Swimming Pools in Milan Kundera's Novels

Paper presented at the “New Topologies” seminar at the University of Copenhagen, September 2005.

1.

Swimming pools are a wonderful and interesting topos that would have had a very long and very important place in the history of western art and literature, had they only been invented some centuries (or millenniums) before. I can’t help thinking that Plato’s famous Banquet - without any doubt one of the most important conversations ever) took place around a pool.

You see swimming pools quite often in movies and music videos - for obvious reasons. I haven’t really found out yet if you see a lot of them I fiction, the way you see a lot of death beds, courting scenes, parties and so on, but surely you see a lot of them in the novels of Milan Kundera.

2.

This is in fact quite surprising. Kundera is not an author with a great sense of place. In general he doesn’t really care about setting. In his first books the descriptive parts are very short and they are very often put into parenthesis as if he wanted to underline how unimportant they were.

We could compare him to another modernist writer, Hemingway - one of Kundera’s favourites and one of my favourites too. In Hemingway setting is everything. Hemingway didn’t like to talk too much about feelings, so he designed his descriptive parts in such a subtle way, that the clever reader more or less would be able to understand what was going on on the inside by looking at the setting: the big two-hearted river, the hills like white elephants, the cross-country snow, etc.

In Kundera setting is nothing: people meet in cafés, parks, in the street, in apartments, places where people usually and casually meet and talk. Because that’s what they do: they talk. They go through life, they do things, they make decisions, but the really important part is to think about and to talk about, what is happening to them. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being for instance we don’t see a man and a woman meeting and falling in love. We se two people thinking about how they met, how they fell in love, and trying to figure out what to do and what it all means.

3.

You could say that Kundera is thinking a story instead of just telling a story. In this perspective it is only natural that setting is of minor importance. Try to think about something in your own life, a conversation for instance. In retrospect, your experience is reduced to an abstraction: “He said this and I said that”; no setting is really required. Just think about what happens to you today: Tomorrow you’ll have a kind of abstract of what has happened in your head, but the hundreds and thousands of concrete details will have disappeared forever.

It is not surprising then that as far as descriptions and portraits are concerned, Kundera obeys a principle of maximum economy. He says that it would be ridiculous to pretend that his characters are real people. What is real on the contrary is their existential code, the complex constellation of questions and paradoxes that they incarnate,

However there are some exceptions to this rule, because sometimes objects and places can contribute to enlighten and explore this existential code. Among these objects, elements and places we have, if we stick to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sabina’s bowler hat, the music of Beethoven, a yellow bench in the park, sparrows, dogs, a copy of Sophocle’s play Oedipus Rex and a swimming pool.

Among these things only dogs and the swimming pool appear in the other novels by Kundera. Pools – and a kind of variation of the same topos, namely beaches - keep popping up at crucial moments in almost all of Kundera’s novels from Laughable Loves and the Farewell Waltz from the sixties and early seventies to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance.

4.

So is the swimming pool really a genuine and certified topos in Kundera’s work?

What is a topos? Generally speaking, an Aristotelian topos is an argumentative scheme, which enables a dialectician or rhetorician to construe an argument for a given conclusion. In earlier rhetoric a topos was understood as a complete pattern or formula that can be mentioned at a certain stage of the speech to produce a certain effect, most of the Aristotelian topoi are general instructions saying that a conclusion of a certain form can be derived from premises of a certain form.

Aristotle provide a list af topoï that the speaker could use in order to make his speech more convincing. These topoï were a kind of arsenal, a collection of weapons, in which you could choose what you liked, and what served your purposes the best.

In a nutshell, the function of a topos can be explained as follows. First of all one has to select an apt topos for a given conclusion. The conclusion is either a thesis of our opponent which we want to refute, or our own assertion we want to establish or defend. Accordingly, there are two uses of topoi: they can either prove or disprove a given sentence; some can be used for both purposes, others for only one of them.

The word ‘topos’ (place, location) most probably is derived from an ancient method of memorizing a great number of items on a list by associating them with successive places, say the houses along a street one is acquainted with. By recalling the houses along the street we can also remember the associated items.

In literature the notion has become a little less defined, but somehow it seems that literary studies in some strange way have taken the mnemotechnical origin seriously. In literature topos can be loosely defined as a place or a location, where certain things are known to happen: the classical locus amoenus, the death bed, the party, the restaurant, the haunted house. What distinguishes the topos from just another scene is the recurrence. It’s a kind of ready made, an empty and open structure that you can use for your own purposes. It may not be far from the cliché, but it is a cliché that you can renew.

5.

What is the significance of the pool, then? One of Kundera’s most significant pool scenes comes from The Unbearable lightness of Being, and it takes place in a dream. This should in fact not surprise us. As Gaston Bachelard pointed out in L'eau et les rêves, water is the symbol of the unconscient energies of the mind, its unformed forces, its secret and unknown motivations.

A young girl, Theresa, has met and fallen hopelessly in love with the charming and quite sympathetic womaniser, Tomas. She moves in with him, but she knows, that he is unfaithful. She is very unhappy, and the images of his unfaithfulness haunt her even in her dream. She dreams that she marches naked round a swimming pool with a number of other naked women. Tomas watches them, screams orders at them and shoot those who don’t execute them properly. Eventually Theresa also is shot and carried away with the other dead women that makes fun of her and scorn her because she is sad for being dead.

6.

This dream is for Theresa the image of absolute horror and desolation. It is also an example of a striking topos where we see Kundera’s thematic concerns being expressed almost directly.

What are these concerns? In order to answer that question, let’s ask: what are the thematic ingredients of this swimming pool scene? I see three elements: sexuality, identity and these two are related in what we could call the character’s fight to escape nihilism.

These three elements are present in all of Kundera’s swimming pool scenes. The mode can be different (tragic in The Unbearable lightness of Being, comic in Slowness, ironic in The Farewell Waltz, nostalgic, ironic and very intertextual in Immortality), the thematic focus can change but in all of these scenes you find questions concerning sexuality, identity and (as Monty Python and others said it) the meaning of life.

7.

So, Kundera combines two paradoxes in a statement about the human condition. The first paradox is about sexuality. Throughout his work Kundera is haunted by the disappearance not of sexuality, but of excitement.

The pool – and in this respect, the beach functions as a variation of the pool – is a place from which excitement has been officially banned.

You know what it’s like. You see a lot of almost naked women and men, but these bodies have been stripped - not only of the clothes they normally wear, but also of their power to excite. You see more or less naked women playing volleyball, and that’s okay. What is not okay is to be excited by the sight. And in some mysterious way, it’s not really exciting. The sheer mass of naked skin takes away the evocative power of naked skin.

Sexuality used to be Pandora’s box - the door that opened to all kinds of catastrophes. Now it’s almost just as ordinary as going to the gym, ride a bus, shake hands. Sex is on the verge of becoming banality. And the question is: if sex becomes banality, will it still be sex?

If we look at the Don Juan myth, which clearly fascinates Kundera, the essential part - according to Kundera - is the confrontation with death. Don Juan was a conqueror. In the pursuit of his wild desires he confronted traditional morality and even God, and the price he paid was death and eternal damnation. Nowadays, it’s impossible to be a Don Juan. You may sleep with a lot of women, but there’s no prize to be paid. There’s no confrontation anymore. Don Juan cannot be a conqueror, only a collector. When nothing’s at stake, Don Juan’s tragic grandeur is engulfed by the banality of everyday life. This is Don Juans posthumous death. It is another kind of death, less flamboyant, less meaningful and a lot more deathly, so to speak.

Sexuality as banality – that’s one of the significations of the swimming pool. But what is banality? What does it mean? Banality means things are worn out by repetition. At each repetition things lose a fragment of their meaning. But can this process just go on and on? Will it not reach a moment, when there’s nothing left, when things have lost the last bit of meaning. Yes, there is a frontier, says Kundera. What’s on the other side of that frontier? Nothing!

We find one of Kundera’s saddest scenes in the last chapter of The book on laughter and forgetting. The male protagonist, Jan, is together with some friends at a nudist beach on an idyllic island. They are talking about the sexual liberation, and they are naked, and Jan has the feeling that he has reached the frontier. What was the core of sexuality, ancient images of men pursuing women, the mystic feeling of something very strange and profoundly disturbing, has been destroyed, and there’s nothing to replace it. Jan knows that there is nothing, and in this place of liberated sexuality without excitement and mystery, he is thinking about the ancient story of Daphnis and Chloe, the story of infinite excitement and pre-coital mystery.

Thus, underlying the swimming pool (and the beach) topos with all its connotations of physical joy, naked bodies and liberation, we find the ghost of nihilism.

8.

The problem of nihilism is even more apparent in the second swimming pool theme: identity. Now what is at stake in Theresa’s dream? Well, her identity is at stake. The dream is so horrific to her because everything that makes her special, everything that makes Theresa Theresa, is taken away from her. Now this is a matter of life and death! If she is not herself, an individual that cannot be replaced, she is nothing. In her dream she is exactly like the other women. They are all naked, and they don’t care; they have nothing to hide, because they are all the same. They are identical.

Water is traditionally seen an undifferentiated mass. As such it represents infinite possibility, but also the danger of dissolution and absorption. This is the danger that threatens Theresa. If she is just identical to everybody else, nothing makes any sense anymore, everything is the same, and nothing is any good.

Apart from being close to the oldest and most traditional theme of the novel: the confrontation between the individual and society, it is also very close to Nietzsches definition of nihilism: alles ist gleich – the feeling that everything is the same, and nothing’s any good.

9.

What really makes things worse is the presence of her lover, Tomas, in the dream. Now there is some hard evidence to back up his appearance in the dream. All of her life Theresa has tried to be herself. It is not as easy as it sounds. When she looks in the mirror, she sees her mothers face in her face. Her face is a repetition, a copy. So she tries to take away everything that is not her. She seeks the tiny bit of difference that makes her unique. This tiny difference is her justification, the evidence that she is something in her own right.

When she meets Thomas, she thinks that she’s got it made. Finally she is seen as someone unique, exceptional, and indispensable by someone who is just as unique, exceptional and indispensable. That is until she discovers that he sleeps with other women as well, and she finds herself face to face with her old problem: Tomas does and says the same things to the others. There is no difference whatsoever between her and them. That is why Theresa dreams of the pool.

This indifferentiation (or similarity) is not only nihilism, it is death. In the dream the dead woman are not only dead, they’re also happy to be alike, and they make fun of Theresa’s desire to be different, “You’re just like the rest of us. Stop pretending. You’re dead, for Christ’s sake”.

10.

If we see things from the other end of the telescope, from Tomas’s viewpoint, the problem is the same. Why does he sleep with a lot of woman? Is it not just a boring repetition? Not really because Tomas is searching for what is different. And the only difference worth seeking is not the difference that everybody’s trying to show off in public life, but the hidden difference. Where do we find the hidden difference nowadays? In sexuality of course! So his womanising is not just vanity or a vain pursuit of pleasure; it is an epic effort to discover the world as difference. So for Tomas as well what makes sense is the discovery of difference. What does not make sense, is sameness, indifferentiation, banality.

11.

In Kundera a swimming pool is normally a swimming pool. They are not symbolic in the way heavy rain is symbolic in a bad movie. But they are related to some of the heavier themes, because they make the characters think (or, as it is, dream) and that is their main purpose. It is used to explore questions of sexuality, identity and, in the final analysis, being. Or to be more accurate, the pool highlightens a series of tensions: the tension between sexuality and banality, the tension between being an individual and just being some organic element of the mass, between meaning and nihilism, between life and death.

Now, the swimming pool is not a very dramatic topos. It’s not characterized by the grandeur of the tragic. In fact it’s pretty mundane. Even though the swimming pool concentrates some of the more serious existential themes in Kundera, it’s not a concentration camp-like place of desolation. It’s not even a sad place. It’s a happy place. In Theresa’s dream all the other women are having a good time. In Immortality the narrator and his friends are drinking wine, telling their stories, having fun around the pool. What does this mean? It reveals the essential lightness of the human drama.

This is one of the points that Kundera is trying to make. In the world of tragedy, your life may be ruined, you may loose everything, but at least you had the consolation of grandeur: Your suffering was redeemed by its dignity. In the world of comic insignificance things are worse, because you are even deprived of that consolation. Your suffering is light, ordinary; it inspires neither terror nor admiration. It means nothing. This is why - among other things - the lightness of being is so unbearable.