Authors

Poetry and prose writer Jan Pavel carries the screenwriting precision and experience into many of his prosaic texts, stories, novellas, short and page turning novels. The introspective and in essence traditional narration of his prose is enriched with swift, dramaticdialogues. Film or television script is in essence based not on merely verbalism and literary methods but also on the adequate connection of word and picture, with dynamic behaviour of the characters and stricking descriptions of the setting, sceneries and landscapes. Therefore it is no wonder that the poet and author of prosaic texts, which are not scripts in the real meaning of the word, thinks and writes in the dimension of visual imagination and almost tangible, detailed realities. Jan Pavel entered Czech literature as a lyricist. Following his poetical debut, Four Percent Interest (Čtyřprocentní úrok, 1993), he published a mature, architecturally structured book of both extensive and miniature texts, Loneliness of Colonnade (Samota sloupoví, 1997), in which he introduced himself as a creator of impressively colourful imagery. Besides these atmospheric suggestive poetic pictures, photogenic “soul landscapes” appear, tied into bigger complexes of cyclical nature. Loneliness of Colonnade consists of two different, although in many respects complementary, parts. After the brief “pictorial” prelude, “Imbibed Colours”, follows the Magician cycle in which the main actor is the Big Magus. This semi-epical composition combines a “ Mácha-like theme of timelessness with the elements of realism. Big Magus resembles Vodička’s Witch of Blois, poet’s composition from the end of the sixties in which Miloš Vodička – like Jan Pavel in the Magician – evokes the atmosphere of neo-baroque mysteriousness and ghostliness, fascination by the appearance of an imaginary creature which can exceed the barriers of ordinariness although it does not forcibly retain the legacy of mythically deified divinity or a vague impression of lost metaphysical depths. Pavel’s Magus observes during endless nights the “shadow play of magic” while inspired to “ fateful words” that he is unable to express or “name”. The Magician thus gets close to the poetic texts by Lubor Kasal. Also in the second part of the Loneliness of Colonnade the author deals with yet another topical theme, which does not turn to the past and romanticism but to the presence, challenging the purpose, meaning and impact of words, credibility or adequacy of the literary statement. Loneliness of Colonnade in Pavel’s work metamorphoses into the loneliness of our senses and their perceptions, whereas the power of verbal information seems to withdraw to a less essential plan and to the territory of assumptions, anticipations and approximations that in consequence rather deviate from than meet the reality. The material from which the poet creates his metamorphoses is the memory, the dialogue with the shadow outlining the memory, or the footprint, which in the first draft, the matrix of a mapped pilgrimage, cannot be vocalised unambiguously. Pavel in his poems is not a mere record-keeper or a “painter of images” but assumes the position of expressionist in the world of memory which “smudges”, discolours or newly gradates every portrait or picture. The cyclical construction, which reveals something about the transformation of the lyricist into a prose writer, is also used in Pavel’s last collection of poetry, Shallow Basins... and Cry of Ravens on the Hills (Mělké pánve… a křik havranů na kopcích, 2004). The benumbed, wintry and delicately coloured landscape with a river meandering to the surface from Kerber’s underworld scattered by the shades of Poe-like ravens – who fly in swarms to the “sweaty countryside ... of lovers ingrown into ages” and to the roofs of rustic houses stabbing the sky – is in fact a dramatic setting or arena where the poet is only capable of whispering the question revealing the futility: “Where have all of you gone?” The loneliness of a sometime colonnade crumbles here into human loneliness and the inability to find another soul in the suffocating landscapes. The Shallow Basins collection had been created closely to Pavel’s texts of stories and novellas which grow to novel-like epics. Also their protagonists are mostly revived shadows, unique beings, adolescent creatures or composites of many characters with an often contradictory “dialogical” view of their surrounding world. The Author’s “screenwriting” vision also constitutes the following texts: a book of minute sketches and causeries Fun Fair (Na pouti) and a triptych When a Dog Tolerates Chocolate (Až pes snese čokoládu). The latter consists of various forms sharing an “alienating” element, which is typical for Pavel, interwoven with the torment of a man dissatisfied with the state of today’s inhuman world sinking into the specious self-ironies where the mimicry of success and career begin to dominate and where every sensitive and self-reflecting soul is doomed to fail. The ironic Portrait of Ordinary Young Artist (Portrét obyčejného mladého umělce) in the form of a film pseudo-script describes the steep professional career and consecutive fall of a kind of universal homunculus of the present moment, who is not in charge of its own existence and is therefore bound to a virtual, superficially theatrical and artificial success. The dimension between life without scapegoats or mimicries and pretended life also distinguishes the author’s other prosaic texts. Micro-story Erica (Erika) consists of dialogues; it confronts the life of adults, their tiredness, apathy and ignorance with the intuitively unrestrained attitude of a child observing its adolescent sunbathing sister changing into a mythical corpse struck with the beaks of Egyptian Vultures. The conflict between demystified reality and natural inclination of perceptive man dominates the limited space of the micro-drama to light up a mythical element inside. The mythical-fanciful accent also creates a tension in Pavel’s more extensive novella, Between Waters (Mezi vodami). The Author works with archetypes that include not only the central “water element” but also a concrete dam or a boat inhabited by a female spirit that represents the essence of almost Goethe-like embraced womanhood and death. Novella A Tram to the Station (Tramvaj do stanice), with its an allusive title referring to the psychological drama by Tennessee Williams, demystifies the central theme consisting of various shapes and forms and changes of desire, at present time equalised by conventions and incommunicable even in the proverbial “diarial” layer of records about what would happen if a man could behave without inhibitions like a black panther one of which adolescent heroines dreams of as of a creature of the wild world, unrestricted by commercial stereotypes. In his prose Pavel characteristically points out the eradication of sexual taboos, ethical negligence and the feeling people have that everything is allowed whereas in his young heroes - shadows - a conscience and feeling of guilt begin to assert themselves against the unrestricted mad desire. The author in A Tram to the Station articulates the cardinal question with philosophical elements, critical of present time when through the mouths of his characters he asks where empty desire in the form of a driving engine of human existence can lead to. Its overtones express the topic of mechanizing and medial patterns of behaviour which the heroes of Pavel’s prose actively resist or succumb to. Hopelessness or nirvana? The fundamental dilemma of Pavel’s texts can be thus described. The texts, influenced by the development of modern and postmodern literature as well as by the theatre of absurd, turn the values and hierarchy of judgements from living beings to puppets, beings-judges. Although on the outside they have the appearance of a common teddy bear or the objective inventory in a flat occupied by changing relations, fleeting love affairs, infidelities, betrayals, masquerades. In the book Disfigure (Jizvení) the aforementioned teddy bear reincarnates into people and expresses their amorphous characters without the author’s suggestion of the contrary possibility – that a chaotically restless person could at least in a desirous dream find himself in the position of a wild creature which has not left its mythical specification. The autobiographical characters of these prosaic texts as well as the author, Jan Pavel, are well aware of the temporariness of life situations and our inherent emotions. They are a kind of mutant from beatnick “trips” of the second half of the past century that suddenly appeared in the coulisses of the world of the groomed puppets destined to never meet the mythical animal hiding in the remotest corner.

(js)

The profile is updated as of 1st March 2009