Unbearable Lightness of Being

I was thinking about Kundera and trying to understand why I find him so interesting. In a way I was trying to dissect Milan Kundera.One  of the most interesting aspects about his writing is his art of dissecting his characters psychologically.  Another great aspect of his writing is usage of metaphors and taking a word and creating a world out of it. Like the word 'eternal recurrence' which he uses in his most beautiful novel, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'. In the starting couple of pages he dissects 'eternal recurance ' and then after doing this he merely transports most lucidly to the characters of the novel. The novel starts with these lines..

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"......."

and then after a while he 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. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

The introduction of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is staggeringly beautiful due to its cogently philosophical narrative and also due to the  sublime metaphorical construction of one of the main characters 'Tereza'. In Kundera the characters are not born in a city but they are born out of a metaphor or a situation. In 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', Tereza is also born out of a metaphor, "she seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed" .Kundera knows the power of metaphors and hence the danger of it. "Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love".Through a metaphor he creates the underlying theme of the novel which is deciphered at various levels in the novel. 

Kundera is like Bach where the technique of counterpoint plays a very central role.Two diverse themes merged to create a work of art which resonates on a central core.His novels are like great fugues. In Kundera contrapuntal form dominates his novels where diverse characters would converge towards a central core. This paradoxical narrative structure is thoughtfully brought out in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' . The two main female characters are created on this paradox.  Sabina is the most fascinating character according to me in the novel. She portrays the 'lightness of being' , a being who is not burdened with any sense of morality or value judgement, which can be said as the most burdensome aspect in a human being. She in a sense is a pure amoral being. Contrasting to her is Tereza. She is loaded with the 'unbearable' burden of fidelity, morality and value judgement. She in a sense characterises the usual emotional human being. But as Kundera says " But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. 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". 

The process that binds  the characters in the novel  is the most contrapuntal word in real staggering proportions. The word symbolises sublime beauty, utter catastrophe, bliss, pure madness etc and is something without which life would be incomplete.This colossal word is 'love'. The main male protaganist in the novel has been struck by this ambiguous word. He is portrayed a real 'Don Juan' , a bard of coitus, a pragmatic man of the world for whom falling in love was like falling to die. But as Kundera counters for the notion of 'eternal recurrence' that you are born once and your life remains incomplete if you have not fallen in love. So it happens that for Tomas, Tereza becomes the sole person in his life who enters his poetic memory. Another sublime metaphor has been used by Kundera here,'poetic memory' which denotes impressions that touch the heart and stays there. Tomas is surgeon who know quite well to stitch normal wounds but this wound of love by Tereza is not healed completely and he leaves even his job for her and goes to the country side to live with her. 

The novel has lots of political metaphors also which I am not interested in but I think this is one work of art that should be consumed by all.