The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Milan Kundera · Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí · a novel in seven parts · first published in French, Gallimard, Paris, 1984; in Czech, Sixty-Eight Publishers, Toronto, 1985 · scored on Kundera’s Czech, read from knowledge, with Michael Henry Heim’s English (1984) for sense and quotation; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of ideas as variations on a theme; love story, political novel and essay in one composition
Mythos
Oedipus, guilty without knowing, built into the plot; the expulsion from Paradise, with a dog as the one creature left in Eden; the foundling sent downstream in a basket
Phase
From Prague before August 1968 through exile and return to the countryside of the 1970s, with Sabina’s last years in America; the chronology broken so that the deaths are told before the idyll
Presentation
Fiction; seven parts in short numbered chapters, Lightness and Weight and Soul and Body each used twice as titles; an author who speaks in the first person in essays set inside the chapters
Register
Cool, ironic and lucid; the essay, the erotic comedy and the aphorism, rising late to elegy
Scale
Four lives and a dog, an occupied country, and the private life under power
Governing Proposition
A Prague surgeon who keeps love and sex apart takes in a young woman who comes to his door with a book under her arm; the invasion of 1968 sends them to Zurich and back, costs him his work for an article on Oedipus he will not retract, and brings them at last to the countryside and their dying dog, while his mistress, a painter, goes into exile and her lover dies after a march on the Cambodian border. The wager of the novel is that a life lived only once cannot be tested and so weighs nothing, that kitsch, the ideal that excludes whatever cannot be loved, is the soul of every political march, and that a novel built as variations on a theme can know this as no plain story could.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens not on a person but on an idea: eternal return, the thought that everything might recur an infinite number of times, and its opposite, a life that happens once and is gone. The narrator, who speaks in the first person as the author, gives the opposite a German proverb: “Einmal ist keinmal.” Once is never; a life lived only once is as if it had not been lived. It weighs nothing. Whether lightness or weight is the positive pole, Parmenides is said to have answered, and the narrator says it is not certain. The question is left standing, and the book is built to turn it over rather than to settle it.
Then Tomas, a Prague surgeon who keeps love and sex apart, and Tereza, who comes to his flat with a book under her arm, in Heim Anna Karenina, and stays. The narrator tells us where his people come from: they are born of a phrase or a situation, and Kundera calls them experimental selves. The six fortuities that brought Tereza to his door are counted out one by one, as if to show how little necessity there was in the meeting that will govern his life.
The book is in seven parts, each divided into short numbered chapters, and the titles of the parts return. In Heim they run: Lightness and Weight; Soul and Body; Words Misunderstood; Soul and Body; Lightness and Weight; The Grand March; Karenin’s Smile. The first and fifth parts belong to Tomas, the second and fourth to Tereza, the third and sixth to Sabina and Franz, and the seventh to Tereza, Tomas and the dog. It is built like music, themes stated and varied, and the first theme is the one in the first title: whether a life that happens once can weigh anything at all.
Movement II
The second part tells Tereza’s arrival again, from her side, and adds what Tomas could not know. The variation is the method: each telling corrects the other, and the reader learns the same moment twice and differently. Tereza is the book’s fullest consciousness and its moral centre. She is imagined as a child sent downstream in a basket, and the foundling’s pattern clings to her. She is jealous of his other women, and her jealousy comes to her in dreams, the worst of them a dream of naked women marching around a pool.
In August 1968 the Soviet-led invasion comes, and Tereza photographs the tanks in the streets of Prague. The couple go into exile in Zurich. There Tomas, sitting on a bench, decides to return: a small elevation of choice in a book that keeps elevation for later. The book’s motto for necessity is Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!”, it must be, and it sets the longing that motto expresses against the lightness of a life that could have gone otherwise.
Back in occupied Prague, Tereza works in a bar and lives inside the regime’s methods: the police, the petitions, the humiliations of an occupation that governs through the private life. A broadcast of private conversations is used as a weapon. The title of the part comes twice in the book, and both times the question is the same: how the soul stands to the body, how Tereza’s love stands to Tomas’s divided appetites, and whether compassion, co-feeling, may be a heavier bond than desire.
Movement III
The third part leaves the couple for Sabina, a painter and Tomas’s mistress, and Franz, her lover. It is built as a dictionary of misunderstood words: entry by entry, the same word means one thing to Sabina and another to Franz. The form is the account of why they cannot love each other. Misunderstanding is not an accident between them; it is the structure of the part, and the reader sees each word from both sides as neither of them can.
Sabina’s bowler hat is the book’s best example of how its images work. It means something different in each scene it enters, and the dictionary keeps a record of what it has meant. For Franz the word parade, and the march it stands for, means the hope of history; for Sabina, who refused the May Day parade in her past, it means the kitsch she has spent her life escaping. The two lovers are separated by the same word.
The essayist is present throughout, and the inheritance he works in is plain and named: Sterne and Diderot for the author who talks to the reader, Broch and Musil for the essay inside the novel, the Central European irony of Hašek and Kafka. Its form had been made already, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), seven parts and all. What this book adds is in parts like this one: the dictionary, the reordering of death before idyll, and the essay on kitsch that the sixth part will bring to its point.
Movement IV
In the fifth part Tomas’s career ends over an article on Oedipus. He had argued that those who did not know are still responsible, as Oedipus, who did not know, put out his own eyes, and under the occupation the argument is read as an accusation against the regime’s servants. Asked to sign a retraction, he refuses. He goes down from surgery to window washing, and later to the country. The myth is not an allusion: it is the action that ends his career, and the moral argument about guilt without knowledge under an occupation.
The sixth part brings the argument about kitsch to its point. It begins with the death of Stalin’s son in a prison camp, on an electrified fence, in a quarrel over excrement, and from there the essayist defines kitsch, in Heim’s English, as “the absolute denial of shit”: the aesthetic ideal that excludes whatever cannot be loved, and that every political movement, and most private self-regard, depends on. The Grand March belongs to the left and its enemies alike. Totalitarianism is this ideal enforced.
Franz joins a march on the Cambodian border, and dies after it in Bangkok, in a looser satirical register than the rest of the book. Sabina goes on to her last years in America. And in this part, in a letter Sabina receives, the book tells us that Tomas and Tereza are dead. The deaths come before the seventh part shows them alive, and the order is the book’s decisive instrument: the idyll that follows will be read by a reader who knows it ends.
Movement V
The last part is the country: Tomas, Tereza and their dog Karenin on a collective farm, far from Prague and from history. It is the expulsion from Paradise run backward, the human longing to return to Eden, and the dog is the one creature in the book who never left it. An essay on Descartes and the animal stands behind it. The dog lives in circular time, the time of repetition, and the humans in the straight line of history that the first essay said could happen only once.
Karenin falls ill with a tumour. He smiles, and dies. Tereza recognises that her love for the dog is the only selfless love the book contains: it asks nothing in return. The register that has stayed cool for six parts rises here, late, to elegy. This is the book’s height, and it is reached in a farmyard, over an animal, by a woman whose jealousy the book has followed from the start.
At the end of an evening Tomas and Tereza dance at a hotel. The reader knows, from the sixth part, that they are already dead, and the dance is at once weightless and heavy, as the opening essay said a life must be. Philip Kaufman filmed the book in 1988, and its terms, kitsch and lightness, have passed into common critical speech; whether the idyll is consolation or kitsch is still argued. The novel that opened by asking whether a life lived once can weigh anything ends on two people dancing whose lives the reader has already seen end.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hardest to put to a novel that is half essay, and it mostly fails to find a cut. The structure is a set of variations: Tereza’s arrival at Tomas’s flat, with a book under her arm, is told from his side and then from hers, and each telling adds what the other could not know. The dictionary of misunderstood words is required, since it is the whole account of why Franz and Sabina cannot love each other. The sixth part, which tells us that Tomas and Tereza are dead before the seventh shows them alive, is required by the book’s argument about weight. Where the test bites: Sabina’s later life in America, Franz’s Grand March and several essay passages restate a point the action has already made, so that perhaps a tenth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. First, on kitsch: that every political movement, and most private self-regard, depends on an aesthetic ideal that excludes whatever cannot be loved, and that totalitarianism is this ideal enforced. In Heim’s English kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”, and the definition is set beside the death of Stalin’s son on a prison-camp fence; the Grand March belongs to the left and its enemies alike. Second, that a regime governs through the private life: Tomas loses his work for an article on Oedipus he will not retract, and a broadcast of private conversations is a weapon. Third, that compassion, co-feeling, is a heavier bond than desire. Held off the top because much of the meaning is said by the essayist rather than found in the action, and because lightness and weight are posed more than answered.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The register is cool, ironic and lucid, and elevation comes rarely and late. The seventh part is the height: Karenin’s illness and death in the country, the dog’s smile, Tereza’s recognition that her love for the dog is the only selfless love the book contains, and the last dance at a hotel at the end of an evening, read in the knowledge, given in the sixth part, that the two are already dead. Earlier heights are of dread and strangeness: Tereza’s dream of naked women marching around a pool, and her photographs of the tanks in Prague. Tomas on a bench in Zurich deciding to return is a small elevation of choice. Between these the book stays by design at the level of the essay and the erotic comedy. The height is real and spaced, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Myth is built at two points and evoked elsewhere. The first is Oedipus. Tomas’s article argues that those who did not know are still responsible, as Oedipus, who did not know, put out his own eyes; the article ends his career as a surgeon and sends him down to window washing and the country, so the myth carries the plot and the moral question of the whole occupation. The second is the expulsion from Paradise, built into the last part: the dog as the one creature left in Eden, the idyll as the human longing to go back, the circular time of the animal set against the line of human history. Tereza, imagined as a child sent downstream in a basket, carries the foundling’s pattern. Held below the gate because Kundera calls his people experimental selves, and they serve the variations of a theme more than they bear the archetype as persons.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is plain, and Kundera has named it: Sterne and Diderot for the author who talks to the reader, Broch and Musil for the essay inside the novel, the Central European irony of Hašek and Kafka. The turn is the musical composition of the novel of ideas: seven parts, themes stated and varied, characters born, as the narrator says, of a phrase or a situation, an author who discusses his own figures, and a chronology broken to put death before idyll. The stake was real: a novel banned at home, refusing the dissident pieties expected of an exile, mocking the kitsch of the anti-communist and of the Western left with equal coldness. Held below the gate because the form had been made in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), seven parts and all, and this book consolidates a swerve its author had taken five years before.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in order, the story is a love triangle under occupation that ends in an accident. Told as variations, it becomes an inquiry: the same moment, Tereza at the door and the six fortuities that brought her, is turned over from two sides, and the reader learns that a life lived once cannot be tested, which is what the book means by lightness. The order of the last two parts is the decisive instrument: by announcing the deaths in the sixth part, in a letter Sabina receives, the book makes the idyll of the seventh weightless and heavy at once, as the opening essay said a life must be. The dictionary form of the third part makes misunderstanding structural, and the essayist’s voice is the medium of the knowledge. Held off the top because some essays could be moved without loss, and the sixth part is looser than its neighbours.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over forty-two years. The book is reread and taught as a novel of ideas and as a novel of 1968, and it has a large criticism, much of it on kitsch, on the essayistic novel, and on its politics and its treatment of women. Its questions stay open: whether Tomas’s descent is a fall or a liberation; whether lightness or weight is the positive pole, which Parmenides is said to have answered and the narrator says is not certain; whether Tereza’s jealousy and Tomas’s libertinage are condemned or merely shown; whether the idyll is consolation or kitsch. Held in the low eights because much of the yield is given on first reading: the essays declare their ideas, and a return finds them where it left them. The return is more to the variations than to hidden meaning, and some of the criticism is a quarrel with the author’s attitudes.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the Czech and Central European novel of the 1980s, and through translation the European novel. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book made the polyphonic essay-novel readable to a mass audience, joined philosophical speculation to erotic and political narrative without either becoming illustration, and gave the anti-totalitarian novel a register that was neither dissident testimony nor allegory. It renews and popularises a form more than it reorganises possibility, since the reorganisation belonged to Broch and Musil and to Kundera’s previous novel, and a school of novels redirected by it is asserted more than documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: one of the most widely read European novels of its decade, translated into most of the world’s literary languages, filmed by Philip Kaufman in 1988, its terms, kitsch and lightness, carried into common critical speech, and its poetics set out for later writers in The Art of the Novel (1986).
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed over forty-two years. The text survives whole, as published; the Czech original is in print, and the book has been continuously in print in English and French since 1984. Presence is wide: reading, teaching, translation and the film; it is among the most widely read novels of its decade in Europe and the Americas. Its surface is fixed in part to 1968 and the Cold War, but that is its matter, not its furniture, and it is read past the fall of the regime it describes. Charged: the book’s standing among critics has cooled from its height in the 1980s, part of its fame was a fashion, and popularity is presence, not proof. These hold it at the figure its span earns and not above. Four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Kundera’s Czech as far as Heim’s English carries it; the Czech sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is of composition and of the lucid sentence. The seven parts are built in a design of returns, two pairs of repeated titles and a coda, with short chapters that let the essay and the scene alternate at the pace of thought. The prose is clear and exact, and its images are few and made to carry: Sabina’s bowler hat, which means something different in each scene it enters; Tereza’s book under her arm; Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!”; Karenin’s smile. The narrator’s address to the reader is placed with control. Charged: the aphoristic manner hardens at times into the epigram and generalises where the scene would show more; the women are drawn largely through the erotic interest of the men and of the narrator, Tereza excepted; and Sabina’s American chapters are thin.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the whole: lightness and weight, the single life that cannot be repeated and therefore cannot be measured, set against the longing for necessity, “Es muss sein!” Take the two most distant elements: the death of Stalin’s son over excrement, on the electrified fence of a prison camp, and the death of Karenin in the Czech countryside. They obey the same law: the one dies because he cannot bear the denial of shit; the other is loved because a dog lives outside kitsch and outside linear time. The law covers eros, in Tomas’s split between love and sex; politics, in the Grand March; art, in Sabina’s paintings; exile and the body. The range is wide and held, from the essay on Parmenides to a dog’s tumour. Charged: the narrator’s freedom to interrupt sometimes breaks the novel’s own physics, and Franz’s death in Bangkok is satire in a looser register than the rest.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Many orders, held by one theme across four lives. Consciousness: Tomas’s divided appetites, Tereza’s jealousy and her dreams. The body: sex, illness and the soul’s relation to the body, which gives two parts their title. Love and marriage, fidelity and betrayal. The state and history: the invasion of 1968, the police, the petitions, the occupation’s methods of humiliation. Labour: the surgeon, the window washer, the collective farm, Tereza’s photography and her work in a bar. Exile: Geneva, Zurich, America. Art: Sabina’s paintings. The sacred, in the essay on God and shit and in the lost Eden. The natural order, in the animals of the last part and the essay on Descartes and the animal. They are integrated, not listed. Held below the higher figures because many orders are named and argued by the essayist more than inhabited, and history is held at the level of the private life and of the idea.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.6. A disclosure that holds, that kitsch, the ideal that excludes whatever cannot be loved, underlies every political march and is enforced by totalitarian rule; a form of variations in which the deaths are told before the idyll and misunderstanding is built as a dictionary; and forty-two years of continuous print, reading, teaching and translation, read past the regime it describes.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.9, held by design: the register stays cool and ironic for six parts, and the heights, Tereza’s dream of the pool, the tanks, the bench in Zurich and the death of Karenin, are real and spaced. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.0, where Sabina’s American life, Franz’s march and several essays restate what the action has shown; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, myth built in Oedipus and Eden but borne by experimental selves rather than by persons.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall three tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Milan Kundera’s Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, written in Czech and first published in François Kérel’s French translation by Gallimard, Paris, in 1984, the same year as Michael Henry Heim’s English, published by Harper and Row, New York; the Czech original first appeared from Sixty-Eight Publishers, Toronto, in 1985. The year of record is 1984. It is scored as one novel in seven parts, and every axis, The Made and the verbal part of The Inevitable included, is judged on Kundera’s Czech. No text of the book, Czech or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Translation · Heim’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is read for sense and is the source of the part titles and of every English word quoted on this page. It was used because it is the English in which the book has been read since its first year and the translation known best to this reading. Its English is not charged to the work, and the rhythm and wordplay of Kundera’s Czech are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Quotation is limited to words that are certain: the two German phrases, which stand in German in the book, and one phrase of Heim’s English, the definition of kitsch; everything else is paraphrased. Philip Kaufman’s film of 1988 is a separate work and not part of this one. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count, the number of chapters in each part and the history of the Czech edition in Kundera’s own country, are not given. Citations are by part.