Reading as Poaching

Comments on Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (1976)
Jay Caldwell
25 February 2009

Any book that foregrounds reading begs for a reader-response sort of analysis. Thus, I intend to approach Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (1976) from just such a stance.

[It being unlikely that many have read this novella, I offer a brief plot summary: Haňt′a, the first person narrator and protagonist, has spent the last thirty-five years, in war-torn Czechoslovakia, compacting trash paper and books in the cellar of his house, hounded regularly by his boss for his lack of efficiency. The conceit of the novella is that he “rescues” from the discarded (or banned) books many of the “classics,” especially classics of philosophy, works by Hegel (especially), Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, to drop a few names. Their philosophies are laced throughout and inform the text. The arc of this 98-page novella covers Haňt′a’s fantasies and visions, his life among, and observations of, gypsies, his recollections of childhood and of his aborted love affairs, and descriptions of the sordid, and generally euphemized, realities of life in a city: the rivers of feces beneath the streets, the armies of rats patrolling and fighting along these subterranean aqueducts, and the management of corpses, specifically those of his mother (cremated, then the ashes are scattered in a garden) and his uncle (found decomposed beyond recognition, but an open casket funeral is conducted). The specter of Communism haunts the novel. After seeing a monster book press that can churn out gigantic bales of wastepaper the size of railroad cars, Haňt′a dreams of “the Press of the Apocalypse,” capable of ingesting all of Prague. Finally, Haňt′a is replaced by two young, ultra-efficient, cadets from the Brigade of Socialist Labor. It is only then that we realize that what seemed but a pleasant reminiscence is actually Haňt′a’s brief self-euology as he climbs into, and is crushed by, the jaws of his own hydraulic compacter, just as had been all the books and art prints and mice and flies and rubbish and blood over the preceding nearly four decades.]

The sentence that got me out of the quicksand and headed in the right direction depicted the fate of one particular set of books from the Royal Prussian Library, “leather-bound tomes with their gilt edges and titles,” that arrived on railroad flatcars: “since it poured the whole week, what I saw when the last load of books pulled up was a constant flow of gold water and soot and printer’s ink coming from the train” (11). Hrabal is working on a metaphor for the debate whirling in academic circles about what constitutes a work of art. In the early 1970s Stanley Fish, then at Berkeley, took issue with the dominant formalist thesis that a work of literature could and should be analyzed as a stand-alone object, that texts had a fully contained reality. That is to say, criticism should consider what a text is, not what it does, and the preferred method was “close reading.” Unfortunately, this led (and leads still) to dogmatic interpretations, not only of the literary classics placed under this microscope, but also of which classics the canon should be comprised. Fish, and others of his ilk in the Reader-Response school of criticism, insisted that literature gained meaning only when it was read and that any meaning it achieved, irrespective of a presumed authorial “intent,” depended from an interaction with the (informed) reader. An (informed) reader versed in the relevant sociocultural milieu, which also surely informed the gestation of the work, would be especially well-positioned for interaction with a text. In fact, Reader-Response critics would perhaps insist on it. One could interpret Hrabal’s metaphor as implying that an actual book or text becomes irrelevant once it is read, for the reader can retain in his/her consciousness all its content. Because only ideas are immortal, the paper and ink document (or any cyberspace [re]production) is meaningless. So although he is destroying books, and finding it hard to do so, he is confident that he has not dislodged knowledge from consciousness.

In a chapter in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) titled “Reading as Poaching,” French philosopher Michel de Certeau notes that until the western world reached a tipping point of literacy, reading/listening was a mostly passive act. A book, after all, is merely a bound sheaf of papers (or rolls of papyrus) onto which have been ciphered a repertory of icons, which in Solitude reappear as “gold water and soot and printer’s ink” and sodden paper that Haňt′a cannot put into his compacter. Such icons “on the militarily organized surfaces of the text” (170), gain semiologic significance, meaning, indiscriminately through social compacts. What, for example, does the symbol “Ϸ” represent? For someone versed in Old English it’s simply how you start the word Ϸorn . “Haňt′a” is another example: in English “ň” has no significance whatsoever, whereas in Czech “ň” is distinct from “n” just as in Spanish “ñ” has its own role and when translated into English piggybacks a “y” with it. In fact, phonetically, ň = ñ! Descartes observed, that if you re-ciphered a text by replacing each letter by the one following it in the alphabet, the new text could have a new meaning to a reader distinct from the original authorial intent. Signifiers are arbitrary.

But until reading could become an active process for a large audience, texts were read aloud. de Certeau notes that during the first several centuries of the printing age, texts were read aloud mostly by clergy, especially Catholic clergy, who, invoking the mystery of its texts, employed them as a way to control its laity. “The use made of the book by privileged readers constitutes it as a secret of which they are the ‘true’ interpreters” (171). Further indication of the passivity of the “reading” public was that while ecclesiastical texts were written and read in Latin, their meaning and significance were quite clear to adherents who had no clue as to what the Latin itself meant, a kind of Descartian transposition.

But once literacy blossomed the false divide between a readable text and the act of reading could no longer be maintained. De Certeau writes, “The creativity of the reader grows as the institution that controlled it declines” (172). In fact, not only is it the creativity of the reader that imbues the great classic texts with so much meaning, but today the transparency of electronic documents (www.recovery.gov) forces controlling institutions, such as government, to be more responsive to enlightened readers.

Reader-response criticism, not surprisingly, has been categorized in as many ways as there are critics, but one of the most fruitful divisions is that offered by Stanley Fish . He sees literature as a presentation by a writer to an informed (or educated, implied, normative, whatever) reader; such presentation can be either “rhetorical” or “”dialectical.” In the former case, one reads text purely for information (“truth”), while in the latter the “truth” must (can only) be ascertained by the work a reader does with a text to discover or interpret it. Only in the latter case, does there really exist a literary moment. The problem with this concept is that it opens the door for as many interpretations as there are readers; such pure subjectivism could lead to a kind of chaotic deconstruction of literature. As a response, Fish went on to describe the concept of interpretative communities, which presupposes that there exist both structural elements within a text (the textural grammar and rhetoric) that guide readers toward or away from certain interpretations, and that groups of readers with a shared background (e.g. university lit students) tacitly agree on these. Thus, the universe of interpretations becomes self-limited. In its present form, then, Reader-Response criticism sees literature as the combined effect of an author subtly guiding an informed reader toward, but not to, certain inferences via the text. de Certeau, however, would take this one step further: “the text has a meaning only through its readers: it changes along with them: it is ordered in accord with codes of perception that it does not control” (170). In his poetic stance de Certeau refines this: “The reader produces gardens that miniaturize and collate a world, like a Robinson Crusoe discovering an island” (173).

In approaching Hrabal then it is important to ask ourselves what exactly it is about that makes its meaning so difficult to grasp. One of Hrabal’s rhetorical ploys is a kind of free association mixed with magical realism. In the course of several pages (consider 32-35) he takes us from the unpleasant reality of a swarm of “dreadful flesh flies” and slaughterhouse blood in the cellar to visions of Jesus and Lao-tze to recollections of his “grandfathers and great-grandfathers” drinking beer to the arrival of two gypsy girls (“two skirts, one turquoise blue, the other velvet violet”) on the stairs, this latter morphing into a description of street scenes. Another aspect of Hrabal’s grammar is repetition. Images, such as the girl in turquoise and the rats in the sewer, reappear regularly. This all seems uncanny at first, but when you realize that all this is but a hurried rememory as Haňt′a comes to his death, it makes sense, at least as much sense as dreams do. I could perhaps offer the concluding words again to de Certeau, who draws a distinction between writers and readers, one with which surely Hrabal would agree:

Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers [sic]; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. (174)