Hi all, I believe this is the first time I’ve created a thread here, I feel so awesome.
I was wondering how many people here have read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, and what you thought the overall ‘message’ was.
Usually I hate phrasing a question about a piece of art or literature that way, it sounds so trivial and adolescent. I am one of those incredibly annoying people who tend to believe that there is no message for something, and that the art should stand for itself. Just call me Miss Pretentious.
It’s like a favorite television character of mine (I’m sure you’ll learn that I watch far too much television), Claire Fisher (Six Feet Under) once commented about an art collection she’d just showed in a gallery: “I have no fucking idea what these pictures mean”. And by the way, how brilliant is Alan Ball?
Anyway. I’m new to this forum thing; hopefully I’ll learn to be more succinct.
I thought that the overwhelming ‘message’ was an internal and external debate on monogamy vs. polygamy.
I’ve always believed that people need different things from different people at different times, and that this kind of eliminates the possibility of monogamy. Tomas would certainly fit into this criteria, and I was wondering what response other people have to his affairs.
I read the book a number of years after I saw the movie. I think the movie was quite good, and I think that Lena Olin was scorching hot in it.
I really don’t try too hard to find the meaning of books or movies, so I’ll only offer a wild ass opinion. I never really thought it was about his affairs or monogamy versus polygamy, but now that you mention it… I saw it as a few people who flee a strife torn country. After settling in Switzerland, a couple of them realize that they belong in the strife torn country doing something, anything, to make it better.
Maybe the fleeing of the country is the same non-commitment that a polygamous lifestyle is. Going back to the country is choosing monogamy. You can add in all the things that go with each lifestyle, and judge accordingly.
I’ll agree that Lena Olin was the best part of the movie.
That makes a lot of sense - returning to a war-torn country somehow seems more safe for these characters (or at least Tereza) than staying in a safe place. It fits with the numerous affairs being less safe than staying in one relationship.
There’s no message. It’s a novel, and if it’s about anything, it’s about the webs of language and various manipulations of the web about some characters or something set in to rouse the rabble.
About a dickhead doctor going around screwing chicks? With some literary allusion?
Fiction, poetry, are not about things, except as that thing is language. I’m not going to do charmap for zoon legon ekon, but it’s only an appeal to sexy metaphysics that to go thus far, one, ascribes power to agents – namely, humans – for purpose.
Little characters in little fiction books are examples, at most, if anything of either a similar capacity or a moralisches Gefuehl meant to evoke sympathy (this latter approach scholars sometimes call “ethical criticism.” Cf. Nussbaum, Wayne C. Booth. For the former idea, it’s a bit extreme but not uncommon for scholars of rigor (read: not beanie-wearing Comp Lit grad students who don’t know formalized proofs for their hypoptheses) to espouse.
Are you in a College survey course? It’s OK if you are – I’m sure you’ll find some help here.
Nope, no college course to do with English Lit. I think we’ll have to agree to disagree that literature isn’t usually ‘about’ anything.
I don’t think it needs to be. I don’t even think it’s done purposefully most of the time. But I enjoy picking apart books and looking for context, ideas and meaning.
Freud would undoubtedly say I was potty trained incorrectly. Oh well.
Well, I agree but not that we must disagree. Nusbaum’s essays, collected in Love’s Knowledge, make a compelling argument that novels instruct “us” by example the difficulty of making moral decisions. In fact, she goes further IIRC and says that the very feeling of ethics and morality is borne by examples, and that the varying degrees of verisimilitude of those characters in fiction reflect the ambiguities and waverings that “we” experience everyday.
On the other hand, you probably might disagree with me and Sartre (I think it was) who, in the latter’s little essay on What Is Literature?, compared the phenomena verbally represented in a novel to the pictorial face of a tapestry. Some are more interested in the reverse – the little nubs of twine and silk or whatever Gobelins or whoever made their shit out of make up the back of a tapestry. To me that’s what a novel is about.
On one level, it’s a long-winded response to Nietzsche’ eternal recurrence. On another, it’s an existentialist manifesto for living an authentic life (or how not to).
I can’t remember the book well enough to argue, but at least you made me want to re-read it soon =D
(My vague memory was that the main point seemed to be something about the futility of nostalgia, but I might be getting it mixed up with Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I read right before it)
