Authors

Since the early 1960s, the period when Bohumila Grögerová completed her first literary texts and translations, it can be said (running the risk of gross oversimplification) that two essential directions have been visible in her extensive, rich and strikingly varied literary oeuvre: the direction of radical verbal and stylistic experiment, and the direction of documentation, striving for the most authentic registration of the cultural and social circumstances of her historically variegated lifetime. Though each of these authorial directions was accentuated differently in various portions of her literary career, at no point did they emerge independently of each other: they were always in mutual communication, one interacting with and reinforcing the other. In the 1960s and 1970s, Grögerová, working in conjunction with Josef Hiršal, began her explorations of new territories of poetic creation. Initially, they commenced in the tradition of Mallarmé’s Un coup de des, the “trans-sense” (zaumnyj) language of the Russian futurist Velemir Khlebnikov, or the Calligrammes of Guillaume Apollinaire, forming lyrical verbal creations that reflect, alongside the semantic level, the visual qualities of individual statements (i.e. the volume JOB–BOJ). Later – particularly under the influence of the artist and poet Jiří Kolář ’s ever-expanding repertoire of collage techniques – they produced three juxtapositioned “cut-up” prose texts (Preludium [Prelude], Mlýn [Mill], Kolotoč [Carousel]). These freely associative poetic arrangements, often resembling mosaics composed by chance, often appear an interplay of masculine rationality creating witty ornamentation on the fluid, ineffable body of feminine emotions (published jointly under the title Trojcestí [Three Paths]). At the same time – in the period 1963–1968 – Grögerová independently prepared a cycle of scientifically austere, precisely descriptive, unemotional, abstract prose works, which she herself termed “ironic model texts”, first published in German translation under the title Zivilisationsschemata in 1970, but appearing in the original Czech only twenty-six years later, under the title Meandry [Meanders]. Elements of historic documentation first made their appearance within the space of the literary work of Bohumila Grögerov á with the beginning of the era of repression following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They can be discerned in one form in Trojcestí, primarily in the introductory section “Preludium”, which resembles a continually kept diary from February and March 1975; in it, pieces of conversation, dialogue, letters, quotations from the author’s reading, as well as momentary impressions and records of daily events, are transformed into literary artefacts. Another method is employed in the monumental three-volume memoir Let let [The Flight of Years], written, once again, in collaboration with Hiršal from the early Seventies up to 1985: over a thousand pages of direct testimony, mapping in great detail the changes, both in large-scale and individual narratives, of Czech society and culture (specifically the literary and artistic worlds) between 1952 and 1968, the historic period that significantly formed both of the work’s authors. Following the fall of Communism, Grögerová independently completed the prose-text Branka z pantů [Gate from the Hinges], which, on several interweaving narrative levels, concretises the author’s life (in this instance, far more personal than artistic) against the backdrop of the ever-shifting contours of the twentieth century. And a clear personal tone is also predominant in her latest work, following Branka z pantů in direct chronological order: a non-contiguous diary-assemblage spanning “the time between then and now” (Čas mezi tehdy a teď), concretely between March 1999 and May 2003, and framed by two tragic events – the two instances in which Josef Hiršal was hit by a tram; in the first case requiring several weeks of intense hospital care and in the second, as of September 15, 2003, claiming his life. Indeed, it is Hiršal, Grögerová ’s partner for over half a century in an incredibly prolific and remarkably harmonious artistic partnership offering confirmation to their own contention that “authorial cooperation between a man and a woman as a creative act is in its deepest essence an act of love”, who forms the primary thematic figure in Čas mezi tehdy a teď. He is the predominant subject, who at the outset starts the movement of the narrative and naturally occupies the greatest amount of space, against the various forms in which the author defines her own self – through fragmentary reminiscences, reflections of everyday events assembled from her readings, writings, private thoughts and conversations, and with increasing frequency her own dreams. If, following the formulation both authors put forward in Trojcestí, a joint text should “express more tenderness and understanding than the most subtle exchange of love letters,” Grögerová strives to achieve this premise in her latest work, even if written by herself alone. Within the margins of her “hospital diary”, she naturally comprehends Hiršal’s sudden absence – his descent into deep unconsciousness – as cruelly unavoidable and oppressive (“I am alone, Joska knows nothing of me”) and reduces her impressions to the single phantasmagorical image of his wounded face – “bloodshot eyes stare tormented at me”. Comprehension, though, is soon in coming: not in terms of emotions that quickly sweep the author into the abyss of destructive pain and despair, a sense of inevitable doom and futile recollection, but cool reason, which dictates the necessity of conducting an imaginary conversation with the now absent Hiršal, a sober and clearly formulated monologue that doubtless is essentially a form of auto-therapy, developing as it does “against the loss of memory, against sorrow” – even if it only forms “a poor replacement for our talks during a stroll, an afternoon chat over coffee, an evening exploration of all possible subjects over a glass of wine.” What results is a textual collage stretched between two worlds, one the immediate world of here and now, the other a space altogether unreachable, almost (following Sartre) cast somewhere outside our consciousness. Grögerová draws Hiršal into the text not only through the records of his slow recovery and first repeated encounters with the actual world, but also through authentic documentations of his descents into the earliest layers of memory and hallucinatory visions produced by his temporarily damaged consciousness (“through his head swim indifferent visions and scraps of childhood memory”). Čas mezi tehdy a teď is essentially a defensive text, or more accurately one of protection: an effort to return a beloved person to life, a diary of heartfelt appeals, an attempt at conjuring. Love, even though (or perhaps precisely because) it is temporarily unrequited, unreciprocated, nonetheless gains in romantic tension, yet shorn of any pathos, lyrical excrescences or blind adoration. Grögerová speaks forth in the most basic of concepts; her simple vocabulary and anti-illusory style communicate the essentials of her own, and most likely all human, existence: “I write on the paper in block capitals: I love you and always think of you”. In this method of formulation of the narrative voice – most clearly in evidence in the book’s introductory section, an austere, rhythmically declaimed report almost calling to be read out loud, it is possible to discern the influence of the creative philosophy of the Czech concrete poets of the 1960s, most clearly of Ladislav Novák, yet additionally, if to a lesser extent, the Surrealist or Surrealist-influenced writers of the same period - Věra Linhartov á , Stanislav Dvorský or Milan Nápravník. For, indeed, even their formalistic experimentations had at their core an existential sensibility often verging on the comic– ironic, humorous, yet above all else absurd. Another point of similarity between the creative aesthetic of the Sixties and Čas mezi tehdy a teď, in addition to the linguistic and stylistic techniques, is its freely, experimentally conceived structure. Contrasted with the basically disciplined authorial collage-technique in Branka z pantů, the most recent book places notably greater stress on creative spontaneity, incongruity, playfulness. Text-segments, of a wide variety of genres and displaying radically different tempos and rhythms, wavering between philosophical reflections, diary-entry, dream-recording, anecdote and prose-poem, are arranged more on the basis of associations and objective chance than any a priori rational concept. The sole security running through the text is the chronological ordering of the events – much as in Let let, for which, as the author repeatedly indicates, Čas mezi tehdy a teď was intended as a modest appendix.

(rk)

This author profile was last updated in 2007

Deutsch Bohumila GRÖGEROVÁ, Deutsch.doc

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