Lightness as Existential Temporality: Exploring the overlap between philosophical and literary approaches to the concept of lightness in two contemporary novels

摘要

Lightness as a formal literary and aesthetic quality has not received as much critical attention in literary study as its philosophical counterpart. Some critical discussion on the subject can be found in the work of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium and Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs . The subsequent critical exploration of lightness by Bede Tregear Scott in his article “On Superficiality: Truman Capote and the Ceremony of Style” and book On Lightness in World Literature explores and identifies certain defining characteristics of what he believes to be a universal quality in several very different works of literature over five different time periods. These include superficiality, irreverence, implausibility, readability and triviality. This articles aims to offer a comparison between a philosophical approach to lightness, that is, one that concerns itself with the more weighty issues associated with existential temporality and the meaning of life, in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being , with a novel that more closely exemplifies the kind of lightness that Scott describes, but that nevertheless still expresses weighty philosophical concerns: Alessandro Baricco’s Silk . In so doing, this article hopes to show that clear boundaries between lightness as a philosophical concept and a literary quality abstracted from weighty philosophical concerns cannot easily be made. But, when they are experienced in synthesis, they have the potential to offer the kind of sublime reading experience that can only be found in literature. In his preface to Six Memos for the Next Millennium , Calvino wrote “that there are things that only literature can give us.” It is also hoped that this article may contribute to the commendation of the value of literature to an inter-disciplinarily minded readership