Modelación de la decisión

During the years Capek worked for Narodni listy prior to World War I, the public identified him with the polemical 'Day's news' column devoted to current events and attacks on rival newspapers, such as the Social Democrat Pravo lidu or the Realist das. These newspapers identified Capek with the politics of his employer; thus, attacks on Capek, his politics, his style as a journalist and his prose fiction, often constituted attacks on the Young Czech Party. The polemics writer for Rasln's (1867-1923) Slovo attacks Capek in a manner typical of the rivals of Narodni listy:

Kdyby v 'Nârodnich Listech' lepe placenÿ bÿv. redaktor 'Narodni Politiky', pan K. M. Capek vëdël, jakÿ hnus vzbuzuji jeho kudrnate, sprost'âctvim prospikované lokâlky, jak ëekâ se, 2e bude povÿsen na zodpovëdného redaktora nëjakého Brousku, a2 mladoCeskâ strana bude ûplnë V koncich, jak po venkovë s odporem stafi, vërni abonenti odklâdaji 'Nâr. Listy' od té doby, co zavlâdl tam Capkùv kurs a ton, snad by se mu pfece rozbfesklo, co pâse sam na sobë a na listë, do nëho2 psâval Neruda. Kdyby uvâ2il, 2e jednou v 'Sebranÿch spisech K. M. Capka', je2 po jeho smrti snad vydâ p. F. Topië, nakladatel redaktorù 'Nâr. Listù', bude z osmi dilû celÿch sest obsahovati jeho sebrané polemické lokâlky, snad by se pfece zarazil, jakÿ portrét si svÿmi

'pracemi' kresli.^*

The polemics in which Capek was involved from 1900 until his death testify to the fact that Capek's reputation as a political journalist influenced his reception as a fiction writer.

1 6 6/

A jestë K. M. Capek', Slovo, 7 March 1904, p. 9.

i67This is supported by the statements of his contemporaries. See, for example, F. X. Svoboda's (1860-1943) comment: '2urnalistické polemiky tvé ovsem vyvolâvaji ti hojnë nepfâtel, ktefi by za to râdi ranili të na umëleckém tvém dile. Tim stalo se, 2e snad nejvice ze spisovatelû nasi generace jsi nedocenën.

Capek adopted the stance of the Young Czech Party; this is manifest, for example, in the anti-German nationalism of the 'Day's news' articles and in Capek's art r e v i e w s . T h a t Capek identified with this party is suggested by the fact that after the war he became a member of the Czechoslovak National Democratic P a r t y . H o w e v e r , Capek asserted that those articles which he did not sign did not express his o p i n i o n . T h e theme of the role and responsibility of the journalist as creator of public opinion runs throughout the debates over contemporary issues in which Capek was involved, like universal suffrage or the Czech-German conflict.

Many of Capek's polemics concern the role of the critic. The question of the critic's responsibility to the nation was raised in debates over the relation between art and politics, in particular in reviews of exhibitions and plays. These polemics also discuss the activity of the critic, that is, the nature of his or her mediation between the artist and the public.

I have divided the polemics into two sections: (i) pre-war debates over contemporary political and cultural events; (ii) Capek's pre- and post-war conflicts with critics of his drama and

daleko nedocenën.' Papers: Capek-Chod; letters from Frantisek Xaver Svoboda to Capek-Chod, 1902-1920; see letter dated 21 February 1910; PNP. Capek engaged in polemics prior to 1900. However, with the exception of the dispute over Bilek, I treat only those polemics after 1900. In terms of the issues raised, the Bilek dispute is linked with later polemics, which also refer back to this exchange between Capek and Mânes.

i^Capek's mistrust of the German minority is also evident in his brief post-war commentary: 'Aby mêla vBdycky', Narodni listy, 25 December 1923, supplement to no. 352, p. 9.

i^"Papers: Capek-Chod; documents: eight membership cards, 1883-1925; PNP. The National Democratic Party was the successor to the Young Czech Party. See: Vaclav L. Benes, 'Czechoslovak Democracy and Its Problems, 1918-1920', A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918-1948, Victor S. Mamatey and Radomir Lu2a (eds), Princeton, N. J . , 1973, pp. 71-2.

^^°A note from Prokop Grégr instructing Capek not to respond to Kramaf's recent article supports the view that the contents of Capek's articles were determined by the political opinions and goals of his employers. Papers: Capek-Chod; letters from Prokop Grégr, 1905-1919; calling card dated June 1909; PNP.

prose fiction. Within each section I discuss the polemics in a more or less chronological order; this organization of the material reflects the fact that the polemics build on one another; opponents in polemics often refer to earlier disputes. Many more polemics exist which could be traced through study of rival newspapers. The present selection of polemics was traced through a systematic search of Nârodnl listy for the years 1900- 1914 and through references to Capek in other journals after World War I . The selection thus concentrates on the period in which Capek was most active in daily polemics. A detailed study of his polemical style would probably provide a useful tool for identifying more of Capek's anonymous articles; I believe, however, that the present selection reveals those issues with which Capek wished to be identified and indicates the style which made him famous, or notorious.

do not treat here Capek's feuilletons, published in Narodni listy during the war.

The Grotesque and Capek-Chod

1. Paradox in Romantic Irony and the Grotesque

Despite their variety, twentieth-century definitions of the 'grotesque' share an understanding of the term as connoting a combination of opposites. In this respect, literary scholars generally follow Ruskin, who describes grotesque art as 'composed of two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful'.^ In his interpretation of the activity which gives rise to this art, that is, the play of the mind with terror, Ruskin also suggests the paradoxical character of the grotesque.^ Kayser defines the grotesque as consisting in 'the very contrast that ominously permits of no reconciliation';^ as 'A PLAY WITH THE ABSURD',** and an attempt 'TO INVOKE AND SUBDUE THE DEMONIC ASPECTS OF THE WORLD'.^ His emphasis on the sinister quality of the grotesque, however, tends to undermine the contradictory character ascribed to the term.* In his interpretation of the grotesque as the 'fusion of organic and mechanical elements', or mixture of the animate and inanimate, he draws upon the original use of the term to designate the frescoes decorating the Golden House of Nero in

iJohn Ruskin, 'Grotesque Renaissance', The Stones of Venice [1853], vol. 3, London, n.d. [1903], p. 139. Barasch comments that twentieth-century theorists have been influenced by Coleridge and Ruskin's theories of the grotesque. Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque. A Study in Meanings, The Hague and Paris, 1971, p. 152.

^Ruskin, 'Grotesque Renaissance', p. 155.

^Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature [Das Groteske: seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung, 1957], translated by Ulrich Weisstein, Bloomington, 1963, p. 59.

**Ibid. , p. 187. Emphasis in the original. *Ibid., p. 188. Emphasis in the original.

*He writes: 'THE GROTESQUE IS THE ESTRANGED WORLD [...] We are so strongly affected and terrified because it is our world which ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world. The grotesque instils fear of life rather than fear of death. Structurally, it presupposes that the categories which apply to our world view become inapplicable.' Ibid., pp. 184-5.

Rome.? He gives little weight to the fanciful character of the grotesque, exemplified by the frescoes, emphasizing that in grotesque art, 'human bodies [are] reduced to puppets, marionettes, and automata, and their faces frozen into masks'.*

'If one were to tear the mask off', he asserts, 'the grinning image of the bare skull would come to light'.*

With a definition derived from Coleridge, Van O'Connor states that grotesque art, 'simultaneously confronts the antipoetic and the ugly and presents them, when viewed out of the side of the eye, as the closest we can come to the sublime'.^ Like Kayser, Van O'Connor endorses the now conventional, if suspect, notion that grotesque art is particularly suited to the twentieth century; he writes: 'The grotesque has developed in response to our age, to atom bombs and great social changes. Bakhtin does not make this assumption; indeed, he bases his definition of the grotesque on an interpretation of medieval and Renaissance art. His presentation of the technique of 'degradation' or debasement, the 'fundamental artistic principle

?Ibid. , p. 183. On the frescoes, see Barasch, The Grotesque, A Study in Meanings, pp. 17-2 0.

*Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 183. *Ibid., p. 184.

^William Van O'Connor, The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays, Carbondale, 1962, p. 19. Barasch writes that Coleridge, in 'On the Distinction of the Witty, the Droll, the Odd, and the Humorous', argued for the transcendental qualities in humour, what later critics identified as the potential sublimity of the grotesque. Barasch, The Grotesque. A Study in Meanings, p. 154.

^^Van O'Connor, The Grotesque: An American Genre, p. 6. See Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 11; Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon. Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963, p. 1; Michael Steig, 'Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 29 (1970) , Winter, 2, p. 253; Philip Thomson, The Grotesque in German Poetry 1880- 1933, Melbourne, 1975, p. 27.

of grotesque realism',^ emphasizes the contradictory nature of the grotesque. For Bakhtin, degradation consists in:

coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth [. . . ] .^^

The action thus has both destructive and regenerative aspects. He interprets the grotesque as attempting 'to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal incomplete unfinished nature of being. Its images present simultaneously the two poles of becoming: that which is receding and dying, and that which is being born'.^^ The essence of the grotesque is, for him, the 'contradictory and double-faced fullness of life'.^

Jennings writes of the grotesque object that it 'always displays a combination of fearsome and ludicrous qualities [and]

[...] simultaneously arouses reactions of fear and amusement in the observer'.^ In the grotesque situation, exemplified by the Dance of Death, he writes that, 'there must be a basic incongruity, inherent in the structure of the concrete world presented to u s ' . H e interprets the grotesque as a means by which 'humour conquers anxiety and fear'.^* Similarly, Steig

^^Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World [Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable, 1965], translated by Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington,

1984, p. 370.

^^Ibid. , p. 21. "Ibid., p. 52. ^^Ibid. , p. 62.

"Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon, p. 10. ^^Ibid. , p. 21.

defines the term as 'the managing of the uncanny by the comic',^ adding that, 'a state of unresolved tension is the most common result'.^ Freud's analysis of the 'uncanny', which influenced twentieth-century theories of the grotesque, also develops, perhaps coincidentally, from a paradox. He points out that the word heimlich can be defined as 'what is familiar and agreeable,

[as well as] [...] what is concealed' {unheimlich) , that is, the antonym of h e i m l i c h .The contradiction in the definition leads Freud to speculate that the uncanny derives from the familiar:

'an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be conf irmed '.

The conception of the grotesque as constituting a paradox is so well established that Barasch mentions it in her introduction to The Grotesque. A Study of Meanings as one of the three current uses of the term.^ The study concludes with the assertion:

Few important novelists since James Joyce have neglected the modern theme of man's search for meaning in a disordered and confusing world; the most prevalent means of expressing that theme have been the grotesque mingling of the ludicrous and the terrible, the use of incongruities, the juxtapositions of low comedy, sordid reality, and the noble delusions of the inner man.^

^^Steig, 'Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis', p. 259.

2°Ibid., p. 260.

^^Sigmund Freud, 'The "Uncanny" ', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (1917- 1919), translated by James Strachey, London, 1955, p. 224. Steig discusses Freud's essay. Steig, 'Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis', pp. 256-7.

2^Ibid., p. 249.

^'Barasch, The Grotesque. A Study in Meanings, p. 10. 24

Thomson succinctly phrases this interpretation of the concept as 'the unresolvable confusion of incompatibles'.^ The secondary characteristics he ascribes to the grotesque include those which are frequently associated with the term: 'a quality of abnormality'; 'a high degree of radicality in substance, presentation and effect'; the inseparability of right and wrong in grotesque art; an anti-rational approach; experimentation with the unusual; the confusion of inanimate with animate/* A further characteristic of the grotesque, according to Thomson, is the arousing of lyrical expectations and their subsequent destruction.^

A direction for further refinement of the term is suggested in Thomson's comparison of the grotesque with irony: 'A world­ view based on the notion of infinite irony [...] or of mutual

irony on a grand scale [...] necessarily implies also notions of universal grotesquery and universal a b s u r d i t y . T h o m s o n usually distinguishes between irony and the grotesque, asserting that 'irony depends on the resolvability, intellectually, of a relationship [...] while the grotesque presents essentially the unresolvability of incompatibles'.^^ Recent critics, however, have tended to emphasize a similarity between the terms; that similarity becomes particularly apparent when one considers the conception of irony elaborated by Friedrich Schlegel.

Schlegel's description of irony as the 'form of paradox'3° suggests an obvious comparison with the grotesque, which has been

^Philip Thomson, The Grotesque in German Poetry 1880-1933, p. 19.

^^Ibid. , pp. 19, 21, 22, 54, 56.

^Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, London, 1972, p. 55.

^'Thomson, The Grotesque in German Poetry 1880-1933, p. 24. ^^Thomson, The Grotesque, The Critical Idiom, p. 50.

^^Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis and Oxford, 1991, Critical Fragment no. 48, p. 6.

understood as 'related to the paradox in l o g i c ' , o r the 'visual incarnation of p a r a d o x ' Ernst Behler identifies three

variations on the concept of irony in Schlegel's fragments, the first two of which may be relevant to contemporary conceptions of the grotesque.^ In the Lyceum (1797) fragments, irony is conceived of as self-restraint:

Schlegel found two antagonistic forces in the author's creative drive, namely the creative strivings of poetic enthusiasm for expression which are counteracted by the scepticism of irony. More specifically, the function of irony does not reside so much in the destruction of creative production, but rather in a hovering, mediating position between enthusiasm and scepticism. Schlegel defined irony as a shifting between two poles, as 'alternation between self-creation and self-destruction', and termed the result of this ironical alternation 'self-restraint'

(Selbstbeschrankung), i.e., the disciplined mastering of the creative drive. This idea is expressed in the following aphorism: 'It is just as fatal for a thinker to have a system as not to have one. He will therefore have to decide to combine both.

Nietzsche also identified the ironic attitude (dissimulation) with self-control.” Nietzsche's conception of irony as a mask

also reveals the influence of Schlegel, who writes of Socratic

”l. E. Pinsky, Realism Epochy Vozrozhedenya, cited by Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 32 nl2.

”Chris Snodgrass, 'Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces: Play, Paradox, and the Grotesque', Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley, Robert Langenfeld (ed.), Ann Arbor, 1989, pp. 27-8.

” Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, 'Introduction', Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, translated and annotated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, University Park and London, 1968, pp. 46-7.

” Ernst Behler, 'The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism', Romantic Irony, Frederick Garber (ed.), Budapest, 1988, p. 61.

”See: Friedrich Nietzsche, 'What is Noble', Beyond Good and Evil, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, London, 1990, p. 214. Behler writes of Nietzsche: 'ironic dissimulation, configurative thinking and writing, double-edged communication, and artistry of living and philosophizing were his response to the universal irony of the world'. Ernst Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity, Seattle and London, 1990, p. 99. My account follows Behler's analysis of the concept of irony, especially as it developed through Schlegel, Hegel, Heine and Nietzsche.

irony: 'In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden. [...] It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete c o m m u n i c a t i o n . T h e potential pessimism of this fragment anticipates that of Heine's notion of 'God's irony' or the 'irony of the world' which 'results from the disappearance of the conviction of reasonable order in this world'.^ Twentieth-century theories of the grotesque — one thinks, in particular, of Kayser — are indebted to Heine's notion of irony.

The second variation on Schlegel's concept of irony, according to Behler, its self-reflective character, is expressed in the Athenaeum (1798-1800) fragment no. 116 concerned with Romantic poetry:

it can also — more than any other art form — hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.^

Schlegel's definition of irony as 'permanent parabasis' may combine both the dynamic self-contradictory and self-reflective character of irony. Georgia Albert states that in this definition the two sides of irony expose each other as fictional, commenting: 'The play that is interrupted by a parabasis reflects on its own f i c t i o n a l i t y . A c c o r d i n g to Schlegel's definition, ironic literature must be inherently self-reflective and involve