Max is NOW!

A while back I wrote this paper on Othello. It wasn’t bad for my skills at the time. I wrote it for a World Lit class at the Junior College I started my academic career at. Although most of my classes were boring at best, this class was overseen by one of the four professors I think I will always admire. He wasn’t much of a man, recently divorced from an affair he had on the side, and really just a nazi when it came to reading our assignments. It wasn’t long before I warmed up to him; in the warmest way you can a man who assails your every intellectual move. The truth is, I admired him. I saw his relentless critiquing of my work as a challenge. I saw something in his words that no other professor had ever given me before, my shortcomings. We developed a rather abrasive relationship in the classroom, butting heads like wild rams fighting for the intellectual space and dominance over the other. A lot of the other students saw this and started to grow afraid to speak in class, as most of the time it came down to him and I dueling over the Whys and the Whats and the Whos. It was incredibly unfair to the other students, a real waste of their money I can imagine to see us do this week after week. But for him and I, it was magic. This entire struggle, this battery and forceful delivery of idea after idea. I’m sure it looked like a siege of brutal academic war against one-another, but as I said, to me it was beauty. I still am rarely pushed around as hard as I was in that class. And from it, came my paper on Othello. Jason, the professor, being an advent Shakespeare reader and critic had given us paper topics. They were the standard issue junior college paper topics. Really, a let down coming from him. So I decided to write my own topic. I had explained to him, “I will show that Shakespeare, in the wake of his own personal love troubles, decided to write a piece that did not show the darkness or lightness of love. Neither the punishment nor reward. Shakespeare wrote Othello to take love apart, piece by little piece. To fillet it once and for all.” I remember Jason laughing at me and wishing me luck with such a ridiculous position. It was here I knew that my philosophical career started, no earlier. Because I left the text and began talking about the author. To make a long story short, I wrote the paper, and although it wasn’t bad for my skills, it was a great distance from being a work worthy of praise. I got it placed in a few journals, but there was really no response. I took that as my queue to forget about it. At least for the following 4 years.

This morning I woke up like any other morning. But on my way to work, in the packed freeway of traffic, my brain started to sink. The past few days I read some pages of La Rochefoucauld and the better part of Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’ve read them both before, but they seem to be these pivoting points of many of my thoughts. And once again, Tomas inspired me. I was thinking about the common understanding of Kundera’s meaning behind Unbearable Lightness. As far as I’ve read, most people agree that he is making a cynical move to the heart of life as meaningless. That because we cannot live it more than once, via eternal recurrence, that our lives can never be imbued with meaning or expression as they are incomparable to anything else. We live it once, and make one choice, and cannot compare anything to it. Most contend that Kundera is citing Parmenides and then using Nietzsche to deliver this bleak message of meaninglessness, of life lightness bereft of weight or meaning. But they are wrong. This might be an idea of the story arc of Unbearable Lightness, but it is not the point, not the morsel of this fiction. The real piece of meaty flesh between its covers is found in the “reader arc,” not the travels and tribulations of the characters, but the travels and tribulations of the reader.

To put it simple, the book reads backwards. The meaning and test of this story does not unfold to its conclusion, it ravels up. Although Kundera distracts us with the big words of Nietzsche, the ideas of eternal recurrence, and the analytic dichotomy of Parmenides, these are all a show. The truth is found in the little piece Kundera slips between the cracks. The moments when Tomas himself does not know why we does them. And Kundera, as well, writes as though Tomas must do them, regardless of the author’s ideas or points or theories on the Lightness of Being. Tomas loves Tereza before anything else, from the very beginning, and at that beginning we find Kundera’s hidden truth. He is a dreamer, a Tristan. The true arc of the story goes back to the beginning. That, above all things, through the meaninglessness actions and moments, in the pure lightness and once-ness of life, Tomas loves Tereza. Not Sabina or his other sexual adventures. These are nothing. These are blank acts against the canvas of nothingness. Sabina is Lightness, and Tomas is the Weight.
Now this long and somewhat contrived position is what brought me back to the very beginning of this story. It occurred to me, that this greater Arc of the author is what I was trying to get at in Shakespeare as well. Not only that, but that this “reader arc” is where we derive the deeper secrets of fiction, the authors, the readers, us, the human animal; full of meaning in a meaningless world.

(TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2)