Authors

The key to the literary work of Karel Kuna, a form of verbal artwork suspended somewhere between the genres of poem, drama, novella and story, is definitively the author himself. The spontaneous, perhaps even neurotically intense, fluid character of the writer – the holder of degrees in both biology and mathematical logic, a former editor of the journal Literární noviny, now an employee of the publishing house of Fragment – has been precisely captured by a literary colleague both in creative terms and age cohort, the poet Igor Malijevský, in his personally tinged review of Kuna’s first published work Cesta do Malšic [The Way to Malšice ]: “I met Karel Kuna on his way to Malšice for the first time almost twenty years ago, and then many times later. Yet the more often he appeared, the quicker he was in disappearing. His appearances and disappearances remained a mystery to us; often, we found it impossible to agree on whether K. K. had not yet come, or had already left. If K. K. did turn up, it was more than likely that he would, in the middle of the party, stand up and with more or less of a theatrical gesture disappear somewhere into the darkness, so that he could, several days later, re-surface and proudly inform us that at the other end of the country there was a blonde barmaid who could draw an excellent pint. This was something we could not understand, even though something had already dawned upon us of his highly complicated system of mental bureaucracy, “Kunism”, which, across various hierarchies of commissions, sub-commissions, departments often holding quite contradictory viewpoints, creates his views on matters of great import (life, religion, women etc.) or even seemingly trivial (such as the quality of the local beer).” Those twenty-six small-scale (if of varied length), lyrical prose-texts that Karel Kuna included in his debut volume Cesta do Malšic came into being from the mid-1990s up to the present moment. And yet it is precisely the anchoring within space and time, solid endurance, the entry into any system of hierarchical social values, from which the figures in all of Kuna’s texts are fleeing, at every moment of their literary and non-literary lives. Themes of the individual narratives touch primarily upon journeys, motion, inter-personal meetings and personal conversations. In one sense, these thematic areas correspond well to the author’s sharp, nervous style, his eruptive and continually hurrying, short sentences, his abrupt shifts from the third to the first person; equally, they reflect the instability of the fictional narrators themselves, endlessly and indecisively oscillating between the village and the city, the pub and the unbounded natural landscape, between man and woman, as much as between reality and dream, humour and light (self)-irony, theatrical scenery-chewing and subdued humility. For Kuna, life is not “elsewhere”, as it once was for Milan Kundera, but everywhere, and nowhere more than the here and now: in tiny, arbitrary shifts of place and moments of stopped time, in the impressionistic capturing of passing instants and details, the instances when the human subject – citing Václav Kahuda – suddenly breaks through the floorboards of the everyday to see, opening before him, the unknown and compelling depths of life, a magical and metaphysical expanse reflecting the previously unknown, reversed side of reality. This is, for instance, precisely how these spaces open up in Kuna’s brief story “Plovoucí podlaha” (Floating Floorboards) before its half-dreaming hero Štěpán: workmen carry him, still in his bed, from the room where they have come to install a wooden, “floating” floor, and in his imaginary yacht he plunges into the waves of the ocean to sail “below the medusa-like chandeliers, among latex plankton and all those keratinised bodies…” Cesta do Malšic certainly has many of the characteristics of fictional writing, containing clear traces of the fabulous, yet nonetheless it bears the deeply imprinted stamp of its author’s actual life, both in individual, concrete instances as well as in the listing of the more general psychological traits of the protagonists. The central figures in Kuna’s texts have differing names, differing settings and fates that may cross, interweave, or run in opposite directions, yet all of these “sensitives,” “soft Charlies”, “wondering wanderers”, heroes who are no “technical types – probably better for books or booze” are linked through their tendency towards an exclusive, unrelenting poetic transformation of reality, through their poet’s sensitivity, their sympathy towards the creative and the free-thinking. And one that prevails even if the reverse side of this method of being, of these fulfilled or never-fulfilled romantic desires may be, and often in Cesty do Malšic in fact is – “crushing solitude”. It is from this solitude that Karel Kuna often brings forth a vision of the divine, of course not only in its traditionally stiff, cold attributes, but additionally with a light trace of the heretical: a Janus-faced god presenting on one side an icon, yet on the other an icon with its shirt-tails hanging out – since the author explicitly assigns him the earthly power “to keep to himself courses in creative writing and the pub of the Burešes”. In the long run, this may well be the most valuable dimension of Kuna’s hitherto sparse literary work: the natural authorial ability to use self-irony and humour to correct the resulting texts. For this cathartic comedy, the reader and critic may well forgive the author more than once for the undeniable fact that many of his prose-pieces resemble quickly registered and quickly fading impressions, or that others are somewhat ill-served by their degree of explicitness, a loquacity that often crushes their essential secrets.

(rk)

E-mail: kkuna@seznam.cz

Deutsch Karel KUNA, Deutsch.doc

En français Karel KUNA, En français.doc