As Kundera explains in The Art of the Novel, existence means being in the world, and as the world changes, existence – being-in-the-world – changes as well (Kundera 36). To understand the characters we need to understand their world and the public events. The events that occur in Prague merge with the lives of Tomas and Teresa in a way that changes their existence. The world they live in becomes an entrapment for both of them.
Teresa works in a bar where she meets an engineer and decides to make love to him to experience physical love through her body alone, without involving her soul, to confirm what Tomas told her time and again – that love and sexuality had nothing in common. Teresa’s risky sexual affair with the engineer, who may or may not be an agent of the secret police, becomes her trap. Recalling the smallest details, she realizes that it may have been a predesigned scenario – a trap set for purposes of future blackmail by the government (Banerjee 233). That is the trap, real or not, that she imagines for herself as she thinks of the possibility that the engineer had been sent by the police (Kundera 24).
Teresa examines the entire event “in search for her offense” (Kundera 108). She remembers the radio series of private talks between the Czech novelist Jan Prochazka and a friend of his. The recorded conversations were produced by the secret police to broadcast the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of Dubcek and slandered his friends. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera writes about an extreme version of totalitarian society in which the boundary between the public and the private is abolished and the lives of citizens become entirely transparent (Kundera 110). Teresa realizes that she too, just like Procahzka, lives in a concentration camp, where privacy ceased to exist (Kundera 167). She retreats to a village to escape the trap and lives in isolation with Tomas. Here Kundera underlines the impact and significance of political events for individuals who are obliged to live under a Communist regime (Kundera 37).
Meanwhile, the article Tomas wrote on Oedipus in the spring of 1968 comes back to haunt him. Using the example of Oedipus, who enacts self-indictment by which he acknowledges the actions he committed in ignorance, the article attacks political leaders who refuse to admit responsibility for their actions, because they did not know and were not completely aware of the wrongdoings and the consequences (Banerjee 240). In his article, Tomas uses the Oedipus analogy to hold responsible the Communist leaders for the country’s misfortunes and for its loss of independence: “If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!” (Kundera 177). When Tomas is pressured to make public retractions of his past statements, he gives up his job as a surgeon and goes to work in a country clinic.
When he is visited by a man from the Ministry of the Interior, he is trapped into something even worse. As Tomas realizes he is under interrogation, he falsifies his answers and inadvertently informs on someone else, on a different editor. His fear and paranoia that the police would make public a false statement over his signature, lead him to lose his profession – something so much a part of him (Kundera 194). As a result of these events, Tomas abruptly resigns from his medical post. He escapes the trap by descending the ladder and becoming a window washer. “Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be interested in him” (Kundera 192).
As Tomas refuses to compromise and to comply, he makes heavy go light (Kundera 196). He embarks on a grand holiday and returns to his bachelor existence. By refusing to sign a note stating that he has nothing against the regime, Tomas is released from “his weighty duty” (Kundera 196). The key words for Tomas’s existential code are lightness and weight. His existential problem is the lightness of being in a world where there is no eternal return (Kundera 32). He fails to see that what he chooses as an honorable decision for him is the most horrible thing possible for Teresa. Faced with personal fulfillment on one hand, and with historical and socio-political circumstances on the other, he rejects his life’s external and internal imperatives. Kundera studies Tomas’s attitudes in these situations by tying the individual to the historical and political events, and looking at how private life is balanced with the larger terrors of life in a police state. Tomas is constantly going back and forth between lightness and weight. As Kundera explains, “that was the ‘Es muss sein!’ rooted deep inside him” (Kundera 194).
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about an investigation of being and existence. It is a political novel, but the description of the politico-historical events or the role of the Communist institutions does not interest Kundera. He places his novel in a world provoked by political events that transform the world, to investigate the human condition and a way of being. He looks at the relationship between the events and real life – the regulation of private situations where the individuals are dominated in totalitarian ways, the resulting depersonalization of the individual, the violation and the lack of certain kinds of freedoms, the danger of losing privacy. According to Kundera, “the novel is an investigation of the essence of human situations” (Kundera 32).
No comments:
Post a Comment