In Defence of the Defenceless

IN DEFENCE OF THE DEFENCELESS

Humour in Slovak literature

The fate of the first work of Slovak literature encapsulates the trials and tribulations that accompanied its later development. Having banned his epigrams a few years earlier, ecclesiastical censorship prohibited the publication of part II of Jozef Ignác Bajza’s The Adventures and Experiences of the Young Man Rene (René mládenca príhody a skúsenosti, 1784). However, writers learned how to “self-regulate”  within a few decades. As they embarked on their romantic quest of developing national self-awareness which was accompanied by a dangerous increase in national oppression, their writing was expected to perform a weighty role and to stand in for non-existent national institutions. Writers were expected to adhere to a strict military discipline, not unlike that of an ascetic religious order. Anything that protruded from the tight formation was ruthlessly eliminated, like undesirable new shoots disfiguring a carefully trimmed hedge.

Like a tortoise, Slovak literature gradually grew so accustomed to living under a defensive shield that it scarcely noticed, after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, that the lethal grip had loosened and that – even though it still had to play the educator’s role – its creative substance had, nevertheless, changed along with the nation’s situation or, to put it loftily, the situation of its potential readership. That is why the two totalitarian regimes that followed, and which used literature to manipulate our lives, found it only too easy to continue the tradition of making literature serve an ideal. The old system was further perfected, giving rise to a conformist and willing literature that can, with hindsight, be partly blamed for what happened in the world of letters. Not only ideas but also the forms of expression, the choice of metaphors and vocabulary, were decreed from above.

Furthermore, since we have always suffered from a tendency to be deadly serious about ourselves, “solid work” in Slovakia has always been more highly valued than “unserious” self-deprecation. The superstitious fear of mockery, regarded as something hostile and harmful, is an echo of the ancient worry about losing one’s dignity and of a resentment of everything ambiguous and ironic, anything that might challenge us or threaten our self-confidence. And, of course, it was in the absolute interest of those in power to cultivate these atavistic feelings in authors and readers. For there is nothing a dictatorship fears more than mockery and challenge.

And that, if nothing else, is the reason why it is not the generations of worthy golden-tongued classics who swim with the current trying to find ever more beautiful and eloquent ways of saying what has been said a hundred times before who really determine the course of literature and through it, the state of national awareness but the disorderly and perhaps provocative convention-breakers and challengers, those who strike out on their own to fight their way through the thicket of prejudice and prescriptivism. They are the only ones capable of diagnosing the diseases of the human soul and of prescribing an uncompromisingly bitter medicine or, where necessary, of wielding the scalpel.

Jozef Ignác Bajza (1755 – 1836), a man of the Enlightenment, was hardly equipped to take on this role. He emerges from the banned Volume II of his Rene novel (see above) as an incensed pamphleteer of the Radishchev school rather than a witty Diderot.  Playwright Ján Chalupka (1791 – 1871) was too much of a poeta doctus to be considered a humorist. Nevertheless, he introduced a type of comedy into our literature that continues all the way to the meek Ivan Stodola (1888 – 1977), whose comedy was built on blunders and mistaken identities. Generations of amateur theatres have been brought up on these comedies, yet he lacks the temperament that would make him a great satirist, as all his comedies follow a rather predictable formula. Despite the ironic election episodes in Ján Kalinčiak’s (1822 – 1871) novel The Restoration (Reštavrácia, 1860), the overall effect, even at the time of the book’s initial publication, must have felt like an olde-worlde idyll, a gentle smile at the past, failing to reflect the hardship and harshness of Kalinčiak’s own real-life experience.

If we accept the renowned Czech critic František Xaver Šalda’s claim that real satire (and after all, what is satire if not an ironic act of rebellion and challenge) is reserved for “the truly poetic, the truly great spirits“ and that the satirist must “passionately resent the compact majority striding and blocking the source of living water like a lazy frog“, the only writer with a legitimate claim to being the grandfather of ironic scepticism and bitter mockery of the deformations of human beings and the times they live in is Jonáš Záborský (1812 – 1866). A sacrilegious man of great stature, one of the few truly free spirits capable of unconventional thinking, he was a man who regarded himself as a patriot, yet dared not only to think but to apply, quite casually, the term “demagogue“ to Svetozár Štúr, and who was able, in fits of angry passion, to penetrate the depths of the human condition of the Slovak intellectual of his days, constantly balancing between destruction and betrayal. He was labelled a “national sinner“, although he was the one who suffered the most from his own cruel irony. (By the way, Bajza was involved in a long-drawn-out polemic with the followers of Bernolák, while Záborský spent all his life opposing the followers of Štúr. Is it merely a coincidence that neither of them was willing to join those marching in step under the sacred national banners? Certainly, there was a degree of offended vanity and cantankerousness in both of these men but is it not a sign of an independent spirit that someone is willing to swim against the current if he considers it necessary, even at the risk of universal condemnation?)

Sadly, this exceptional figure had no followers, although Ladislav Nádaši-Jégé’s Mephistophelian ironic frown must not be ignored. Yet the trickle of irascible nay-saying and mockery ran beneath the surface of Slovak literature like a subterranean river. Only from time to time could its current be glimpsed deep down, for example, in certain passages by Janko Jesenský (1874 – 1945) or in Timrava’s (1867 – 1951) muted polemics on the national mentality and the position of women in society. Unfortunately, a convulsion of talent forced the promising early works of Gejza Vámoš (1901 – 1956) to veer from the river’s course, even in his most passionate book, The Broken Branch (Odlomená haluz, 1934). However, it suddenly surfaced again in Ján Bodenek’s (1911 – 1985) angry memoir The Days of the Wolves (Z vlčích dní, 1947) as well as in the relentlessly sarcastic tragicomedy A Play Without Love (Hra bez lásky, 1946) by Štefan Králik (1939 – 1983), written before it became suppressed again in his later works. And it is most certainly dotted around the books by the solitary doubting troublemaker Alfonz Bednár (1914 – 1989).

This is not to say that Slovak literature did not produce exceptionally talented writers whose original vision and goals were out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, apart from the eternal outsider Rudolf Sloboda (1938 – 1995), who stubbornly followed his own path, most of them allowed themselves to be enticed back into the mainstream of regulated communist literature, often not so much by direct brute force as by the prospect of gain.

A lone exception was Dominik Tatarka (1913 – 1989), the sole righteous man and moral authority in dark times, a writer who resisted the regime’s stifling power, ultimately becoming a martyr to its increasing brutality. He was a true Old Testament prophet and visionary, a personality whose every word and every gesture, as adept at cultivating a garden as at striving towards castles in the air, exerted a fascination. He would have been equally at home in the Negev desert or as a hermit sage in the hills of Slovakia. However, his words were not up to carrying the burden of his thoughts and his writing fell short of the flights of fancy direct contact with listeners induced in him, his words going round in circles when they should have given way to a more eloquent silence. This applies first and foremost to his searing satire of Stalinism, The Demon of Consent (Démon súhlasu, 1956), a book that was a breakthrough in Slovak thinking. The critic is faced with a difficult choice in determining the scholastic dispute between form and content, realizing at the same time that it is only in their harmonic union that a literary work can truly take full flight.

No further significant breakthrough occurred until the arrival of a new generation that had not been sullied by the mud splashing from the wheels of history. It was a generation unaffected by the painful somersaults of fate and, though perhaps more naive for lacking this experience, it looked to the future with more confidence.

In 1959 the student duo of Milan Lasica (1940) and Július Satinský (1941 –2002) illuminated our literary firmament like a meteorite arriving from another galaxy.  From the very beginning their dialogues sparkled with paradox, reaching the darkest recesses of the human psyche and society. They created a type of authorial theatre that appealed to people from all walks of life. They only ever played themselves, observing the world, art or history in an entirely non-actor–like manner, commenting on their discoveries with the bravura of irony, playing with words and stretching them to the point of total nonsense. They were not interested in topical political satire. Rather, they offered a smiling philosophical commentary on the human condition and modern society, thereby debunking – without the need to resort to topical allusions – our everyday reality as well as the ordinary people as perpetrators of tradition and fellow creators of the modern world, exposing its prejudice and misdemeanours as well as its concerns and problems.

Their friend and colleague Tomáš Janovic (1937) is on a similar wavelength. He is a contemplative poet, renowned author of children’s books, lyricist (including the lyrics for Lasica and Satinský’s first plays) but, above all, living proof that real humour cannot be separated from poetry. He has been involved in a perennial struggle for maximum effectiveness achieved through minimum means. While in his earlier work he sought to capture the absurdity of life in poetical nonsense metaphors, recently he has created an original new genre of “sad jokes“, which might be characterised as laconic definitions with an explosive content. Smiling sadly, without prejudice, he delves mercilessly beneath the surface of malice and narrow-mindedness, seeking to define the man of the present. The charmed reader starts by admiring his brilliant wit, discovering only gradually that it leaves a bitter aftertaste.

A witty ironicist and unsurpassed trickster, Pavel Vilikovský (1941) has experimented tirelessly not only with the form of fiction but also with the psyche of the modern man. His books are a constant linguistic adventure. Words in his hands turn into explosives. Vilikovský the magician uses words to undermine conventions both in life and in fossilised literary patterns. A case in point is his brilliant novella Forever Green Is... (A večne je zelený, 1989), a firework of parodic cheekiness and sacrilegious polemic with the “eternal values“ of our consciousness. As we glance into his distorting mirror, enjoying the classy entertainment, a sudden flash of recognition forces us to question most of our rock-solid “certainties“.

There have not been many writers in whom the way of thinking and lifestyle was in closer harmony with their work as in Vlado Bednár (1941 – 1984). His ruffian’s mask concealed a lyrical vision and a never admitted nostalgia. His adult and children’s fiction is often constructed as a collage or parody of excerpts of pulp novels, old textbooks and manuals. However, its dominant feature is an exaggerated play with topsy-turvy values and a provocative, nonsensical “logic“. This method, especially when applied to his short stories reminiscent of old American crazy comedies, might be tentatively labelled as “shock aesthetics“.

Dušan Dušek (1946), the quiet initiator of a sunny and non-aggressive world, has never accepted the rough reality of our lives. He sought its antithesis and a compassionate refuge in some point in the past, in dreaming of a time when Grandmother and Grandfather were still young and it was quite normal for people to live in harmony with each other and with nature. It is in this landscape that the author keeps on searching for his own childhood, memories and stories from his grandparents’ youth. Their harmony and their painfully gathered experience transform his dream of the past into a message for the future.

            In his passionate polemics with illusions, Dušan Mitana (1946) exposed the relative nature of our ideas and intentions, emphasising human loneliness and the impossibility of communication in modern society. Even from the most “scandalous“ stories in his cult debut Dog Days (Psie dni, 1971), with their provocatively irrational motives and explicit eroticism, there emanated a longing and bitter resignation. With each book, the tragic sense of being misunderstood and powerless and his attempts at rebellion became more pronounced, culminating in the cheekily flippant irony of the story collection The Slovak Poker. Naked Stories (Slovenský poker. Holé príbehy, 1993). In his later work he has abandoned this key principle, shifting into a metaphysical vagueness.

This strong middle generation of authors (which includes the robust story-teller Pavel Hrúz (1941) as well as the aristocratic essay writer and rebel Ivan Kadlečík (1938) has made a significant contribution to shaping the further development of Slovak literature. Its sceptically frowning world is only a step away from the ironic tricksters of the “Krowiak generation“, as I would tentatively label them after their spectacular collective spy parody Roger Krowiak (which first appeared in instalments in the journal Kultúrny život in 1992 – 1993 and then in book form in 2002). The “Krowiaks“ made a decisive break with the deadly seriousness of Slovak literature, claiming the right to be playful. Typical of this generation are the Krowiaks’ spiritual parents Peter Pišťanek (1961) and Dušan Taragel (1961) as well as Viliam Klimáček (1958), Igor Otčenáš (1956), Rado Olos (1970) and Peter Uličný (1960). Other authors, close in their views and poetics, include Daniela Kapitáňová (1956), Balla (1967), Karol D. Horváth (1961), Oliver Bakoš (1953), Peter Krištúfek (1973), Tomáš Horváth (1971), Pavol Rankov (1964), Silvester Lavrík (1964), Vlado Janček (1974), Marek Vadas (1971), Michal Hvorecký (1976), Márius Kopcsay (1968), as well as some younger writers such as Jakub Nvota (1977) and Kamil Žiška (1978) but also some who are slightly older but close to their outlook, such as Václav Pankovčín (1968 – 1999) and Jana Juráňová (1957), to name but a few.

Let us hope that this finally augurs well for Slovak literature and that this current in it will never again be driven underground. For irony and self-deprecation are the only weapons intellect has with which to defend itself. Being able not to take oneself too seriously, to laugh at one’s own problems and difficulties, at inferiority complexes and prejudice, and even at one’s own suffering, is key to the health of individuals as well as to a healthy society. And we have a lot to catch up with in terms of this kind of treatment.

     Translated by Julia Sherwood