The novel has a quartet of main characters, Tomas, his wife Tereza, Sabina and Fritz. Tomas is a skilled surgeon and womanizer, who ends up in the black books of the totalitarian dictatorship, forcing him to become a window washer. Tereza took photos of the 1968 protests that unwittingly give the regime information on dissidents. Sabina is Tomas' lover who ends up escaping to the West. Fritz is Sabina's other lover, who ends up dying while on a humanitarian mission in Bangkok.
The novel is essentially about lightness and its comparison to the opposite. Humans are often blindly stuck in the arrogance of lightness in the secular world. Kundera says that true human love only comes when the recipient has no power. This strikes a chord against the modern being. These type of insights are what make the novel worth reading. It has the reader think well beyond the pages of the book, which all great novels should do, instead of having us "lost" in the novel. Kundera's philosophical insights are also what make the book timeless and not frozen within the Iron Curtain age.
Sabina lives the ultimate lightness. She abandons family, country, Tomas and Fritz to represent the essence of the title. She has a lack of commitment, fidelity and moral responsibility. She has great freedom but it all lacks meaning. It gives her a disengagement from society.
In contrast, Tereza is the great symbol of heaviness who gains much greater approval from the author. She suffers from her commitment to a husband of daily infidelities but brings about his ruin when she leaves the freedom of Switzerland to go back to Czechoslovakia with Tomas soon following to prove his love to her. The almost unbearable burdens of commitment and fidelity nearly ruin Tereza. Both lightness and heaviness cause the characters to sink and suffer.
All moral philosophical stances seem to come up short for Kundera. Three of the four main characters die and the fourth disappears. One ideal of his prevails. Kitsch is an ideal denying the existence of the ruins of life. Kitsch is present in the Iron Curtain regime under the banner of totalitarian kitsch. He begins the novel with: "The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant."
Besides Sabina, another main example of lightness was Tomas' infidelity with the female gender. He "desired but feared them. Needing to create a compromise between fear and desire, he devised what he called 'erotic friendship'." He would tell his mistresses: the only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other." It was sex based entirely on the exclusion of love.
Kundera cleverly reminds us that compassion is Latin for "with suffering." To have compassion, "means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion-joy, anxiety happiness, pain...therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme." Tereza has this compassion of heaviness. For Tomas, loving her was "beautiful but it was also tiring......not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." Kundera, in reference to heaviness, uses the example of Beethoven. His words "Der schwer gefasste Entschluss" or the "difficult solution." This phrase comes together with "Es musssein." In other words, of necessity, weight and value, only necessity is heavy and only what is heavy has value, according to Kundera. This is his major affirmation on the side of heaviness.
For Sabina, her relationship with Franz was built around her uncontrollable need for him to use physical superiority, even punishment on her. It was the closest she could come to perceiving heaviness. The lack of this was why she left him, further signifying her life of abandonment. "Living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful." Lightness is Sabina's decay. "The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about....the thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us." Sabina's abandonments or betrayals did not give her any clear resolution to finding purpose.
Kundera's male bawdiness in the novel is at times tiring. We get his own version of the worst of Gabriel Marquez. The magic of the book is that just when you are coming around to despise the novel, he captures you with a gunshot motif that immediately shakes your intellectual senses. Take "men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.......The obsession of the former is lyrical-what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointing again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconsistency a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering." The obsession of the latter is sex. The men posess few if any subjective ideals upon the woman and since most things interest him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has some element of scandal in it. The epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption or redemption through failure. An ultimate lightness. Tomas was of "no subjective ideal."
Much of the novel is Kundera's seemingly biographical account of the Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. This section ends up taking a minor role in Kundera's bigger circle discussion of heaviness/lightness. Especially when sex is brought in as a talking point. For Tomas, "attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had." Tereza was mainly a source of compassion. Her role is much heavier. He feels a part of her body in a dream. Love's weight has pull.
For the last part of the novel, we delve into Kundera's definition of kitsch and his disdain for it. To him the "aesthetic ideal is called kitsch." It is the "absolute denial of shit." It "excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence." A weaker argument of Kundera is when he applies kitsch to the following: "every display of individualism(because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt(because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony(because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously)," is an object to the supposed lightness of the simplicity of totalitarianism. The heaviness of critical thinking is not allowed. Kitsch is, as Kundera masterfully puts, "a folding screen set up to curtain off death." In the totalitarian kitsch, no questions are allowed. On the other hand, all of us aiming for another's heart, especially in any collective manner, need to apply kitsch to their tactics. Tereza realizes how all of us are not immune to kitsch. "None among us is superhuman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition."
In relation to the 21st century, Kundera summarizes that "we all need someone to look at us." There are four categories. In the first, they long "for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words" or a public gaze. In the second, they need to be looked at by many known eyes. In the third, the people need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love(ie.Tereza). The fourth is those "who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present." They are the dreamers such as Franz. All categories apply to the heart and require a certain amount of imagination. "Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion." In an existential manner, kitsch gives us meaning, despite its premise of falsehood.
Kundera refers to Nietzsche saving the horse from a coachman's whipping in Turin to make it clear that he prefers Tereza's heaviness over lightness. He asks and declares the following: With selfless love, with true human goodness, you do not need to ask does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love when we measure, probe and test it, have the added effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand love from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him, demand freedom and ask for nothing but his company. At the end of the novel, while soaking in a bath, Tereza realizes she set her lifetime of weaknesses against Tomas. The cost of love is bestowing one's vulnerabilities onto the other. Success in a relationship can often be a matter of how much the other can bare.
Kundera's minimalization of traditional conventions puts the onus on him to keep the reader's attention. This is where his mastery as a writer shines through and gave it the status of masterpiece. Kundera was able to do what few writers can accomplish and that is to give the reader a different context on which to measure life. That is what choice of lifestyle is most worthy in the manner of purpose and meaning.
*****
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