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Roland Barthes’s Masks in Bohumil Hrabal’s Gaps: 

Accounts of a Transfer, Transfer of Accounts

Holt Meyer — Universität Erfurt

GABRIEL: I mean, as you’re probably aware, Barthes said, ‘The cultural work done in the 

past by gods and epic sagas is now being done by laundry detergent commercials and comic-

strip characters’

[…]

CLARA: Hang on. Who’s this Barthes guy? Which Birdman is he in?

(Birdman).

1

This article analyzes Roland Barthes’s presence in Bohumil Hrabal’s text Gaps 

(thus the title of English translation of Proluky by the Czech Canadian Tony Liman)

2

 

as a transferring and transferred reading. The reading is a transferring one, since 

Barthesʼ text (Writing Degree Zero) negotiates a very different field of operations than 

that of Hrabal. It is a transferred one because, among other things, Barthes is reading 

a number of texts in his writing, and Hrabal’s text transfers these readings as well. 

Accounting for these transfers involves also a transfer of accounts, also in the sense 

of an assessment of the value (and values) transferred by means of the Barthes-import 

performed by Hrabal’s text. In saying this, I am addressing the aesthetic value (also in 

Mukařovský’s sense) of the respective texts, keeping in mind their respective posi-

1

  

com/film_scripts/ FSP3823_BiRDMAN_MINI_SCRIPT_BOOK_C5.pdf> [pp. 11–12 of the 

pdf version of the script; 11. 5. 2015]. This is not an actual quote, but rather a paraphrase 

of Barthes’s references the detergent ‘Omo’ in Mythologies.

2

  My contribution focuses on Hrabal’s text Proluky in the original, but also to a certain de-

gree on the English translation when it does conspicuous or instructive things, such as 

omitting the reference to Ignát Hermann’s novel U snědeného krámu (in contrast to the 

French translation, which includes the reference and if only for that reason plays a cer-

tain role here) in the passage which explicitly mentions Roland Barthes. Problems and in-

dividual choices of the English translation are significant to a lesser degree; in some cas-

es I will be mentioning these as well. It seems to me generally that a discussion of a Czech 

text precisely in the context of transferring readings needs to take account of the transla-

tion of the text into the language in which this discussion is taking place. I did this exten-

sively in my German language analysis of Kdo jsem (Hrabal 1995b; cf. Meyer 2014) with 

reference to the German translation which took many incomprehensible liberties, includ-

ing leaving out a third of the text altogether.

OPEN ACCESS

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60 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

tion within the social systems and official institutions which assign value (or valu-

lessness in the form of liquidation) to writings and their writers and provides them 

with or depletes them of social and political capital.

The transfer discussed here applies to the location of the texts in question in their 

time and/as their culture, but also to operations along genre borders which are, in 

turn, determined by respective historic-cultural placements of the texts as a whole. 

In the context of the genre question, I give particular attention to the autobiographi-

cal

3

, since this is a key aspect of the Hrabal text in question, but also of the writings 

of Barthes and Hrabal in general. This, in turn, makes the issue at hand potentially 

interesting not only for Hrabal studies, but also for Barthes studies.

The specific textual configuration at hand is an example of the appearance of 

Barthes’s texts in Hrabal’s work in general, particularly in the early 1980s. This case 

of transferred and transferring readings has been essentially ignored by Hrabal schol-

arship to date,

4

 but is actually a significant factor in the self-positioning of Hra-

bal’s texts from the point of view of culture, genre, traces of memory and other key 

aspects of Hrabal’s writing.

Hrabal’s text is in effect an acting-out of Barthes’s theories (a transference from 

analytical description to performance).

5

 This is one of the factors which make this case 

relevant not only for the analysis of Hrabal, but also for Barthes scholarship. One might 

even speak of an acting out of Barthes a way similar to the Barthes paraphrase in the 

recent film Birdman (2014): ‘Barthes said, “The cultural work done in the past by gods…”’ 

(see motto). This too is a reentry of the theory of (ideologies of) fictional narrative into 

fictional narrative itself. In the case of Birdman it is a literal acting-out in a meta-theat-

rical setting. In the case of Hrabal’s Proluky / Gaps, the repetition of the gesture of point-

ing to one’s own mask also has a theatrical quality, which makes it not insignificant that 

the Barthes reference in the Hrabal text occurs in the context of an author’s reading — 

also a theatralization of the text and a self-representation of the author’s body.

6

Accounting for this transfer means not only naming the (types of) borders along 

which the transfers take place. It also means giving an account of how writing/écriture 

positions itself with respect to a history of writing which it is openly and consciously 

writing itself into (and in doing that offering resistance to). In the case of Barthes’s writing 

of the early 50s, it is an at least quadruple self-positioning in connection with Descartes 

3

  On the autobiographical in Barthes’s writing see Brown 1992, p. 119 f, Stafford 1998, p. 193 

f., Ette 1998, p. 414 f., Martin 2003, p. 105 f., Gil 2012, p. 416 f., Rylance 1994, p. 103 f. Scha-

bacher 2007 is most the extensive newer study on this issue, Kennedy 1981 is one of the first.

4

  Jankovič (1996, p. 147 f.) writes about Barthes in Hrabal’s later work, calling the section of 

the book Larvatus prodeo, but there is no analysis of the indirect reference to that Descartes 

quote in Proluky/Gaps. See James 2012, particularly p. 98 f., as well as Fulka 2010. Of par-

ticular interest is the study Češka 2010, which with reference to the concept ‘the death 

of the author’ precisely addresses the general status of Hrabal’s Barthes paraphrases and 

their paradoxical affirmation and negation of Barthes’s positions. .

5

  On Barthes and performance see Scheie 2000.

6

  The author’s body between sex and gender and as the producer of the material of the 

messy text was the subject of a talk I gave in December 2014 in Erfurt at a conference 

on Hrabal which I co-organized with Alfrun Kliems and Alexander Wöll. Some of the 

thoughts of this paper were taken up in this one.

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