Authors

From 1962-1966 she was involved with Prague’s surrealist group. Since 1968 she has been living and working in Paris. There she became close friends with the painter Josef Šíma and she has written a book about him. She has been writing in French since 1969.

Linhartová’s work is not about formal experimentation, intellectual games or showing off, but rather about perception and thinking through language, about writing with the categorical requirement of sincerity, with full personal risk, whereby Linhartová follows the “grand jeu” project of the artists from the interwar French group of the same name. She attempts to break down the wall behind which reality seems to be closed off, to break through the boundaries of the body, space, speech and perception. She is interested in the gaps which open between two or more languages, gaps in speech, in space, the interstice to an emptiness of charged energy. In work that is motivated in this way there is a logical concern not only for the content of communication but also for the space itself, the architecture of the literary text, from which stems her deliberate and careful work, for example, with punctuation, with the lines in the text and, in the case of poetry, with various typefaces and figures such as acrostics and others. We can also view as significant her interest in mirroring as a principle of the double refraction of seeing, reflection and self-reflection. For Linhartová the mirror is a view through to another reality, a portal to another space. The story, which in her first texts (Prostor k rozlišení, Meziprůzkum nejblíž uplynulého) was permeated with chains of interweaving contemplations, quotes, paraphrases and detours, gradually becomes lost; it is replaced by rational contemplation, later by a stream of poetic images, layered and accumulated beside and across each other without any apparent connection, with the knowledge that the poetic image can be just as true or even truer than the everyday reality which surrounds us and which is verifiable and perceptible to the senses.

If in her last piece of prose written in Czech, Chiméra neboli Průřez cibulí (1967), a path is still indicated, in her later French texts a similar trail in the form of a storyline no longer exists. Here the basic energy becomes an uncertain and at times confused (however, the confusion is deliberate) search for a new, metamorphosing space in which not even the narrator of the text remains the same, but rather is constantly changing, moving between the “ich” form and the “er” form, between male and female genders, and passing between different languages. The lonely characters and their behaviour, the plot twists and their unravelling are not important, even when it is possible to recognise the level of myth beneath the “smoke screen” of the story taking place in some kind of non-time (Masožravé portréty). In texts such as Dům daleko, Ubývání hlásky "m" and TWOR, normal speech merges into a so-called otherlanguage and finally reaches the border where it dissolves and inclines towards quietness and emptiness. The reader is drawn to fragments of discourses in which there are loose grammatical, morphological and syntactic connections. By creating one language out of all languages, it is as though the author were trying to reach an original primal language. In the radio plays (particularly in Překladateli) it is suggested that perhaps a language without words, without sound, could be possible, a condition where “only vibrations of the throat and tongue would be languages.”

In the prose written at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s the text is illuminated and translucent as though lit up by a light from somewhere “within” or from “the other side”. Linhartová’s texts seem to be situated in the “vanishing point of silence” (attributed to the French poet Gilbert-Lecomte, a member of the Grand Jeu group whose texts the author translated), where according to André Breton all contradictions and opposites disappear. They then become, through a purely temporary suspension, the capturing of a spiritual movement, an aspect of asceticism in the sense of advancement. It is precisely this “strength of self-denial” (another of Gilbert-Leconte’s phrases) which is essential if one is to be ready and open to the perception of the most basic of experiences. This orientation is borne out by the collection of three pseudo travel books compiled under the title Kaskáda. Here it is shown that in Linhartová’s writing travel has a metaphoric, spiritual meaning and is the expression of a growth in spirituality. Travelling is a way of life, a refusal to settle, the expression of a constant surging forward, of permanent searching and discovery.

The novelistic work of Věra Linhartová is consistently complemented and in many ways also explained (inspirations, the understanding of certain ideas, categories of ideas, artistic tendencies, concepts of artistic creation, writing, poetic imagery) by her specialist articles, essays and monographic studies.

Adapted from the website Slovníku české literatury po roce 1945 (author of entry: Miloslav Topinka, 1995; Veronika Košnarová, 2009 − entry updated 2009)