Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (3 page)

His style, in other words, represents an absolute refusal of ideology. He refused to sign Charter 77, organized in 1977 by the dissident movement, just as he refused to sign the anti-Charter, organized by the Communist regime. For Hrabal's vision of history and politics was of universal mistakes. And so the temptation of ideology was beyond him. Instead, he celebrated an art of “unendeavouring endeavour,”
[21]
of palaverers, like Uncle Pepin, these narrators who are in a state of almost mystical beatitude, in the pubs, and the steel factories:

“Those no longer affected by birth, or death, or torment, and who are actually unfathomably happy in this world.”
[22]

For no one is innocent—so goes the evidence of Hrabal's fictions. And I remember the observations of two dissident philosophers: one who left the Communist aquarium, and one who stayed. In his great history of Marxism, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski observed that during the Stalinist terror in the Ukraine, no one was without guilt. Collaboration was total: “the whole party became an organization of torturers and oppressors: no one was innocent, and all Communists were accomplices in the coercion of society.” And so, writes Kołakowski, with infinite irony, “the party acquired a new species of moral unity.”
[23]
And I also remember how the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, a founder of Charter 77, would contrast the order of the just to the order of the day—this, argued Patočka, was true resistance: to refuse the terms of politics entirely, in the minute everyday.

This was the ethical basis of Hrabal's escape from the political, which he invented in the 1960s: a position of absolute irony, in the form of his deranged palaverers.

Because it is a philosophy, after all, this Hrabalian inversion: to refuse to sign political petitions, for instance, but to devote yourself to animals—like Hrabal's beloved cats. True, Hrabal's irony also has its comic tradition, a kind of folk Hollywood slapstick, which Hrabal called “Prague irony.”
[24]
But it still has a philosophy—even if Hrabal's version of philosophy is only visible through the messy junk digressions of his narrators. But then, Hrabal's idea of philosophy was Schopenhauer's: “A philosophy where you do not hear between the pages the tears, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the fearful tumult of mutual murder, is no philosophy.”
[25]
Hrabal would later recall how he discovered Schopenhauer:

Of all of Hrabal's tall stories, his wishful inventions of reality, this is one of the most symbolic. Schopenhauer offered Hrabal a way of formulating the world in which the will created the world, and the will was governed by the flippancies and craziness of desire. The universal was a function of the self's privacy. But the true beauty of Hrabal's legend is in the conjunction with the Czech writer Ladislav Klíma. For Klíma, who loved Schopenhauer, was also Schopenhauer's most willfull interpreter. Where Schopenhauer had written
The World as Will and Idea
, Klíma wrote
The World as Consciousness and Nothing
. There was a playfulness to this philosopher, Hrabal's philosopher: Ladislav Klíma. He wrote his essays lying on the floor, living in a series of cheap hotel rooms. He delighted in examining the resultant paradoxes of Schopenhauer's more stately meditations. “The world,” wrote Klíma, “is the absolute plaything of my absolute will.” (Another of Klíma's admirers was the notorious dissident rock group The Plastic People of the Universe, who in 1980 put out a mini album called
Ladislav Klíma
, which included the track “Jsem absolutni vůle”—“I am absolute will.”) And so, Klíma explained, in a text called “My Autobiography”: “I am nothing other than the steady (often, quite often, in my dreams as well) cracking of the whip of my Absolute Will, commanding absolutely and awash in Itself until the end of time, and the frantic ‘irrational,' but always more or less obedient whirl of thoughts and mental states.”
[27]
If the world was a creation of the human will, then man is a kind of god, freed through his will and desire from the system of external conditions. And so with his idea of “egodeism,” Klíma asserted that all the ordinary categories could be upended.

Klíma, in other words, resembles Hrabal's hopeful if thwarted narrators: “I would like to prove, on the basis of my own life,” writes Klíma at the end of his short autobiography, “that there is a ‘transcendent deliberateness in All That Happens' (Schopen.)—no less conclusively than any dissertation.”
[28]
But his deep lesson was a paradox, the transformation of apparent opposites, and the deepest of these paradoxes was desire:

This is the kind of paradox that should probably be called Hrabalian, and its pure structure is demonstrated in a paragraph by Klíma that Hrabal used as the epigraph to this novella of lightness:

With this philosophy of paradox, his upside-down theory of a Central European aesthetic, Klíma tried to save the phenomena from the encroachments of ideology. And so I think that this philosophy should also be compared to the great lectures in the 1930s in Vienna and Prague of Edmund Husserl on the crisis of European humanity, where Husserl lamented the forgetting of the concrete, of ordinary life, in philosophy's description of the world—lectures with which Milan Kundera, who had left Prague in 1975, would begin his essay “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes” at the start of
The Art of the Novel
, an essay in which he would assert that, with the novel's paradoxes of the concrete everyday, beginning with Cervantes, “a great European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being.”
[30]

Hrabal's narrators are their own fugitive pursuers. Near the end of his life Hrabal would say “you can see that even my writing is a constant pursuit of my final definition of my own self, an enquiry after whether I have ever been an identity, like the two matching halves of the Koh-i-Noor ‘Waldes' patent press-stud.”
[31]
Koh-i-Noor was a Czech manufacturer of stationery and haberdashery. Its logo was a winking press-stud face. And with this everyday metaphor from the world of junk, Hrabal defines the radical ambiguity of his writing.

He once said that what he valued, as a reader, was the inaccessible: the text he reread most often, he added, was the Tao. And this might seem strange, it might seem difficult to reconcile with the novelist of billiard tables and pissing poets, except that Hrabal's writing, as much as Lao-tzu's, dissolves into absolute uncertainty. For Hrabal was not sure of the logic of integrity. The only true integrity was to be a zero: to disappear. In the 1960s, in the era of totalitarian decomposition, this position allowed Hrabal to undertake his most exuberant experiments in the art of the novel. In the 1970s and '80s, in the full sclerosis of Soviet Communism, his experiments became rarer and sadder. In the early '70s, around the time he wrote but did not publish his great novel of shame,
I Served the King of England
, Hrabal composed a “Letter to a Friend,” where he described his reduction to nothing. “Now I live in a null situation; my credo is NULL; it pleases me that the Greek ZERO designates not only zero, but also a pure vision ... I am in a state of the threshold of inspiration.” At that time, he felt threatened by another kind of nothing, an absolute self-disgust—observing a “fate that was lurking in wait for me, the fate of one who betrays and informs on his pals, on people with whom he sits in pubs.” For Hrabal was trapped. “It's hard publishing books in this country, even back then I started fearing my own texts and I still fear them to this day.” But Hrabal's irreproachable self-examination is an effect of a deeper knowledge: “I, as I discover and am afraid to say in essence, am rather a man of no character.” And its form is the joyful flight of the great palaverer who years earlier narrated
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age,
roaming around his past, and the past of everyone else, as a series of nonidentical sequences: an infinite zigzag of particulars.

In the twentieth century, as Hrabal described it, Central Europe was a “literary laboratory.” But the moral paradoxes examined in this laboratory are not only Central European, or of the twentieth century. No, the questions are global, and permanent. And so Hrabal's fictions, with their intent sad joyfulness, their reworking of the usual art of the novel, are portable. His narrators are haunting, and this haunting, I think, is because the avant-garde veering and careering of the technique is so sadly and comically embedded in a true and lovable character, so that the reader is caught between a clinical detachment and an anguished empathy. Because there is no real need to know, as Hrabal tells his wife in
In-House Weddings
, without mentioning
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
: “I was a champion at polka and waltz, I won a prize in the mature/advanced category, you know, I completed two levels of dance, wanted to be the number one of the dance.”
[32]
No, there is really no need to know the depth of Hrabal's self-exposure in his narrators, how far he identified with these painfully vulnerable fantasists. And so I write this and wonder if something analogous, from the modern world of Los Angeles, would be the sadness that leaks from Thomas Pynchon's paranoid fantasists, trapped in their noirish plots and counterplots; or the melancholy films of David Lynch, where the fragmentation of the narrative is countered by the helpless tenderness of his characters.

Yes, Hrabal's fiction is portable: his irony is a necessary instrument. For after all, the truth about man is by nature ironical, wrote Thomas Mann in his essay on Chekhov. And he was right: this irony is universal. Not even death is preserved from the history of mistakes. Maxim Gorky was at Chekhov's funeral, and he described how the coffin

Which reminds me of a story, told by Hrabal's friend, the literary critic Radko Pytlík, of Hrabal's funeral. The organizers of his funeral wanted the old waltz song “Fascination” played. The Gypsy band hired for the occasion assured everyone that they knew it. But this was, it turned out, only wishful. They were Hrabalian, after all, this Gypsy band. Instead of “Fascination,” they played a melancholy folk song called “Gypsy Tears.”

—ADAM THIRLWELL

1.
Quoted by Radko Pytlík in
The Sad King of Czech Literature
(Prague: Emporius, 2000), 8.

2.
Ibid., 44.

3.
Bohumil Hrabal,
Total Fears
, translated by James Naughton (Prague: Twisted Spoon, 1998), 40.

4.
Milan Kundera,
Encounter
, translated by Linda Asher (New York: Harper, 2010), 121.

5.
Pytlík, 44.

6.
Quoted by Bohuslav Mánek in “The Czech and Slovak Reception of James Joyce,” in
The Reception of James Joyce in Europe
, volume I, edited by Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo (London: Continuum, 2004), 187–97 and 192.

7.
Bohumil Hrabal,
Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp
(Prague: Charles University, 2008), 113.

8.
James Joyce,
Joyce's
Ulysses
Notesheets in the British Museum
, edited by Phillip F. Herring (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 503.

9.
Hrabal,
Pirouettes
, 58.

10.
Bohumil Hrabal,
A bâtons rompus avec Bohumil Hrabal
, interviews with Christian Salmon (Paris: Criterion, 1991), 33; translated from the French here by Adam Thirlwell.

11.
Václav Havel,
Bohumil Hrabal
, translated by Claudia Ancelot (Paris: José Corti, 1991), 22–23; translated from the French here by Adam Thirlwell.

12.
Bohumil Hrabal,
Vita Nuova
, translated by Tony Liman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 1.

13.
Hrabal,
Pirouettes
, 114.

14.
Ibid., 47–48.

15.
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer,
Studies in Hysteria
, translated by Nicola Luckhurst (London: Penguin, 2004), II.

16.
Ibid., 9.

17.
Bohumil Hrabal,
In-House Weddings
, translated by Tony Liman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 63.

18.
Ibid., 92.

19.
Hrabal,
Pirouettes
, 26.

20.
Hrabal,
Total Fears
, 39.