Words and/without Bodies: The Incorporation of the Word as Poetological Imagery in Texts by Bohumil Hrabal and Jáchym Topol

Words and/without Bodies: The Incorporation of the Word as Poetological Imagery in Texts by Bohumil Hrabal and Jáchym Topol Anna Förster — Universität Erfurt 1. As many studies have shown, the history of images of incorporation in literature is as long as the range of their metaphorical usage is wide. From antiquity to the present day, images of absorption, of imbibing or devouring, of sexual intercourse, of consuming oneself or the other, be it out of hunger, hate or love, desires of complete material possession or intellectual apprehension cover the whole spectrum from ‘communion to cannibalism’ (cf. Kilgour 1990). By dwelling on a point that can be defined as an interface, a topos of contact and interchange between the Self and the world it is surrounded by and situated in, they address the body specifically with regard to antithetical conceptions prevailing within or alongside established understandings of corporeality. Indeed, by focussing on the point of transgression of the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body, they touch, so to speak, on the primal image of all binary oppositions.1 A special place therein is occupied by literary images of the incorporation of the written word. While exhibiting all the features mentioned above, they add an additional notion of self-referentiality. They specify the binaries that are addressed by focusing on the differentiation and the boundary between soma2 and logos in particular, and, on a more figurative level, of the relationship between the interior and the exterior of the text (also in the sense of intertextuality). Hence, in this paper, I will suggest reading images of incorporation of the word as a poetological metaphor, in which texts visualize the prerequisites, conditions, and consequences of their own narration and/or of their écriture. And therefore, as this term (bor1 In La dissémination, Derrida writes: ‘Pour que ces valeurs contraires (bien/mal, vrai/faux, essence/apparence, dedans/dehors, etc.) puissent s’opposer, il faut que chacun des termes soit simplement extérieur à l’autre, c’est-à-dire que l’une des oppositions (dedans/dehors) soit déjà accréditée comme la matrice de toute opposition possible’ (Derrida 1972, p. 117). 2 Here this is understood as both the body in the sense of the anatomical system as well as the body as equally the subject and object of sensational experience. Neither Czech, nor English nor French semantically differentiate between the two, while German (Körper/ Leib), for example, or Russian (telo/ploť) do. For the lack of this differentiation in Czech, see Vojvodík 2006, p. 31. OPEN ACCESS 206 SLOVO A SMYSL 24 rowed from Roland Barthes3) already indicates, images of the incorporation of the word also implicitly embrace a reflection on the intertextual historicity of their own imagery.4 If one understands of the body as a medium of orientation in and of experience and apprehension of the world as Josef Vojvodík has suggested,5 literary corporeality cannot be studied as an isolated textual element, but has, in general, to be considered within a wider range of what Vojvodík calls ‘antropological-ontological categories’ [‘antropologicko-ontologické kategorie’].6 This has to be taken into account, even more for images of bodily absorption of the word. Their very poetological constitution is comprised in not being spontaneous and singularly constructions, but in them generally referring to the broader textual discourse itself (cf. Kohl 2007, p. 3). This, consequentially, leads to the fact that the study of poetological metaphors cannot be limited to the very image itself, but has always to be considered as hyperonymous, so to speak, for the text as a whole. In this paper, I will consider such imagery in texts of two authors, namely Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) and Jáchym Topol (* 1960), whose relationship has been (somewhat questionably) described in terms of familial kinship.7 And while the elder of the two died shortly after the younger’s debut novel was published, and there is no evidence (or at least none that I am aware of) that it was ever read by Hrabal, Topol openly acknowledged his perceived indebtedness to the other, albeit with some delay (cf. Topol 2014). But even beyond such extratextual claims, the proximity of their ways of writing, of their écritures, to use Roland Barthes’ term, has been noted numerous times (see for instance Kliems 2010, p. 221, Zand 2013, p. 29), but surprisingly still has yet to be made into the object of closer investigation.8 On top of that, Topol’s Sestra and, to 3 In this paper, I will use the original French term, since, at least in my opinion, the English translation as simply writing is too ambiguous and can be also understood as in reference to an author’s work or body of texts in general. 4 In Le degré zéro de l’écriture, Roland Barthes explicitly defines his concept of écriture in terms of literary historical verticality. See e.g. the following passage in which he confronts écriture with language and style: ‘Langue et style sont des forces aveugles; l’écriture est un acte de solidarité historique. Langue et style sont des objets; l’écriture est une fonction: elle est le rapport entre la création et la société, elle est le langage littéraire transformé par sa destination sociale, elle est la forme saisie dans son intention humaine et liée ainsi aux grandes crises de l’Histoire’ (Barthes 1993, p. 147). 5 In the introduction to his voluminous study on images and conceptions of corporeality in Czech avant-garde art and literature, Vojvodík, by drawing especially on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Vojvodík addresses the body as a specific means to explore and conceive the Self’s ‘being-in-the-world’ (cf. Vojvodík 2006, pp. 9–43). 6 He especially points out the triad ‘tělo — čas — prostor’ [‘body — time — space’] (ibid., p. 22). 7 Topol’s German publishing house, Suhrkamp, labels him as Hrabal’s ‘literary grandson’ [‘literarischer Enkel’] <http://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/die_teufelswerkstatt-jachym_ topol_42144.html> [7. 10. 2015]. Besides raising the question of who, if one would take this claim seriously, would actually have to be considered the missing father in this lineage, it must be suspected that, in the late 1990s, this was rather an attempt to improve the commercial prospects of an author still unknown to the German readership then a serious critical statement. 8 The same must be stated for the work of a third author, namely Jaroslav Hašek. While the crucial role of Hašek’s writing for Hrabal’s work can probably be considered to be bomem- ANNA FöRSTER 207 a lesser extent, his short story Waffen aus Tolmin (2011, Zbraně z Tolminu / Weapons from Tolmin),9 toy with the idea of literary history and personal canon formation as a matter of biological genealogy — including all oedipal connotations that might come along with such a conception (see also Förster 2014). As already mentioned, their kinship plays out above all on the level of their respective écritures. In a way quite similar to Hrabal, Topol’s beginnings as a writer are rooted in poetry, a foundation that both author’s works never really abandon, even though later primarily producing prose works.10 Both authors’ writings attribute great significance to oral speech and both are highly attentive with regard to historical, social, or communal shifts in register, and are verbally excessive in one way or the other, if not in fact of a certain verbal hyperactivity often creating its own rules. Texts by Hrabal as well as Topol place their wager on a stream of speech (to which I will return again later) which is ideally not interrupted by conventional punctuation, but only by techniques imitating the intonation and rhythms of spoken discourse, if at all.11 Putting aside all those similarities, the greatest discontinuity between Hrabal’s and Topol’s writing can be best observed in their very use of poetological metaphors. In doing so, Hrabal’s texts as well as Topol’s early prose works12 draw particularly on images of inand decorporation. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that even though the images are very similar, their usage is not. In the case of Hrabal’s works, it clearly is approving and affirmative, while, with regards to Topol’s texts — and, again, particularly in Sestra13 — it reveals itself as being hesitant, if not righteous denial. istic common knowledge, especially due to the early studies of Emanuel Frynta and Václav Černý, its meaning for Jáchym Topol’s writing has, much like that of Hrabal’s, been often stated, but never thoroughly analyzed. Thereby, especially in Sestra, the roles of Hašek as an author, of his Švejk figure as sort of an archetype of the Czech national character and his écriture itself, are even more prominent than Hrabal’s. 9 As far as I know, this text has been published only in German (Topol 2011). 10 In fact, Jankovič has talked about much of Hrabal’s prose works as an intertwining of the lyrical and the epical, constituting a peculiar ‘lyrical-epical’ [‘[l]yrickoepick[é]]’ writing alternating epical narration and conceptions of time with retarding passages he described as lyrical ‘crystallizations’ [‘krystalizace’] (Jankovič 1996, pp. 79–98). 11 In addition to the fact that a great number of other areas and levels could be pointed out on which the bond between their works articulates itself, for example their oscillation between a peculiar ‘absence of history’ (Josef Kroutvor) on one hand, and a hyperbolization of certain historical events and motifs on the other hand, the fact that Topol’s writing (and at the risk of making it sound redundant, especially Sestra) works off the entire genre-memory of Hrabal’s écriture (besides Hašek’s work, especially French as well as Czech surrealism and diverse avant-gardes), or, for instance, their respective self-fashioning as 20th century ‘proklet[í] básní[ci]’ as well as their self-representation of their writing as an ecstatic écriture automatique, or as ‘psaní alla prima’, as Hrabal calls it, or an écriture du premier mouvement. 12 With this I refer to his works written in the 1990s, i.e. Sestra, Anděl [Angel Exit], Výlet k nádražní hale [A Trip to the Train Station] and exclude his later novels and stories as well as his collection of American Indian legends Trnová dívka [The Thorn Girl] (1997). 13 The fact that Sestra places by far more emphasis on both metapoetical and meta-linguistical reflexion so to speak and consequentially attributes greater significance to metapoetic metaphors than any other text written by the same author might be solely due to the fact 208 SLOVO A SMYSL 24 In the following, I will first attempt to provide an exemplary insight into how two selected texts — Hrabal’s Příliš hlučná samota [Too loud a solitude] (1977)14 and Topol’s Sestra [City, Sister, Silver] (1990)15 — establish and use metaphors of inand decorporation, and second, reflect on their consequences for the respective narrative discourse as a whole. 2. ‘SUCKING WORDS’ — BOHUMIL HRABAL’S PŘÍLIŠ HLUČNÁ SAMOTA In Hrabal’s prose text, Příliš hlučná samota, the first-person narrator named Haňťa has been working in Prague’s subterranean central wastepaper storage for 35 years. His days have consisted of the pressing and bundling not only dirty wrapping materials and newspapers, but also mass reproductions of famous artworks, and above all, books. In the flow of his speech, Haňťa speaks about the knowledge he has gathered over the years by reading books before throwing them into the hydraulic press, and by ‘rescuing’ others from suffering the same fate by taking them home to his apartment. His narrative discourse thereby not only incorporates innumerous and eclectically juxtaposed references to and quotes from books, Haňťa destroys or which he remembers having destroyed in the past. But in the context of this meditation on the written word and its use as well as deliberate misuse by the protagonist, the text also reflects on the relationship between soma and logos. Hrabal not only lets his narrator muse about how the very objects, in whose destruction he is partaking, become part of his own body. In one passage, the narrator speaks about orally consuming the written word, sucking it like a candy drop until it dissolves into his bodily fluids and, thereby, reaches even the remotest cell in his body: když čtu, tak vlastně nečtu, já si naberu do zobáčku krásnou větu a cucám ji jako bonbón, jako bych popíjel skleničku likéru tak dlouho, až ta myšlenka se ve mně rozplývá tak jako alkohol, tak dlouho se do mne vstřebává, až je nejen v mým mozku a srdci, ale hrká mými žilami až do kořínků cév (Hrabal 1994, p. 9).16 that it is his first prose text and his first large-scale work (all told, the first edition consisted of more than 480 pages). 14 Having been written in 1976, at least according to the author himself, the text was first published in the inofficial edice Expedice in 1977, and a first official edition was published in 1987 (Pražská imaginace). It exists in three different versions, one of which is in verse form, and on top of that, as it is the case with many of Hrabal’s texts, each variation exists in several different version. For more details on the complicated publishing history, see Milan Jankovič’s editorial commentary in Sebrané spisy Bohumila Hrabala (sv. 9. Pražská imaginace, Praha 1994, p. 7–78). I will quote from the same edition. The English quotes refer to the translation by Michael H. Heim (Hrabal 1990). 15 In the following, I am quoting from Topol [1994]/2008. The English translations of the Czech quotes are taken from Alex Zucker’s translation (Topol 2000). 16 ‘Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing my brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel’ (Hrabal 1990, pp. 1–2). ANNA FöRSTER 209 In doing so, he, not only incorporates incredible amounts of knowledge17, but he also, after all those years, starts to turn into the written word himself: ‘umazávám se literami, takže se podobám naučným slovníkům’ (Hrabal 1994, p. 9).18 The endangerment of his operation of the hydraulic press constitutes to the written word becomes mutual — when the amount of books he takes home to save them from being destroyed starts to exceed the storing abilities of his apartment he puts them away on shelves under the ceiling, where they constantly threaten to slay him while he is sitting on the toilet or sleeping in his bed.19 As his destructive work progresses, he eventually realizes that the weight of the books piled up above his head has compressed his very body and remarkably reduced his height.20 By completely abolishing the difference between intellectual, hermeneutical reception and material absorption, the novel establishes a nearly textbook-like case 17 He describes himself as being ‘proti své vůli vzdělán’ [‘educated against my will’]. Haňťa addresses the incorporation of the word as a total internalization of knowledge (Hrabal 1994, p. 9; Heim translates this as ‘My education has been so unwitting’, Hrabal 1990, p. 1]. 18 ‘[I have been] smearing myself with letters until I’ve been come to look like my encyklopedias’ (Hrabal 1990, p. 1). 19 ‘[T]ak jsem vytvořil baldachýn a postelová nebesa na kterých do stropu jsou vyrovnány knihy, […] a když usínám, dvě tuny knih jako dvacetimetráková můra tlačí moje snění, někdy, když se neopatrně otočím, nebo ze spaní zakřičím a hodím sebou, v hrůze naslouchám, jak knihy se sesouvají, že stačí jen lehký dotyk kolena, třeba jen výkřik, a jako lavina se na mne všechno z nebes zřítí, roh hojnosti plný vzácných knih se na mne vysype a rozplácne mne jako veš […], naslouchám, jak knihy nade mnou snují pomstu a možnosti mne ohrožují na klidu duševním natolik, že raději spím vsedě stoličce u okna, docela zděšen tou představou jak zřícené knihy napřed mne rozmáznou v postelích a pak prorazí podlahou prvního patra a pak do přízemí a nakonec do sklepa tak jako zdviž’ [‘I pushed my twin beds together and rigged a kind of canopy of planks over them, ceiling high /…/ and when I fall asleep I’ve got all those books weighing down on me like a two-ton nightmare. Sometimes, when I’m careless enough to turn in my sleep or call out or twitch, I am horrified to hear the books start to slide, because it would take little more than a raised knee or a shout to bring them all down like an avalanche, a cornucopia of rare books, and squash me like a flea. /…/ I hear the books above me plotting their revenge, and I am so terrified by the prospect of having them flatten me and then crash through each floor all the way to the basement, like an elevator, that I prefer sleeping in my chair by the window’] (Hrabal 1994, pp. 19–20, Hrabal 1990, p. 17f.). 20 ‘A když jsem se vrátil domů, odstavil jsem v kuchyni stovky knih od futra dveří do pokoje a tam jsem našel znamení inkoustovou tužkou a čáry s datumem, kolik jsem k řečenému dni měřil. Vzal jsem knihu, přistoupil zády k futru dveří, shora jsem přitiskl knihu na temeno hlavy, pak jsem se na místě otočil, udělal čárku a už pouhým okem se viděl, že jsem se za těch osm let, kdy jsem se naposledy změřil, srazil o devět centimetrů. Pohlédl jsem vzhůru na baldachýn z knih nad mojí postelí a usoudil jsem, že jsem se nahrbil tím, že pořád jako bych nesl na zádech ta dvoutunová nebesa z knížek a knih’ [‘When I got home, I pushed a couple of hundred books away from the kitchen door and found the lines I used to draw on the frame with an indelible pencil to show how tall I’d been on a given date, and I picked up a book, stepped back against the doorframe, and pressed the book on my flat head, and when I turned in place and drew another line there, I could tell with the naked eye that in eight years I had shrunken four inches, and I decided I must have shrunk under the weight of that two-ton canopy of books’] (Hrabal 1994, p. 22, Hrabal 1990, p. 20). 210 SLOVO A SMYSL 24 of bibliophagy, or, given the fact, that he doesn’t devour books as a whole, but talks about sucking words and sentences, of ‘grammatophagy’ (Butzer 1998). Images of the eating and devouring of books or the licking and swallowing of the written word have often been looked at from a wide range of perspectives (see for instance Körte 2012). For instance, as manifestations of the grotesque21 and sometimes even as cases of metaphorical cannibalism (see Hansen-Löve 1987); they have been studied under the premises of media theory (see Wenzel 1997), but also with emphasis on their presumably cultic and religious origin.22 Therefore, it is not surprising that the imagery of incorporation established in Příliš hlučná samota bears traces of religious reference, be it to Judaism or to biblical images and the Eucharist.23 Thus, the text admittedly lays the groundwork for a potential reading as a metaphor of transcendence or, more specifically, of transubstantiation (cf. Zuzana Stolz-Hladká 2004, pp. 39–44). This seems obvious, especially since on one hand, a couple of chapters later, Jesus himself makes an appearance, and on the other hand, the text explicitly refers to Holy Communion when the narrator reflects about what exactly happens during his incorporation of the word: Když očima se dostávám do pořádný knihy, když odstraním tištěná slova, tak z textu nezůstane taky víc než nehmotné myšlenky, které poletují vzduchem, spočívají na vzduchu, vzduchem jsou živeny a do vzduchu se vracejí, poněvadž všechno je koneckonců vzduch, tak jako současně krev je a současně není ve svaté hostii (Hrabal 1994, p. 10).24 21 I would (somewhat ironically) call this the ‘Bachtinian’ tradition of reading images of incorporation since literally all studies dealing with this with regard to the grotesque draw on Bachtin’s work on Rabelais. 22 In this context, most authors point out biblical sources, such as Ezekiel 2:9–3:10 or Revelation 10:2–10:10. But as demonstrated by Wolfram Drews, for instance, they themselves to be very likely to draw on even older cultic images and practices, such as the antique Egypt tradition of the dissolution of papyrus in water that was later drunken by priests (cf. Drews 2004, esp. pp. 127–132). 23 In one passage, the text not only explicitely refers to the Talmud, but consecutively parallels the destruction of books and knowledge with the destruction of Jewish culture, a link that one also comes across in other passages of the text alluding more or less overtly to the Holocaust: ‘když lis zacinkal v poslední fázi a drtil knihy silou dvaceti atmosfér, slyšel jsem drcení lidských kostí, jako bych na ručním mlýnku šrotoval lebky a kosti v lisu drcených klasiků, jako bych presoval věty talmudu: Jsme jako olivy, teprve když jsme drceni, vydáváme ze sebe to nejlepší’ [‘whenever my hydraulic press entered its final phase and crushed the beautiful books with a force of twenty atmospheres, I would hear the crunch of human skeletons and fell I was grinding up the skulls and bones of press-crushed classics, the part of the Talmud that says: For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us’ (Hrabal 1994, p. 17, Hrabal 1990, p. 14). 24 ‘When my eyes land on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ’ (Hrabal 1990, p. 2). ANNA FöRSTER 211 But if one takes a closer look at this passage, one can see that Haňťa’s ‘tak jako […] je’ [‘as it is’] does not compare his incorporation of the word with the oral reception of the Host itself, but that it rather refers to the suspension of the difference between the material and the immaterial that the sacrament of Communion claims to occur to the wine and the Host through consecration.25 Through Haňťa’s comparison, the text links this underscoring of the difference between the material and the immaterial to the written word, and consequently, to the binarity of the sign as medium and meaning. But as Hans Blumenberg pointed out in his study on metaphors of reading and the ‘readability of the world’, when the difference between the signifier and the signified is suspended, one can read no more (cf. Blumenberg 1986, p. 35). Thus, it is absolutely consequent that the narrator doesn’t speak about reading as if he was sucking the words and sentences, but as, in fact, not reading at all (‘protože já když čtu, tak vlastně nečtu’, Hrabal 1994, p. 9).26 Or, as Haňťa himself hints at with his references to Communion, his peculiar practice of reception does not necessarily suspend or transcend the written word’s materiality, but consists in receiving it as a co-presence of the material and the immaterial, thus, of the body and the word. 3. TOPOL: DISSOLVING THE WORD IN SEMEN Jáchym Topol’s Sestra also unfolds its relationship between body and word in a metaphor of incorporation. But as is revealed by a closer reading, the fact that Topolʼs text employs the same imagery as Hrabal’s Příliš hlučná samota does not necessarily mean that it establishes a comparable relationship between soma and logos. In fact, in the following pages, I will argue that it does quite the contrary and uses an almost identical metaphor to constitute a major shift between the écriture of Hrabal’s texts and its own poetic stance, yet to be defined in his prose debut. 25 With the apparition of Jesus and Lao-tze becomes clear that the suspension of binary opposition goes much further. The narrator reflects about the importance of their age for their respective thinking. While he sees Jesus as young, energetic, and eager to revolutionize the world, Lao-tze appears as an old man, who has withdrawn into himself to meditate about the emptiness of eternity. The narrator associates the first case with optimistic progression, the latter with the regression to the origin, cf. Hrabal 1994, p. 31 (Hrabal 1990, pp. 33–34). In this way, the text does not limit the suspension of binarity to the opposition of the carnal and the intellectual, but extends it into a reflection on different conceptions of temporality. First, the narrator associates Jesus with a winding, but still rambunctiously spiral moving forwards and upwards and the old Lao-tze with a solemnly recurring circle, and thereby establishes an antithesis of a teleological with a circular conception of time. But then, a couple of pages later, their opposition is blurred, if not abolished, when he talks about how ‘spirála a kruh si […] odpovídají a progressus ad futurum splývá s regressem ad originem […] a začal jsem si teď snít o tom, že progressus ad originem si odpovídá s regressem ad futurum’ [‘my professional spiral and circle come together and progressus ad futurum meets regressus ad originem /…/ I /…/ ruminate on progressus ad futurum meeting regressus ad originem’] (Hrabal 1994, p. 46, Hrabal 1990, p. 48). 26 ‘[W]hen I read, I don’t really read’ (Hrabal 1990, p. 1). 212 SLOVO A SMYSL 24 In the novel’s first chapter, after a few introductory sentences, the narration takes off with a sudden flashback in which the narrator (or more precisely, the voice presented as a narrator — a differentiation I will return to later) recalls his adolescent years in ‘normalized’ Czechoslovakia of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He especially reminisces on his then-girlfriend, who, as the text suggests, introduced him to the pleasures of sexuality. In this context, the text introduces an image of absorption, a reading I would like to keep in mind with the aforementioned sucking of the word in Hrabal’s text. Here, the reference to Holy Communion is even more explicit since absorption is not only compared to the reception of the Host, but the image deals with a Communion wafer itself: Na jazyk mi dává oplatku, to znamínko boží, a já tam mám ještě semeno, kde sou tvý děti, třeba všechny neumřely, jak sem rychle běžela. Později tu chuť mazala, už to nepotřebovala, moskytiéru v džungli, povlak na jazyku, kterým jsme tolik lhali, rodinám, škole, knězi, všem ostatním, všem mimo společenství, to už potom jablka [sic], nebo se alespoň napila vody a měla jiný, složitější masky a převleky (Topol 2008, p. 10).27 Even though the comparison with the fruit drop the text draws might be unexpected in Hrabal’s text, Haňťa still speaks of his sucking words with a somewhat buoyant solemnity; here the encounter of the consecrated Host with the semen left on the tongue from a previous sexual encounter clearly reveals a travestying effect. The very fact that the Host is not dissolved in salivary and later in gastric juices, as it is supposed to be, but in spilled seminal fluid clearly is a case of the ‘profanation’ [‘profanace’] Vladimír Novotný has posited as a central figure for Topol’s debut novel (Novotný 2000).28 But while absorption is employed to blur or even abolish the border between the word and the body in Hrabal’s text, here the very image results in the opposite — namely in the reinforcement of the binarity between soma and logos. It is, in fact, employed to exclude the body from the narrative discourse. Above all, this is due to the fact that while in case of Hrabal’s text incorporation is successfully finalized, here it is intermittently, if not righteously denied in various ways. On the one hand, on a metaphysical level, so to speak, it is precluded by the noncompletion of the sacramental act. The text remains unclear if the person receiving 27 ‘He put a wafer on my tongue, the sign of God, she said, and I still had semen in there with your kids, they might not all’ve been dead yet, I ran the whole way. Later she wiped off the taste, no longer needing that mosquito net in the jungle, that coating on the tongue we lied with so often, to our families, teachers, priests, to everyone outside the community, and instead she ate an apple, or took a sip of water, using other, more elaborate masks and disguises’ (Topol 2000, p. 18). 28 Even though I do not necessarily agree with the conclusions Novotný draws in his paper, or with his decision to label this phenomenon as specifically ‘postmodern’, I agree with him to the extent that in Topol’s texts I see de-sacralisation as a central gesture. In my opinion this is neither restricted to Sestra nor to the depiction of religious objects or the use of religious imagery, but also extends to secularized areas such as national mythology or historiography. ANNA FöRSTER 213 the Host actually swallows it (which, according to the idea of Communion, is essential for the incorporation of the word, the body of the believer). In fact, the text uses the somewhat odd and at the very least ambiguous expression of the person ‘wip[ing] off the taste’ (‘chuť mazala’) which could mean that the mixture of sperm and Host has been swallowed and only the after-taste has been gotten rid of. But it could also refer to the contrary and be read as the receiving person having spat out the mixture. Even more so, as, in the same sentence, it is referred to as ‘povlak’ [‘coating’] on the tongue, which, after all, suggests that something remained unswallowed. On the other hand, on a physical level, incarnation is excluded by the denial of a potential conception, a reference that far exceeds this short passage. The text not only places the sperm not inside the body, but solely on the tongue, but also refers to the spilled semen as ‘unborn (or rather unconceived) children’ dying on the tongue (‘tvý děti, třeba všechny neumřely’). A couple of pages later, the narration jumps forward to the events of the summer of 1989 and the arrival of thousands of East German refugees in the West German embassy on Prague’s Malá Strana. The narrator and his girlfriend break into neighboring houses to have sex in damp basements and dirty coal cellars. In this context, the non-completion of incorporation becomes even more acute since the text links the potential conception of a child to a series of horrific visions in which the narrator sees his own sperm inseminating his partner’s eggs and a rapidly growing fetus inside her body who threatens to consume him.29 Right in his arms, the young woman starts to morph into an ugly old hag, raddled by age as well as by pregnancies and births.30 The fear of losing his bodily integrity to an uncontrol29 ‘V těch soumracích jsme stárli a každá buňka našeho společného těla už byla veteránem bitev… a síla mojí Psice se obracela proti ní, protože ona nežila jen pro sebe, už ne, chtěla dál… i se mnou. Ale já se bál… být na světě tak, jak ona chtěla, dát jí to, být tu v někom dalším… ztrácel jsem svou sílu tím, že jsem hrál, v různých převlecích a postavách jsem si ohmatával svět, protože jsem byl plný strachu pro přímý dotek’ [‘We aged in those twilights, by now every cell of in our shared body was a combat veteran… and She-Dog’s power was turning against her because she wasn’t living just for herself anymore, she wanted to go farther… and take me with her. But I was afraid… to be in the world the way she wanted me to, to give it to her, to be inside someone else… I was losing my power by acting, feeling out the world in assorted costumes and character because I was fearful of direct contact’] (Topol 2008, p. 17, Topol 2000, pp. 25–26). 30 ‘V mých očích, které byly upřené do usmívajících se očí Psice, jsem viděl svou hrůzu, když jsem putoval po kůži stařenina břicha, a poslala mě ještě dál, a teď i v čase, tělem jsem se dotýkal vlhkých zárodků a už to nebylo moje tělo, stal jsem se jednou z látek embrya a byl jsem v něm, čas se náhle otočil a já byl s nimi, když zrály v břiše té ženy a šly na svět v krvi a pláči, cítil jsem, jak se čas zastavuje, když přišla bolest, a jak vytváří skutečnost a pak mne Psice znovu vyslala do stařeniných vnitřností, které se mi otvíraly, a znovu jsem byl na cestě ven a pak v Psici a cítil jen tlak v ptáku. Když jsem stříkal, přál jsem si už jít do dne, ven, ale Psice držela pevně… teď jsem cítil, jak nás čas života, ten starý čas ve sklepeních, který jsme vyhledávali, začíná strhávat, sesmekli jsme se z výklenku a letěli vzduchem, tělo Psice v mém objetí těžklo, viděl jsem, jak se jí propadá tvář, vlasy jí šedivěly. Měla hrubou kůži, dotýkal jsem se jejího břicha, zjizveného po porodech, a tebe ti neukážu! dala mi větu’ [‘In my eyes, fixed on the smiling eyes of She-Dog, I saw my horror as I travelled along the skin of the old woman’s belly, and then she sent me farther, now through time 220 SLOVO A SMYSL 24 (ed.): Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997). Papers from a Symposium. University College London, London 2004, pp. 35–49. Topol, Jáchym: City. Sister. Silver, trans. Alex Zucker. Catbird Press, New Haven 2000. Topol, Jáchym: Sestra. Host, Brno 2008. Topol, Jáchym: Waffen aus Tolmin, trans. Eva Profousová. In: Plinio Bachmann — Rita Czapka — Knut Neumayer (eds.): Kakanien — neue Republik der Dichter. Zsolnay, Wien 2011, pp. 220–242. Topol, Jáchym: Hrabal přede mnou trčí jako balvan. Hospodářské noviny, 26. 3. 2014. Vojvodík, Josef: Imagines Corporis. Tělo v české moderně a avantgardě. Host, Brno 2006. Wenzel, Horst: Die ‚fließende Rede‘ und der ‚gefrorene‘ Text. In: Gerhard Neumann (ed.): Poststrukturalismus. Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft. J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart — Weimar 1997, pp. 481–503. Zand, Gertraude: Výbuch času 1989: Jáchym Topol a staronový svět jeho románu Sestra. In: Česká literatura na konci tisíciletí. Příspěvky z 2. kongresu světové literárněvědné bohemistiky. Ústav pro českou literaturu Akademie věd České republiky, Praha 2001, pp. 793–800 (republished in Říha, Ivo /ed./: Otevřený rány. Vybrané studie o díle Jáchyma Topola. Torst, Praha 2013, pp. 23–30). RESUMÉ Slova a/bez těl: inkorporace slov jako poetologická metafora v textech Bohumila Hrabala a Jáchyma Topola Příspěvek studuje vztah mezi tělem a slovem v textech Bohumila Hrabala a Jáchyma Topola. Zabývá se především obrazy inkorporace a zkapalnění slov, které chápe jako poetologické metafory. Navrhuje, abychom protagonistu a vyprávěče Topolova debutového románu Sestra chápali nikoli jako literární postavu v úzkém smyslu, nýbrž spíš jako alegorizovanou referenci k Hrabalově poetologické metaforice. RÉSUMÉ Words and/without Bodies: The Incorporation of the Word as Poetological Imagery in Texts by Bohumil Hrabal and Jáchym Topol The paper studies the relationship between body and word in works of Bohumil Hrabal and Jáchym Topol. Attention is paid particularly to images dealing with the incorporation and liquifying of the written word, which are understood as explicitely poetological metaphors. It further suggests that we understand the protagonist and narrator of Topol’s debut novel Sestra, Potok, not as a genuine literary character but rather as an allegorized reference to Hrabal poetological imagery. KLÍČOVÁ SLOVA / KEY WORDS Bohumil Hrabal; Jáchym Topol; intertextovost; poetologické metafory / Bohumil Hrabal; Jáchym Topol; intertextuality; poetological metaphors Anna Förster | Universität Erfurt [email protected]