Friday, August 25, 2017
Compulsion vs. Choice
We talked quite a bit in class this week about the scene when Tomas decides to follow Tereza and return to Prague. He is haunted by Beethoven's est muss sein (it must be), feeling that he has no real choice in the matter. I feel that this is connected to the opening scenes of Tomas and Tereza's relationship because, just as Tomas feels he must follow Tereza back to Czechoslovakia (a country now ravished by tragedy and despair), Tomas also feels compelled to care for Tereza while she is sick with the flu. Both times he feels he has "no choice," despite having refused to allow many a woman to spend the night with him in the past. In each scene, there is additionally a sense of pain—Tereza falling sick, and Tereza returning to a country that has in a sense become "sick" itself. Perhaps due to Tomas' nature as a surgeon, he feels that he must protect Tereza, whom he partly views as someone to take pity upon.
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I agree that Tomas feels compelled to take care of Tereza as numerous times he views her as "a child put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket and sent downstream" (10). The narrator relates this view to ancient myths. Pharaoh's daughter found the basket carrying Moses, and as a result, there is the Old Testament. Polybus took in Oedipus, and Sophocles wrote his tragic story. I feel that Tomas makes the choice of "taking in" Tereza because the metaphorical significance of rescuing children in myths. This idea also relates to the topic of chance because the myths also contain an element of it. It is interesting that the narrator describes metaphors as dangerous because that notion makes one feel as though Tomas' coincidental "discovery" of Tereza and the result—love—are risky.
It is evident that Tomas feels obligated to do a lot of things, at least in terms of family and love (Tereza). With his first wife, Tomas felt he was "forced” to have a son with her. When Tomas and his first wife divorced, “the very thought” of raising his son in his own way, which opposed his ex-wife’s beliefs and values, “exhausted him.” Regarding Tomas’s character, I was disappointed as well as fascinated by his methodical approach to life outside of his vocation as a surgeon. This approach suits him well at his workplace and in his personal life, but then Tereza comes along (fate vs chance) and with her, the unbearable heaviness of love and marriage. Sabina remarks that Tomas is “turning into the theme of all [her] paintings,” which is the “meeting of two worlds.” Along the lines of what Ms. King discussed with us, this duality in art, in Sabina’s paintings, reflects duality in life. Tomas is both the caring husband and the relentless womanizer. They are divided entities (Tomas never renounces his views of sex and love being separate from the other, even at the novel’s conclusion).
I think Tomas' struggles with choice throughout the novel are very important and the relation to sickness that you allude to in the post definitely seems significant. Tomas' feeling of his fate to be a doctor is one of the strongest felt "Es Muss Sein"s in the novel, something he feels even more unambiguously than his love for Tereza. Kundera intentionally connects his profession as a doctor to his love for Tereza by having her become sick and need his help.
Also, in relation to what Jun said about the allusions to classical myths, the theme of fate is once again implicitly brought up. In the story of Oedipus, which is very prominent in the novel, Oedipus does not really have free will and his life is seemingly predetermined by fate. In the story of Moses, while one can think of the Pharoah's daughter saving him as an event of chance, I think in the context of the Bible it is an event that God is supposed to have caused, which is another way of describing fate or destiny. By alluding to these stories in which the characters seem to have little free will as their actions are foretold by prophecies or are controlled by an omnipotent God, Tomas empathizes and feels that he himself has no choice in his actions.
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