This paper will reason that Teresa’s dreams in The Intolerable Elation of Being foreground the character’s suppressed fright of uniformization and her alternate representation of Tomas. as the Apollonian. concluding masculine figure par excellence. This statement will be developed alongside the lines of the reading of dreams provided by Sigmund Freud and by Carl Gustav Jung.
In his Interpretation of Dreams. Sigmund Freud argued that dreams are manifestations of the unconscious and that their imagination is a combination of motives drawn from world and deformations operated by suppressed feelings like fright and gender residing in the subconscious: the rigorous privacy or isolation of the dream from existent. true life on the one manus. and on the other the continual invasion of the 1 on the other. the changeless dependance of the 1 on the other.
—The dream is something wholly separate from the world we experience when awake ; one might name it an being hermetically closed within itself. cut off from existent life by an unbridgeable chasm. It frees us from world. extinguishes our normal remembrance of it. and topographic points us in another universe and in a quite different life-story. which has basically nil to make with our existent one ( Hildebrandt. quoted in Freud. 1976 ) . The impression that dreams conveying to the bow an alternate life narrative is rather important for our analysis of the presence of dreams in Kundera’s novel.
Teresa’s dreams represent a parallel life narrative in the novel. which regards and explicates the character’s manifest life. As compared to Tomas. who strives for the annihilation of the differences between spirit and affair. Teresa recognizes the importance of individualism as translated by one’s consciousness of the organic structure. However. her relationship with her organic structure is a debatable 1 because her female parent had imposed a entirely different corporeal doctrine on her in her childhood.
The exposure of the bare organic structure. devoid of any reserve or libido represents. in the eyes of grownup Teresa. the uniformization of the ego. It is besides a grade of eternal anon. sexual intercourse which is epitomized in the novel by Tomas’ illicit love personal businesss. In one of her perennial dreams. which she recounts to Tomas. the fright of material aneantization. which she suppresses while awake. surfaces with a retribution: I was at a big indoor swimming pool. There were about 20 of us. All adult females. We were naked and had to process around the pool.
There was a basket hanging from the ceiling and a adult male hanging in the basket. The adult male wore a broad-brimmed chapeau shadowing his face. but I could see it was you. You kept giving us orders. Shouting at us. We had to sing as we marched. sing and make knee decompression sicknesss. If one of us did a bad articulatio genus set. you would hit her and she would fall dead into the pool. Which made everybody laugh and sing even louder. You ne’er took your eyes off us. and the minute we did something wrong. you would hit. The pool was full of cadavers drifting merely below the surface.
And I knew I lacked the strength to make the following articulatio genus crook and you would hit me! ( Kundera. 1999. p. 18 ) . Corporeal sameness signifies. as the storyteller explains. the namelessness of gender and individualism which Teresa fears intensely. As in Freud’s reading. the fright of homogenization translates the fright of decease. which Teresa clearly expresses in this dream in contrast to the other adult females whose laughter and vocal seem to observe the nearing absolute sameness in decease. The peculiar instantiation of Tomas. have oning a chapeau is extremely important excessively.
Harmonizing to Jung. “the hat. as a covering for the caput. has the general sense of something that epitomizes the caput. [ … ] a stranger’s chapeau imparts a unusual personality” ( p. 120 ) . Tomas appears in this dream as a music director and liquidator because. on the one manus. because of his philandering in existent life. he forces Teresa into the namelessness of sexual organic structures and. on the other manus. his “strangeness” could mean his equation with tyranny. Teresa’s dream hence draws a analogue between unrepressed gender and decease. the bodies’ nudity equivocally touching either to gender or to the decease cantonments.
These dreams express Teresa’s fright of the annihilation of individualism ( and finally. her fright of decease ) through Tomas’ unfaithfulnesss which undermine her self-image as a fantastic accretion of eventualities which she values so much. Mentions: Freud. Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Penguin Books. 1976. Jung. Carl Gustav. Dreams. Routledge. 2001. Kundera. Milan. The Intolerable Elation of Being. trans Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper Collins. 1999. Porter. Laurence M. The Interpretation of Dreams: Freud’s Theories Revisited. Twayne Publishers. 1987.
