The Unbearable Lightness of Being faded away on the screen with the couple driving into eternity, while the afterimage flashed constantly in my mind. The motif in the picture and the sound of violin are so haunting that I can’t let go.
There might be something between the story and me.
The only thing I bought in Chengdu during my first travel out of town was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Czech novelist Milan Kundera. I finished reading the book for the first time on the train back home alone. Lying in the upper berth while reading the book was not comfortable for my body in sixteen, when the male hormone was shaping me into a man. I simply swallowed it. The Being did not matter to me. The Lightness made no sense to me. I was fascinated with the myth between man and woman as well as the sensuality.
The book: An allegory of love and sex, politics and human’s memory. Kundera destroyed the tradition of narrative. You don’t expect that the story develops with plots or characters or the illusion of time passing, which have been too familiar to novel readers. Kundera abandoned to represent the real life, as the Cubism painters did in the early 20th century. He was fond of the characters he created. He was likely trying to look for solutions for some questions related with life, history or politics. But don’t expect he would tell you the solutions: he is in pursuit of those solutions. You have to participate in the characters, to track your own image and emotion in the characters and the language they speak. Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility, he says.
It is not at all a comfortable experience to read the book. The plots may not be attractive enough; the structure is casual. But what encouraged me to get it through was the illusion of Tomas, the core character in the fiction, on whom I have some sympathy for the sake of some commonness assumed to exist between him and me.
I read the first two pages again and again, taking it for granted that this part about Nietzsche’s argument on eternal return was the key to the kernel of the fiction. Meantime, I re-read some Nietzsche’s work on my shelf, like The Gay Science and The Birth of Tragedy, both of which were also far beyond of my understanding. My effort was proved vain. But I took it a necessary part of reading.
This book is not for a young man of sixteen years old anyway. But the metaphors of Lightness and Weight, Flesh and Soul have been sharp in my growth of pain, keeping me stay alert of the path I am heading, the decision I have to make and the girls I lie to.
The film: A marriage of art house and Hollywood, The Washington Post puts. It is genuinely erotic. Over the 170 minutes, I just cannot get out of the untouchable atmosphere that stirs my heart, the hormone inside and the complex of narcissism.
Directed by Philip Kaufman, the film is of more narrative without sacrificing the density of Kundera’s prose. Unlike the book, the film invented a reality in sight, but that does not necessarily mean less illusion. The music is being played from the inside of the two beautiful women’s bodies, in concert with every movement of passion, however, carrying the feeling of deep nostalgia, as blue as the spring of Prague.
Don’t take the film as some experience of voyeurism. Yes, the sex scenes are sensuous, but bittersweet, sometimes poignant, or sad. I can’t help thinking of being the man or the woman in the mirror. How can I make love that way, as producing some art?
The trio: In a man’s life, there are two women: wife and lover, though the latter sometimes appears illusive, but truly exists. The two women are the two side of the same coin, respectively representing the man’s soul and flesh, but there should be no definite identity: wife is the embodiment of innocence, dependence and loyalty, who is heavy. Lover is the symbol of orgasm, abandonment of commitment, who is light.
Tomas, an excellent surgeon, has one wife and one lover, plus many other ladies who more or less have affair with him. How can this bastard do this, his colleagues curse jealously. He has a lean, intellectual look. He is lonely for his independent and critical thinking. A sort of cynic, he retreats himself from the world of weight by indulging in the game of sex. For him, sex seems like a form of physical meditation, rather than an activity with women. I love the way he says “take off your clothes”, like an order but in whistle that the listener cannot refuse. He says to Sabina, his lover, life is so light. Sounds like a wise excuse to leave the woman alone after he put on his clothes again. He never spends any night in a woman’s bed. Tomas lives a life so lacking in commitment or fidelity or moral responsibility to anyone else, and the marriage with Tereza also fails to change the way he is, though I would like to pretend to believe that he has got anything from the lessons of losing Tereza.
Sabina, a painter, has a lush, voluptuous body, big-breast and tactile. She could be any man’s poison, the enemy of wives. She paints with mirror, in which she also sees the man on her top every time. She is also brilliant and sincere. In fact, I think she has a sort of purity, which should not be tangled with her maintaining a lightness of being. Kundera says Sabina lives by betrayal, abandoning family, lovers, and finally country.
Tereza is a beauty of innocence, who is the exact opposite of Sabina in fidelity and attachment to the real earth. She reminds me of those virgin girls who ever made me feel hesitation. Undertaking the moral burden, she is pure and fresh, the very woman many men cannot refuse to harbor. Life is heavy, she says to Tomas with tears in her eyes when she knows his affairs. Despite of her confidence in her husband’s love, she questions in vain: how can a man have sex with a woman without loving her. What a poor question. Tereza cannot bear Tomas’ lightness. She is haunted by the recurrent nightmares. She escapes again and again. It seems that Life Is Elsewhere for her.
Tomas’ life is broken into two worlds. In the world with Tereza, he has to betray his code of lightness and maintain the way a husband should be. He is gentle and physically strong. He loves his wife. But he is not ready to get out of another world he has been so used to be with Sabina and the other women, even though he is exiled to Switzerland or ousted to make living as a window washing worker. His situation reflects the paradox of the identity of opposites, the recurrent theme of the book and the film. It is the paradox for both man and woman. It is ambiguous. And there seems to be no final solutions.
Gucheng, the self-exiled Chinese poet, wrote on the preface of his only novel published after his death: you are my wives; I love you both. He ended his paradox by murdering his wife and committing suicide afterward.
Such story barely repeats itself anytime and anywhere.
Eroticism: The film earned the fame for eroticism. The idea that what I would feel if I watched it ten years ago appears funny to me. There is a lot of nudity in the film, but of no quality of pornography. The camera does not linger; the angles are selective. The most beautiful scene for which I can’t set myself calm is when Tereza and Sabina photograph each other in Sabina’s flat. Tereza is asked to take some pictures of nudity. Sabina agrees to be the model. The way that Sabina looks at the camera is breathtaking; her lines and her color are voluptuous; she is a little bit shy while so wild under Tomas. She tries to hide away her beauty before another woman, her lover’s wife, but she just can’t prevent from unveiling it. Tereza’s tears are unforgettable when she has deeply focus on shooting. She must admire Sabina’s body, while she knows exactly it is the very body that her husband is inside and out before he goes back home, with the liquid smell left on his hair.
Now it is my turn, she says to Tereza, take off your clothes. Receiving the order as firm as Tomas’, the little woman looks frightened like a lamb. She slowly takes off her clothes, hiding behind a sofa. Does she feel inferiority, or simply embarrassed when she covers her breast with hands and looks around helpless? Her body is less sexually seductive, but of the quality of the girl in the painting of Spring. Such body can well serve many men’s imagination of virgin of innocence.
Silence falls between the two when Sabina put her hand on Tereza’s back while she is lying flat in the sofa with her back to the viewer. Sabina’s hand moves down to Tereza’s buttocks, then gently put off Tereza’s last underwear, in the way a man does to an uneasy girl with no experience. The silence is secret, like a deep meditation, leaving me hold my breath to wait for something uncertain to happen.
It couldn’t be more erotic like that. There is no music, but the remote thunder and the rapid sound of the camera. The sound is more stirring than any heavy breath or touch. I wish I were the camera.
Bad memories: I had no knowledge about Prague Spring before I read the book. I was indeed indifferent to the event that Kundera deliberately interprets as the tragedy of his country and his generation, which took place in 1968, 2 years later than the launch of Cultural Revolution. I simply took Prague Spring another erased fact in my history book, which is discouraged to record any blur of communism.
How heavy is the history? Is Hitler’s genocide heavy while such crime is re-committed in Rwanda? Is the Great Wall of nonsense weighty while we are constructing a Great Damn over the Yangze River? Is human’s history heavy when it duplicates itself?
How heavy is an individual’s life when examined in the setting of the history? Is the blood any difference between the students killed for protest against the Kuomingtan government in 20s through 40s and those butchered in 1989? Are the lives in 20s heavier than those in 1989? Yes. Mr. Lu Xun wrote to condemn the murderers, while the gunmen and their boss are praised for the victory over the anti-revolution movement on the propaganda. Grandmother warned me not to participate in any student protest movement when I was departing for the university in Beijing. She has witnessed the blood shedding of students for the protest against the KMT in 20s, against Japanese in 30s, against American in 40s, and against the communists from 50s through 90s. The lives that were as young as I am are merely manipulated. Truth is being forgotten, while lies are or will be justified.
In the spring of 1968, the leader of Czech Alexander Dubeek was managing his communism country into a government of more human. Tomas write an article to add his voice to the public debate. He argues that those in power should take the responsibilities for trading his country’s sovereignty and the speech freedom and for torturing or murdering many innocent citizens, however the politicians disclaim guilt on the ground of being unaware of the truth or result. Dubeek was down after the Russian invaded. Tomas is asked to sign a confession letter prepared by the communism authority in order to testify his faith in communism and Soviet Union. He refuses to throw himself into the tide of kitsch. So he has to bear the mark of infidel of communism, while he knows exactly the result of disdaining against the authority. Like those who stand hard to maintain integrity, Tomas is driven out of his hospital, where he is indeed needed. He is left with only one soul partner, Tereza, but his loyalty has yet surpassed his libido.
Life could have been light should he sign the letter. He again goes to the opposite side of lightness. Though barely invented by Kundera, Tomas represents the true humanity, which is distorted and manipulated by the force of history beyond any individual’s strength. Like those who are ostracized by their own people, Tomas earns little sympathy for living up to his integrity. On the country, people take his misfortunate as laughing stock.
The individual’s weight makes sense only because he or she lives but once. An individual’s decision or movement is not retractable. However, history is another case. History is duplicated somewhere else and in some other time. Can we afford to let Japanese to slaughter another 200,000 people in the whole city in one week? Can we bear the lightness if the Cultural Revolution reoccurred? Would our sorrow be any different if Daniel Pearl was killed once and once again? Such horrible and crazy vision makes me deeply sick.
The argument of eternal return referred in the first two pages has been lingering in my mind. The echo grows faint when I stay indifferent; it turns stronger when I try to be heavy.
The hatred to Hitler’s crime is getting bleak, let go Prague Spring. The burden of the memory of Cultural Revolution is decreasing. The Japanese insist that their Royal Army had nothing to do with the holocaust in Nanjing that was committed less than 70 years ago. The Party is to write the Tiananmen Square Protest into textbooks as an example of anti-revolution. The husband’s disloyalty is forgiven as the wife pretends to be loved. Lies metamorphose into truth. We don’t believe that history will return, but our memories are truly fallen.
I am comfortable with the fatal accident of Tomas and Tereza. But I also believe that they have or will come back to the earth. Some morning when I wake up in my own bed, I might find myself so indifferent to the love of the past, which was so heavy that I couldn’t help crying for. Some evening when I put on my clothes in a woman’s house, I might see Tomas in the mirror. That is not a ghost, but a man who can’t be more real.
March 16, 2002
