Ego And Alter Ego

Who is an individual? Where does his identity lie? All novels seek to answer these questions. But by what exactly is the self defined? Is man capable of self understanding? Milan Kundera has asked these questions in his novels and does so again in Identity (Faber, special Indian price, £10). These reflections are the dominant themes: the self and the world, the meanings of plural identities. Above all, love: Is it real or just fantasy where the impossible creeps into the possible?

If the English have little taste for ideas disguised as literature - and not much for ideas at all Europeans have even less for creative work without theories. While English literature is concerned with what it means to be something or someone, European literature deals with what it means not to be something: to be in flux. And because the mind swings from one extreme to another, it is impossible to pin down Kunderas novels to just to one or two themes.

 

The fundamental theme is the quest for the self. Kundera explores this within the framework of a simple love story. Two friends. One day, Chantal imagines that her old companion, Jean-Marc, is Lost to Sight. This turns the light inwards in search of her own identity. Because the novel cannot breach its own limits, the mere fact of bringing these limits to light, is an immense discovery, a triumph of recognition of what she could be. Sadly, the search for the self ends in a paradoxical dissatisfaction.

Since his last encounter with F, he has been thinking about it: the eye: the window to the soul; the centre of the faces beauty; the point where a persons identity is concentrated; but at the same time an optical instrument that requires constant washing, wetting, maintenance by a special liquid dosed with salt. So the gaze, the greatest marvel man possesses, is regularly interrupted by a mechanical washing action. Like a windscreen washed by a wiper...

Jean-Marc watches the eyes of people he talks to and tries to observe the action of the eyelid; he finds that it is not easy. ...

And he goes on thinking: puttering in His workshop, God stumbled on this body form to which we must each become the soul for a short time. But what a sorry fate, to be the soul of a body cobbled together so offhandedly, whose eye cannot do its looking without being washed every ten, twenty seconds! How are we to believe that the person we see before us is a free, independent being, his own master? How are we to believe that his body is the faithful expression of whatever his soul inhabits? To be able to believe that, weve had to forget about the perpetual blinking of the eyelid. Weve had to forget the putterers workshop we come from. Weve had to submit to a contract to forget. Its God Himself who imposed the contract on us.

Metaphors with an interior monologue pervade the novel. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera says, the novel is not the authors confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. Identity explores the trap made worse by the contradictions in our selves. That life is a trap was known born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die but it is seen afresh with a new pair of eyes.