Divák

The previous books by Tomáš Horváth, fiction-writer, playwright and literary scholar, have divided the lines of his readership into two camps. Those, who enthusiastically acclaimed his poetics as something refreshing and entertaining, and those, whose perplexed faces revealed that their traditional models of interpretation had fallen prey to the playfully insatiable text. A similar discourse is characteristic of Horváth’s most recent and bestseller-prone book Divák (The Spectator).

            Divák has all that makes a good parody on the spy suspense thriller. The suspense with a hat shoved all the way forward, entertainment bordering on the softly perverse, a full load of irony and self-irony, a car race (this time two yellow Citroens 2CV) and a bit of murder here and there, all under the author’s programmatic gesture that “books can become their authors‘ ultimate demise“ (p. 107). The problems multiplay when it transpires that Horváth, in addition to being the victim of fictitious murder, is also a secret password, the author of a murderous book, a part of a quasi-citation of a point and so on. By way of explanation to all of this, the reader is warned, from the first page on, “the range of possibilities within which he can operate is strictly and forever limited” (p. 104). On with the show!

            Dauzat, who seems to amount to the book’s main character, becomes unwittingly and against his will a part of some sort of strange theatrical performance, which simulates reality by having the audience and actors switch their roles. Dauzat and the reader alike are entering a refined world of plotting and manhunt, without clear delineation of who is the hunter and who is the hunted. At this point begins the undoing of traditional, say, and novelistic composition. As a result, the action breaks down into fragments of seemingly independent stories. It is any reader’s choice to make up his or her own reading, but the win-lose game with the author without ending up with checkmate on the last page can be played only by those readers who are able and willing to “murder” the classical reader in themselves and accept the rules of the game as set by the author already in his previous books.

Hence,  a character saying “beyond text there be nothing” (p. 33) should be taken at face value, although Divák is surely more than a mere self-contained nothing-but-construction kind of text. These configurations of stories can be summed up as an ironic take on the contemporary media-driven teleworld, where life is closely inspected by cameras or the curious eye of the beholder and thus resembling the popular and successful “reality show”. In this sense, the actual text ultimately remains the only genuine reality, in this case dangerously concealed in an orange cover with a weird illustration, title and name of the (alleged) author.

What T. M. finds most important is “to make readers respond in some way” (p. 32). This is undeniably complied with as the readers are at worst bound to throw the book down under the bed, or, at best and more likely, to immerse themselves fully into the intelligent metatextual frenzy offered. As for the actual work with the text, the book is unrivalled, once again in confirmation of its author’s unique position in Slovak contemporary fiction. However, conservative readers without the experience required are hereby expressly warned: beware of the Divák!

Marek Kopča