Words of Innocence and Experience

At first glance, Kundera seems to portray Tomas and Tereza, two of the four main characters in his novel, according to gender stereotypes, in which a man can freely go on physical adventures without injecting emotions in the process while the woman takes pains in tolerating his infidelities. In this regard, the relationship between Tomas and Tereza is complete inequity. Tomas is a skilled surgeon in Prague whereas Tereza is a waitress in a provincial town before they meet. Practically, Tereza is dependent on Tomas during the first few years of their love life after being ‘rescued’ by Tomas from her meager means and household humiliation (and Tomas himself considers her a child sent to him in a bulrush and whom he picks up to love and protect) and agonizes over Tomas’s unfaithfulness. Nevertheless, with Tereza’s distinctive self-perception, or to be more precise, obsession with her soul, her ineradicable residence in Tomas’s heart eventually transforms the libertine into the loyal husband.

To begin with, Tereza’s fixation on her soul is slightly different from the common female experience. According to Rivkin and Ryan’s introduction to essentialist feminism, women’s physical differences from men (birthing, lactation, menstruation, etc.) make them more connected with the physical world. Essentialist feminists argue that men must abstract themselves from the material world by separation from mothers in order to enter the patriarchate. They take a violent and aggressive posture towards the world they leave behind by interpreting it as an “object.” Women, on the other hand, are not required to separate from mothers. Thus, women’s psychological and physical ties to physical being remain unbroken. For Tereza, on the contrary, the blood ties and close proximity to her mother have brought her endless suffering and humiliation. Traumatized by her two dreadful marriages, Tereza’s mother puts all blame on Tereza, who has no choice but receiving the punishment. Not only is Tereza forced out of school given that she is an excellent student, she is both the breadwinner and the one responsible for household chores in the family. Worse still, her mother deliberately puts the ugliness of the body (e.g. marching around the mouse in the nude, farting) on display and denies the existence of youthful beauty in Teresa’s body. To bolster herself in the environment of physical repulsiveness, she longs for something “higher,” something not anchored to the body, as analyzed by Misurella in Understanding Milan Kundra: Public Events, Private Affairs. She worships books, music, and most importantly, her soul. When Tomas appears in the restaurant where she works, the fact that he is reading a book and the radio is playing Beethoven calls to Tereza’s very soul. She feels her soul within her body ascend “through her blood vessels and pores itself to him” (48), propelling her decision to leave her hometown to for Tomas without hesitation.

Unfortunately, Tereza’s expectations on Tomas are, in a way, mistaken. Although loving Tereza deeply, Tomas is the Don Juan who has the compulsion to hold various women in passionate embraces. Teresa’s anguish over Tomas’s infidelities is vividly reflected in her dreams. The most prominent one is the nightmare in which many naked women march around a pool and knee bend and Tomas would shoot a woman if her pose is not in accordance with others. Troubled by the women’s celebration of their sameness and struggling to keep up with them, Tereza feels that she is about to be shot by Tomas. Away from her mother and with Tomas, Tereza’s still feels that her individuality is ruthlessly violated. To have the man all to herself, what she could do was to overpower him, but she does not realize it until much later in the novel.

The Prague Spring forces the couple to take refuge in Zurich. While Tereza has photography as her profession in Prague before the Russian invasion, she counts on Tomas for everything in Zurich. Picking up a call from an unknown woman with a German accent further fills Tereza with jealousy. Driven by vertigo, defined by Kundera as the “heady, insuperable longing to fall” and “the intoxication of the weak” (76), Tereza decides to return to Czechoslovakia, the country of the weak, as an action not to drag Tomas down by her weakness. Tomas, of course, follows her to Prague. As they lie side by side in bed on the night Tomas returns, Tereza feels responsible for Tomas’ life and fate. Misurella regards Tomas’s homecoming as a turning point of their relationship, in which Tereza becomes the stronger partner in the marriage.

Due to the increasing social oppression in Prague, Tomas descends to work as a window washer. Tomas works from morning till afternoon while Teresa works from afternoon till night, so the couple rarely sees each others on week days. Although stuck with a job much inferior to his own profession, Tomas regards it as a break from surgery and makes the most of his working hours for more erotic adventures. Tereza, after sniffing another woman’s existence in Tomas’s hair, again feels her body’s inability to prove her uniqueness to Tomas. In another nightmare of hers, Tomas takes her to a park with red, yellow, and blue benches in it. Tomas sits on one of the benches and asks her to walk on top of a hill to acquire what she really wants. When she reaches the top, she sees men fulfilling people’s wish to die. The men carry rifles and escort people into a forest to choose a tree where they would like to end their lives. Tereza says it is not her choice to die when it is her turn, and the men let her go. This dream is a variation from the dream with marching naked women and Tomas since Tereza has the right of refusal this time. Tomas has absolute authority in the previous dream, but this time Tereza takes the responsibility of her own life. It is a sign that Tomas no longer has complete control over Tereza.

The aforementioned nightmare still leaves Tereza with bitter aftertastes. She makes up her mind to try sleeping with someone whom she does not love, to test Tomas’s theory of sex without love. She goes to the house of an engineer, who was a customer of the bar where she works. During their sexual intercourse, Tereza experiences contradictory feelings—her body’s excitement and her soul’s rejection to take the engineer in. She rebels against the man with whom she has sex in order to affirm her soul’s unconquerable position in her identity. Even though she considers her one-time affair with the engineer a mistaken step in her life, it instigates her choice to move to the country.

Tomas, having indulged himself in one or two erotic adventures, finally experiences emotional tiredness. His libertinism, interestingly, is linked to his desire to know the individuality of his lovers, the “millionth part dissimilarity” (199) that separates a woman from others. However, no matter how many women he has slept with, his heart is tied to Tereza alone, and none of his mistresses can replace Tereza’s position in his heart. Both he and Tereza realize how spiritually and physically ugly Prague has become, and amid pangs of stomachache, he agrees with Tereza’s suggestion to move to the country even when he knows that both his career and erotic adventures would come to an end afterwards. As Tereza comforts Tomas when he tries to sleep, role reversal has taken place in their relationship.

The lovers’ village life is not always pleasant, the peacefulness disturbed by Tereza’s suspicion of yet another Tomas’s affair and the death of their beloved dog, Karenin. During the days where Karenin’s health deteriorates, Tereza envies Karenin’s reveling in daily repetition and also sees the love from an animal as better love, as it does not require anything from the beloved one. In one dream of hers, Tomas shrinks into a tiny rabbit before her, and Tereza happily holds it in her arms and takes it into the room she had when she was a young girl. All in all, seeing an aging Tomas trying to refill a tire of a car one day, she understands that she is responsible for the end of Tomas’s professional career by making “a display of her suffering to him, thereby forcing him to retreat” (300). In the end, Tomas loses his strength and became a rabbit in her arms. Revealing her feeling of guilt to him, he assures her that he feels happy in the country.

Tereza’s love for nature in the last section of the novel reenters the shared realm of female experience. She identifies herself with the tranquility and harmony of nature and takes Tomas into her world in which they are both enveloped. Kundera makes light of the existence of idyllic happiness by killing off Tomas and Tereza in a car accident, but at least in their last hours on earth, they are bathed in bliss.

References

Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
New York :Harper Perennial, 1999.

Misurella, Fred. Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs.
Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, c1993.

Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: an Anthology.
Malden, MA : Blackwell, 2004.

For the “NTHU Memory” contest

1.

My cousin and I walked towards the auditorium, at whose door students and their parents protested angrily, “Open the door and let us in!”

“We can’t,” said one guard firmly, despite the increasing pressure from people’s jostling and shrieks. He did not move an inch away from the entrance to the auditorium, intricately adorned by ornaments especially for the graduates of National Tsing Hua University.

“Never mind being in that red-carpeted hall and listening to the insincere speeches,” I whispered to my cousin cynically. “It looks like Clytemnestra’s banquet for the returning Agamemnon, anyway, and the guard is the poor Cassandra.”

“Huh?” his expression was one of sheer bewilderment.

On the day the graduation ceremony was scheduled to be held, it was bright, sunny, and sweltering. Several friends of mine and I decided to meet in the late June morning to feast on the beauty of the Tsing Hua campus with our cameras. After all, some of us did not know when we would set foot on Tsing Hua again after that special day. We all excitedly anticipated the graduation ceremony to take place at the “Vast Lawn” and the fireworks to close our university days with splendid explosions in the sky later in the evening.

Unfortunately, it was literally a bolt from the blue when the sky grayed at dusk and raindrops fell violently to the ground. Our celebration at the “Vast Lawn” was cancelled, our fireworks intact and unlighted. The ceremony had to be switched to an indoor location—the auditorium. Since the auditorium was not spacious enough to accommodate all graduates, their families, and friends, students who did not arrive there before 6:30 p.m. would not be allowed to enter the auditorium.

Having indulged myself with photography all day long, I desperately wanted to fill my empty stomach before joining the commencement party. “They won’t block me,” I thought smugly. However, I was proven wrong when I walked to the auditorium leisurely with my cousin, who was an ESS (Engineering and System Science) graduate student in Tsing Hua, and was confronted with crowds of frustrated students with their furious parents, bundles of flowers in hand. They all shouted for the gates of the auditorium to be opened, but to no avail.

How could the guards forbid me to join my own graduation ceremony? I felt enraged and betrayed in front of the auditorium, fresh and gleaming white in the night air, having been washed by the rain.

Wandering to the nearby Cheng-Gong Lake, my cousin and I sat ourselves down on the unoccupied stoned chairs. I chuckled to myself, realizing that not only did my college life begin and end at the auditorium, but it also witnessed some crucial events during my days in Tsing Hua.

2.

Four years earlier, my roommates and I, after quickly finishing our breakfasts, dashed to the auditorium at full speed at eight o’clock in the morning. While the dormitory is the first place where all first-year students spend their first night in Tsing Hua, they were asked to participate in the “Freshman Training Program,” which lasted for six days in the auditorium. When I stepped onto the stairs before the gates of the auditorium, I imagined the following events to be eye-opening for a coy and clumsy newcomer like me. However, my original enthusiasm turned into boredom and drowsiness as I listened to one speech after another. The speakers’ monotonous voices, the soft couches, and the comfortable air-conditioned air sent me into deep slumbers.

Luckily, my impressions of the auditorium as a huge bed chamber were dramatically altered after attending various musical concerts, plays, talks, and performances there. I was often thrilled at seeing posters advertising upcoming shows at the auditorium, waiting to be entertained and inspired.

3.

The auditorium also witnessed my failed date with my first crush in university. It was the day before the Christmas Eve, a cold and windy night. Being a diligent student, I had spent my Christmases in Hsinchu mostly by myself, only dining with several friends at night. Then I met the male student from another department who stirred inexplicable feelings in my heart. I could not endure another lonely Christmas. By all means, I had to make a meeting happen. He suggested a movie to be shown at the auditorium, and I consented at once despite the fact that the movie appeared to be uninteresting.

He suddenly text-messaged me that morning, telling me that he would leave immediately after the movie was over, that a friend of his would possibly come along. I might as well cancel the date if it was the treatment I received after swallowing my pride and discarding my modesty. After hours of mental turmoil, eventually I reached the auditorium a little earlier than the hour we agreed to meet. The tall trees opposite the auditorium hid my thin form, which was trembling with nervous anticipation.

Then he showed up on time, dashing on the darkling stairs of the auditorium, alone! I longed to give voice of all the surging emotions in my treacherous heart but could not. Walking myself out from behind the trees, I told him that I would not go to the movie with him. The brutal wind, carrying the foolishness and tumult of the whole incident, crashed on me with every step I took away from the auditorium, which stood still, unmoved.

4.

For us students of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, the senior play occurring annually in the auditorium is the perfect culmination of our university life. After months of painstaking preparations, we locked ourselves in the auditorium for a week before our performance dates. For most of us, it was the first time did we have the chance to explore the insides of the auditorium intimately instead of staying in the audience seats. During the rehearsals of our senior play, we busied ourselves backstage, in the dressing rooms, the sound control room, and the light control room. The days grew nearly unbearable as the auditorium practically became our prison, but all bearing was worthwhile when we released our pent-up anxiety on stage. We had two nights with nearly all audience seats occupied.

5.

The graduation ceremony was over. My cousin and I easily slipped in the opening doors of the auditorium. My eyes immediately found my classmates.

“Hey,” my friend patted on my shoulder as I approached her. She was smiling but there was a slight frown between her brows. “In the end, they let us in if we were in our bachelor gowns, of course without families and friends. Didn’t you try?”

“Well, no.” I gestured to show my companion’s presence. “How was the ceremony?”

“Tedious, as expected.” I could hear the wry amusement in her voice. The opulent life in Tsing Hua had been priceless even if the beginning and the ending of it were not spectacular, I reckoned.

“Besides,” she continued, “it doesn’t matter at all even though you missed the ceremony,” then referring to my admission to a master’s program in Tsing Hua, “You will have another commencement party soon.”

“Yes, I know.” I smiled. My life in Tsing Hua goes on.