Newsgroups: bit.listserv.literary
Date:         Tue, 25 Aug 1992 21:53:58 -0400
From:         John Chang <changj@CS.RPI.EDU>
Subject:      new threads (Kundera)
Comments: To: LITERARY@ucf1vm.cc.ucf.edu
              21 Aug 1992 19:43:00 GMT <199208230711.AA25626@cs.rpi.edu>

>   I think that you will find that the themes of lightness and weight
> can be found in the characters themselves.  It has been awhile but
> Tomas is caught between light( sex is light, there are noe
> commitments) and love (heavy because it weighs you down and makes you
> do things that you wouldn't normally do), it is burden.  His wife
> represents weight, the weight of love.  When she had her affair she
> wanted her lovers weight on her becasue she wanted love that she
> wasn't getting from Tomas.  Tomas' mistress represents the lightness
> of sex, of mobility.  She has no attachments and moves farther and
> farther west (the west represents light as well, just think of Disney
> land as being as far west as you can go:)) Tomas is caught between
> them but the weight of love draws him back to Czechoslovakia to
> Teresa(?).  This is all pretty light itself but if you explore it on
> your own I think that you will find that it has many possibilities.  I
> wish that I could get into it a bit more but it has been several years
> since I read this book.  Let me know what you think.

Hi,

Thanks for responding to my question.  I'm not sure I agree with you
completely.  For example, though Sabina (Thomas' mistress) has no
attachments and moves around, I never thought of her as being
particularly light.  I've kind of thought lightness in Kundera's sense
meant not so much lack of physical attachemnt, be it to people or
place, but more an emotional lightness - happy, spirited, etc.  I've
always thought this weigh/lightness duality was Kundera's version of
Mann's art/bourgeois, decadence/health, Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy
(kind of).  I think the concept of wight is pretty clear, though I'm
not sure lighness is so clearly presented:

weight (quoting from the book):

"Beethoven apparently viewed weight as something positive....only
necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value....we believe
that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate
as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders."

Sabina:

"Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the
goal of all her betrayals?....The unbearable lightness of being - was
that the goal?"

Rereading this passage on Sabina, I'm not so sure what lightness is
anymore.  I would think her emptiness and implied sadness would place
her more on the other end of the spectrum, and "unbearable lightness"
itself acquires some sense of weight.  Is lightness something we
strive for, but when we realize or think about what it is, it becomes
unbearable and throws us back to the side of (down with) weight?
What do you think lightness and weight is?  Do you think lightness is
just lack of physical attachment?

That's one thing that bothers me about this book - he has all these
ideas he kind of just throws out seemingly without any attempt to
present them thoroughly or coherently; usually they are almost side
thoughts.  It's frustrating.  Right now I'm trying to outline each
chapter to see if I can discover some grand scheme buried in all
these apparent disorganization.



						John Chang
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