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1929. Rok (nejen) Lazebníka: Poetika, sen, polemika

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Málek P.

Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense

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2019

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tom 16

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nr 32

32-108

EN

Drawing its methodological inspiration from A History of New Modernism. Czech Literature, 1905–1923 (2010), this study aims to present the development of Czech literature over the course of a single year: 1929. The objective, however, is not to portray the literary events and literary production of this year in the manner of a chronicle, nor in their entirety, but to capture certain ‘nodal’ characteristics of the imagination and literary language. There is one event that allows the author to take this approach — i.e. to identify themes, images and figures that are typical of the artistic discourse of the period —, namely the publication of Richard Weiner’s The Barber-Surgeon. The themes, motives, and figures found in this text (dream and dream writing, language, failure, literary polemics) constitute a point of departure for grasping the dominant features of a literary period which is otherwise rather amorphous. By virtue of Weiner’s poetics, a thread of sense begins to emerge, and eventually the ‘story’ or ‘drama’ of 1929, out of the re-constructed configurations and correlations of several different literary texts. Through its ‘otherness’, Weiner’s ‘dream poetics’ separated itself from the universalizing aesthetic concept of its time, thus falling ‘out of the picture’ from the perspective of literary history. By contrast, the author considers it as the central feature of a network of relations among a number of texts published in 1929: the short story AM from Jakub Deml’s collection My Purgatory; the poem The New Icarus by Konstantin Biebl; Karel Čapek’s Tales from Two Pockets; Jaroslav Durych’s essay on Poetics; and Vladislav Vančura’s novel The Last Judgement. The themes and figures under consideration here — poetics, dreams, dream writing and literary polemics — are all related to the writer’s self-consciousness in the creative process and the attention paid by the writer to material elements of the work. This manifests itself as an interest in the question of poetics and in a vivid ‘linguistic awareness’, which is also manifested in the widespread interest in questions of language and the culture of language that Czech linguists, especially those associated with the Prague Linguistic Circle, studied in accordance with — and in dialogue with — contemporary trends in modern art.

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Jak číst Vančuru? K proměnám obrazu autora ve světle (i stínech) jeho recepce (1923–1945)

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Málek P.

Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense

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2024

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tom 21

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nr 44

76-137

EN

This study aims to better understand the authorial figure of Vladislav Vančura by reconstructing the critical and literary-historical image conveyed to us by the reception of the writer during his lifetime, starting with the writer’s first short story collections and finishing with his Obrazy z dějin národa českého (‘Images from the history of the Czech nation’). Loosely following on the theoretical bases of previous discussions, which in various ways conceptualize the effect of the ‘name of the author’ in relation to his work (Foucault, Bourdieu, Russian formalism, Mukařovský), this study examines Vančura’s literary output through the lens of its author (as a constructed figure and category), especially in terms of the author function as it serves to form this output into a unified whole. It deals with changes in the name of the author mainly in relation to Vančura’s reception. During the interwar period the critical reception captured the creative phenomenon of the writer in the course of his development, at a moment when his extreme style and language caused numerous controversies which grew into open polemics. While these revolved primarily around the issue of aesthetics (in the case of Pole orná a válečná and Poslední soud), they involved broader worldview and ideological issues (as with the novel Tři řeky). Vančura’s persistent search for a narrative form repeatedly compelled critics and interpreters of his time to reassess the criteria and critical standards for literature. This study traces the transformations of the author’s image in this context all through his life as it assumed countless ‘faces’, subverting the traditional assumption of coherence in Vančura’s literary output that the concept of the author was meant to guarantee, and thus demonstrating — given the failure of this concept to bring about such coherence — how it is necessary to look instead for those places of incoherence, contradiction, and disparity. To this end, the study does not seek to cover the history of Vančura’s reception in all its facets but to trace those significant moments when the image of the author and his work was transformed, challenging unequivocal interpretations and defying the interpretative stereotypes and schemes into which it has so often been confined.

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„Obležení ucha“: válka a proměny smyslového vnímání v literatuře moderny. Weinerovo Ztřeštěné ticho

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Málek P.

Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense

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2015

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tom 12

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nr 23

13-35

EN

The paper focuses on R. Weiner’s 1916 short story collection Lítice / Furies which captures his direct experience from the Serbian front. I present a reading of the story Crazy Silence from the broader perspective of war and the associated issues of perception and representation, language and imagination, pursued from the viewpoint of “the way of internalization”, i.e. the processes of metaphorical and allegorical transmutation of the war events, as well as from the viewpoint of the history and economy of sense-perception, as Weiner’s prose reflects the changes incurred by the impact of the military apparatus. The title of the story, Crazy Silence, denotes the central image of the text, linked with the key role of the auditory experience of soldiers in the field, confronted with a yet unknown “siege of hearing”, understood already at the time as an unmistakable perceptual characteristics of World War One. This war-time “mobilization of hearing”, as reflected in literature, is then situated within the broader context of transformations of sense-perception accompanying the processes of modernization, accompanied by the experience of “great noise” (F. Kafka). Our reading of Weiner’s text turns our attention to the question of the literary representation of this “siege of hearing”: how can one communicate the perceptions and attacks that fell on the ear during the war? Whereas, for instance, the Italian Futurists stopped at a direct imitation of the noises of the battlefield by means of onomatopoia, other authors pursued the path of metaphorical and allegorical capturing. The auditory perceptual experience in R. Musil’s The Blackbird and Weiner’s Crazy Silence launches the process of allegorization which creates a metaphorical image of the war, captured in the tension and the disturbing synthesis of the dispersed noise of killing technology and an epiphanic experience.

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Dvě lekce studia literatury aneb o pomalosti

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Málek P.

Slovo a smysl - Word & Sense

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2018

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tom 15

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nr 29

13-56

EN

Drawing on the considerations of Karlheinz Stierle, who claims that one of the key tasks in thinking about literature is to oppose the technical totality of modernity and its repressive mechanisms with the substantiality of the slow and the already past, this study aims — in the reading of Franz Kafka, for example, by German thinker, literary theorist and critic Walter Benjamin, and that of Karel Čapek by Czech literary historian and critic Jiří Opelík — to present a form of thinking about literature and its studies that would belong in some ways to the ‘slow reading culture’. At a time when the predominant view of the status of the discipline has grown skeptical, when one has come to doubt the meaning of literature, it is useful to return to the sources and principal questions that comprise our basic attitude towards literature and its study. The question of the current state of thought about literature is reflected here by the prism of slowness and the culture of slow reading, together with a study of literature that opens our way to something we might have otherwise abandoned in the ‘rhythm of constantly renewed acceleration’. The first part of the study, dedicated to Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, focuses on several motifs, grouped around the idea of study and the idea of the image. He develops his interpretation of Kafka’s short stories, The New Advocate, and his reading of the photographic portrait of little Kafka, by reflecting on Benjamin’s tendency to introduce the subject in a circular manner, and through a method of interpretation that gradually approaches, interrupts and postpones, the methodological equivalent to slow reading, revolves around the conviction that the center of the thinking about literature is the understanding of literary works, his open movement, which can never reach a culminating understanding. The second part of the study, devoted to Opelík’s reading of Karel Čapek, deals with the philological footprint and philological impulse in the literary-historical works of Jiří Opelík: at the epicenter of literary research he inserts the poetic word, which like the history of his stratification is also a model of the historicity of understanding and the experience of time slowing down. Slowness, in the context of Opelík’s Čapek, receives numerous synonyms, some immediately implied (continuity and stability), others emerging from his Čapek reading spontaneously (service), and still others seeming to suggest themselves: loyalty. Loyalty to the author, a service rendered not only to him but also to the readers, to ongoing research, to the constancy of the contemporary reader’s interest. Opelíkʼs methods remain an element of confidentiality in relation to the studied work, which is both first and last instance of understanding, confidentiality based on the slow experience of reading.