Professor Jolanta W. Wawrzycka

Betrayal as a Flight from Kitsch in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
by Jolanta W. Wawrzycka

This essay appeared as a chapter in a book titled Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction, Aron Aji, ed. Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1992 (pages 267-280).

 Copyright © Jolanta W. Wawrzycka.

Betrayal as a Flight from Kitsch in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

"Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death." (Kundera 253)

It is the inevitable condition of human beings that we are endowed with the capacity for responsibility. We either bear responsibility (that is, are responsible) for something, or assume responsibility, or are made responsible for something, or we act responsibly.1 The complexity of the issue increases when we consider our responsibility towards ourselves vis-à-vis our responsibility towards the others. Ideally, there is no moral dilemma if the two coincide. Realistically, however, they rarely do: having to make a choice often results in betrayal of one for the sake of another. On the level of "I" vs. "myself" we can betray our values, ideals, beliefs, or commitments; on the level of "I" vs. "the other" (or "others") we can betray our parents, lovers, spouses, children, friends, colleagues, teachers/mentors, countrymen, and, implicitly, all the social institutions and orders that they represent: our family, community, church, political party, profession, or our country.

But when does the act of leaving behind one's values, or family, or country become the act of betrayal? Whose moral/ethical judgments deem certain decisions or actions a betrayal? These, among others, are the ever-recurring questions posed by the narrator and the characters of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Although it is well beyond this essay--as it is beyond the scope of the novel--to provide answers to these questions, it is, nevertheless, valuable and enlightening to analyze their nature and implications. The ontological basis of Kundera's inquiries and their epistemological ambitions seem to be at odds in the novel because the questions, rather than providing answers, perpetually bifurcate, until their initial gravity and urgent relevance dilapidate, thin out, become imponderous, weightless, unbearably so.

Because of the periodic accumulation of questions, the style of Kundera's novel approaches at times the dimensions of a profoundly philosophical inquiry.2 Beginning with the simple example of responsibility assumed by Oedipus who "put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes" (176) for unwittingly causing a number of disasters, Kundera has his protagonist Tomas accuse the Communists of giving Czechoslovakia into the Soviets' hands. As a retort to their pledges of innocence ("We didn't know! We were deceived! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!" 176), Kundera can only pose the following questions: "Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?" (176) Is "a man innocent because he didn't know? Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?" (177)

In a way, for over two millennia, Western ethics tried to propose some possible answers to these eternal dilemmas. As early as in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that people are "punished for offenses committed through ignorance of some provision of the law which they ought to have known, and might have known without difficulty; and so in other cases ignorance is held to be due to negligence, on the ground that the offender need not have been ignorant, as he could have taken the trouble to ascertain facts."3 Kundera speculates that the majority of Communists were, in fact, unaware of the atrocities committed by the most devout enthusiasts of the regime (176-177), but to him the level of their awareness is not an issue at all. He has Tomas say:

As a result of your 'not knowing', this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you've done? How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have put them out and wondered away from Thebes! (177)

Obviously these questions imply the presence in the novel of another kind of betrayal not yet mentioned here: the betrayal of whole nations by their governments endured for decades by a number of nations in the Soviet-occupied part of Europe. One could actually advance a thesis that all the betrayals in the novel stem from this single, fundamental betrayal. Since 1945, when the countries of Central Europe became the satellites of the Soviet Union, many Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, East Germans and others have emigrated to the West. They were judged harshly by those who remained for "betraying" their countries, their nations' struggle and their peoples' cause, all (it was said) for the sake of personal gain abroad. Here the individual's responsibility toward him- or herself and for his/her own well-being clashes with responsibility toward and for the other(s). Faced with the necessity of choice dictated by the needs of personal fulfillment on the one hand, and by historical and socio-political circumstances on the other, no individual can find a compromise; the choice between "either this" "or that" necessarily results in betrayal of one cause for the other. Schopenhauer (and before him Parmenides, Plato, etc.) had formulated this deterministic axiom almost a century ago when he observed: "To a given man under given circumstances, are two actions possible, or only one? The answer of all who think deeply: only one."4

Significantly enough, it is the female character of Sabina who provides the context for the notion of betrayal in Kundera's novel. She is also the only character who after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia emigrates and remains in the West (Tomas and Tereza having returned to their country after just several months abroad). Sabina, as conceived by Kundera, is, in fact, "charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity." (91) She has always associated the word "fidelity" with the sheltered, limited world of her Puritan father, a provincial Sunday-painter of "woodland sunsets and roses in vases" (91). Although she had taken to painting after her father, already in her teenage years she was all too thoroughly aware of the lethal 5 escapism of his kitsch "art," as well as of punitive/normative injunctions of his religion. The imminent betrayal of her father came when he forbade her, roughly at the same time, to see the boy she loved; her betrayal had taken a form of imitating Picasso (ridiculed and dismissed by her father) and later, of marrying an aspiring actor (bound to be equally ridiculed and dismissed by him). Eventually, when Sabina went off to Prague to study art, she did so filled "with the euphoric feeling that now at least she could betray her home" (91).

Betray and not disobey. The economy of obedience and disobedience sustains and fuels the whole apparatus of power. Obedience, as Marcuse discusses it in the politico-religious context of Luther and Calvin, is "the mechanism which holds the worldly order together: a system emanating from the family, of subjectio and superioritas, to which God has given his name for protection: 'The titles of Father, God and Lord, all meet in him alone . . ." (5). But, as James Joyce puts it, "Fatherhood is a legal fiction." Hélène Cixous, in quoting Joyce, elaborates that "Paternity, which is a fiction, is fiction passing itself off as truth. Paternity is the lack of being which is called God. Men's cleverness was in passing themselves off as fathers and 'repatriating' women's fruits as their own. A naming trick. Magic of absence. God is men's secret."6 And, may I add, men's power exerted through obedience to God's law. In other words, obedience is the function of the dialectics of power where subjectio is both granting and accepting power exerted by superioritas. But it appears that Sabina is conceived by Kundera to be on the margins (if not outside) of this dialectic, both on the level of family and of the state. A single paternal prohibition has triggered in Sabina not so much disobedience or transgression of the system (potentially amendable by the repentance and reconciliation), as betrayal of the very foundations of the whole spatial order that shaped her: the inscriptive autoletic space of her family dwelling (province, shelter), prescriptive, mimetic space of her father's art (woodlands, vases), and proscriptive, autocratic spatio-temporality of their life (Puritanism, Sunday-painting). However, to the extent that nothing can really exists outside power structures of pater familias, such interpretation would seem wanting. But "power structures," as understood by Foucault, are neither a group of oppressive institutions, nor a mode of subjugation, nor system of domination of one group over the other. Instead, Foucault sees power as:

the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate, as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they [these force relations] take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. 7

For Foucault power is omnipresent because it is "produced from one moment to the next [and] from one point to another."8 The self-propagation of power is "simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement." 9 Sabina, then, could be seen as caught in the middle of such mobilities and yet constantly disallowing the process of crystallization of these forces into any sort of centrality, institution, nominalistic trap.

But once in the state-run Academy of Fine Arts, however, Sabina is again forbidden something: this time, to follow Cubists. But she is not alone: she is among her fellow-students, soul-mates artists, trapped by politico-historical circumstances in an alien/ating socialist ethos:

It was the period when so-called social realism was prescribed and the school manufactured portraits of Communist statesmen. Her longing to betray her father remained unsatisfied: Communism was merely another father, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and Picasso, too. And if she married a second-rate actor, it was only because he had a reputation for being eccentric and unacceptable to both fathers (91-92) [emphasis added].

Sabina's ultimate, if ironical, escape from her biological father came when he, grief-stricken after her mother's death, took his own life. Here Kundera resorts to the deus-ex-machina device to effect Sabina's "escape," and such an authorial trick allows him 1) to save Sabina's character from crystallizing into a stereotype of a cynical rebellious daughter, and 2) to show Sabina in pangs of conscience as the new circumstances force her to re-examine her father's world, values, and mode of thinking. Her questioning whether it was, indeed, so reprehensible that her father painted roses and could not live without his wife reverberates beyond the scope of the novel and crosses over to the ethical problems of validity of judgments passed by children on parents, by one human being on another, etc. But whereas the same authorial trick could plunge Sabina's character into trite sentimentality and melodrama of a repentant daughter vis-à-vis a judicious father, Kundera manages to save Sabina from such a fate, paradoxically, by endowing her with the ever-human capacity for embracing kitsch: after her parents' death she began to transform the memory of the once detestable, provincial house of her parents' into an image of an ideal home, a kitsch image of a peaceful and quiet place with two windows lit by the sunlight and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father (255).

Kitsch as a saving grace? Kitsch as a novelistic strategy? Kundera seems to employ kitsch here as the mean of either of the extremes that Sabina could fall into. The economies of power come back in the form of an ostensible inconsistency in Sabina's character. On the one hand, Kundera shows Sabina sensitive to the magic of the kitsch image of family: " . . . more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day." (255) On the other hand, though, he also presents her as an artist who considers kitsch her enemy (255), a subject to which I will come back later in this essay. Two forces are at work here in Sabina: one, a deeply moral force fostered and perpetuated by bourgeois ideology and ethos (and appealing to sentiments), and second, an artistic force, a strife towards autonomy (Kant calls autonomy "the supreme law"), functioning "only in reference to itself, [and aiming] at attaining through its immanent teleology what was once called beauty." 10 Such polarization of Sabina's sensibility may well have saved her art from kitsch, but her consciousness has forever been adulterated by the persistent socio-cultural kitschy image of family and family life.

As Theodor Adorno defines it, "kitsch or sugary trash is the beautiful minus its ugly counterpart. Therefore kitsch, purified beauty, becomes subject to an aesthetic taboo that in the name of beauty pronounces kitsch to be ugly." 11 More than just the dross of art, for Adorno, kitsch

lies dormant in art itself, waiting for a chance to leap forward at any moment. Fickle, like an imp, kitsch defies definition. The one enduring characteristics it has is that it preys on fictitious feelings, thereby neutralizing the real ones. Kitsch is a parody of catharsis. . . . It is useless to try and draw a fine line here between what constitutes true aesthetic fiction (art) and what is merely sentimental rubbish (kitsch).12

Kundera elucidates the notion of kitsch even more powerfully when he states:

The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not (…) depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children love.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

It is the second tear that makes the kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of men on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch. (251)

The powerful hegemony of kitsch, thus, does not stems from any centralized locus. The neo-romantic and symbolist art of the fin de siècle, in bracketing and denying the existence of the world of commodities, has itself become a commodity, thus bearing within itself a seed of kitsch. 13 In the power dynamics of beauty/ugliness, the second "persists as canon of prohibitions"14 and derives its power precisely from the taboo it thus fosters. As Foucault puts it: "power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society."15 The power of kitsch, like Foucaultian power as such, is a nominalistic phenomenon resulting from the warring socio-cultural economies. Sustained by the canon of prohibitions that are present at all levels of social organizations, kitsch has pervaded such concepts of pater familias as "marriage," "government," "law," "art," "church," etc. It has not only rendered them as commodities, but has also engaged the individuals in the dialectic of subjugation to these establishments, prohibiting to transgress them--they are the Logos, center, order, all tending towards some transcendental telos that these very institutions teach us to venerate.

In contrast, Sabina's character, first as an artist and later as an artist-exile, is conceived on the basis of another type of constant: her vehement instinct (or is it will?) for independence from pater familias. For Heidegger, such a freedom means "truth;" for Kant, such a freedom is "essentially moral--inner, intelligible--freedom and, as such, it is compulsion"16 (that is, the more one is morally compelled, the more free one is). Sabina then can be seen as representing all those who, to use Kundera's words, refuse to keep ranks, to raise fists in marches, to sell their souls to lost causes, and, as Marcuse would say it, to subordinate their individual reason to the universal prejudice called "patriotism: the absolute and general reign of national dogmas,"17 the kind of kitsch that appeals, as Kundera-the artist-exile succinctly puts it, to the realm of "the dictatorship of the heart"(250).18 The artist stands alone.

One is reminded here about James Joyce's pronouncement that "No man (…) can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself."19 That Kundera abhors the multitude is evident from his own exile and refusal to follow others "on the road to brotherhood." Through the character of Sabina, he grapples with the complex issue of resistance to power and with categorical refusal. Like power, resistance is present everywhere, contends Foucault, and like power, it lacks any "single locus of great Refusal . . . source of all rebellions. Instead there is a plurality of resistances."20 Deriving from no heterogeneous principle, resistances, he continues, are inscribed in power relations as "an irreducible opposite." From resistance there is only one step to refusal, then to dissent and, inevitably, to betrayal.

It is interesting to ponder the extent to which Kundera inscribes himself into Sabina's character, especially in the light of the fact that he also creates such male characters as Tomas and Franz, who, in terms of gender, would allow for a much more immediate identification. If she, indeed, is his fictional Doppelganger, why does Kundera choose a female character to explore the notion of betrayal?

On the one hand, if he valorizes betrayal negatively and construes Sabina's character as the embodiment of disobedience, then his "sentencing" her to loneliness and displacement is no other than a contemporary equivalent of an old dramatic and novelistic convention requiring that the heroine who dared, who trespassed, who defied patriarchal codes be "killed off." Seen in these terms, Sabina would simply be yet another female character "author/ized" by a male, another creation--in Sandra Gilbert's phrasing--"penned" by man, "sentenced," "indited/indicted." A heroine in such a convention, argues Gilbert, is wholly at the mercy of her creator: "As a thought he has `framed,' she [is] both `framed' (enclosed) in his texts, glyphs, graphics, and `framed up' (found guilty, found wanting) in his cosmologies."21

On the other hand, however, if Kundera regards betrayal as a positive, universally human behavior, then his implicit identification with Sabina and, by extension, with women, has a much more profound meaning than the superficial reading would suggest. The fact that Kundera's two main female characters in this novel are artists in exile (Tereza, after all, is a photographer; she is also an exile in her own marriage) points to his recognition that women--artists in the sense that they create, build, nurse--are perpetual exiles from the men's world of wars and political conflicts which destroy, dismantle, dis/ease; they are exiles from love, such as represented in the novel by Tomas's love for Tereza, for Sabina, and for the trail of women he "marked" as his; they are exiles from the paternal/patriarchal concept of love that basically forbids on all levels of pater familias. It can only be speculated to what extent Kundera's own exile affected his attitude toward betrayal; he seems to harbor a pervasive ambiguity about the ethical undertones of this complex notion and project it into Sabina's character.

Indeed, the ambiguity of her attitude to betrayal always lingers in the periphery of her conscience as she remembers the lessons "told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable... (91). Although betrayal of her home has opened the world for her, it still remains "irreparable. It causes a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes [her] further and further away from the point of [her] original betrayal." (92) Sabina's life in numerous western European cities and later in the United States proves this to be true. Although Kundera allows us to hear the hopeful voice of Sabina's (his own?) conscience that perhaps there is an end to all betrayals (98), he also seems to justify her ways by making allowance for the following reflection:

But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown (91).

Even when Kundera shows her living in the United States as a successful painter sponsored by art connoisseurs, he still manages to sabotage this seemingly "settled" image of her; we see her aware of the fact that when the sponsors die, her

path of betrayals will continue elsewhere, and from the depth of her being, a silly mawkish song about two shining windows and the happy family living behind them would occasionally make its way into the unbearable lightness of being. (256)

As we already saw, Sabina is only too conscious of trite sentimentality of her image of home. Kitsch is the one "power" she cannot leave behind or betray. However, as Kundera shows, by recognizing kitsch as kitsch, she manages to render harmless its "authoritarian power" and to make it "as touching as any human weakness." (256) "For none among us," proclaims Kundera, "is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition"(256). Kitsch is a mimesis of fictitious sentiments created by a given cultural set of paradigms (all the pater familias institutions mentioned before). Kitsch, says Kundera, has "its source in the categorical agreement with being" (256) and, in this context, operates as a sort of "truth," a common denominator for human emotions, a point of reference, a center, a teleological exclamation mark. Foucault would see kitsch as one of the "cultural archives" and the reading of such an archive would result from "strategically contesting all claims to truth which ignore the diversity of possible view points,"22 which is exactly how kitsch operates. By ignoring multiplicity of perspectives, kitsch presupposes transcendental knowledge and power, and hence, claims a monopoly on truth, "since what counts as 'truth' for any given culture is a product of forces which work to legitimate certain forms of knowledge and repress or marginalize others."23 And these are exactly the forces that humans, locked into socio-cultural economies, cannot escape. We can only neutralize them, like we see Sabina neutralize the power of kitsch.

Kitsch, then, seems to be at the very root of Sabina's betrayals. Throughout the novel Sabina's ceaseless flight from kitsch is based on the repulsion she felt toward totalitarianism as such: paternal autocratism at first, and Communism later. In her mind, they seem to have conflated into one. Her repulsion toward Communism had not so much ethical, as aesthetic grounds, and the ugliness of the Communist world ("ruined castles transformed into cow sheds" 248-249) repelled her less than the mask of beauty that this world tried to wear (cf. her father's "art"!); what repelled her was the Communist kitsch (249). To amplify that, Kundera allows Sabina's art to speak for itself and devises it as a testimony of a true artist in her when he describes how, in her Prague days, Sabina had always managed to save her paintings from socialist realism kitsch by supplementing the "intelligible lie" of the surface with the "unintelligible truth showing through." (63; 254) Her paintings, old and new,

all featured the confluence of two themes, two worlds, . . . they were all double exposures so to speak. A landscape showing an old-fashioned table lamp shining through it. An idyllic still life of apples, nuts, and a tiny, candle-lit Christmas tree showing a hand ripping through the canvas. (63-64)

Ironically, by the time she is "author/ized" to proclaim in fury: "My enemy is kitsch, not Communism," (254) she had already lived in exile. Kundera illustrates the predicament or an "émigré artist from "behind an Iron Curtain" as follows: he has a German political group organize an exhibit of Sabina's works; the group makes available to the public an introductory catalogue about Sabina, with her picture behind superimposed barbed wires and a biography of a martyr-saint who had "struggled against injustice, been forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle." (254) Kundera, aware of the fact that "the identity of kitsch comes not from a political strategy but from images, metaphors, and vocabulary" (261), has Sabina object to the catalogue's text, of course, in vain. In what amounts to a powerful albeit tacit statement, Kundera has Sabina delete facts from her biography, so that, by the time we see her in California, she has actually been able to conceal the fact that she is even Czech. (254) Kundera is thus offering a justification of his character's desperate attempt "to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life." (254) Ironically though, by trying to save her from one fiction called "Sabina, the Czech artist-martyr," he plunges her into to another one, called "Sabina, the non-Czech." But, by extension, Kundera is also dispensing a compassionate absolution of sorts to all of the expatriates-by-choice who had ever felt the need to disinvite unsolicited pity from those among whom they came to live, a pity that only too often reduces the ethos of their exile to the pathos of kitsch.

But here the question emerges whether the decision to deny one's nationality is a betrayal. Was it the ultimate act of betrayal on Sabina's part? Has she reached the end of her betrayals? Until a certain time, writes Kundera,

her betrayals filled her with excitement, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love, were gone--what was left to betray? Sabina felt emptiness around her. What if emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?

When Sabina lives in California, "farther west, farther from the country where she had been born" (273), the emptiness is magnified by the fact that she takes "less and less interest n her native land" (272). Significantly, we do not see her keep in touch with the Czech émigrés either, and, by explaining the reasons for Sabina's aloofness, Kundera offers a biting criticism of émigré activists: only too often their chief interest is to use gatherings of exiles as an excuse to point accusatory fingers at others for not staying in the old country and continuing the struggle (95), thus turning the cause into kitsch.

Kundera also explores the specific nature of the fear of death peculiar to the émigrés. Sabina's sense of rootlessness and alienation is gradually replaced by the fear of "shutting herself into a grave and sinking into American earth." (273) He explains that her fright is a result of how negatively most of the American cemeteries compare with the European ones. The coldness of stones 24 put on graves and the trim, barren, contrived regularity of the American cemeteries bear no resemblance to those "sweet, nostalgic" (104) places that the word "cemetery" has always evoked in Sabina's memory:

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. (…) When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby. (104)

Of course, like the sweet image of a perfect home, this image of a perfect final resting place is another kitsch that Sabina has found herself nourishing. Like many before her, Sabina is unable to reconcile herself in death to what she had spent a lifetime renouncing. Aware that "before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch" (278), and unable to surrender to it even in death, she "one day composed a will in which she requested that her body be cremated and its ashes thrown to the winds." (273) As Foucault says, death is the power's limit, the moment that escapes power, "the most secret aspect of existence, the most 'private'."25 Kundera's authorial decision has thus brought his character to the only logical conclusion if, as a character, she is to remain consistent--responsible for herself, as well as true to her own self -- to the end. The essence of that fidelity is her ultimate freedom.26

But that is only the "I" vs. "myself" part of the ethical dimensions of responsibility mentioned at the beginning of this essay. The "I" vs. "the other(s)" is problematic in Sabina's case: considering her attitude to her dead parents, to the death of Tomas and Tereza, and to her homeland, could it be that she is simply free from the sense of responsibility for others? By presenting a life such as Sabina's, could Kundera be transmitting a profound message about the potential--and actual--costs of freedom from responsibility for family, fellow-citizens, and the fate of one's own nation? In case of Sabina, these costs appear to be tremendous: an irrevocable displacement and aloneness, later magnified by fear that in death, "they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable." (125)

But Kundera spares Sabina form being covered up with a stone. Arguably, he designed her character so as to illustrate the possibility of escape from--or is it betrayal of?--all the restraints that various socio-political circumstances and institutions incessantly impose upon us. Sabina, to state it more radically, seems to have escaped (betrayed?) the kitsch of human life both in the Communist world and in the so called "free" world; she seems to have escaped (betrayed?) the burden of la condition humain that dictates the rules for us to follow without many allowances for choices. In a way, Sabina seems even to have escaped (betrayed?) death, or at least all the socio-cultural implications of what it means to be dead, by refusing to have a grave and to be put under a stone adorned with pink plastic flowers.

Considering that the character of Sabina has crystallized in the process of a series of betrayals, it is paradoxical that the question posed at the beginning of this essay, whether or not it is a betrayal to leave one's values or country behind, does not seem to apply to Sabina. After all, the values she "betrayed" (marriage; her country in the grip of totalitarian Communist regime) were never really her own. If she relegated them to the level of sentimentality and kitsch, and if kitsch "has its source in the categorical agreement with being" (256), as it does in terms of all the other characters of this novel, then Sabina's constant flight from kitsch demonstrates her categorical disagreement with Being, especially with the conditions that Being is obligated to obey. Whose judgment is it to deem it betrayal?

Notes.

1. After Roman Ingarden, Man and Value, p. 53.

2. Cf. pages 3 through 8 of Kundera's novel.

3. All over the novel there are short chapters interwoven into the narration, with clusters of questions, often rhetorical. Cf. Part Three, chapter 4 (esp. p. 97); Part Four, chapter 6 (esp. p. 139); Part Five, chapter 2, 9, 15 (esp. p. 222), 16, 23; Part Six, chapter 2 and 13; and many single rhetorical questions scattered throughout the novel, too numerous to list here.

4. Schopenhauer, 62.

5. Marcuse, Studies in Political Philosophy, 67.

6. Cixous, 100

7. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92.

8. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 93.

9. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 93.

10. Adorno, 89

11. Adorno, 71

12. Adorno, 340

13. Adorno, 337. Also, Foucault talks about representations as commodities, when he mentions that "representation ceased to have validity as the locus of origin of living beings, needs, and words, or as the primitive seat of their truth; . . . It is no longer their identity that beings manifest in representation, but the external relation they establish with the human being. [Man is designated by them since] the relation between his needs and the means he possesses to satisfy them is such that he is necessarily the principle and means of all production" (The Order of Things, 313).

14. Adorno, 68

15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 93.

16. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 10. Also, she could be seen as Kundera's interpretation of what Schopenhauer describes to be the basic human character: individual, empirical, constant, and inborn. Cf. Schopenhauer's discussion of the character of man, his will and consciousness of others in Essay on Freedom of the Will, pp. 49-64.

17. Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy, 116.

18. Cf. Franz's fascination with Sabina as a victim of and the refugee of the Communist regime; with marches for brotherhood, equality, and justice; with raised fists and with the leftist political kitsch in general, all in accordance with the following definition: "What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March." (257)

19. Joyce, "The Day of the Rabblement," p. 69.

20. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 96.

21. Sandra Gilbert, 13.

22. Norris, 199.

23. Norris, 199.

24. Stones on the graves horrified Sabina because she has always believed that:

"when graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't get out anyway! What difference does it make whether they are covered with soil or stones? The difference is that if a grave is covered with a stone it means we don't want the deceased to come back. The heavy stone tells the deceased, "Stay where you are!"

That made Sabina think about her father's grave. There was soil above his grave with flowers growing out of it and a maple tree reaching down to it, and the roots and flowers offered his corpse a path out of the grave. If her father had been covered with a stone, she would have never been able to communicate with him after he died, and hear his voice in the trees pardoning her." (124)

25. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 138

26. As Heidegger states, "The essence of truth if freedom" (Basic Writings, p. 125). It is presented by Heidegger as "accordance," while the essence of freedom as "the inner possibility of accordance" and "correctness," and hence as the openness to "let being be." When Kundera parallels this concept of truth embodying it in the character of Sabina, the Heideggerian opposite of truth, "untruth" (or "dissimulation, lies and deception" [Heidegger 126]), stands for everything that Sabina despises and therefore needs to live free from the public eye in order to avoid having to make "allowances for that eye" and live "in lies" (Kundera 113).

Works Cited.

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1984.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Foucault, Michael. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1978.

---. The Order of Things. New York: Random House, 1970.

Gilbert, Sandra. "The Queen's Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity." The Madwoman in the Attic. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Ingarden, Roman. Man and Value. Transl. Artur Szylewicz. Wien: Catholic University of American Press, 1983.

Joyce, James. "The Day of Rabblement." James Joyce. The Critical Writings. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Transl. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Marcuse, Herbert. Five Lectures. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

---. Studies in Critical Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

Norris, Christopher. The Contest of Faculties. London: Methuen, 1985.