Sas 24 web indd

HOLT MEYER 69

speak. Hrabal’s text emerges as a viewing of the shambles created by over 30 years 

of official Czechoslovak Marxist statehood, while Barthes’s book Writing Degree Zero 

is comprised of texts written at the moment when this peoples’ republican statehood 

is just being established. This is not just a chronological coincidence. Barthes’s diag-

nosis of ‘triumphant Stalinism’ (p. 23) as a position within which there is ‘no more 

lapse of time between naming and judging’, as a set of practices ‘presenting reality 

in a prejudged form’, using ‘tautology’ and operating on a ‘penological’ (all on p. 24) 

basis, is very precisely a prognosis of the production of the category of ‘writer in 

liquidation’ which Hrabal’s text retraces from the beginning of normalization in 

1968–1969.

The central event in the middle of all of this normalizing is nothing other than 

a birthday party (based no doubt to Hrabal’s 55

th

 in March of 1969), this in turn be-

ing the very location in which the name ‘Hrabal’ is connected to the profession of the 

‘scribbler’ (‘škrabal’). The biological birth celebrated in March of 1969 can be seen as 

an echo of the appearance and disappearance of the biological father which sets the 

stage for the Barthes reference.

HRABAL-ŠKRABAL, AND SCRIBBLER BARTHESE:  

THE UNCHARTED TERRITORY OF BARTHES AND/IN HRABAL

Nikdy mi ani ve snu nenapadlo, že bych si přál anebo chtěl změnit politické události, ve 

kterých jsem žil. [It never occurred to me, not even in my dreams that I should wish 

or want to change the political events in which I lived] (Hrabal 1995b, p. 221; 

first sentence of Kdo jsem / Who I am, trans. H. M.).

18

‘Changer la langue’, mot mallarméen, est concomitant de ‘changer le monde’, mot 

marxien. il y a une écoute politique de Mallarmé, de ceux qui l’ont suivi et le suivent 

encore (Barthes 1980, p. 34).

There are no Hrabal texts of the early 80s which are more important than Kdo jsem / 

Who I am and Proluky / Gaps, and both of these texts, particularly the former, hinge 

on readings of Barthes. Despite this, as I already mentioned, the role of the thinking 

of Roland Barthes for Bohumil Hrabal’s has not been subject of any extended serious 

scholarship, neither on this period nor on any other.

19

I would claim that this is an issue which is of key importance for the study of Hra-

bal at least in this last decade of ‘state socialism’ in Czechoslovakia — as well as for 

the study of the culture of decaying ‘state socialism’ itself — and is at the same time 

an illuminating case of transferred and transferring reading. In addition, it opens 

18

  There is no English translation of this text despite its centrality for the comprehension of 

Hrabal in this period and also beyond this period.

19

  Since it was not the main concern of the article, I had not come upon Annette Lavers’ in-

sight that precisely ‘distance’ is at the core of Barthes’s concerns in Writing Degree Zero, 

which is obviously of supreme relevance for a contribution to a volume covering the very 

issue of ‘Distanz’.

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70 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

up a discussion of the negotiation of Barthes in fictional and quasi-fictional writ-

ings, as well as in other media (including the already mentioned film Birdman). This 

negotiation can be read as an extension of Barthes’s own work on and at the interface 

between theory, fiction and autobiography.

We are dealing with texts which are central and canonical in the French 1940s 

and 1950s and the Czech 1970s and 1980s (as well as the French 1970s, if one includes 

the reading of Barthes’s inaugural lecture in Kdo jsem / Who I am or Derrida’s afore-

mentioned link of Writing Degree Zero with Camera Lucida). One can thus broaden 

the perspective even further and speak of a significant chapter of Czech-French 

literary relations of the 20

th

 century, perhaps even the most significant of the late 

20

th

 century.

Hrabal’s concern with the status of his own writing and at the same time with the 

possibility of the autobiographical in his specific discursive situation of ‘liquidation’ 

in the normalization after 1968 so uncannily echoes the concerns in the same field on 

the part of Barthes that it seems impossible to ignore it. One needs only look at the 

figures of thought at the core Andrew Brown’s (1992) influential study of Barthes 

which has not lost its relevance despite its emergence almost a quarter century ago. 

Brown’s main terms of ‘figures of writing’ which he works though in Barthes’s texts 

are as follows: ‘drifting’, ‘framing’, ‘naming’ and ‘scribbling’. All of these issues and 

techniques and not only generally important for a Barthes-Hrabal comparison, but 

are very specifically applicable to the writing configuration analyzed here, a con-

figuration which can be summed up in the ‘standard’ held up at the birthday party in 

March of 1969 which is described in the last part of Proluky / Gaps: ‘Ať žije Bohumil 

Hrabal, slavný český škrabal’. This phrase is translated in the official English version 

as ‘Long Live Bohumil Hrabal, Famous Czech Scribe’ (Hrabal 2011, pp. 122–124), but is 

clearly better translated as ‘Long Live Bohumil Hrabal, Famous Czech Scribbler’ or 

‘Famous Czech Scribe and Scribbler’.

Andrew Brown’s general definition of the concept of ‘the scribbler’ is directly 

applicable in this context applicability: ‘fascination for writing itself — writing, as 

it were, rather than what writing says’ (Brown 1992, p. 8). When he goes more into 

depth, Brown describes a ‘writing down’ rather than just ‘writing’ which reminds 

one of the Hrabal’s describing himself as a ‘zapisovatel’ (roughly: someone who takes 

notes) rather than ‘spisovatel’ (writer).

20

 He shows us Barthes concerned with ‘show-

ing’, with reproducing the gesture and the forms of the object being put into writing, 

particularly if this object is one already culturally gestured and formed.

READING THE BARTHES PASSAGE IN PROLUKY / GAPS

[…] nalil vodky a nastavil ji proti mému muži. Pane Hrabal, jsem váš žák, ukázal jste 

mi cestu, jsem četbou vašich knížek opět člověk, nikoho už se nebojím, připijte mi! 

A můj muž se začal dávit [and then he poured my husband a shot and put it in front 

of him. Mr. Hrabal, I am your student, you showed me the way, reading your books 

20

  See various texts in the 18

th

 volume of Sebrané spisy Bohumila Hrabala with the title Ze zá-

pisníku zapisovatele (Hrabal 1996).

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