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Arindam Nandi
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
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-
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
What is an Encounter?
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
This paper therefore strives to understand the idea of desire in the two ways which are
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.
At the very beginning of the third chapter, Klima’s protagonist dismisses the ‘beauty’ and
Over breakfast I’d read a poem in the paper by the leading author writing in jerkish:
Chain of Hands
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
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
happiness, and I think it's good that it is like that ...let’s be serious when you're in that
Similarly, as an artist and a writer Klima's protagonist is sustained more by suffering than
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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).
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
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).
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
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
Lacan on his Seminar XXII on the Sinthome on February 18 1975, redefined it (the
enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic. Far from calling for some analytic
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
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
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
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
Conclusion
I realized that she was asking about us, and I dared not say yes, even though I could see
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.
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
symptom without any underlying meaning or traceable effect. That is, the sinthome only
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.
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.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. Eds. David
Print.
Ghost Pictures. “Zizek - Our Fear of Falling in Love”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29
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:
Sandler, Joseph, et al, eds. Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction”. By Sigmund Freud.