Sas 24 web indd

HOLT MEYER 75

…A TEN ČLOVĚK POVÍDÁ… / …AND THE GUY SAYS…

Povídám, maminko… [So I say, Mother]

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 (Hrabal 1995a, p. 432, Hrabal 2011, p. 12).

The preterite and the third person in the Novel are nothing but the fateful gesture 

with which the writer draws attention to the mask which he is wearing (Barthes 

2012, p. 40).

Let us go through the passage in question voice for voice. I will be restricting the anal-

ysis to narratological aspects (voice, frame, time) and will refrain from getting even 

deeper into the passage and its individual motifs, with the exception of the issue of 

biological and spiritual fatherhood. I will begin with the individual voices and tech-

nologies of addressing, then take up the framing of the voices on the part of the he-

gemonic female narrator.

Putting the Barthes-Hrabal transfer (i.e. the Degree Zero-Gaps transfer) to the fore 

means not only focusing on the passage in which Barthes is mentioned, but also fo-

cusing on voice, since the main interest is the meaning of the voice as mask in the 

Barthesian/Cartesian sense. Thus I will be mainly locating and retracing the negotia-

tion of the placing of a ‘third person preterite’ mask on one’s narrative face. Thrice 

naming the name Hrabal in this passage is from this point of view not a breakthrough 

to the authentic author, but, quite the opposite: it plays through the naming of the 

name as mask. It intentionally only scratches the surface. This seems to be the only 

plausible interpretation of the assigning of the Barthesian mask-donning to the fig-

ure of an actor who has decided to be a fool and a clown.

Transitions from one voice/mode to another are key here. I count twelve of them 

within the passage. I hope that, in counting them and accounting for them, I estab-

lish their value for the text and make my skepticism about assuming the existence of 

‘a single narrator who integrates all those voices’ (Jankovič) plausible.

The twelve changes of voice/mode are as follows:

1. from the embedded narrator ‘můj muž’ to the representative of the biological 

father; 2. from the representative of the biological father to the embedded narrator 

‘můj muž’; 3. from the embedded narrator ‘můj muž’ to the master of ceremonies 

of the reading; 4. from the master of ceremonies of the reading to the embedded 

narrator ‘můj muž’; 5. from the embedded narrator ‘můj muž’ to the biological sis-

ter; 6. from the biological sister to the embedded narrator reporting his own speech; 

7. from the embedded narrator reporting his own speech to the embedded narrator 

reporting events; 8. from the embedded narrator to the master of ceremonies; 9. from 

the master of ceremonies to the embedded narrator reporting events; 10. from the 

embedded narrator reporting events to the embedded narrator reporting speaking 

about past speech of his own in past tense; 11. from the embedded narrator report-

ing speaking about past speech of his own in past tense to the embedded narrator 

reporting speaking about Barthes’ speech in the present tense; 13. from the embedded 

narrator reporting speaking about Barthes’ speech in the present tense to the Barthes 

paraphrase. 13 from the Barthes paraphrase to the embedded narrator’s expansion 

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  Also translatable as ‘I am telling [the story], Mother’.

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76 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

of the paraphrase (with undisclosed authorship). Our direct subject matter is com-

prised, of course, of the last three voice transitions, i.e. transitions 11, 12 and 13. The 

previous nine transitions prepare the narrative ground (a ground ultimately stood on 

barefoot by the hegemonic female narrator, from whom the transition from zero to 

1 and from 13 to zero takes place — something I will discuss in the next section). This 

narrative ground is thematically something which deals with the first person narrator 

(embedded in another first person narrator) weighing the effects of biological and 

social birth and placing this, in turn, in historical contexts from Austria-Hungarian 

Moravia to the communist Czechoslovak state. The transitions between types of per-

son (peppered with the Socialist call to the ‘comrade’) cross lines of family and their 

representatives and thus place the reader at those borders and at the same time make 

those borders visible. The embedded narrator, marked constantly as the familial mar-

ital, but also gendered ‘můj muž’ in the overriding narration of female hegemony, 

creates arrangements of its own origin. This is staged at the place in which its body 

appeared on the earth, and at the same time the voice of this body intones the litera-

ture (fictional voicing, cultural activity) which has caused its native town to invite the 

owner of this body, addressed officially as ‘comrade’, be part of its cultural sphere.

One could claim also that the transitions provide not only thematically, but also 

structurally exemplary material for the introduction of the Barthesian mask by em-

bedding third person narration in first person narration (embedded in another first 

person narrative) and thus directly negotiating the very relationship of narrative 

person which is at the core of Barthes’s problematization of third person bourgeois 

naturalism.

I will discuss the embedded voice of ‘můj muž’ and the twelve transitions either 

singly or in groups. The voice of ‘můj muž’, the embedded narrator, sets in as follows:

Všecko dobrý, až když už jsem stoupal do sálu, tak tam v zatáčce stál takový člověk, 

v prstech držel skřipec, vedle něj stála ženská, a ten člověk povídá. [Everything was 

fine, right up until I was ready to make my appearance, and standing there in the hall 

is this guy, pince-nez in hand, and he’s with a woman, and the guy says]. (Hrabal 

1995a, p. 479, Hrabal 2011, p. 56)

Interesting in the context of our argumentation is the switch from past to present, 

which is not unusual or conspicuous, but can arguably be connected to an empha-

sized presence of the voice embedded in the embedding: the voice of the present bi-

ological sister’s and the absent biological father’s representative, designated as ‘this 

person’ (‘ten člověk’). Voice transition 1 leads to:

Jsem pověřen, vy jste pan Hrabal, nebo nejste? Jste! Pověřil mě můj kamarád, bývalý 

rakouský důstojník, abych vám oznámil, že vy jste jeho syn. A tohle je vaše sestra. Že 

lituje, že si vaši maminku tenkrát nemohl vzít, ale odejel na bojiště na Halič, tady pro-

sím je jeho fotografie jako rakouského důstojníka v plášti, tady v kabátci vojenském. 

Pak, když válka skončila, tak už vaše maminka byla provdaná, ale to víte, je tady krev, 

váš vlastní tatínek, bývalý rakouský důstojník, je to už dědoušek, hrozně toho lituje, 

ale to víte, mladá krev tenkrát za Rakouska. a tady prosím jsou fotografie z nynější 

doby [I have been entrusted, you are Mr. Hrabal, are you not? You are indeed! I have 

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