It’s not often that I read. When I do, I only read books I enjoy. That is why, after reading Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” I was overjoyed to discover that pretty much all of his works were great. The last time I had a favorite author was when I was in second grade and really into Roald Dahl.
There is something validating about being a college student who can answer the question of my favorite author like: “Oh? Favorite author? Hm… I’ve really been digging Milan Kundera’s work lately…” It’s a clean, strong name. It’s a very collegiate favorite author to have.
Being a lazy collegiate adult, however, I have found that the best way to find books that I enjoy is through reading books that exist in direct conversation with each other. I like reading works that authors I already enjoy recommend or note as influential in their growth. Marguerite Duras’ (once again, strong name) “The Lover” was added to my reading list after it was readily mentioned in a memoir I read this past summer. It’s a short novella with a reputation of importance. I like when I’m reading something that is already thought of as brilliant because I don’t have to do any heavy lifting to defend its quality.
“The Lover” is a story that exists best on the page, due largely to the tactful handling that its narrative demands. “The Lover” is an autobiographical coming-of-age story which follows a 15 year-old girl as she develops a relationship with an older man. It’s not material you want to mishandle. But Duras paints a picture of female adolescence that can effectively resonate with anyone who has ever had to interrogate their identity and navigate their place in the world, regardless of whether they have lived a similar experience to Duras.
While reading, I noticed a connection to Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”: the hats worn by central female characters in both “The Lover” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” play a large role in demonstrating values and identity. In Kundera’s novel, the bowler hat is associated with Sabina, a sexually liberated artist whose lightness of being could be described as unbearable. In “The Lover” the female protagonist wears a floppy, oversized men’s fedora. Both Kundera and Duras situate female individuality and identity under the brim of a hat.
In “The Lover,” Duras imagines the moment in which she might have stumbled upon the hat and the way that wearing it made her feel. Duras writes, “I try it on for fun, look at myself in the shopkeeper’s glass, and see that there, beneath the man’s hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else”(page 12). The fedora plays a role in her perception of self and the identity she projects into the world around her.
Duras continues by writing that, on her, the hat “[has] become … a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it’s deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire.” The hat evokes a sense of clear existence and identity in the young woman and completes her sense of being. “I take the hat, and am never parted from it.”
Expectations are readily thrust upon women, so it makes sense that the masculine nature of a fedora hat would be so appealing to a young girl who is becoming increasingly aware of the role she is meant to play. The fedora provides an image that separates her from the path that she is following as she comes of age. With the fedora, she becomes more than just another face in the crowd and people can see that there is more to her than meets the eye.
In Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Sabina gives her black bowler hat the same importance that Duras gives to the fedora in “The Lover”. Kundera explains Sabina’s feelings towards the bowler hat, writing “[she] bent over, picked up the hat, and put it on her head. The image in the mirror was instantaneously transformed: suddenly it was a woman … a beautiful, distant, indifferent woman with a terribly-out-of-place bowler hat on her head.” The masculine nature of the hat is something that demands the women’s reflection and, through this interrogation, the women understand how they function in the world around them.
The bowler hat belonged to Sabina’s grandfather, and then her father, and was the sole object of her inheritance. It readily serves as a memento to string together her relationships with the men in her life. But beyond sentiment, “it was a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated.” Kundera writes, “The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina’s life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed.”
The bowler hat is a motif, rife with meaning in the context of its existence throughout the novel. In life where things are ever-changing, what does it mean for a person to have an object that they can go to and reflect upon to gain a better understanding of where they are and who they have become? “The Lover” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” are highly reflective of lives and moments that have come and gone. But the two stories begin in different stages of life for these women.
Being 15 years old, the protagonist in “The Lover” is gaining, for the first time, an idea of what it means to exist in the eyes of others as a woman. Sabina, on the other hand — nearly a decade older, is well-versed in the challenges of femininity and uses her hat not to gain a sense of autonomy, but instead to navigate and better understand her life.
For Sabina, the bowler hat punctuates her life as what it means to her changes from moment to moment. Kundera writes, “While people are still fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”
I include these long excerpts from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” not only because I find them extremely well composed, but also because I believe his language is essential in fully nurturing the reader’s understanding of the characters and the reality they live in. The title of his novel is a pretentious one, but it says something about notions of femininity and masculinity as we navigate the way in which we navigate and give meaning to life.
Kundera writes, “If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.” He then draws upon notions of weight that are referenced in the title. “It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).” But his challenge lies in this: “If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?” A life well lived is one shrouded in experience and persistence.
He continues and explains, “The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”
Are flights of femininity to be weighed down by masculinity the same way the masculine nature of the fedora and bowler hat challenge and restrict the projection of femininity with Duras and Sabina? When women who are placed as the object of men’s desire wear these hats that serve as masculine impositions, are they reclaiming a sense of independence and autonomy that would’ve been theirs all along if it weren’t for the way that men often impose themselves on women’s lives? Individuality and autonomy of self is something that Kundera and Duras depict as a necessity for these women as they navigate ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ and attempt to weigh themselves down to earth under the brim of a more masculine hat.
Muss en sein? Es muss sein!