Since 2004, my undergraduate university has offered something called URECA, Undergraduate Research on Campus. It is designed “to cultivate a research culture and nurture research capabilities early in undergraduates’ university education.” All URECA invitees upon successful completion and submission of their research would be conferred the impressive sounding title, “NTU President Research Scholar.”

While the primary audience of the URECA program are engineers and scientists, the bread and butter of a university aptly named Nanyang Technological University, it was extended to undergraduates in the arts and humanities. Hence, having earned a first-class grade point average – the highest grade range – in my second year, I was invited to participate in URECA and had to choose a professor in my department to work with and a topic to do extended ‘research’ on.

I had read one of my Professor’s articles on the quality of lightness in Literature. It was subsequently expanded into a book titled On Lightness in World Literature (2013). The article resonated with me and my professor was agreeable to supervise this extended thesis. He is amazing! So, from August 2011 to June 2012, I worked on this ‘side’ project, and am happy with the result: although the report had to be compressed quite a bit, it still received the highest grade possible, an A+, and was published in the Proceedings of the URECA@NTU 2011-12.

Here it is. If the abstract hooks you, then read on. Use it to sleep better otherwise. I will!

Lightness in Literature and its Reflection of Reality

Abstract – ‘Lightness’ as either a formal quality or philosophical concept in Literature has not received substantive critical attention. Some critical discussion on the subject can be found in the pioneering work of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Six Memos) and the semiotics of Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (among others). The subsequent critical discussion on the subject by Asst Prof Bede Tregear Scott and the previous URECA student have identified and discussed qualities such as superficiality, the deliberate attenuation of meaning, the ‘lightness’ of language glossing over the weight of reality, as well as playfulness and formal freedom. This paper aims to continue exploring this quality of ‘lightness’ in two contemporary novels: Alessandro Baricco’s Silk and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (ULB), expanding its definition to include a formal expression of epistemological crises (Silk) and its implication as an aspect of the Nietzschean thought experiment of Eternal Recurrence as it is portrayed in the ULB.

Introduction

‘Lightness’ is a term that can embody a potentially wide and even contradictory range of literary qualities or concepts. As a case in point, the aspects of ‘lightness’ explored in this paper may seem markedly divergent from the critical attention that it has previously received. The focus on ‘lightness’ as a formal tool employed to support an epistemological crisis within the post-colonial narrative of Baricco’s Silk, and also as having a dichotomous relationship with ‘Weight’ in Kundera’s conception of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence in his ULB, which is “moisten[ed] . . . with meaning” (Barthes 1984, 70), may seem like a movement in the opposite direction to ‘lightness’ as a “deliberate attenuation of supplementary meaning,” one that privileges the “signifier over the signified” (Scott 2011, 128).

Nevertheless, I will argue that Italo Calvino’s Six Memos—the pioneering work on ‘lightness’ as a literary quality—supports ‘lightness’ as a formal expression of epistemological crises, as I will provide evidence for in line with the argument concerning Silk. Silk’s foreign Japanese setting inherited from its post-colonial underpinnings adds to its inscrutability and corresponding ‘lightness’ which I will expand upon in the literature review. The critical materials that I will use include the aforementioned Six Memos, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, and Robert Rushing’s “Seta: Travel, Ventriloquism and the Other” which offers to explain how Silk’s oriental bent serves to “elicit knowledge of self rather than the other” (Rushing 2003, 215), a project “without end” (Rushing 2003, 211). This is what, I argue, supports the quality of ‘lightness’ in the novel.

I will also argue that Six Memos acknowledges the use of ‘lightness’ in the ULB as a part of the Nietszchean thought experiment of Eternal Recurrence which was posited (in the ULB) as a weighted response to the unbearable ‘lightness’ of humanity’s temporal existence, rendering everything meaningless, or ‘light.’ One of the implications of considering ‘lightness’ as a concept concerning the temporality of existence, especially in the case of the ULB, is that the issue of morality appears: Does morality have meaning in a temporal world? I will argue that the ‘lightness’ expressed in the ULB cannot be furnished with a prescriptive morality and that while it may be attractive for a while, it soon becomes “unbearable” in its meaninglessness. This is then expressed through a pervading tone of melancholy, especially toward the end of the novel which I argue is a formal manifestation of ‘lightness’ similar to the one in Silk. To elucidate this argument I will be looking at critical articles which include Michael W. Payne’s “Problematising the Ethical,” and for a further understanding of Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence, Roe Sybylla’s “The Ethical Effects of Attitudes toward Time and Body” as well as Sharli Anne Paphitis’ “The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence and its Significance.”

Aims

This paper aims to expand and explore other ways of understanding ‘lightness’ both as a literary quality and concept: as a formal means to express epistemological doubt and as a descriptive term for the human condition of temporality within the backdrop of our perennial search for permanence.

In so doing, this paper hopes to contribute to the question of what constitutes ‘lightness’ in a work of literature, attempting to locate divergent yet acceptable definitions from what has previously been established: the emphasis on surfaces, readability, and the deliberate divorce from supplementary meaning for aesthetic immediacy.

Literature Review

In Calvino’s Six Memos’ chapter on ‘lightness,’ he provides several examples from science and literary myth to explain his understanding of the value of ‘lightness’ in literature. He says that “today every branch of science seems intent on demonstrating that the world is supported by the most minute entities” (Calvino 1993, 8). He cites Lucretius, a Roman philosopher from the 1st century B.C., whose poem “On The Nature of Things” describes the material world as “made up of invisible particles” (Calvino 1993, 8). Certainly then, if all reality can be broken into atomic ‘lightness,’ then a movement away from the solidity of meaning in literature, from symbolically dense plot lines or adherence to formal structures, as has been defined and expanded upon by Prof Scott in his article and the previous URECA student’s paper, is consistent with Calvino’s thoughts on the matter. However, Calvino also provides for the possibility that ‘lightness’ as a literary quality can support a meaningful underlying theme: “there is such a thing as lightness of thoughtfulness . . . in fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity dull and heavy” (Calvino 1993, 10). In another of his analogies, one which draws from the Greek myth of the fight between Perseus and Medusa, Calvino describes Perseus’ use of the mirror to see Medusa without being turned to stone as “an allegory to the poet’s relationship to the world, a lesson in the method to follow them in writing” (Calvino 1993, 4). This conception of ‘light’ language as a pale allegorical reflection of reality allows for the possibility that ‘lightness’ can support an epistemological theme—that truth is arbitrary, and by extension, language cannot truly represent reality. This, I will argue, is evident in Silk.

Silk is a translated Italian novel about a French silkworm merchant, Hervé Joncour who, for lack of silkworms in Europe, goes to Japan to buy them and falls hopelessly in love with the mistress of Hara Kei, the man with whom he conducts his business with. The epistemological crises in the novel, which I argue, are the underpinning motivations for its formal expression of ‘lightness,’ manifest themselves in three ways: the inscrutability of the foreign Japanese culture and imagery, the many questions in the novel that are not given answers, and Joncour’s passive attitude toward his life, a life that he is unable to infuse with meaning.

In Prof Scott’s paper on ‘lightness,’ he refers to Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs as using Japan to “offer liberation from the tyranny he associates with Western semiotic structures” (Scott 2011, 141). Barthes recognizes the value of ‘lightness’ in Japanese culture and literature such as Bunraku and the Haiku because of their emphasis on surfaces and a proportionate relationship between signifier and signified, something he believes the language of the West denies. Prof Scott too corroborates with this idea that “Japanese literature is so light that it is sometimes almost impossible to discover its meaning” (Scott 2011, 129), a quote which he takes from a Chinese scholar Hain Jou-Kia, who studies Japanese literature. The use of Japan in Silk has a similar purpose: it is used to produce an atmosphere of inscrutability.

Joncour’s first experience with the Japanese silk trader who cannot speak and wears a black silk veil introduces to him and the reader the inscrutability of the Japanese. He judges Hara Kei’s voice on his standards of intonation and thinks that it was “a singsong voice that melted into a sort of irritating falsetto” (Baricco 2007, 25). Hara Kei is described as being surrounded by “absolute silence, and emptiness” (Baricco 2007, 43) and he refuses to answer Joncour’s questions about the girl who was sleeping on his lap, the girl Joncour subsequently falls in love with. The servants in Hara Kei’s house are consistently described as moving “imperceptibly” and, after completing their task, mysteriously vanishing (Baricco 2007, 25, 42). This atmosphere of inscrutability is again evidenced in Joncour’s encounter with shadows appearing and disappearing “without a sound” (Baricco 2007, 45) behind the traditional Japanese rice paper panel, an experience which he likens not to the solidity of reality, but to theatre, a ‘light’ reflection of reality. Toward the novel’s conclusion, neither Joncour nor the readers know why Hara Kei chooses not to kill him when he returns looking for the girl or accept the gold that he offers to finance the civil war that they become embroiled in.

Because this interaction is between a Frenchman and the Japanese in the 19th century during her policy of Isolationism, the novel can be understood as articulating a certain post-colonial discourse related to a facet of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism: “a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1979, 3) done in one way through a depiction of the Orient as a place of “sexual promise . . . untiring sensuality, unlimited desire . . . where one can look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe” (Said 1979, 188-90). He cites “Flaubert’s Oriental experiences” (Said 1979, 188) as an example, an author who is named multiple times as writing the novel Salammbô during the events that are occurring in Silk. Rushing, in his article, argues that in the case of Silk, “the Orient serves precisely to elicit knowledge of self rather than knowledge of the other” (Rushing 2003, 215) a project that “raises the possibility of a movement without end, of knowledge that cannot be fully apprehended, full of anxiety as well as possibility” (Rushing 2003, 211). This is consistent with Said’s concept of the post-colonial mutually constitutive dichotomy between the Orient and Occident. There is indeed compelling evidence to read Silk as using the other to attempt to understand the domestic self, a project that, as Rushing notes, cannot have a satisfying end.

The girl that Joncour falls in love with does not have eyes of an oriental shape (Baricco 2007, 28). According to Rushing, the reason why she is so attractive to Joncour is because “although she is undeniably the same as he is (European, at the mercy of Hara Kei), she introduces what Joncour finds simultaneously alluring and frightening: difference” (Rushing 2003, 216). This is where, Rushing argues, the “difference between self and other becomes differences within the self” (Rushing 2003, 217). Another instance includes the letter that Joncour thinks was sent by the Oriental girl which he takes to a Japanese fabric shop owner in Nîmes named Madame Blanche to translate, only to find out later that it had been written by his wife who had previously gotten Madame Blanche to translate it into Japanese for her after she finds out about the girl in Japan. His quest to decode the translated letter becomes an exercise in understanding his domestic relations. Lastly, Hara Kei’s command “try to tell me who you are” (Baricco 2003, 26) to Joncour at their first meeting indicates that his foray into Japan is an exercise in learning about the self, that in the presence of the Orient, “the west finds that at last it can provide a plenitude of truth and presence, an absolute orientation of self and home” (Rushing 2003, 215).

None of these explorations, however, yield successful results. Joncour never learns more about himself or the meaning of his life within the context of his experiences. He does not know whether his wife truly loves him since he later finds out that she also has an affair. He never learns why the girl he falls in love with cannot be with him or how she even got to Japan, how his wife finds out about it, or why Madame Blanche hates Japan. The many questions in the novel, whether related to the plot or to understanding the significance of life, are never resolved, and in response, Joncour reacts with a certain resigned passivity about his life and the circumstances surrounding it. After he no longer has any hope of returning to Japan or finding that girl, he is described as having the “unassailable peacefulness of men who feel they are in their place” (Baricco 2007, 122). After his wife suddenly passes away with brain fever and his good friend Baldabiou leaves town, he questions the illogicality of his fate, but quickly moves from despair “submitting to what was left of his life . . . with the unyielding tenacity of a gardener at work the morning after the storm” (Baricco 2007, 126). And finally, alone, and living day by day in his “liturgy of habits” (Baricco 2007, 131), the novel ends with him spending hours looking at the lake, contemplating “the inexplicable spectacle, light, that had been his life” (Baricco 2007, 132).

The use of Japan, the novel’s many questions that do not have answers, and Joncour’s corresponding melancholic passivity toward his life that they cannot infuse with meaning all contribute to the atmosphere of epistemological inscrutability in the novel, which is further embellished with the formal aesthetic of ‘lightness’ manifesting itself in two ways: in the stark simplicity of the language used in the novel and through “image[s] of lightness that acquire emblematic value” (Calvino 1993, 17).

The novel features very short chapters and the sentence structures are mostly short and simple as well. This ‘lightness’ in the narration seeks to convey the basic message required for the reader to understand the plot, and to leave connections, associations, and character motives for the reader to posit. This approach to supporting an epistemologically inscrutable theme is oppositional to the use of language in a dense novel like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which expresses its inscrutability through an “adjectival insistence upon inexpressibility and incomprehensible mystery” (Leavis 1998, 21). Baricco, on the other hand, subtracts from his use of language, so that there are “subtle and imperceptible elements at work” (Calvino 1993, 17) whereby “meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that is weightless” (Calvino 1993, 16). This coherence between the novel’s epistemological inscrutability and ‘lightness’ of language allows it to become aesthetically pleasing because they develop a congruency of form and content toward Baricco’s desired end, that the search for meaning, experientially as well as textually, is futile because truth is arbitrary.

One of the ways in which ‘lightness’ is manifested for Calvino is when “a visual image of lightness gains emblematic value” (Calvino 1993, 17). The symbol of silk, the central plot device, gains emblematic value because of its transparency and lightness: “If you held it between your fingers, it was like grasping nothing” (Baricco 2007, 34), in consistency with the simple transparency of the language throughout the novel. Another image of ‘lightness’ as playfulness that has emblematic value is the colourful flight of the collection of birds that escape Hara Kei’s immense aviary “of every type, astonished, fleeing everywhere, gone wild, singing and shouting, a pyrotechnic burst of wings” (Baricco 2007, 63). The event bears no meaningful significance except to celebrate in its aesthetic logic, an aspect of ‘lightness’ closer to the one identified by Prof Scott. Joncour is so moved by the spectacle that he designs an aviary just so that he can re-create that scene to re-experience its beauty once more when he is in a lovely mood (Baricco 2007, 78).

Interestingly, Calvino’s positive conception of ‘lightness’ as a literary quality can be used to support themes of epistemological doubt, giving it (in Silk) a dimension of melancholic beauty and even playfulness. The emergent quality of ‘lightness’ here is therefore not that far removed from the ones previously established and expanded upon by Prof Scott about buoyancy and aesthetic immediacy. The difference is that the quality of ‘lightness’ in Silk is used to support an epistemological theme so that it encourages readers to be thoughtful about the meaning, or lack thereof, that the ‘lightness’ points to.

‘Lightness’ as a philosophical concept rather than formal quality takes on a more ambivalent characteristic in the ULB. On the subject of whether or not ‘lightness’ is positive or negative, Kundera writes that “it is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all” (Kundera 1995, 5). Certainly, while one of Kundera’s characters’ Sabina wishes for her ashes to be thrown over the sea as a gesture of ‘lightness,’ one that gains a positive emblematic value, the pull of weight upon her in the form of her social connections with Tomas and Tereza is what gives her life much-needed meaning; Kundera indicates that she is torn between the two. At the heart of this, and many of the other characters in the novel, who vacillate between the weight of social connections and political realities and the ‘lightness’ of freedom, moral or otherwise, is Kundera’s philosophical rumination on the pros and cons of living our lives with either the unbearable ‘lightness’ of our temporal existence in mind or with the weight of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, a thought experiment which Kundera uses as a philosophical counter-weight to the temporality of ‘lightness,’ something that Calvino notes, referring to the ULB, is a “human condition common to us all” (Calvino 1993, 7).

To better understand Kundera’s ‘lightness’ then, we must understand his corresponding concept of weight, or Eternal Recurrence, its moral implication, since that is an important issue in the ULB, and how this mutually inseparable relationship between ‘lightness’ and weight is played out among the characters in the novel.

Eternal Recurrence in the ULB is a philosophical concept that posits that “the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make” (Kundera 1995, 4) because “everything recurs as we once experienced it, and . . . the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum” (Kundera 1995, 3). The reason why I believe Kundera chooses to use Eternal Recurrence rather than say, the Christian concept of salvation and eternal life as the weighty counter-point to his ‘lightness’ is because he wants to infuse positive earthly moral sentiment in his weight, or as Sybylla put it in her article: “to elucidate and advocate the more appropriate values which emerge when human existence is understood as entirely earthborn” (Sybylla 2004, 309). This is important because it has its corresponding moral implications for his concept of ‘lightness.’ To elucidate my point, Sybylla’s article provides an example from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which is a novel about an English butler Stevens who reminisces about his failed opportunity to begin a romantic relationship with his former colleague Miss Kenton a few decades past because of his “absolutist” (Sybylla 2004, 316) devotion to his boss, Lord Darlington. Sybylla notes that “Stevens is wrong to make this promise to himself of a future ‘better world’ . . . further, in his negation of present bodily life in favour of an imagined future end, Stevens behaviour corresponds to the ascetic rationality which Nietzsche expresses as a will to nothingness” (Sybylla 2004, 319).

Therefore, if eternity, responsibility, and weight, can only be resident within a system of belief that encourages ascetic self-denial (for example, in the case of Christian belief), something which Nietzsche and by extension, Kundera see as unethical, the alternatives can only either be complete nihilism, in which the individual “resides in a state of resignation and potential despair,” (Payne 2006, 166) or an acceptance of Nietzsche’s “solution to the problem” (Payne 2006, 162): Eternal Recurrence. Therefore, by invoking Eternal Recurrence as the counter-weight to the unbearable ‘lightness’ of temporal being, all of the transcendent, ascetic, or absolutist aspects of that kind of morality may be removed, leaving only a moral framework that issues from what would arguably be considered to be a materialist world view. In contrast, ‘lightness’ is then infused with the reality that, if life only happens once, and never again, then objective transcendent meaning cannot be found, which implies that moral freedom can only come with temporal existence. It is within this thought experiment that Kundera begins his narrative and drops his characters.

Kundera’s novel is set in the Prague Spring, during the political period of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and centres around four main characters: Tomas, a womanizer and surgeon, Tereza, his wife who is a passionate photographer, Sabina, Tomas’ mistress and Franz, a professor who loves Sabina. These characters vacillate between ‘lightness’ and weight, ultimately showing that the yearning for both is a common experience among them and, as Kundera implies, a condition that befalls us all. By looking at these characters then, we can gain an understanding of what characterises Kundera’s ‘lightness.’ I will argue that ‘lightness’ features moral freedom, sexual or otherwise, disengagement from responsibility, political or familial, and at a fundamental level, an unbearable absence of transcendent, or immutable meaning, resulting in a narrative tone of resigned melancholy, especially toward the end of the novel that bears resemblance to the more neutral aspect of the formal quality of ‘lightness’ I argued is apparent in Silk.

Tomas is a man who values ‘lightness.’ His revel in ‘lightness’ is associated almost exclusively with the freedom it affords him to engage in sexual encounters with multiple partners, over 200, by his estimation (Kundera 1995, 192). At the beginning of the novel, we learn that he stops visiting his divorced wife and son, the latter to whom he felt “was bound by nothing but a single providential night” (Kundera 1995, 11). Because of this however, his parents disown him, and he develops an approach to relationships he calls “erotic friendships” where “neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other” (Kundera 1995, 11), in other words, sexual relationships devoid of responsibility or love. However the unbearable meaninglessness of his relationships soon weighs on him, and he feels the pangs of real love, with all its responsibility and heartbreak, in Tereza, a woman he meets in Prague. The real pull of love and responsibility that he has toward her is evidenced in his return to Prague after she leaves him in Zurich to go back there. At first, he experiences the “sweet lightness” (Kundera 1995, 29) of the possibility of going back to his bachelor life, but only a few days later he is hit by the inevitable “weight the likes of which he had never known” (Kundera 1995, 30). He was “tortured by compassion . . . imagining Tereza living on her own in Prague” (Kundera 1995, 32) and decides to go back.

Later in the novel, Tomas, a reveller in ‘lightness’ exhibits weight again in his political statement to a weekly newspaper denouncing the communists for their “judicial murders resulting from the[ir] political trials” (Kundera 1995, 172). Even though the editors shortened the final text without his approval, making it “too schematic and aggressive” (Kundera 1995, 172) and eventually getting him in trouble, he refuses to retract the statement and is forced to leave the hospital he works at to become a window washer. In short, he makes the weighty decision to stand by his moral integrity, invoking and adhering to an objective moral standard that his original life of ‘lightness’ was once devoid.

Sabina, another character who initially values ‘lightness,’ loves the idea of betrayal, both relational and political. She unexpectedly leaves Franz, her lover, leaving no trace. She also rebels fervently against the idea of Kitsch in the form of political solidarity and finds the idea of “people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison” to be an image of true evil (Kundera 1995, 96-7). Her grandfather’s bowler hat, which serves as a prop for sex, is valued by her for its use outside its original context and therefore its meaninglessness. However, the narrator notes that she nevertheless felt “the unbearable lightness of being” (Kundera 1995, 118) living alone in Paris after leaving Franz on a whim. Three years later, when she receives a letter telling her that her only friends Tomas and Tereza have died in a car crash, “she could not get over the news [because] the last link to her past had been broken” (Kundera 1995, 119). In her pursuit of ‘lightness,’ she realizes how much she craves and misses weight in the form of meaningful social connections.

Within the backdrop of these characters who move from ‘lightness’ to weight, Kundera, toward the conclusion of the novel, reveals the unbearable truth that Eternal Recurrence is an illusion: “History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow” (Kundera 1995, 217). In one declaration, Kundera reminds us of the sobering truth that Eternal Recurrence is just a thought experiment “which requires neither the truth nor the coherence of the cosmological hypothesis” to theoretically “give meaning to our suffering in a world in which we no longer have the transcendental to appeal for otherworldly hope” (Paphitis 2009, 190, 195). ‘Lightness’ is our true condition, Kundera argues, regardless of whether we yearn for weight or not. Sabina concludes that the only expression of ‘lightness’ that she can appropriate after her death is for her ashes to be thrown “to the winds” (Kundera 1995, 265) a sign of ‘lightness’ which I have noted gains emblematic value in the ULB. Tomas himself, along with Tereza, dies, as Sabina finds out, at about the halfway mark in the novel. However, their story continues as the narrator moves back to them after finishing Sabina’s arc. ‘Lightness’ then becomes a formal quality that affects the reader intellectually and emotionally: the subsequent actions and conversations by Tomas and Tereza become ‘light’ to the reader because they bear no significance since readers know that they will arbitrarily die soon after, a reminder that we also cannot escape death and that our actions are just as ‘light’ as theirs.

The two other significant characters in the novel, Franz and Tereza, are characters who initially value weight. Franz, unlike Sabina, hates things that have no meaning and is uncomfortable with her using the bowler hat as a sex prop because “it was neither obscene nor sentimental, merely an incomprehensible gesture” (Kundera 1995, 84). He has a great love for demonstrations (Kundera 1995) and takes part in a Grand March to Cambodia during its Vietnamese occupation to protest to allow the international medical committee in to provide aid for the Cambodians (Kundera 1995), which fails miserably. As the protestors begin their return, Franz “could not accept the fact that the glory of the Grand March . . . was lost in an infinite silence . . . he wanted to prove that the Grand March weighed more than shit” (Kundera 1995, 261). The irresolution of his political crusades reveals to him their true condition of ‘lightness,’ along with his being mugged and stabbed randomly and his eventual death in the care of his wife, whom he despises (Kundera 1995, 266-268).

Tereza who also values weight as evidenced in her passionate use of photography to capture the effects of the political changes on the street and then giving them to “foreign journalists” (Kundera 1995, 24), toward the end of the novel, begins to revel in ‘lightness.’ While she is passionate about her weighty role as a photographer: to “preserve the face of violence for the distant future” (Kundera 1995, 63), she quickly gives it up for Tomas. As their pet dog Karenin passes away at the novel’s conclusion, she decides to inscribe a meaningless dream she had of Karenin on her grave: “Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to two rolls and a bee” (Kundera 1995, 295).

Using death, disappointment, and alienation as the novel progresses, Kundera embellishes his philosophical rumination on ‘lightness’ with a tone of melancholy. The ethereality of life and the corresponding uselessness of the search for meaning implied in the deaths of the characters and their (for Sabina and Tereza) concluding exaltation of ‘lightness’ produces a formal quality of ‘lightness’ rather similar to the one associated with epistemological doubt in Silk.

Results

This paper has used Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Alessandro Baricco’s Silk to expand the definition of ‘lightness’ both as a literary quality and philosophical concept, to include an expression of epistemological doubt and melancholy at our temporal existence, one in which both meaning and morality cannot be found.

‘Lightness’ is therefore polysemous, able to accommodate a large range of meanings and uses, to evoke also a varied range of emotions depending on its use, as discussed in the literature review and in previous criticism, most notably Prof Scott’s article.

Conclusion

Certainly, ‘lightness’ should continue to be explored as a literary concept and have its definition expanded, or to see if its identified qualities may be found in other works of literature and what implications this has to the work itself and the effect it has on the reader.

Regarding Calvino’s Six Memos, Lucia Re notes that he believed “there is a particular understanding of the world that only literature can give us” (Re 1998, 125), and I think ‘lightness’ reflected in the melancholy of both the novel’s main characters and embedded in the novels’ form is indicative of this. By narrating a human experience common and identifiable to readers, the reflections in turn produce emotions (like intellectual melancholy) that simple rhetorical prowess cannot evoke. When readers identify with the experiences of the characters in the novel, ruminate on the philosophical or symbolic themes, and at the same time appreciate the aesthetic quality of the language in consistency with what the author wants to convey, they experience something that I believe only literature can give, and in the case of ‘lightness,’ (at least the one identified in this paper) a curious mix of melancholy, a touch of nihilistic playfulness and finally passive acceptance.

It is right therefore, for Calvino to think that literature can “produce something that it does not know how to say, something that it does not know yet” (Re 1998, 130), and concerning ‘lightness,’ something which can “elevate the reader’s mind to a higher intellectual dimension” (Re 1998, 136).

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Prof Bede Scott for supervising me, for providing direction in writing the paper, and for being understanding, especially toward my other academic obligations, giving me freedom and space to research and write at my own pace.

I wish to acknowledge the funding support for this project from Nanyang Technological University under the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) program.

References

• Baricco, Alessandro. 2007. Silk. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Vintage Books.
• Barthes, Roland. 1984. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
• Calvino, Italo. 1993. Six Memos for the next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: Vintage Books.
• Kundera, Milan. 1995. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Faber and Faber.
• Leavis, F.R. 1998. “The Great Tradition: George Eliot; Henry James; Joseph Conrad.” Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. Ed. Nicolas Tredell. New York: Colombia University Press.
• Paphitis, Sharli Anne. 2009. “The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence and its significance with respect to On the Genealogy of Morals.” S. Afr. J. Philos. 28 (2).
• Payne, Michael W. 2006. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being, OR Problematising the Ethical.” Religion and Theology. 13 (2).
• Re, Lucia. 1998. “Calvino and the Value of Literature.” MLN. 113 (1).
• Rushing, Robert. 2003. “Seta: Travel, Ventriloquism and the Other.” MLN. 118 (1).
• Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
• Scott, Bede Tregear. 2011. “On Superficiality: Truman Capote and the Ceremony of Style.” Journal of Modern Literature 34 (3).
• Sybylla, Roe. 2004. “Down to Earth with Nietzsche: The Ethical Effects of Attitudes toward Time and Body.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. 7 (3).