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HOLT MEYER 63

To take a step further, it also seems not to occur to Jankovič to recognize the refer-

ence to Barthes in the very texts he is discussing as the signal which it is: a reference 

to the fact that the play with voice in text of the trilogy cannot only be described in 

Barthes’s terms, but also and above all that the text makes it clear that it is aware of 

this and wants to include this awareness in its field of signification. Jankovič is so 

dedicated to the structuralism of his teacher in Prague that he ignores the fact that the 

Prague author he is analyzing is openly drawing his inspiration from another (post- 

or para-)structuralism, that of Barthes in Paris. To put it another way: Jankovič ig-

nores the fact that another border which Hrabal’s text is ‘blurring’ is the one between 

literature and theory itself. Like many readers of Hrabal, Jankovič underestimates 

the sophistication of the texts he is treating.

This concerns the texts’ play with voice and authorship, as well as other aspects, 

e.g. with gender, space and the political, just to name three. It is no coincidence that 

these are all issues of post-structuralist theory, or at least theory after Mukařovský.

BARTHES THE DRIFTER POSITIONING THE MASK

Alles, was tief ist, liebt die Maske; die allertiefsten Dinge haben sogar einen Hass auf 

Bild und Gleichnis (Nietzsche 1999/IV, p. 57).

Barthes, in addressing the showing-of-mask, is calling the illusion of naturalism in 

the bourgeois novel of the 19

th

 century into question. More specifically, he takes up the 

use of the third person and of the conventional past tense or ‘preterite’ (passé sim-

ple), and in this context brings the figure of the mask into play Hrabal’s narrator (of 

Hrabal).

Barthe’s operation takes place in the form of a reference to the passage in Des-

cartes’ Préambules where one famously reads ‘I advance masked’. Barthes takes the 

thought a step further by stating that ‘what writing does in the novel’ is to ‘put the 

mask in place and at the same time point it out’ (Barthes 2012, p. 34). He specifies later 

in the same chapter: ‘The preterite and the third person in the Novel are nothing but 

the fateful gesture with which the writer draws attention to the mask which he is 

wearing’ (Barthes 2012, p. 40). Immediately following this is the sweeping statement 

in which Barthes explicitly quotes the Cartesian formulation in Latin: ‘The whole of 

Literature can declare Larvatus prodeo’ (Barthes 2012, p. 40).

Brown, at the end of the second chapter of his extended elaboration of the con-

cept of the ‘drift’ (la dérive) as the key feature of Barthes’s écriture (meaning both 

Barthes’s concept of écriture and Barthes’s own writing), notes that for Barthes ‘the 

subject of reading and writing can no longer be isolated in self-present authenticity’ 

and thus cannot ‘be located in the intention to mean’ (Brown 1992, p.109). Brown links 

this position with writing’s ‘point[ing] to its mask in silence’. This pointing, in turn, 

‘may take the form of a punctuational quirk, an unacknowledged citation, an allusion 

to science, or a lexical impurity’. Paradoxically, ‘itʼs sociability lies in its distance and 

otherness’ (ibid.).

The mask thus becomes a metaphor for various manifestations of ‘distance’ moti-

vated by the reluctance or refusal to participate in the illusion of naturalness forced 

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64 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

on speakers of language by the dominant ideology of the language’s culture. In Writ-

ing Degree Zero, the workings of this ideology are expressed by the collusion of Nature 

and History written with capital letters in formulations like ‘la langue est comme une 

Nature qui passe entièrement à travers la parole de l’écrivain’ and ‘Roman et His-

toire ont eu des rapports étroits dans la siècle même qui a vu leur plus grand essor’ 

(Barthes 1993, p. 145, 155). The issue is a kind of writing which does not directly op-

pose the ideology and does not fall into silence, but which continues on and ‘points 

to the mask’.

In connection with Hrabal it is of great significance that the ‘drift’, which Brown 

rightly works through as the key figure of thought and writing in Barthes’s work 

(later he adds in ‘scribbling’, an issue I will take up later), decenters the writing sub-

ject. It does so even at the same moment when the writer seems to be placing her/

himself into the foreground (i.e. in writing which in one way or another participates 

in the autobiographical mode). This Barthesian gesture of self-decentralizing at the 

moment of seeming self-foregrounding is something one recognizes immediately 

at even the most cursory look at the writing of Hrabal, particularly in the case at 

hand, when the writing seems to deflect its ‘male’ subjectivity to that of the narrating 

(grammatically female) spouse.

Hrabal’s Proluky / Gaps: Genre (as) Masking

Genres are not to be mixed.

I will not mix genres.

I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them (Derrida 1980, p. 55).

It is inevitable [fatal], both just and unjust, that the most ‘autobiographical’ books 

(those of the end, as I have heard said) begin at death to conceal all other books 

(Derrida 2001, p. 66).

The discussion of the novel in Writing Degree Zero

9

 is, of course, a direct negotiation of 

genre, of the interface between écriture and genre or of how écriture becomes genre 

and deals with (and resists) the baggage the genre brings with it.

I already mentioned the function of Hrabal’s text with respect to the positioning 

and self-positioning of genre. It is indeed important to underscore the fact that it is 

difficult or perhaps impossible to assign Hrabal’s text of the early 1980s to a particular 

genre

10

 (a feature which it shares with many of Barthes’s texts, which is no coinci-

dence, I would claim), and so I simply call it a ‘text’.

It is counterproductive, to say the least, to simply call Proluky / Gaps — or the 

entirety of the trilogy — an ‘autobiography’. Milan Jankovič speaks of an ‘autobi-

9

  Another philological issue which I can’t even begin to touch on here is the question of the 

Czech editions and the Czech reception of Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, the only signifi-

cant Barthes text translated into Czech in the 1960s — in 1967 Nulový stupeň rukopisu, most 

likely causing Hrabal to refer to Barthes’s ‘écriture’ as ‘rukopis’ (literally ‘manuscript’) on 

other occasions of referring to Writing Degree Zero and to Barthes in general, including to 

later texts such as the inaugural lecture. See Meyer 2014 and references there.

10

  On genre in Hrabal’s texts see Voisine-Jechova 2002.

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