Authors

Hodrová began to write novels (as well as theoretical works) in the late 1970s, but most of them could not be published till after the political changes that began in late 1989. She applied her ideas about the uninterruptible continuity of historical events, human lives, and the symbolic presence of diverse realities that last from one era to another, in her first novels, a trilogy she called Trýznivé město (Agonizing city). The first two novels in particular, Kukly (Chrysalides/Masks) and Podobojí (In both kinds), demonstrated her view of the parallel continuity and coexistence of several time planes, which are objectively projected into the subjective consciousness of the concrete narrator (or into the alter ego of the writer); they brought together a great number of diverse motifs, allusions, and, especially, linguistic utterances in a single monolithic narrative. In this narrative concrete details come to life and things, such as symbols of the past, which last into the present also by means of them, and are suddenly personified, till they become other characters of the story. In so doing, Hodrová places the greatest importance on the historical consciousness of time; her references and reminiscences mostly concern historic events, all of which are connected with specific Prague locations. One can therefore interpret Hodrová’s fiction as distinctive “Prague novels,” which aim to convey emblematically the genius loci of this central European city, of whose history Hodrová highlights the tragic features. In the course of the narrative she several times makes them into a ritual or makes them sacred, until she models them in the aggregate as a never-ending, never-closed strip of tableaux vivants, which take place both in real history and in the narrator’s (and therefore the protagonist’s) equally real memory. In comparison with the first two volumes of the trilogy about Prague, a city agonized by history and by a set of concrete tragic “ordinary“ human lives (or things), a certain shift occurs in the novel Théta, the final part of this triptych. Here, into the historical fabric of reflections and associations, the narrator’s own fate and profuse autobiographic themes make their first intense entrance. They are connected with the subjective experiencing of objective fact, which give the other novel of the cycle of tableaux vivants the character of a shared initiation into the historical past and also the historical present. On the one hand, the merging together and interpenetrating of “minor” and “major” history are now more emphasized; on the other hand, these heterogeneous worlds are presented especially as phenomena that manifest themselves in a continuous “pupation” or “masking.” These aspects of knowing the world or aspects of the world revealing itself to human society and its concrete characters (that is, the character of the narrator) also appear in the opposite discourse, that is, in the phase of their emerging from assumed non-existence, entering into the concrete consciousness of man and history, identifying themselves both with our memories of time and, in the context of self-analysis, with the search for one’s own place in life. The inanimate often then appear or speak as though animate (and vice versa); people become signs of the objective and subjective world (and vice versa). The dialectical-static sequence of tableaux vivants is, however, systematically made dynamic (and also deconstructed) by the narrator’s inquiry into the actual identity of the state of things and the spirit, by her permanent search for those real, not unreal, only apparent signs of initiation of identity consciousness. These latent signs of parallel perception of various levels of space and time become the axis of Hodrová’s other “Prague novels” – namely, the special literary guidebook Město vidím... (I see a city), which also contains an echo of the changes of 1989, and the subsequent literary variations on the lives of different women who have been drawn into private history and “historical” history, that is to say, into the compositions of the novels Perunův den (Perun’s day) and Ztracené děti (Lost children). Hodrová published her subsequent novel only after a break of several years. It took her four years to write Komedie (Comedy). As in the preceding novels, this too is a work demonstrably autobiographical, presented on purpose as a credible, concrete statement about one person’s life, one person’s fate, which is again conceived as an “open” piling on of episodes of the never-ending roman-vie. At the same time, however, Hodrová has in this synthesizing novel come with a variation on the genre, whose components she herself describes as “poetic fiction, a self-tormenting confession, and a national farce.” Into the novelistic amalgam of various mutually overlapping and sometimes parodic levels of genre and style, she draws “living” men and women of letters as well as other well-known writers, for example, “the strange philosopher” Ladislav Klíma, an admirer of Nietzsche, or the “mad poet Hölderlin,” who is apparently so alien to Czech culture and its literary tradition. At the same time, however, this is not a contradiction of the roman-realité and roman-invention, but a clash between the roman-refuge genre level and roman-piège genre modification. Primarily, however, it is a caustic, poignant “comedy of the soul and the world,” as if it had been staged as literature during the narrator’s eternal wandering through the old cemetery at Olšany, Prague. To a certain extent Hodrová’s novel Komedie is the culmination of her gravitation towards the self-denial of genre and the stressing of self-reflection in the narrative of the novel.

(vn)

Deutsch Daniela HODROVÁ, Deutsch.doc

En français Daniela HODROVÁ, En français.doc

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