the unbearable lightness of peeing

So I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being again, after a period of some three years. I didn’t remember much of it, just a few scenes (colored park benches floating down a river, kinky sexual adventures with a bowler hat, intriguing philosophical reflections on Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, scatological musings, etc…) so I was able to sink into it more or less with a fresh mind.

Since I have changed so much in the interim of those years, it is difficult for me to read an author this didactic without some sort of mental protestation, some kind yeah but going through my head when I read his political tracts and this-is-how-things-are descriptions of mental states and behavior. Kundera is probably one of the most authoritative voices I have encountered, and if you don’t agree with what he is saying, you’re probably going to hate his books. There’s no arguing with him. He gives you characters and situations and tells you exactly who they are and what they mean. He doesn’t really describe more as proscribe, and so the worlds his character’s inhabit remain uncolored, sketched out. Except for a beautiful and startling comparison of a toilet to a water-lily rising out of the earth, this is not a book for people who like to be immersed into intricately constructed environments and atmosphere. What Kundera is unmatched at, however, is his structural form. His books are constructed as intricately woven proofs to complex philosophical ideas, so what you get is really an argument furnished by the ‘examples’ of character and behavior. What saves it all from being overbearing, obtuse or arrogant is that Kundera refuses to resolve dialectics – for every proof there is a counter-proof, for every successful explanation there is a foil. Shades of meaning build up on each other like musical motifs, like themes in a classical construction. And it also helps that he’s incredibly intelligent and funny in that wry, ironic smart-person way. Here’s an excerpt from a section explaining his ideas of ‘kitsch’:

1

Not until 1980 were we able to read in the Sunday Times how Stalin’s son, Yakov, died. Captured by the Germans during the Second World War, he was placed in a camp together with a group of British officers. They shared a latrine. Stalin’s son habitually left a foul mess. The British officers resented having their latrine smeared with shit, even if it was the shit of the son of the most powerful man in the world. They brought the matter to his attention. He took offense. They brought it to his attention again and again, and tried to make him clean the latrine. He raged, argued, and fought. Finally, he demanded a hearing with the camp commander. He wanted the commander to act as arbiter. But the arrogant German refused to talk about shit. Stalin’s son could not stand the humiliation. Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. He hit the target. His body, which would never again make a mess of the Britishers’ latrine, was pinned to the wire.

2

Stalin’s son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the conclusion that his father killed the woman by whom he had the boy. Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of God (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off. People feared him twofold: he could injure them by both his wrath (he was, after all, Stalin’s son) and his favor (his father might punish his cast-off son’s friends in order to punish him).
Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe – no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.
Then, at the very outset of the war, he fell prisoner to the Germans, and other prisoners, belonging to an incomprehensible, standoffish nation that had always been intrinsically repulsive to him, accused him of being dirty. Was he, who bore on his shoulders a drama of the highest order (as fallen angel and Son of God), to undergo judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit? Were the very highest drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close?
Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo?
It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall.
If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin’s son ran up to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a scales sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.
Stalin’s son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country’s territories to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country’s power to the west – yes, they died for something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of war, the death of Stalin’s son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.

3

When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me fright, because even though I had come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image – and God has intestines! – or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus “ate, drank, but did not defecate.”
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

4

In the fourth century, Saint Jerome completely rejected the notion that Adam and Eve had sexual intercourse in Paradise. On the other hand, Johannes Scotus Erigena, the great ninth century theologian, accepted the idea. He believed, moreover, that Adam’s virile member could be made to rise like an arm or a leg, when and as its owner wished. We must not dismiss this fancy as the recurrent dream of a man obsessed with the threat of impotence. Erigena’s idea has a different meaning. If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place in the world. The penis would rise not because we are excited but because we order it to do so. What the great theologian found incompatible with Paradise was not sexual intercourse and the attendant pleasure; what he found incompatible with Paradise was excitement. Bear in mind: there was pleasure in Paradise, but not excitement.
Erigena’s argument holds the key to a theological justification (in other words, a theodicy) of shit. As long as man was allowed to remain in Paradise, either (like Valentinus’ Jesus) he did not defecate at all, or (as would seem more likely) he did not look upon shit as something repellent. Not until after God expelled man from Paradise did He make him fell disgust. Man began to hide from what shamed him, and by the time he removed the veil, he was blinded by a great light. Thus, immediately after his introduction to disgust, he was introduced to excitement. Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses.
In Part Three of this novel I told the tale of Sabina standing half-naked with a bowler hat on her head and the fully dressed Tomas at her side. There is something I failed to mention at the time. While she was looking at herself in the mirror, excited by her self-denigration, she had a fantasy of Tomas seating her on the toilet in her bowler hat and watching her void her bowels. Suddenly her heart began to pound and, on the verge of fainting, she pulled Tomas down to the rug and immediately let out an orgasmic shout.

5

The dispute between those who believe the world was created by God and those who think it came into being of its own accord deals with phenomena that go beyond our reason and experience. Much more real is the line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation.
Behind all European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
“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 existence.

The Temptation of the West

My Amazon wish list, which I use as a general to-read schedule, is over five pages now, but I am slowly chipping away at it in the dank confines of second-hand bookstores and on the occasional trip to the over-commercialized gloss that is Indigo. It’s a last resort, I swear.

However when faced with yet another unfamiliar row of books squashed in the dusty closet space of Balfour’s or Seekers, I am tempted to forget my carefully wrought selections of literature, biography and philosophy. Such was the case with Andre Malraux’s early philosophical treatise masquerading as literature, “The Temptation of the West”.

I was intrigued both by the cover design by surrealist Joel Peter Johnson, as well as his connections with Charles de Gaulle’s government in France during the 60’s and his instrumental decision that sparked off one the most quixotically grand riots the world had seen.

Malraux was, at that time, the Minister of Culture in de Gaulle’s cabinet, and enjoyed a reputation with the cultural elite as being an astute critic and philosopher with a slightly risque body of work and extensive knowledge of Chinese culture, seeing as he had spent many years there and was witness to several (and at the time failed) communist uprisings.

Anyway, at this time the French New Wave was just starting up, and maverick film-makers like Jean-Luc Goddard (see Breathless if you haven’t already!) and Francis Truffaut were making ‘waves’ with the French youth, breaking all narrative convention in their movies and giving rise to concepts like the Auteur theory and Cinema Verite. I fell in love with movies after experiencing the intellectual headiness, the vigor, the anarchic flame embodied in every frame of works like Pierre le Fou and Band of Outsiders. And so did the disaffected youth at the time, suffering under unemployment, the militaristic regime of de Gaulle, and a ridiculously inept/corrupt university system.

In May of 1968, Henri Langlois, long-time film-archivist and operator of the popular cinema-phile hangout, the Cinematheque Francois, was fired from his job by Andre Malraux. Why did Malraux do this? He cited administrative incompetence, but for the bevy of head-strong iconoclasts like Goddard and Chabrol, there was an underlying sense of a clash of sensibilities, ironically the very same subject that is tackled in Malraux’s book. The Nouvelle Vague film-makers revolted, holding demonstrations in favor of Langlois and even ruining the Cannes Festival by storming theaters and holding down the curtains, preventing any films from being seen. This in turn sparked off larger riots, and before long hundreds of thousands of people, youth and otherwise, were marching in the streets (including Goddard, Truffaut, Chabrol and others), and after countless deaths, teargas canisters and car-fires (the regular repository for any riot), France’s ‘Fifth Republic’ was overturned.

As a cinephile, all this makes me a little giddy. It is almost inconceivable today for film directors to be so politically active and influential, and movies to be anything but expendable fodder for the popcorn-chewing masses. But I am contended that it was not always like this.

Anyways, what of Malraux, the unwitting spark to all that malcontent? His “The Temptation of the West” is set up as a series of letters from a Frenchman who travels to China to a Chinese who travels of Europe. The juiciest bits come from the rather stereotypically named Ling, who dissects Western civilization in the light of Eastern philosophies concerning art and the development of man. Here are some excerpts:

“We are not sketching a single illusory image of ourselves, but many images, some of which are hardly even rough drafts that the annoyed mentality rejects, even though it collaborated on the outlines. Any book, any conversation has the power to make these images appear; reinvigorated by each new passion, they change in accordance with our most recent pleasures or latest pains. However, they are potent enough to leave in us secret memories which then grow so great as to constitute one of the most important single elements of our lives: that awareness we have of ourselves which is so veiled, so opposed to reason that any attempt of the mind to understand it only makes it disappear. Nothing definite, nothing that allows us to define ourselves; only a sort of latent power… As if we lacked only the opportunity to carry out in the real world the exploits of our dreams, we retain the confused impression, not of having accomplished them, but of having been capable of accomplishing them. We are aware of this power within us just as an athlete, without thinking about it, is conscious of his strength. Pitiable actors who don’t want to stop playing our glorious roles, we are, in our own eyes, creatures in whom is dormant an unsophisticated and jumbled procession of act and dream.”

“The artist is not the man who creates, but the one who feels. Whatever may be the qualities, or the quality, of a work of art, it is minor, for it is no more than one proposition of beauty. All the arts are decorative. Consider, for example, bamboos, on which the multicolored birds of the imagination love to perch, or banyans, which have the pomp of funeral chants; give the gardener, a man worthy of consideration, his salary and at least some respect. But now look at the river which mirrors these things; it alone is truly worthy of admiration.”

“Reading and the theater, for unsophisticated people, are sources of imaginary lives. Nothing is less disinterested than the desire to know. The West, ignorant of opium, has the press. Each day’s struggling ambitions, defeated or victorious: a newspaper. What a world swirls behind the eyes of an absent-minded reader! This is what gives the men of our race a walled existence. Nothing reverberates inside them with the sound one would predict. Imagine, my friend, that among us there is not a man who has not conquered Europe. What possibilities for scorn…”

“When I say ‘cat’ what dominates my mind is not a picture of a cat, but an impression of certain supple, silent movements peculiar to cats. You distinguish among species only by their outlines. Such a distinction applies only in death. (It is said that your painters used to study the proportions of the human body by sketching cadavers.) … The notion of species is an awareness of what ties together the forms existing in individuals who belong to a group: the necessity of particular movements. That is why it can no more be exactly defined than can style; but style can be achieved, the sense of species, only suggested. Suggestion is the highest technical perfection in art; it is the symbol of the living as the outline is the symbol of the dead. To understand a universe of successive existences one must first understand suggestion, and it is by suggestion that the artists, in his play, discovers the universe. It marks the profound distinction between your conquest and our own: you go from the obvious analogies to more obscure ones, while we proceed to irreconcilable differences.”

Here is something very curious. The book was published in 1926, and I stumbled upon a passage that evokes the precise spirit of French existentialism that would gain force more than three decades later with Sartre and Camus:

“At the core of Western civilization there is a hopeless contradiction, in whatever shape we discover it: that between man and what he has created. This conflict between the thinker and his thought, between the European and his civilization or his reality, between the indiscriminate consciousness and its expression in the everyday world through everyday means – I find it in every aspect of contemporary life. Sweeping away facts and, finally, itself, this spirit of contradiction trains our consciousness to give way and prepares us for the metallic realms of the absurd.”