Authors

As a literary historian, theoretician, and critic Aleš Haman’s emphasis has been on Czech literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Though he made a successful start to a career as a scholar upon the publication of his polemical study on Adolf Branald and a seminal theoretical study on Neruda’s prose (1968), he had to limit his activities during the years of normalization to occasionally publishing criticism and reviews or essays in samizdat. At the end of the 1980s he worked in the National Library’s research department, studying reading preferences and readers’ attitudes to belles-lettres. The various questionnaires he formulated led to popularizing the study of Literature from the perspective of the reader. Immediately after 1989, Haman returned to his former career as an academic, again taking a position at the Institute for Czech and World Literature (as it was still called at the time) and resuming what he had begun in the 1960s. In the spirit of contemporary European literary theory, he tended took a post-structural approach and favored German and French literary critics, the precursors of the first stage of postmodernism such as Gaston Bachelard, René Girard, Maurice Blanchot, and Umberto Eco. Haman’s understanding of a literary work was also greatly influenced by the scions of Prague structuralism, which blossomed in postwar literary criticism, aesthetics, and art criticism and coalesced into the Prague Linguistic Circle, a group once define by such giants in the field as Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukařovský, and René Wellek. Using semiotics, the circle investigated the ontological and genetic nature of texts and the construction of literary works by considering their structural organization. As opposed to Mukařovský, who stressed the aesthetic function of art and extra-artistic expression, Haman was less orthodox, and he enriched his study of Neruda, and his other work as well, with a psychological and sociological dimension. Haman’s volume of collected essays, Východiska a výhledy [Departures and Perspectives, 2002], a retrospective of his literary criticism, suggests that his theoretical work can be divided into three main groups. The first comprises a clarification of “general questions,” in which he attempts to understand the sense and position of literary criticism, or art criticism, in today’s postmodern world. Haman explores the transformation of subjectivity as articulated in a contemporary work of literature when the virtual world does not hold to the classic Hegelian division of subject and object, of real and ideal, or if you will, fictive. The conception of the subject in modernist and postmodern writers and critics is according to Haman a result of a general tendency toward the “deindivualization of the subject.” On the one hand, the locus for the consciousness of individual existence, and not just that of the artist but the human generally, is occupied by a complicated searching and formation of identity through which the subject is incorporated into the commonality of mankind and universal whole. On the basis of his detailed knowledge of how modern literature, aesthetics, and art developed, Haman shows that the Nietzschean dichotomy between the Dionysian and Apollonian in terms of creativity spilled over into the art of the 20th century and that the “Apollonian reduction of sensuous forms” transformed into an intellectual transcendence of “spirit bound to corporeality.” The modern post-Duchampian world in one sense gave rise to hermetic, “scholarly,” intellectually motivated constructs of a mimetic treatment of reality, but also to the countless -isms of the first half of the 20th century, “destructive” concepts both deforming and transforming. Such a perspective is not merely theoretical or late structuralist, but is conceptually aesthetic and epistemological. Originating in Haman’s polemic with Mukařovský, but going beyond yet to encompass the ideas of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, Haman shifts his focus to his studies of literary history and criticism, particularly 20th-century Czech prose. In addition to concentrating on modern Czech fiction, Haman continued in his study of the post-Revivalist and Romantically tinged literature of the 19th century. In this work he attempted to delineate the late Revival period and nationalist responses in the period’s art and tease out what in Mácha or Neruda went beyond the parochial and placed Czech literature in the European context. As early as 1962 he wrote a study on Božena Němcová, the author of The Grandmother, relating her work to the European literary tradition. He finds parallels between her and French novelist George Sand, both of whose work spans revolutionary emancipation to melancholic romanticism. Haman likewise examines Neruda – the post-Mácha poet of Písně kosmické [Cosmic Songs] and the vignettes from everyday life Malostranské povídky [Tales of the Lesser Town] – in the context of European literature and sees an artist rebelling against the reduction of literature to national questions conditioned on modern history and culminating many years after Neruda in the battle over the Manuscripts. In his writings on Neruda, Haman removes the label placed on him by Marxist literary history, which emphasized his putative social or even socialistic thinking. To Haman, Neruda is a critic of Czech nationalism and its historicism, like in Havlíček Borovský’s writings, brimming with returns to glorious historical epochs such as the Hussite period. Haman sees Neruda as a modern, liberal thinking spirit who connected Czech culture and its independence to Europe. Though it might seem that the struggle to emancipate Czech culture was largely complete by the end of the 19th century with the rise of modernity and the influence of the West blending with Slavic myth (e.g., in Zeyer’s work), after the formation of Czechoslovakia the emancipation question again arose. It appeared in Karel Čapek’s Chesterton cult of the “little common man” and of standing outside history, and as well in the forming of a newfangled Czech myth of the type that was so aggressively promoted by Alois Jirásek. Haman, therefore, is examining Čapek and Vladislav Vančura, and giving some attention to Halas and Vítězslav Nezval as well, when he repeatedly comments on the puristically aestheticizing of their work and also the “social role of the writer during the interwar period.” And in these essays he consistently steers clear of any ideological ballast and pathos; he interprets interwar work primarily by looking at the texts’ structure and semantics, their “language of signs.” Another major area to which Haman devoted theoretical and critical attention was the fate of postwar Czech prose, particularly after 1948. The summation of his overall perspective on the period is the high-school textbook Česká literatura po 1945 z ptačí perspektivy [Czech Literature after 1945: A Bird’s-Eye View]. Here he describes the arc of Czech literature as comprising three layers: official literature sanctioned by the regime; exile literature; samizdat writing. In the mid-1990s he published the first monograph on Arnošt Lustig. He places Lustig in the context of Czech psychological prose (like Egon Hostovský and Milan Kundera), which by the end of the 1950s was trying to free itself from the strictures of socialist realism and positivism. At present Haman is a university professor, and he writes criticism largely on contemporary Czech prose. He has authored a number of textbooks and reference books in which he has clarified his approach and interpretation of the world of letters and literary history. Úvod do studia literatury a interpretace díla [An Introduction to the Study of Literature and the Interpretation of Text], Nástin dějin české literární kritiky [A Concise History of Czech Literary Criticism], and Literatura v diskusi [Literature in Discussion].

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En français  Aleš HAMAN