In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.” When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. “The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. “How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up? For him, the senator declares, the sight of the gambolling youngsters is the very definition of happiness, at which there flashes through Sabina’s mind an image of the senator on a reviewing stand in Prague smiling benignly down on the May Day parade. In The Unbearable Lightness he writes of one of the characters, the Czech painter Sabina who lives now in America, being taken for a drive by a US senator who stops to allow his young children to play on the grass in the sunshine. Kundera has a deep fascination with and horror of kitsch, a concept he returns to again and again throughout his work. Kundera is a man of the Enlightenment, and is not loath to champion reason over emotion, pointing out, as he has frequently done in his essays as well as his fiction, that many of the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who attended most passionately to the dictates of the heart. When The Unbearable Lightness was published, its author had been living for many years in France, and the book evinces more the influence of Rousseau and Stendhal than of Kafka or the Capeks. Kundera was one of the keenest listeners to the break-up of the international order.
The cold war was at one of the hottest stages it had ever reached, with Reagan in the White House and Andropov in the Kremlin.Yet even in those bleak years, those with hearing sufficiently sharp could detect the first faint creakings of the ice-cap as it began to shift. By 1984 Orwell’s dystopian vision of a world ruled by totalitarian ideologies was seen to have been frighteningly prescient, particularly from the perspective of the eastern bloc countries.
Here was an avowedly “postmodern” novel in which the author withheld so many of the things we expect from a work of fiction, such as rounded characters - “It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived” - a tangible milieu, a well-paced plot, and in which there are extended passages of straightforward philosophical and political speculation, yet it became a worldwide bestseller, loved by the critics and the public alike.Īs in the case of all immediate and great artistic successes, Kundera’s book must have spoken directly to the contemporary ear. Why had so little remained for me? Is it the result of failing memory, or is there indeed an essential weightlessness to the book? The Unbearable Lightness of Being had a remarkable success when it was published in English in 1984 (this autumn will see an anniversary edition from Faber).
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