PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Hajji, Abdelouahed
TI  - Kitsch and the desire for eternity in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality
DP  - 2022 Jun 30
TA  - Romanica Olomucensia
PG  - 145--160
VI  - 34
IP  - 1
AID - 10.5507/ro.2022.010
IS  - 18034136
AB  - This contribution analyses the notion of kitsch in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality through an examination of the characters and the essayistic chapters of the novels and entitled "The Great March" and "homo sentimentalis", respectively. According to Kundera, kitsch is a denial of shit, a way of forgetting reality and hiding the wretchedness of existence behind what he calls a "rosy veil". Kitsch, like nostalgia for the lost paradise, is a "desire for eternity": it allows people to sublimate their lives and to make them bearable. Humans thus seek a profane immortality which inscribes them in history, as exemplified by the character of Kendra's Immortality, Bettina von Arnim. Moreover, kitsch is a rejection of the complexity proper to existence. In this sense, the kitsch-man tends to simplify the complexity of existence by turning it into stereotypical images. It is a form of utopia that draws on abstract ideals and feelings that are supposedly absolute. In response to the development of kitsch, in his novels Kundera cultivates the art of ambiguity. That serves to rehabilitate individual autonomy. Kitsch annihilates the individual, who gets dissolved in the lyrical feelings of the public and in the illusion of perfection. The kitsch-man desires to be perfect, in the image of God. From this point of view, the narrator of "The Great March" associates kitsch with the theme of totalitarianism as a wall that conceals weakness and death. In other words, kitsch denies the world of death and excrement. Indeed, the beautiful lie proper to what Kundera calls "homo sentimentalis" and the "imagological man" replaces relativity and truth. In Immortality, Laura and Bettina embody the concept of homo sentimentalis, as they set up their feelings as an absolute value. In this case, kitsch, as a beautiful dream, is part of the human condition and no one can escape it.