Having been lectured by David Vichnar, the Charles University professor
and literary scholar whose other occupations include that of an editor, a
publisher and a translator, it was a pleasant surprise to find out how
approachable he was. This impression of a person of both great sophistication
and at the same time down-to-earth nature got deconstructed, critiqued,
abstracted—at one point the background noise formed a counter-movement to the
voice recorder and called Imperialist bullsh*t only to distort and mis-read the
whole thing—and ultimately corroborated by way of a great conversation.
·
PhD, Joyce and the Avant-Garde
You’ve completed your PhD only recently, is that correct? What are your
current projects?
Yes, that was
finished back in January so I’m a fresh PhD. But in a sense I’m still working
on it preparing a book publication which should happen later this year so
there’s quite some rewriting going on and some editing... it’s a whole other
genre.
What was your doctoral thesis on?
It was called The Avant—Postman: James Joyce, the
Avant-Garde, and Postmodernism and it mapped the post-war experimental
writing in the wake of Joyce’s Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake. It covered
experimental writing in Britain, the US and France, so it had a broadly
comparative focus. It argued for the liveliness of the avant-garde modernist
tradition in the so-called postmodern period. Its overall claim is that
postmodernism is not something that brings modernism to its end, tolling its
death knell, but that it is modernist tradition continued, at least in terms of
Joyce’s materiality of language taken as its unifying principle. The reason
France is in there was also a practical one: my PhD programme was undertaken
within the cotutelle arrangement between Charles University and the Sorbonne
Nouvelle. I spent a year and a half in Paris working with Professor Jean Bessière who was my
French supervisor and doctor Armand was my Charles supervisor and in January we
had this big defence in front of a seven-member jury, with three academics
flying in from France.
How was it?
It was long (with a weary expression). It dragged on
a bit because everyone had to write a report and those reports had to be read
and discussed and each of the reports brought up three or four questions that
needed to be dealt with so it took over two hours.
Did they give you a hard time?
Well, everyone in
the jury made it evident very early on that the thesis itself was more than
acceptable but the defence was an opportunity to think together further and to
challenge some of the assumptions. Of course, with a work of this sort you
always provoke the “who’s–in–there–and–who–isn’t” kind of
criticism, which was also the case here; for example, I purposefully chose not
to deal with Samuel Beckett, a controversial decision that invited some of the
jury’s criticism. Beckett is naturally the first suspect when it comes
to the Joycean avant-text, but the PhD was not really a study in literary
influence, it was more of a genealogical work with a formalist focus, and a
writer of a Beckett-like status (and there aren’t many) would of course form
his own genealogy, in many respects independent from that of his precursor. So,
in order that focus be maintained, Beckett had to go. The PhD didn’t aim to
show what or how the writers after Joyce borrowed or imitated, but how they
used his techniques in order to create anew.
Just what was happening afterwards.
(With a consenting tone) It basically
aimed to evaluate how, if at all, Joyce’s modernist experiment (if we adopt
this label) is still relevant. It departed from the sixties with people like
B.S. Johnson in Britain and William Burroughs in the U.S. and the nouveau
roman in France and it ended in the present with writers like David Foster
Wallace in the U.S. or David Mitchell or Steven Hall in Britain.
With Joyce, you’ve mentioned the “materiality of language.” What do you
mean by that?
Chiefly three
things: writing as a trace, as a physical mark, writing producing physical
objects / signs that are subject to material happenstance and accidents,
erasure, distortion, etc. Then, writing as plagiarism. Literary writing as this
incessant parody of styles, writing and language as something essentially
borrowed, words as handed down to us by tradition, by environment, by history,
language as an essentially political entity.
So we’re talking about different permutations?
Permutations of these two, among many other things, render the concept of originality,
a problematic one. One of the ways Joyce actually proposes is the third type of
his language-as-material strategy: it is to create your own words, it is to form signifiers subversive of the dictionary
convention; what he does in Finnegans
Wake is that he crafts this own language of his full of multilingual
portmanteaus, full of puns, paronomasia, etc. One of the things in which you
destabilise the conventional meaning is
the pun, where the word comes to signify two things at once, to humorous and
comic effect, and the same goes for the portmanteau. So these are the three
major Joycean modes: writing as trace, writing as plagiarism and writing as
this idiom, the creation of unique words which are objects themselves. What
Beckett famously in the early review of Work
in Progress called—
That they are that something
(Nodding) That they are that something
themselves. They are not about something
anymore, right? (assertive) This
strategy forces you to view words as concrete specific entities. They’re no
longer vehicles for meaning. They are things themselves, objects—
So there’s this drift for independence?
Yeah, there’s a
deal of independence in them – and of course the problem of aesthetic autonomy
is central to the entire aesthetics of the avant-garde. So that’s materiality
of language as explored and furthered through Joyce. It’s this really formalist
approach, to examining ‘Joyce’s signature’, that’s another word I’m using, it’s
a Derridean concept, the idea that you sign your own presence within language,
not so much with a signature, that’s trivial, but through the way you use
language, by leaving a trace of your own personality inscribed within the
linguistic traces you’re using—and that’s exactly what Joyce did. And the
measure of the relevance of that signature is the number of writers who
countersign it, as it were; who respond to the signature by adding their own,
and these countersignatures happen precisely through these operations upon
language furthered by Joyce, at least so I claim.
How, then, is
Joyce relevant for the writers after him?
From the sixties
onward, with the advent of television and the rise of film there were many
crises that fiction underwent; what it is that is left for it to do, what are
its social functions, you know, with the rise of capitalism and this sort of
laissez-faire approach to things political... you wonder is there any critical
function to literature; can literature present a social critique like the
Avant-gardes believed they did? And Joyce is someone who in his own particular
way might be said to at least attempt a
social critique through the most social of all literary instruments, language.
I mean you have people like Philippe Sollers, a French experimental writer of
the Tel Quel magazine, who will claim
that Finnegans Wake is the most
profoundly anti-fascist book to come out of the thirties! In how it destabilises
identity—personal, national—in how it mocks the notion that you can have
something like pure national “–ism”, national identity.
I think that upon being asked what he did during the war, Joyce replied
that he wrote Ulysses.
Yeah, that’s from
Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, something
along the lines of ‘what did you do during First World War, Mr. Joyce? I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?’ So there is
that sense in which Joyce’s writing, even though oftentimes described and
critiqued as this purely aesthetic art for art’s sake, this essentially
useless, ludic masturbatory game that he’s playing with and for himself and no one
else, is both political and critical in its form and content—and what my PhD
has shown is that that’s what the authors who strived to be avant-garde,
experimental, innovative from the 60s onwards, that’s what they tried to be and
do, and that’s what they looked for in Joyce.
Is it fair to say that the more interpretations the better with these
authors?
Of course, the
aim was not to measure, ‘did they read Joyce correctly? Did they interpret him rightly?’ These writers are no
scholars of Joyce, oftentimes they are repeating clichés or they’re grossly
simplifying but that is part of Joyce’s own message, right, you have to
misinterpret and you have to be creative in your mis-readings in order to
create something of your own, you have to be irreverent, iconoclastic – another
avant-garde sentiment on Joyce’s part, perhaps.
·
From Joyce and Theory to Teaching to Translating Louis Armand
How did your transition from being a student to being a lecturer happen?
Well, the
transition was rather abrupt, as I said, I only defended in January and started
teaching in February. That was part of a plan that was already there, that was
agreed on. Professor Procházka was keen on including me in the department. I
had taught previously during my PhD years under Louis Armand’s supervision or
presence in the class, I taught a course on Joyce and I taught one of the
English Literature courses on the 20th century, English Lit seminar
for 3rd year BA. So I had had some teaching experience before and
I’m teaching the Joyce again this semester from a different perspective to a
different crowd obviously than I did three years ago. (Warmly) And I also got offered this Literary Theory historical
introduction which is where we met (meaning the interviewer, ed. note). That
was partly because of my MA which was this broad huge 600-page thing that got—
Oh shit—
(Smiles) That got famous just for its
bulk basically.
And that was kind of a survey?
That was a survey
of contemporary... (well, that is, in 2008 when it was finished and defended
and then it was published in 2010 when we had the James Joyce Symposium here at
the Philosophy Faculty) so yeah, Joyce
Against Theory (Litteraria Pragensia Books) was a survey of the past 25
years of Joyce scholarship, criticism; ‘James Joyce after Deconstruction’ even
though this ‘after,’ it is one of the theses of that work , this ‘after’ is
rather problematic.
How does Joyce fare with theory?
Well, there’s that
sentence from Terry Eagleton’s Introduction
to Theory of Literature according to which it’s always useful to test your
literary theoretical thesis by actually applying to Finnegans Wake. (Smiles)
That’s the testing ground.
Aren’t such attempts always doomed to splash and crash as a wave against
a coast?
Yes, there is
that half of the equation, I mean, the ‘against’ in the title departs from
Jacques Derrida’s plenary lecture at the Frankfurt Joyce symposium where one of
the tenets basically was that Joyce’s writing method of all-inclusion and of
ever-increasing expansion and self-reflection makes it essentially impossible
for there to be anything said about Joyce; all you can say, Derrida argues
provocatively, about Joyce has already been said by Joyce himself.
The criticism is in this double bind or in this dead end or dead-lock—you can
only repeat. (Excitedly) Which has to
do with that materiality of language; you can’t paraphrase Joyce, you know,
without quoting, without borrowing from him and oftentimes all criticism
attempts to do is merely to identify operations that are already present in the
text. There’s this notion of signature and counter-signature, right, if Joyce’s
signature encompasses everything, then what is there for theory to do? And yet,
the paradox is, that Joyce wrote in such a way –complex,
innovative, inter-textually allusive etc. etc. —that he calls for a critical
response. And indeed the etymology of “against” points back to “again” – so the
book also traced all the “Joyce-agains” of critical theory. No other writer has
been more written about than Joyce by literary critics. There’s only
Shakespeare who boasts as many scholarly publications, academic journals and
symposia and conferences as Joyce. He’s second to none apart from Shakespeare
in this respect. So there’s the paradox, you know, that you have this huge,
huge portion of academic attention devoted to interpreting and annotating and
contextualising, all with the awareness that Joyce, more than any other writer,
himself wrote it all. It’s a never ending process. That’s one of the reasons
why I went for it and got into it; it’s interesting to keep finding similar
problems, similar dead ends or double binds implicated across all these
critical/theoretical texts.
You translated Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight (Equus Press,
2012), Letters from Ausland (Vagabond Press, 2011). How did you get to
that?
I got involved
with the Litteraria Pragensia Books academic book series published alongside
the journal here at the department. In 2008 I believe I became the managing
editor which meant close collaboration with Louis Armand who had been my M.A.
supervisor up till then. We became friends quite quickly on a personal level
outside of the school proper. Then, with Litteraria occasionally publishing
literature “proper,” not only theory or criticism, and these publications
attracting critical attention, in 2011 I launched Equus Press, an independent
publishing enterprise based in Prague but also affiliated with Paris and
London. Apart from my studies in France, I also spent a year in London
researching the Anglophone half of the thesis and working at Birkbeck College,
University of London, and in both these places I tried to establish ties with
the local publishing scenes. Equus started by publishing Louis’ fiction
alongside some of the other Prague Anglophone writers such as Thor Garcia or
Ken Nash, and Breakfast at Midnight
caught the attention of Ladislav Nagy of Hospodářské
noviny. He wrote an excellent review of it, which in turn caught the eye of
Petr Onufer from Argo who had known Louis from before, and he decided to get
the book translated into Czech and publish it with Argo. Louis consented and
suggested me as the translator because we’d long been in touch and I’d
translated bits and pieces of it for public readings which were both in English
and Czech to attract a wider, bilingual audience. So that’s how the Czech
translation came into being.
What is the appeal of that book for you? What do you find good about
Armand’s writing?
Well, Joyce is
not only a writer, it’s a mode of thinking, experiencing literature—it’s a
state of mind. Louis is a Joyce expert himself, he started off as a Joyce
scholar, his PhD on Joyce (Techne: James
Joyce, Hypertext, and Technology) was published as a book with Karolinum.
So, what I like about his writing is similar to my liking for Joyce: Louis’
writing has these games to play with the readers, it is allusive, “learned” in
the best sense of the word, it incorporates a lot of references and it
resembles this hide-and-seek game or a process of detection. It’s a writing
that foregrounds its style, it’s written with attention to rhythm, to the sound
of the words and it’s also writing posited in between languages just as Joyce’s
was because of his nomadic life. Louis, too, lives between languages,
obviously, as someone who’s based in Prague and in touch with the Czech
language. And as for the book itself, the narration jumps back and forth in
both time and place and it’s an experiment in the Noir genre, it’s the Noir
about the Prague of the 90s.
And I must say that it’s gorgeously filthy and dark.
(Glad) It is filthy and dark, I
see you’ve read it. So yeah, there’s filth and darkness and obscenity galore,
but it also has its symbolism, its poetic vision, its message, ethical and
moral—really old fashioned in that sense, but again the good sense. I found it
an interesting piece of writing that I didn’t really see in contemporary Czech
literature and Argo thought that too and that’s why it got translated. There
are quite few books like Topol’s Anděl
Exit that no longer take Prague as the Prague of the Alchemist or the Golem
but as the dark and filthy place it also can be once you get to Žižkov and its
nákladové nádraží or Libeň and its landfills, you know, (sarcastically) the real hardcore stuff.
What other books by Louis would you recommend?
Equus has just
published his latest one, Cairo,
which traces these five different plot lines around the globe: there’s an
Australian part, there’s a New York part, there’s a London part, there’s a part
taking place in Cairo of course. All of them spring from this hypothetical
future event of an asteroid hitting ground zero in New York; where WTC was, now
crashes an asteroid (or perhaps a broken satellite) and the whole world just
goes berserk. So it’s a sci-fi and a highly amusing comical novel departing
from this ridiculous premise; you can’t do it with a straight face really. But
it’s also very much about the current surveillance society, how everything is
observed, watched, controlled, mediated to and for you, pre-packaged; how very
much unsafe we are in this global McDonald democracy that we think we’ve
created.
So you’re saying definitely recommendable. Are you planning on
translating it? (Makes an agreeing noise as he takes a sip of his
drink) It’s gonna be a much more difficult task than Breakfast because it features local colour in all these different
places, you know, Australian speak and Australian slang, there’s London slang
and there’s New York and its peculiarities. So I’m not that sure how that could
be pulled off, since Czech obviously doesn’t come anywhere near this global
status... I mean it would be a great challenge
and if Argo were keen on doing it I’d be honoured. I’d gladly take it up but it
would make for a whole different story.
·
Microfestival, VLAK, Equus Press, Prague poetry scene
About your other involvements, VLAK and Prague Microfestival, if
you could sketch what are they about?
Prague
Microfestival came into being in 2009 so this year marks its sixth instalment.
The last couple of years it’s been under the directorship of Olga Peková who’s
a student of ours and it’s really about bringing Anglophone poets from around
Europe: from Paris, from Amsterdam, from Berlin but also from Hungary, from the
Switzerland, even from the US—to bring them to Prague and see them perform in
bilingual English–Czech readings
and enable them to interact with the local Czech or Slovak poetry scene. So
we’ve had Czech poets also performing in English translations and we’re
interested in what these two traditions and these two languages have to ‘say’
to each other, trying also to get involved as many English Department students
with an interest in poetry.
How does this work, if a student wants to get involved?
If a student
wants to get involved, they should email me or Olga Peková or come to 219b on a
Tuesday afternoon when we’re usually there and talk to us; whether it’s for
translating or just basic help with the business itself, you know, we’ve got a
bookstand where we sell books, we’ve got an exhibition to accompany it, and so
on. The Festival has been hosted by K4, the student club in Celetná, and
usually takes place around 10th of May. This year it’s May 11th
to 14th, and we’ve got a website with all furtther details. VLAK
is an internationally curated editorial project; it’s a huge (400-plus pages)
magazine that comes out once a year and it’s devoted to fiction, poetry,
criticism, arts, media, and photography conceived in a broadly defined
experimental sense.
So that’s the most avant-garde thing that you have going on?
Sort of sort
of... and we’ve got editors, again, from New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam,
Melbourne—around the globe. We edit it chiefly here in Prague between Louis,
Olga, myself and another student colleague, Ewelina Chiu.
Now I’ve read and you have told me yourself that the philosophy of
Prague Microfestival is to bridge boundaries between different nations or
traditions, that it’s “translocal” or “cosmopolitan” and something similar is
said on the Equus Press website, that it’s “doubly marginalised” against the
mainstream world of Anglophone publishing and against any kind of strict
nationalism so I would like to ask if there’s sort of a school or tradition
being born here of writers from all around the world united behind this idea
of a universal and yet locally unique
counter-movement?
Right, ‘Writers
of the world unite!’ (Smiles) Well I
would doubt that it’s being born here, it has been happening in Prague at least
since ’89, pretty much with the opening of the borders. The label stands for
Anglophone writers in exile and writing about their foreign emplacement. So
somewhat unlike Joyce who kept writing about his dear dirty Dublin wherever he
was. I mean “translocal” would be writing that engages with its local condition
and the ‘trans’ would reflect the fact that these writers are based in Prague,
Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and all are writing about these places in English. But
you have a few problems; however we can think that English is universally
spread, the average Czech fellow in the street is not going to read these
English writers. But nor are the major publishers in e.g. the UK interested in
an Anglophone English writer living in Prague writing about Prague, that book’s not going to sell.
So isn’t it a scene for itself?
Well, you have to
create your own audience, your own sort of networks; we can all flatter
ourselves into believing how global and cosmopolitan we are but if you look at
something like literary grants, literary prizes—these are still governmentally
or institutionally supported and unless you have a permanent residence in the
UK, in the Australia, or in the US, you usually can’t apply for these, and even
if you can, you’re not likely to make for a serious candidate. So if you’re a
writer living in Prague, writing in English, however great your stuff might be,
you’re never going to get the attention, as in the case of doing the same in
London. This interest in translocality and this pursuit of cosmopolitanism is
no catchphrase or is no cliché because we’re really dealing with some serious
obstacles in our way and we’re trying to think of ways around them. The fact,
even in 2014, remains that literature is still bound tightly with nationalism,
that it’s still English literature we’re taught, American literature we’re
taught.
Translocal means subversive.
Well,
subversive... it’s trying to think about literature otherwise, to do away with
labels; it does create a label but
it’s a label as general, as un-label-like as possible.
If the reader is interested in approaching this topic, is it fair to
first point him to your Thresholds compilation
(Thresholds: Essays on The International
Prague Poetry Scene, Litteraria Pragensia, 2011)?
(In an agreeing tone) Thresholds is a collection of essays
about the Prague Anglophone scene and it promotes this translocal notion. The
term is of course not of my own devising, it has been around and in circulation
by poets and writers living in Berlin and in Amsterdam (Alistair Noon, Megan
Garr…)—it’s originally an anthropological notion that got re-applied, rather
neatly, to this new situation...
Well, new and not so new, right, look at all the modernist expats in exile.
In what sense is it new?
Well, the
socio-cultural situation is different yet again; back in modernism, you had
patrons that could exist internationally or publishing enterprises that could
be undertaken individually. In the contemporary world you’re stuck with
literature being this national pet and nationally bred species, you know, (with rising tone) unless you play
according to the rules of the game you’re out of it.
So you’re trying to create your own game?
(Amusedly) We are trying to create our
own game, sort of, our own teams and for them to play in their own tournaments,
get their own awards and rewards. I mean it comes natural to us as people
dealing with the English language and the Anglophone tradition in Prague in an environment that is
other culturally, linguistically, historically, you name it.
Last two questions: how do you feel about non-natives writing in
English? Rarely
successful?
It is rarely
successful but then again there are a few writers you can name that have broken
through these boundaries. You can even argue that Joyce and Beckett, these two
great shakers of the English tradition, wrote the way they did because they
conceived of English as a foreign language or that they treated language with
this distance—
As this object?
(Nodding) As this object, from the
distance of their Irishness. So yeah, why not, I mean with the universal
spreading of English, it’s becoming increasingly easier and easier and more
necessary for writers of small languages to, if not write in English, then
write with an eye on translation, right, already sort of mentally preparing
their Latvian or their Greek or their Armenian texts for that process.
And the final, and perhaps a stupid question; if there were the
opportunity, what one question would you put to Joyce?
(Honestly musing) What would I ask
Joyce... I mean from what we know Joyce was not this particularly witty chap
always ready with a joke… He was no Oscar Wilde and he wasn’t a talkative
person; with Beckett they would spend hours just silent and enjoying each
other’s quiet company.
Just absorbing.
(Nodding) Absorbing the atmosphere and
the fresh Parisian air, I guess. (Realising)
What I would ask Joyce, probably; I would be curious—and it’s not just my
curiosity—where he wanted to go after Finnegans
Wake, really.
(Laughing) If there was something.
I mean there are
indications that there was something, that he did not take the Wake as any sort of an ultimate stopping
point. He is reported to have said something like ‘now I’m gonna write
something simple’ (laughing) so I
would be very curious to see what that simple thing and the design that he had
for it was, what that would have looked like. But then again he died too early
for anything to really materialise, there’s not one jot extant. So yeah, (in good humour) I would have probably
asked him, ‘What’s next, Mr. Joyce?’
Jaromír Lelek
