Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being explores themes of love, existentialism, and power dynamics through the stories of four characters: Tereza, Tomas, Sabina, and Franz. Throughout the narrative, Kundera repeats motifs of childlikeness and kitsch, especially when talking about love. His ideas surrounding these topics seem similar to poet Friedrich Schiller’s perspective in his essay “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry”. Using Schiller’s essay as a frame of reference, I will examine how Kundera describes love in the relationships between both people and animals to identify the relationship between love, simplicity, and kitsch. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera designs the dynamics between characters to explore the nuances of power, relationships, and love. By doing so, he ultimately demonstrates love as inevitable in the face of simplicity-revealing vulnerability.
In “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry”, Schiller first unpacks why we are captivated by nature, then categorizes poets as either simple or sentimental. He argues that our reverence for nature is not due to the aesthetic pleasure it brings, but rather the moral pleasure stemming from nature being “the image of our highest perfection in the ideal world”. He goes on to state, “The very feature that constitutes their character is precisely what is lacking in ours to make it complete” (181). However, this interest in nature is only possible in a “moral soul” which is capable of ideas. It is the ideas that objects close to us evoke “which, causing us to look closer into ourselves, show us more clearly what in us departs from nature” (182). Children are a prime example of this phenomenon, as their purity and closeness with nature leave us in awe of "the contrast between their natural character and what is artificial in us" (183). He calls this state of nature simple (as opposed to art, or artifice). As such, the simple poet is nature, while the sentimental poet seeks nature (194). Though Schiller’s essay addresses simplicity and artifice in terms of poets (and, more broadly, people), morals, and emotions, his philosophical arguments can also be applied to love as well.
Already viewing his 1795 society as an “artificial age”, Schiller presents a pessimistic view of the world in his essay (194). He states, “As soon as nature gradually vanishes from human life—that is, in proportion as it ceases to be experienced as a subject (active and passive)—we see it dawn and increase in the poetical world in the guise of an idea and as an object” (191). Schiller’s “poetical world” refers to poetry’s legacy and its space in society, but we can narrow this scope to an individual’s poetical world, too, or, as Kundera puts it, their “poetic memory”. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera postulates that “The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful,” just as nature charms and touches us through its sublimity (208). He then says, “Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory” (209). Love enters one’s poetic memory as nature enters poetry as an idea and object. From this perspective, love and nature share the same qualities of simplicity that make them worthy of being held dear in a poetic world, whether societal or personal.
Schiller clearly delineates the scope of “nature” early in his essay, stating that the “love and respectful emotion” brought on by it is “often elicited when nature is considered in her plants, in her mineral kingdom, in rural districts; also in the case of human nature, in the case of children, and in the manner of country people and of the primitive races” (180). In other words, the nature he talks about is that which is free from the corrupting influence of his artificial society. However, since Kundera’s work is a novel exploring different characters’ perspectives and experiences, the definition of love is not as clear-cut, especially since it does not adhere to societal conventions. To uncover Kundera’s implicit perspective, I will first present a synthesis of some characters’ explicit mentions of love. Then I will dive into Tereza’s relationships to highlight the nuances of love and its connection to simplicity and sentimentality.
The narrative in The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with the origin story for Tomas and Tereza’s relationship. Though Tomas is a libertine and initially views Tereza as no more than a fling, she comes down with the flu when visiting him and is stuck weak and feverish in his bed. Kundera, as the narrator, says of his situation, “What could it have been if not love declaring itself to him?” (7). He thinks of her as a child sent to him in a bulrush basket and feels an “inexplicable love” toward Tereza because “she seemed a child to him” (6). She ends up staying over at Tomas’s place, something he never does with his mistresses, and Kundera observes that “Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)” (15). Tereza is weak with her illness, and sleep is a state of defenselessness. When facing this situation, Tomas cannot help but feel what he thinks could be love. Since it declares itself to him, the feeling does not arise of his own volition. Love, then, is inevitable in the face of vulnerability.
Though not explicitly stated, Kundera consistently repeats this sentiment of vulnerability being necessary for love. Vulnerability is necessary mutually, for the person falling in love, and for a person to be loved. In Franz and Sabina’s relationship, Franz says “love means renouncing strength” (112). Though they had differing definitions for all aspects of their life, Kundera speculates that, had they more time or different circumstances, “Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other” (124). They could have fallen in love and understood each other if they had renounced the strength of their egos and let down their defenses to allow their music to intersect, if they had been vulnerable with one another.
When having a casual affair with a stranger, Tereza “tried to withstand the strong desire to burst out crying in his presence. She knew that her failure to withstand it would have ruinous consequences. She would fall in love with him” (157). This moment underscores the idea that vulnerability is a powerful and involuntary trigger for love. Tereza's instinctive reaction to cry in front of the stranger highlights her innate desire to express authentic emotions despite the potential consequences. By doing so, Kundera suggests that love can arise from moments of intense emotional exposure. Thus, being fully vulnerable in front of another is enough to cause the sparks of love.
Finally, later in her life, Tereza dreams that Tomas becomes a rabbit, symbolizing his lack of strength as he ages. At this point, he has moved to the countryside for her and lost everything he had in the city, including the erotic friendships he so loves. When Tereza apologizes for taking advantage of him by leveraging her weakness, he says, “Haven’t you noticed I’ve been happy here, Tereza?” The two dance together on a dance floor in a hotel bar, content in their old age and relationship (313). Tereza is always jealous and anxious about Tomas’s erotic affairs with other women, and thus cannot be fully comfortable in his presence no matter how much she loves him. And it is questionable how much she really does, as “she was obliged to behave lovingly because she needed him” (289). However, once the power dynamics between them break down, Tereza can finally love Tomas with no reservations because of his vulnerability. Her wish from their conflict in Switzerland finally comes true: he becomes an old man, weak before her. His essence is completely now completely bare. Since vulnerability is weakness, defenselessness, and transparency, it reveals one’s unembellished, essential nature. Simplicity (the simple poet, or lover, is nature), then, even if only before one person, is necessary for love, and real love is necessarily simple.
Tereza, the child in the bulrush basket, is the perfect embodiment of a simple lover’s dynamic evolution. Throughout the novel, she first falls from simplicity, then becomes sentimental, and finally returns to simplicity before her death. Her melancholic sentimentality in her complex situation mirrors Schiller’s pessimism toward the survival of simplicity in a society of artifice. In his essay, he writes,
The poets of this order,—the genuinely simple poets, are scarcely any longer in their place in this artificial age. Accordingly they are scarcely possible in it, or at least they are only possible on the condition of traversing their age, like scared persons, at a running pace, and of being preserved by a happy star from the influence of their age, which would mutilate their genius. (194)
There is no place for simplicity in modernity. That which is simple quickly gets corrupted by its surroundings. For Schiller’s simple poet, the surrounding is an artificial society. For Tereza, it is her incompatibility with Tomas despite their mutually proclaimed love.
Tereza begins as a symbol of simplicity but quickly loses this trait as her relationship with Tomas progresses. Tomas initially attracts Tereza because, when he “called out to her in a kind voice”, she “felt her soul rushing up to the surface through her blood vessels and pores to show itself to him” (48). Due to her traumatic experience with her mother’s exhibitionism and crudeness, she longs for someone who would see her soul to differentiate her body from other bodies (58). Yet, to Tomas, all bodies are the same, and he is “genuinely incapable of abandoning his erotic friendships” (21). This destroys Tereza and dissolves her hopes. She screams during intercourse with him, where “What was screaming in fact was the naïve idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time” (54). There is a rift in their perspectives: Tereza wants her soul to shine through her body, while Tomas views body and soul as separate. He loves Tereza’s soul, but Tereza wants to be loved in totality. Her love’s naïve, or simple, idealism screams out its final breath (other English versions of Schiller’s essay translate “simple” as “naïve”). The contradictions she experiences are the overturning force knocking her from her flying vessel of naïve hope and into a state of a perpetual fall.
As Schiller observes, “Simplicity in our mode of thinking brings with it of necessity simplicity in our mode of expression, simplicity in terms as well as movement; and it is in this that grace especially consists” (187). Yet, after discovering Tomas’s unfaithfulness, Tereza’s “gestures grew abrupt and unsteady”, implying that her movements had been smooth and graceful before, further highlighting her initially simple nature outside of Tomas’s perception. After becoming entangled with Tomas, “There was no way out” for her (21). This admission and acceptance of the tragic situation is a good representation of her melancholy, which colors the tone of her sentimentality.
After becoming disillusioned with her and Tomas’s relationship, Tereza becomes sentimental and, instead of being nature, seeks nature instead through her relationship with Karenin, her and Tomas’s dog. Karenin, as an animal, is simple and pure, and Kundera explicitly portrays him as so when he wakes up every morning with “a naïve and simple amazement” at existence (132). She loves Karenin wholly and unconditionally. “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power,” Kundra writes, again highlighting the necessity of simplicity-revealing vulnerability in love (289). Karenin becomes Tereza’s anchor to replace her lost simplicity and wonder. Tereza seeks nature by loving him.
If Tereza represents evolving simplicity, then Tomas represents the subject experiencing her simplicity in his poetical world. As Schiller mentions, nature can only exist as an object in a poetical world, and no longer as an active or passive subject, as it vanishes in society. Tomas is by no means simple. He is described as a strong and independent libertine, and his character does not experience Tereza’s initial level of simplicity as a subject. He is instead pessimistic and cynical, concluding “that the love story of his life exemplified not ‘Es muss sein!’ (It must be so), but rather ‘Es könnte auch anders sein’ (It could just as well be otherwise)” (35). His character and perspective make his love for Tereza sentimental, as he is aware of how his decadent behavior contrasts with Tereza’s naïve goodness yet is unable to change despite knowing how much it hurts her (21). Her simplicity highlights his own impurity, and he loves her for it. However, as Tereza loses her childlikeness, his sentimental love no longer has a basis, and thus Tereza dreams that he sends her to die — in her fallen state, she is no longer lovable to him (146–151).
As described earlier, Tereza is able to love Tomas after he becomes weak, and they live a simple, rural life on a collective farm. Miraculously, years after Tereza’s fall and loss of child-like charm, Tomas finally embodies the same simplicity-revealing vulnerability that Karenin represents by becoming a rabbit in Tereza’s mind. Thus, her character comes full circle, and she returns to simplicity, if only briefly, before she and Tomas die in a car accident driving home. This moment becomes the eternity of love that they had been seeking their whole lives with each other, as both simple lovers’ natures finally align.
Tereza and Tomas’s relationship, as well as Kundera’s observations as the narrator, reveal that real love corresponds to Schiller’s simplicity of nature. Then, Schiller’s artifice corresponds to Kundera’s descriptions of kitsch in the novel. When introducing the term, Kundera defines it as so:
’Kitsch’ is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human experience. (248)
In other words, kitsch distills the human experience into something artificially palatable by deeming natural bodily functions as crude and unacceptable — it is the epitome of artifice.
However, this conception of kitsch introduces tension into the theory that real love is simple. Kundra states that “The identity of kitsch comes not from a political strategy but from images, metaphors, and vocabulary” (261). So, is love also kitsch, then, given Tomas falls in love with Tereza because of a metaphor? And if it is kitsch, or artificial, how can it also be simple? To reconcile such a contradiction, I propose that the experiences surrounding love can be separated from the experience of love itself. Experiences adjacent to love can be kitsch, but the essence of love is simple — the feeling itself is simple. The kitsch of a metaphor is transformed into nature the moment it enters the poetic memory, much like how “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine” (Kundera 4). Once an event or thought passes, it gains a new nostalgic identity. The metaphor is no longer experienced as a subject, but as an object for the sentimental lover, or Tomas.
While Schiller views artifice as negative in his essay, Kundera maintains a neutral stance on kitsch. He condemns it using Sabina’s character but admits that “none of us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition” (256). Though kitsch is a corrupting force, it is also a necessary element of being human. Tomas and Tereza fall into kitsch with their mutually repellent sentimentality, Tomas’s metaphor, and Tereza’s abandonment of herself when she sleeps with the anonymous engineer (154). However, once all the kitsch elements are removed in their simple, rural life, the revealed essence of their love is ultimately simple. Love in The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with kitsch but transcends it in the end.
By following the growing pains of a simple love between Tereza and Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera demonstrates that love is inevitable in the face of simplicity-revealing vulnerability. Love is like nature because the lover enters as an object in one’s poetic memory, much like how nature enters as a sentimental object in the poetic world. This notion is especially prominent in the novel, as Kundera frames vulnerability and weakness as necessary for love, for it reveals one’s nature. Though moments of Tereza and Tomas’s relationship can be viewed as kitsch and artificial, the essence of their love remains simple. They finally end their lives with a healthy love as they both love in alignment with the other – they become weak together, and thus, happy.