Authors

František Dryje is a poet of the ‘negative night’, of heady blue smoke, and of sexuality that lies between play and erotic spirituality, between strenuous corporeality and a light dream, in which we would rather dress the object of our amorous desire than undress it. Like most of the leading proponents of Surrealism between the two world wars and then just after liberation in 1945, Dryje is a diŌcious artistic figure. He writes verse, fiction and essays, but has also made numerous collages and other surreal objects. He composes his texts in cycles, whose titles suggest their content, for example ‘Variabilní symboly’ (Variable Symbols/ Invoice Numbers), ‘Nutná obrana’ (Reasonable Force), ‘Paralelní básně’ (Parallel Poems), ‘Proplétání jazyků’ (A Confusion of Tongues), ‘Temné jasno’ (Dark Clearness), ‘Vykopaný pes’ (Disinterred Dog/That’s It) and ‘Zezadu’ (From Behind). A selection of cycles written in 1987–93, titled Požíraný druh (The Eaten Type), was the author’s first publication. It is introduced with Konrad Lorenz’s observation that for the eaten the presence of the eater is a distinct advantage. That’s why we can read most of the texts in this volume as gloomily apocryphal variations on the theme of the weaker and the stronger, the eater and the eaten, the one who gives oneself up and the one who takes power over the other, the passive and the active. Concealed within these polarities are the poetics of de Sade, of the wildness of passion and, on the other hand, of the equally ardent yielding of the one who, in the hands of a passionate person, changes into a trapped animal or some sort of priestess-offering. Dryje’s work of fiction ‘Pavla Adlerová’, which forms a major part of Požíraný druh, has a parallel in Breton’s renowned ‘Nadja’. The fictitious and real heroine is not only the poet’s love, but also the essence of femininity, which the male world subjugates and enslaves, mocks and shows contempt for, but also remakes in its own image. This Pavla Adlerová is an ‘unusual formation’ as if out of a work by Valéry, an eternal mother and amorphous woman, a being that can close itself into its cave. We can read the text as a variation on an old Freudian theme, for example the Oedipus complex, but also as a universal expression of the feelings of every loving human being, who wants to conquer love by running away from it. The tension between the female and male worlds, between sex and the erotic, acquires a purely detached abstract intellectual character. Dryje’s poems, full of innuendo and hints, rawness and Naturalism, as well as intellectual playfulness, are reminiscent of the women’s torsos in the collages of Karel Teige, which are asexual, asexually angelic, and seem to evoke the idea of male fear and existential angst in the face of the mysterious world of woman, of the elemental and the natural. Thus, in the work of František Dryje, Surrealism, which from its beginning had removed the inhibitions in man, turned into more than just its opposite – namely, something anxious when confronted with animality, on the run from the trap of sexuality to more distant, untouchable realms, in which all intercourse between the body and the spirit occurs in the land of solitude. The variations on Kafka’s ‘Höhle’ (cave or burrow) or Poe’s ‘pit’ is the fragment ‘Proplétání jazyků’, published in Muchomůr – génius noci (a play on the Czech for ‘toadstool’ and the Latin genius loci). From the abysm, as the primal state of being, we slide along the vertical line of life to the metamorphosis of the pit (jáma) into the ‘lady’ (dáma), whence leads the ‘path of the loner’ to the ‘workshop’ in which this ‘work’ is made, a work, however, of an esoteric nature, so that this surreally alchemistic act or transmutation will ultimately result in the ‘strong personality’ (as the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin put it) of the ‘Great House’. The vertical text suggests that in the work of Dryje, as in the work of his Surrealist artist colleague Martin Stejskal, there is a clear overlapping of Surrealist method and a general understanding of the world towards deep and transverse teachings and sacred, hermetic, cabalistic, mystic disciplines. Here, the intellect turns into renewed religious cult and myth. More than about physical touch or relations between beings enclosed in a single time and space, these cycles and texts, in the volume Mrdat (To Fuck), are also about ‘strikes of an eye’, about the blows and hits of intellectual abstraction and asceticism, about penetrations into the essence of phenomena through their external absurdity. The four-part composition Šalamounův hadr (Solomon’s Rag) is an expression of the formal boundlessness and freedom of the Surrealist view of the world. The first part of the book, called ‘Některé polohy’ (Some Positions), is clearly the strongest. The poet’s alchemistic, mystical wanderings are manifested at the level of quotations; the dynamics of movement – forward, backward, on one leg, squatting, flying, riding, being in tow, in ‘rays of the wind’ – introduces an existential tone into his writing, an element of unquenchable searching, which also toys with death. The change from ordinary situations to abnormality, a mysterious interaction between subject and object, the confusion of the world, surmounted by the order of the soul that mirrors itself – these are the constants of František Dryje’s work so far.

(js)

E-mail: dryje@email.cz

This author profile was last updated in 2005

Deutsch František DRYJE, Deutsch.doc

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