![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Jaroslav Hašek’s popular World War I satire The Good Soldier Švejk relies for its comic effect on the bumbling antics of its title character and the consequent inconveniences for the Austro-Hungarian army into which he has been conscripted. This article argues that the satire of Švejk lies less in the irreverence and humor of its content than in its deep structural mechanisms of repetition, delay, and non-resistance pushed to the point of absurdity. The concept of “idiocy, ” key to the novel, serves as a deconstructive or destructive force in relation to the politico-juridical ideologies of early 20th-century nation-statism, militariation, and European imperialism in particular, and to the status of the law within any would-be biopolitical system in general.
Notes
1. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Daniel Heller-Roazen, ed. and trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 256
.2. Id.,at 57.
3. Id., at 261.
4. Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier vejk, Cecil Parrott, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1974), 19
.5. Herman Melville, “Bartleby,” Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 12
.6. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 32.
7. Id., at 31.
8. Robert Musil, “On Stupidity,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, Burton Pike and David S. Luft, eds. and trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 268.
9. Id.,at 279.
10. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 470.
11. Id., at 275-277.
12. See Musil, supra note 8 at 283.
13. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 465.
14. Id.,at 5o6.
15. Id.,at 734-735.
16. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine this in the detail it deserves, it is also worth noting that what save švejk in this instance from a backside-kicking by Lieutenant Lukáš is the arrival of the evening’s pork soup: thus it is that when the logic of logos and leges is dissolved, the only thing that remains (with any cohesion) is the body.
17. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 262-263.
18. Id.,at 422-423.
19. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Peggy Kamuf, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 103
.20. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 19.
21. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 210
.22. Id.,at 210.
23. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 422.
24. See Musil, supra note 8 at 268.
25. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 487.
26. Id., at 488.
27. Not so incidentally, at least for a consideration of satire’s historico-political functions: Princip died of tuberculosis in solitary confinement in the prison at Terezin, later to become Thereisenstadt concentration camp, the halfway stop, as it were, between the Prague ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ruth Bondi, who translated Švejk into Hebrew, recounts (as told by Avner Shats), “People in the Ghetto quoted Švejk all the time, and some could actually recite whole chapters by heart; the spirit of Švejk was so fitting to Ghetto life that one writer began to write the new adventures of Švejk in the Ghetto: He stands in the wrong line at city hall, has his ID stamped with the letter ‘J,’ and ends up in Terezin. The book was not completed as the writer died in the whereabouts of Auschwitz.” See “Animal Review Makes the Scene: Švejk,” AnimalReview: Fanine ofHerbivorous Youth <http://www.shats.com/AR/Previous/AvnerJune.htm>.
28. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 259.
29. Id., at 259.
30. Id., at 226.
31. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power wid Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 148
.32. This technique of caricature, incidentally, is the reason why it seems wholly misguided to try to speculate on the “real” intentions of Hašek’s main character (as for example Cecil Parrott does in the introduction to his translation): while Švejk’s actions are certainly not always consistent, he nonetheless cannot be said to have a character beyond or beneath them. Hašek’s own political views and temperament are more or less clear, even without recourse to biographical information: but Švejk, however colorful a character, is less an individual than a narrative conceit.
33. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 398.
34. This is something that Bertolt Brecht also failed to understand in his stage adaptation of Hašek’s novel, Schweyk in the Second World War, John Willet, trans. (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000). During Schweyk’s interrogation at Gestapo headquarters, S.S. Lieutenant Bullinger addresses his cross-examinee with “Here’s the question: Do you shit thick or do you shit thin?”“Beg to report, sir,” Schweyk responds, “I shit any way you want me too”, id., at 8o, Scene 2. While this answer obviously conforms to Švejk’s general attitude towards authority, it basically misses the point: shitting is one of the few things that falls completely outside the law’s domain. Even in the army, one goes to the latrines in private. Brecht seems to have taken up Hašek’s scatological motif only for its theatrical shock value, as a way to show the S.S. man as a tyrant and a vulgarian, thereby missing any of the deeper possible implications of Hašek’s unseemly subject matter. (Or, more charitably, it could be that Brecht’s change reflects the real extremes to which biopower was taken under the Third Reich, compared to which even the institutional slaughter of World War I looks comparatively carefree.)
35. See Agamben, supra note 31 at 125.
36. Let us ourselves state the obvious exception that unlike the extermination camps of the Nazis, the battlefields of World War I were not explicitly designed for the purpose of killing off an anathemized section of the population. Ostensibly, the idea was still that every soldier would come home victorious and a hero. But the well-known fact that advances in military technology made this idea a bitter farce also established the ground for the possibility of the later wholesale elimination of populations.
37. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 296-297.
38. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, James Strachey, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), 285
.39. Hašek, supra note 4 at 294.
40. In this respect, it may be interesting to note that one of Hašek’s stump speeches for his 1911 mock political campaign as a candidate with ‘The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law’ takes a stand against the use of animal names as invective epithets. The speech ends with candidate Hašek’s impassioned plea: “People talk of dogs with greatest contempt, just because their name is used as a term of abuse for human beings. And yet we see that dogs under the name of police dogs perform today yeoman service for the safety of all humanity. It would therefore be only right for animals to be rehabilitated, at least as far as concerns these wisest representative of the whole animal kingdom. It would be a good thing if those who insult police dogs were prosecuted for insulting official personages. Let us all in future do our best to see that animals are looked upon as beings which deserve the respect every political party, and that their names are not used by them for unwarranted agitation in the electoral campaign.” See Zenny K. Sadlon
, Švejk Central <http://zenny.com/Švejk/vekCentralNN.html>.41. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 296.
42. Id., at 292.
43. Peter Steiner, The Deserts ofBohemia: Cechi Fiction and its Social Context (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 36-37
.44. Franz Kafka, The Trial, Willa and Edwin Muir, trans. (New York: The Modern Library, 1964), 286
.45. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 3.
46. See Steiner, supra note 43 at 37.
47. Id., at 39.
48. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 7.
49. Id., at 238-239.
50. Id., at 286.
51. Id., at 3.
52. Id., at 2o.
53. Id., at 22.
54. Id., at 20.
55. Id., at 23.
56. Id., at 25.
57. Id., at 22-23.
58. Id., at 24.
59. See Agamben, supra note 31 at 6o.
60. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 18-19.
61. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Kevin Attell, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 49
.62. See Agamben, supra note 31 at 57.
63. See the concluding paragraphs of G.W.F. Hegel, The PhiilosophiyofHistory, J. Sibree, trans. (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 456
: “This is the point which consciousness has attained, and these are the principle phases of that form in which the principle of Freedom has realized itself-for the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom. But Objective Freedom--the laws of real Freedom-demand the subjugation of the mere contingent Will-for this is in its nature formal. If the Objective is in itself Rational, human insight and conviction must correspond with the Reason which it embodies, and then we have the other essential element-Subjective Freedom-also realized.” That is, the freedom which is the goal of political history (for which Hegel, incidentally, deems imperial, Catholic Austria yet unripe) is the perfect correspondence without remainder of subjective will with sovereign law. It is especially instructive that in the paragraph preceding this statement, Hegel cites the fact that “a share of the government may be attained by every one who has a competent knowledge, experience, and a morally regulated will,” Id., at 456, (emphasis added). Those without--the state’s idiots-may, it is implied, opt out of public life. One could say then that the innovation of universal military conscription is the ultimate form of political participation furnished by the nation-state to its citizen-subjects, and without even the above bothersome requirements.64. Agamben, supra note 31 at 56.
65. Id., at 56.
66. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 580.
67. See Agamben, supra note 31 at 185.
68. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 82.
69. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rcthelais and His World, Hélène Iswolsky, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 12
.70. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 752.
71. See Steiner, supra note 43 at 48.
72. See Hašek, supra note 4 283.
73. See Agamben, State of Exception, supra note 61 at 49.
74. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 716-717.
75. See Agamben, State of Exception, supra note 61 at 88.
76. See Hašek, supra note 4 at 284-285.
77. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collige de France, 1975-1976, David Macey, trans. (New York: Picador, 1997), 16
.78. Particularly in its native Czech Republic, as well as throughout Germany, Northeastern Europe, and Russia, The Good Soldier Švejk is not merely a work of literature but a full cultural phenomenon. Among other examples, Švejk’s name has been given to over a dozen bar-restaurants, a documented medical syndrome, a hockey strategy (“Švejking”), a planet, and, most significantly, the political (or, rather, apolitical) principle of “Švejkism.” See Sadlon, supra note 40. On “Švejking” in particular, see Nick Paumgarten, “On the Ice, the Shadow Knows,” The New Yorker, 1 May 2006
.79. See Werner Hamacher, “The End of Art with the Mask”, Hegel after Derrida in Stuart Barnett, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 124
, on the slide in Hegel’s thought from comic subjectivity (specifically in the late or romantic stage of art) to abstract legality: “it is this dispatch of the self from every substantial fulfillment through the ‘national spirits,’ through laws, conventions or the contents of faith that dilute the subject, reduced to its most abstract form, into a ‘spiritless,’ ‘disembodied’ ‘individual person’—to a legal person as the absolute mask that no longer conceals anything and is worn by no one but ‘fate.’” . Švejk takes this emptying-out of the subject at its literal word, confronting a law which posits a nation of nonentities with the paradoxical, provoking figure of a nonentity infieshi and blood.80. One might say that Švejk’s embodied mindlessness is the parodic double of the Hegelian Christ, that is, Spiritless-ness incarnate. In a manner similar to that which allows Agamben to (however problematically) claim Bartleby as a kind of Benjaminian messiah: in Hašek’s vision, at the never-ending end of history (again, the “war to end all wars”), stands reconciliation indeed, but in negative rather than positive form.
81. See John Snyder, “The Politics and Hermeneutics of Anarchist Satire: Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier. Švejk,” 2 LIT 289-3o, (1991)
.82. Foucault, supra note 77 at 175.
83. Agamben, Potentialities, supra note 1 at 259.