The Tragedy of an Unlived Life
November 3 of 8: The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera - HarperCollins 1984
To put it very simply, this is a novel about codependence. The two main characters, Tereza and Tomas, fall into each other’s lives haphazardly. Tereza is a small-town girl with ambitions, desparate to escape her suffocating family home and difficult mother. Tomas is a pathologically independent fuckboy and practicing surgeon. They meet by chance in a restaurant in Tereza’s hometown when Tomas is passing through for business and soon after they start an affair, which Tereza has calculated as an opportunity to start her life over in the big city of Prague, and which Tomas takes in stride as just another tryst in his philanderous routine. But the relationship quickly takes over their lives, and they both suffer for it.
In many ways this second book I read had nothing to do with The Long Run, but it surprised me how much they felt related. To me, both books were at least partly about the will to take responsibility for the making of your life.
There’s a passage in The Long Run where D’Erasmo writes about the Samuel Delany’s novel, Dark Reflections. Of the central character, Arnold Hawley, she writes, “at every juncture where his life might have widened, Hawley has chosen to narrow it […] Hawley’s tragedy is everything he doesn’t do, doesn’t dare, doesn’t allow himself to feel. He is skin to skin with no one. It is a tragedy not of a single dramatic act, but of the same, highly socially acceptable refusal repeated over and over—a tragedy of negative accretion, of the ultimately crushing weight of an unlived life” (59).
The moral of this story, if there is one, D’Erasmo says a couple of pages later, might be: “allow yourself to be touched, even to be shoved, to be moved, to be pulled and pushed by the world or risk an ultimately deadly self-enclosure, lost in space with just a bit of shriveled self for company” (61).
I read Unbearable Lightness as a similar kind of tragedy — the characters are trapped in an inertia generated by their relationship. Ostensibly, the characters do allow themselves to be touched, shoved, moved, pulled, pushed. But what D’Erasmo doesn’t say in the passage I quoted above is that for a person to benefit from all that shoving and pulling, they need to have a strong sense of self capable of drawing a line through all that agitation. Otherwise, the first shove is the end of the story, which is essentially what happens to Tereza and Tomas:
“She longed to do something that would prevent her from turning back to Tomas. She longed to destroy brutally the past seven years of her life. It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall.
“We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down” (76).
The image of verticality in these sentences is the heart of the novel: up versus down, lightness versus weight, falling and falling. There’s a kind of falling that is independence, autonomy, solitude, excitement, sollipsism, and there’s another kind that is dependence, entanglement, burden, connection, responsibility. Either one will kill you. Kundera makes a compelling case that this is the defining paradox of a person’s life.