Authors

Surrealist theory and practice accords particular significance to the ‘defining encounter’, and in the case of the young Prague grammar-school student Milan Nápravník this was his encounter with Karel Teige, the theorist of Czech Surrealism, in 1946. Influenced by this ‘defining encounter’, Nápravník started collaborating with the Prague Surrealist circle as early as the mid-1950s, duly sharing the fate of this unpublished literary and artistic community; for a long time, most of his texts could not be published – and there was little hope of their seeing the light of day during his life in exile either. Nápravník’s first collections of poems and prose poems, Básně, návěstí a pohyby (Poems, Signals and Movements) and Moták (Secret Message [in the prison sense], which was later expanded under the title Kniha Moták [Secret Book]) already reveal all the basic signs of his aesthetics, which incline to the Surrealist conception of the literary text: they are dominated by the principle of automatic, though not spontaneous, writing that aspires to be rhythmical at the sentence level and find phonic and semantic associations in individual words and phrases. During his life in exile, the poet moved from experimental verse in the Surrealist vein to associative prose sequences which he himself described as ‘Surrealist protocols’ (Na břehu – On the Shore). His basic leaning towards a Surrealist philosophy of art, however, is extended to include an Existentialist view of the state of the world, in particular a vision of society as an absurd labyrinth in which we are witness to disillusionment, scepticism and a destructive anxiety. The actual purpose of his testimonial texts is to find a new reality in the form of a distinctive territory abounding in mystery, hitherto unknown ritualized acts and, especially, the enigmatic meanings of verbal expression. An example of this surreally phenomenological tendency is his vast ‘automatic text’ Příznaky pouště (Symptoms of the Desert). The playfulness of automatic writing is here plainly suppressed, the entire text bearing the imprint of a strictly imposed integral order of semantic and philosophical associations that convert a prose that rests on the dominance of one formal feature into not a traditional, but a classical psychological narrative on the human situation of existential helplessness and defencelessness, so typical of the spiritual disposition of the human subject. The book hinges on records or reflections of the innermost responses of the authorial individual where, side by side with symptomatic Surrealist visions in words, there are repeated shifts towards a pamphleteering style, a schematization of given sequences of ideas and literary allusions that applies equally to the awareness of the universe and to the happy coincidences that have such a stable place in our world, which Nápravník compares to a ‘landscape of phantoms’. The author can neither name nor detail these phantoms; he can merely reflect them, since they ‘are magical witnesses of a beauty which is not in the eye of the beholder. For communication begins where atomic structures are still being formed, long before the gibbering mouth of Homo sapiens has opened to discharge a river of weird lingual croaks, most of them unworthy of any decent frog.’

(vn)

Deutsch Milan NÁPRAVNÍK, Deutsch.doc

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