The unbearable lightness of being (28 page)

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tion (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 feel disgust. Man began to hide
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.

The dispute between those who believe that 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.

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Behind all the
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.

6

Sabina's
initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in
character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the
Communist world (ruined

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castles
transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear—in other
words, Communist kitsch. The model of Communist kitsch is the ceremony called
May Day.

She had seen May
Day parades during the time when people were still enthusiastic or still did
their best to feign enthusiasm. The women all wore red, white, and blue
blouses, and the public, looking on from balconies and windows, could make out
various five-pointed stars, hearts, and letters when the marchers went into
formation. Small brass bands accompanied the individual groups, keeping
everyone in step. As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most
blase faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were
properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper
agreement.
Nor were
they merely expressing political agreement with Communism; no, theirs was an
agreement with being as such. The May Day ceremony drew its inspiration from
the deep well of the categorical agreement with being. The unwritten, unsung
motto of the parade was not "Long live Communism!" but "Long
live life!" The power and cunning of Communist politics lay in the fact
that it appropriated this slogan. For it was this idiotic tautology ("Long
live life!") which attracted people indifferent to the theses of
Communism to the Communist parade.

Ten
years later (by which time she was living in America), a friend of some
friends, an American senator, took Sabina for a drive in his gigantic car, his
four children bouncing up and

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down
in the back. The senator stopped the car in front of a stadium with an
artificial skating rink, and the children jumped out and started running along
the large expanse of grass surrounding it. Sitting behind the wheel and gazing
dreamily after the four little bounding figures, he said to Sabina, "Just
look at them." And describing a circle with his arm, a circle that was
meant to take in stadium, grass, and children, he added, "Now that's what
I call happiness."

Behind his words
there was more than joy at seeing children run and grass grow; there was a
deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a Communist country where,
the senator was convinced, no grass grew or children ran.

At that moment an
image of the senator standing on a reviewing stand in a Prague square flashed
through Sabina's mind. The smile on his face was the smile Communist statesmen
beamed from the height of their reviewing stand to the identically smiling
citizens in the parade below.

How
did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their
souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the
fourth and began beating him up?

The senator had
only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind
finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the
heart reigns supreme.

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The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share.
Kitsch may not, therefore, 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 running on the grass, the motherland
betrayed, first 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 kitsch kitsch.

The brotherhood
of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.

And
no one knows this better than politicians. Whenever a camera is in the offing,
they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the
cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political
parties and movements.

Those of us who live in a society
where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences
cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch
inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality;

the artist can
create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power,
we find ourselves in the realm of
totalitarian kitsch.

When I say
"totalitarian," what I mean is that everything

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that
infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism
(because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling
brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end
by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything
must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the
man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree
"Be fruitful and multiply."

In this light,
we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose
of its refuse.

The
decade immediately following the Second World War was a time of the most
horrible Stalinist terror. It was the time when Tereza's father was arrested on
some piddling charge and ten-year-old Tereza was thrown out of their flat. It
was also the time when twenty-year-old Sabina was studying at the Academy of
Fine Arts. There, her professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory of
socialist art: Soviet society had made such progress that the basic conflict
was no longer between good and evil but between good and better. So shit (that
is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could exist only "on the other
side" (in America, for instance), and only from there, from the outside,
as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it penetrate the world of
"good and better."

And in fact, Soviet
films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that crudest of
times, were saturated

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with
incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict that could occur between
two Russians was a lovers' misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved
him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall
into each other's arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.

The current conventional
interpretation of these films is this: that they showed the Communist ideal,
whereas Communist reality was worse.

Sabina always rebelled against that
interpretation. Whenever she imagined the world of Soviet kitsch becoming a
reality, she felt a shiver run down her back. She would unhesitatingly prefer
life in a real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat queues. Life
in the real Communist world was still livable. In the world of the Communist
ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to
say, she would die of horror within a week.

The feeling Soviet kitsch evoked in
Sabina strikes me as very much like the horror Tereza experienced in her dream
of being marched around a swimming pool with a group of naked women and forced
to sing cheerful songs with them while corpses floated just below the surface
of the pool. Tereza could not address a single question, a single word, to any
of the women; the only response she would have got was the next stanza of the
current song. She could not even give any of them a secret wink; they would
immediately have pointed her out to the man standing in the basket above the
pool, and he would have shot her dead.

Tereza's dream reveals the true
function of kitsch: kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.

In the realm of
totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any
questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is
the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through
the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact,
that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to
Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth
showing through.

But the people who struggle against
what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts.
They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes
understand, to provoke collective tears.

Sabina had once had an exhibit that
was organized by a political organization in Germany. When she picked up the
catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a drawing of
barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography that read like the
life of a saint or martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been
forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle.
"Her paintings are a struggle for happiness" was the final sentence.

She protested,
but they did not understand her.

Do you mean that modern art isn't
persecuted under Communism?

"My enemy is kitsch, not
Communism!" she replied, infuriated.

From that time on, she began to
insert mystifications in her biography, and by the time she got to America she
even managed to hide the fact that she was Czech. It was all merely a
desperate attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life.

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She stood in front
of her easel with a half-finished canvas on it, the old man in the armchair
behind her observing every stroke of her brush.

"It's
time we went home," he said at last with a glance at his watch.

She laid down her palette and went
into the bathroom to wash. The old man raised himself out of the armchair and
reached for his cane, which was leaning against a table. The door of the studio
led directly out to the lawn. It was growing dark. Fifty feet away was a white
clapboard house. The ground-floor windows were lit. Sabina was moved by the two
windows shining out into the dying day.

All her life she had proclaimed
kitsch her enemy. But hadn't she in fact been carrying it with her? Her kitsch
was her image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving
mother and wise father. It was an image that took shape within her after the
death of her parents. The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the
more sensitive she was to its magic, and 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.

She had met the
old man in New York. He was rich and liked paintings. He lived alone with his
wife, also aging, in a house in the country. Facing the house, but still on his
land, stood an old stable. He had had it remodeled into a studio for Sabina and
would follow the movements of her brush for days on end.

Now all three of
them were having supper together. The old woman called Sabina "my
daughter," but all indications

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