Authors

With Jiří Drašnar’s appearance on the Czech literary scene, an original experimenter arrived whose prose “provokes and unsettles” (A Haman). His rich experiences in life give him a unique view of the world which, when combined with formal experimentation, creates a dynamic and inspirational image that stretches across the contemporary horizon. Through all the changes in styles and genres it is possible to decipher the author’s central theme: at the beginning is a personal story which the author then generalizes and allows to grow into a wider, usually cataclysmic view of history. Behind the mock-up scenes of modern history lie a disrupted world order and the crumbling integrity of contemporary man. Although the main characters never give up in their search for an authentic life, as a rule they never reach their goal. In a Czech context – after less significant publications abroad - Jiří Drašnar arrived on the scene in 1992 with the prose triptych Desperádos informačního věku (Desperados of the Information Age). The first part deals with young “layabouts” during the period of real socialism. In contrast to the official rhetoric, their lives are filled with boredom, emptiness, skiving, promiscuity and alcohol etc. The main characters, with a twenty-year-old narrator as their leader, respond with cynicism and (self-)destruction to the bleak reality which follows normalization when unscrupulous careerists take control of society. The protagonist’s wanderings first take him away from the city and then finally away from the whole country. The second and third parts of Drašnar’s first prose work describe the narrator’s emigration experiences and then the return to his homeland after 1989. However, even here his disillusioned view of the world rarely alters and the personal tone becomes less distinctive. The personality of the narrator disappears into the background, and in place of a subjective view which passes over the rubble of experience, events, observations, conversations, visions and hallucinations, he lets the world “speak for itself”. At the same time the main character remains in permanent conflict with the leading ideology (whether it is communism, pragmatic capitalism or religious teachings) and uses his experience to reflect on “the enchanted circle of history”, where revolutions only bring to the helm all manner of collaborators, whilst the just vanish without a trace. Drašnar fully elaborates upon his particular view of the mechanisms of history in his second novel entitled O revolucích, tajných společnostech a genetickém kódu (On Revolutions, Secret Societies and the Genetic Code, 1996). A record of the last days of a dying elderly woman opens a panoptic picture of Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day. For the seemingly non-participatory narrator, history is not a thing of the past, but is something present in our own lives. Therefore, he passes through several time periods, forming a very flexible and dynamic model of narration. The author does not only trace the lives of the individual main characters, but also frequently mentions entire families and generations. He follows the past in its extreme, dramatic moments, and by using these key points he tries to ascertain the causes of historical catastrophes and evil in general. He perceives history as the eternal struggle between primitive instincts and rationality, where he considers both the repression of people’s natural characters and their unfettered expression to be destructive. When examining the development of civilization and ideology the author turns to biology and genetics in particular in an attempt to discover some kind of “elemental force” which governs people’s passions and behaviour. However, he does not establish a universal pattern; in history (as in people’s souls) random, unfathomable “blind” factors always play a role. The view of people as being governed by demons (including sexuality), and history as the crossroads of power and ideological interests, does not provide a consolatory vision of the world. In Jiří Drašnar’s first two works there was a characteristically raw, “bloody” vision of the world. The author’s writing, to paraphrase, “stank of old socks, unwashed bodies, scabs, bandages and gun powder, it tasted of goulash from dead horses, it reeked of intestines that had burst from stomachs ripped by shrapnel and bayonets, of pus and poison gas, of the lime from mass graves, it smelled of snow, coal, fire and sea…” His next works introduced radical changes in style. In 2001 Drašnar surprised everyone with his collection of experimental writings Noc na pláži (A Night on the Beach). Under the subtitle Etudy, improvizace a ostatní cvičení (Studies, Improvisation and Other Exercises) lurked a jumble of montages, remixes, manipulations and computer-generated fragments. There are texts from the inspirational Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, through Kolář’s “crossing of style and idea”, experiments using meditative techniques, to the already mentioned computer-formed or modified texts in which the author reveals a peculiar semantic world at the border of grammar and logic: “the great computer befriends the sad girl”, “Thomas loves Thomas”, “masturbation”. The author – either through his own intervention or through mechanical combinatorial analysis – uses various points of view, various genres and tries to “grasp and materialize linguistically the mutual operation and communication between consciousness and text”. After the endless counting of textual variations and their interpretations we feel on the one hand melancholy (“words can convey nothing”), but on the other hand there is a “zen” humour emerging from the perennial world game. Jiří Drašnar’s last work to date is the novel Venuše spící v krajině (Venus Asleep in the Countryside, 2004). The story, which divided critics, mainly expands upon passages which reflected the author’s main themes. However, from a formal position, it seems unusually muted and “restrained”. At the centre of the narrative is the monologue of an American man who is searching for his identity in the arms of women, in art and also in the philosophy of Japanese martial arts. The story is pared back; it is mainly a narrative meditation on existence, beauty and growing old, etc. The author compares various concepts of life and sets East and West in opposition concerning “American, European and Asian souls”. Again, he does not prefer one path over another – he merely presents the various views on life and leaves the rest to the reader.

(jn, photo www.blisty.cz)

This profile was last updated on January 1st 2008