ACTIVIDAD DEL ESTADO EN LA ECONOMÍA

1930 lists it as the title for Hostovsky’s forthcoming novel to be published in the w i n t e r .H o s t o v sk y describes the novel to Cemy as a tale about inner division, as a contest between a man and his increasingly independent and powerful shadow, which is narrated by means o f drawing on all kinds of stories relating to mirrors and so on. He describes his approach to the text in the following way:

exposice, v niz seznamuji ctenafe s hrdiny a prostfedim je psana jako filmové libretp, charakteristicky a naznaky. Potom se pfenasi dëj do nitra, ale v psychologisaci, myslim ze dûkladné, zachovâvâm stale tutéz formu filmovou. Tyz spad a stfidani obrazu zâmëmë zkloubenych. Vybavuji si vsechny vzpominky na své dëtstvf, na nemoci a horecné sny atd., kdy clovëk vnima lidi, vëci i stavy duse odlisnë od zdravého mozku a prece plasticky a vërojatnë.^^

Several points arise from these comments. First, by way of a factual aside, the subsequent novel was adapted for the cinema as the 1937 film Vydérac, although reviews o f the film suggest that the novel’s psychological foundation (which Hostovsky is so enthusiastic about here) disappeared in the screenplay, a fact one might have surmised from the film’s title. Secondly, Hostovsky’s interest in memories, illness, and dreams as a means of perceiving people, things and states of consciousness ‘odlisnë od zdravého mozku a pfece plasticky a vërojatnë’ sounds like the Decadent belief in intermediate states of consciousness as vehicles to a higher reality. Finally, Hostovsky’s new mode o f narration in the novel is important because the opening up of the novelistic space through a ‘filmic’ panorcpiic eye is a movement away from the hermetic structures — and the hermetic psychology, in which the world continually refers back to the self — of his preceding texts. Whether the new perspective suggested a new theme or whether the new theme suggested a new perspective is unimportant: the opening up o f the space o f the novel goes hand in hand with some exit for the protagonist from his isolation chamber.

The opening o f the novel — an observation of people performing mechanized work rather than some kind o f information about the personality o f the protagonist — intimates a new relationship between the protagonist and the world in his attempt to relate and compare his own behaviour to that of

58 Report by ‘-chb.’ [Vâclav Chab] in Ndrodni osvobozeni, 7, no. 220, 12 August 1930, p. 4.

others. We begin with the group of workers and clerks whom Basek fears resembling and move towards the bourgeois circle (the Frybls and Dr Piroh) he desires to infiltrate; his studied attention to their behaviour (the insincere greetings between Olga and Dr Piroh, for example) is a form of preparation for his imitation o f them. Basek is particularly aware of the disparity between their speech and their gestures and facial expressions: the account of the evening at the Frybls sometimes reads like a series of instructions from a theatre director: ‘vslmal si kolemsedicich. Doktor vypoustel oblaka koufe, funel, hekal, klel, chechtal se, Frybl drzel v jedné nice karty, hlavu mël hluboko sehnutou, dolni ret se pfemitavé pohyboval z koutku do koutku. Druha ruka hledala nezne Olzino rameno. Zvedl jsem zvedave hlavu, nebof mi neuslo, ze si Olga odsedla’ (pp. 34-35). While Basek is acutely conscious o f the way that other people relate to one another (and that is significant in so far as it represents a new characteristic for a Hostovsky protagonist), he remains egocentric since, in recognizing a broad web o f relationships, he is predominantly concerned with his role as a focus for those relationships: thus, as his self-confidence increases, he is aware ‘ze se v mych rukou sbfliaji nitky osudu nekolika lidi’ and that he represents ‘pro celou fadu mozku dûlezitÿm elementem’ (p. 91).

Set against this circle radiating from the protagonist’s self-consciousness is a wider circle o f action, involving incidental deaths, which frames the novel and to which Basek is a passive witness. Basek attributes his change of fortunes (seeking out Olga, the financial fraud) to the ‘trivial’ incident of overhearing a crowd discussing the murder of three people; his attention is drawn by the name of the street in which the deaths occurred. At the end of the novel, Basek is standing outside a building when he hears the horrifying shriek o f a man repairing window-frames falling to his death from the sixth floor of a block o f flats (p. 154). The event of this death creates a pattern of responses like the drop o f a stone in a large pool o f water: Basek observes first a small group o f people around the body, then fifty metres away people gawping at the first group, and then a further fifty metres away townspeople continuing to go about their business, looking round without returning or stopping. Basek is involved then in distinguishing a whole sequence of effects radiating out from the corpse. The people on the street, diverted to different degrees by the spectacle o f the dead man, and the small bustle around him, are nevertheless

connected by the mere fact of their response. In a reference to the incidental deaths at the beginning of the novel, and as an expression o f how he has changed, Basek wonders whether among the crowd there is also someone who is interested only in the name of the street and not in the dead man; ‘Tudy prave prosla smrt, dotkla se mne, dychla na mne’ (p. 155). Death rather than the dead man has suddenly affected Basek, perhaps because he realizes that his mortality is a condition that he shares with others (and one thinks back to the epigraph to the novel, ‘Jsem pry synem zeny a muze.../Podivné! Myslil jsem, ze jsem vie’). As Papousek states, mortality is identified here as an existential point o f connection between people. Death is incorporated in the hero’s view of existence.^®

The interconnectedness of life which Hostovsky introduces as a theme in Ztraceny stin is developed further in Pfipad profesora Kornera as Komer, gazing out of his window, glimpses snatches of people’s lives through those windows which are lit up and can form impressions, for example, of how wealthy or poor they are, ‘vsechno to v jediné slitine zdiva, vsechno to rûzné a pfece semknuté jakymsi zfejmym fadem, jakousi vyssi jednotou. Nikdy se odtud takhle nedival. S tak az zavratnym uzasem nad velikym zivotem sta malych zivotu’ (ibid.) That Komer can perceive some kind o f order governing the world without his window suggests another development in Hostovsky’s representation o f the relationship between the self and the world in his work. He sees ‘deset, dvacet, padesat oken, temnych i ozafenych, deset, dvacet, padesat spicich i zijicich svëtû zavadilo nahle o jeho oci’ (p. 19). Just as Basek apprehended a ring o f effects radiating out from the corpse, so here the repetition o f ‘deset, dvacet, padesat’ suggests a layered depth o f connections between people. It is as though Hostovsky begins here where he left off in his previous novel. Komer shares Basek’s experience of an ekstasis or epiphany, standing outside o f his own life to observe Life unfolding before him: his senses are assailed by the smells, noises and colours he beholds, ‘takze stal jakoby vytrzen ze svého zivota, ze svého sveta a pfehlizel lidské mraveniste, v nëmz az dosud byl slepy’ (ibid.). Basek and Komer represent a significant modification o f Hostovsky’s earlier protagonists. The world no longer constitutes solely an extemal configuration of the protagonist’s consciousness: