Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3
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Eternal Return and the Country/City Dynamic in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Adam McKee
<1> The concept of the division between country and city has been of interest to cultural critics since the beginning of urban experience. Perhaps the most complete history of this binary is the landmark work The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams. In this work, Williams attempts to thoroughly document this dynamic split throughout the history of British literature. Williams traces the way in which the country and the city have been portrayed as existing across a radical cleavage and the influence of industrial capitalism on the ideological binary at play in this deployment. Remarking on the divide, Williams writes, "On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation" (1). Williams examines this myth almost from the origins of English literary output up through the twentieth century, showing the way in which the pastoral and a displaced form of life are almost constantly ideologically reflected upon at any given moment in British literary history.
<2> Yet, these concerns can, as Williams notes, also be seen throughout the literary output of many other countries. One author in the twentieth century outside of Williams's critical apparatus who examines the country and the city as opposing forces is the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera. Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), while displaying a profound preoccupation with binaries, reflects upon the split between the country and the city. However, this novel confronts the split from the standpoint of a Central European nation bound up in totalitarian, Soviet-communist rule, rather than through the capitalist standpoint of Williams's England. Williams' study provides us with a blueprint to understanding the way in which the country/city split has operated in English literature, a blueprint that is helpful in navigating both how and why Kundera engages and inverts this binary. This essay will examine Kundera's novel through the ideological country/city split, Friedrich Nietzsche's theorization of eternal return (or recurrence), and the privileged binary system of Parmenides that Kundera utilizes in the novel's opening, and what these philosophical underpinnings subsequently provide for an understanding of the ideologies placed on the country and the city in The Unbearable Lightness of Being through the experiences of the characters of Tomas and Tereza. While many critics have responded to Kundera's somewhat flawed engagement with philosophical issues in the text, none have addressed the way in which the philosophical discourses he adopts for the novel contributes to the specific deployment of the country/city binary in the novel, describing the ideologically saturated geographies of the Czech countryside and Soviet Prague [1].
<3> This examination will illustrate that any critical engagement with Kundera's novel and the central philosophical notion of Nietzsche's eternal return must be read through the ideological divide between the Czech countryside and the city of Prague as Kundera utilizes Nietzschean concepts applied to the geographical and ideological divisions described by Williams. This argument expands upon conversations such as Petra von Morstein's on the importance of the Nietzschean concept by filtering it through the country/city divide. Additionally, this essay will establish the ways in which Kundera contributes to the theoretical conversations on the ideological split between the country and the city by grounding the binary in a specific historical moment in Czech political struggle. This historical conjuncture allows Kundera to do something unexpected with the country/city discourse by deconstructing the narrative.
<4> In order to understand the philosophical structure of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and how it alters the perception of Prague and the Czech countryside, it is necessary to first understand the concept of eternal return (or recurrence) developed in the late-nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche. The concept of eternal return has major ramifications on the entirety of the novel, and it also provides important background for the discussion of the country and the city in the characters of Tomas and Tereza. Petra von Morstein has demonstrated the importance of the concept to the novel when she writes that, "To read The Unbearable Lightness of Being is to witness the birth of a novel from the spirit of eternal return" (70). This is evident from the beginning of the text, as Kundera opens with a brief description of the Nietzschean concept. He writes, "The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!" (ULB 3) [2]. In his subsequent critical work The Art of the Novel (1986) Kundera links this opening with the character of Tomas and his way of experiencing the world. Kundera states, "That reflection introduces directly, from the very first line of the novel, the fundamental situation of a character-Tomas; it sets out his problem: the lightness of existence in a world where there is no eternal return" (The Art of the Novel 29). Kundera labels this issue Tomas's "central problem", one that he will struggle with throughout the text. However, the implications of Nietzsche's concept on the ideological differences of the country and the city in the text have largely been overlooked, perhaps even by Kundera.
<5> The issue of Tomas's struggle through a world with no eternal return also relates to the second important philosophical issue within the text: lightness versus heaviness. The second paragraph of the novel sets forth this dilemma as Kundera writes, "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" (ULB 3), an implicit statement on the weightlessness of Tomas's existence at the beginning of the text which relates to Nietzsche's initial discussion of the concept of eternal return in The Gay Science (1882). In section 341 of The Gay Science, titled "The greatest weight," Nietzsche provides the reader with the hypothetical situation of a demon appearing to proclaim the concept of eternal return: "The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" (GS 273) [3]. This section contains the first explicit mention of eternal return in the oeuvre of Nietzsche, and the end of this section provides Kundera with the important reference to heaviness and lightness through eternal return. The demon states, "If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight" (GS 274). For Nietzsche, the concept of eternal return proposed that each time a decision is made, it is not only made once but for all time, perpetually, ceaselessly repeating in the same manner. Hence, a person's actions bear the "greatest weight" or heaviness; they are not simply one-time actions without consequence, but decisions made for all time, making the weight of them so heavy that they risk crushing an individual.
<6> Eternal return appears as a crucial concept in Nietzsche's work Thus Spoke Zarathusta (1883-92). In the section "On the Vision and the Riddle" the central character of the text, Zarathustra, tells a riddle about attempting to ascend a mountain while a dwarf, labeled the spirit of gravity, rests upon his shoulders. As Zarathustra reaches the top of the summit he confronts the dwarf with a vision of linear time, stating that there are two paths that converge at a gate labeled "Moment", one stretching eternally into the past, one eternally into the future, to which the dwarf replies "All that is straight lies…All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle" (TZ 158) [4]. The proposition of eternal return, the heaviness of this concept, frightens Zarathustra, who states that; "Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts" (TZ 158). This thought weighs on Zarathustra who wishes to perfect himself shortly after the discussion. Man's greatest weight, Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, threatens to crush Zarathusta, just as it does the hypothetical reader in The Gay Science.
<7> Nietzsche's concept of eternal return produces a sense of heaviness that invests the actions of an individual with meaning and significance. However, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as Kundera himself previously acknowledged, the character of Tomas lives in a world where there is no eternal return, and no heaviness placed upon his actions. The question in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is not whether or not the concept of eternal return is present; the real question in the text revolves around whether or not a lack of weight applied to existence is an essentially positive or negative aspect and whether the concepts of eternal return and repetition are preferable to experiences that are one-time decisions. Here Kundera brings in the philosophy of Parmenides and his reading of the system of privileged binaries discussed at the beginning of the novel. In Kundera's reading of Parmenides's philosophy, there are a series of binaries, such as good and evil, of which Parmenides labels one side positive and the other side negative. For Kundera it is easy to understand why good would be positive and evil negative, or being positive and non-being negative, yet the concept of heaviness and lightness provides a more problematic equation for Kundera. He writes; "Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative. Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all" (ULB 5-6). Kundera's chief dilemma (and the novel's primary philosophical question) then rests not on the problem of whether eternal return exists or not (since Tomas exists in a world where it does not) but whether or not it is preferable to live in a world of heaviness or lightness. Kundera asks whether his characters desire the heaviness of eternal return or the lightness of living in a world where decisions do not reverberate for all time but rather happen only once. At this point, Kundera merges the philosophical systems of Nietzsche and Parmenides, but the exchange with a third concept makes Kundera's conversation unique.
<8> Here the concepts of eternal return and the privileged binary come into contact in one important way: the characters's perceptions of the opposition between the city of Prague and the Czech countryside. While the character of Tomas demonstrates the dilemma of a character living in a world without the concept of eternal return, his wife Tereza develops from a different perspective. As Petra von Morstein notes; "Tereza's life perspective is one implied by the idea of eternal return. What is must be. What must be precludes alternatives" (74). However, the notion of eternal return does not represent how Tereza's existence is, but rather the notion of eternal return indicates the way in which Tereza desires to exist. Indeed, several moments in the text amplify Tereza's attitude towards the perspective of eternal return compared to the lightness of being Tomas experiences. These key sections appear at the very end of Part Five ("Lightness and Weight") and throughout Part Seven ("Karenin's Smile") in dialogue and Tereza's interior monologue. These moments address the duality of country versus city in the novel as well as the debate over whether lightness or heaviness should be on the positive end of Parmenides's binary.
<9> The first mention of this conversation appears in Section 21 of "Lightness and Weight" when Tomas and Tereza are discussing what to do now that Prague has "grown so ugly." Tereza proceeds to suggest that they move to the country because, "We'd be alone there. You wouldn't meet that editor or your old colleagues. The people there are different. And we'd be getting back to nature. Nature is the same as it always was" (ULB 233). This is an important statement for several reasons. The first of which is the way in which this plays into Raymond Williams's observations regarding the construction of the country as more peaceful and natural compared to the city as a place of lightness and achievement. Further exhibiting this split between the natural countryside and the achieved city, Petr Bilek observes that, "The city in the actual world is an artificial, man-made structure. It is based on radical reconstruction of the natural world that brings into existence certain spatial settings and arbitrary rules that model the behavior of its inhabitants and visitors" (249). The third important element of this statement is that it brings the idea of eternal return into the conversation of the country and nature as a place of repetition and sameness compared to the fluidity and flux of the city. This is the first mention of this issue in the text, but both Tomas and Tereza expand on this idea in the final section of the novel: "Karenin's Smile."
<10> The opposition in ideologies of the country and the city reveals an aspect of the problem of eternal recurrence that has been largely overlooked in Kundera's novel. Shortly after the couple's move from Prague to the countryside the conversation surrounding the country/city dynamic takes center stage once more. Initially, the countryside is positioned as in a sense "outside" of the control of the Soviet controlled state: "Perhaps it was the fact that no one wished to settle there that caused the state to lose its power over the countryside" (ULB 283). Hence, the countryside is unquestionably separated from the life of the city in Prague, which was highly controlled and highly influenced by the Soviet occupation yet the countryside remains separate. As Bilek notes this separation from the city is a crucial element in the novel, "The word Prague enters the fictional world of the novel almost seventy times; usually with a spatial preposition: in, to, from, over, out of. Such a general reference expressed by just one unspecified word also implies another spatial relation: Prague versus non-Prague" (252). The separation of Prague versus non-Prague represents the binary split here; there is Prague and the negation of Prague, here exemplified by the countryside. This is certainly evident in the passage referencing the state's loss of power in the countryside, and is on display in the two separate settings for the characters of Tomas and Tereza at this point in the novel. With the state's "loss of control" in the area, it is much more likely to remain, in Tereza's words, "the same as it always was."
<11> Clearly Tomas and Tereza are the central human characters in this section of the novel, but it is also quite apparent that Karenin, their dog, acts as a vehicle for philosophical reflection, especially for Tereza. Earlier in the novel Kundera writes of the difference between dog time and human time in a reflection that sounds very similar to the dwarf's statement in Thus Spoke Zarathustra; "Dog time cannot be plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing to the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock, which-they, too, unwilling to dash madly ahead-turn round and round the face, day in and day out following the same path" (ULB 74). Karenin lives in a world where the concept of eternal return does exist, his time, linked to the circularity of the clock and the rhythms of nature, becomes the time of Tomas and Tereza only after they leave Prague; "Never before had his (Karenin's) position as keeper of the clock been so respected. The country was no place for improvisation; the time in which Tereza and Tomas lived was growing closer to the regularity of his time" (ULB 284). The country, where the couple is now living with unchanging nature, undoubtedly changes the couple's perception of both time and "return". Indeed, for the first time in his life Karenin wakes Tomas and Tereza because, "he felt compelled to share his overwhelming joy, a joy of return and rebirth" (ULB 285). This was Karenin's conception of time while the group lived in Prague, but only now, in the country, can Tomas and Tereza view time in the same fashion.
<12> Here it is important to note the text's explanation of why it is that Karenin has a different conception of time than Tomas and Tereza; here Kundera links the concept of the fall from Paradise with man's attainment of linear rather than circular time. Kundera develops this issue thoroughly in Section 4 of "Karenin's Smile" with a sustained discussion of the idyllic image of Paradise. He writes; "life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom. As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regularly recurring seasons, they retained at least a glimmer of the paradisiac idyll" (ULB 295-6). Williams thoroughly demonstrates throughout The Country and the City that the countryside has been commonly portrayed not only as an innocent edenic way of life, but has also become synonymous with recurrent cycles such as seasons, an essential connection that allows Kundera to reintroduce Nietzsche in this context. Here the structure of Paradise was a place of eternal recurrence for man, a place that we no longer have access to, but animals like Karenin do because; "only animals were not expelled from Paradise" (ULB 298). It is clear that by linking the concept of eternal return to Paradise, Kundera is embedding Tereza in the point of view that life in nature is preferable to the city.
<13> Perhaps the key passage in this discussion occurs in Tereza's interior monologue after her contemplation of animals as figures still existing within the eternal return of Paradise. Tereza thinks, "And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. Yes, happiness is the longing for repetition, Tereza said to herself" (ULB 298). If happiness is the longing for repetition, then a world with eternal return, and therefore heaviness, is preferable for Tereza. While Kundera, as previously mentioned, places Tomas from the beginning of the novel in world where eternal return is absent, his perspective undergoes a dramatic shift towards that of Tereza once outside Prague. As Morstein notes; "At the end of their life which fulfills his (Tomas's) initial vision of the common death, the perspective implied by eternal return supersedes his perspective from transience and fleetingness" (76). After escape from the city life of Prague, Tomas is able to live a life of repetition, and by the end of the novel he is able to seek happiness in isolation with Tereza. It is at this point that the struggle with Parmenides's binary system becomes important. Tomas finds his life in the country with Tereza preferable to his life in the city. The change in Tomas is noticeable in his conversation with Tereza at the very end of the novel. Kundera writes,
"That's a silly comparison to make," said Tereza. "Your work meant everything to you; I don't care what I do, I can do anything. I haven't lost a thing; you've lost everything."
"Haven't you noticed I've been happy here, Tereza?" Tomas said.
"Surgery was your mission," she said.
"Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions" (ULB 313).
Tomas transitions to celebrating the country life that he and Tereza now have and he also counters the "quests" he has had throughout the novel. The "unbearably light" life of Prague, where Tomas endlessly pursues women and refuses to sign the statement prepared by the Ministry, leads to his fall from surgeon to window washer. Kundera explains that he "descended voluntarily to the lowest rung of the social ladder" (ULB 192), because, "Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be able to publish a statement in his name, for the simple reason that no one would accept it as genuine. Humiliating public statements are associated exclusively with the signatories' rise, not fall" (ULB 192). Tomas abandons his missions in the countryside, instead referring to them as "stupid".
<14> It is obvious throughout Kundera's deployment of the country/city split that this is not simply a geographical distinction, but also part of the ideological divisions highlighted in Raymond Williams's work. In addition to the inside/outside narrative of Prague and the countryside, the novel also illustrates the way in which each of these spaces carries with it an ideological structure. The city of Prague has been labeled with the "noise, worldliness, and ambition" (Williams 1) that Williams examines, while the Czech countryside has been deployed as a "natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue" (1). In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, this ideological construct plays out most obviously in Tomas's shift to fidelity upon the couple's move to the countryside, however, Kundera seemingly fits into the classical notion of this ideological opposition of the country and the city in several ways.
<15> The aforementioned implication of Tereza's equation of the countryside with repetition and therefore Paradise is part of a much longer story surrounding the ideological construction of the country and the city. As Williams writes, "in a conventional association of Christian and classical myth, the provident land is seen as Eden" (24). However, Tereza's equation of the countryside with Paradise/Eden rests, perhaps, more on the sense of repetition and less on the countryside as a place for man's interaction with fertile and "provident land". Tereza's equation comes from seeing the country as the opposite of the city; or, in Williams's words, "The 'timekept City' is implicitly contrasted with the natural rhythms of blood, day and night, and the seasons; a rural past is conflated with faith or with innocence: a new version of pastoral, by the emphasis of urban negations" (240-1, emphasis added). This sense of "urban negation" is evident in Tereza's motivations for moving into the countryside. As Kundera writes, she desires to escape, "her jealousy and his infidelities" (ULB 234). In "Karenin's Smile", Kundera writes that,
Tereza was happy to abandon the city, the drunken barflies molesting her, and the anonymous women leaving the smell of their groins in Tomas's hair. The police stopped pestering them, and the incident with the engineer so merged with the scene on Petrin Hill that she was hard put to tell which was a dream and which the truth...In any case, Tereza was happy and felt that she had at last reached her goal: she and Tomas were together and alone (ULB 234).
Tereza's explicit desire to escape the chaos of Prague, including her own sexual encounter with the engineer and not simply Tomas's infidelity, reinforces the ideological construction of the countryside as the "negation" of the urban. Williams argues of this desire to escape the confines of the city that, "The individual was the person who must escape, or try to escape, from the repulsive and degrading mass" (222). Indeed, the conceptualization of the countryside that Tereza carries with her is emblematic of this ideological tendency observed by Williams. This marks a distinct transformation from the urban crowd and alienation to a sense of community and privacy.
<16> However, Tereza's way of thinking is not unique to her position in the novel. Williams notes that this construct of the countryside is part of another long-standing and much commented upon ideological split. In addition to the edenic and natural countryside split with the man-made city, the divergent ways in which time is experienced also appear. Williams explains, in a development of this binary through D.H. Lawrence,
A working country, that is to say, was becoming, yet again but in a new way, a place of physical and spiritual regeneration. It was now the teeming life of an isolated nature, or the seasonal rhythm of the fundamental life processes. Neither of these feelings was new in itself. What was new was their fusion into a structure of feeling in which the earth and its creatures-animals and peasants almost alike- were an affirmation of vitality and of the possibility of rest in conscious contrast with the mechanical order, the artificial routines, of the cities (252).
Once again we see the negation of the urban in the pastoral and this appears analogous to the conception of Karenin's "time" compared to that of Tomas and Tereza. An earlier statement by Williams in The Country and the City furthers this notion. He explains that, "a country community, most typically a village, is an epitome of direct relationships: of face-to-face contacts within which we can find and value the real substance of personal relationships" (165). This is evident in Kundera through the change in Tomas and Tereza's relationship after the move to the countryside. The ideological construction of Prague and the countryside is not simply one of human interactions, but rumination on the political ramifications of Prague's occupation. Aside from to the countryside as a place of innocence and natural rhythms, also stands in opposition to Prague as a place of peace and distance from the totalitarian government, bringing Kundera's construction of the binary into the realm of ideological apparatus. As Williams illustrates, "in times of war and civil disturbance... the peace of country life could be contrasted with the disturbance of war and civil war and the political chaos of the cities" (17). Williams expands on this notion by stating that, "country life, as traditionally, is an innocent alternative to ambition, disturbance and war" (24).
<17> The ideological constructs expanded on here by Williams find correlations in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's original conception of eternal return/recurrence does not take this ideological form in the same way that Williams's country/city division does; yet in Kundera's text the issue of eternal return mixes with the light/heavy binary and the country/city binary to produce an ideological construct by filtering Williams's dynamics through the philosophy of Nietzsche. In Kundera's novel, the country becomes not just a place of innocence, peace, and tranquility, but it also becomes a place of repetition and heaviness. These two concepts, repetition and heaviness, become preferable ideas for the couple by the end of the novel. This ideological construct is perhaps most evident in the lives of the characters before and after their move from Prague to the countryside.
<18> The most obvious result of Tomas's move to the countryside is the aforementioned change in his relationship with women. After the regime demotes him to window-washer in Prague, Tomas sets out on an almost never-ending stream of affairs with various women. The affairs continue throughout his marriage to Tereza in a pseudo-mission for Tomas. Kundera writes, "He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex" (ULB 200). The search for dissimilarity allows Tomas to live in a world without repetition where each woman he engages in a sexual encounter with represents a linear progression in a sense through a new experience. In his sexual encounters it is evident that Tomas's lack of eternal return is exhibited in the fact that his decisions carry with them a sense of lightness rather than heaviness. Only after his encounter with the stork-like woman does Tomas feel rattled because of the unusual nature of their sexual encounter. Rather than a parade of encounters where the women are indistinguishable, "one-millionth part" gives Tomas the lightness of being where his actions do not return upon themselves. Once in the countryside however, his fidelity to Tereza results in the heaviness of repetition. Once the couple moves, Tomas becomes faithful to Tereza, when he incorporates Tereza's perspective of eternal return into his own life, seeking heaviness in a place of repetition.
<19> The move to the countryside draws attention to the concluding and perhaps most important issue within the novel (given the title); the privileging of lightness or heaviness in the philosophical framework of Parmenides. Kundera himself asks which one should be more preferable, lightness or heaviness. In a sense, this is the primary question the novel itself sets out to answer. Tomas certainly lives in a world with "unbearable lightness of being" throughout. In a world without eternal return, Tomas makes no decisions that will resonate for all time, only decisions that do not persist; equating lightness not weight: his life, "whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean(s) nothing" (ULB 3). However, once he and Tereza move to the countryside they are able to find happiness in the repetition of nature, a repetition that provides "the greatest weight" of Nietzsche's eternal return. By the end of the novel, which ironically concludes before Tomas and Tereza's death even though the reader has been privilege to that information for some time, it is clear that this weight of eternal return is positive. Without this weight we live in a world with an "unbearable lightness of being" the weight and the repetition at the end become positive, lightness the negative in their binary opposition.
<20> Even in the totalitarian government of the novel, Tomas and Tereza are able to find this ideological relief in the countryside. Kundera illustrates that, "Under Communism, however, village life no longer fit the age-old pattern" (ULB 282), yet there is a certain amount of distancing, and negation that still exists in the Czech countryside for the couple. Kundera's conceptualization of the collective farming community envisions a space with more freedom than the totalitarian regime of Prague (represented in Tomas's fall from grace and Tereza's suspicion of the engineer as a regime spy), but also a more democratic space where leaders are elected and allowed to maintain autonomy from the state. While Kundera's development of the countryside here takes away the common ideological element of the countryside as a place of communion with the land (the farmer "forms no allegiance to either region or work"), he still places the countryside as a negation of the city, here in the difference between totalitarian and democratic leadership.
<21> At this point in the novel Kundera does something both and new and unexpected with the deployment of the ideologies of the country and the city experienced by Tomas and Tereza. In Tereza's conceptualization of the countryside she,
discovered in herself a picture of country life originating in memories of books she read or in her ancestors. It was a harmonious world; everyone came together in one big happy family with common interests and routines: church service on Sundays, a tavern where the men could get away from their womenfolk, and a hall in the tavern where a band played on Saturdays and the villagers danced (ULB 282).
This conceptualization of the countryside that Tereza carries with her into the Czech countryside was extremely common, as Williams notes, this dates back to "Christian and classical myth" where, "the provident land is seen as Eden" and the "recurrent myth of a happier and more natural past." Tereza's preconceived notion of the countryside finds agreement in this pastoral, communal, and more socialist notion of the countryside that Raymond Williams observes in The Country and the City.
<22> However, this a priori notion of the countryside that Tereza carries with her is undermined by the political position of the actual Czech countryside. As previously noted, Kundera writes that the pattern of village life has been changed under Communism. The belief, conceived under the pressures of Capitalism in Williams, of the communal and socialist countryside collapses under Communist control of the Czech countryside. The countryside, rather than a socialist space of communal relations becomes a democratic sphere of relationships devoid of connection to a pastoral and idealized past. Furthering this notion, Kundera portrays the countryside as a place of individualism. He writes that, "at the end of a day's work filled with boisterous shouting and relaxed chatter, they would all shut themselves up within their four walls and, surrounded by contemporary furniture emanating bad taste like a cold draft, stare at the refulgent television screen" (ULB 283), and that, "The country offered them nothing in the way of even a minimally interesting life" (ULB 283). In the novel, the Czech countryside has lost the communal relations that were so idealized in the pastoral conception of the times past.
<23> In addition to the loss of communalism associated with the Czech countryside, the pastoral implications of a natural way of life tied "to the seasonal rhythm of the fundamental life processes" (Williams 252) of the land also remain elusive for Kundera's characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera writes, "A farmer who no longer owns his own land and is merely a laborer tilling the soil forms no allegiance to either region or work; he has nothing to lose, nothing to fear for. As a result of such apathy, the countryside had maintained more than a modicum of autonomy and freedom" (ULB 283). In fact, Kundera's countryside under communism is a reversal of the system typically vilified under Capitalism. The political ramifications alienate the farmer from their production on the collective farm because they are no longer granted access and control over the land and the items that come from it. Tereza comes to the countryside with the notion of a communal connection to the land, a connection that has disappeared, for Kundera, through Communism.
<24> In a further modification to the typical narrative of the country/city split, the countryside also becomes the only democratically run space in Czechoslovakia throughout the text, because it is run by elected leadership. Once again, Tereza's conception of a communal countryside deconstructs itself in Kundera's novel, he notes, "The chairman of the collective farm was not brought in from outside (as were all high-level managers in the city); he was elected by the villagers from among themselves" (ULB 283). Under the totalitarian Communist rule of Prague, officials are chosen for the people. Yet, the countryside provides the citizens with the agency denied to them in the city through a democratic election of leadership. Once again, the traditional associations of the countryside are altered in Kundera's novel.
<25> Turning to Raymond Williams helps to explain these modifications to the ideologies of the country and the city in the novel. InThe Country and the City, Williams mentions Friedrich Engels's hope in his discussion of Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England that socialism could destroy the split between the country and the city. Yet, while Engels envisioned the removal of the structural devices employed to hide the working-class from the middle-class in Manchester, Kundera's novel complicates this binary by destroying the stable categories that many, such as Tereza, bring with them upon entering the countryside. Williams himself observes that "the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present", before declaring that, "we use the contrast of country and city to ratify an unresolved division and conflict of impulses, which it might be better to face in its own terms" (297). In the end, both Kundera and Williams begin to deconstruct this country/city binary by showing the inherent instability in both categories and their most common conceptualizations.
<26> This essay has shown the way in which Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, Parmenides notion of binary oppositions, and the conflict between the country and the city collide within Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This also displays the way in which Kundera approaches the ideological split of the country and the city through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy and continues on to modify this binary under the specific conditions of Prague and the Czech countryside. By the end of the novel Kundera has examined the way in which the concept of eternal return, complete with Nietzsche's "greatest weight" is preferable to becoming "only half real, [with] movements as free as they are insignificant" (ULB 5). As Morstein states; "In a world without eternal return we would have to live with a terrifying sense of weightlessness. If we believe in eternal return we transform the weightlessness of fleeting appearances into the greatest weight. It is just this terrifying sense of weightlessness that Tomas experiences and struggles with" (67). It is clear in the novel that while weightlessness is terrifying, heaviness and burden are man's path to happiness and meaning, and these characteristics are met only when Tomas and Tereza move to the countryside.
Notes
[1] This essay concerns itself with Kundera's deployment of philosophical terms from Nietzsche and Parmenides while acknowledging that critics have taken issue with his philosophical readings. Kundera's usage of terms, especially from Parmenides, has been discussed as somewhat topical. For more on Kundera's relationship to and usage of philosophy, see Maria Nemcova Banerjee's Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) and Calvin Bedient's "On Milan Kundera". Salmagundi 73 (1987): 93-108.
[2] The Unbearable Lightness of Being, abbreviated as ULB throughout.
[3] The Gay Science, abbreviated as GS throughout.
[4] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, abbreviated as TZ throughout.
Works Cited
Bilek, Petr A. 'Reading Prague: Narrative Domains of the Image of the City in Fiction.' Style 40.3 (2006): 249-257. Print.
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Perennial Classics, 1999. Print.
---. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1988. Print.
Morstein, Petra von. 'The Eternal Return and The Unbearable Lightness of Being'. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.2 (1989): 65-78. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1974. Print.
---. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. Print.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print.
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