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HOLT MEYER 83

way, the double third person narration of the embedded narrator speaking about him 

as one who quoted Barthes in the past and of the Barthes words themselves undergo 

an operation which one could view, in turn, as being Barthesian — they ‘drift’ away 

from the direct designation of a subject matter and unmask’ their own drifting.

In accounting for the transfer of Barthes’s words to the context (and negotiation 

of contextualization itself) in the Hrabal text, I have only marked the most basic ef-

fects of the transitions from one narrative voice or mode to another. Much more work 

would need to be done on the explanation of individual motifs and of course of the 

intertextual (and intratextual) references which go beyond the Barthes paraphrase 

and interact with it. I leave this for more in-depth study and move on to the larger 

framing of all of the operations sketched here. I will only cast a brief glance at this 

last topic.

NAKED FRAMING: THE WASHING OF FEET

Useknutá noha. Viktorinus [Severed feet. Victorinus] (Legenda zahraná na strunách 

napjatých mezi kolébkou a rakví, in Hrabal 1994, p. 350, trans. H. M.).

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Když ji vedli nahou do nevěstince, zahalili ji andělé do jejích vlasů. Ovce. Agnes [As she 

was led into the bridal chamber, angels hid in her hair. A sheep. Agnes] (ibid., p. 352).

Having broken down the embedded narrative and all of the embedding contained in 

it, I will take one step back and one step forward in the narratology and look at the 

framing which brackets the embedded narration of ‘můj muž’. The transition from 

zero to one is as follows:

seděl u stolu, hrál si s pivním táckem, prsty mu kmitaly, nedovedl zastavit tu jejich 

hru s kulatým papírovým táckem s nápisem Zlatý tygr. Tak jaký to tam bylo? povídám 

a vnořila jsem špinavé, zaprášené nohy do lavoru. Poklekl, mydlil mi a omýval ty 

moje nohy a tiše vykládal [he sat at the table playing with a beer coaster, fingers going 

like crazy, he couldn’t stop fiddling with that round paper coaster from The Golden 

Tiger. So how was it? I asked as I plunged my dirty, dusty feet into the tub. He kneeled 

down and lathered and washed my feet and then said quietly] (Hrabal 1995a, p. 480, 

Hrabal 2011, p. 57).

The transition from twelve back to zero ends in the unexpected and rather dramatic 

declaration of the hegemonic female narrator that she recognized that she and ‘můj 

muž’ are really husband and wife:

[…] hovořil můj muž, dívala jsem se na něho dolů, klečel přede mnou a umýval mi 

nohy, myl mi nohy a té chvíle jsem věděla, že on je můj manžel a já jsem jeho manželka. 

[so said my man, kneeling before me, washing my feet, and I knew that he was my 

husband and I was his wife]. (Hrabal 1995a, p. 480, Hrabal 2011, p. 57).

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  There is no English translation of this text.

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84 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

The image of the speaker of the embedded narration, marked as male, washing the 

female main narrator’s feet as he tells his tale should not be ignored. It seems to be 

a travesty of one of the two famous foot-washing or foot-anointing scenes of the New 

Testament, i.e. either Jesus washing the disciple’s feet, or, more likely, Mary of Beth-

any anointing Jesus’ feet with costly oil. The reversal of the gender roles, making the 

female narrator into the Christ figure, should be noted.

The image of bare feet is important in Hrabal’s writing of the 1980s in at least one 

other context — in the already mentioned text Kdo jsem / Who I am. As I already dis-

cussed in my first analysis of the text which alone due to its title might be called auto-

biographical (but of course it is not simply autobiography, indeed also due to the me-

diation of Barthes), the seemingly anarchic text ends with the image of bare-footed 

women traversing the Moravian countryside. It would be going too far to describe 

the passage in Kdo jsem / Who I am as directly complimentary to this scene in Proluky 

/ Gaps, but it is striking that the foot-washer has just returned from a trip to the very 

area of Moravia where the peregrination of the bare-footed women is taking place.

In the analysis of the article (Meyer 2014) I noted that the narrator of Kdo jsem / 

Who I am describes both his own liking for going barefoot and the barefooted wander-

ing women of Moravia. This gives the motif a transgendered quality which is impor-

tant for the context I am writing about here. Stripping feet bare in order to wander, 

then donning the shoes again upon the arrival in town — this seems to be the op-

posite of what we are dealing with here: the removal of footwear in preparation for 

playing the role of a listener, not a teller.

In my specific analysis I underscored the fact that thematizing bare-footedness 

underscores walking itself, i.e. literally setting-foot (Begehung) and its impression 

on the body, rather than the goal of the journey, and significantly enough the goal of 

the journey in the seventh and last section of Kdo jsem / Who I am is the place of the 

very birth whose biological fatherhood stands in question in the passage of Proluky / 

Gaps which contains the Barthes reference: Brno-Židenice.

I further note in that other study that the images of bare-footedness bring to-

gether the present of fetching water in Kersko barefoot and the long-gone past of the 

bare-footed wandering women, and that both seem to be part of a quasi-Rousseau-

esque critique of civilization which is in contrast with another passage in the fourth 

section of the text which demonizes practically applied numbers — an example of 

this practical application being the numerically expressed sizes of shoes and cloth-

ing. A sphere of non-quantification, of peregrination with no particular destination: 

this is the bare-footedness with which the text Kdo jsem / Who I am ends.

In addition, the non-progression and the non-quantification is also a factor in the 

departure and distancing from history itself which plays a large role in the text which 

begins with a rejection of all actions which might actually change (historical) reality 

(this, in turn, being a pastiche or parody of Barthes’s inaugural lecture). In the con-

text of my analysis here, one might say that this distancing from history is a version 

of the ‘blank writing’ which Barthes advocates in Writing Degree Zero: the only escape 

from a (or in a) language poisoned by malicious history.

In a general sense the narrator revealing her soiled bare feet as a preparation for 

‘můj muž’ telling her the story of his biological father brings images of corporeal-

ity together in a manner which is extremely ambivalent. The tale told by ‘můj muž’ 

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