Authors

One of the keys to Lubomír Martínek’s multilayered essays and other prose works is the search for modern man’s lost identity. He believes that the modern world is full not of people settled into a healthy egotism, nor of Renaissance condottieri of a Faustian and Quixotic individualism, but of floundering shades of individuals who exhibit marked narcissistic tendencies and want, as Baudelaire noted, ‘to live and die in front of the mirror’. Narcissism leads to alienation. To his milieu and to himself man becomes a stranger; not, however, a voluntary stranger in the Camus mould, but a variant of the Wandering Jew, a close cousin of Josef Čapek’s ‘limping pilgrim’, a successor to the mediaeval vagrants and fools revived in the monstrous farces of Ghelderode and the Venetian masked pageant played out against the background of the disintegrating city-world. In Palimpsest, a collection of essays, the stranger is defined as an individual who lives not in a pack, but in solitude. He is a lone wolf, an internal exile who is looking for a home and knows that somewhere nearby a fragment of home does exist. But he is also the prototype of another, higher degree of vagrancy, a ‘nomad’. The nomad is a being on the point of departure, whose anchor is hoisted, a man setting out into the desert or tearing himself away from the home shore: ‘The nomad is a stranger enriched by departing, by movement’, Martínek writes. He becomes a bird of passage, ‘massacring the obvious’ and seeking the exclusive and unusual; he is an eternal adventurer and dealer in uncertainty. Yet he too must one day merge into the fate of one who has no more will to return, one who changes from man into ‘lost soul’. The lost soul is a kind of ‘cube root of the stranger’, though the very transition of the nomad, a being on the move, into the static lost soul permitted to stay on one spot, within the circle of his own lonely freedom, is a long and painful process. If the stranger and the nomad lack identity, the lost soul, paradoxically, comes close to having one, since he is inwardly aware of some endlessly mobile, shifting home which is the world at the edge, a strand-line world lying between the cruel drabness of the land and Nietzschean joy at the limitless reaches of the sea. Life in Martínek’s triad of vagrants, which is also the modus vivendi of modern man’s timeless beatnik estate, is indeed like a mysterious scroll, a parchment palimpsest from which the original text has been scratched to have a new text written on it. Since 1979, when Martínek emigrated to Paris, his work has been saturated with French rationalism and Cartesian intellectualism, but also with a sense of lacking any emotional anchor, a deficit in life that grasps at sundry substitutes and surrogate passions. The worlds of his novels are fragmentary and parallel, even to a degree schizoid, since they are filled with the lot of an émigré who has turned his back on his homeland, moves around on one leg, claps with one hand and would like to limp back to the lost island of his home. A Kerouac-like existence ‘on the road’ is one of the semiotic lines in the short pieces of fiction included in Linka č. 2 (Line 2). The names of the stations on the Paris metro are an imaginary horologe, an anomalous chronometer that the narrator-passenger wants to get beyond by means of something that has been, something that took place at some almost unreal distance and which begins to undulate before his very eyes like a frightening dream. In Martínek’s next road text, Mys dobré beznaděje (The Cape of Good Hopelessness), the reader is taken on a journey through the exotic setting of the Far East, imbued with mysticism and Zen Buddhism. But he may also perceive it as an experiment to limit the freedom of a man of no identity who, in seeking his ego, yields to the temptation of an ‘endless journey’ through the countryside of Asia and then Old England. Nausinoos and his mate Nausikaa, the two Post-modern protagonists, born apparently out of classical antiquity, are nomads with an urge to get to the core of lost souls, or those whose sails are unfurled but remain in thrall to the coast. In Persona non grata a journey along the outer edges of remote worlds turns into a more labyrinthine journey through the human inner self. It is a kind of fictitious diary of a man waiting to be granted French citizenship and whiling away the time by trying to describe every detail and the course of every second. Martínek’s literary method is not unlike that of the French nouveau roman and the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, but the experimental quality of this text is less important than the internal Kafkaesque quality of the character, trapped in officialdom, which, paradoxically, returns the hero from being a survivor, a stranger, to being a man obliged to communicate with the world. Sailing, boats and harbours perceived – la Pessoa are key images also in Martínek’s other works. They always take place within a kind of timelessness and placelessness. Hence he symptomatically called one of his ‘shoreless’ books Sine loco – Sine anno. Since the Changes of late 1989 the author has appeared regularly in Prague, but faced with the marasmus of Bohemia he always re-emigrates to the unbounded bohemia of Paris and the discursiveness of France. Externally, too, the oppressive theme of the ‘return of the lost soul’, a theme bordering on the Ulyssean in Joyce, gains in depth here. The span between home and exile is also elaborated in Martínek’s Opilost z hloubky (L’ivresse des grandes profondeurs). The return to one’s birthplace, the finding of home, is again confronted with the postulate of eternal vagrancy, which the author believes is the most adequate modus vivendi for modern man in a global world ‘in which fruit has to be picked unripe in order to survive the journey’. To live both here and there, in paradise and on earth, on the road and off it, is attempted by the four characters – exiled, solitary and in effect homeless – who are happy enough with just a handful of friends and plenty of solitude.

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Deutsch Lubomír MARTÍNEK, Deutsch.doc

En français Lubomír MARTÍNEK, En français.doc