an author’s biographical details in relation to their work, there are nevertheless a few interesting things to note about The Kreutzer Sonata. The first is that Tolstoy had many sexual liaisons before meeting the woman who would become the Countess Tolstoy, Sonya Andreevna Behrs, like his libertine main character, and before their marriage he gave her his diaries documenting those affairs and also had to admit that he had an illegitimate child. The husband of the novella also has to tell his fiancée prior to the wedding about his decadent past, as he fears one particular event will soon become public knowledge and too gives her his diaries. Also, like the marriage portrayed in the novel, Tolstoy’s own had begun in passionate fashion only to become more and more strained as the years went by, particularly following his moral crisis and conversion in 1878. The frustration of a strained marital relationship is something that he was no doubt able to draw upon from his own experiences.
The Beethoven piece that the novella is named for, Beethoven’s Sonata no. 9 in A Major for violin and piano, Op. 47, forms the centrepiece, as it is the recital performed by her wife and another man that represents her betrayal. The actual relations between the two are purposely left vague, even when they are caught together it is not in the act so to speak. In the performance though, the husband sees the secret, wordless communication between his wife and the musician, even if the rest of the onlookers do not notice it. The part of the piece that Tolstoy explicitly references is the presto of the first movement, a tonally darker section that follows a slower chordal adagio sostenuto. The faster tempo of the presto and the angrier tone serve as a musical accompaniment to the husband’s violent jealousy and give an intensity to relationship of the wife and musician, the latter emphasised by rising violin passages that are answered by the piano. It is almost as if the playing of this particular piece at this place and time is what gives rise to the events that follow; the charged Sonata of Beethoven engendering the emotions within them to a higher degree.
For the husband, the primary cause of the events is the sexual, “swinistic” nature of human relations, and he argues that despite the advances in equality in the late nineteenth century, women can never be equal until they cease to be seen as objects of desire. True to Tolstoy’s late radical position, he also advocates abstinence as an ideal, as opposed to sex and marriage, as a purer love, “the love thy neighbour” of Christ. Whether this rejection of pleasure is almost akin to misanthropy as Chesterton suggested is a point to be debated, but what The Kreutzer Sonata does present us with is a portrait of a very dangerous kind of love that soon becomes hate and not only drives a man to murder, but condemns him to spend the rest of his life seeking in others the forgiveness that his dying wife refused to give him.
The Death of Ivan Ilych
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invisible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles at the hands of his executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him the most torment of all.
As he approached the end of his life, Tolstoy became more and more worried about the meaning of life. The Death of Ivan Ilych, one of his late masterpieces, is not so much about death itself, but the anguish the individual experiences when forced to evaluate his life in relation to it. The titular Ivan, already dead when the story begins, is tortured by the schism between the fact that he has wasted his life and his belief that he couldn’t have lived it any other way. In Tolstoy’s choice to make Ivan’s fatal illness ambiguous, it is almost as if his failure to bridge that gap is what causes his physical suffering, his metaphorical “black sack”, and it is only by accepting the truth about his life that he is able to find peace.
The novella is also a scathing attack on the self-importance of bourgeoisie life. Ivan is a judge, a man who enjoys his position purely because of the power that he has over other people, even if he does not abuse this power. He takes a great deal of pride in helping other people when he is legally required to do so, but refuses to do so unless they have the correct legal paperwork. He gets married to a woman, partly because he finds her agreeable to his tastes, and partly because society would see it as a fitting match. The relationship doesn’t go well though, and for the most part they argue. The only reason that his wife doesn’t wish that he would die is because the allowance she would get from the government would be less that his salary (Tolstoy’s rejection of the institution of marriage is well noted). Attaining a good position in Petersburg after fading into obscurity, he becomes almost obsessed with making the house look impressive, not realising that it in fact looks like all the other houses in which people purchase lower priced antiques in an attempt to emulate the style of the wealthy. Rather comically, it is an incident that occurs when he is arranging these antiques that causes the injury to his side that serves as the catalyst for his existential malaise.
If the unexamined life is not worth living, then the examined life can be a dangerous thing. Suffering in a great deal of agony, with no cure from contradicting doctors who are unable to decide whether it is an appendix problem or a floating kidney, Ivan has to take a good hard look at the superficial life that he has lead. In looking back, he sees that all the things that he used to think were important don’t have the meaning that they once did, and the only time when he was truly happy is the one time that is completely inaccessible to him now, his childhood. As mentioned earlier, he refuses to believe that he could have lived his life any other way, thinking that his superficial life was still a good life. The unthinkable horror is that to admit otherwise would be to admit that the entirety of his life had no real meaning, a leap that he is unwilling to make until the end. The only thing that can soothe his pain is the presence of Gerasim, a young man from who country who serves as Ivan’s butler’s apprentice. The innocence of his youth, his kind-hearted nature, and compassionate pity serve as a panacea for Ivan’s existential anguish.
In The Death of Ivan Ilych, we see the literal representation of the problem that had come to plague Tolstoy as an older man, how is one to live their life? The real problem of this question is uncertainty, even if you can provide an answer there is no way to know if it is the right one. This is the black sack that so haunts Ivan as a manifestation of his physical suffering, a harbinger of the unavoidable appearance of Death. He will not make his appearance though until after Ivan has accepted that his life was a wasted one because it was not a moral one. As Nabokov writes in his lectures on Russian literature, for the deeply Religious Tolstoy, it is only by doing so that Ivan is able to begin his new life, his Life in the Kingdom of God.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one’s own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one’s fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one’s wit before hidden microphones – I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends) which attracts me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.
One of the great tragi-comedies of the twentieth century, Kundera’s novel is primarily concerned with duality. He opens with an account of Nietzsche’s rather strange ideas about eternal return; the theory that everything reoccurs eternally in the same order. The horror of such a burden, that everything that we do should be repeated ad infinitum, is pure existential terror; Nietzsche calls it das schswerste Gewitcht, the heaviest of burdens, and Kundera writes “If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross”. The unfortunate truth is that the antithesis is no less terrorizing, a line is even less comforting that a circle. If everything that we do only ever occurs once, then existence has an unbearable lightness. Einmal ist keinmal, what happens once may just as well not happened at all. Without another life in which to make different choices, we have no way to measure the weight of our actions. In the novel, love and sex, life and death, everything is permeated by this unbearable lightness.
The novel’s plot revolves around four linked individuals and a dog during the Prague Spring, demonstrating the repercussions of the Soviet invasion of 1968. Tomas, a prominent surgeon who eventually loses his job due to his failure to support the despotic communist regime, meets and falls in love with Tereza. For Tomas, love and sex are characterised by lightness and he operates on a system where he keeps a number of mistresses that he sees at various intervals. He does not take these relationships seriously, and takes pleasure from collecting those small details that make a woman different from others during sex. With Tereza, he has something different though, she comes to him like the baby Moses in a basket, but even that love is defined by lightness, the lightness of the coincidences that lead to it occurring. If his colleague had not been sick, he would not have gone on the trip where he met her, and if she had not been sick when she visited him, he would not have allowed her to stay after they made love, and fallen in love with her. Despite his love for Tereza, he refuses to give up his philandering, although he tries to hide is best as he can as not to hurt her.
While Tereza does her best to try and accept Tomas’ little trysts and not be jealous, it causes her a great deal of anxiety. In order to try and make her happy, Tomas gets her a dog, named Karenin after the husband in Anna Karenina, that becomes between the pair a shared point of reference, the clock winder of their days. She often has nightmares about executions, in which it is Tomas that sends her to her death, perhaps as an unconscious realisation that he could order her to leave at any moment, just like the rest of the anonymous women who also feature in some of her dreams. Due to a complex relationship with her mother, Tereza is obsessed with the duality of the body and the soul, spending hours as a girl standing in front of the mirror in an attempt to see her soul. When she first arrives at Tomas’, her stomach is rumbling, and she is grateful for the rest of their lives that he never mentioned it. In an encounter later in the novel when she attempts to have an affair because she believes it will help her be less jealous of Tomas, she becomes fixated on the idea of an alien penis (as opposed to a specific one) in close proximity to her own body. Ultimately she believes she is a burden to Tomas, but it is being with her that makes him happy, regardless of his dalliances.
The other two characters of the novel are Sabina, an artist and mistress of Tomas’, and her lover in Geneva, a well-regarded scholar called Franz. Their relationship is doomed because they meet too late in life, after they have formed different semiotic histories. Franz’s idealism is the opposite of Sabina’s own feelings, who sees it as the highest form of kitsch, which she sees as her enemy. Due to a puritanical upbringing, Sabina is obsessed with betrayal, seeing it as a way at getting back at her father, even long after he is gone. She leaves Franz after he abandons his wife to be with her, and continues ever westward, repeatedly betraying each place she settles until she ends up old in California with no further to go. Franz moves on to another woman, but the spectre of Sabina hangs over him like a deity that he lives to please. He dies at the result of tragic misunderstanding, first believing he would please his deity by travelling to Thailand to demonstrate against the Khmer Rouge, and then being fatally wounded in a mugging. He believes in fighting back he is displaying his strength, but he has failed to understand that the strength that Sabina wanted from him was not physical, but sexual.
Kundera’s central question is whether or not, like Parmenides states, lightness is good and weight is bad. Is it worse to be chained to meaning or to suffer from a lack? Neither seems particularly appealing. In her final dream, Tomas is no longer Tereza’s executioner, he shrinks away until he vanishes and he she is handed a rabbit by the gunman. Tomas has grown old and tired, no longer a surgeon or a womaniser, and has become the domestic pet that she always wanted him to be. At the end, in fleeting, they are both happy though, and regardless or light or weight, that is the best that any of us can hope for.
