Words on the Page, Emotions in the Gut: Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being

In this chapter, the question of gendered emotions complicates neuroscience’s idea of a “core self.” Kundera’s Nietzschean-inflected novel, discursively fragmented and paradoxical, represents an historical moment (1968) when the sexual revolution, Nietzschean influences, Cold War politics, and structuralist literary theories cohabit the same (white, male) cultural space. An antipathy to Dostoevsky’s “murky depths” of emotion is Kundera’s subtext, while the novel’s paradox is that revelations about these depths, especially in reference to visceral feelings, constitute the novel’s emotional power for the reader. The novel opens an opportunity to confront alternate descriptions of how consciousness works in fiction, and how neuropsychoanalytic and corticocentric theorists debate the interplay between body and mind.