From: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,talk.politics.drugs
Subject: Re: Update on me [ Stuart Reges ]
Date: 8 Apr 92 01:41:44 GMT
Reply-To: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland

Stuart Reges asked to sign a paper promising not to break loosely
defined tules again brings to my mind the retraction asked to be
signed by the surgeon Tomas after the "Prague Spring" in Milan
Kundera's _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_.  Here's the quotation
posted earlier on Usenet by someone else:


From: pfarrer@isr.harvard.edu (David M. Pfarrer)

I thought I might enlarge the ongoing discussion of responsibility to
fight for rights with the following lengthy quotation from Milan
Kundera's novel _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_.  Kundera is a
Czech emigre who now lives in Paris.  Only one of his works, _The
Joke_, was published in his native country, during the Prague Spring
of 1968.  His other best known work is _The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting_.  He is a very great and facinating writer and I would
recommend his work to anyone.

Here's a little background on what follows: Tomas is a surgeon who in
the "Prague Spring" of 1968 published a letter to an intellectual
weekly comparing those communists who were denying any knowledge of
old atrocities and saying that they had always been sincere true
believers in socialism and the greater good to Oedipus.
Tomas's point is that lack
of knowledge is not an excuse; that Oedipus, who unknowingly slays his
father and marries his mother, still must atone for his sin and does
so by blinding himself and giving up the throne of Thebes.  A couple
years later, with the Soviet-backed regime back in power, Tomas is
called on to retract his article.  What follows is taken from the
novel:

When Tomas came back to Prague from Zurich, he took up in his hospital
where he had left off.  Then one day the chief surgeon called him in.

"You know as well as I do," he said, "that you're no writer or
jounalist or savior of the nation.  You're a doctor and a scientist.
I'd be very sad to lose you, and I'll do everything I can to keep you
here.  But you've got to retract that article you wrote about Oedipus.
Is it terribly important to you?"

"To tell you the truth," said Tomas, recalling how they had amputated
a good third of the text, "it couldn't be any less important."

"You know what's at stake," said the chief surgeon.

He knew all right.  There were two things in the balance: his honor
(which consisted in his refusing to reteract what he had said) and
what he had come to call the meaning of his life (his work in medicine
and research).

The chief surgeon went on: "The pressure to make public retractions of
past statements -- there's something medieval about it.  What does it
mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said?  How can anyone state
categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid?  In
modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.  And
since to retract an idea is impossible, merely verbal, formal sorcery,
I see no reason why you shouldn't do as they wish.  In a society run
by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously.  They are
all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.
Let me conclude by saying that it is in my interest in your patients'
interest that you stay on here with us."

"You're right, I'm sure," said Tomas, looking very unhappy.

"But?" The chief surgeon was trying to guess his train of thought.

"I'm afraid I'd be ashamed."

"Ashamed! You mean to say you hold your colleagues in such high esteem
that you care what they think?"

"No, I don't hold them in high esteem," said Tomas.

"Oh, by the way," the chief surgeon added, "you won't have to make a
public statement.  I have their assurance.  They're bureaucrats.  All
they need is a note in their files to the effect that you've nothing
against the regime.  Then if someone comes and attacks them for
letting you work at the hospital, they're covered.  They've given me
their word that anything you say will remain between you and them.
They have no intention of publiching a word of it."

"Give me a week to think it over," said Tomas, and there the matter
rested.

[4]

Tomas was considered the best surgeon in the hopital.  Rumor had it
that the chief surgeon, who was getting on towards retirement age,
would soon ask him to take over.  When that rumor was supplemented by
the rumor that the authorities had requested a statement of
self-criticism from him, no one doubted he would comply.

That was the first thing that struck him: although he had never given
people cause to doubt his integrity, they were ready to bet on his
dishonesty rather than on his virtue.

The second thing that struck him was their reaction to the position
they attributed to him.  I might divide it into two basic types:

The first type of reaction came from people who themselves (they or
their intimates) had retracted something, who had themselves been
forced to make public peace with the occupation regime or were
prepared to do so (unwillingly, of course-- no one wanted to do it).

These people began to smile a curious smile at him, a smile he had
never seen before: the sheepish smile of secret conspiratorial
consent.  it was the smile of two men meeting accidentally in a
brothel: both slightly abashed, they are at the same time glad that
the feeling is mutual, and a bond of something akin to brotherhood
develops between them.

Their smiles were all the more complacent because he had never had the
reputation of being a conformist.  His supposed acceptance of the
chief surgeon's proposal was therefore further proof that cowardice
was slowly but surely becoming the norm of behavior and would soon
cease being taken for what it actually was.  He had never been friends
with these people, and he realized with dismay that if he did in fact
make the statement the chief surgeon had requested of him, they would
start inviting him to parties and he would have to make friends with
them.

The second type of reaction came from people who themselves (they or
their intimates) had been persecuted, who had refused to compromise
with the occupation powers or were convinced they would refuse to
compromise (to sign a statement) even though no one had requested it
of them (for instance, because they were too young to be seriously
involved).

One of the latter, Dr.S., a talented young physician, asked Tomas one
day, "Well, have you written it up for them?"

"What in the world are you talking about?" Tomas asked in return.

"Why, your retraction," he said.  There was no malice in his voice.
He even smiled.  One more smile from that thick herbal of smiles: the
smile of smug moral superiority.

"Tell me, what do you know about my retraction?" said Tomas. "Have you
read it?"

"No," sad S.

"Then what are you babbling about?"

Still smug, still smiling, S. replied, "Look, we know how it goes.
You incorporate it into a letter to the chief surgeon or to some
minister or somebody, and he promises it won't leak out and humiliate
the author.  Isn't that right?"

Tomas shrugged his shoulders and let S. go on.

"But even after the statement is safely filed away, the author knows
that it can be made public at any moment.  So from then on he doesn't
open his mouth, never criticizes a thing, never makes the slightest
protest.  The first peep out of him and into print it goes, sullying
his good name far and wide.  On the whole, it's rather a nice method.
One could imagine worse."

"Yes, it's a very nice method," said Tomas, "but would you mind
telling me who gave you the idea I'd agreed to go along with it?"

S. shrugged his shoulders, but the smile did not disappear from his
face.

And suddenly Tomas grasped a strange fact: everyone was smiling at
him, everyone wanted him to write the retraction; it would make
everyone happy!  The people with the first type of reaction would be
happy because by inflating cowardice, he would make their actions seem
commonplace and thereby give them back their lost honor.  The people
with the second type of reaction, who had come to consider their honor
a special privilege never to be yielded, nurtured a secret love for
the cowards, for without them their courage would soon erode into a
trivial, monotonous grind admired by no one.

Tomas could not bear the smiles.  He thought he saw them everywhere,
even on the faces of strangers in the street.  He began losing sleep.
Could it be?  Did he really hold those people in such high esteem?
No.  he had nothing good to say about them and was angry with himself
for letting their glances upset him so.  It was completely illogical.
How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent
on what they thought of him?

Perhaps his deep-seated mistrust of people (his doubts as to their
right to decide his destiny and to judge him) had played its part in
his choice of profession, a profession that excluded him from public
display.  A man who chooses to be a politician, say, voluntarily makes
the public his judge, with the naive assurance that he will gain
favor.  And if the crowd does express its disapproval, it merely goads
him on to bigger and better things, much in the way Tomas was spurred
on by the difficulty of a diagnosis.

A doctor (unlike a politician or an actor) is judged only by his
patients and immediate colleagues, that is, behind closed doors, man
to man.  Confronted by the looks of those who judge him, he can
respond at once with his own look, to explain or defend himself.  Now
(for the first time in his life) Tomas found himself in a situation
where the looks fixed on him were so numerous that he was unable to
register them.  He could answer them neither with his own look nor
with words.  He was at everyone's mercy.  People talked about him
inside and outside the hospital (it was a time when news about who
betrayed, who denounced, and who collaborated spread through nervous
Prague with the uncanny speed of a bush telegraph); although he knew
about it, he could do nothing to stop it.  He was surprised at how
unbearable he found it, how panic-stricken it made him feel.  The
interest they showed in him was as unpleasant as an elbowing crowd or
the pawings of the people who tear our clothes off in nightmares.

He went to the chief surgeon and told him he would not write a word.


--------------------------------------------

from _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ by Milan Kundera, Harper and
Row, 1984, pp. 179 - 184.
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.society.civil-liberty,misc.legal,talk.politics.drugs,talk.politics.misc