Primal scenes of the ‘sanatorial text’: decoding the spa worker’s gaze in the swimming pool scenes of Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England and Milan Kundera’s The Farewell Waltz

This article explores the tentative notion of spa literature morphing into the heterogeneous body of the transnational and pan-European ‘sanatorial text’ and proposes the notion that this text body consists of different ‘primal scenes’ (Ned Lukacher), which can be viewed as ‘a trope for reading’. The aim of this article is to use Lukacher’s concept of primal scenes as a reading lens for decoding two swimming pool scenes in Milan Kundera’s novel Valčik na rozloučenou (1970–1971; Farewell Waltz, first published in English as The Farewell Party, transl. P. Kussi 1972) and Bohumil Hrabal’s Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (1971; I Served the King of England, transl. Paul R. Wilson 1989). Both novels address the interactions between hotel and spa personnel and their guests, revealing the gender and bio-politics in this sphere and turning it into a contested field of both transnational interests and politics of national identity. The close temporal proximity in which the two novels were written and the almost mirror-inverted architecture of the two scenes provide substantial basis for their comparative analysis. The analysis sheds new light on the intertextual connections between the two works and uncovers writers’ strategies for the sanatorial text as a broader concept.