“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera (post 3): Multiple personality is when a person—a character or an author—has more than one “I”

In post 2, I interpreted Tereza’a grasping her lover while she was partially asleep as being the action of an alternate personality. But since multiple personality originates in childhood, it would be nice to have evidence that Tereza’s alternate personality originated in childhood:

“Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas’s hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training for it since childhood” (1, pp. 54-55).

Another reason to infer multiple personality is that Tereza studies herself in the mirror for a very peculiar reason. She worries that facial features similar to her mother’s may indicate the intrusion of her mother’s “I” and the “confiscation” of her own:

“It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own ‘I’…she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face…Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother’s features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew [plural] charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation” (1, p. 41). Now we can better understand the meaning of Tereza’s secret vice, her long looks and frequent glances in the mirror. It was a battle with her mother” (1, p. 47). From childhood on, Tereza had been ashamed of the way her mother occupied the features of her face and confiscated her ‘I’ ” (1, p. 298).

The author, himself, says that his characters are an extension, the “unrealized possibilities,” of his own “I”:

“As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

“But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?

“…The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about” (1, p. 221).

Comment

People who don’t have multiple personality are multifaceted, and have various situation-appropriate roles in their everyday life. But they don’t think about their “I” or whether it has been intruded upon or whether it has been extrapolated. They take having one basic sense of self for granted.

1. Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.