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Thursday
When I heard that Milan Kundera had died, I looked for past blogs on the Czech author and found several dealing with his reflections upon the nature of authoritarian governance. Kundera, of course, had witnessed close-up the Soviet oppression of his country, and his observations apply as well to Donald Trump and the MAGA right.
In his novel Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for instance, he talks about how authoritarian governments rely on people forgetting, which they help along by manufacturing their own set of facts. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Kundera writes at one point, and his novel opens with a memorable scene.
In it, Kundera notes about how a famous photograph of Czechoslovak leaders—“Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums”—was later doctored to remove one who had fallen into disfavor. It was as though he had never existed.
During the 2016 presidential campaign Esquire columnist Charles Pierce applied Kundera’s observation to Donald Trump, and we saw it grow truer once he became president. Here’s what Pierce said at the time:
The 2016 presidential campaign—and the success of Donald Trump on the Republican side—has been a triumph of how easily memory can lose the struggle against forgetting and, therefore, how easily society can lose the struggle against power. There is so much that we have forgotten in this country. We’ve forgotten, over and over again, how easily we can be stampeded into action that is contrary to the national interest and to our own individual self-interest. We have forgotten McCarthy and Nixon. We have forgotten how easily we can be lied to. We have forgotten the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs and the sale of missiles to the mullahs. And along comes someone like Trump, and he tells us that forgetting is our actual power and that memory is the enemy.
Along with describing how authoritarians attempt to erase history, Kundera in his novels shows us how intoxicatingly light we can feel when we forget. That helps explain the title of Kundera’s best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it is the point of an extended parable in Book of Laughter and Forgetting where a character thinks that she has escaped her history by reaching an island inhabited by children. No longer, she thinks, will her memories weigh her down.
Children are innocent because they have no history. At first Tamina is joyous as she engages in ring dances with the children. But these children also lack morals and a sense of responsibility. As a result, the parable takes a dark turn when, showing themselves capable of anything, they rape her.
In that post, written in May 2016, I wrote,
At the moment, too many voters are acting like children. As a result, we now see a racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, xenophobic quasi-fascist as the presidential candidate of one of our two major parties.
We all know what happened next, of course, culminating in January 6 insurrectionists seeing an attack on the Capitol as a joy ride. Kundera’s reflections on the polarity of lightness and heaviness in Unbearable Lightness helps explain some of Trump’s popularity.
Kundera doesn’t at first say that either light or heavy is better:
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
Serious governing means taking on heavy burdens. On the other hand, denying that there are serious problems that must be confronted or thinking you can invent a reality that is more to your liking can leave you feeling lighter than air. If you can automatically dismiss those experts who claim that climate change is a problem or that pandemics require a complex response, then life seems a lot easier.
This airy feeling, I suspect, is what buoys up many MAGA Republicans these days. They just add passionate intensity to the mix to convince themselves that it’s serious and substantive.
Kundera notes that the philosopher Parmenides probed the heaviness/ lightness polarity in ancient Greece. But whereas he saw lightness as positive and weight as negative, Kundera is not so sure. In Lightness of Being, he contrasts three defectors from Soviet-controlled Czechsolovakia. Two of them, finding life in the United States too light, return home whereas Sabina embraces America. Or rather, the surface of America. Kundera writes.
Sabina continued to receive letters from her sad village correspondent till the end of her life. Many of them would remain unread, because she took less and less interest in her native land.
The old man died, and Sabina moved to California. Farther west, farther away from the country where she had been born.
She had no trouble selling her paintings, and liked America. But only on the surface. Everything beneath the surface was alien to her. Down below, there was no grandpa or uncle. She was afraid of shutting herself into a grave and sinking into American earth.
And so one day she composed a will in which she requested that her dead body be cremated and its ashes thrown to the wind. Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of weight. She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter than air. As Parmenides would put it, the negative would change into the positive.
Sure, being dead feels lighter than being alive. And blaming someone else for making difficult decisions feels lighter than taking them on yourself. I think of another work in which the heaviness of responsibility is contrasted with the lightness of avoidance. In Jean Paul Sartre’s The Flies, a reworking of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Electra blames her brother for having dragged her into killing their mother for her murder of the king:
Thief! I had so little, so very little to call mine; only a few weak dreams, a morsel of peace. And now you’ve taken my all; you’ve robbed a pauper of her mite! You were my brother, the head of our house, and it was your duty to protect me. But no, you needs must drag me into carnage…
To which Orestes, an existentialist speaking on the importance of acting freely and responsibiy, replies,
We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.
I’m not saying the heaviness is always better than lightness. But “the eternal lightness of being,” as Kundera knew only too well from his experience with authoritarianism, comes with a price.