Destruction in We and TULoB

In both We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera there is a constant motif of damage, and destruction, pervasive and often inexplicit. Although both writer's attitudes on the theme of destruction, damage and obliteration have some similar points, in many ways they often hold quite different views. Although obliteration is, not surprisingly, vehemently detested by both writers, destruction itself is a more controversial, subjective issue.

For the most part of We destruction is often seen as a necessary, if not essential, part of life. The destruction of the Green Wall and the planned destruction of the entire One State itself are seen as good things in the novel. D-503's message of "It is essential that we all go crazy - as soon as possible!" calls upon the readers of the necessity of damage. D-503 himself, with his eyebrows "struck through" and "a vertical scar between them", with his "sickness" is himself damaged in a way. These positive meanings given to damage and destruction are possibly because the opposite of damage and destruction, perfection and eternity, are two concepts that Zamyatin was fighting against by writing the novel.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being the themes of damage and destruction are also present, but resemble closer to the much darker concept of obliteration. For example, the destruction of the soul that Tereza sees with her mother or the destruction of the individual created by the Russians or kitsch. Of course, there is no objective definition of destruction. When Sabina puts the bowler hat on it destroys her concept of herself as it was "violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman" however one of the concepts of the bowler hat was that "it was a sign of her originality", that is the bowler hat creates herself at the same time. Therefore destruction, like most of the other themes in the novel, are treated with the same fence-line fuzzy subjectivism that comes out of an investigation into the postmodern universe.

TULoB and We - Privacy and Panopticon

The theme of privacy and enclosement is apparent both in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. More specifically, the lack of it is generally seen as a good sign of authoritarian control in both novels. They both can also be connected to the Panopticon philosophy, which deals with people under a constant gaze or the complete obliteration of privacy. Interestingly, many characters in both novels try to use a similar type of gaze to understand their life.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being many of the citizens of occupied Czechoslovakia are living under the constant gaze of the Russians. This is connected to the idea of the concentration camp, a place where privacy is meaningless. In these places not only is every life or soul insignificant but every action has a weight to it, a highly uncomfortable situation.

In We the themes of privacy and the Panopticon gaze are probably explored more, as unlike The Unbearable Lightness of Being the novel has an explicit political motive. The most obvious example of the loss of privacy is that all the houses are made of glass. Then although every single cipher is not under constant watch by the Guardians, there is always the risk that they are being watched. The philosophy of privacy, based on sayings like "My (sic!) house is my castle" are laughed upon for being silly.

However in both novels many of the characters wish to see using a gaze similar to the Panopticon, in order to explore more about the world around them. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being both Tomas and Tereza wish to see more and expand their knowledge, thus decreasing the privacy of their deepest truths. Tomas, as seen in Part 5, chose his job as a surgeon because of his wish to explore, and uses the same policy in his exploration of women. Whenever Tereza or anyone else analyzes themselves in the mirror they wish to expand their knowledge. Likewise during an intimate moment with I-330 in We D-503 envisioned himself becoming "glass" and "seeing myself, inside". This was an attempt to expand knowledge into his inner world and use the Gaze to understand more about himself. In general We's approach to enclosement is quite mixed as exploration and Gazing into the world of crazy mysteriousness is seen as better than enclosing it off and essentially keeping it "private". The One State's forefathers, and more importantly Zamyatin, made the Green Wall's glass "foggy and dim" for a reason. One of the reasons is because with that area walled off the One State has essentially cut off a huge area of the world, making it much easier to abolish privacy in the rest of the world. Therefore privacy is not always seen as good.

The relationship between social and personal life in TULoB and We

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being and We there is often social or external conflict that mirrors internal conflict. In We D-503's conflicting inner self is mixed with a conflict between the One State and the Mephi. Furthermore we in fact see a third battleground in the novel which is the core of Zamyatin's intentions in writing the novel the battle between the One State's philosophy, which is based on modernism, belief that absolute knowledge, "the ultimate wisdom" as D-503 calls it, can be determined and the utopian ideal can be reached; and the Mephi's philosophy, based loosely on postmodernism and in the belief that absolute knowledge cannot be determined and, more importantly, the utopia, if possible to achieve, is bad. (I-330 claims that absolute happiness needs a minus sign). The reason it is bad is because nothing will happen next, as "the ideal is (clearly) a state where nothing actually happens any more", which means that history, revolution and innovation will all disappear. This third battleground connects up the other two as each side contains a part relating to the psyche and mind (the true nature of absolute knowledge) and a closely related part concerned with politics (the true nature of utopia). The novel ends in the complete separation of the external, political world (through the wall of high voltage waves) and the complete separation of the internal world of D-503 (through the Great Operation).

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being there is also a relation between social world and the personal world, however a great conflict between two opposing theories is, if not completely false, a humongous oversimplification. But just like in We there are overlying and underlying concepts of the novel which are portrayed by the duality of the exterior world and the interior one. Tereza's attempts to attach lasting significance to the Russian invasion is connected to the similarly totalitarian universe of her mother where bodies have none of this lasting significance. While Tomas tries to defend his letter to the editorial that connected the Communists to Oedipus he gets the Oedipan realization of the effect his affairs were having on his wife's health.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - "Soul and Body" sections 1-8

Sections 1-8 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being's part two "Soul and Body" trace the origins of Tereza and the relationship between the soul, the body, lightness and weight in her early life and in her mother's life. Section 1 shows "the irreconciliable duality of the body and soul" by showing how the body, when under neglect, begins giving the soul pain. It is almost as if the body and the soul are a married couple. The soul and the body cannot be the same, yet they cannot be separate or opposite. In We there seems to be the a similar relation, because although the soul, through the use of the root of -1, is seen as transcendant of physical values (the domain of the body) it is also shown as confined to the body as once a certain area of the body (the section of the brain cauterized during the Great Operation) is gone, the soul is gone with it (although it is interesting to note how D-503 still remembers the number 112, the number of the auditorium where his soul first emerged).

This group of sections, which seems to investigate the body primarily, also portrays two schools of thought about the body's purpose. One school of thought sees the body as "an instrument panel", significant only as a function or a machine and eternally recurring. Tereza's mother harbours this school of thought. She constantly displays her nudity, breaks wind in public and shows her false teeth to everyone. To her these movements are no more shocking than seeing an engine blow steam or a wobbly replacement pipe (again there is a good connection to We). She sees the world as "a vast concentration camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible". Notice that by downgrading the value of the body she, and therefore the school of thought she embodies, also downgrades the value of the soul.

The second school of thought is the one which Tereza more easily aligns with, that is besides being a function there is something special about the body which lets it be able to be classified along with her soul as what makes up herself. This can be seen when she looks in the mirror in Section 3. When she does this "she forgot that the nose was merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as the true expression of her nature". Souls are not invisible but reside in the body ("the bowels" in the case of TULoB) and can be seen. Tereza, as the representation of this school of thought, does not like the body being seen as identical and thus insignificant (compare to We Record 2's "We are so identical" passage) and thus tries to rid her body of her mother's presence. Therefore this school of thought subscribes to the uniqueness of the body, and that it is attached to the transcendant soul in some way.

Section 1 sees a painful argument emerging between Tereza's soul and body, which ends in the presence of Tomas. The pain that the body gave Tereza's soul was caused by a neglect and distancing of the soul from the body. Is it true, then, that Tomas causes soul and body to reconcile? Section 8 provides the answer. Throughout Sections 2-7 we have seen a struggle for Tereza to see the importance and the unique significance of her body. In order to be significant her body must be unique, therefore it must deviate away from the light world of her mother (in other words her mother's school of thought must be betrayed; similar but definitely not identical to how the Mephi must betray the One State in We.) Books were this betrayal and Tomas was the symbol of these books. Therefore Tomas has made Tereza apparently achieve the significance of her body that her soul had longed for, and thus the body is no longer the soul's prison. However, this mindset is rigorously challenged later in "Soul and Body", where Tomas's infidelities challenge the uniqueness of the body (while they leave the uniqueness of the soul relatively unscathed).

Connections between We and The Unbearable Lightness of Being

There is a handful of connections that I have seen before from these two books. Each of them might be a potential Research Assignment topic.

1. The ideal. In We the One State emphasizes striving for the ideal, "where nothing actually happens any more". In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (hereafter shortened to TULoB) kitsch represents an image of the ideal which many characters especially Sabina find horrifying. Both authors resent the idea of the ideal and the attempt to reach it in different ways.
2. Conformity. We is quite self-explanatory (maybe a little too much so) in this case. Conformity pops up in many dimenstions in TULoB, for example in the Communist system or in Sabina's mother and her nightmares. However, it might be hard to relate to TULoB's central themes.
3. Betrayal and Revolution. Zamyatin considered the revolution an essential and eternal aspect of history. In TULoB Kundera offers a balance of betrayal and fidelity. However, again it might be hard to connect to central themes in TULoB.
4. The book's format - how it's written. We's diary format is important in understanding D-503's transformation. It also contains a few inconsistencies, maybe to impose the author's presence in the novel. In TULoB the author is all-important and the book is written in an essay format, diminishing Tomas, Tereza and co. to ideas. This helps the readers understand that TULoB's function is not so much to portray the relationships of people but the relations between different concepts. However it might be very hard to relate the two novels' formats together.
5. Postmodernism. The One State in We is portrayed as the ultimate modernist society, where "the ultimate wisdom" is achieved and there is no more to be known. However that's where Zamyatin injects postmodernism in his novel, as D-503 struggles to define new, mysterious concepts transcendant of the One State's borders. In TULoB Kundera keeps returning to the same events except in a different light, showing how there is no right or absolute viewpoint to the world.
6. Eternal reccurence and infinity. There are many references to infinity in We, for example I-330's notion that "revolutions are infinite" and that the One State keeps the illusion that there is no infinity, which ties in nicely with postmodernism. In TULoB this is shown in the "heavy" concept of eternal recurrence, most noticably how Parts 1 and 2 describe the same events (as well as Parts 4 and 5) and Parts 2 and 4 are both called "Soul and Body" while Parts 1 and 5 are both called "Lightness and Weight". There are some nice connections here, however the topic is probably too broad and needs some narrowing down.
7. Soul, body and machinery. In We's One State the soul is diminished and the body, as a piece of machinery, is all-important. TULoB also discusses soul and body, albeit maybe in a different way.
8. Awareness. Awareness of the world of mysteriousness, of the postmodern, is ever-pervasive in We, however, not much is known about TULoB to say a lot about it. More research needs to be done if this topic is to be chosen.
9. Significance and insignificance. We's One State demands that its ciphers are insignificant and just "a millionth part of a ton". In TULoB insignificance and significance are in a four way balance with lightness and weight. Significance means weight, however objects that are signficant are unique, individual (a good connection to We's portrayal of the individual can be made here) and therefore only happens once. Yet that makes them light. Vice versa, insignificance, which seems like a light concept, is pervasive across space and time and is thus eternally recurring, and therefore heavy. This might make a good topic if it could be made less broad and if the philosophical, not political, implications of significance and insignificance in We is better explored.