Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age Read online

  5

  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:

  Freud’s clients were all disturbed, but how they expressed themselves was almost poetic. And the Surrealists’ predilection for the deranged was as great as my own. That includes my uncle, his way of telling stories and really his whole life; through all his shouting and story-telling he was really treating himself. In other words, the stories he told us at home, the yarns he spun to girls in the pubs, it was all a kind of therapy, as if he was one of Herr Freud’s patients.[14]

  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.”[15] 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.”[16]

  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,”[17] 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 Matouššek 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.[18] 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 Švejk and His Fortunes in the Great War, first published in 1921. Švejk 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 Švejk, 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 Haššek’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, Hašek 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.” Hašek’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 Švejk on the toilet:

  ... ormer pension, unfortunately ladies

  ncertain age, but really more old tha

  ng the majority very self-contained los

  in bringing men to their chambers, or in indul

  in peculiar entertainments. And if they scat

  ome found nought but sorrow for one’s honou

  e improved, or did not wish to wor

  o successfully, as they themselves might have wi

  was nothing for young Křiček.

  —to the journalese of a local newspaper:

  We might well have been back in the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans, when Mucius Scaevola had himself led off to battle, regardless of his burnt arm. The most sacred feelings and sympathies were nobly demonstrated yesterday by a cripple on crutches who was pushed in an invalid chair by his aged mother.

  A metaphysics of junk: this was the Central European lesson of Hašek. “I probably fit in the category, or rather I’ve adopted the mantle, of Jaroslav Hašek,” 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.”[19]

  6

  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 Hašek 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.”[20]

  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 “unend
eavouring 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.

  7

  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:

  Imagine that opposite the Law Faculty there used to be a bookshop—it disappeared during the bombing of Prague—and I bought five volumes there. They were Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, black-bound, with hand-notes and underlinings, and new words jotted in the margins. I could tell from the handwriting that they came from the library of Ladislav Klíma.[26]

  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:

  It is necessary to love—to love everything; even that which is most revolting. Love is the cruellest, most difficult thing of all. Herein, however, lies the Mystery: that which is most revolting is more likely to melt into love than that which is only half revolting—[29]

  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:

  Not only may one imagine that what is higher derives always and only from what is lower; one may imagine that—given the polarity and, more important, the ludicrousness of the world—everything derives from its opposite: day from night, frailty from strength, deformity from beauty, fortune from misfortune. Victory is made up exclusively of beatings.

  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]

  8

  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 t
he 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.

  9

  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