Holiday Research: The relationships between 'If This is a Man' and 'The Unbearbale Lightness of Being'

In the texts ‘If this is a Man’ by Primo Levi and ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera the demolition of individuality is presented through the depiction of a concentration camp. The depiction of the concentration camp holds both contrasting and similar qualities between the two literary works. The main difference lies in its real life depiction in ‘If this is a Man’ and its metaphorical depiction in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. Aside from this difference the depiction concentration camp still intends communicate its ability to extinguish ones originality and create a community of uniformity. Tereza’s experience within a concentration camp appears to be perceived unlike Levi’s first-hand experience; however both experiences succeed to tormenting both of them psychologically. Above all the unwritten aim of the Concentration camp is to create a state of kitsch, which quietly haunts the souls of those who fear it most including Sabina in the Unbearable Lightness of Being.

A Concentration camp to Tereza is nothing more than a metaphor to describe her life from childhood yet it still manages to fuse into her adult life. Ever since being a small child she has been obsessed with her body image, undoubtedly influenced by her mother known to ‘walk naked out onto the street’. It is for this very reason she values its privacy. Amidst her desire to ‘wish away’ her mother’s complexions from her face by ‘standing hours in front of the mirror’ to become an individual or her own, she is plagued by the external world that inhibits her ability to achieve this. The concentration camp in Tereza’s life takes its form from her desire to become an individual rather than a mere ‘continuation of her mother’ as well as the dream to define herself differently from the many other of Tomas mistresses. Levi is contrastingly plagued by a concentration camp in ‘the hundreds’ of identical bodies he’s sees before him. Externally they resemble nothing more than his own appearance like ‘miserable and sordid puppets’ no longer living in their own control but from the control of the German Nazi’s. Unlike Tereza whose concentration camp has intertwined her life since birth, Levi’s experience is forced upon him unexpectedly which perhaps makes it easier to maintain his sense of self from what it has been for so long. If Tereza did not despise sharing physical attributes of her mother and Tomas’s mistresses perhaps her world would not be defined as a concentration camp as it is not inflicting mental pain and controlling her way of life to the same extent.

Kundera interestingly develops Tereza within a metaphorical world of a concentration camp in order to develop the world to wishes to escape to. ‘She came to Tomas to make her body unique, irreplaceable’ but instead she had been sent back into ‘the world she tried to escape’ the world amongst the other naked women. The only reason why she had the strength to escape her mother (whom she never stopped loving) was because of the absence of her ‘mothers loving voice’. At first it had seemed like Tomas had rescued her like ‘baby Moses’ from the depths of her mother’s world, ‘a world where all bodies were equal’ but Tomas only drew an ‘equal sign’ between her and all his other mistresses. She is left to remain helpless in the ‘humiliation’ of ‘nudity’ haunting her day and night. Levi has similar desires to escape the effects of the concentration camp in identifying the lives of individuals such as the couple ‘Francesca and Renzo’ and ‘3 year old Emilia’. In doing so he fights against the Kitsch of the concentration camp, giving back life to each individual and mentally destroys the tattooed numbers which rid them of this. Levi treats the principles of a name delicately because of his will to preserve ‘the strength’ that enables him to keep the ‘something behind his name’ as it was before. Maintaining this sense of self and others, nurtures his saneness and enables him to momentarily escape the psychological constraints of the concentration camp.

The development of the Concentration camp during World War two was designed to slowly torture its victims both physically and mentally until eventual death, wiping out a population of jews. A ‘group of naked women’ for Tereza is a ‘quintessential image of horror’ and one that returns continuously in her dreams. The horror of the dream is not developed in its single existence but in Tereza’s ability to re-play them in her mind ‘turning them into legends’. It is in the repetition of the dream that tortures the mind, enabling the dream to appear real to Tereza and even more threatening.

Amidst the world of the concentration camp, Levi and Teresa cannot help but feel sunken to ‘the bottom’. Levi is awakened to the allusion that perhaps it is the ‘private initiative of our Charon’, the Greek mythology character to transport them ‘down’ ‘on the bottom’ of the earth, the place of hell, the concentration camp. But in titling the second of his chapters ‘On the Bottom’ we as readers are informed of the real reality of hell. Although we are aware that all things heavy ‘sink’ to the bottom, it is ironic that Levi is placed on the bottom when stripped and empty of what defines him as an individual. His number, ‘174517’ that is tattooed is all that is ‘given’ to him that is different from everything else he is given within the camp. It is inevitably a symbol of baptism whilst ironically a symbol shadowing his future death ‘carried on his arm’. Hence it is his number that lures him to the place ‘on the bottom’, the place death, as it forecasts the beginning of his journey there. Levi finds the ‘double sense’ in understanding in why the Germans call Auschwitz ‘an extermination camp’. It is to literally exterminate the human by slow reverse personification, from one is deprived of ‘everyone he loves, his house, his habits, his clothes, everything he possesses ‘into a ‘hollow man’ so that he can ‘lie on the bottom’.

This concept is similarly explored in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, but from Tereza’s striking perspective. Through the depiction of Tereza Kundera considers the idea that ‘someone whose goal is something higher must expect some day to suffer vertigo’. Kundera defines vertigo as not only ‘the fear of the falling’ but the ‘voice of emptiness below which tempts us and lures us’. In Tereza’s world the emptiness below is the place of her mother and Tomas’s mistresses, empty because of their separation of soul from their bodies. It is because of this Tereza had experienced a strong desire to escape terrified from this place, but it continues to ‘mysteriously beckon’ her back in her dreams. ‘The corpses in the hearse rejoicing’ that she was dead were ‘down below’ and are depicted like lonely echoes of the soulless calling her. In ‘times of weakness’ Tereza feels obliged to follow these calls, giving up the strong connection she holds between her soul and body that enable her to live among the other of Tomas’s mistresses, without the pain of humiliation.

When a man is hollow he is weak, but Levi is resilient in preserving himself so he does not ‘lie on the bottom’ as a ‘hollow man’. Although he admits that it is ‘practically pointless’ to wash every day in the ‘turbid water’ of the ‘filthy wash basins’ he feels he must do so to sustain his human ‘dignity’. Not because ‘regulation states it’ but because ‘dignity and propriety’ help you ‘remain alive’. One must not ‘begin to die’ in a Concentration Camp as otherwise you will become weak and ‘lie on the bottom’ even before you are destined to get there. In this sense instead of the ‘the voice’ that calls Tereza back to ‘the bottom’ it is the temptation to give up your normalities of your previous life and begin to shrink into the darkness of concentration camp that lures you to this place in ‘If This is a Man’.

Depth of the Pool: suffocation of one’s soul, the fear of falling into the deep waters of the pool where she is helpless, like the others of Tomas’s mistresses. Tereza feels particularly vulnerable in her dreams where she her fear of ‘falling to her death’ is maximized. In her dream she is forced to do knee bends in rhythm with the other mistresses. While around the ‘pool full of corpses floating just below the surface’ she felt like she ‘lacked the strength to do the next knee bend’ and was sure of herself that Tomas would shoot her. From this perspective the difference between the pathway to ‘the bottom’ for Levi and Tereza is their difference in strength. Both admittedly lack physical strength, Tereza in her inability to do ‘knee bends’ and Levi in his ‘weak and clumsy’ nature; however the difference appears in their psychological resilience. Tereza’s dreams only work to fuel her fear of becoming no different to the other of Tomas’s mistresses and consequently her belief that she will always be like this. She lacks the mentality to fall out of this viscous cycle that has repeated itself ever since being a child. She firmly believes that she is weak living ‘among the weak, in the camp of the weak’,

What do dreams serve in both texts. For Tereza they only seem to relive the horrors felt during the daylight, but for Levi they act as an opening of freedom, the opportunity to dream beyond the barbed wire of the camp, and infuse a moment of hope into his life, they are comforting at the time, only the ‘awakening’, that point in time where he wakes up is his hope crushed by the world he awakens to(described as the acutest of sufferings). We are told that dreams are only rare inside the concentration camp and ‘they are not long’. Levi’s excuse of dreaming in such way is because he is a ‘tired beast’. His use of ‘beast’ best describes the strength that he once held inside of him, but also the potential to regain this strength only because he is ‘tired’ not dying. The dream is hence a function of being tired. When we are tired we easily drift into the world of subconscious, the dream, losing focus of reality. Often from her we are taken to a place of comfort greater than the conscious world. Although the dream may disappear within seconds for Levi, it mere existence tells us of his deep internal desire, to escape to a place more comforting than where he currently is. The wagons carrying What do dreams serve in preserving our human nature? They are there to reflect, organise and find answers to problems in the conscious world; the subconscious is intriguingly sophisticated and often surprises us by what it manages to create.