Authors

During the 1980s and 1990s he played saxophone for several Prague jazz, folk and rock groups (Krásné nové stroje, Jazzfonický orchestr, Polydor Jazz Quartet etc.) From 1988-1990 he lived in New York on an immigrant’s passport. Since the mid-1990s he has been living alternately in Prague and Australia.

“I am only a phantom, a mask, almost nothing. There is only constant movement and transformation in my brain cells. Rhizopus nigricans: People, dogs, trams, a museum filled with school trips inside me. Arbitrarily changing into wolves? All the cellular activity digs away inside me like diligent woodworm and move forward to old age. A restless ant. Do I need an examination? Am I capable of clearly feeling the imperceptible sclerosis and hardening? What will come of all of this confusion?” Such are the musings in Štolba’s novel Provazochodcův sen [The Tightrope Walker’s Dream] of the main character, the aptly named Zvěd, a student working as a male-nurse in a psychiatric clinic in his first-year work placement. Zvěd is the author’s alter ego. He is an impractical, uninformed person for whom everything normal seems like a deviation from the norm and from the borders of politeness, whereas everything abnormal, absurd, impractical and insane are marked by the seductiveness and the unrepeatability of an ancient myth. Štolba finds he has more in common with the patients than with the personnel, doctors and nurses of this medieval nightmare home. As though the real world were only to be found on the borders of normality, in a place where the rules have gone askew, but also observed inwardly from a stark and perhaps post-romantic madness, and though the insane wish to remain that way in spite of the treatment, they are crammed back into the pincers of normality. In this magical prose, influenced to a certain extent by surreal poetry, it is as though the author would like to bring to a literary form Foucault’s notions of insanity and the insane as being people in society who have been cast away and misunderstood, but who are at the same time much more genuine and real as they have not been touched by the corruption and dirt of the world. The counterpoint quotes from the book Secret Societies of the Occult by the Czech mystic and propagator of occultism, Karel Weinfurt, are a kind of countertext which permeate the mixture of specific scenes, spectacles and stories from the psychiatric institute and its immediate “private” surroundings. The quotes describe Zvěd’s searchings and emphasise his submergence into abnormality as the only modus vivendi which is at least partially tolerable because the spirit of the times only professes utilitarian, superficial values. The themes which  Štolba used autobiographically in Provazochodcův sen, such as his experiences as an ambulance driver and male-nurse are further expanded upon in the larger novel Město za [The City Beyond], which has been described as a “jazz novel” and is set in the 1980s. Once again it has biogpraphical and confessional aspects to it. The main character is a young saxophonist who tries – sometimes successfully, other times in vain – to escape from the nirvana of normalizational non-time to the extravagance and exclusiveness of jazz trips and seances where the exercise and experience of music takes us to the previously mentioned borders of normality, to a vibrant and meaningful insanity, which is in the homeopathic spirit of treatment, or at least aimed towards the inner madness of the hecticness of life and the hypocrisy of a spiritually empty age. The novel Město za is reminiscent of the idyllic world of Josef Škvorecký’s The Cowards or The Swell Season. If jazz was an escape for Škvorecký from the impact of German and Russian totalitarianism, as well as a return to the last vestiges of paradise, for Štolba the process by which man accepts the fate of his escape is interesting in itself. Jan Štolba is also an excellent poet. The poetry, which he writes and publishes more often than prose, also permeates the world of his novels. There is constantly present within it the thirst and insatiability of the lyrical “I”, a never-ending processionality, a life full of reversals, transformations and volatility. It is as though a poet stood in front of us with the mark of Ahasverus, moving between body and shadow, between one who disowns everything and one who insatiably desires everything. Štolba’s lyrically held world is distinguished by its fragmentary nature, by the mirror of illusion, the feeling of an unreplenished reality shifting to the realm of dreams and visions which are more alive than reality and which in the end remain the only area and property left to man. In the poem Kus from the collection Nic nemít there is a Derrida-like poetic deconstructionism: the busy and illusory civilisation of the city breaks into a grimace at the banality of the village green, where in this reversed film and lyrical retrospective there takes place the disintegration and metamorphosis to a “spat-upon, overturned island”, to a place which does not exist in reality, but simply is: “napůl zapomenutým průchodem / kudy obchází / nenarozené dítě / s povinnou vizáží dospělého”. In the subsequent intellectually mature as well as deeply empathetic poems, Štolba is searching for a child-like clarity, an awareness of our ability to bear the weight of our history and civilization, which is seen as an obstacle, a mask and mimicry in front of the purity of nakedness. Štolba is also a globetrotter, a man of two homes: here and elsewhere, at a Prague window and at the sea, far away, whether in New York where he lived in semi-exile, or Australia, where the poet continually returns. If in the book Nic nemít he is coming to terms with memories and the uncertainty and openness of home, in his poetry collections as well as in his diary notes and observations Den disk, Central Europe appears in the same way as Whitman’s American plains, Šiktanc’s Český orloj and Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

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