In one of the more surreal things I’ve ever read in the Hollywood Reporter, Scott Roxborough’s obit of Milan Kundera takes the cake. All I can say is that I’m glad Milan Kundera was not around to read it. The brilliant novelist died in Paris at the age of 94. I can only hope he lived a good life and wasn’t around to see what’s happened to Western culture, which is so very like what he wrote about when the Soviets crushed so much of the most beautiful things humans can do.
In his strange, biased obit on Kundera, Roxborough describes The Unbearable Lightness of Being this way:
Kundera’s 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was an instant global hit and reprinted in dozens of languages. The story follows Tomas, a Czech surgeon and serial philanderer who is caught between his wife, who wants a monogamous relationship, and a seductive painter he regularly meets for sex. After the Soviet invasion, the politically outspoken Tomas is banned from working as a doctor and becomes a window washer.
So yeah, I guess you could describe it that way, though one wonders why the Hollywood Reporter would choose a writer who either doesn’t understand Kundera’s work or actively loathes it. That sets you up for this paragraph:
Kundera’s depiction of personal, amoral behavior and sexual politics as a metaphor for the inherent absurdities of life in Czechoslovakia under communism, drew widespread praise but also criticism, particularly from feminists, who detected an inherent misogyny in his portrayal of female characters. Most of Kundera’s male protagonists behave abominably toward women and most of his female figures end up victimized. His supporters thought showing men behaving badly was part of his social critique.
His supporters thought? Is that how it went? Not that he was a brilliant writer and observer of human behavior, specifically hypocrisy in human behavior? While it’s true that today’s art, film, comedy – heck, even science is the very thing Kundera feared — who needed the Soviets when you have whole industries ready and willing to join an alliance to do exactly the same thing — eradicate freedom of the mind.
A slightly better analysis is from the New York Times’ Daniel Lewis:
As punishments go, washing windows is a pretty good deal for Tomas: A relentless philanderer, he’s always open to meeting new women, including bored housewives. But the sex, as well as Tomas himself and the three other main characters — his wife, a seductive painter and the painter’s lover — are there for a larger purpose. In putting the novel on its list of best books of 1984, The New York Times Book Review observed that “this writer’s real business is to find images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.”
“He uses the four pitilessly, setting each pair against the other as opposites in every way, to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity.”
And includes this paragraph, which would indicate to some that Kundera was “known” for being a misogynist, which is most certainly not the case – feminism back then is not like what it became, certainly not like it now, although as with most of the best things — almost nothing can survive the scrutiny of “social justice warriors”:
He could be especially pitiless in his use of female characters; so much so that the British feminist Joan Smith, in her 1989 book “Misogynies,” declared that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women.”
And in the Times obit, this:
Mr. Kundera’s fear that Czech culture could be erased by Stalinism — much as disgraced leaders were airbrushed out of official photos — was at the heart of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which became available in English in 1979.
Culture erased by Stalinism? Turns out you don’t need Stalin, do ya? Citizens, if passionate enough about their utopia, will do it for you, no government required. Erase everything and start anew is the idea. Top of that list is freedom of the mind. People like Kundera would not survive today’s Woke Purge. Sadly, almost no truly great storytellers can.
Writers in America on the Left in 2023 can no longer write what they really think or observe about the human condition. That is strictly forbidden inside a utopia. But at least here, people are just being cast out, fired, attacked on Twitter. Kundera’s hypothesis, and it’s a good one, utopias can’t last so why not build a paradise on the outside? This is my favorite quote of his:
“Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.”
Those writers who wrote with abandon and free thought would be demonized today and considered the height of “white male privilege.” The only thing offered in their place has been the opposite, that which confirms the objectives of the utopia. That probably felt satisfying for a while, after the era of free thought became meaningless or even oppressive to many. But now, we’re on the far end of the pendulum and it’s ready to swing once again, even if it has to be a little gulag on the other side of paradise.
I lived through the era of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was a film that was what I would call a great teacher of life. Whenever I encountered a perplexing puzzle of human behavior as a young woman, my curiosity would take me deeper into the story and I would watch the film over and over again until I understood the characters, their motivations and the writer’s intent.
Only in the most grotesque, Orwellian read of Kundera’s influence would one regard his work as “misogynist” without also understanding that his books, like so much of our past, offer up an authentic truth from the writer’s mind, but also from each character’s point of view. And in the case of Unbearable Lightness, he gives us contradictory people and situations and leaves it up to us to decide what to make of it. That’s called trusting the reader.
As a young woman growing up in the Reagan era, I was lucky enough to have art to turn to for freedom. Ah, if it were only true today. But had I never seen this film, had I never known about Milan Kundera’s work, or Orwell’s for that matter, I might not understand as well the time we’re living through now.
The ending of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the first time I contemplated death. It’s a hard movie for me to watch now not because of that scene but because of the death of their beloved dog they love so much. It is only after that, the lightness of life takes them too, in an instant. That is what I’ve lived for decades now, that unbearable lightness of being alive, when it could all end in an instant.
Rest In Peace, O Great One.
