HOLT MEYER 69
speak. Hrabal’s text emerges as a viewing of the shambles created by over 30 years
of official Czechoslovak Marxist statehood, while Barthes’s book Writing Degree Zero
is comprised of texts written at the moment when this peoples’ republican statehood
is just being established. This is not just a chronological coincidence. Barthes’s diag-
nosis of ‘triumphant Stalinism’ (p. 23) as a position within which there is ‘no more
lapse of time between naming and judging’, as a set of practices ‘presenting reality
in a prejudged form’, using ‘tautology’ and operating on a ‘penological’ (all on p. 24)
basis, is very precisely a prognosis of the production of the category of ‘writer in
liquidation’ which Hrabal’s text retraces from the beginning of normalization in
1968–1969.
The central event in the middle of all of this normalizing is nothing other than
a birthday party (based no doubt to Hrabal’s 55
th
in March of 1969), this in turn be-
ing the very location in which the name ‘Hrabal’ is connected to the
profession of the
‘scribbler’ (‘škrabal’). The biological birth celebrated in March of 1969 can be seen as
an echo of the appearance and disappearance of the biological father which sets the
stage for the Barthes reference.
HRABAL-ŠKRABAL, AND SCRIBBLER BARTHESE:
THE UNCHARTED TERRITORY OF BARTHES AND/IN HRABAL
Nikdy mi ani ve snu nenapadlo, že bych si přál anebo chtěl změnit politické události, ve
kterých jsem žil. [It never occurred to me, not even in
my dreams that I should wish
or want to change the political events in which I lived] (Hrabal 1995b, p. 221;
first sentence of Kdo jsem / Who I am, trans. H. M.).
18
‘Changer la langue’, mot mallarméen, est concomitant de ‘changer le monde’, mot
marxien. il y a une écoute politique de Mallarmé, de ceux qui l’ont suivi et le suivent
encore (Barthes 1980, p. 34).
There are no Hrabal texts of the early 80s which are more important than Kdo jsem /
Who I am and
Proluky /
Gaps, and both of these texts, particularly the former, hinge
on readings of Barthes. Despite this, as I already mentioned, the role of the thinking
of Roland Barthes for Bohumil Hrabal’s has not been subject of any extended serious
scholarship, neither on this period nor on any other.
19
I would claim that this is an issue which is of key importance for the study of Hra-
bal at least in this last decade of ‘state socialism’ in Czechoslovakia — as well as for
the study of the culture of decaying ‘state socialism’ itself — and is at the same time
an illuminating case of transferred and transferring reading. In addition, it opens
18
There is no English translation of this text despite its centrality for the comprehension of
Hrabal in this period and also beyond this period.
19
Since it was not the main concern of the article, I had not come upon Annette Lavers’ in-
sight that precisely ‘distance’ is at the core of Barthes’s concerns in
Writing Degree Zero,
which is obviously of supreme relevance for a contribution to a volume covering the very
issue of ‘Distanz’.
70 SLOVO A SMYSL 24
up a discussion of the negotiation of Barthes in fictional and quasi-fictional writ-
ings, as well as in other media (including the already mentioned film Birdman). This
negotiation can be read as an extension of Barthes’s own work on and at the interface
between theory, fiction and autobiography.
We are dealing with texts which are central and canonical in the French 1940s
and 1950s and the Czech 1970s and 1980s (as well as the French 1970s, if one includes
the reading of Barthes’s inaugural lecture in Kdo jsem / Who I am or Derrida’s afore-
mentioned link of Writing Degree Zero with Camera Lucida). One can thus broaden
the perspective even further and speak of a significant chapter of Czech-French
literary relations of the 20
th
century, perhaps even the most significant of the late
20
th
century.
Hrabal’s concern with the status of his own writing and at the same time with the
possibility of the autobiographical in his specific discursive situation of ‘liquidation’
in the normalization after 1968 so uncannily echoes the concerns in the same field on
the part of Barthes that it seems impossible to ignore it. One needs only look at the
figures of thought at the core Andrew Brown’s (1992) influential study of Barthes
which has not lost its relevance despite its emergence almost a quarter century ago.
Brown’s main terms of ‘figures of writing’ which he works though in Barthes’s texts
are as follows: ‘drifting’, ‘framing’, ‘naming’ and ‘scribbling’. All of these issues and
techniques and not only generally important for a Barthes-Hrabal comparison, but
are very specifically applicable to the writing configuration analyzed here, a con-
figuration which can be summed up in the ‘standard’ held up at the birthday party in
March of 1969 which is described in the last part of Proluky / Gaps: ‘Ať žije Bohumil
Hrabal, slavný český škrabal’. This phrase is translated in the official English version
as ‘Long Live Bohumil Hrabal, Famous Czech Scribe’ (Hrabal 2011, pp. 122–124), but is
clearly better translated as ‘Long Live Bohumil Hrabal, Famous Czech Scribbler’ or
‘Famous Czech Scribe and Scribbler’.
Andrew Brown’s general definition of the concept of ‘the scribbler’ is directly
applicable in this context applicability: ‘fascination for writing itself — writing, as
it were, rather than what writing says’ (Brown 1992, p. 8). When he goes more into
depth, Brown describes a ‘writing down’ rather than just ‘writing’ which reminds
one of the Hrabal’s describing himself as a ‘zapisovatel’ (roughly: someone who takes
notes) rather than ‘spisovatel’ (writer).
20
He shows us Barthes concerned with ‘show-
ing’, with reproducing the gesture and the forms of the object being put into writing,
particularly if this object is one already culturally gestured and formed.
READING THE BARTHES PASSAGE IN PROLUKY / GAPS
[…] nalil vodky a nastavil ji proti mému muži. Pane Hrabal, jsem váš žák, ukázal jste
mi cestu, jsem četbou vašich knížek opět člověk, nikoho už se nebojím, připijte mi!
A můj muž se začal dávit [
and then he poured my husband a shot and put it in front
of him. Mr. Hrabal, I am your student, you showed me the way, reading your books
20
See various texts in the 18
th
volume of Sebrané spisy Bohumila Hrabala with the title Ze zá-
pisníku zapisovatele (Hrabal 1996).