In the panopticon reality of a totalitarian regime, the power of fictionalizing a culture’s vision is of essence. Objects disappear, individuals are erased, the totalitarian government continuously exerting its tightening grip over the means of communication, visual and verbal. People are instructed to follow, unquestioningly, the automated choices made for their benefit by the ever-watchful power elite, until their routine has become so internalized that they, in turn, try to persuade themselves about how their ‘linear narrative’ is as individualistically singular as any narrative can be. Everyone is meant to live out “the idyll” of conformity and fear as they proceed to believe in the independence of their actions, in the uniqueness of their efforts. In other words, people living within the confines of a totalitarian system exist as “seen objects” while they strive to ascertain their positions as “seers”. However, no narrative, including the ‘seamless’ textuality of a totalitarian cultural identity, abides thoroughly by the pre-scripted strategy of its author(s). There is always an intermission, an unforeseen discrepancy in the blueprints of the final plan; it could be miniscule, but the size of its impact on the narrative is far greater. Milan Kundera’s deliberately challenging storytelling ways in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being reaffirm the power of such an intermission on the pages of European history.
Time and again, throughout the seemingly cryptic structure of his seven part narrative, Kundera the narrator reminds us of fiction’s final laugh, as it exposes the fallacy of a world, a system, a routine whose power lies in its cyclical weightlessness, with no one present to pull the trigger, and yet the empty fields count over a thousand deaths. As Tomas and his wife Tereza go between their subject positions, first as “seen objects”, then as “seers”, they test the foundational irrationality of the totalitarian system they inhabit. Tomas finds his particular niche in the refuge of his professional and extra-marital life: as a surgeon, in a society void of God’s mystical gaze, he is able to recast himself as a powerful agent; as a lover, he is able to be a part of something transient, brief, self-controlled, self-defined. Kundera comments on Tomas’s individualist actions by examining them as complementary elements of one and the same passion, that of being in charge of one’s destiny: “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 other of her sex. (Here, too, perhaps, his passion for surgery and his passion for women came together. Even with his mistresses, he could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since he longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open.)”
On the other hand, his wife Tereza, discovers her sense of self when she discovers photography. Once armed with the power of the “mechanical eye”, her being is no longer just that of a helpless waif, controlled by Tomas, used by her mother in the past. She captures on film the circumstances of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; her still images of these turbulent times give her a sense of empowerment, which allows her an illusionary penetration through the surface of personal and historical forces of oppression as she attempts to build her own sense of weight. Ironically, she realizes that the same photographs that liberated her spirit, and gave her a power of self, have been used by the government to rob off people from their sense of self. Even though she finds out that none of her own work has been employed by the manipulative upper-hand of the regime, she no longer views her ‘liberator’ with the same innocent gaze: “It was a picture of a young man grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd looking on in the background. “Collaborator Punished” read the caption. Tereza let out her breath. No, it wasn’t one of hers. Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks. How naïve they had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.”
When the couple leaves the life of the city behind them, seeking refuge in the idyllic milieu of the countryside, they retrieve to their previous status of controlled entities, immersed in mythical need for a shelter, a place of non-existence whose linguistic enchantment bears the final mark of imprisonment. They no longer possess the ability to exert their selfhood; they have willingly surrendered their subjectivity to live out the pretense of the idyllic sphere and its ramifications. In that respect, the totalitarian regime has subdued the power of the individual by exerting its control even over the luminosity of dreams and fantastical retreats, having the individual internalize the need to escape into the translucence of lightness, leaving behind any memory or recollection of social awareness and individual identity. However, Kundera’s narrating style does not disavow the validity of his characters’ futile struggle for self-definition. The novel’s kaleidoscopic vision of narrated reality establishes the story of Tomas and Tereza as a model of man’s inner search for identity, which in the end is perhaps the one way to effectuate our power as historical agents, as citizens, as individuals.
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