Nietzsche's idea of eternal return has perplexed many philosophers. You, though, will merely find my eternal returning to the idea of eternal return over the coming pages merely annoying. But is not annoyance the heaviest of human burdens? Yet does not the absence of annoyance, the lightness, confer the unbearable burden of insignificance?
Parmenides would have posed this question in the sixth century had he been an east European intellectual intent on grinding his readers' noses into the superficiality of his thought. Which then shall we choose? Lightness or heaviness? Probably neither, for even the stupidest person can see this is a false dichotomy, that both ideas are equally invalid. If something only happens once, could not that make it more, not less, significant? But these counter-revolutionary thoughts have no place in the Prague Spring of 1968, so let's continue with the novel.
I have been thinking about Tomas, the Czech surgeon, for some years but only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. He had first met Tereza in a small town three weeks earlier. They had met for an hour. Ten days later she visited him in Prague. They made love and she came down with flu for 10 days. Then she went home again. In his inordinately deep way, Tomas was perplexed to find himself feeling something more for her than just a physical desire of objectification, so he says to himself, as we all do at such times, Einmal ist Keinmal, what happens once might as well never have happened.
One day Tereza returned again with a copy of Anna Karenina and Tomas sees her as a child in a bulrush and himself as Oedipus. Unperturbed by such pretentious imagery, he sleeps with her again and when he awakes to find her holding his hand in a transgressive act of dissent against Soviet alienation he feels obliged to marry her. Tomas has been married before and has a son whom we shall call, for argument's sake, Simon. Tomas has decided to have no contact with Simon – a decision that appears to give him few qualms and goes unquestioned by everyone throughout the novel.
Instead he chose to indulge his solipsism by shagging as many women as possible, arguing that love and sex were incompatible, and in Sabina, an artist who liked to fuck in a bowler hat and with as ridiculous a line in symbolism as himself, he found the perfect mistress. This being the work of a middle-aged male novelist, Tereza naturally came to accept Tomas's dissociative state as the natural order, though she was given to the occasional intensely symbolic dream herself as she photographed Russians in the streets of Prague.
For his part, Tomas's narcissism was startled to imagine that Tereza might have once slept with another man, so he suggested they move to Zurich so he could be nearer to Sabina. Tereza went along with this for a bit, but after Tomas had also shagged half of Switzerland, she got a bit fed up and went back to Prague. Initially, Tomas felt an incredible lightness that his wife of seven years had left him. But then he thought of Sophocles and Beethoven and the heaviness returned. So he went back to Prague and Tereza was quite pleased.
Tereza had had a difficult life and, were this novelist was not quite so keen to be taken seriously, he might have said that Tomas had abused her as much as had her mother. But he didn't, so there we are. She too was very interested in the artificial split between lightness and heaviness and, after shacking up with Tomas for very different reasons to his, she accepted she was a metaphor for Dubcek's weakness and sadly patted her dog, Karenin.
Franz was Sabina's other Swiss lover, a man of less depth and substance than Tomas, though no less absurd. Unwilling to have sex with Sabina in the same town in which he lived with his wife, Franz, unlike Tomas, failed to understand the importance of the neo-Marxist, post-Freudian bowler hat. With Franz the bowler hat was no longer a comic connection to her father and grandfather, it was a symbol of violence and public rape. Apparently. So she ridiculed his puppy-like nuzzling of her breasts in coitus. Such is the existential ennui of the mittel-European. A world of missed connections between Franz and Sabina, Tomas and Tereza. The misunderstanding between lightness and heaviness, between a book of substance and a load of bollocks.
Tereza took a job as a waitress after the Russians occupied the city. She regularly smelled other womens' vaginal juices on Tomas's hair, but she shrugged it off and went about her day pondering the lightness or heaviness of the Cartesian mind-body split. Was her body part of herself? She still wasn't sure after she had been fucked an engineer who may or may not have been a Communist spy in the toilet. And no one else certainly cared. She wandered up to Petrin Hill in a dream and watched herself get shot by a firing squad while Tomas looked on. Either I'm a prostitute or I'm in love.
Meanwhile I was a little worried Tomas had forgotten he was also supposed to be an allegory for Soviet repression, so Tomas began taking a previously well-concealed interest in Czech politics. His Sophoclean musings had led him to write a letter of dissent on the nature of passive complicity to a radical newspaper, and he now found himself being asked for a retraction by a Man from the Ministry. Caught in the balance between lightness and heaviness, between Beethoven's Muss Es Sein? and Es Muss Sein! and between his existential Parmenidean obsession for finding the millionth part of difference in a woman and just being the figment of a dirty old man's mind, he refused.
Tomas was forced to resign from his job as a surgeon and became a window-cleaner in Prague, where his main duties were having sex with 37 women a day, all of whom unaccountably desired to surrender their anus, his favourite part of the female anatomy, to him. After a year or so, a radical editor, who had admired his Sophoclean musings, invited him to a meeting at which his son Simon was present. Naturally, the cause of modernist magical realism was best served by them not discussing the 20-year hiatus in their relationship, so instead the conversation centred on whether Tomas would agree to sign a petition protesting at the Russian occupation.
So why did he not sign? For one thing, the split between lightness and heaviness had been blurred in the editing of his Oedipal fixation and he did not hold the position ascribed to him. Yet more importantly, he did not sign because I did not let him for this is the moment in which the post-modern authorial intervention reminds you the characters are all my own invention and therefore facets of my own character. So rather Tomas thought of the ineffability of lightness and heaviness, the ineffability of unbearable tosh.
Tomas was surprised to discover that Tereza had detected vaginal juices on his hair, having believed a good wash of his body was all that was required and in her own proto-Nietzschean way Tereza came to realise her duality was best resolved by being a doormat until Tomas's tragically light-heavy descent from being the finest surgeon in Prague was completed by his intractable attachment to being a complete Kant and they were obliged to become farmers.
Sabina moved to New York where she continued to wear a bowler hat and fuck anything that moved and it was here she heard that Tomas and Tereza had died in a car crash. Franz had gone to Cambodia, bizarrely believing that his own lightness/heaviness situation with Sabina would somehow be resolved if he joined a protest. There he was hit over the head and died later in hospital, his wife believing that he did in fact love her after all. Tomas and Tereza lived their life refracted through their dog, Karenin, whom they believed had learned to smile. It was, though, a rictus as she had cancer. The only smile was on my face, having passed off the unbearable lightness of drivel as work of great heaviness.
The Guardian's Digested Classics series
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