Sas 24 web indd

HOLT MEYER 67

Jste spisovatel Hrabal? Můj muž přikývl a ještě víc zrudnul a mladík vytáhl legiti-

maci a představil se jako úředník ministerstva vnitra. [Are you Hrabal the writer? 

My husband nodded and went even redder and the young man pulled out his ID and 

introduced himself as a clerk from the Ministry of the Interior (Hrabal 1995a, p. 474, 

Hrabal 2011, p. 51).

Barthes’s and Hrabal’s writing contexts are radically different, and seem in many 

ways to be diametrically opposed. For an account of the transfer, it is important to 

sketch in broad strokes the weight this issue brings to bear on a mutual enlightenment 

Barthes and Hrabal might provide for each other.

In describing/advocating an ‘écriture blanche’ in accordance with a ‘degree zero’ 

of writing, Barthes attempts to come to terms with a circumstance of language which 

remains a fundamental assumption throughout his work: the assumption that the 

language in which a writer composes his works carries a huge amount of baggage 

which the writer cannot simply dispose of. In the late 1970s, he will famously call this 

feature of language ‘fascist’.

13

 Due to this feature of language, the writer must empty 

his writing, take a posture of maximal ‘distance’, as it is phrased by Annette Lavers in 

her summary of Barthes theory (Lavers 1995, p. 146).

Without getting into great detail on the possibilities and meaning of this ‘blank 

writing’ (literally ‘white writing’) in the late 40s and early 50s of the 20

th

 century in 

France, I would like to underscore the fact that Barthes addresses the mask in the 

context of radical critique. The gesture of moving forward wearing the mask and 

at the same time pointing to it, this Brechtian gesture,

14

 is part of the self-distancing, 

worked out by Lavers, which is necessary for resisting the ideological forces litera-

ture needs to confront.

In Barthes’s case, these ideological forces are those of bourgeois society, and 

even if Barthes in Writing Degree Zero is looking for a path of departure from an 

orthodox Marxist tradition (above a nuanced alternative path to that of Sartre), it 

is the opposition to bourgeois ideology which serves as the fundamental concern 

of Barthes’s text.

In paraphrasing the Barthes formulation, Hrabal re-contextualizes it in a seem-

ingly opposite societal configuration: the bourgeoisie has been officially driven from 

power and supposedly no longer holds sway in the Czechoslovak ‘people’s republic’ 

after over twenty years of Stalinism and Neo-Stalinism. The question to be asked 

here is whether the Proluky / Gaps text is setting up another societal configuration 

as equivalent to the bourgeois society which Writing Degree Zero is addressing, or 

whether the text is to read as a parody or pastiche of Barthes’s texte marxissant, per-

haps going so far as to set up an ironic equivalence between socialist 1980s Czechoslo-

vakia and capitalist bourgeois society.

13

  ‘La langue, comme performance de tout langage, n’est ni réactionnaire, ni progressiste; 

elle est tout simplement: fasciste; car le fascisme, ce n’est pas d’empêcher de dire, c’est 

d’obliger à dire’ (Barthes 1978, p. 14).

14

  On Barthes and Brecht see Shookman 1989, Carmody 1990, Bident 2012, p. 49 f., Gil 2012,  

p. 196 f., Martin 2003, p. 24 f., McQuillan 2011, pp. 61–63, Rylance 1994, pp. 98–99, 139–40 

and passim, Stafford 1998, p. 38 f. and passim.

---

68 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

In any case, neither Writing Degree Zero nor Proluky / Gaps is conceivable without 

a very specific political constellation. These constellations cannot be ignored. They 

are of course radically different, due to the time gap of 30 years and the widely di-

vergent cultural and political situations of Paris of the early 50s and Prague of the 

early 80s. Ironically, Hrabal’s situation after 1968–1969 is a grotesque fulfillment of 

Barthes’s vision of Stalinism formulated in the late 40s and early 50s.

Barthesʼs text is grappling with Sartre’s existentially influenced concepts of litera-

ture and modes of anti-bourgeois engagement in the present, also in its inheritance 

of the bourgeois novel of the 19

th

 century, but also in connection with a critique of 

Stalinism, which is relevant both for the heritage of the novel and for the contextual-

ization of Hrabal’s text in the neo-Stalinist Czechoslovak normalization. The historical 

and political subject matter of the past tense perspective of the entirety of Proluky/

Gaps is the entirety of the liberalization period starting in the mid-1960s (allowing 

the narrator to pick up the first published book of ‘můj muž’

15

 as the first event of the 

narrative), followed by the Warsaw pact invasion of August 1968 and the ensuing first 

months of normalization which produces ‘people in liquidation’, one of whom is ‘můj 

muž’. This too is obviously a time of huge upheaval which could leave no thinking 

person indifferent to political questions. It is just as present here as in texts whose 

narrators claim to take no interest at all in changing the worlds (or language), such 

as Hrabal’s Kdo jsem / Who I Am.

In a recently published study I analyze that very text, which much more obvi-

ously and thus seemingly more centrally negotiates a Barthes text (Meyer 2014) — 

this time a work towards the end of Barthes’s oeuvre: the inaugural lecture deliv-

ered at the College de France, the very one in which Barthes speaks of the ‘fascism’ 

of language.

16

 I analyze it as a prime case of the performance and negotiation of dis-

tance — something which some consider to be the central strategy of Barthes’s écri-

ture (Lavers 1995).

The Hrabal text addresses directly the question of political engagement and, as 

already stated, explicitly denies having any interest in such a thing. This is a clear 

indication that the references to Barthes in Hrabal’s texts of the early 1980s take 

place in full consciousness of Barthes’s reflections on the conditions of being politi-

cally engagé, both at the beginning of his oeuvre in the late 1940s and at the close of  

the 1970s.

17

Each of the two texts in its own way places itself within what might be called the 

‘history of Marxism’ in the broader sense, but at opposite ends of the history, so to 

15

  I refer to the person the narrator refers to as ‘my husband’ in precisely this manner in Czech: 

‘můj muž’. It is the only designation of absolute certainty which one can use for the figure.

16

  See Meyer 2014; on Barthes at the College de France see O’Meara 2012.

17

  See Ottmar Ette’s (1998, p. 62 f.) incisive comments on the close relationship between Writ-

ing Degree Zero and the inaugural lecture, particularly with respect to the status of lan-

guage itself. It is precisely the baggage which language brings with it before a writer starts 

using it, be it ‘bourgeois’ or ‘fascist’, which motivates Barthes to recommend a ‘blank lit-

erature’ in Writing Degree Zero. Ette’s insight makes it all the more significant (for a com-

plete view of Hrabal’s Barthes references, which I can only hint at here) that Hrabal refers 

to these two particular works of Barthes.

---