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HOLT MEYER 65

ografická trilogie’,

11

 which is somewhat ambiguous, since it could be translated as 

‘trilogy consisting of autobiography/autobiographies’ but also as a ‘trilogy in the au-

tobiographical mode’. A number of other analysts, critics and publishers also apply 

the term autobiographical directly and unambiguously to one or more of the three 

books.

12

 The problem with this designation is not that the texts bear no relation to 

the autobiographical, but in a sense the opposite: they indeed actively negotiate their 

own genre in its relation to the autobiographical and for that reason are precisely not 

simply autobiographies. The direct designation of them as ‘autobiographies’ or of the 

entirely as an ‘autobiographical trilogy’ (in the first sense) blocks all roads towards 

a meaningful comprehension of this (self-)negotiation.

Derrida’s Barthes eulogy The Deaths of Roland Barthes (Derrida 2001) works through 

many of the points mentioned here, especially that of genre, and can in a sense be set 

parallel to Hrabal’s Barthes-work of the early 1980s, particularly considering the fact 

that Kdo jsem / Who I am can also be read as an indirect Barthes-eulogy (it names the 

date of Roland Barthes’s death as the finishing touch on an chapter about numbers).

Derrida shows Barthes negotiating his own genre work, quoting Barthes’s self-

observation in Camera lucida on being ‘torn between two languages, one expressive, 

one critical’ (quoted in Derrida 2001, p. 52). Derrida comments that ‘as early as Writing 

Degree Zero, all this passes through the Novel and “The Novel is a Death” — the beyond 

of literature as literature, […] literature producing itself and producing its essence as 

its own disappearance’ (Derrida 2001, p. 53). Derrida shows Barthes to be implicating 

and questioning his own, i.e. Barthes’s own genre orientation in this negotiation of 

genre (and of expressive media in general, including photography), ostensibly play-

ing the role of a critic, and at the same time being ever more strongly attracted by the 

‘expressive’. A similar self-reflective genre work can be found in Hrabal’s writing, 

which — above all in Kdo jsem / Who I Am — gives us a certain amount of evidence for 

the fact that the self-reflective genre work in Hrabal’s writing is itself a reading of 

Barthes’s self-reflection on/of genre.

Be that as it may, the title of the text Proluky / Gaps itself can, among other things, 

be read as a reference to the gaps between genres which the text occupies, particu-

larly considering the fact that the word proluka often refers to gaps between houses 

and the fact that whole trilogy can be read as the autobiography of a house (the plot 

of the trilogy begins with the entrance of the hegemonic female narrator into the 

11

  The chapter on this subject in Jankovič’s book is called Psaní proudem — autobiografická tril-

ogie (Jankovič 1996, p. 114)

12

  For instance, the back cover of the English translations of each of the books of the trilogy, 

including the 2011 edition of Gaps, sports the designation ‘autobiographical trilogy’. At the 

same time, Gaps is designated on the front cover as ‘A Novel’, as is Vita nuova (Hrabal 2010), 

something which is not the case for the 2007 English language edition of In-House Wed-

dings by the same translator in the same series at the same publishing house. The only ref-

erence of this kind is in the copyright notice, referring to the ‘trilogy’ but not to the genre 

of the texts of which the ‘trilogy’ is comprised: ‘In-House Weddings is the first volume in 

a trilogy that includes Vita Nuova and Vacant Lots’. Note the diverging translation of the ti-

tle of what then, four years later, became Gaps. The German translation also uses the term 

‘novel’ (Roman) on the title page (Hrabal 1999).

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66 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

communal and conjugal apartment on 24 Na Hrázi street in Prague and ends with her 

vacating, the emptying of this space). The idea that the text Proluky / Gaps — like the 

whole trilogy containing it — is concerned with a house and thus with ‘gap sites’ or 

‘empty sites’ on a city street, seems uncontroversial to me. In this context, the house 

would serve as a metaphor for genre, e.g. as something which frames and contains 

the emission of words. In a sense, the text as a metonymically designated architec-

tural structure is a more or less hospitable home, a space which willingly receives 

guests, be they voices, (inter)texts and/or genres.

At the same time, the text not only occupies the empty space of genre (to me more 

exact: empties the space of genre), but also masks its own genre activity by provoking 

readers to treat it as a simple ‘autobiography’, which it is not. Many readers, editors 

and critics seem to have fallen into this rather obvious and equally tempting trap. 

This trap can be treated as part of the text’s strategy. The complexity of genre is not 

just a technical aspect of the text, but is an essential object of the text’s discourse and 

is a significant factor in the text’s transfers. I hope to have made that clear in my re-

marks on the work with genre and/of the novel in Barthes Writing Degree Zero.

At least two clear signals in the Hrabal text are of importance for my claim that the 

negotiation of genre is a pivotal programmatic issue for the text:

1. The fact that the first two texts of the trilogy do contain genre designations, al-

beit unorthodox ones (‘dívčí románek’ [girl’s novelette] in the case of Svatby v domě and 

‘kartínky’ [Russian word for pictures] in the case of Vita nuova), shows that the texts 

explicitly position themselves with respect to their own genre, and that the absence 

of such a designation in Proluky can be viewed as a sort of minus technique, i.e. as a call 

to reflection about the genre the text might belong to.

2. The reference to Roland Barthes in the third text of the trilogy, which, as I said, 

has no genre designation as a whole, addresses a fundamental critique of the realis-

tic novel written in third-person fiction (and in the conventional past tense — passé 

simple), making the reference a directly elaboration of genre theory and of the genre 

of the text itself.

Viewing the two signals together, one can come to the following preliminary con-

clusion: The obvious and marked attention to genre work in combination with the di-

rect reference to Barthes’s work with the novel places the Barthes reading at the core 

of the text’s intense self-positioning with respect not only to genre, but to many other 

key textual parameters, this certainly warrants a closer look at the interface between 

the two bodies or writing and the transfer operations performed between the two.

‘HRABAL’, ‘BARTHES’, MASKS: A BRIEF SKETCH OF 

CONTEXTS IN SEEMING DIAMETRICAL OPPOSITION

Having deprived himself of any means of explaining how these modes of writing 

came into existence, Barthes is none the less a superlative, albeit tactical, critic when 

it comes to analyzing them and awarding praise and blame. Praise depends […] most-

ly on a profoundly Barthesian criterion. This criterion can be summed up in the word 

distance. It is the common denominator of his efforts to promote certain modes of 

writing (Lavers 1995, p. 146).

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