arts + lit Existential literature for the January blues

Arts and Lit writers discuss the literature that will get you through these dark mornings

Waste Land’ T.S. Eliot

SOMETIMES existential literature serves a better purpose for curing our January blues than soppy romance or success stories. It reminds us that we aren’t the only ones experiencing the dramatic post-Christmas sadness and that the concept of time and existence has been thoroughly explored for many years.

T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is the prime example of a post-war questioning of what the future holds given the state of society at the time of writing (1922). Flitting between time periods, personal events and even different languages, Eliot conveys a sense of disorder and not knowing what is to come. It often feels chaotic upon reading but in reality, it’s easy to seek solace in this kind of literature. Eliot is notoriously difficult to read and ‘The Waste Land’ is certainly no exception. But this means it’s open to interpretation, much like our own future as a human race. Despite this poem being written immediately after World War One, along with the emergence of the suffrage movement, the fallout of the flu pandemic and the spiralling economic state of England, the themes of the poem can largely reflect our lives today. Political instability and health crises are becoming more common, leading us to wonder what the point of all of it is.

Existential literature is commonly defined as literature concerned with the meaninglessness of the environment around us and it becomes apparent that the title ‘The Waste Land’ is named as such to match the protagonist’s internal image of what they can expect in the years to come. With similar societal problems continuously arising today, sometimes reading this literature allows us to understand that our dramatic ‘When will this boredom/sadness be over?’ crisis (often experienced during January) is not a true reflection of our mental states but more something we’ve been forced into feeling, through a collective hatred of the month that follows Christmas.

Gracie Moore, Lifestyle Editor

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera

MILAN Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might not only lift your January blues but give you a whole new perspective on life. This existential novel was published in 1984 whilst the author was in exile from his native Czechoslovakia. Kundera places his own work more in the tradition of his adoptive country, France, than that of Prague. Nevertheless, having come to Kundera as a Kafka fan, I enjoyed his work and found rewarding similarities. Lightness focuses on two couples — Tomas and Tereza, and Sabina and Franz — in the years around the 1968 Prague Spring. Even with its surreal and often García Márquez-esque imagery, Kundera’s novel is not, primarily, a plot- or character-driven one. His style is interspersed with fourth wall breaks and philosophical meanderings, and, at times, the characters seem secondary to Kundera’s own philosophising. In an address to the reader, Kundera even admits the shallowness of his own characters, calling them nothing more than his own “unrealised possibilities”. The characters also serve to embody the philosophy presented in this book, which opens with references to Nietzsche, eternal recurrence, and whether we can step through a stream twice. The characters themselves seem to play out philosophical paradoxes, particularly the central opposites of the ‘heaviness’ and ‘lightness’ of being. Meanwhile, the experience of one character completely fails to align with another’s perception of them. Indeed, as a study of relationships, Lightness is fascinating and seems to opine — significantly for his experience of Czechoslovakia — that love is often simply the occupation of one person by the metaphoric constructs of another. Another motif associated with this is Kundera’s‘kitsch’— apparently a wilful self-delusion that seeks to deny the existence of anything bad in society and underpins both the ideal Soviet and the ideal American.

A common criticism of Lightness is that it is soulless. It is cerebral, yes, but I found it to be a deeply moving and, ultimately, optimistic book. If we do only step through a stream once, then maybe that is a good thing.

Austin Taylor, Features Editor