Créditos

By now, we have defined the position which the narrator of the story and its characters (its protagonists) hold in the narrative of literary texts. To complete the whole process of preparation for the main analysis of Hakl’s and Balabán’s texts, we have to look at one more objective and that is the connection between the author, the narrator and the protagonist of the text.

First, we have to establish who the author of a literary text is. The author is a person who writes and publishes books. In other words, the author is a real person who is responsible for producing a new discourse; he/she is the connection between the world that lies beyond the text and the world that lies within the text. The author is also the name that appears on the cover of the book. In the majority of literary works, this name is identical

with the name of the real person. However, there are also authors who publish their books under another name, their pseudonym or their pen name. Both the real name and the pseudonym are names of the real person. The author, however, is the one whose name is representing the book.

When discussing the author of the text, the narrator of the text and the characters of the text, literary theory points out significant shifts that occur in their position within their mutual world. Literary scholars recognize connections that work on different levels between all these subjects of the text, and they demonstrate it on various literary genres and styles. These scholars then speak about differences between autobiography, biography, memoir, diary, literary fiction etc.

The literary scholar, Philippe Lejeune, defines autobiography as ‘a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (Lejeune 2007: 298). He adds that the name of ‘the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical’ (Ibid: 299). If any of those requirements is not met, then, according to Lejeune, we cannot talk about autobiography but about the diary (no retrospective point of narrative), memoir (subject of the text is not a story of personality but a story of the times), literary fiction (there is no identity between the name of the author and the narration) or biography (the name of the narrator and the name of the main protagonist are not identical) (Ibid.).

In autobiography, the identity of the narrator and of the main protagonist of the text, in the majority of cases, is reached by the use of first person perspective – the ‘I’.⁴¹ It is then the reader who, based on his/her knowledge of the text, establishes a connection that exists between this ‘I’ and the personality of the author. Once again, it is Philippe Lejeune who recognizes two ways of establishing this identity: it can be done implicitly, when the first person refers to the name of the author (e. g. ‘this is the story of my life’) or when the first person enters the text by acting as if he/she were the author of the text, and in an obvious way, when the narrator and the protagonist are given the name of the author (Ibid: 308-309). According to Lejeune, the reader does not have to go to the outer world to determine whether there is an ‘identity’ between the name of the ‘I’ of the text and the name of the author, as it is the text itself that offers him or her all the answers he or she needs to know (Ibid.). On the other hand, we should add that the reader does have to go to the world that

41 There are some autobiographical works which use the third person perspective. For more examples, see Lejeune.

lies beyond the text in order to determine whether there is any ‘resemblance’ between the narrator, the protagonist of the text, and its author, in case the identity of all three subjects is not reached.

Such literary texts in which the reader, based on his/her knowledge of the outer reality and the text, sees the resemblance between the fictive and the real world, are not autobiographies but they can be classified as ‘autobiographical fiction’, or as fiction inspired by the author’s personal history and life. Autobiographical fiction is therefore the case where the author, the narrator and the main protagonist of the text are not identical but where the reader suspects that there is a certain degree of resemblance between the author and the narration. This also refers to cases where the narrator and the main protagonist of the text carry the name by which the reader recognizes the real name of the person who is hidden behind the pseudonym, the pen name that is used as the name of the author of the book. The identity between the author and the narration is not reached here; however, a certain degree of resemblance can be determined.

The difference between the autobiography and the autobiographical fiction arises from the difference between the ‘identity’ and the ‘resemblance’ of the text which the reader recognizes in the process of reading the text. The difference between any form of fiction, biography, and autobiography comes with the fact that both biography and autobiography are referential texts. The aim of the fiction is not primarily to provide an image of the real world; the main aim of the fiction is to entertain (and engage) the reader by taking him or her on the journey through the discovery of the fictive world.

Nevertheless, we must also not forget that, despite the identity and the non-identity of the text with the real world and despite the resemblance and the non-resemblance of the text with the real world, fiction, as much as autobiography and biography, is also a representation of the real world and a way into the life of the others. After all, we read because we want to know the worlds of other people outside of our own little space.

Literature, in general, provides us this access to the world(s) of the others.

In fiction, the resemblance between the real and the fictive world can be identified only by the reader and his/her knowledge of the outer world; it is not what the text primarily and obviously seeks. To what degree the reader sees the fictive world as the image of the real world is fully up to the reader himself/herself and his/her perception of both the fictive and the real world. Primarily, fiction relies on the fantasy of the reader, and thereafter on his/her knowledge of the world.

As opposed to fiction, both autobiography and biography ‘claim to provide information about a reality exterior to the text… Their aim is not simple verisimilitude, but resemblance to the truth. Not “the effect of the real,” but the image of the real’ (Ibid: 316).

But, whilst autobiography requires the identity of the author and the narration, biography is based on the author’s knowledge of another real person. It is then another real person who is the object of his/her narration, not the author himself/herself. The author of autobiographical text provides the reader with the story of his/her own life and his/her own personality; the aim of the author of biographical texts is to provide the reader with a history of another person and a history of the world this person lived.

In the same way as we have analyzed the difference between the autobiography and the (autobiographical) fiction, and between autobiography and biography, we would be able to continue with other literary styles which, up to a certain degree, play with the idea of the identity/resemblance of the author, the narrator and the main protagonist of the text.

However, as the main purpose of this research is the analysis of Hakl’s and Balabán’s fiction, we would focus only on this fiction, on their possible ‘resemblance’ with the world of both the above authors and on their effect on the reader’s perception of the world. To anticipate, this is because in both Hakl’s and Balabán’s fiction we can trace a certain resemblance between the author and the narrator.

Finally, it is important to point out that all translations of Hakl’s and Balabán’s fiction and other texts used in this study have been made especially for the purposes of this work. This is because, apart from Hakl’s novella, O rodičích a dětech (Of Kids and Parents), English translations of Hakl’s and Balabán’s fiction were not available.