Too loud a solitude, indeed

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A brief explanation for the name of this blog: I’ve been reading short novels lately, many of them by Eastern European writers such as David Albahari, a Serbian living in Canada in self-exile, and these days the late Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, on whom you can find comprehensive coverage in James Wood’s 2001 overview and in The Guardian’s profile. And how can you resist a graphic novel adaptation and a photo exhibit, both inspired by Hrabal’s strangely ungainly and alarming title Too Loud a Solitude?

I read Too Loud a Solitude with admiration, amusement, and sadness, gaining invaluable insight into the structuring of my novel, and illuminatingly, if not a little resignedly, into my own relationship to solitude, and I wonder now (constantly, it seems) about the indestructibility of books, of their metaphorical and literal impact on a fragile, absorbent mind. The novel is Haňtá’s comic rumination on literature and philosophy, as well as on bottomless pitchers of beer, as day after day he compacts trash in a basement with a hole of a window opening onto the street through which people toss unwanted books. Haňtá either lovingly feeds these books into his hydraulic press or carries them home for his own consumption, to an apartment filled to the brim with discarded darlings churning about from the horror of their own weight. There is the threat—or promise—that the overflowing shelf above Haňtá’s bed will one day smother him in his sleep.

Two spots in the novel refer to the title. In the first, two Gypsy girls visit Haňtá while he’s experiencing one of his drunken hallucations, this time with Jesus and Lao-tze standing before him in all their contemplative glory, Jesus radiating “mellow ecstasy” and Lao-tze gazing about with “scornful indifference” * ; in the second title reference, Haňtá contemplates Kant’s Theory of the Heavens while he compacts van Gogh’s Sunflowers and protesting families of mice. (Note that I am quoting from the 1990 Harcourt publication translated by Michael Henry Heim.)

p. 41:
I looked up and realized that Jesus and Lao-tze had disappeared up the white-washed stairs like the turquoise and velvet-violet skirts of my Gypsy girls before them, and looked down and realized that my pitcher was empty, so I stumbled up the stairs on all threes, my head spinning from too loud a solitude, and not until I’d made it to the back alley and breathed some fresh air in my lungs could I pick myself up and get a firm grip on the pitcher.

p. 53:
It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I’d seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.

Though I tend to imagine more mundane things, like a rippling shadow out of the corner of my eye, and unfortunately not at all while under the influence of beer or any hallucinogen, I relate deeply to Haňtá’s experience, as he describes the essence of the act of reading, of destroying and being destroyed by a book. Plus I just have to love a narrator who’s that off his rocker and alone.

* I’m enamored of the comparison between Western and Eastern thought here via Haňtá’s relationship to his terrifying hydraulic press—and especially through his drunken hazes—and would like to quote one more passage from p. 40:

I saw Jesus in the sanguine corporality of his ciphers and symbols and Lao-tze in a shroud, pointing at an unhewn plank; I saw Jesus as a playboy and Lao-tze as an old gland-abandoned bachelor; I saw Jesus raising an imperious arm to damn his enemies and Lao-tze lowering his arms like broken wings; I saw Jesus as a romantic, Lao-tze as a classicist, Jesus as the flow, Lao-tze as the ebb, Jesus as spring, Lao-tze as autumn, Jesus as the embodiment of love for one’s neighbor, Lao-tze as the height of emptiness, Jesus as progressus ad futurum, Lao-tze as regressus ad originem.

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