Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
Bohumil Hrabal
BOHUMIL HRABAL (1914–1997) was born in Brno, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. More interested in poetry and the life of the brewery managed by his stepfather than in his studies, Hrabal eventually enrolled in the law faculty at Charles University in Prague. The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 led to the closing of the universities and Hrabal did not complete his degree until 1946. Not inclined to practice law and unable to find a publisher for his poetry once the Communist Party came to power in 1948, Hrabal held a long series of odd jobs, including notary’s clerk, warehouseman, railroad worker, insurance agent, traveling salesman, foreman in a foundry, wastepaper recycling center worker, and stagehand. In 1962 he became a full-time writer, but due to government restrictions was obliged to publish much of his work in underground editions or abroad. The motion-picture adaptation of his novella Closely Watched Trains brought Hrabal international recognition, including the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, but only in 1976 was he “rehabilitated” by the government and permitted to publish select works. By the time of his death—he fell from a fifth-floor window in a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the birds—Hrabal was one of the world’s most famous Czech writers and the author of nearly fifty books. Among his other works available in English translation are The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, I Served the King of England, and Too Loud a Solitude.
ADAM THIRLWELL is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape; and an essay on novels, The Delighted States. He lives in London.
DANCING LESSONS FOR THE ADVANCED IN AGE
BOHUMIL HRABAL
Translated from the Czech by
MICHAEL HENRY HEIM
Introduction by
ADAM THIRLWELL
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
DANCING LESSONS FOR THE ADVANCED IN AGE
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
1
BOHUMIL Hrabal was born in the city of Brno in 1914—just in time for the finale of imperial Austro-Hungary. And this is one reason, perhaps, why years later Hrabal might enjoy inventing narrators who claim that “a fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind, then she reached over to me and I fell off the rocking chair and overturned the aquarium.”
Or why, too, Hrabal might claim that his family ancestry could be traced back to a French soldier wounded in the Napoleonic Wars who became entangled, in every sense, with a Moravian girl. And while Hrabal’s legend may also be true, I like the additional fact that this story of his ancestor is similar to the story of another French soldier who fell in love with a girl in the course of his campaigns, Denis Diderot’s Jacques—who was himself a transmigration of another campaigning narrator, Laurence Sterne’s Corporal James Trim ... And if this series of real and imaginary lives is shuffled together, what emerges is a composite portrait: a narrator saddened by history, who refuses to accept that life is fate. For Hrabal, the exemplary instance of such a narrator was his uncle Pepin, who once served in the Austro-Hungarian army and who, wrote Hrabal, was a constant teller of stories, who “sat there at the table and started at the ceiling and saw what he was talking about up there. He merely reproduced it.”[1] Uncle Pepin is the pure form of what Hrabal would call “palaverers, people who, thanks to their madness, transcend themselves through experiment and spontaneity, and through their ridiculousness they achieve a kind of grandeur, because they end up where no one expected them or expects them.”[2]
Hrabal, of course, is also describing himself—a palaverer who, like every palaverer, refused to accept the usual categories of grandeur, whose digressive hyper-novels constitute not only a refusal of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, and the subsequent Soviet invasion of 1968. Yes, they represent a refusal to allow these grand events to be the final arbiters of meaning. Palavering was Hrabal’s response to the overbearing narrative of the world historical: “my defence against politics, my policy in fact—my mode of writing.”[3]
And it is a palaverer who narrates Hrabal’s novel in one monologue: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. The novel was published in Prague in 1964, when Hrabal was fifty. “Ah, those beloved Sixties,” remembered Milan Kundera, “at the time I liked to say cynically: the ideal political regime is a crumbling dictatorship; the machinery of oppression functions ever more incompetently, but it is still in place to stimulate a critical, mocking turn of mind.”[4] In the 1940s and 1950s, Hrabal had been a worker—on the railways, in a steel factory, a theater, a paper-pulping plant—who also happened to write gorgeous stories. In 1964, with this novel in one sentence he arrived at the form of his originality—a style of accelerated digression. In the decades that followed, when Prague became a place of paralyzed anxiety, the palaverer would be forced into more contorted and more melancholy acrobatics. But Hrabal was ready for his duel with world history. With this style, so adept at inverting the ordinary values of history, Hrabal was happy.
2
But I suppose that to the modern reader in Shanghai or Los Angeles, Hrabal’s text might seem to be an exercise in pure technique: a novel in one sentence, without even a final full stop! It might seem another freak-out from the nouvelles vagues of the 1960s. But Hrabal’s novel represents something more permanent than a trick: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is an instrument for registering how sadly and how gravely reality can morph and flow into a fiction.
The reader overhears a monologue addressed to a group of “young ladies,” in some sort of pub—that maybe also operates quietly as a brothel—by a man who cheerfully admits he is nearly seventy (“now you know why I make so many trips to the cemetery”) and who recounts his stories, especially from the era of the monarchy. He was a soldier, but he left the army to become a shoemaker (like, coincidentally, Hrabal’s uncle Pepin)—a trade he entered at twenty-two, with Weinlich and Sons, purveyor to the court. After shoemaking, he went into the brewery business (like Uncle Pepin, too). He is in love with the world of work, and so his monologue is a breviary of practical advice on how to make a shoe, brew beer, or choose between Javanese and Ceylonese cinnamon. He is also a former member of the Sokol Gymnastic Society and, in his own words, “as sensitive as Mozart and an admirer of the European Renaissance.” For most of all, he is a seducer: by “European Renaissance” he means sex—like the emperor “doing the European Renaissance with the Schratt lady,” just as he means the same thing by “dancing lesson,” and he confidently explains that “rich ladies are always romantic, the offers I used to get would make me break out something awful.” But although his tone possesses a certain levity—the Holy Trinity is mischievously described as using a “carrier pigeon to communicate,” amazed as he is by the fact that “for a thousand years the Church has been squawking at us Czechs to curb our passions”—what remains, in the end, is sadness.
For this is a palaverer who is bewildered by the real (“I mean, the things that happen”). The real is a series of crazed disturbances: like a thief putting his hand around a door and having it chopped off by the incensed householder within, a hand that returns in the story of a general’s hand blown off by a grenade in a practical joke played on him by his recruits. And so yes, he may be just an ordinary roué, “promising you red leather pumps like the ones I once made for Doctor Karafiát�
��s sister, who was a beauty, but had one glass eye, which is a problem, because you never know what it’s going to do next, a hatter from Prostějov once told me,” but really, of course, amidst these tall stories—like the story of two identical twins, one of whom drowned in the bath when they were a year old, but since they were identical no one knew which one had drowned, Vincek or Ludvíček, and so although they decided, after tossing a coin, that it was Ludvíček, as he grew older Vincek couldn’t help wondering if in fact he was really Ludvíček, and that it was Vincek who had in fact died, and so he would drink, and wander by the water’s edge and go swimming, “testing the waters, so to speak, till at last he drowned”—yes, amidst these exaggerated stories a sad desire emerges: “I take a different tack, I want to be a hero.”
Such craziness! Such vanity!
Or so the ordinary reader would ordinarily think. But the palaverer is a hero, in fact—precisely in his lack of heroism: his absolute gentleness. He has replaced living with talking, and he is heroic in this commitment to the alternative beauty of fiction, to his stories—which are, as he says “like windows on the world, points, goals, scores, the principle the late Strauss applied to his heavenly melodies, sending them out into the world to refine the emotions.” A hero, and also hopeful: his stories discover beauty everywhere—like “the time when we initiated the stove fitter into the mysteries of love on the billiard table.” This isn’t, of course, the usual form of heroism: but then, why should it be? “They achieve a kind of grandeur,” Hrabal said of his palaverers, “because they end up where no one expected them or expects them.”[5]
3
And Hrabal’s novel is no more an ordinary novel than its hero is an ordinary hero. Characters flicker into animation and are then killed off, or are killed off only to be mentioned as possibly still alive—who knows? It is a mess of transitions, of moral dicta leading to momentary anecdotes, which then lead into a spiral of relations and friends and further stories about related incidents in far-off cities, so that the original moral point, whatever it was, is completely lost.
And this style has its genealogy, its history. There is the example of the picaresque, digressive novel—like Sterne’s and Diderot’s. But there is also the modernist model of Ulysses: and, in particular, its finale—Molly Bloom’s sleepy stream of consciousness.
In 1930, a translation of Ulysses into Czech had been published in three volumes. In 1932, a Czech version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” a section of what was to become Finnegans Wake, was also published. Prague was dizzy with international experiment. And then world history intervened. In 1959, when a translation of Joyce’s early book of short stories, Dubliners, was published in Communist Prague, the translator now admonished Joyce for loitering too dangerously on the “path of destructive experimentalism.”[6]
Hrabal was loitering beside him. He once said that Dancing Lessons was “a stream of narration ... analogous to Molly Bloom’s, that’s to say Joyce’s.”[7] But the two streams still flow in different directions. Molly Bloom, lying in bed at the end of Ulysses, as her husband Leopold Bloom falls asleep, thinks in a series of nine unpunctuated sentences—without commas, or apostrophes, and with only occasional capital letters—each forming a single unpunctuated paragraph. Joyce’s commitment here, as in the first French translation of 1925, where Joyce had the monologue printed without any French accents, was to flow, gathering up the miniature blocks of concrete detail that Joyce jotted in his working notes, like “MB got LB promoted,” or “LB thanked her for frig,” and so on—the absolute intimacy: “How did my foot excite him?,” “Is he thinking of me?”[8] But Joyce’s best invention, I think, is not so much these details as the swerving syntax that gathers them into a fluent drift of pensive, distracted digression. He invented a new way of showing how someone might sleepily think.
Hrabal, however, invented a new way of showing a certain style of talking. Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness is only in her head, while the flows and streams in Hrabal’s novel are performed for a mutely captive audience. And this creates a shimmer that isn’t present in Joyce, even if Joyce is the great precursor (the “acme of literature,” as Hrabal once said[9]). The movements of Hrabal’s narrators are joyous, but they are also forms of avoidance.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age offers the dazzled reader a whole encyclopedia of digressive forms, a handbook of impossible evasions. I once tried to classify these digressions according to a two-part system: Digressions Caused by the Narrator’s Character, which could be subdivided into a) the desire to offer autobiography, b) the desire to give advice, c) the desire to expand on an anecdote to prove a moral point, and d) the desire to follow the path of his comprehensive memory; and Digressions Caused by the Narrator’s Narrative Aesthetic, which could be subdivided into a) the desire to give comprehensive detail, b) the desire to pay due attention to rumor, c) the desire to describe relatives, and d) the desire to include random improvised portraits—a last subdivision which led me despairingly to invent a third category: Things Not Included in the Above Two Categories, like a nonsequitur masked by a hinge word, or a stray thought leading to an associative anecdote leading finally to a minor character’s future. And this is not, no not at all, an exhaustive taxonomy.
4
Hrabal loved to talk up the noisy headlong clatter of his Perkeo typewriter—to exaggerate the everyday materiality of his writing. (His Perkeo had been made in 1905, and he picked it up from some Soviet soldiers during World War II. But Perkeo was a German manufacturer. And so there was a problem for the Czech novelist: a Perkeo was not adapted to the complicated system of Czech accents. In fact, it possessed none at all. And so Hrabal’s texts were written in Czech without accents, and so Molly in translation was translated.) But this exaggeration was in fact a form of self-concealment, of slyness. Hrabal took these high-speed rushes and then submitted them to a process of deliberate and delicate montage. Hrabal’s art is double, based on cutting as much as on digression. As well as a typewriter, he relied on scissors and glue: “I take a pair of scissors, a cutter, and I proceed like a film editor.”[10] (Even Dancing Lessons, after all, began as something else—The Sufferings of Old Werther, one of Hrabal’s earliest experiments: a sequence of seven texts dictated to Hrabal by his uncle Pepin in 1949, which Hrabal didn’t publish—but which he then recut, restyled, and rewrote in the process of inventing his 1964 novel.)
And this creation of a novel as collage—a conjunction of disparate particulars—was made possible by a particular intuition: a story, in Hrabal’s writing, is very small. It might last only a sentence, or half a sentence—it might only be as long as the distance between two commas, or parentheses. This is why he is a novelist of such lightness: con brio, he dispenses stories, he disperses them. This is the form that Hrabal perfected in the 1960s: a rewritten spontaneity.
In an essay written in 1956, when he was twenty, in the samizdat magazine K, Václav Havel tried to explain the meaning of Hrabal’s technique in his early stories. It represented, thought Havel, “a desire to give as truthful an image of the world as possible, as objective a witness as possible.” And he explained: “No isolated fact, even when described with the greatest fidelity, constitutes a truth in itself; it only becomes truth if, in the same sentence, we become aware of another fact, opposed in some way to the first.” Truth exists, but it is not available to the lone and lonesome human, the single paragraph. “In effect,” added Havel, “Hrabal says that the human being is always mistaken in his point of view on the world, but that the world in which he lives, its underlying truth as a context of facts, cannot be mistaken.”[11] In Hrabal’s constant juxtaposition of oppositions lay a desire for infinite representation.
And this new kind of writing requires a new kind of reader—a reader who can, in Hrabal’s term, practice “diagonal reading.”[12] It requires the reader to remember a scrap of sentence (“having the time of my life with you like the emperor with that Schratt lady”) that will be explained, a little,
by a scrap of sentence a few pages later (“you should have seen him do the European Renaissance with the Schratt lady, I was on guard duty in Meidling and I saw it all”); or it will require the reader to wonder if patterns exist in apparently random details: if, say, the story of the poet “Bondy pissing his two buckets onto the rug” might be related metaphorically or thematically to the story of Olánek, who once “right there in the main square,” on being asked how he was on his fiftieth birthday, “pulled out his member—he had ten beers in him at the time—and drenched the advertisement for Náchod Mills all the way to the accent over the a.”
For the sentence is not the only unit of style, this is the lesson of Hrabal’s novel in one sentence. Instead, much stranger devices are possible, like Hrabal’s blockages, and slippages: his digressions that are secretly progressions ...
What, after all, is the meaning of a novel in one sentence? What did it mean for Hrabal? As a symbol of absolute digression, it represents, I think, a desire for a total novel. In the 1950s, Hrabal’s friend, the poet Egon Bondy, had invented the slogan “total realism” to describe their shared aesthetic ideal. The total! That was the desire of a novel in one sentence—a form that Hrabal had sensed in Joyce’s finale to Ulysses (and in Apollinaire’s unpunctuated collage poems), and later, when he was writing a trilogy of novels that pretended to be his wife’s autobiography, he would find in Faulkner: “In recent years I’ve felt an affinity with Faulkner in sensing a need for such endless sentences. I’d hardly go any further than inserting commas and just the odd full-stop. With him I expect it was the same as what I feel myself, just breathing in and breathing out. I inhale images and then exhale them over a period.”[13]
