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HOLT MEYER 81

For our purposes it is important to note that this second longer colloquy belonging to 

one voice also has the father-photographs at its core. The simultaneity of the voices 

of the readers questioning the work of the writer and the effects of the father-pho-

tographs seems to evoke the border between studium (contextualization, code) and 

punctum (the gesture of uniqueness of addressing and thus of the absence of code). 

The naked corporeality represented by the photographs is presented as seductive and 

at the same time unacceptable: Francin, the assumed father totally accepted, also 

with the ‘guilt’ he brings and associated with literature and film of the first republic 

(Herrmann, Frič) is chosen over this bodily father figure oddly connected to Austria 

by means of the uniform repeatedly stressed (either as his own observation or as an 

echo of the words of the father representative who points out this detail, this in turn 

determining whether it is to viewed as a reality or as a costume).

In the context of my argumentation it is important to note that all three mentions 

of the photo(graph)s utilize the word ‘podobenka’, while in the colloquy with the 

father-representative both voices use the word ‘fotografie’ (also three times — again 

a sign of careful composition). This fact alone makes it clear that it is essential to dif-

ferentiate between voices, and that the claim that all the voices are integrated into one 

is extremely problematical. The word ‘podobenka’ underscores — at least etymologi-

cally — the similarity of the image with its object, while, in contrast to ‘podobizna’, it 

can today only designate a photograph.

28

 If the usage were not so clearly complemen-

tarily distributed, the use of ‘podobenka’ would not be conspicuous. Given the clear 

distribution, it seems justified to bring the issue of similarity into the discussion — of 

similarity as a bodily feature but also as a poetic or poetological quality (the embed-

ded narrator thinks the word ‘podobenka’ while listening to questions about his word 

asked by his reading public, and this in some way answers with this word).

Given the fact that the passage ends with a reference to the mask, it is plausible 

to consider this to be the paraphrase of one of Nietzsche’s most well known formula-

tions concerning the mask: ‘Alles, was tief ist, liebt die Maske; die allertiefsten Dinge 

haben sogar einen Hass auf Bild und Gleichniss’ (Nietzsche 1999/IV, p. 57). Here, it 

is — as in the case of ‘podobenka’ — important to underscore the basic meaning of 

similarity contained in the word ‘Gleichnis[s]’.

In this context, the narrative transition from the call of the embedded narrator 

into the public hall to this colloquy, which in turn negotiates various cultural, familial 

and ethical identities, is an ingeniously structured focus on the multiple embedding 

of the subject at hand. The border marked by the transition complex, indicative and 

central. On the one hand there is the insistence of the state of being (always) already 

embedded in whatever place its contingent administrative policies assign to those 

subject to its absolute power. On the other hand is the inner negotiation between 

the bodily lineage (from Austria) and the personally chosen lineage (from the first 

Czechoslovak republic). The first is marked by the poke, the punctum of the father 

28

  The word ‘podobenka’ designated in the 19

th

 century the larva of an insect. It is used two 

other times in Proluky, both in the meaning of ‘photograph’: ‘kde leželo plyšové album 

s podobenkami všech předků mého muže’ ‘tetka položila koláčky a talíř s masem a sa-

látem na desku, chvíli tady setrvala, dívala se na podobenku na náhrobním kameni, tam 

byla fotografie mladíka, pak vyleštila přepečlivě celou hrobku’.

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82 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

materially visualized in the photographs, while the second is subject to cultural con-

textualization, including literature and film in circulation in the historically bourgeois 

sphere.

This is what prepares the tenth transition, the one to the Barthes complex. Cru-

cially, the first step is the embedded narrator’s commenting on his own previous nar-

rations vis-à-vis the hegemonic female voice, which is voice transition 10:

a tak, jak už jsem ti říkal, [and like I already told you] (Hrabal 1995a, p. 480, Hrabal 

2011, p. 57).

The self-reference to his own Barthes reference in the past presents a further element 

of the embedded narrator’s cultural self-historization and systematic self-position-

ing. The reference to the Barthes formulation is revealed to be a repetition, perhaps 

even a regularly repeated phrase in the communication between the embedded nar-

rator and the main narrator. It is marked as a known, or perhaps even a standard 

perception in the background of all passages of the border between the two voices. 

There follows to move to a voicing with the same authorship but in another mode: the 

first person embedded narrator, after referring to his ‘having said’ the formulation 

of Barthes, makes Barthes not as much into a philological or philosophical authority, 

but much more into a figure in the fiction by giving him the name ‘Mr. Barthes’ (like 

‘Mr. Marysko’). Thus the function of transition 11:

jak říká pan Barthes, [like Mr. Barthes says,] (ibid.).

The same verb říkat (in the imperfective mood, designating an act in progress and in 

the present also possible a repeated act) is used for both, but the embedded narrator 

refers to himself in the past, while ‘Mr. Barthes’ speaks in the present. This puts him 

on the same modal level as the father-representative at the beginning of the passage, 

thus creating an equivalence which informs the twelfth transition: to the Barthes 

paraphrase itself:

kráčím sice vpřed, ale prstem ukazuju na svou masku, [Although I forge ahead, I point 

to this mask of mine] (ibid.).

The thirteenth and last voice transition is a transition hidden to those who aren’t fa-

miliar with the Barthes quote, for it brings elements into the discussion which are 

absent in Barthes without marking them as such:

kterou jsem si nasadil jako herec, který si usmyslil, že bude dělat kašpara, šaška 

[which I wear like an actor who has decided to play the clown, the fool] (ibid.).

By smuggling the clown and the fool into the making words supposedly belonging in 

their entirety to Barthes, the text performs a remarkable double gesture of voicing: 

the element is imported, and this importing itself marks itself as the act of a clown 

who juggles with the Barthes text in a manner which contaminates it, but in naming 

the clowning, cancels the clown-like activity as primary work with the text. In this 

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