Nandi 1

Arindam Nandi

Dr. Sunanda Ray

M.Phil 2018-19

Department of English

University of Calcutta

30 May 2019

The Experiential Opposition between Love and Happiness in Ivan Klima's Novel Love

and Garbage

Background and Context

Considered to be Ivan Klima’s magnum opus and the most prolific of his novels, Love

and Garbage traces the life of an ex-university professor and a garbage sweeper living in pre-

independent Czechkoslovakia. This unnamed narrator, considered by many commentators of the

novel to be Klima's own mouthpiece, given the book's semi autobiographical status, describes his

experience of life, before and after falling in love with an art sculptress Daria after he returns

from America to his native city Prague.

Thereupon, the narrator further goes on to explore the conflicting circumstances of the

nature of love and happiness in a person's life, exploring in the process other universal themes

which capture the lives of people living in post-war, soviet occupied Prague.
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Introduction

Ivan Klima's novel Love and Garbage treat love and happiness as emotional-

psychological categories that remain mutually exclusive and incompatible at all times.

But for us to try and understand this phenomenon (a phenomenon which the novel constitutes) of

opposition, that not only works on two different levels of experience (the cultural and the

personal), but as experiences which themselves function with respect to two different modalities

(emotional and psychoanalytical), we must try and make a particular distinction between these

two modalities in the first place, if we fully wish to comprehend the epochal and historical nature

of the opposition that is to be talked about and discussed.

This distinction of modalities shall be of a qualitative nature and would deal on the one

hand with a certain set of emotions which are experienced by the characters in Klima's novel

Love and Garbage, and on the other hand would also concern certain psychoanalytical concepts

which would be used to investigate those felt emotions in this paper.

Emotional States and Psychological Abstractions in the Novel

It can be said that the characters in Ivan Klima’s novel experience a multitude of

emotional states which remain chiefly universal and so to speak timeless to a general degree.

Emotions such as love, passion, fear, anxiety and suffering all have their roots in the very

historical origins of anthropological consciousness, whereas on the flipside certain concepts

pertaining to psychoanalysis that shall be used in this paper such as the ‘object cause of desire’1,
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‘narcissism’2, ‘the sinthome’3 and ‘the libido’4 have their meaning only within the discursive

framework of psychoanalysis, a discipline that is still considered by many to be in its embryonic

stage, given the whole extent of human history .

The function of these two categories which would work together in this paper, one on the

textual level of the novel and the other on a more critical analytical level, is twofold.

1 .The emulsification of these universally felt emotions, and Freudian and Post-Freudian

psychoanalysis would provide the experience of the characters in the novel, especially the

unnamed narrator with a particular historicity - that of the post war Soviet occupied Prague

during the 60s and the 70s which roughly forms the historical backdrop to the novel. And,

2. These psychological experiences would be seen to not only epitomize the characters

that partake in the historical moment in Klima's novel, but also become culturally pervasive and

symptomatic of a divided collective consciousness typical of post-war Eastern Europe.

Klima's novel Love and Garbage tries to understand this synthesis of the universal

(emotional states) and the cultural (psychological abstractions) by portraying the breaking up of

the human soul into the two divided elements of love and happiness which attain the status of

oppositions throughout the course of the novel. (In fact the despair ridden Daria constantly

complains to her lover the narrator that, he has either lost his soul or is incapable of habouring

one). This breaking up of a once unified human soul is depicted by Klima who contrasts the

initially uneventful life of the protagonist as a city sweeper until he falls in love with a married

art sculptress Daria - an encounter which changes everything he had once believed in and which

forces him to reconsider and reevaluate his ideals of passion, love, fidelity and happiness till he
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reaches an impossible and epiphanic impasse- that one can never be happy and in love at the

same time.

This impasse is reached gradually throughout the narrator's experiences of a double life,

an experience which had begun in the novel at a singular moment of encounter, as noted earlier,

between the unnamed protagonist and the sculptress Daria, when they meet for the first time

inside the caravan of a mutual friend -

She received me courteously and we chatted for a while… she moved adroitly among her

shelves. As she walked there was a moment of eyes and lips on her long skirt, a pattern of

brown eyes and bright red lips. Her own eyes we're blue and her lips rather pale. What

would happen if I embraced her among her shelves? But I knew that I wouldn't (Klima

7).

This singular instance attains the status of the ‘love encounter’ between the protagonist

and his soon-to-be lover Daria, and becomes the most critical juncture in the fate of the

characters and as well as in the novel

What is an Encounter?

Slavoj Sizes explains the nature of the love-encounter in an interview,

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Love. Love in the good old fashioned sense which is today more and more rare. Love is

an encounter. This is why in English and also in some other languages, not all, like

French, you use the term fall. We fall in love. This is the evental dimension (Zizek Love).

While in Prague the narrator comes in contact with many other people including

members from his team in the garbage work party like the decapitated captain, the irritable Mr.

Rada, the young man from Svatá Hora and the Indian looking Mrs. Venus. But his meeting with

Daria is kept well isolated by the novelist and singled out in the text by the narrator's use of

retrospection leading up to their meeting, his memory of the event and the time they would end

of spending together in the future.

The novel therefore follows the narrator through his transformation from a writer in the

middle of writing an essay on Kafka, who has taken up the job of a road-sweeper in Prague, into

that of a lover who abandons his previous endeavor completely. This ‘event’ or ‘encounter’

which separates the before and the after and which drastically mutates his experience of and

response to life is, according to Klima, the ‘love-encounter’. This encounter as Zizek explains is

not simply a coming together of bodies for a singular moment in time but attains the status of a

phenomenological event - that is, it goes on to permanantly alter the ideological consciousness of

both the protagonist and his lover Daria, and also changes the way they had initially responded to

living in a culturally demolished Prague.

According to Slavoj Zizek what distinguishes a simple meeting or encounter with Klima's

alleged ‘love-encounter’ which the protagonist experiences in the novel is the evental nature of

the latter. Unlike simple and inconsequential encounter(s) which lie forgotten and do not create

further ripples in the causation of time, the ‘event-encounter’ results in a transformation of the
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past and also generates a ‘revolutionary openness’ to the future, initially at a smaller scale but

also eventually ekes into the socio-cultural dimension of political life as well.

Jacques Derrida also explains the phenomenological event as a simultaneous moment of

expansion and breakage, “a rupture and redoubling” (Derrida 107), in his essay Structure, Sign

and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Taking about the phenomenological

emergence of the event, the post-structuralist philosopher explains the conceptual rethinking

about the term ‘event’,

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be

called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the

function of structural—or structurality—thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use

the term “event” anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this

sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling (Derrida 107).

What this paper tries to elaborate and delineate is that the nature of the ‘love-encounter’,

as an ‘event’ in Klima's novel can be assigned a double historicity – one with respect to

protagonist and his lover Daria, and the other in terms of the non-fictional contemporary

historical moment. That is, the story of love which alternates between the narrator of the novel,

his mistress Daria, and his wife Lida, construe a dynamical structure that is typical of a post-

modern, post-war consciousness and therefore the events in the novel and the fate which the

protagonist finds himself in, located between the desires of two women is not only a

consequence of his own actions and ideals but is also symptomatic of the cultural epoch he
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belongs to, and constitutes the dominant Zeitgeist5 of the times; an epoch and a time in history

where,

1. Love and happiness seems to have attained the status of emotional opposites,

2. True happiness is often sacrificed at the altar of a perpetual desire for it, and

3. Any act of true love can only manifest by a simultaneous act of infidelity towards one's

own previously happy existence.

In psychoanalytical terms this personal-cultural symptom, which is this case formulates

into a triple symptom, is what Jacques Lacan calls the ‘sinthome’ or the exhibition of a pure

jouissance6 without meaning. Lacan says that, "the symptom can only be defined as the way in

which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the

subject" (Rose)

This exhibition without meaning can be thought of a process, a process which in the

novel becomes the constitutive factor of the plot on the one hand and the tour de force of narrator

on the other hand. This symptom although has no qualification or cause of its own, results in a

set of consequences which divides the narrator's ideals of happiness and love in such a manner

that they become mutually exclusive to one another to the extent to which they elude him

completely as separately broken parts of his once unified soul, making him vacillate between the

two possibilities throughout the context of Klima's text.

This paper therefore strives to understand the idea of desire in the two ways which are

present in the novel and is exhibited by the narrator:

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1. Through his constant search for the object of desire that may bring him happiness and

contentment, a search which continuously and always evades him (in fact this concerns

his attempt to hold on to happiness in the form of his wife and children, than search for it

elsewhere), and

2. His life and actions being governed by the need for love in the form of ‘the object cause

of desire’ or what Jacques Lacan calls the objet petit á7, which engulfs him and afflicts

him with the forever fleeting sensations of passion and sexual intensity.

Happiness and The Obiect of Desire.

At the very beginning of the third chapter, Klima’s protagonist dismisses the ‘beauty’ and

simplicity of ‘happiness’ as “jerkish” (Klima 120) or being ‘too popular culture’,

Over breakfast I’d read a poem in the paper by the leading author writing in jerkish:

Chain of Hands

Who knows who knows

where beauty is born

where happiness seeks us

why love trusts us (Klima 119)

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And instead the author asserts in his novel that the narrator's sense of emotional

gratification lies purely in the soul's flight towards self preservation, marking himself as a

narcissist and a selfish human being, who only acts according to the sustenance of his own

immediate desires.

Freud in his essay On Narcissism explains that this ‘cathexis’ of ‘libido’ from external

objects towards one's own self is the precondition of the narcissistic setting and is a characteristic

element of the megalomaniac. Freud claims,

The question arises: What happens to the libido which has been withdrawn from external

objects in schizophrenia? The megalomania characteristic of these states points the way.

This megalomania has no doubt come into being at the expense of object-libido. The

libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego and

thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism (Sandler 4).

Happiness therefore on the other hand as a category, Freud argues, has more to do with

the possession of the object of desire and making it a part of one's own self. Happiness is about

possessing the object of desire and not is a desiring of the object at all. It is more concerned with

the contentment and security of having the object to itself rather than an active wish for the

object as desire, that is, a state where desire itself is substituted by the physical presence of the

object itself.

Consequently Zizek in one of his lectures claims the illusive nature of happiness and its

inherent dissonance to desire,

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If there is a point in psychoanalysis, it is that people do not really want or desire

happiness, and I think it's good that it is like that ...let’s be serious when you're in that

creative endeavor, that wonderful fever,my god I'm on to something..happiness doesn't

enter it. You're ready to suffer (Zizek Why Be Happy).

Similarly, as an artist and a writer Klima's protagonist is sustained more by suffering than

by happiness, both philosophically as is revealed by his frequently despair ridden monologues

and later on when he follows them up materially by his amoral philistinism.

His work as a professor at an American University which he says, had provided him with

enough contentment, in turn had made his life boorish, miserable and dissatisfactory, and more

importantly had taken away any recognition of his true identity. In the very first pages of the

novel he justifies his return to Prague,

Even if I had to sweep up garbage in the streets I would be for them what I was, what I

wanted to be to the exclusion of anything else, a writer, whereas here, even if I could

drive around in my little For, I would always be one of those immigrants on whom a

great country had taken pity (Klima 2).

Similarly, his wife and children, who had always provided him with the quiet tranquility

of life and happiness is discarded completely by his impulse to break away from such confines of

categorical contentment, in exchange for a different dimension of life- that of desire and love;

much like he had thrown away his career as a teacher for a profession in garbage cleaning.
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In the very first chapter he narrates about his daily struggle to write in his apartment and the

respite which his family brings him,

Thus I would wait for my wife and children to return. The moment their footfalls on the

stairs shattered the silence I could feel tranquility return to me- not the tranquility of

silence but the tranquility of life (Klima 13).

But later on, it is this tranquility of peace and silence and isolation from his family which

he had earlier despised, which enthralls him and provides him with the sensation of life. Talking

about his time alone with Daria he remarks,

But she [Daria] was mistaken: in her presence I usually forgot that I sometimes tried to

invent stories, and I would watch her so closely only because I wished to understand the

language in which she spoke to me when she was with me in silence (Klima 21).

And even further on in the novel he aligns this silence to the Apocalypse and inadvertent

state of the whole cosmos,

The Buddhists have their own vision of the apocalypse. Once all our good deeds, love or

renunciation no longer offset our crimes, the equilibrium between good and evil in the

universe is upset. Then snakes, crocodiles, dragons and many-headed monsters will

emerge from all the openings in the earth and from the waters, breathing fire and
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devouring mankind. This will restore the disturbed equilibrium, and harmony of silence

and nothingness will reign once more (Klima 115).

The narrator, although Klima's mouthpiece, given the tentatively autobiographical nature

of the novel, remains blind and conceited about what true happiness means and forever seems to

either elude it though his whims and actions or assign it to some half unknown divinity that

remain beyond the grasp of Man, depicting in every way possible his almost obsessive aversion

to any kind of a stable sense of satisfaction and security on the one hand, and again his inability

to desert his family at the last instance on the other hand.

Perhaps there is within us still, above everything else, some ancient law, a law beyond

logic, that forbids us to abandon those near and dear to us. We are dimly aware of it but

we pretend not to know about it, that it has long ceased to be valid and that we may

therefore disregard it. And we dismiss the voice within us as foolish and reactionary,

preventing us from tasting something of the bliss of paradise while we are still in this life

(Klima 192).

Love and the Object Cause of Desire

The unnamed narrator's love for Daria his mistress constitutes his primary ‘object cause

of desire’ in Ivan Klima's novel Love and Garbage. But the equation in this case is not that

simple. Love is always more complicated than happiness because the former has less to do with
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being content and humble and concerns more with the experiences of passion, desire, emotional

excess and sexual thrill.

Jacques Lacan's objet petit á is literally translated as the ‘little object a’, or the ‘little of

object of desire’, but the literal translation doesn't do idea justice enough conceptually. For

Lacan the objet petit á is irreducible, which is why he marks it with an algebraic sign. Because as

Lacan says, and as Slavoj Zizek reiterates in one of his interviews, the objet petit á is not an

object at all, but a condition or circumstance that evokes desire in an individual, making Zizek

qualify it as the ‘object cause of desire’ or the ‘bridge’ which connects desire to its object.

Klima's narrator is in love with Daria because ‘love’ according to Slavoj Zizek is

concerned not with happiness but with the ‘object cause of desire’. That is, it is precisely because

the narrator is married and has a family which cares for him and provides him with emotional

refuge, that his love for his mistress presents him with an avenue, or an escape to break out of

this “conformist category of happiness”(Zizek Why Be Happy) and feel something more

authentic, real and new. Daria (the mistress and lover) herself is therefore not the cause of the

narrator's love for her, but his love is ultimately woven around the very fact that she is and would

always be unattainable and unavailable, given that she is married to another man as well, and that

he (the narrator) himself would always have to return back home to the care and security of his

wife.

In fact, as Zizek mentions in an interview while discussing this dichotomy of love and

happiness, the narrator's feeling of emotional tranquility on the one hand and his passionate and

all consuming love for his mistress Daria on the other, can be thought of as functioning as a state

of ‘experiential equilibrium’ throughout the novel. That is, without the one, the other fails to

subsist and the protagonist's whole fantasy of balancing the two shatter down,
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…the classical story that I like. The traditional male chauvinist scenario. I am married to

a wife, relations with her are cold and I have a mistress, and all the time I dream, Oh my

God is my wife were to disappear...it would open up a new life for me with the mistress.

You know what every psychoanalyst will tell you quite often happens, that wife goes

away, and you lose the mistress also. You thought this is all I want, when you had it there

you found out that it was a much more complex situation where what you want is not

really to live with the mistress but tk keep her as a distance as an object of desire about

which you dream. And this is not just an exclusive situation. I claim that this is how

things function. We don't really want what we think we desire (Zizek Why Be Happy).

It is therefore the prevailing conditions of illegitimacy, infidelity, adultery and a non-

conformity to a general sense of happiness which programs the narrator's love for Daria and

constitutes the ‘object cause of his desire’ with respect to her - his desire to ultimately suffer

because of his inability to possess love and happiness under the guise of one single body, which

again takes the readers back to the question of Klima’s treatment of the human soul in the novel,

especially in a culture that has been persistently haunted by the enormity of violence, mass

extermination and the Holocaust. As, reminiscing about the turpitudes of his adolescent life the

narrator states at the early stages of the novel, the failure of his once unified soul to recover from

the tragedies of childhood,

My wife also used to suspect them. During attacks of sudden self-pity she used to

maintain that I was unable to get close to her, that in my childhood, when death was
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ceaselessly hovering all round me, I had suffered an injury to my soul and that I have

never recovered from it (Klima 26).

Suffering as the Dominant Symptom in Love and Garbage

Lacan on his Seminar XXII on the Sinthome on February 18 1975, redefined it (the

sinthome) as a particular modality of a person's ‘jouissance’, an expression without any

particular meaning underneath,

The sinthome thus designates a signifying formulation beyond analysis, a kernel of

enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic. Far from calling for some analytic

‘dissolution’, the sinthome is what ‘allows one to live’ by providing a unique

organisation of jouissance. The task of analysis thus becomes, in one of Lacan’s last

definitions of the end of analysis, to identify with the sinthome (Evans 191).

At every point in the novel when the narrator or the characters around him are given a

choice between happiness and suffering, they, for some reason or the other, opt for the latter. The

protagonist's wife Lida who is a psychoanalyst by profession, and as the narrator claims,

possesses the ability to dissect the souls of her own patients, fails to understand her own

husband’s beaten down existence. She chooses to live in denial about her husband and his

whereabouts, rather than leave him, trusting his erratic behavior and his sudden departures

without questioning his motives to the extent of being naive and self-indulgent.
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Lida thereby chooses to suffer throughout the whole extent of the novel, and in fact her

benign sense of faith in a husband who had once confessed to infidelity, almost elevates her into

the figure of a martyr- a voluntary sufferer of other people's damaged souls.

In the earlier stages in the novel, talking about a gifted law student, the author remarks

about the former's endeavor to understand the joy and misery of man,

…when he had irrefutably established the vanity of human endeavor, sat down and wrote

his philosophical testament, whose conclusion was that happiness was just a dream and

life a chain of suffering, and directly over that philosophical testament he shot himself

through the head, so that the blood pouring from his wound put several final stops under

his writings (Klima 18-19).

Even the narrator and his lover Daria remain consumed by this post-war cultural

sinthome of suffering. And as overtly sensitive artists with hauntingly sordid pasts they allow

themselves to suffer the most, and also as consequence rejoice in their soul crushing affair for a

ten year long period.

In love, they are bound by an invisible force which warps them together during the day

and tears them apart at night, both knowing well that they have families to return to. And it is

this intermediate state of uncertainty and unknowingness which make the lovers oscillate

between the worlds of love and contentment, and passion and humility, an oscillation which

exiles them from either of the experiences, keeping them suspended between both. This

vacillation and conflict is what constitutes not only the predominant symptom in the novel, but
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also mirrors the fate of a Soviet occupied Prague, swaying between the states of freedom and

oppression, spiraling its way towards an eventual decimation.

Conclusion

So you think every love indulges in false hopes? She asked.

I realized that she was asking about us, and I dared not say yes, even though I could see

no reason why we should be exceptions (Klima 20).

Ivan Kilma's novel Love and Garbage thereby works to serve a double function:

It mirrors the narrator's life of procrastinated decay - a decay which comes from his

inability to choose either love or happiness, and it also magnifies this decay beyond the scale of

one man’s suffering and into a more cultural phenomenon and epochal symptom.

This absence of an integrity and commitment towards life, emotional as well as

ideological upholds the narrator's (and in fact the whole of contemporaneity’s) lack of emotional

depth, philosophical allegiance, and his astute adherence to the bland laws of economic living

and self-preservation, as Daria explosively states during one of their last meetings,

You want to bargain with me? Amidst the silent noctural landscape she screamed at me: I

was a coward, a liar and a hypocrite. A trader in emotions. A dealer with no feelings. At

least not for her. How could I be so cruel to her, so shameless? (Klima 199-200).
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The question of happiness or love thereby becomes an act of choice, one which the

narrator keeps at an arm’s length throughout the majority of the novel, knowing very well that

once the decision is made and he commits himself to either one of the two possibilities, going

back to the moment of making the choice would be impossible. It is this prolonged moment of

choice and circumspection which constitutes the predominant sinthome of suffering, of both the

narrator and the cultural epoch which he occupies - the singular cause of all joy and sorrow,

beyond either happiness or love, existing only in the ever fleeting realm of jouissance and

heartache.
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Notes

1. The object cause of desire is not an actual object in itself, but the conception of an

impossible object that reveals its nature under certain conditions. This paper focuses on

Slavoj Zizek’s reinterpretation of the object cause of desire as that which produces desire

in the subject. It is nothing more than a pure fantasy where the subject’s jouissance tries

to realize itself.

2. Narcissism is basically self- love or the repositioning of object-libido towards one’s own

self as ego-libido.

3. Lacan’s first use of the Sinthome was in terms of the presence of symbolic and conscious

symptoms which can be traced back to a real and unconscious cause. This paper uses a

different qualification of the term as was revised by Jacques Lacan. The Sinthome, Lacan

says in his Seminar XXII, is manifestation of a pure jouissance; a cause or symbolic

symptom without any underlying meaning or traceable effect. That is, the sinthome only

exists on the level of representation and not meaning.

4. Libido is defined by the OED as “The energy of the sexual drive s a component of the life

instinct”.

5. Zeitgeist would qualify as the dominant or defining spirit of an age or epoch in history.

6. An excess; a surplus of enjoyment.

7. Refer to Note 1.
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Works Cited

Big Think. “ Slavoj Zizek | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?”. Online video clip.

YouTube. YouTube, 25 June 2012. Web. 21 May 2019.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. Eds. David

Lodge and Nigel Wood. Noida: Pearson India, 2007. Print.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychonlysis. London: Routledge, 1996.

Print.

Ghost Pictures. “Zizek - Our Fear of Falling in Love”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29

March 2015. Web. 19 My 2019.

Osers, Ewald, trans. Love and Garbage. By Ivan Klima. London: Random House, 1990. Print.

Rose, Jacqueline, trans. “Jacques Lacan Seminar XXII.” Jacques Lacan & the Ecole Freudienne:

Feminine Sexuality (1982): 162-171. Print.

Sandler, Joseph, et al, eds. Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction”. By Sigmund Freud.

London: Karnac Books Ltd, 2012. Print.