Would You Bed Your Celebrity Crush? (More on Milan Kundera's Immortality)

When I posted "Milan Kundera's Aside on Journalism in Immortality," I didn't expect to blog any more about the book, but I was wrong. I keep thinking about a question toward the end that Professor Avenarius poses to the author:

“Imagine that you are given the choice of two possibilities: to spend a night of love with a world-famous beauty, let’s say Brigitte Bardot or Greta Garbo, but on condition that nobody must know about it. Or to stroll down the main avenue of the city with your arm wrapped intimately around her shoulder, but on condition that you must never sleep with her.”

Later, Avenarius talks about how most people would answer:

“Everyone, including the worst no-hopers, would maintain that they would rather sleep with her. Because all of them would want to appear to themselves, to their wives . . . as hedonists. This, however, is a self delusion . . . No matter what they say, if they had a real choice to make, all of them, I repeat, all of them would prefer to stroll with her down the avenue. Because all of them are eager for admiration and not for pleasure.”

As playful as the question may be, it does strike close to the serious theme of Immortality, which the title of the book states. Much of the book consists in reflections on the care we take for our image: how we look to others and how our image lives on without us. According to Kundera’s character Avenarius, being seen with your celebrity crush is more important than actually bedding him or her. Kundera’s point is well made, and I find it intriguing that however one answers the question, the answer conceals a desire for admiration.

Answering with a preference to sleep with the great beauty is the result of a wish to look like a hedonist, the sexual conqueror, the lucky dog. Answering with a preference to be seen with the great beauty, rather than an admission of the truth, is the expression of a desire to come off as a nice person more interested in purely emotional interaction than sex.

In both cases, it's the appearance that counts. But is all appearance rather than reality? Avenarius presents a bleak outlook:

 

“Reality no longer means anything to anyone.”

I would add that perhaps we do not even know our own true desires. Perhaps, as psychoanalysis claims, part of us hides other parts of us from other parts, so that all this concern for our image, for appearance, isn’t hiding any solid core of true desire or motive. Perhaps tending the image, projecting a fantasy of ourselves, sometimes even to ourselves--as we do through endless posts on social media about what a positive, healthy, intellectual, witty, or weird person we are--is as substantial as we get.

For my part, I can’t decide whether I would prefer a meaningful encounter in seclusion or a night on the town that ends when the great beauty withdraws into a taxi, leaving me on the sidewalk feeling like a million bucks and needing a stiff drink. Either way, it would just be what I want you to think of me.