Life Is Elsewhere: Analysis of Major Characters
"Life Is Elsewhere" is a novel that delves into the complexities of youth, creativity, and familial relationships through its exploration of major characters, primarily focusing on Jaromil, a young lyric poet. Jaromil embodies the struggles of a sensitive artist caught between his mother's overwhelming love and his aspirations to assert his identity as a man. His relationships with two significant figures—a redheaded shop girl and the Czechoslovak Communist revolution—serve as catalysts for his emotional turmoil and ethical dilemmas, leading to acts of betrayal that haunt him. His mother, referred to as Maman, symbolizes the burdens of unfulfilled dreams and maternal expectations, while her attachment to Jaromil ultimately leads to profound disappointment upon his early death. Jaromil's father, an unremarkable but philandering engineer, represents the conventional life Jaromil resists, while the modern artist who mentors him embodies the conflict between artistic freedom and societal demands, culminating in his tragic downfall. Together, these characters illustrate the intricate interplay of love, ambition, and the harsh realities of life that shape Jaromil's journey and fate. This analysis invites readers to reflect on the broader themes of identity and the cost of artistic ambition.
Life Is Elsewhere: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Milan Kundera
First published: La Vie est ailleurs, 1973 (English translation, 1974)
Genre: Novel
Locale: Prague, Czechoslovakia
Plot: Satire
Time: The 1930's through the early 1950's
Jaromil, a young lyric poet. Jaromil was born into overwhelming, devoted, mother love. This devotion is a boon to his childhood but becomes increasingly odious as he grows older. It is his bad fortune to support this love wonderfully. He is a precious boy, pretty rather than handsome, and he has, for his one talent, the dainty art of lyric poetry. His genius is feminine (no one could understand the masculine and feminine humors quite so vividly as a lyric poet), and he wants, with the furious insecurity of youth, to become a man. He works at this, awkwardly, with the help of his two adult loves. One is a redheaded shop girl, for whom he conceives a great passion, and the other is the Czechoslovak Communist revolution. This leads Jaromil to great cruelty. Besides the injustice he does to his own art, making it serve the revolution, he betrays to the revolution both the brother of his redheaded lover (who has the benefit of his omnivorous jealousy) and the modern artist who had first recognized his talent and served as his mentor. He does not live long enough to regret these actions. In the tradition of lyric poets, he stands ridiculously on his dignity. Having been humiliated in public, he ignores a cold night and catches his death of fever. In the weakness of approaching death, he clings to the one certainty of his life: the love of his mother.
Jaromil's mother, called Maman, an insincere woman who is acted on more than she acts and thus is treated somewhat brutally by the world. To secure some consolation from life, she has settled all of her own hopes on her son. Having mistaken the daring of her first romantic abandon for a great passion, she becomes pregnant. She lives, sometimes proudly, sometimes self-pityingly, through her loveless (and, after Jaromil, childless) marriage, her own unsettling affair with Jaromil's radical modern art instructor, the loss of her comfortable prerevolution bourgeois life, and Jaromil's love affairs. Always, she comes back to her one true occupation, her love for her son. Consequently, she faces the greatest disappointment of her life when he dies in early youth. He does not do so without professing (it is almost a deathbed confession) his most tender affection for her.
The redheaded girl, Jaromil's young lover. She is a homely, talkative, uncomplicated, and proletarian young woman. She is not temperamentally suited to his poet's muse. He wants to make a grand leap into the absolute at every opportunity, whereas she is earthbound and makes everything mundane by her unpretentious manner. Jaromil's energetic poetic revisionism is equal to this challenge. He builds up a consuming passion for her and wills to absolve every defect he sees in her, if only she will submit to his tyrannical affections with gratitude. She herself is sexually uncomplicated, breezily bi-sexual, and naturally promiscuous. She responds to the strength of his ardor for her and reins in her own nature. In doing so, she makes a fateful mistake. She tells an innocent lie, which works on Jaromil's jealousy so that he ends up denouncing her favorite brother to the police; brother and sister are both sent to prison. She is, after his own talent, Jaromil's chief victim.
Jaromil's father, an engineer. He is a philandering, soccer-playing, earthbound spirit; in short, he is whatever his wife wishes he would not be and everything Jaromil wishes that he himself could be. His influence over his son is slight, both because his son inherited almost no characteristics from him and because of his own early death. He nevertheless remains an idol to his son. Having conceived his son offhand-edly, he is reconciled to marrying his lover when her family presents him with what is, in effect, a substantial dowry. This dowry makes his place in the world; secure in his place, he abides by his marriage, grudgingly and apathetically. When he dies, during a Nazi attack on a Jewish ghetto, it is thought that he had been a martyr of the resistance. Later, it is revealed that he had died keeping a rendezvous with his Jewish lover.
The artist, Jaromil's mentor. He is a modern artist and expects art to be unpredictable, to consist of the random, coming as it does from the great stream of the human subconscious touching certain individual lives. For him, to be an artist is to answer the call of freedom. To be an artist is to stand against the horrors of modern life, the petty inhumanities of industrial society, and the great inhumanities of modern war. He encourages Jaromil to think of himself as one of the elect, touched by a random muse, with a talent that has little to do with himself and that opens up possibilities beyond himself. He indulges his autocratic nature in an affair with Jaromil's mother, making her into his own arbitrary creation, driving her, finally, to a nervous breakdown. He follows his love of freedom into the time of the revolution, which causes his fall. The revolution demands that art serve the tastes of the proletariat and supply the needs of agitprop. He has followed his urge to be utterly modern into the time when the modern has rejected him, and no one is so avid for this new modernity as his protégé, Jaromil. He is eventually forced from his teaching and made to be a construction worker.