Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (2 page)

Hrabal, however, invented a new way of showing a certain style of talking. Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness is only in her head, while the flows and streams in Hrabal's novel are performed for a mutely captive audience. And this creates a shimmer that isn't present in Joyce, even if Joyce is the great precursor (the “acme of literature,” as Hrabal once said
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). The movements of Hrabal's narrators are joyous, but they are also forms of avoidance.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
offers the dazzled reader a whole encyclopedia of digressive forms, a handbook of impossible evasions. I once tried to classify these digressions according to a two-part system: Digressions Caused by the Narrator's Character, which could be subdivided into a) the desire to offer autobiography, b) the desire to give advice, c) the desire to expand on an anecdote to prove a moral point, and d) the desire to follow the path of his comprehensive memory; and Digressions Caused by the Narrator's Narrative Aesthetic, which could be subdivided into a) the desire to give comprehensive detail, b) the desire to pay due attention to rumor, c) the desire to describe relatives, and d) the desire to include random improvised portraits—a last subdivision which led me despairingly to invent a third category: Things Not Included in the Above Two Categories, like a nonsequitur masked by a hinge word, or a stray thought leading to an associative anecdote leading finally to a minor character's future. And this is not, no not at all, an exhaustive taxonomy.

Hrabal loved to talk up the noisy headlong clatter of his Perkeo typewriter—to exaggerate the everyday materiality of his writing. (His Perkeo had been made in 1905, and he picked it up from some Soviet soldiers during World War II. But Perkeo was a German manufacturer. And so there was a problem for the Czech novelist: a Perkeo was not adapted to the complicated system of Czech accents. In fact, it possessed none at all. And so Hrabal's texts were written in Czech without accents, and so Molly in translation was translated.) But this exaggeration was in fact a form of self-concealment, of slyness. Hrabal took these high-speed rushes and then submitted them to a process of deliberate and delicate montage. Hrabal's art is double, based on cutting as much as on digression. As well as a typewriter, he relied on scissors and glue: “I take a pair of scissors, a cutter, and I proceed like a film editor.”
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(Even
Dancing Lessons
, after all, began as something else—
The Sufferings of Old Werther
, one of Hrabal's earliest experiments: a sequence of seven texts dictated to Hrabal by his uncle Pepin in 1949, which Hrabal didn't publish—but which he then recut, restyled, and rewrote in the process of inventing his 1964 novel.)

And this creation of a novel as collage—a conjunction of disparate particulars—was made possible by a particular intuition: a story, in Hrabal's writing, is very small. It might last only a sentence, or half a sentence—it might only be as long as the distance between two commas, or parentheses. This is why he is a novelist of such lightness: con brio, he dispenses stories, he disperses them. This is the form that Hrabal perfected in the 1960s: a rewritten spontaneity.

In an essay written in 1956, when he was twenty, in the samizdat magazine
K
, Václav Havel tried to explain the meaning of Hrabal's technique in his early stories. It represented, thought Havel, “a desire to give as truthful an image of the world as possible,
as objective a witness as possible
.” And he explained: “No isolated fact, even when described with the greatest fidelity, constitutes a truth in itself; it only becomes truth if, in the same sentence, we become aware of another fact, opposed in some way to the first.” Truth exists, but it is not available to the lone and lonesome human, the single paragraph. “In effect,” added Havel, “Hrabal says that the human being is always mistaken in his point of view on the world, but that the world in which he lives, its underlying truth as a context of facts, cannot be mistaken.”
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In Hrabal's constant juxtaposition of oppositions lay a desire for infinite representation.

And this new kind of writing requires a new kind of reader—a reader who can, in Hrabal's term, practice “diagonal reading.”
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It requires the reader to remember a scrap of sentence (“having the time of my life with you like the emperor with that Schratt lady”) that will be explained, a little, by a scrap of sentence a few pages later (“you should have seen him do the European Renaissance with the Schratt lady, I was on guard duty in Meidling and I saw it all”); or it will require the reader to wonder if patterns exist in apparently random details: if, say, the story of the poet “Bondy pissing his two buckets onto the rug” might be related metaphorically or thematically to the story of Olánek, who once “right there in the main square,” on being asked how he was on his fiftieth birthday, “pulled out his member—he had ten beers in him at the time—and drenched the advertisement for Náchod Mills all the way to the accent over the a.”

For the sentence is not the only unit of style, this is the lesson of Hrabal's novel in one sentence. Instead, much stranger devices are possible, like Hrabal's blockages, and slippages: his digressions that are secretly progressions ...

What, after all, is the meaning of a novel in one sentence? What did it mean for Hrabal? As a symbol of absolute digression, it represents, I think, a desire for a total novel. In the 1950s, Hrabal's friend, the poet Egon Bondy, had invented the slogan “total realism” to describe their shared aesthetic ideal. The total! That was the desire of a novel in one sentence—a form that Hrabal had sensed in Joyce's finale to
Ulysses
(and in Apollinaire's unpunctuated collage poems), and later, when he was writing a trilogy of novels that pretended to be his wife's autobiography, he would find in Faulkner: “In recent years I've felt an affinity with Faulkner in sensing a need for such endless sentences. I'd hardly go any further than inserting commas and just the odd full-stop. With him I expect it was the same as what I feel myself, just breathing in and breathing out. I inhale images and then exhale them over a period.”
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On the other hand, this is also a form of derangement.

These narrators have a literary genealogy, sure, but they also possess a clinical past. They are all case studies in hysteria—like the patients described in the notes of Hrabal's beloved Freud:

In Freud and Breuer's “Preliminary Statement” to their
Studies in Hysteria
, a text dated to December 1892, in Vienna—in the center of the Austro-Hungarian system in whose ruins Hrabal was to live—they observed in italics how “
hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences
.”
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Hysteria, according to their research, was a poignant domestic example of the way history emerges as a suite of symptoms—effects whose causes are occluded. For after all, they write, although sometimes the connection between the traumatic cause and its consequent symptom is obvious, very often “the connection is not as simple; all that is present is what might be called a symbolic relation between the cause and the pathological phenomenon, a relation such as healthy people form in dreams.”
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Hysteria represents a simultaneous repetition of, and flight from, the past. And this is another way, I think, of describing the double movement of Hrabal's fictions—the way they both linger on and evade what they are trying to describe. The narrator of Hrabal's novel in one sentence, say, is constantly saddened by the disappearance of what another of Hrabal's palaverers calls the “beautiful and murdered things,”
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but he mentions them in passing, lightly, hidden away in a digression, like the moment when he talks about a brewery in Sopron, which makes him think of Budapest, which makes him also remember how “Admiral Horthy ordered the sailors led by MatouÅ¡Å¡ek to be executed, he had the poor men blind-folded.” And then the narrative continues: past the executions.

This is one form of hysteria: a deep need to resist the narratives of world history. But Hrabal's technique is so moving, finally, because the world historical past is only an element of our universal nostalgia. For “in the days of the monarchy shoemaking was more chemistry than craft,” laments our hero, “today it's all conveyor belts, I was a shoemaker, but I wore a pince-nez and carried a stick with a silver mounting because back then everyone wanted to look like a composer or a poet”: a nostalgia itself reminiscent of the moment when he laments the similar changes in the brewing industry: “in the good old breweries they made a log fire under a copper kettle and the flame traveled up through the copper and caramelized the beer—what a memory I have! a true joy.” And it is a joy, no question—for Hrabal's style is always a form of pleasure—but this joy is also melancholy, for the need to preserve the past is a form of hysteria, a proof of trauma.

While Hrabal—why not say it?—was a hysteric himself. And I remember the moment in the first volume of his fiction or memoir,
In-House Weddings
, narrated by his wife, where Hrabal—who is now a character, his own palaverer—becomes inspired on the subject of the lost, the rejected, the rubbish: remembering his years working in a steel factory, with its “mountains of obsolete tools and machines and junk”; and his years working as a salesman, selling “trinkets, toys, all that schlock, angel hair to sparklers, scrub brushes to eyelash curlers”; and his years working in a paper-pulping factory, among the tatters of old paper.
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These are the secondhand items which form the content of Hrabal's novels, which he infinitely tries to preserve from the tyranny of forgetting. Its form might be a flow, a zigzag, a hysterical series of switchbacks and hesitations: what is being preserved, however, is the private past, the endless human junk.

But this theme of junk, I think, reveals another, less elevated Central European ancestor in Hrabal's scribbled genealogy—the Prague novelist and hack journalist Jaroslav Hašek, the author of
The Good Soldier Å vejk and His Fortunes in the Great War
, first published in 1921. Å vejk is a Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, who presents himself to the Austro-Hungarian authorities as a manic patriot and conformist, but with a devotion so exaggerated that it seems a parody of patriotism. This Å vejk, the unfailing conformist, doubles as a dissident subversive whose enthusiasm reveals the absurdity of the decaying empire. And so this slapstick novel is also a modernist experiment in radical, reticent ambiguity.

But HaÅ¡Å¡ek's usefulness to Hrabal was not just as a model of radical irony; his novel was also a giant museum of linguistic junk. In 1907, when he was twenty-four, HaÅ¡ek wrote an article called “About Poets,” where he gently dismantled the clichés of poetry: “A peculiar type, these people, a peculiar literature and product. They lose their way in distant regions, wade through mud and call in vain for someone to rescue them.” And he concluded: “A favourite habit of these poets is that they are ‘constantly' waiting, where no one else has been waiting for ages, that they are gloomy in spirit, are always waiting ‘to lift something to the heavens,' to crucify souls which are breaking, to press flowers to their hearts, but never manage it.” HaÅ¡ek's constant subject was the petrifaction of language into kitsch. His novel is a montage of the kitsch styles produced by authority, ranging from a torn page from a women's novel, read by Å vejk on the toilet:

—to the journalese of a local newspaper:

A metaphysics of junk: this was the Central European lesson of HaÅ¡ek. “I probably fit in the category, or rather I've adopted the mantle, of Jaroslav HaÅ¡ek,” said Hrabal in 1984, “who may have written for the newspapers, but his irony was of such vast dimensions that I still can't see where it ends.”
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But this is where Hrabal's resistance to the impositions of history becomes inflected with a poignancy. For Hrabal's books were constantly entangled in the history they sought to evade—the shifts of political alignment. Behind the precision of his style there is always the politics of Prague. In 1959, a book of Hrabal's short stories was banned by the Communists who, following the outcry over Josef Škvorecký's great comic novel
The Cowards
, decided to take literature seriously. In 1975, his books were burned by anti-Communist dissidents—angry that he continued to publish with the permission of the state. Between these dates, an entire sequence of ideological reversals in the government of Czechoslovakia was encoded. But Hrabal himself never reversed: he simply stayed still, while the politics reversed around him. He was always (“as HaÅ¡ek taught me”) “a man of the Party of Moderate Progress, that is my modus vivendi in this Central Europe of mine, this literary laboratory from the first four decades of this century.”
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