Eternal Recurrence and Milan Kundera (4/4)

This is Part 4 in a series examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence through film and literature. Expect spoilers.

If popular culture can employ Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence (or eternal return) to meaningful effect, then certainly high culture can do the same. Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a stunning example. It begins with an unconventional take on eternal recurrence that is the novel’s central theme.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes belief in eternal recurrence as “the heaviest burden,” for the thought of endless repetition would give weight to every thought and every action. Kundera reverses the idea:

 

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

 

As the characters of the novel make the decisions that determine the course of their lives--in matters both historical (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and personal (numerous romantic rendezvous)--they are frequently gripped by a feeling of lightness, like Franz is after he tells his wife about his lover Sabina:

 

A while later he met Sabina at the airport. As the plane gained altitude, he felt lighter and lighter. At last, he said to himself, after nine months he was living in truth.

Unfortunately for Franz, the spice of the affair for Sabina came from its secrecy. Once it becomes public, she soon shuts out Franz, leaving him without wife or lover. The unpredictability of life and the knowledge that there are no do-overs can induce a light-headed, dizzy feeling familiar to anyone who has fallen in love, started a new job, or taken a principled stand despite the threat of negative consequences.

Confronted with Nietzsche’s and Kundera’s views of life, we need not choose one over the other, for Nietzsche’s is merely a thought experiment and Kundera’s merely a playful reversal of it. Neither is intended as fact. Eternal recurrence is undoubtedly a strange idea, so the lightness of being that comes with non-recurrence may seem more familiar to our customary ways of viewing the world, but surely we are also familiar with the weightiness of existence. Precisely because our decisions incur irrevocable consequences, being is often unbearably heavy whether it repeats or not.

Either way, we are all just atoms swerving through the void (to paraphrase Roman poet Lucretius in De reum natura), and do we not swerve in search of greater well-being? Nietzsche chose to invest every moment of his life with the weight of endless repetition so that he would awaken to life’s preciousness. By contrast, Kundera uses the transitory and finite nature of life to highlight its beauty. As there is little difference between the two in effect, it seems to me that we may adopt whichever works--or both or neither as we deem appropriate for our own circumstances.

 

Previous posts in this series:

Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)
Eternal Recurrence and Edge of Tomorrow (2/4)
Eternal Recurrence and Groundhog Day (3/4)

Deux hommes et une femme et leurs livres (Best of 2014: Books, Part 2)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn stands as the best book I read this year, because it was every bit the thrill ride it was cracked up to be (previous post), but I had the good fortune of running across a lot of other interesting books this year. By some coincidence, the best of them came in pairs by French authors: Michel Houellebecq, Francoise Sagan and Milan Kundera.


Michel Houellebecq:

Early in the year, I discovered Michel Houellebecq, whose books in the UK editions have covers with a shameless sex-sells aesthetic. Nonetheless, they’re eye-catching, and a good book cover is worth nearly as much as a good book:

 

Atomised (The Elementary Particles in US editions) follows the lives of two brothers. Michel is a molecular biologist with almost no interest in love, while his brother Bruno is a loser obsessed with sex. They are both, as the title expresses, isolated from their fellow human beings by the conditions of modern life, among them market forces dominating everything from economics to sex. Largely set in today’s world, the story reaches beyond into science fiction. Michel discovers a method for cloning humans, thereby separating reproduction from love and sex.

It’s a book of ideas with a lot of explicit sex, which is all well and good, but what hooked me was the author’s blatant misanthropy and pessimism. Let’s face it, more often than not the world is a crock of shit, and Houellebecq isn’t afraid to say so. I’m not as much of a pessimist as I once was, but I can’t deny that in Atomised I encountered passages echoing many of my own dark thoughts. The author’s voice was a familiar one, and as one that doesn’t sugarcoat, I found it a great relief.

Platform is also about a man named Michel, and he too is sex-obsessed. An unrepentant sex tourist, he and his girlfriend embark on a sex tourism business venture, but it doesn’t end well. While Houellebecq’s portrayal of the lonely men who ache for sex with young women is at times compassionate and eloquent, the novel often comes off as propaganda in favor of sex tourism without an honest look at its downsides, such as how awful the lives of many prostitutes must be. Platform, while interesting, was less inspiring than Atomised. Often, I put it down feeling dirty.

 

 

Francoise Sagan:

 

The works of Francoise Sagan are also sordid--but less hard-core. Bonjour Tristesse is about Raymond and his daughter Cecile who spend their summers drinking, partying, lazing about and sleeping around on the French Riviera. Their dissolute lifestyle is scandalous for the times and alienates them from respectable society. When her father makes a bid to marry a proper woman, Cecile will have none of it and hatches a plot that ends in tragedy.

Bonjour Tristesse is fluff, and A Certain Smile--about a young girl’s love affair with an older, married man--is fluffier still. But I enjoyed these books. Their literary heft and insight into the human spirit is debatable, but the voices of the young protagonists are charmingly affectless and carry you along for short, sweet rides. Perhaps it’s just me, but I believe the languorous and free-spirited nature of Sagan’s characters are visible in the eyes of the author herself:

 

 

 

Milan Kundera:

While Milan Kundera’s Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being were both written in Czech, the author is usually described as French-Czech, so he makes it into this post on a technicality. Immortality is a book that reaches in many directions, and while I’ve already posted on it twice, I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Check out my earlier posts (4/10/2014, 4/20/2014) or just check out this cover illustration for Immortality because it’s excellent:

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with an original take on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and goes on to relate the changing fortunes of a doctor named Tomas, his wife Tereza, and his lover Sabina against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia. As the years pass, they make decisions that burden or lighten their emotional state, and along the way they have many amorous and erotic encounters.

While Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can be applied to anything, I was surprised to find Kundera intentionally applying it as the framework underpinning his characters, right down to chapters headed “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.” Since words like “music” or “fidelity” mean different things to each person, we often fail to understand each other. One of Jacques Lacan’s famous pronouncements is “Communication is a successful misunderstanding.” And so it goes for Tomas, Tereza and Sabina. They inevitably fail to grasp each other, but sometimes they get along well nonetheless.

Not only does Lacan’s theory of signification factor heavily in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but there were also clear references to the Mirror Stage, objet petit a, foreclosure, and other Lacanian concepts without ever mentioning Lacan or using his curious terminology. No doubt others have noticed this in the 30 years since the book was published, but I hope to go into it more in a later post.

None of that was part of the reading I had scheduled for myself this year (I did finish the Dune arc laid out by Frank Herbert and take down a handful of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books as planned), but it was unscheduled reading in French literature that turned up some of the best reading in 2014.