Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Dilshan Boange
The very notion of rationalizing, or trying to rationalize, ‘love’, may seem like
an incursion by the sciences calculated by the brain upon the aesthetics felt by
the heart. But one may ask does ‘reason’ completely elude love, and its possible
explication? While the reasons and its subjectivities may vary, Czech born writer
Milan Kundera presents in his work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one such
perspective of how love happens and how it may continue. In the Booker prize
winning novel The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje propounds a rationale for the
occurrence of love, which may resonate with the ideas of Kundera which these
writers have grounded in the genre of literary fiction.
In the section entitled ‘Litost’ in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera
presents a character by the name of Kristyna, a woman of about thirty whose
station in life does not entreat her with intellectual stimulation. The small-town
life she leads as the wife of a butcher and mistress of a mechanic is pleasantly
jolted when she meets a graduate student who visits her town on summer vacation,
invigorating her sense of being from a point of intellect she had not experienced
before.
Kundera describes Kristyna’s visual encounter with the student and consequent
making acquaintance thus-
“Meeting the student turned her head powerfully. He had come to the town to spend
his summer vacation with his mother, had twice stared at the butcher’s wife as she
stood behind the shop counter, and the third time, when he spoke to her at the
local swimming place, he was so charmingly timid that the young woman, accustomed
to the butcher and the mechanic, could not resist.”
The illicit love affair that ensues is not one that is constituted of amorous
intentions so much on the part of the woman, Kristyna. What she discovers is a new
experience of life, a freshness that is consequently fused with flows of
intellectuality of which the source is the graduate student. To her the
eruditeness of the young man becomes a plane of thinking that had not until then
touched her humdrum life’s provincial setting. The world of poetry and philosophy
that accost her through the words of the student and his scholarly impetuses in
the course of conversations posits the young man of letters as a fount of
knowledge and literary beauties. The enchanted listener the young man finds in
Kristyna makes her more attractive to him, and reinforces his sense of
learnedness. And in this paradigm of emotions certain parameters had also set in
terms of how far the aspect of physical intimacy could stretch between the two.