Would Sabina Have Shat in Her Bowler Hat

Would Sabina Have Shat in Her Bowler Hat?
Questioning the Self in Postmodernity

Katherine Parrick
May 23, 2005

Malynne Sternstein, Advisor
William Orchard, Preceptor

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts

MASTER OF ARTS PROGRAM IN THE HUMANITIES
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Novel. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some themes of existence. -- Milan Kundera

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera posits shit and kitsch as polemic modes of existence. Kitsch and shit rely on a multitude of definitions, but for the purpose of this essay, we will consider them in their aesthetic and existential modes of application. The term “kitsch” arose from aesthetic debates, as a descriptive term for art that is sentimental or vulgar, often appreciated in pretentious bad taste.¹ Clement Greenberg popularized the term for Western culture in the early twentieth century by associating kitsch with ersatz art: a sort of lowbrow creation produced for the masses. Yet, prior to Greenberg’s assessments, Eastern European thinkers such as Hermann Broch had developed further features of kitsch. Most notably, Broch began to associate kitsch with its producers and consumers, identifying kitschmenschen and “lives inspired by kitsch.”² Here, the first developments of kitsch as a psychological aspect, a mode of being in the world, comes into play. Ultimately, Broch concludes that kitsch creates a ‘schizophrenic’ attitude towards life, “a confusion of the ethical category with the aesthetic category” where the one aim of the kitsch producer is “an effect of beauty.”³

For Kundera, Broch’s definition is particularly apt. Kundera describes an existence in which the only way man can experience a “categorical agreement with being” is through the acceptance of kitsch and “the absolute denial of shit.” While there is kitsch art, kitsch attitude and kitsch kitchens, the real problem of kitsch is metaphysical in nature. Kitsch is a phenomenon of modern man, an exclusion of everything “which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”⁴ It implies a way of life, a mode of existence, a form of being in the world in which humankind veils itself from the ‘ugly’ characteristics of reality and sates temporary satisfaction. Not only does kitsch create a screen from the ugly, but when the world becomes so saturated with kitsch, one loses sight of all value appreciations. The base and the sublime become one under the guise of kitsch; aesthetic judgment becomes skewed by the overwhelming pretense of kitsch, and ultimately humankind is no longer able to recognize anything, or anyone, for what it is.

When Kundera writes, “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word,” he exemplifies the polarity between the two existential concepts of agreement and negation. From the isolation of defecation to the creation of outhouses and modern plumbing, human beings strive to conceal their shit and participate in an abnegation of reality. A reality comprised of the materiality of our bodies and the figurative reality of unacceptable shit. Shit in the latter context arises from the association of our feces with all things negative. Our shit is our baggage, burdensome in its actuality, and preferably nonexistent in an ideal world.

One either acknowledges his shit and denies kitsch, or revels in the screen of kitsch and denies his shit. The acceptance of shit and the acceptance of kitsch are opposing forces, yet the two rely upon one another, creating a dialectic that both thrives on and resists its interchangeability. Just as the magnetic poles of our sun and earth switch; our perceptions, our realities, our existences can be flipped upside down, toppling the dimensions that we live by and transporting us into the unbearable lightness of being. This happening occurs when the boundary between constructed opposites becomes hazy, and as the poles near each other we are sent into a state of vertigo, the lightness of which is not to be confused as having positivist value, for it implies a loss of reality—a loss that is thus reconstructed as a polemic reality.

This is not a permanent state. One does not live either entirely within the realm of shit nor kitsch. Yet critics consistently consign Kundera’s characters to one mode or the other. However, doing so creates an insufficient appraisal of his novel and its relative importance for considering our own existence, or possible existences, within the postmodern age. In an interview with Philip Roth, Kundera worried that “people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.” This modern urge to answer rather than ask, dissimulates the true purpose of the novel and novelist, which is to “teach the reader to comprehend the world as a question.” ⁵

Hence, I begin my exploration as a question as well. By asking whether Sabina, a character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, would shit in her bowler hat, we tear down the constructive differences critics have created to align the characters with their respective poles of existence. Doing this allows for an investigation into the various themes and meanings associated with kitsch and the anti-kitsch, the modes of being associated with the two, and how they operate in the modern day. This comparison also accounts for the misinterpretations surrounding the text and thus leads into a discussion of Kundera’s critique of Postmodernism and its applications.

Many critics begin their exploration using the recurrent image of the bowler hat within the novel. For Hana Pichová, it operates as vehicle that contains Sabina’s memories, her past, and her neglected homeland—a symbol of memory—necessary for exiles to maintain in unknown territory. ⁶ For John O’Brien, the hat is expressively tied to femininity, representing both Sabina’s negation and delight of masculine dominance creating a doubling of vision that pervades the novel. ⁷ For others, such as Fred Miller Robinson⁸, the hat contains a multiplicity of meaning, though every critic returns to its role as a memento of times past. Yet, all of these analyses lend symbolism to the role of the bowler hat. Whether ascribing it with historic meaning, feminist interpretation, or a duplicitous bearer of ‘light’ and ‘weight,’ all grant it an important symbolic and thematic role within The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A role that, I contend, is absolutely false.

The bowler hat is, for Sabina; a “vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather,” a “memento of her father,” a “prop for her love games,” and a “sign of her originality;”⁹and nothing more. Instilling it with values and meanings, thus symbolizing it to construct a narrative, bastardizes the role it serves in the novel—as kitsch. Kundera defines kitsch several times and in many ways, but for this immediate instance we shall refer to it as a “mask of beauty” ¹⁰ that is worn over something ugly, or in this case, something false, which appeals to the masses. As Kundera elucidates, kitsch “must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories.” ¹¹ Thus, all these constructions of the bowler hat’s meaning, themselves mimic kitsch as each critic imparts a bit of universal sentimentality into the hat.

Kundera, on the other hand, may be the one to blame for this. In The Art of the Novel, he defines the word ‘hat’ in a curious manner:

Hat. Magical object. I remember a dream: A ten-year-old boy is standing at the edge of a pond, wearing a big black hat on his head. He throws himself into the water. They pull him out, drowned. e still has the black hat on his head.¹²

Of course, an entry such as this is open to interpretation. Taking it in context with the novel, however, makes it more manageable. Within The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is no room for magic except within the realm of dreams. Only through Tereza’s dreams does one find magical objects, often presented in a manner as confusing as Kundera’s dream above. Yet within Tereza’s dreams, the images unfold into direct symbolism, symbols that are often explained to the reader by the author/narrator.

For instance, Tereza dreams of a forced parade of naked women around a swimming pool. “You kept giving us orders,” she explains to Tomas upon waking, “Shouting at us. We had to sing as we marched, sing and do kneebends.” ¹³ If any of the women faltered, Tomas would shoot them with a pistol and they would fall into a pool brimming with blood and corpses. As each woman was shot, the others would burst into laughter and song. The reader is left with this disturbing image for twenty-four chapters before it is explained by the narrator. It unfolds that Tereza takes issue with the naked body, terrified of immodesty, and trying to protect her inherent uniqueness through her physicality. In her mind, Tomas’s sexual infidelities reduce her being to just another body, a body no different from the multitudes of women he sleeps with. Her soul, tied and embedded within the body, refuses to take delight in the union of death with other women—a union of souls and bodies—that Tomas defines for her through his affairs. ¹⁴ Thus, the magic of the dream is systematically destroyed, explained in terms of the individual character’s history and psychology.

Tereza shares symbolically charged dreams with her lover because they “tell Thomas what Tereza was unable to tell him herself.” ¹⁵ A collective voice for the unspeakable, dreams operate as a psychic unfolding of human emotion. “Thomas lived under the hypnotic spell” of Tereza’s dreams while recognizing their meanings and understanding the accusations imbedded within them. Yet, the narrator intervenes, explaining the seductive force of dreams and their duplicitous role within Tereza’s lives and our own:

The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine—to dream about things that have not happened—is among mankind’s deepest needs. Here in lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten.¹⁶

Tereza’s dreams left “nothing to be deciphered.” ¹⁷ Elsewhere in the novel, seemingly magical occurrences are splayed out, dissected and revealed for what they are; in one case, a series of coincidences, in another, the misplaced conceptions of a woman’s bowler hat. Tereza’s dream is invoked a third time in the novel, when the author dedicates a chapter to an explication of shit and kitsch. Here, Tereza’s dream “reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.” ¹⁸ Tereza’s dream, in this passage, relates to Sabina’s horror of living in a world of kitsch transfigured into reality. A world where the Communist ideal and Soviet kitsch is actualized creates a space that—in its essence—is both comprised of and devoid of kitsch through negation.

This fearful reality, where kitsch neither has to wear “a mask of beauty” nor “curtain off death” for the “world of grinning idiots,” ¹⁹ is encouraged through contemporary critics’ assessments of the bowler hat. Like Tereza, “coming back to her dreams, running through them in her mind, turning them into legends,” Pichová ascribes beauty to the bowler hat, a beauty mimicking that of the mask kitsch wears and the game of imagination that creates a screen similar to that of kitsch. The game of ascribing meaning holds value, not the object itself—the object, like Tereza’s dream, is kitsch: a mechanism through which we shield ourselves from shit.

Pichová, in her assessment of the bowler hat and Kundera’s oeuvre, arrives at the conclusion that both are bound in the dualities of remembering and forgetting—memory is burdensome or heavy while lethe is light. Pichová structures her argument around the bowler hat’s many recurrences and its relation to Nietzsche’s idea of ‘the eternal return.’ⁱ The Unbearable Lightness of Being opens with a discussion of the notion:

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. ²⁰

In brief, Pichová’s argument is that the bowler hat is an exile’s memories objectified, “a reminder of its owners and their aspirations, as well as of the nations two centuries of cultural and political upheavals.” ²¹ It operates as an embodied form of eternal return—a memento that Kundera uses to “articulate a longing for the Nietzsche’s repetitive version of history because, despite its monotony, it still allows for a resistance against a life which…in the end means nothing.” ²²

For Pichová, the hat is joined to the Nietzschean notion by its constant return within the text and ultimately fades from the text as Sabina does, due to her “voluntary forgetting.” According to Pichová, Sabina is “reduced to a disconnected existence” in order to teach the reader the necessity for remembering. Yet, this is an awful lot of shit to fit into a bowler hat. Pichová assumes memory is “weighty,”²³ a past that acts as an anchor in our otherwise weightless lives. As Sabina forgets her past, her existence becomes weightless. Considering that Kundera describes “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit,” ²⁴ a false authenticity: a mask, a lie; thus for Pichová, as Sabina succumbs to kitschiness, “stripped and separated from any authentic and meaningful relationship to her past,” ²⁵she loses all that weighty shit in the bowler hat.

Of course, Pichová never mentions shit in her assessment. If she did so she would probably realize the fallacy she created. When Kundera begins his novel with the Nietzschean notion of eternal return, he begins by explaining it in a negative manner—a life, if not eternal, means nothing. Yet he continues this thought by questioning whether a war repeated eternally would alter and answers it: “It will: it will become a solid mass, permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.” Nietzsche’s eternal return allows for no alteration, no progression, no straying from the eternally repeated course. All that happens is our every decision is imbued with foreknowledge of its permanence.

Pichová immediately does what Kundera warns against in the following chapter by asking the question, “which one is positive, weight or lightness?” Kundera concludes that there is no answer, only the question and the ambiguity of the opposition. Yet, Pichová attributes value to the terms “light” and “weight.” For Pichová, a life without memory is light; a life with memory is weighty. A life with weight is a “rich, dense” life; a life without memory is “meaningless” and light. Weight: good. Light: bad. This designation of positive and negative value allows Pichová to misconstrue the questions the text poses. To assume that the hat becomes “weighty” when bearing the content of Sabina’s past and “light” when used as an erotic toy also passes value judgments on the contexts in which the hat is used: shifting its meaning and symbolism throughout the course of the text.

She likens the hat as an embodiment of the eternal return, though for it to truly be symbolic of eternal recurrence, its semantics would never alter. Within Sabina’s life it would have to remain either heavy or light—a plaything or an icon of history. To truly fit into Nietzschean context as Pichová uses it, it would have to retain its meaning throughout the lifetimes of its owners—in this sense it would have never altered from what it began as—a hat, worn for decoration and signifying the prestige of a dead grandfather. Yet, Pichová continues in this vein, claiming that the past (in the form of the bowler hat) once forgotten, is countered by the notion of eternal return. Pichová seems to think that the eternal return is enclosed within a lifetime, for she writes, “A history characterized by eternal return confronts and resists the temptation of the unbearable lightness of living without memory and thus without meaning.” ²⁶

The concept of eternal return does not imply an awareness of the past. What it does, is impact the futurity of events with the notion that every action is to be repeated eternally, hence all actions should be considered carefully. Yet without the awareness of what is to come we can never know which action is the best one, or as Kundera poses it, the eternal return is a state of being where the “rehearsal for life is life itself.”²⁷ It is a fanciful to assert that Kundera yearns for this state because it “allows for a resistance.” There can be no resistance, as the author explains to us, “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” ²⁸

Pichová simply uses these misconceptions as a springboard into an argument that culminates with the bowler hat’s role as an image for the “complex philosophical and existential issues of memory.” An argument that strives to consider Kundera’s work solely as the work of an exile—a disassociated identity, meaningful solely through memories—an argument that fails. Pichová’s reduction of Kundera’s work is a creation of kitsch; aligning itself neatly with what Broch claimed in 1933 as “the simplest and most direct way of soothing nostalgia." ²⁹

Many other critics fall into this trap. It seems to occur whenever one takes a character or the narrator at face value, never questioning him, following him through a fictional land, like one of the characters into a “trap the world has become.” ³⁰ The misconceptions surrounding the bowler hat arise from a few select passages in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Critics vary in their choice, as each passage can construct contradictory interpretations of the bowler hat’s meaning. O’Brien, in his assessment of feminism within Kundera’s work selects passages that feature an erotic encounter and subsequent power struggle:

When they looked at each other in the mirror that time, all she saw for the first few seconds was a comic situation. But suddenly the comic became veiled by excitement: the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence, violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman. She saw her bare legs and thin panties with her pubic triangle showing through. The lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity, while the hard masculine hat denied it, violated and ridiculed it. ³¹

O’Brien points to the contradictory forces at play and argues that the hat itself embodies contradictory meanings; possessing both the comic and erotic ‘lightness” and historical “weightiness,” creating an “ambivalent double influence of both terms of the opposition of her life.” ³² While granting symbolic stature to the hat, O’Brien, unlike Pichová, is careful to point out that the hat “does not signify lightness once and weight some other time, pivoting from one either/or extreme to the other.” ³³ He argues instead that the hat, like Sabina’s paintings, like the novel as whole, is filled with oppositional forces which reside alongside one another. While the hat may have one meaning in a certain context (weighty as it reminds Tereza and Tomas of their heritage) and another meaning in a different circumstance (light as it’s regarded comically and as an erotic prop); both meanings are there all the time, a polarity the hat and Sabina cannot escape.

All recent critics point to Robinson’s text when analyzing the meaning of the bowler hat. Indeed, Robinson accounts for a vast history of the bowler—following its path from its conception, through modernity, its comic and erotic life in Chaplin movies and the cabaret, its aesthetic appeal to Magritte and symbolic appeal to Kundera. For Robinson it is bound in multitudinous meanings and thus shifts symbolic roles throughout the history of man and the course of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Robinson accounts for all the possible connotations bound up in the bowler hat, “It will always have its heavy and light aspects: from its history as a sign of the middle classes to its status as an object of design,” ³⁴ though he continually defines these “light” and “heavy” aspects against one another: like Superman and Clark Kent, they are never present at the same time. An absence must be created for the poles to coexist—an absence that is not articulated in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Robinson, like many other critics, fails to recognize that the bowler hat, in its various interpretative poses represents in itself the “trap the world has become.”

When Kundera exposes the hat as a “magical object” in The Art of the Novel, he deprives it of history, of meaning, of context other than that of a dream about a nameless, faceless boy. This empty void leaves us with no direction, no place to begin a conclusion: a cyclical space of lone questions with no conclusive answers. When a hat is then transported into the context of a novel, where “existence is a realm of possibilities”³⁵ guided by the author, the mock construct of reality is permeated by history. The history is the history of the world boiled down, disseminated and dissimulated behind an overwhelming parade of symbols.

Kundera’s ‘symbols’ are like Tereza’s dreams. Just as she “kept coming back to her dreams, running through them in her mind, turning them into legends,” ³⁶ a simple hat is turned into an iconic force as it weaves throughout the text. Like Tomas, the critics stand blinded by the beauty of the symbol, hypnotized by the image—hanging on the every word of the dream weaver and losing themselves in a “forest of symbols.” ³⁷ Unable to disassociate from the mask of beauty before them, they operate much like the kitschmensches of the Grand March. Here we could easily replace Kundera’s words to read, “What makes an [academic] an [academic] is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.” ³⁸

The Grand March is emblematic of the postmodern age. It is used to signify the unifying doxa of all ideologies as they move towards a meta-historical conception of the world. In this sense, communism and fascism, democracy and totalitarianism, are one in the same. It reduces human existence to an aggregate ideology, where individual modes of existence are superficially banished in the pursuit of universal brotherhood. Yet this construction is possible only on the basis of kitsch. Milan Kundera constructs this coalition of kitsch by describing kitsch in general and the forms of usage when applied to politics and history. For just as kitsch “may not depend on an unusual situation: it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories” ³⁹ it also, when used politically, or in any societal ideology, comes from “images, metaphors and vocabulary” that unites the people more so than any political identity.

What has happened to Sabina and her bowler hat, is readers and critics have fallen into the blind belief in the universal realm of kitsch. Unable to recognize their allegiance to the superficial beauty of Kundera’s trap, they espouse the hat as an emblem of a universal truth—not realizing that they are sharing a collective tear. Kundera writes:

     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. ⁴⁰

In this instance, the critics form a common voice exclaiming, “How nice it is to see a woman remembering her heritage! How nice it is to be moved, together with all mankind, by a woman remembering her heritage!” Many have thus incorporated this heartfelt emotion to explain the text as a whole, sadly reducing Kundera’s work to little more than kitsch itself.

One can fix this problem by asking whether Sabina would have shat in her bowler hat. For Kundera, shit is the absolute opposite of kitsch. It is an acceptance of truth, an awareness of reality, a rejoicement in our base humanity—a humanity neglected and ignored through the gradual acceptance of Western theologies that define and condemn man from sublimity. As Martin Pops succinctly explains it, “The further you are from shit, the nearer you are to God. ⁴¹ God does not shit. Man does. Thus, God is sublime, man is base. Since in Western Theology man must strive for sublimity, we must hide our baseness, we must be ashamed of our shit. Yet God made man defecate. If God made man is his image, does he too take shits? If human shame was discovered from the knowledge in Eve’s apple, and man banished from Eden—a place in which shame was nonexistent—man could shit in peace without feeling ashamed.

In Kundera’s words,

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. ⁴²

Hence, our abnegation of shit is akin to kitsch, where we assemble a façade to veil us from the acceptance and jubilation of our humanity through a false pretence of beauty that we ensure brings us closer to paradise. Critics use the bowler hat as this façade, hardly ever mentioning the passage that explains Sabina’s excitement in the erotic play involving the bowler hat.

But first, let us turn to the text for the implications that hint at the bowler hat’s true role in Sabina’s life—not one of a vehicle for remembrance or eroticism—but one of kitsch.

Sabina has been interpreted as the anti-kitsch, the libertine, the feminist, and the exile—all of these titles bestowed on her through discourse concerning her bowler hat—other characters are intertwined with kitsch, yet only Sabina (and occasionally, Tomas), is exempted by the critics. The confusion begins with Kundera’s explanation of the bowler hat’s role in Sabina’s life:

     First, it was a vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather, the mayor of a small Bohemian town during the nineteenth century.
     Second, it was a memento of her father.   After the funeral her brother appropriated all their parents’ property, and she, refusing out of sovereign contempt to fight for her rights, announced sarcastically that she was taking the bowler hat as her sole inheritance.
     Third, it was a prop for her love games with Tomas.
     Fourth it was a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated.   She could not take much with her when she emigrated, and taking this bulky, impractical thing meant giving up other, more practical ones.
     Fifth, now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object…the hat, no longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past…a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing into the distance. (87)

What critics fail to recognize is that this narrative aside resides in what Kundera calls “the magnetic field” of his character, Sabina. The description of the bowler hat obviously cannot apply to Franz, Tomas, or Tereza, yet critics continuously use it as a comparative point by which to showcase the various characters’ ability or lack thereof to tie themselves to their homeland and roots.

So, within the sole context of Sabina’s existence, what does the passage above implicate? Pichová claims that through the bowler hat, “Sabina cherishes her past and her memories as those that grant her the unique double vision of an exile,” ⁴³ But what memory, exactly, is Sabina cherishing through the bowler hat? If the bowler hat is a symbol of history, how can the reader actually assert that it is reflective of Sabina’s history? To begin, the bowler hat is undoubtedly a Western symbol. As showcased by Robinson himself, the bowler hat as “a symbol of England…whose imperial power and influence in the nineteenth century would scatter the bowler over the Western world,” ⁴⁴ creates for it a locality of origin that certainly does not evoke ties to a Czechoslovakian history. However, perhaps this can be eased, as Robinson also states that above all the bowler semantically represents the culture of modernity and the middle classes.

Yet even these do not work well when ascribing meaningful significance of the bowler hat to Sabina’s history. If, taking it as a symbol of the West—a West that Kundera describes as “created four centuries ago at the dawn of the modern era: the era founded on the authority of the thinking, doubting individual, and on artistic creation that expressed his uniqueness” we can also negate its relevance here: as at the time of the bowler’s popularity (roughly from its conception in 1850 through 1910) Czechoslovakia was not immersed in the culture of the West. For, as Kundera also writes, “the last direct personal experience of the West that Central European countries remember is the period from 1918-1938.” ⁴⁵ If this is applied to the bowler hat, then it is not representative of Sabina’s personal or Czechoslovakian past. Like Central Europe itself, Sabina struggles to preserve her Westerness, an identity that existed prior to the bowler hat, or its presence in her grandfather’s life. Dictating the symbolism of national identity to the bowler hat undermines her struggle and falsely ties her to an icon that is not personally representative of an ideal.

Reading the bowler hat’s role as an insignia of exile, even within the context the critics’ assessments, makes Sabina and her struggle somewhat kitschy. With this reading, she longs for exile and forgetting but holds onto the bowler hat as a token of her identity. Is this not kitsch? She is a self-exile, annoyed with Communist kitsch, yet through the bowler hat, she fills “the need to gaze into the mirror of a beautifying lie and be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.” ⁴⁶ She sees it as source of roots, as identity that can only be understood in the context of her life, and within the greater context of the Czechoslovakian struggle for independence. Hence, Franz misunderstands the bowler hat; he is separate from the context and the meaning that Sabina ascribes to it. However, it is exactly this meaning, this context credited to a mere tangible token that makes Sabina’s bowler hat kitschy.

Yet if Franz misunderstands the bowler hat since he is not part of the shared past of Czechoslovakian heritage, then shouldn’t a fellow Czech, say Tereza, grasp its significance? But when Tereza encounters the bowler, the reader is told “it was the kind of hat—black, hard, round—that Tereza had seen only on the screen, the kind of hat Chaplin wore.” ⁴⁷ She then asks if Sabina would like to be photographed in the bowler. At no point does she grasp its significance, its shared meaning in their lives as a shared heritage. The bowler means nothing to Tereza—no times past, no unknown grandfather wearing bowler hats in a time when Czech’s had their dignity, though we should assume that if the bowler hat is representative of a ‘lost history’ then Sabina would recognize it as such.

Commenting on the meeting between Tereza and Sabina, O’Brien takes the narrator’s response that “Sabina laughed for a long time at the idea” ⁴⁸ of being photographed in the bowler hat and writes that she is “perhaps reacting to the irony of trying to capture this important icon of depth and multi-dimensional paradox on a limited photographic surface.” ⁴⁹ Um, okay. Or maybe she is laughing at the notion of her lover’s wife photographing her with their sex toy. Or maybe she is laughing at the worn-out and slightly cheesy artistic images of women in bowler hats. Or maybe she is laughing at the awkward situation she has entered. Whatever it may be, it seems unlikely that an artist, a painter who also utilizes a one-dimensional surface for self-expression, would laugh at the idea of capturing ‘depth’ on paper.

This scene aside, the bowler hat as a symbol of Czechoslovakian heritage, a lost past and family is simply kitschy. However, this kitschiness could be removed from Sabina herself through an interpretation of the hat as a “Western” symbol. “The deep meaning of their resistance is the struggle to preserve their identity – or, to put it another way, to preserve their Westerness.” ⁵⁰ Sabina indeed preserves her Westerness. She may be the only character who manages to do so. Yet, she is not doing it through the false portal of the bowler hat. Her art, her “consciously cultivated originality,” ⁵¹ and her self-imposed exile into the West constitute her Western individuality and freedom. If we take this symbol, interpreted as a Western emblem, then perhaps it escapes kitsch. Yet, if we consider the hat as symbolic of a Czechoslovakian heritage—as a paternal tie to Sabina’s roots—as the novel’s critics have, it becomes the subject of kitsch.

Interpreting Kundera’s description of the bowler hat at face value for what it stands for, as Sabina sees it, then it is unquestionably a form of kitsch. Take the statements, “a vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather” and “refusing out of sovereign contempt to fight for her rights, announced sarcastically that she was taking the bowler hat;” do these impart a sense of nostalgia; a bond to and regret for a lost family and motherland? Or do these invoke a sense of a “consciously cultivated originality?” An originality, that uses the bowler hat as a confirmation of her exiled status, then sentimentalizes it through false memories of a lost family and homeland. What these statements evoke, is a sense of Sabina’s initial awareness of the kitschiness of the hat, yet a kitschiness she eventually falls prey to as she begins to believe in the mask of beauty the bowler hat comes to symbolize.

The only time when the hat is not kitsch is when it is used as “a prop for her love games with Tomas.” The one moment that all the critics point to as the hat in its “light” mode (in their appropriation—not mine—light meaning superficial, playful, less meaningful and important) is the moment at which the hat is its weightiest (once again, not my evaluation of the definitions ascribed to light and weight). The only time the hat stands for what it is, is when it is used as an ornament, a prop, a mere juxtaposition of a masculine object on a feminine body, arousing Tomas and Sabina in a manner similar to the excitement of the Edenic man and woman. For just as there was no shame in paradise, as man and woman did not recognize their differences, once those differences were defined both shame and its subsequent excitement could ensue; Sabina articulates the differences between her body and man’s by donning the hat, thus causing her and Tomas to feel excitement.

This excitement leads directly to shit. Later, when Kundera explains his concepts of shit and kitsch in his novelistic essay, he includes an anachronistic appendage to Sabina and Tomas’s lovemaking scene:

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. ⁵²

In this passage, the union of shit, eroticism and excitement is clear. Sabina, being on the verge of fainting, calls to mind the experience of feeling the unbearable lightness of being. Kundera describes this feeling as the proximity of two poles creating vertigo. When sublimity and depravity collide, when two modes of existence—of understanding the world—come “vertiginously close,” “the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall.” 53

Here, it appears that combination of self-denigration and eroticism cause Sabina’s vertigo. Yet self-denigration and eroticism both exist outside the realm of Paradise, so it is unlikely that these two poles cause Sabina to feel the unbearable lightness of being. What it could be, however, is the brief realization of kitsch and shit coming so close in proximity. The bowler hat, seated on her head as she is seated on the toilet. The kitsch being aligned with shit; falsity and truth, coming too near; for no kitsch existed in Eden. There was no need to create a mask of beauty for what was already beautiful. Without shame, without self-reserve, without remonstration, shit happened; kitsch however, could not. There was no reflection in Eden on “how nice it is to be moved!” One was moved. Either by a “the sight of a swallow” 54 or by a bowel movement. There was no distinction of beauty amid a realm without a lack of it.

Hence, would Sabina have shat in her bowler hat? Would she shit on the lie she created? For a woman who strives to escape kitsch, she has a tendency to create it. Her betrayals were a lie she constructed “to open up new paths to new adventures of betrayal,” 55 a mask of a mask that keeps her from recognizing and responding to the reality of her life. Her closed eyes as she made love with Franz is kitsch, for her, darkness “meant a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see.” Most importantly, her bowler hat and the meaning she constructs through it is kitsch.

Prior to the vanishing of the bowler hat from the text, it is described as Sabina sees it:

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. I might call it Heraclitus’ (“You can’t step twice into the same river”) riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which each time Sabina saw another river flow, another semantic river: each time the same object would give rise to new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony. 56

The reader is never tempted by Kundera to take this as a universal truth by which the narrator and we are to view the bowler hat (though most critics read it in this manner). It is meant solely for Sabina. We are not told, “the bowler hat was a bed through which each time another river would flow,” it is modified by “Sabina saw.”

When Kundera speaks of “musical compositions” he argues that peoples’ lives are composed like music: “Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individuals life.” 57 Sabina has done precisely this. The bowler hat has taken on meaning to create beauty where it might not otherwise be. Another clue in the bowler hat’s designation of kitsch, is the term “a parade of echoes.” Parades, for both Kundera and his character Sabina, are the epitome of political kitsch. Parades exemplify the falseness of belief exhibited by people who unquestioningly (or forcefully) support ideologies in the guise of brotherhood and “categorical agreement with being.” 58

After all this kitsch—arguably a lifetime of kitsch—the narrator finally returns to Sabina, describing her as being “on the threshold of old age,” hence, implicating the wisdom associated with a life lived. She has ‘adopted’ an older couple in America, and through them, constructed a sentimental family that aids her in a sentimental construction of her past. Yet at this point, Sabina recognizes the illusion.

…from the depths 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.
Though touched by the song, Sabina did not take her feeling seriously. She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none of us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. 59

This passage is at the chronological point that critics accuse Sabina of losing her Czech identity, her memory, her past. Many critics point out the absence of the bowler hat, for it is not mentioned after her departure from France. Yet they do so in a problematic manner. For example, Pichová argues, “once her past is forgotten and left behind, Sabina’s presence, along with her bowler hat, fades out of the text.” 60 For Pichová, it loses its magic and becomes an ordinary object, no longer worth mentioning.

Yet, what this passage implicates is along with recognizing others’ kitsch and kitsch in general, Sabina has finally gained the insight to recognize her own. Perhaps the bowler hat is absent because Sabina finally recognized it for what it is: “On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.” 61 Since Sabina is able to recognize kitsch, and disband its power, we can assume an answer to my question. Would have Sabina shat in her bowler hat? Yes.

Though in doing so, she would undoubtedly summon the unbearable lightness of being. For as her constructed world and the real world collided she would momentarily, experience vertigo, the unbearable lightness of being created by the sudden lack of reality, a burdensome reality that is suddenly polarized and morphed into a new mode of existence. While no one is “superhuman enough to escape kitsch completely,” the recognition of her own kitsch, for Sabina—a character who, unlike the others in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, abhors and avoids kitsch to such an extreme—would undoubtedly be bewildering.

For Sabina the artist, the self-acknowledged libertine, defecating in her bowler hat would be a concrete abjection to her self-constructed kitsch. In fantasy, she is able to both remove and construct “the mask of beauty,” by voiding her bowels under the bowler hat, she beautifies both her shit and her relationship with Tomas. In reality, shitting on the hat would obscure the screen that kitsch creates. She would ultimately be replacing her kitsch with her shit, supplementing the surreal with the real. Sabina’s art reflects her imagined life: “On the surface there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop’s cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.” 62

If Sabina were to shit in her bowler hat, it would be a true encounter between two existences, rather than the iconic representation of the two from her paintings and fantasy. Sabina, even with her abhorrence of kitsch, lives under the mask of it; her hat mimics that of her horror of tombstones, whose heavy stone “means we don’t want the deceased to come back” 63 For Sabina to truly accept the ‘shit’ of reality, to truly acknowledge her own mortality and her own existence in an unintelligible world, she must recognize that the hat operates like her paintings, like the iconic tombstones, offering an incomplete glimpse of the truth that lies under the screen of kitsch. Shitting on the hat would be an acknowledgement of it kitschiness and a destruction of it.

Sabina would experience the collision of two modes of existence, one in which she would realize that she too is not “superman enough to escape kitsch completely.” Her mode of being is defined by a perceived lack of kitsch, a perceived unity with reality that would be flipped upside down by the sudden realization of her vulnerability, her utter inclusion with everyone for whom “kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.” 64 The clash of her self-ascribed individuality—her own “something different, something mysterious or abstract”—with the utter normality of humankind; would topple her perceptions and alter her mode of existence.

Yet, Sabina’s conundrum, that of desperately wanting to avoid kitsch yet being subsumed by a world infiltrated with it, is emblematic of the postmodern condition that afflicts the reader today. Kundera’s inclusion of Nietzsche’s eternal return at the beginning of the novel is a deliberate one. Nietzsche’s concern, like Kundera’s, is the aspect of questioning. Without access to the word “kitsch,” Nietzsche’s ontological explorations seem absorbed with the worry that humankind operates without ever questioning or truly apprehending their existence. Before he introduces his concept of the eternal return, Nietzsche writes of “the intellectual conscience” and humankind’s apparent lack thereof: in the endeavor to live peaceably, man never questions his values, beliefs, and ethics, or the means by which he attained them. Like a man surrounded by sheep blinded by the curtain of kitsch, Nietzsche writes

But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors ["Discordant concord of things": Horace, Epistles, I.12.19.] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody:—some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice. 63

Thus, without the need to question one’s existence, one invariably dulls or loses the intellectual faculties that would allow him to ponder his being. This is the horror that Nietzsche evokes with the concept of eternal recurrence: if one were eternally tied to their minutest decisions, one would begin questioning his existence, actions, and surroundings. Yet, modern man does not perceive this need and thus goes blindly through life; accepting, without questioning, the ideologies presented to him.

It is not the notion of eternally replaying our choices that horrifies both Kundera and Nietzsche, it is the assumption that most people do not even stop to consider their existence—why the love what they love, why they believe what they believe, why they fight for what they fight. Kundera articulates it as “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.” 66 Nietzsche calls this contemplation “the greatest weight;” 67 a designation that Kundera uses to illustrate the existential difference between lives lived without weight which “causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant,” or lives lived with without lightness, where “the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.” 68

When Sabina is last referred to in the novel, she is noted in connection with lightness and weight: “She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter than air. As Parmenides put it, the negative would turn into the positive.” 69 Sabina’s perceived existence was one without kitsch, one in which she constantly sought the ‘weight’ granted through questioning her experiential existence in a world of kitsch, thus what she once valued negatively becomes a positive. Her ultimate decision to succumb to lightness, is emblematic of the struggle of all humankind in the Postmodern era. In a world once defined by polarities—lightness and weight, kitsch and shit, seeking and answering—we have all been subjected to an unbelievable amount of kitsch that prevents us from even recognizing that we experiencing the unbearable lightness of being.

What Pichová deems as Sabina’s ‘forgotten past’ is more aptly related to Hedigger’s “the forgetting of Being.” 70 There is no escaping kitsch. Sabina didn’t shit in her bowler hat and neither have we. She, like the reader, is stuck in “the trap the world has become.” 71 We live in a world where kitschified beauty—easily consumable aesthetics—reign supreme, and shit is not only denied, but seemingly obliterated the likeminded efforts of idealists. Kundera argues that this is a direct consequence stemming from World War I, which created a horrific state where:

Nothing that occurs on the planet will be merely a local matter, that all catastrophes concern the entire world, and that consequently we are more and more determined by external conditions, by situations that no one can escape and that more and more make us resemble one another. 72

The advent of world wars created a planet that “has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war…that guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere.”

The traumatic events of the twentieth century lead to a new quest of cultural appreciation and the subsequent development of a global economy. The globalization of culture, which in its endeavor to maintain ‘multiculturalism’ has created a new sense of universality that often masked under a guise of pluralism. Lothar Bredella points out the drawbacks of such a development, “While universalism can be accused of ignoring the rights of collective identities, pluralism can be accused of ignoring the rights of individuals.” 73 Thus, in appreciating the various ideological apparatuses of various cultures we tend to forget that all of them operate as kitsch—the totalitarian, Soviet, and Communist kitsch Kundera describes is no different than the kitsch of any ideological or political convention. They are all means by which people shield themselves from shit; a distraction erected to keep us from questioning our very existence.

This is the fundamental clause that critics ignore when assessing Kundera. They eagerly allude to the alluring backdrop of communist Czechoslovakia, placing fictitious characters in a real world and assessing them through historical and cultural lenses, which negate their fictivity. Doing so ascribes a historiographic interpretation of the novel, one that “writes the history of society, not of man.” 74 Forgetting that Kundera’s characters are a “human possibility,” 75 an “existential situation” 76 against the background of a historical situation, reduces them to nothing more than mediations of postmodernism, rather than meditations of our own existence in Postmodernity.

In this manner, the critics fall prey to kitsch. The kitsch constructed by the postmodern condition that promotes the “process of the de-realization of reality, culminating in complete illusion that allows us to distinguish only between true and false fakery.” 77 In the ‘trap the world has become,’ we still have the ability to tear down the veil of kitsch—the beautifying commodities of post-industrial capitalism and the overpowering yearning for an illusory ‘unity of mankind,’ exposing the constructed apparition that surrounds us and exercising our own ‘intellectual conscience.’ Whereas in Kundera’s novels, “no confusion is possible, nor any trickery as to what Satre called the “freedom of characters,” 78 we still have the freedom of recognizing our kitsch, shitting on it, and thus joining Kundera in his existential exploration.

i Nietzsche’s contemplation of the ‘eternal recurrence’ is sufficiently relevant to the text to be cited in full:

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!"— Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!" If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

1 The Oxford English Dictionary: Oxford University Press, 2005. www.oed.com

2 Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” In Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles. (New York: Universe Books, 1968.) 63.

3 Ibid. 65.

4 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999) 248. (All Kundera quotes in this paragraph are from the same page)

5 Milan Kundera, interviewed By Philip Roth, London, United States, 1980, trans. 11/30/1980.

6 Hana Píchová, The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 55-66.

7 John O’Brien, Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections (New York: Saint Martins Press, 1995) 114-177.

8 Fred Miller Robinson, The History and Significance of the Bowler Hat: Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Beckett, Magritte and Kundera (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993)

9 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 87. 10 Ibid. 249. 11 Ibid. 251. 12 Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000) 130. 13 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 18.

14 Kundera, Ibid. 57.

22 Ibid. 63. (Ellipses are from the quoted passage above)

23 Ibid. 57.

24 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 248.

25 Pichová, 66.

26 Pichova, 63.

27 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 8.

28 Ibid. 8.

29 Broch, “Kitsch,” In Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, 73.

30 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 221.

35 Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 43.

36 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 58.

37 Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 63.

38 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 257.

39 Ibid. 251.

40 Ibid. 261.

41 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 251.

42 Martin Pops, “The Metamorphosis of Shit,” Salmagundi 56 (Spring 1982) 43.

43 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 247.

44 Píchová, The Art of Memory in Exile, 63.

45 Robinson, The History and Significance of the Bowler Hat, 5.

46 Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books (April 26, 1984), 37.

47 Ibid. 37.

48 Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 134.

49 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 64.

50 Ibid. 64.

51 O’Brien, Milan Kundera and Feminism, 121.

52 Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” 34.

53 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 87.

63 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 63.

64 Ibid. 63.

65 Ibid. 124.

66 I bid. 256.

67 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book I, Section 2.

68 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 247.

69 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 341.

70 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 5.

71 Ibid. 273.

72 In his discourse on the “forgetting of Being,” Heidegger also calls upon the ontological enquiries of Heraclitus and Parmenides who are also featured in Kundera’s texts.

73 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 221.

74 Ibid. 27.

75 Lothar Bredella, “Pluralism and Cosmopolitanism: Two Answers to a Multicultural Society at the End of the Century,” in Postmodernism and the Fin de Sičcle. Ed. By Gerhard Hoffmann. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2002.) 41.

76 Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 37

77 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 221.

78 Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 38.

79 Johann N. Schmidt, “The Sameness of Variety” in Postmodernism and the Fin de Sičcle, 28.

80 François Ricard, Agnes’s Final Afternoon. (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.) 133.

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