The unbearable heaviness of embarrassment
Politics is an embarrassing pursuit. The zealot activist can be annoying and the tidal wave of texts and calls to vote in yet another meaningless election is exasperating. Nobody wants to talk about who they voted for at dinner parties or holiday get togethers.
For everyone involved it’s a humiliating ritual. And it’s a lesson for the disaffected bourgeoise intellectual that Czech novelist Milan Kundera depicts in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) in both a hyper philosophical and scatological manner.
Tomas, the surgeon protagonist soon turned window washer, loathes the Communist regime and its adherents. It’s a hatred that becomes acute in the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968.
He’s prompted to write a letter to a local paper indicting those who allowed this, intentionally or not, and tacitly suggests they blind themselves in the manner of Oedipus.
But that is where his resistance ends. Even as he is punished by being removed from his surgeon position and forced into washing windows. He refuses to sign the petition against the new regime and declines to join his friend Franz in a trip to Cambodia to help provide aid to those suffering under the Vietnamese occupation.
For Tomas the process is depicted as a philosophical and literal hollowing out. Firstly, on the philosophical side he is divorced from his feelings.
Love begins with a metaphor.
In this instance, the feeling requires a representation, a linguistic substitute for it to be realised. The signifier precedes the signified.
Its logical conclusion is that being is tied up in representation, that the character in a novel is no different to the human in the material reality.
… characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?
Such a disavowal of one’s self comes clear on the scatological side. There are lengthy passages on defecating, a recurring daily activity that we are unable to speak of, yet it is all around in the pipes that weave around our rooms, akin to “ventricles” to the heart of the home.
Our embarrassment at this ritual lies at the heart of a cultural origins. Our image of God, who in turn made man in his own image as the doctrine says, is one free from the duty of defecating.
Either/or: either man was created in God’s image — and has intestines! — or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.
Yet it is in the human expulsion of waste or in sexual lubrication that the truth cannot be fully concealed. Tomas, a serial philanderer, does everything he can to hide the evidence of contact with other women in a rigorous cleaning routine. But this is a futile effort as Tereza confesses she has known all along.
‘For months now your hair has had a strong odour to it. It smells of female genitals. I didn’t want to tell you, but night after night I’ve had to breathe in the groin of some mistress of yours.’ The moment she finished, his stomach began hurting again. He was desperate. The scrubbings he’d put himself through. Body, hands, face, to make sure not the slightest trace of their odours remained behind.
Between our inner and outer selves is the embarrassment of truth. Our bodies are forever squirting out waste we try to pretend we don’t do. And yet how is this different from concealing our convictions we shy away from on a day-to-day basis for the greater good of a negative peace.
For Tomas it’s a melancholic rot borne of the despair of a historical moment that leaves people stunned and hopeless. Forever under the eye of a hostile totalitarian regime. However as we retreat from displaying who we are on the outside, we slowly find ourselves, our being, steadily hollowed out, paralysed by an empty inertia and unable to feel.