Life Is Elsewhere: We All Have a Bright Future

It started with a song I've been listening to recently, titled "Life Is Elsewhere." Its melody — at once cheerful and melancholic — paired with the singer's vintage-tinged voice, utterly captivated me. Even someone like me, who normally just hits shuffle, couldn't help but loop it for days.

I later learned that the name "Life Is Elsewhere" comes from a novel of the same title by Milan Kundera. And Kundera's novel title, in turn, came from a poem by Rimbaud — or rather, a revolutionary slogan. Why "or rather"? Because Rimbaud, in his poem A Season in Hell, cried out "True life is absent," and during France's May '68 student movement, the walls of the Sorbonne bore a modified version of this line as a slogan: "Life is elsewhere."

Kundera originally titled this novel The Lyrical Age, changing it to Life Is Elsewhere only at the last moment. "The lyrical age" is a concept unique to Kundera. It could be considered part of his most famous concept, "kitsch" — a more youthful, more intense version of kitsch. As for kitsch itself, perhaps I'll discuss it separately someday after I finish The Unbearable Lightness of Being. For now, let's return to the lyrical.

Kundera's "lyrical age" is a critical concept — he is not celebrating lyricism, but rather using it to expose the dangerous relationship between youth, lyricism, and revolution that lurks beneath idealism. It refers to a period in society when young people approach the world with a simplistic, absolute, black-and-white lyrical attitude, where grand collective narratives obscure all the complexity, ugliness, and contradiction of individual humanity. People derive a cheap sense of sublimity from these passionate absolute truths.

I believe our generation — or our parents' generation — is no stranger to such a social era. Even on today's internet, the phenomena of emotion trumping fact, rejection of human complexity, and worship of absolute simplification are everywhere.

"Life is elsewhere" is a concrete example within this lyrical age. "True life does not exist" gets naively appended by lyrical-age people with a perfect, reachable destination — "elsewhere" — along with the belief that revolution is all it takes to create this "elsewhere."

Idealists carrying this belief trample everything that stands in the way of creating "elsewhere," exclude everyone who doesn't participate in creating "elsewhere," and swell with pride at their own participation.

Furthermore, although the novel doesn't directly offer much subjective evaluation or judgment of poets or poetry, the poet-protagonist's brief, dramatic life makes it clear that the author is telling this story with a critical eye. Using a line as poetic as "Life Is Elsewhere" as the novel's title, then letting readers witness the author's fierce satire of poetry — that's quite something.

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The novel revolves around the poet Jaromil and his imagined alter ego, Xavier, who lives in "elsewhere."

The novel's opening doesn't reveal the protagonist's name, referring to him simply as "the poet." Clearly, his name as an individual doesn't matter — what matters is that he is supposed to be a poet. Just as a table is already a table before it's built, and a house is already a house before it's constructed, so too the poet: before he was even born, he was already a poet.

The poet appears to be full of thought and imagination, relatively independent, brimming with a sense of justice. Though dissatisfied with reality, he's full of beautiful expectations for the "elsewhere" of the future. But in truth, he is fleeing his inner fears and insecurities, constantly seeking himself through others' eyes, lacking any understanding or acceptance of complexity. Swept up by passion, he cannot tolerate even the slightest "ugliness" or "impurity," and uses naïve, absolute thinking to assess and attempt to change the world of "here." This leads to his becoming a pawn of others, to his betrayal of the lover in his self-glorifying "romance," and ultimately to his death at the hands of the "elsewhere" self he imagined and the passions shaped by his naively romantic ideas.

In the poet's eyes, he himself is the entirety of the world. Yet his way of seeking self-worth is through others' recognition. Whether it's a mature painter praising his drawings in language he can't understand, or the commendation he receives when his poems are deliberately exploited by certain organizations, or a filmmaker cozying up to him to rehabilitate his own political reputation — all of these make the poet feel he exists. In his eyes, what he sees is the truest, most complete representation of the world. Yet he naïvely perceives only the painter's praise, the official commendation, and the filmmaker's goodwill, blind to the complex motives behind them, believing it all to be evidence of his growth and society's gradual progress toward a beautiful "elsewhere."

In the poet's eyes, lyrical "poetry" triumphs over everything — even death. Any stain in the poetic world is unacceptable. In the lyrical world, love is pure, sacred, and passionate; only love without the slightest impurity, love for which one would give up one's life, is true, not false. When the poet is swept into violence and powerless to fight back, death becomes the best form of resistance, because death is poetry's eternal theme. Yet the poet also fears suicide, because only a successful suicide is a great epic — a failed one is merely a farce. The poet fears failure, rejecting every possible "blemish" life might bring.

In the poet's eyes, there is no middle ground. Beauty and ugliness are absolute; all people exist at the extremes of absolute good and evil. The filmmaker would never sleep with him while he's wearing ugly underwear, because that wouldn't match his poetic imagination of passion — ugly underwear as a stain on the romantic scene — so the poet flees. His girlfriend's brother wants to emigrate — such a person who would undermine the great revolution is an absolute villain; such behavior, which would sabotage the construction of the beautiful "elsewhere," deserves the harshest punishment, even if that punishment would deal a fatal blow to his own pure, unblemished love. To reach "elsewhere," any sacrifice is acceptable and worthwhile.

This poet, to combat his own cowardice, imagines another version of himself in "elsewhere" — one who accomplishes everything he wants to do but doesn't dare. He is endlessly satisfied with this "elsewhere" self. But in the end, when he becomes the object of the very things his "elsewhere" self has done, his attitude swings to the opposite extreme.

Near the novel's end, the author invokes a kind of godlike power, forcibly shifting the perspective to another complex, real character, making our poet-protagonist appear all the more naïvely ridiculous. Believing he had grasped the truth, that he'd seen the road to "elsewhere" — he had merely rejected the complexity and diversity of real life, living in his own imagination all along.

In the commentary following the novel's story, a critic notes that this is one of the harshest works he has ever read, with "harsh" taken in its most radical sense. Throughout the novel, Kundera often calls the protagonist "the poet" rather than by his name, Jaromil. Because what Kundera aims to critique is not Jaromil, nor incompetent poets — but all poets and all poetry.

In Kundera's eyes, poetry is the adolescence of literature, brimming with lyricism and self-absorption, ignoring ugliness, fleeing from the complexity of reality. Looking at reality, the fate of many poets does indeed confirm Kundera's critique: one drowned himself in a river out of patriotic anguish; another killed his wife, suspecting her of infidelity or of stealing military documents; yet another, suffering from schizophrenia, lay down on the railroad tracks...

Setting poetry aside, even the poetically inclined philosopher Nietzsche saw his writing co-opted as powerful ammunition by the Nazis. The Übermensch is the Germanic race; the will to power is the craving for domination. Though Nietzsche himself opposed Nazism, that no longer mattered. His poetic words were enough to plunge people into longing for a grand "elsewhere" — the "elsewhere" the Nazis envisioned, one without Jews and populated only by Aryans.

Kundera is not critiquing poetry and poets per se, but rather reminding readers how close lyric poetry stands to absolute and extreme values, to hollow idealism — to dangerous things. Poetry can easily become a tool for fleeing the complexity of real life. After all, Kundera himself began his literary career with poetry.

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There is a phrase that became especially famous after Heidegger quoted it: "Man dwells poetically upon the earth." At first glance, it might seem to clash sharply with Kundera's ideas — one advocates that humans should dwell poetically on this land, while the other relentlessly critiques poetry's naïve ignorance and the potential devastation lurking behind lyricism.

In truth, they don't conflict. The "poetic" that Heidegger speaks of is not poetry or the writing of poems, but rather the most authentic state of being that remains after stripping away work, calculation, and value — all those external factors. Heidegger's aim is to find, for modern people caught up in the busyness of life, a place where they can truly settle and dwell.

Kundera's lyrical age, on the other hand, critiques the collective frenzy that arises when individual emotions are mobilized — a march toward absolute totalitarianism where individuality ceases to exist.

Heidegger's call for "poetic dwelling" and Kundera's critique of lyrical poetry — if we set them against each other as opposites, we would be doing precisely the kind of dangerous thing Kundera warns us about.