My Fucking Paper

Final Paper
Philosophy of Literature in Western Culture
By Grace Byrne
The basis of this thesis is that dreams are a central commonality between lightness and heaviness as presented by Milan Kundera‘s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This commonality is explored through the compatibility of dreams with reality and its corresponding effect on weight. Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel expands upon this effect by showing the pervasiveness of dreams in all literature.
The 6th century philosopher Parmenides that Kundera questions in the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being believed that nothing could come of nothing. I interpret this nothing in the context of Kundera‘s novel to mean that any sense of meaning is reliant on its realization of reality. In Kundera’s novel the alternative to reality is nothing, and nothing is a dream. In other words Parmenides was saying dreaming leads to dreams and nothing else, so we should focus on reality.
For the purposes of this paper dreaming is meaning embodied in metaphors, unrealized futures and pasts, dreaming in sleep, and creating hypothetical scenarios. While exploring the notion of dreams with specific examples it becomes difficult to distinguish when meaning is drawn by reality and drawn by dreams. Kundera seemed to understand this on a surface level but never reconciled with it in The Unbearable Lightness of Being except for to pose the problem with a series of stories.
Dreaming brings life out of any momentary emotion, and into the depth upon which meaning is based. The relationships within the Unbearable Lightness of Being illustrate this through it characters and its’ very existence. These stories question the bond between reality and dreams, and therefore our relationships to meaning in lightness or heaviness.
Lightness was Parmenides intended view point in effect. It’s a detachment from any overarching meaning where there is no one meaning or significance to events. Lightness in Kundera’s terms came from the singularity of a moment, because at any given time we can only make one choice with no true point of comparison. Therefore there is no destiny that can be known or necessity to any one particular choice. This sense of realism was embodied in Thomas’ character.
Womanizing is the most prominent example of his tendency toward lightness. He’s always sleeping with women, and never wants to feel tied to them with any emotional responsibility. As a result, in the beginning of the book he had refused to even fall asleep next to any women for the past nine years. Before Tereza there was no necessity to be in love with the women he was romantically involved with, because it would place importance on his relationship with one woman. A relationship with one woman would require a hypothetical notion that she was above all other options. For Thomas to fall asleep next to a woman would have been granting her the intimacy of dreams. To be in love would be to have placed meaning in dreams, and to Thomas reality wasn’t made of dreams.
Kundera believed heaviness in contrast to be a sense of external meaning and attachment. A heavy person has no coincidences, everything has the capability to unlock their destiny. Meaning is dealt with as if preordained. Thomas’ wife Tereza’s had a relationship to meaning that was generally heavy and burdened. For example she reacted to all of the events that lead up to her and Tomas’s relationship as if destiny had exposed itself to her rather than chance, a belief that was thoroughly embedded in dreams.
Many of the characters in this novel who exhibited heavy behaviors were shown as unaware or cumbersome for their capacity to have dreams effect their reality. Kundera portrayed through these characters that this mindset which is generally indicative of over sentimentality often leads to escapism or the ‘the stopover between being and oblivion.’ Kundera called the characters of Franz and Simon the dreamers because of their inconsequential determination to give their experiences underlying meaning.
Later in the book there is a chapter dedicated to Tereza‘s dream sequences in her sleep, and how she interpreted them as significant in her relationship with Thomas. This chapter interweaves reality with dreams to the extent that the reader often confuses their interpretation of the reading. As I experienced this confusion and insanity I began to wonder if a light person really must become heavy to love, and if Tereza’s insanity was inevitable because of her weight. If everything tends towards confusion with weight, is the confusion of dreams indicative of weight? If this is the case, and Parmenides was right to think that dreams lead only to dreams how can one know when one is dreaming?
Dreams are not always clear cut or avoidable. I will take an example of dreaming in the midst of the lightness of Thomas. In the fourth chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera described Thomas’s metaphor for Tereza. This was the first sign of Thomas’s ability to be heavy within his own lightness. He thought of her as a cradle that had come to him on a river bed like the baby Moses. This metaphor was classified as dangerous by Kundera, I believe because it was heaviness camouflaged in a dream. Imagining Tereza in the way that he did led Thomas to envision a future. ‘What if Moses had never been rescued?’ he had thought to himself, in other words, ‘What if I’m missing out on the love of my life?’ This was supposing a certain destiny to his relationship with Tereza, and this metaphor becomes a reality as it brings him closer to her. This occurs directly before and after he so lightly accepts that he has no point of comparison for his decisions. If dreams are inconsequential as Parmenides stated and Kundera pondered, than how is it that a light person like Thomas may have a dream which leads him to the realization of that dream in reality? If dreams and reality are so clearly undefined, can there be a light dream?
Thomas eventually did realize the opportunity of lightness within his dreams, “Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.” This was Thomas’ take on Nietzsche’s eternal return in which every decision and choice that is made is repeated again and again forever. It is a hypothetical theory, a dream that Kundera perceived as adding heaviness to everything because of the destiny to fulfill itself. For Thomas however it seemed that decisions on these other planets have the option of being changed as circumstances are repeated. As each planet was contemplated there wasn’t a sense of a destiny, only a knowledge of previous choices that gives his dream the same freedom of options his life has. The meaning in this vision of the future was held in his recognition that in order to even justify hopes or lack there of it is necessary to dream. All dreams can therefore be a justification to not only be positive or negative but also heavy or light. These dreams are necessity for someone as light as Thomas to maintain a vision of the future or sense of direction towards wants without believing it will occur in accordance with destiny.
The will to maintain lightness over a prolonged period of time is a vision of the future with meaning and is therefore in itself a dream. It is a dream that becomes attached to its subject in a very similar respect to the dreams which ensue a heavy relationship to meaning.
If dreams are then not strictly heavy, what factors of a situation distinguish a light dream from a heavy dream, and what are the effects of these on weight? The difficulty demonstrated in subjectively recognizing dreams as dreams in specific circumstances means that these distinguishing factors can not be identified in the intent of the dream or the dream itself.
The differences between heavy dreams and light dreams must be founded instead in the opposing reactions to these dreams that exposes the person’s relationship to meaning. The lighter person will more easily excuse their dreams when their meaning is betrayed by circumstance. The heavier person will not easily let go but they will dream with the attachment of destiny.
Thomas was a constantly coping with the detachment of the lightness in his dreams. He thought of whether or not to do the right thing, such as when he sat staring at the court yard wall again and again. Each time he found himself thinking that life is light, that there is no other logical choice. He was bound to this idea more so than to many ideas of what he believed ‘must be.’ Despite this belief, throughout the novel he lightly lost his lightness in order to heavily dream with heaviness. Eventually he found heaviness in his relationship with Tereza that confounded all will to be light. Thomas did so because each potential life he dreamt of was filled with the detachment that grants its release.
Each time this release occurs there is an opportunity to become heavy. To become heavy Thomas gave his dreams the attachment that guarantees they will last even when confronted by the lightness he believed must be. He did so for the first time with the metaphor of Tereza as the baby Moses, and eventually came to realize that what appeared as a metaphor had become a reality.
This attachment is what led Franz to his untimely death as he saw Sabina’s imaginary eyes upon him. It is also what led Franz’s wife to place ‘A Return after Long Wonderings’ upon Franz’s gravestone, and for Simon to search for his father relentlessly.
Conversely, Sabina’s dreams of her lightness after death were manifest in her wanting her body to be turned to ashes. It was the only dream that Sabina allowed to last because although death is a certainty, she could react to her dreams of death with detachment. With no vision except for lightness sustainable, she escaped her whole identity. Her dream of lightness became for her what Franz’s escape into the kitsch was for him. They escaped each other in their dreams. Franz’s dream ended in a tomb stone, Sabina’s dream in ashes.
Parmenides belief that nothing leads to nothing is now contradicted. One can not presume to know something doesn’t exist, because if something can’t be known through existence, nothing can be known of it, including whether it exists, so the certainty of Parmenides quote is unjustified. If this nothing is a dream, then the effects of dreams on both lightness and heaviness have equal potential.
All of the examples I have given thus far of the relation between dreaming and weight have been through characters’ stories in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To truly grasp the pervasiveness of dreaming, these concepts can be reintroduced through the lens of Lucak’s Theory of the Novel.
In order to further illuminate the way in which the dreams of Kundera’s plots can be understood, it is necessary to ground these concepts within a broader context of literature. Lightness and heaviness relate to novels and epics respectively in literature. According to Lucaks, the aim of a novel is to have the reader feel or identify with the characters while simultaneously freeing the reader from the characters’ world. Similarly, the aim of a light person is to feel and identify with the individual even though they are free of attachments to others. If one is light they will believe in individuality and inconsistency the same way the novel appeals to a detached and consequently diverse audience. Conversely, an epic is heavy in the same way a person can be heavy by attaching idealizations of people and circumstances to scenarios that have a definitive meaning. If one is heavy they will believe in sustaining this meaning even when circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise , much like the epic hero does, and thereby appealing to a conformed audience.
The novel has the difficulty of not offering some large resolve for the reader who wants to search for some large ideal, and the epic has the difficulty of too much weight and a failure to acknowledge the lack of consistency in reality, like the dreams which so over took the heaviness in this novel.
Since dreaming is the commonality between heaviness and lightness, this is also true of novels and epics. Characters represent the potential weight of dreams, and literature is the externalization of these dreams. The closer a dream comes to reality, the more attachment it ill be granted because it is bound and covered in a recognition of itself as a dream. Kundera chose to do so with a book that has a disdain for dreaming. This paradox gives the book an attachment to be detached within those who are heavy or light.

The question that this raises Kundera illustrates beautifully, “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 one else has discovered or said something essential about.” This statement is followed by one of the most pertinent questions which illuminates the dreams in lightness and heaviness, “But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?”