Authors

Václav Jamek is the only bilingual author in Czech literature today, able to express himself fluently not only in his mother tongue, Czech, but also in what he calls his “personal” tongue, French. He first devoted himself to verse, a collection of which, Surový stav (Raw state), he published in samizdat in 1989. It was at this time, too, that Jamek’s jocular heteronymous doppelgänger, in the spirit of Fernando Pessoa, was born – “Eberhart Hauptbahnhof, Bohemian poet.” Jamek first published Hauptbahnhof’s “book of over-versified poems” published in the Petlice samizdat series in 1988. It was not until after the changes of 1989 that Jamek’s works could come out in a Czech publishing house. By that time, however, his Traité des courtes merveilles, written in French, had already been published by Grasset, Paris (1989), which, that same year, won the prestigious Prix Médicis in the essays category and the Prix du Globe Européen, which is awarded to a correspondent of an important European newspaper. Jamek says that he is in no hurry to publish this work in Czech, however, because Krkavčí múza (The negligent muse), written in his mother tongue, is similar –enigmatic and, characteristically of Jamek’s work, imbued with European, particularly French, culture and elegance. When Krkavčí múza was published by Odeon, Prague, in 1992, the critic Pavel Janáček called it a work of “differentiation and defining a generation,” a psychological immersion, unique in Czech essay writing, full of self-revealing urgency, as well as subtle irony and intellectual detachment. Like Traité des courtes merveilles, so too Krkavčí múza is an introspective essay, overflowing with doubts about the point of literature and the impact of the poetic word in the post-Baudelairean era, in times of levelling, when belles-lettres overlap negatively with the mass media and penetrations of other realities, particularly virtual ones. To his hard, heartless muse he confesses his sense of permanent impropriety and not belonging to the muse-less milieu and a world devastated by the pragmatism of life. In the silence of this world, the most appropriate response would be to relinquish the word and its power. Jamek sees several reasons for this inward orientation to silence. One is the manifold devaluation of the message of literature in the modern and post-modern periods. In them, the writer means little or nothing. He writes for a small circle of similarly attuned people. Another is that he cannot rely even on a prudent literary critic, because critical judgement has atrophied and lost its objectivity. The language, too, which the writer speaks and relentlessly spews from his soul, is ceasing to be a public affair in the Aristotelian sense of the word and often comes back like a boomerang to the author’s inner abysm, from which it is difficult to communicate with the outside world. In this deformed world, literature is no longer a mirror of phenomena and things, but rather some labyrinthine formation, a hermetically sealed, suffocating space. In Krkavčí múza, and also in his essays and commentary on literature, which were written in the 1990s, Jamek realizes the urgent need to return the poet to the community, to turn his private, little understood language back into an instrument frequent in society. In this way he revives the old Baudelairean paradox of poète maudit, the writer who can, through the profoundest humiliation, but also with a violent, often provocatively evil deed, a Nietzschean gesture of “reassessment,” wrest language free from the curse of devaluation and dishonesty, and thereby – as Jamek writes in Krkavčí múza – “reinvent the printing press.” Certainly, these essays contain expressions of his experience of totalitarianism, which, in his opinion, did not end with the collapse of ideological pressure; instead, he argues, it was changed into the new, possibly even more monstrous diktat of economic barbarism and alienation, which had been diagnosed back in the 1950s and 1960s by, among others, French intellectuals and Existentialists like Sartre and Camus. Similarly, the problem of contemporary literature is, according to Jamek, an existential one and, moreover, separated from the existential problem of the writer. A quotation from Krkavčí múza should serve to illustrate: “the only suitable recommendation is therefore to write, and to write with the inward attitude that excludes obsessive writing: […] writing is simply one of many human activities and it matters little who the person who does it is, in this case it is me. I must live my life like everyone else. Writing is part of it.” This attitude to artistic work, excluding in advance its therapeutic and socially instructive role, is precise but dualistic, split. Jamek is well aware of the dangerous dividing line between the intellectual and the artist. In an interview originally for Prágai Tukor, a periodical for Hungarians outside Hungary, which was reprinted in what is so far the largest volume of Jamek’s essays and other commentary, Duch v plné práci (A spirit in loads of work), Jamek claims he tended to be “pigeonholed an intellectual,” but considers himself mainly an artist. He confesses that he has a tendency to deal with things logically, reflectively, but, since an artist has in himself “fragility, anxiety. I call it a daemon, which is why I would not, for example, hold political office.” Jamek’s self-restraint relates both to his verse and to his essays, the latter of which form the predominant part of his writing. The volume of verse, Surový stav, was not published in a regular publishing house till 1995, though it also contained earlier verse from 1973–78. This verse clearly shows the influence of the many French poets who he has translated or written essays about to be included in their published works: Michaux, Reverdy, Bonnefoy. The critics of the time, for example in Literární noviny, a Czech literature weekly, reproached him for having excessively revealed himself and having been too frank; they sought in that way to bring attention to his homosexual orientation, which Czech readers still found unnatural. Unlike French society, which is open and accepts difference, the homosexual in the Czech consciousness is still perceived as someone who deviates from the norm. It has been Jamek’s experience in his native land that all unusual behaviour is mocked. Although Černý, Jamek’s “master,” perceived caricature as the perspective of the critical spirit, Jamek claims with authority that homosexuality cannot be accepted as a caricature of the essence of man, but as a “living experience, as profound sympathy for the drama of human love.” One of the key essays, and also one of the longest, of Duch v plné práci is “O prašivém houfci neboli o literatuře, homosexualitě a AIDS” (Black sheep, or Literature, homosexuality, and AIDS), in which the author examines this phenomenon in European (including Czech) literature. Duch v plné práci is also a retrospective of Jamek’s activity as a translator, editor, and literary historian, relating mainly to the classics of French literature and French modern literature. Jamek has written informed essays (including afterwords) on Czech translations of works by Victor Segalen, Michel Tournier, Emmanuell Bove, Albert Camus, Boris Vian, Jean Genet, Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux, and Hervé Guibert, as well as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Suzanne Renaud (a French writer who lives and works in Bohemia). In the first half of the 1990s, in the pages of Literární noviny, a literary weekly, he commented on contemporary politics, but repeatedly returned to his main theme, the role of the writer, literature, and culture in general in the post-Modern age. The view that one must return the word, language, linguistic code to the public space is discussed in O patřičnosti v jazyce (On propriety in language), which summarizes his critical glosses and columns from 1993–98. Here he comments negatively on the distortions of the language of politics and the mass media, the embarrassing vulgarity of advertisements, and the decline of the sense of aesthetics and ethics. He does so in his typically doughty, pugnacious manner, but also with a good dose of intellectual scepticism and irony. Paradoxically, the most widely read of Jamek’s works are probably his “Hauptbahnhof” variations, parodies and travesties written in the 1980s. He himself sees them as “temptations” and a resulting expression of his bilingualism and “unsettledness” in his mother tongue or even in the distance that his “personal“ tongue, French, affords him towards his mother tongue. In “Pokoušení pseudonymem” (Temptation by pseudonym) he observes that this way of writing “corresponds to the approach of a foreigner who has taken Czech out of thin air and then excessive pressure of this derangement (to learn Czech) impels him to write verse in this unknown language.” Jamek’s lot as a writer is the fate of a dualist being who seems to be longing to use literature, writing, and infinity in order to become whole. One would be hard pressed to find another such loner and grumbler in Czech literature, and an author so tormentingly self-analytical and open, who seems to be vainly, desperately, seeking a suitable mask for his naked face.

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E-mail: vaclav.jamek@ff.cuni.cz

Deutsch Václav JAMEK, Deutsch.doc

En français Václav JAMEK, En français.doc