During my dinner break out by the lake, i was rereading a section in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where the doctor talks about his relationship with women and his wife, discussing the possible roles of a man in the pursuit of women. As the book is wont to make me do, my mind quickly wandered from the book to a state of internal discussion about the descriptions of relationships.
We are trained to label all of our relationships with people – daughter, friend, student, lover, etc. These labels provide roles and those roles come with expectations. When one fails to live up to the expectations, one is seen as a bad daughter/friend/student/lover. Even within these labels, we have to evaluate the magnitude of our role there. I hated the middle school negotiations between friend and best friend. The latter implied a large committment, a stronger bond, and a greater responsibility…
As an adult, i find it very difficult to label my relationships between people, partially because i’ve intentionally blurred the lines. I mean, what separates on from being a daughter or a friend? What about a friend or a lover? As a daughter am i supposed to tell my mother of my affairs? If i do, does that make us friends? As a friend am i supposed to refrain from sexual interactions? If i don’t, does that make us lovers? Is a lover a subset of a friend or unrelated? Can one be a lover without being a friend?
Not only is it confusing to have one’s relationship to another be described by multiple potential roles, but i find it all the more frustrating when a given role is only supposed to apply to one person. Certainly, some of these happen from outside and thus get the “like-a” addition. For example, father implies a certain type of longevity, i’ve adopted like-a-fathers. Yet other relationships which are more based on internal definitions become quite confusing. For example, what does it mean to be a lover to multiple people? Being a friend to multiple people is OK.. what separates friend from lover? Is it like the best friend problem where you are only supposed to have one? Why? Even in the polyamorous world, i’m always startled to hear the term primary lover, implying that while it might be OK to have multiple lovers, there is still a hierarchy.
For years, i’ve found myself recoiling from definitions of relationships, primarily because i find the definitions only destroy the actual relationship. This is no clearer than watching people get engaged. Suddenly, people are no longer lovers; they are engaged to be married. And this increase in status seems to destroy so many relationships. It comes with a set of expectations that are terrifying and in the face of such clear expectations, people run away. When a label is placed on a relationship, it comes with the expectations associated with that role.
I have particular expectations for people in different roles in my life. Some have been mentally articulated (i.e. i expect my friends to be there when i’m mentally chaotic; i expect my advisor to respond to my emails). Others are more fluid and less thought out, most noticed when they are lacking. When people don’t live up to my expectations, i find myself getting resentful, frustrated, annoyed. It is precisely this emotional reaction that makes me dread having to label a relationship. I end up preferring it to be in a state of flux, because it removes my need to expect certain things from that person. Without knowing the role, i don’t know what to expect. Without knowing the expectations, i find myself more fluid in our interactions, less neurotic and frustrated. I find myself capable of just being, just engaging, just interacting.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with everyone. Just as i need to know exactly where the books in my world are, other people absolutely must know where their relationships stand. This only makes sense. We mentally categorize everything in order to know how to relate. Most people get highly anxious when they don’t know whether someone is male or female. Thus, it only seems logical that they get anxious when they don’t know how they relate to someone, using what role.
Is it possible to have role-free relations? Or do people have a default relationship, such as friend, to resort to? Can you live without expectations of others? Or does this make one a social hermit?
Ah… how i do appreciate books like Unbearable… to get my mind rolling on relationships. Because i really am fascinated by people and their interactions…
Decided to shift the I.
The unbearable lightness of being to:: the unbearable lightness of all beings but me:: Today I am just unbearable. So…
Examining the semiotics of the novel with particular attention to “four appeals’ to which he [Kundera], as a novelist responds. . . Play, dream, thought and time which I feel :: created as language. Entering into a discussion (alone) of metaphors, metonymy and binary oppositions one points out the narrative is a meshing of meaning that, like language, is ever shifting and finding a new point of intersection: But what turns a static column of oppositions into a dialectical process, is the discovery that, within each pair of oppositions in the entire network, boundaries are increasingly challenged, transgressed or effaced. This I know for a fact. I.
I thereby conclude that the narrative is constructed by the gap’ of language and that the process of dichotomies and breaking them down, uniting them and pulverizing them have all been possible only because those processes are part of language itself.
On apparently complex thoughts like these: Maria Banerjee in a discussion of the substitutive process of themes and character types that constitute myths, finds that “in the place of sensuality they find only a phantom of freedom, a verbal artifact that functions like the dialectical negation of a ubiquitous external power that has posited itself as the only permissible image of God.
Calvino, in 89, after having fallen in love for the eleventh time that year, wrote: “the Nucleus of the book resides in a truth as simple as it is ineludible: it is impossible to act according to experience because every situation we face is unique and presents itself to us for the first time.
On the other side of the spectrum and basing his argument on The Joke by examining the contradictions of Kundera’s insistence upon a novel’s moral ambiguities in 1986 Norman Podhoretz in “An Open Letter To Milan Kundera. pleaded him to stop being ambiguous, this was an attempt to pull Kundera to a conservative American policy of “anticommunism. Norman Podhoretz in my opinion does not qualify as a being. Ambiguous?
John Bayley’s “Fictive Lightness, Fictive Weight. premise is that Kundera uses a dialectic system in a way that prevents his own prose from becoming a unitary fiction, and by which a number of relative truths’ develop as an ambiguity opposed to “Truth”. John Bayley and Norman Podhoretz have since writing these reviews visited Prague twice and are currently working on a better Czech/English translation.
“i find the definitions only destroy the actual relationship.”
I find that Kunderas words are unable to reconcile the Dionysian and Apollonian in me. In the Birth of Tragedy, to be human is to be stretched between these two domains. Chaos and order. There is fiction in the space between.
K