[문학 속 호모에스테티쿠스] Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’: A Literary Way of Rationalizing Cheating

‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ book cover

Kyung-Kyu Lee, Professor at Keimyung University

If you delve deeper into ‘Chamjonga’, as if philosophy were dressed up as a novel, you will encounter various philosophical discourses. From the title, the unusual word ‘existence’ holds weight, and the titles of the seven chapters are also full of abstract conceptual words rather than literary ones. Lightness, heaviness, body, soul, words, etc. It can be said that this is a difficult book to read. Nevertheless, it is a novel that has sold over a million copies in Korea alone, making it a million-seller. This is proof that it is not as difficult as you think, or that the level of Korean readers is quite high. Although philosophical thoughts are inserted throughout the book, the conceptual and logical discourse does not continue at great length. It’s just a seasoning to add flavor, and the main body of the novel is an interesting narrative created by individual characters.

The main character, Tomas, is a successful surgeon in Prague. She got married early and had a son, but they broke up after two years and lives alone. I have no regrets or regrets about the divorce. It’s just a joy to regain the freedom that was mortgaged. Tomas, a playboy by nature, has relationships with numerous women. The main axis of a relationship is sex. Tomas calls this ‘erotic friendship’. It is a relationship that is clearly distinct from love. How to distinguish between sex and love? The criterion for distinction is whether or not there is communal sleeping. Tomasi has sex with numerous women (more than 200), but he does not sleep with them. If he is at home, he sends the woman out, and if he is outside, he leaves the bed himself. Here comes Tomasi’s unique theory of love: “Love is not expressed through the desire to have sex, but through the desire to sleep together” (Jae-Ryong Lee, 29). There can be as many objects of love, but it becomes difficult to have more than one object of love. Later, Tereza becomes one of these people.

Tomasi’s theory of love is closely linked to other themes in ‘Charmzonga’. That is, lightness and heaviness, body and soul, one-timeness and eternal return, coincidence and inevitability, futility and optimism. The former is connected to sex and the latter is connected to love. The body and sex are light and vain as they are accidental and one-time, while the soul and love are heavy and optimistic as they are inevitable and repetitive. Tomas is a person who thoroughly represents the former. The latter is what human culture and scholarship have pursued and advocated so far. However, this is a fiction and a cover-up that is far from the truth. The artistic term for this is kitsch. In other words, things like soul, inevitability, heaviness, eternity, and optimism, which have long been recognized as great values, are all appearances and decorations that have nothing to do with reality.

A change occurs when Tomas gets a woman to sleep with. A woman named Teresa goes on a visit to Bohemia and meets by chance in a bar. The relationship was made not because of alcohol, but because of the open book on the table. Tomas sleeps with a woman for the first time since his divorce from Tereza, who comes to his house some time later. I didn’t intend to do that from the beginning. There was so much heat in Tereza’s body that she couldn’t let it go even after the relationship was over, so she stayed overnight. However, one night turns into a week and their relationship develops into marriage. When Tomas sees Tereza lying sick on the first day, he feels an undeniable pity, like “a child who was carried in a basket and washed up in the water.”

The love-hate duet between Tomas and Tereza forms the central narrative of the novel. The values ​​and worldview of the two people are fundamentally different. Each represents one side of the concept pair mentioned above. Thomas pursues lightness, and Teresa pursues heaviness. Thomas pursues the body and sex, while Tereza pursues the soul and love. This again leads to coincidence and inevitability, and finally to kitsch and anti-kitsch. At the center of the conflict is Thomas’ uninterrupted ‘sexual friendship’. Regardless of his love for Tereza, he continues to have ‘light’ sexual relations with other women. For Tereza, the unbearable lightness of existence is unbearable. The fact that he is ultimately just such a light being is even more unbearable.

Someone asks Tomas why he has relationships with so many women (more than 200 over 25 years) when all women are like that. He jokes that there are less than 10 people a year and presents a strange logic. People differ from each other in all areas, the difference being one in a million. This subtle difference constitutes the uniqueness of the self, and there is no experience more mysterious and amazing than knowing this. This can never be predicted or imagined until experienced. The difference can be found in all areas, but it is said to be most evident in sex. Tomasi cannot give up his ‘erotic friendship’ because of this mysterious and magical experience. A theoretical argument is also provided here.

The uniqueness of the self is hidden in areas that human beings cannot imagine. Humans can only imagine what is the same in all beings and what is common to them. The individual self is distinct from the universal and therefore cannot be guessed or calculated in advance, so it must first of all be uncovered, discovered, and won from others (327).

The fact that Tomas feels the uniqueness of this self best during sexual intercourse is also related to his sense of training as a surgeon. He says that his relationship with many women is not a desire for sensuality, but a “desire to conquer the world.” This can be criticized as sophistry and ultimately just an uncontrolled affair. Here too, the speaker provides an explanation on behalf of Tomasi.

Since ancient times, cheating can be divided into two types: lyrical cheating and epic cheating. Lyricism is mainly represented by poetry, but as it is an expression of subjective emotions, changes according to time and space are not of interest. A lyrical womanizer is someone who always sticks around with the same type no matter how many times they change partners. I don’t know where or how it was formed, but I have my own ideal type inside me, and I only look for people who fit it. If a person is always the same type no matter how many times they change partners, this is a lyrical wish. If this is severe, the speaker says, people around them do not even realize that the partner has changed. This type of flirt is someone who loves their own ideals rather than loving the other person. Therefore, no matter who you meet, you are bound to be disappointed and the ‘transfer’ is bound to be repeated.

The exact opposite of this is a narrative affair. In literature, narrative refers to events or actions that progress over time. The narrative is driven by new characters or new events. Unlike lyrical winds, narrative winds do not have a fixed ideal type. How different you are from previous people is the only motivation and criterion. The epic playboy is of no interest to generalized and stereotypical beauty. It’s an obvious logic, but we get bored easily and fall into boredom. Because something new soon ceases to be new. Tomas is the epitome of such an epic playboy. He is fascinated by the one-in-a-million differences and is constantly in relationships with new women. But how quickly does the one-in-a-million novelty disappear?

Tomas’s bizarre and exaggerated behavior feels extremely light, not only to Tereza but also to us readers. This is by no means what writer Kundera aims for. It is a kind of irony, and is primarily a way of criticizing the social atmosphere of the time (Prague in the 60s and 70s) where everything was considered so heavy that one could not even breathe. Furthermore, it exposes how words such as soul, inevitability, eternity, and love, which humanity has long attached weight to, have unfairly oppressed humans. The kitsch discourse in the latter part of the novel focuses on proving how light and unbearable kitsch such heavy things actually are. Indeed, what is unbearable is the lightness of kitsch disguised as heaviness.