by Sergio Pitol
However, his faith in reason, science, and progress did not stop—because his writing was a pure exercise in freedom—some of his stories from adopting an almost evangelical tone. In one of his last short stories, “In the Ravine,” evil and usury are assimilated into a lie, and the only nobility is connected to suffering, the rhythms of nature, the earth, manual labor, with religiosity as intense as that of the late Tolstoy that he disliked so much. The only difference is that in Chekhov, the preacher disappears and only the writing remains. In a letter he writes: “Pharisaism, stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation. […] That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.”18 In his narratives and plays, these clear concepts would be transformed into a storm of details, would fragment, become dust, ashes, unfinished sketches, apathy, vague intonations. Paradoxically, this apparent insignificance would infuse his work with meaning and value. Perhaps that is what allows us to read him as a contemporary.
Xalapa, August 1993
16Translated by Ronald Hingley
17From “The Stature of Anton Chekhov” by Thomas Mann.
18Translated by Constance Garnett
ŠVEJK19
In the opening scene of The Good Soldier Švejk, the author, Jaroslav Hašek, places his protagonist at the very center of history: of Bohemia, his country, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of Europe, and of the world. In Sarajevo, Švejk is told that the heir to the imperial throne has just been assassinated. In the subsequent episodes of Hašek’s antiheroic tale, history will gradually lose its gifts and privileges, it will fade into a distorted backdrop against which a series of disproportionate and grotesque actions unfolds, whose protagonists are the poor soldier who gives the title its name, his friends and tavern mates, and his comrades in arms, all of whom lack any aspiration to grandeur, prestige, or glory. And, too, as the story progresses, a more abstract plot takes shape: the absurdity that governs and weaves the infinite network of relationships created by power within society and manipulated from above, and, ultimately, the neglect of an insignificant man, who in novels is but an infinitesimal part of a crowd, an easily interchangeable subordinate, committed, almost always, to being unaware of his neglect. The Good Soldier Švejk illustrates how this candid and irreducibly anarchic being, the protagonist, suddenly sees himself trapped by a seemingly perfect machine, and describes further the tools of wit that a homunculus is capable of employing to avoid being destroyed by mechanisms that he will never succeed in or be interested in understanding.
This character, always surprised but never intimidated, who ambles through a labyrinth of bridges and corridors, courts and galleries, until arriving at the front lines, navigates various court proceedings as enigmatic as those brought against Mr. K., his neighbor in Prague. Neglect and lack of pretexts, rather than reduce this Bohemian Sancho, have given him a freedom that the sedentary man would be unable to conceive of. Trapped in a seemingly impregnable and treacherous prison and administrative world, Švejk will have no choice but to topple it or cause it to explode. Because the Švejks of the world, men with doltish faces, are the perfect gravediggers of any empire. Dogged and guileless, they are destined to be implacable moles, cheerful and voracious termites, and time bombs ready to demolish any system considered to be monolithic, rigorous, and univocal. They have as their golem another of the illustrious characters of Prague: the vitality of the imprecise and the unfinished. They are unpleasant, they are vulgar, and above all, they are indestructible. Like cockroaches, they will manage to survive any disaster.
In the opening paragraph of Hašek’s novel, Mrs. Müller, a charwoman at a squalid rooming house, announces to her tenant, Švejk, a hawker of dogs: “So they’ve killed our Ferdinand!”20 The action takes place in Prague. The author makes clear immediately that an army medical board has certified our protagonist an “obvious imbecile.” They’re talking about none other than the Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg, the heir to the Empire’s throne. From that moment on, a dialogue of the deaf takes place between heraldry and ordinariness at ground level. Mrs. Müller will settle on the highest branches of the ruling dynasty; her tenant, on much more villainous levels. Of course, Švejk will triumph, and although the novel endeavors to address the decline and fall of an empire, it will forever be, from the beginning to end, a chronicle of disorderly factions, those most contemptuous of perfection that society embodies. Hašek’s novel is a chronicle that revels in its vulgarity, in the absence of virtues, in bodily filth, and, in due time, in scatophilia.
Švejk, all the while rubbing his knees with an anti-rheumatic liniment, asks the question that anyone would think to ask upon hearing the Christian name of someone who has been killed: “Which Ferdinand, Mrs. Müller?” adding, before the interlocutor can answer, that he only knew two Ferdinands, one the delivery boy of the chemist Prusa, who had once drunk a bottle of hair lotion by mistake, and the other Ferdinand Kokoška, who collected dog waste from the streets. He concludes, “They wouldn’t be any great loss, either of ’em.”
Thus, from the beginning, an irrepressible and bawdy verbal stream flows from the protagonist’s mouth. Švejk’s speech recalls those drunken, incoherent, and unhinged tirades heard in taverns in the wee hours of the morning. After hearing that the assassination involved a member of the imperial family, he comments that a customer at the pub had told him not long ago that someday all the emperors in the world would be brought down, which forced the tavern owner to have him arrested, but the bloke landed a punch on the landlord and two on the policeman. He adds that they then took him away in a drunk cart until he returned to his senses, and while the dizzied reader is unable to grasp what the rain of punches was all about—who gives them or who receives them or why they happened in the first place—Švejk returns suddenly to the death of the Crown Prince, without a doubt the most commented upon incident at the time in every corner of the Empire. But the manner in which he explains his reflections is extremely chaotic: “Yes, Mrs. Müller, there’s queer things going on nowadays; that there is. That’s another loss to Austria. When I was in the army there was a private who shot a captain. He loaded his rifle and went into the orderly room. They told him to clear out, but he kept on saying that he must speak to the captain. Well the captain came along and gave him a dose of C.B. Then he took his rifle and scored a fair bull’s eye. The bullet went right through the captain and when it came out the other side, it did some damage in the orderly room, in the bargain. It smashed a bottle of ink and the ink got spilled all over some regiment records.” Like us, the readers, Mrs. Müller is completely lost. She ponders everything for a moment, trying to understand the story, then, unwisely, asks her tenant the fate of the soldier. Švejk’s response is instantaneous: “‘He hanged himself with a pair of braces,’ said Švejk, brushing his bowler hat. ‘And they wasn’t even his. He borrowed them from a jailer, making out that his trousers were coming down. You can’t blame him for not waiting till they shot him. You know, Mrs. Müller, it’s enough to turn anyone’s head, being in a fix like that. The jailer lost his rank and got six months as well. But he didn’t serve his time. He ran away to Switzerland and now he does a bit of preaching for some church or other. There ain’t many honest people about nowadays, Mrs. Müller.’” And soon after these longwinded and unnecessary circumlocutions, he returns to the topic: “‘I expect that the Archduke was taken in by the man who shot him. He saw a chap standing there and thought: Now there’s a decent fellow, cheering me and all. And then the chap did him in.’”
In that inornate beginning, overwhelmed by the character’s verbal incontinence, w
e glimpse Hašek’s narrative intention: to degrade history, History in uppercase, until it becomes a trivial series of foolish tales. The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne constitutes one of the most consequential events in our century. The shot that ended the life of the Archduke marked the beginning of the First World War, an event that would change Europe’s political landscape and, in the medium or long term, the world. The collapse of the empire would give rise to a new series of nation states. Bohemia, the country where Švejk lived, would unite with Slovakia to form the Republic of Czechoslovakia. Inside Russia, the other great empire of Continental Europe, a transformation of the social, political, and economic structures would take place that would introduce others that until then had been regarded with the conflicting emotions of loathing and hope. Utopia was becoming a reality. Borders everywhere would change. There would be a new distribution of colonial territories and spheres of influence. For Švejk, the assassination of Ferdinand of Habsburg is reduced to the level of the death of the druggist Prusa’s delivery boy, that idiot who accidentally ingested a hair lotion, that of Kokoška, the collector of dog excrement on the streets of Prague, or the soldier who hanged himself with the jailer’s suspenders. The episodes of greater historical significance are trivialized upon being compared with the most anodyne human detritus. Hereafter, this device will become one of the hallmarks of the best contemporary Czech narrative. The tone of the Švejk’s soliloquies resembles the delirium of those drunkards who remember everything only to confuse everything. Hašek’s world is a world upside down, where the mechanisms of power are confused with carnival and where plot and language constitute a marked unity with a Rabelaisian seal.
Angelo María Ripellino believes that The Good Soldier Švejk belongs to the tradition of Habsburgian literature. “Even if it does so with harshness and bitterness and without a minimum of sympathy, the book expresses the agony of the Empire, the Finis Austriae, the twilight of Kakania, of that—as Musil said—misunderstood and now non-existent nation that was in so many ways an unappreciated model.” Hašek’s book, in fact, does not reveal any sympathy for this world or any of its myths. He does not delight in ironizing the extreme complexity of a culture in the process of growing dark as Musil does in The Man Without Qualities, or in the heroic military exploits regarded for centuries as the most valuable foundation of that dual monarchy—royal and imperial—as occurs in the novels of Lerner-Holenia, or in the bitter and melancholy memory of its gradual dissolution, as in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, or the delusional pathos with which Andrzej Kuśniewicz, one of the great chroniclers of that collapse, a Pole born in Galicia, one of the eastern regions of the Empire, who, in The King of the Two Sicilies and Lesson in a Dead Language, describes the death rattle of the final agony. Hašek doesn’t feel the slightest nostalgia for that defeated world on the verge of extinction. The information we have about the character testifies to his disdain for everything related to that political entity, its culture, its customs, its religion. Above all, he detested the judicial and administrative mechanisms in whose labyrinth Švejk, just like the characters of Kafka, his contemporaries, stumble endlessly, as an example that no one, no matter where he was, could permanently escape its tentacles.
Humor abounds in Hašek’s account: a malignant, barracks humor that emerges more from the belly than the intellect, more characteristic of popular culture than of the refined strata of Bohemian society. Hašek’s laughter comes from the earth and never manages—because neither does he try—to climb upward. A humor centered, to use Bakhtin’s words, on the movements of the belly and the bum. According to the Russian thinker, popular humor has a spring, dawn, and morning character par excellence: “More precisely, folk grotesque reflects the very moment when light replaces darkness, night-morning, winter-spring.”
If the humor that permeates and becomes a foundation of the narrative has this luminous character in the early chapters, where Švejk still remains far from the front, in the last chapters, as the good soldier sinks into battlefields, he changes and connects, even if only in some aspects, with the Romantic root, always present in the Germanic world, where the absence of the solar element is a condition and is the only light capable of penetrating the darkness. The most powerful aspect of German Expressionism was nourished by this violent, blasphemous, and derogatory foundation. Hašek’s world at one point coincides with the vision of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and the early Kokoschka. His tone, says Wolfgang Kayser, “is sinister, dreadful, and distressing.” During Švejk’s journey, the cheerful and luminous tone at the beginning will gradually change signs, and by the time he arrives on the battlefield, it will become fecal. The soldiers march, defecate, kill, defecate again, and, in the end, die, sometimes in the very act of defecating. The war appears as a stage swept by the harshest winds, or reduced to a sordid, drunken brawl like those that might take place at any beer hall in Prague. The adventures and reflections of the delusional character who is Švejk, the dog merchant turned soldier, are resolved through an alchemical pass from dread to laughter. “Fear,” and here I return to Bakhtin, “is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter.” Alexander Herzen underscores the revolutionary character of laughter: “No one laughs in church, at court, on parade, before the head of their department, a police officer, or the German boss. House serfs have no right to smile in the presence of their masters, only equals can laugh among themselves. […] To cause men to smile at the god Apis is to deprive him of his holy status and turn him into a common bull.”21 And Victor Hugo adds that the great geniuses of literature distinguish themselves by committing to that which the mediocre avoid: excess and disproportion. Hašek revels in these: Švejk is the embodiment of an absence of limits.
Every era mocks certain subjects that were venerated in the past. Shakespeare laughs at the notion of the heroism contained in the Homeric poems, demolishes epos, and treats the subject as if the immense movement of troops from every corner of the Hellas to the walls of Troy, and the incessant battles where dying meant an act of obedience to the commands of the gods, were nothing more than a frivolous byplay that illustrated the marital conflict between a whore and a cuckold, as attested by the characters of Troilus and Cressida, as splendid as contemptible, the Greek Thersites and the Trojan Pandarus, whose commentaries on war and its leaders are noteworthy for their sarcasm. A very black humor runs through all tragedy. There seems to be an insurmountable rupture between this kind of humor and laughter. The same occurs in the fables of Swift, the work of Beckett, in all of the theater of the absurd. A frozen grimace accompanies their reading. Hašek’s humor is similar. Comparing in the first lines of his novel the most prized offshoot of the Habsburgian dynasty to a collector of street droppings reveals his intention. A few lines suffice to demystify Olympus. The divine Apis suddenly becomes a tame ox.
During the entire course of Švejk’s hazy slog, we never stumble upon anyone who possesses the stuff from which heroes, poets, or saints are made. The vast humanity that inhabits the pages of the novel—the officers who lead the military operations as well as the anonymous starving and drunken multitude that marches toward death—is not characterized by its epic spirit. The world of war is reduced to inarticulate cries, swearing, arrests and corporal punishment, deprivation of every kind, stupidity, robbery, incessant transit from one court to another, from prison to a military commission, from the hospital to the madhouse, from the ward to the battlefield. Amid the roar can be heard Švejk’s indefatigable mumbling. And how reasonable that voice unexpectedly begins to seem to us as it attempts to superimpose itself onto chaos! In a world that has lost all reason Švejk’s incongruent memories, the thousand absurd anecdotes that he reels off in excruciating detail with unrelenting logorrhea seem to border almost on sanity.
The author maintains an attitude of permanent ambiguity toward his creation. Is Švejk, “officially weak-minded—a chronic case,” as he likes to introduce himself, truly mentally re
tarded, or is he a clever impostor, a sly rogue who manages to fool the authorities all the time? His greatest blunders are always accompanied by an angelic look and an expression of absolute purity. The doubt is never resolved. One of Hašek’s great successes is to never reveal to the reader exactly who Švejk is.
Švejk renders candid testimony of every stop along his judicial odyssey. “Nowadays” he says, “it’s great fun being run in. There’s no quartering or anything of that kind. We’ve got a mattress, we’ve got a table, we’ve got a seat, we ain’t packed together like sardines, we’ll get soup, they’ll give us bread, they’ll bring a pitcher or water, there’s a closet right under our noses. It all shows you what progress there’s been.”
In an edition of the Corriere della Sera from the end of 1987, I read a story about the political perspectives that were visible at that time in Czechoslovakia; the Italian correspondent gathered opinions from writers and artists. Significant changes were beginning to take place in Eastern Europe. Unexpectedly, warm winds were blowing from Russia that seemed to announce that the end of a hibernation that had extended far too long. The Corriere article was titled: “In Prague the soldier Švejk still prevails.” One of the interviewees, whom the Italian journalist referred to by first name only, Ludvik, commented: “The country is rife with Švejkism: it’s a great literary creation, but from a moral point of view, it’s a catastrophe. Czechoslovakia is full of Švejks: hypocrites, opportunists, incompetents. Conformity and concealment know no bounds.” At that time, it was impossible for intellectuals like Ludvik to know if the official lie was exposed, strengthened, and laid bare, precisely because of the work, whether conscious or unconscious, of Švejkism. A falsehood published in the press received so much praise, acceptance, and exaggerated approval by an entire army of complacent Švejks, expressed in a tone that never rid itself of a vague taste of parody that, by contrast, was suggestive of a lie. The official statement, which was repeated with exaggerated emphasis by insane voices, was transformed immediately into a caricature. In the world of the Švejks nonsense is exemplary, an achievement of modern times. Error is extolled as a virtue. Servile adjectivization can reach aberrant levels. Švejk, for example, thinks that a prison system is exemplary because the toilets are placed under the inmates’ noses.