Ian Courtenay Johnston

“ Translating bad food to farts and then to shared jokes can happen, but only if we are fully human and not overwhelmed by a sense of our own importance. The jail may stink of the shit bucket, but perhaps that odour is associated with the sense of a great communal equality and humanity only available where no one can pretend to be more important that he, in fact, is. That may be why it is typical of inmates in the jail to share experiences and to sing—not doleful tunes of their common misery but all sorts of energetic songs which celebrate their moment of companionship. ”

“ He is some official’s batman or a regimental orderly, without the freedom to choose. His function is to accept the label pinned on him by others, to obey orders without question, to carry out duties for other people, and to go where they tell him. That is a fate he shares with all other lower ranks in the book. The only real freedom he experiences as an observer of people making choices about who they are or want to be occurs, ironically enough, in the lunatic asylum:
“There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have ever dreamed of. ”

“ He will carry out orders in his own manner, and if things go wrong, well, that’s just how it is. Hence, he’s always in difficulty when he has to deal with the life blood of the bureaucracy—paperwork or phone calls or precise timetables, things which demand that he pay close attention and care about a particular outcome for the sake of a larger enterprise. In that sense, he ironically subverts the bureaucracy by accepting its authority, sometimes enthusiastically, and continuing to be himself within the limits imposed. ”

“ And there is thus no more immediate way to alert us to the absurd pretensions of those who would subordinate what human beings truly are to the language of their official systems than by juxtaposing the neat language of official prose to the messy realities of the human body. ”

“ So the absurdity which governs human society is a permanent feature of existence. Humour is a way of coping moment by moment, but it has nothing to offer as an alternative vision. Life remains as cruel and absurd after the joke or the story as it was before (a point which the movement back and forth between Švejk’s adventures and the grimmer tones of the narrator emphasizes for us) .
Perhaps that is the reason why we don’t feel so disappointed that Hašek didn’t live to complete his novel. ”

“ In that sense, attempting to destroy or correct old ways can be a way of encouraging us to create something better.
However, if we ask what creative moral vision underlies The Good Soldier Švejk, we cannot arrive at an answer as readily as we can with, say, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Aristophanes’ Frogs (not that these works are entirely unambiguous, of course) . For in Hašek’s novel, we are not given any very clear direction on how we ought to live our lives. There is certainly a very strong sense of human folly, greed, and cruelty, but is there anything in the novel beyond that? ”

“ One of Hašek’s most characteristic ways of highlighting the satiric follies of bureaucratic officialdom is to constantly confront us with its most obvious counter-force, the physical demands of life itself, as these are manifested by food, drink, and the body’s response to its basic needs— particularly vomiting and shitting. ”

“ Their constant baffled frustration and impotence when confronted with Švejk suggest that they, too, sense how impossible such a response is to the world they serve. They can’t process him because they can only deal with normal human beings, who are inherently hostile or indifferent to the larger system (a response which is natural enough, given that the system, as Hašek presents it, acts to warp, suppress, and deny common humanity) . ”

“ It’s important to notice that Švejk spends almost the entire novel carrying out orders or being told what to do by people who have official authority to compel and to punish. If they want to sell him to someone else in a game of cards, there’s nothing he can do about it. He has no real freedom to make decisions about any of the most important issues of his life. In fact, apart from the opening scenes, he has no life of his own: he has to participate in the life other people have determined for him. ”

“ That may well be the reason why in this book the moments which register as the most relaxed and most truly human interactions tend to take place when people are enjoying the most basic physical pleasures—drinking, preparing food, eating together, or sharing a cigarette. At such times, for example, a Czech and a Hungarian can forget their ethnic and political differences and share their resources to prolong the moment which, for all the language differences that make any normal conversation impossible, insists upon their common situation and nature. ”

“ How can we reconcile someone who, on his own, seems to be incapable of walking a few kilometres without getting lost or caring about getting lost, even on a road he’s already travelled (as in Part II) with the apparently much shrewder and decisive man in certain adventures in Part I and later?
The narrator doesn’t give us much help here, since we are very rarely offered a glimpse into what’s going on in Švejk’s head. We hear what he says and see what he does, but the motives are rarely clear. ”

“ Much of Hašek’s novel would seem to fit into this tradition. Certainly, if we look for alternatives in the story to this pervasive sense of absurdity, there’s not much to build on. From time to time we do derive a sense that among themselves the common people have a way of dealing with each other which is much more human than anything that goes on in the bureaucratic system. Ordinary people here share food, drink, money, tobacco, and each other’s company freely, often under difficult circumstances. ”

“ There may even be a sense here, especially in the above remark, that Švejk is able to deal with the official lies which prop up the bureaucracy (and even declare his faith in them) because in his civilian life he was such a successful liar himself. He invented genealogies designed to dress up canine mutts in the finery of some noble pedigree and spent his time trying to persuade people to accept ugly mongrels as thoroughbred prizes. Smothering them with his narratives is for him a sales tactic. So he understands better than anyone the deceptive power of stories and is not going to be fooled. ”

“ But Hašek’s assault on the “salon” he refers to involves more than bringing the expressive idioms of the streets to the centre of human interactions. It also means going after many of the hallowed Czech myths so zealously promoted in the language of high culture in the previous fifty years (at least) by those hoping to create a “lofty” historical identity for the emerging Czech nation. It’s as if he deliberately intends to mock those traditions as completely meaningless to the modern realities of Czech working-class life. ”

“ This form of satiric humour arises, not from the discrepancy between how we ought to behave and the way we do behave, but from a pervading sense of the ridiculousness of everything. It’s a response to life which affirms no coherent moral alternative simply because there is no such thing: the very faith in such a possibility is as absurd as everything else. ”

“ It may be worth noting here that Hašek’s attitude to the lofty official prose of the modern bureaucracy is part of a widespread and significant phenomenon, the way in which after brutal modern wars many people are very suspicious of language itself, the vehicle by which they were deceived into thinking the brutality they now have to come to grips with was a “worthy” chapter in a “noble” enterprise. In the context of central Europe, this point may help to explain some of the appeal of Communism between the wars. ”

“ The most beloved figures of the official versions of Czech history serve to bring joy into the man’s life only because he can turn them into snot sketches on glass—an “artistic” process that gives him so much pleasure he’s prepared to undergo repeated beatings rather than give it up. The humour here may be coarse, but it’s brutally effective. ”

“ Thus, there may be a sense from time to time that the problem lies with the bureaucracy rather than with human nature and that if we could only live in a much more anarchic way, letting ordinary people be themselves, human beings could get along. ”

“ In a sense, they are reminders of something linked to the point I made about the various attempts to construct official narratives of imperial greatness or military heroism or Czech ethnic identity. Švejk’s inexhaustible collection of tales about ordinary people keeps reminding the reader that the realities of life cannot be reduced to a single narrative uniting all people, because life consists of an infinite number of unique narratives, each of which is more persuasive and interesting than any bureaucratic propaganda. ”

“ These signs of authority are all officially sanctioned, but no one believes in them; people simply use them as instruments of their own authority in a system which reinforces itself by reflex appeals to such traditions. ”

“ And a dead man, who lay on top of the cover with his legs hanging down and half of whose head had been torn off by shrapnel, just as though he’d been cut in half, he too in the last moment shitted so much that it ran from his trousers over his boots into the trenches mixed with blood. And half his skull together with his brains lay right underneath. A chap doesn’t even notice how it happens to him. ”

“ The Good Soldier Švejk is in many ways a very traditional work, written as picaresque novel, a story which tells the adventures of (usually) a low-born rogue (picaro is the Spanish for rascal) who uses his native wit to survive a series of adventures. The plot is commonly structured in a linear sequence of incidents which confronts the hero (and his companion, if he has one) with various elements of a complex and often corrupt society. ”

“ Hašek repeatedly confronts us with the didactic voice of the narrator, sometimes in casual asides and sometimes at considerable length (note, for example, the opening of Chapter 11 in Part 1, a two-page rant against religion: “Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination. . . .” And so on) . We learn that the narrator was himself a soldier in the 91st regiment when he interrupts the story of Švejk to deliver a small lecture on batmen in the army (162–165) . ”

“ The presence of this standard offers a vision of how we ought to live our lives and, in the midst of a work which is always attacking and tearing down human pride, pictures a more meaningful alternative. ”

“ Hence, we would be closer to the heart of the novel, I think, to claim that the real target here is the army as a structured bureaucracy designed to organize human effort, and, beyond that, of all forms of social bureaucracy claiming authority over the common folk in the name of some greater good—religious, imperial, judicial, or whatever. ”

“ A frequent additional feature of a number of picaresque novels is the presence of a narrator who guides us through the adventures and typically delivers his own views on particular issues which the adventures of the hero are exploring or illustrating. In other forms of storytelling such repeated intrusions into the world of the represented fiction by the narrator’s editorial opinion can affect our response for the worse because we may well sense we are being pushed in directions we do not want to go or where the fiction is not taking us. ”

“ And yet in some ways this novel is obviously about a good deal more than war. After all, while there are a great many caustic comments and satirical moments when the inhumanity of modern military life is exposed for the idiotic folly it is, there are no combat scenes in the novel, and we are never given a detailed and sustained glimpse of soldiers killing and being killed. ”

“ Where that occurs, often the main point of the work is the nature of that development, the extent to which his experiences have changed or failed to change the hero in significant ways (we shall consider later whether that is the case with Hašek’s hero) .
The picaresque novel is a genre well suited to satire because it enables the author, with a minimum of effort, to introduce a wide variety of social types in different and often incongruously funny situations in order to expose their hypocrisy, vanity, and stupidity. ”

“ Whatever the realities of life may be, they simply cannot be contained or defined by rhetorically pious formulations handed down from on high. One of the most amusingly ridiculous attempts of the military hierarchy to impose order is the emphasis on repeated enemas or the demand from a visiting general that the troops all shit on schedule—the victory over the Italians depends on that more than on anything else. ”

“ Hašek is determined that in the literature of the new republic the people’s voice, even at its most colloquial, ungrammatical, vituperative, scatological, and shocking, will be heard in their own idiom and will not be ignored or sidelined by an national agenda dominated by intellectuals and modernist artists publishing manifestoes in lofty prose. ”

“ And as the troops passed through and camped in the neighbourhood there could be seen everywhere little heaps of human excrement of international extraction belonging to all peoples of Austria, Germany and Russia. The excrement of soldiers of all nationalities and of confessions lay side by side or heaped on top of one another without quarrelling among themselves. ”

“ The most obvious means Švejk uses to cope is to talk—he loves engaging in conversation with anyone and always has ready his amazing store of narratives about people he has known or heard about or invented. ”