Jun 022014
 

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Harlequin’s Millions is the long recollection of Bohumil Hrabal, the last of three novels from the late Czech writer that bear witness to the unrecounted histories of a family, a people, and the passage of time, illusory and elegiac in form, it is a momento mori of unbroken, dreamlike prose that captures in remembrances the reticent waiting of old age, set to Riccardo Drigo’s airy, Pucciniesque serenade, from which the title derives, with all the rhythm and repose of a forgotten love song, wistful and nostalgic. —Sebastian Ennis

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Harlequin’s Millions
(Harlekýnovy Milióny by Mladá Fronta, 1981)
By Bohumil Hrabal
Translated from the Czech by Stacey Knecht
Archipelago Books, 2014

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Harlequin’s Millions is the long recollection of Bohumil Hrabal, the last of three novels from the late Czech writer that bear witness to the unrecounted histories of a family, a people, and the passage of time, illusory and elegiac in form, it is a momento mori of unbroken, dreamlike prose that captures in remembrances the reticent waiting of old age, set to Riccardo Drigo’s airy, Pucciniesque serenade, from which the title derives, with all the rhythm and repose of a forgotten love song, wistful and nostalgic.

Originally published in 1981 and translated for the first time into English with this 2014 Archipelago Books edition, Hrabal’s requiem for the temps perdu concludes the interwoven story he started in Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. Yet Harlequin’s Millions officially made it to print some years before these earlier works, which were banned under the communist regime after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops from the Warsaw Pact. Hrabal chopped up and edited bits of text from The Little Town, which was not published in its “unedited” form in Prague until after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, disfiguring the tone and, to a great extent, the meaning of the text, and leaving intact only the human face of the times. But it is the very humanity of the text that makes Harlequin’s Millions so powerful. Josef Škvorecký, the celebrated Czech-Canadian writer, said of Hrabal’s entire oeuvre that, by its miraculous existence alone, it was a critique of the social categories of his day because his characters were “triumphantly alive, they displayed the politically incorrect classlessness of raconteurism.”[1] This is no less true of Harlequin’s Millions, which is essentially a dirge for “old times,” but which receives its dissident quality from Hrabal’s timeless portrayal of the human spirit in all its eccentricity.

Harlequin’s Millions is set in a small castle that is now a retirement home, an edifice of crumbling plaster and exposed masonry ravaged by time, the façade of which belies the aura of any past decadence, changing shape within labyrinthine blocks of prose—Hrabal does not break up his chapters into paragraphs and he favours the comma over the period—to resemble the “the faces of each and every elderly pensioner” in their weary likeness, silent and motionless, to the bare, ruinous exterior. Inside lies a broken wrought-iron clock with limp, crossed hands, forever stuck at twenty-five past seven, a reminder to those waiting for the bell toll of the middle hour that their lives are stuck in the interval between life and death, because, as the unnamed female narrator tells us, everyone here knows that “most old people die in the evening, at just about half past seven.” And within this darkly comic lapse of time the soft melody of “Harlequin’s Millions” unravels and winds its way around the castle’s uncanny grounds, pouring out of rediffusion boxes that are hung not only in the corridors of the castle, where each note trails after wisps of cheap perfume, but also in the trees in the park, trickling down leaves like morning dew, and everywhere it casts its spell upon the pensioners, who are witnesses to the old times of the inescapable serenade.

As the music plays on and on, the story of an ex-brewery manager’s wife unfolds, her toothless, wrinkled face recalling little of her former beauty as she wanders through the castle grounds, distant and reproachful, looking back upon her life in the little town “where time stood still,” which can be seen from the windows of the retirement home. The unnamed woman bears the unremarkable qualities of old age and is defined only by her past, which the other pensioners guiltily acknowledge, gaining a certain pleasure in seeing her come to such an end. In her reverie for the old times, we learn of her unfaithfulness to the little town where time stood still, leading up to her escape, a sojourn in Prague where she bought a perfumery beyond her stature, only to return, broken spirited, with unsold cases of those sweet-smelling bottles and soaps that ward off old age, souvenirs of her failure. “[L]ike a severed cord whose ends had been tied together again,” her time in the little town now seemed endless. After the war, the workers took control of the brewery and fired her husband, and that once severed rope grew taut around the little town that was now part of an endless cycle of progress, hopelessly longing to return to a better time.

In the retirement home, there are three other “witnesses to old times,” who, for the brief moments that they share in the laughter and forgetting of their own histories, become the young men of their pasts once more, while other times, with the faintest trace of life left in their voices, they chronicle the old folk tales and the daily eccentricities of their long forgotten neighbours. And always they tell their stories to the unnamed woman, a narrator of true invention, as if speaking unto memory itself, so that, under the spell of the narrator’s toothless voice, the castle becomes a place of memory and fantasy, isolated from the changing times. Stories of bacchic ecstasy erupt from a poverty of spirit reserved for the elderly alone, or perhaps it is the narrator’s own boredom, her sad triviality, that causes her to bring to life in the half-lives of the pensioners the scenes of erotic love and violence that are portrayed in the castle’s fresco-lined ceilings.

Reality sets in, however, as the past is made manifest and the old graveyard of black marble gravestones and golden crosses that the castle overlooks is unearthed. The pensioners with the strongest nerves watch with tears in their eyes, reminded of all they were torn away from when they entered the retirement home, their houses, their homes, their front yards and flower beds, as the granite tombstones are pulled from the clay “with the perseverance of a dentist trying to pull a molar with crooked roots out of swollen gums,” for the roots of the trees had grown deep within the ground and wrapped around the coffins. “I myself had the feeling that, once again, all my teeth were being pulled out,” the narrator reflects, “slowly, one after another, in the morning my teeth had grown back and it started all over again.” I return constantly to this image. An endless cycle of having your teeth pulled, all that is lost in life and in death forgotten, and memory’s soft melody plays on without us.

“What is life?” the narrator asks. “Everything that once was, everything an old person thinks back on and tells you stories about, everything that no longer matters and is gone for good.” It’s fake teeth and the ones that get pulled, the past we leave behind and the stories that take its place. Reality and fiction are woven together in Harlequin’s Millions to tell a beautiful story of the unequal battle waged between life and death, and the human spirit that remains in the remembrance of the past.

—Sebastian Ennis

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Sebastian Ennis
Sebastian Ennis is a future law student living in Vancouver. He has a background in Classics and contemporary French and German philosophy.

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Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Škvorecký, Josef. “Introduction” of Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. London: Abacus, 1993, x.
Mar 122014
 

William Gassvia This Recording

The first blue words of this book seem to form “a soft quality in the air, a color, a flutter: permanent in their passage.” Like starling murmurations on cold winter mornings, for Gass, blue is a thought without a centre; meaning softly gathers around the word the way lint collects and, at the turn of a forgotten page, takes flight. In this sense of the word, Gass writes in blue with the language of birds… —Sebastian Ennis

On Being Blue
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New York Review of Books
Softcover, 91 Pages, US $14.00 / CAN $17.00 / UK £7.99

 

In spite of its philosophical dressing, On Being Blue is really a long essay on language written with elegant exaggeration and a self-mocking pretentiousness. First published in 1976, it reads like a flight of fancy. Gass is noticeably freer with his prose here than in his earlier fiction and he uses that freedom to explore language in its broadest sense as a way of forming meaning in the world (a recurring theme in his later literary essays). Michael Gorra, in his introduction to its republication this month, places On Being Blue within the linguistic turn of that period’s academic criticism, at a time when written English had grown ever closer to the spoken tongue. Now we’re used to taking liberties with the written word to make it sound more like speech. So I suspect few people will sympathize with Gass’s highbrow defense of the art of language, what is best described as his French aestheticism, which he masks with American grit. That being said, I’m one of those people. I believe language is more than its uses, more than the way we commonly speak. It’s figurative, too. So take a word like blue—it’s straightforward, you can point to its correlative in physical experience, it’s there. When we say it we think we know exactly what we mean. But then follow Gass from cover to cover and you may begin to see and say things differently.

First, ignore the philosophy that says there’s any strict or arbitrary relationship between words and things. Gass was a philosophy professor at Washington University, but he avoids theory here and so should we. Let’s just talk blue: “Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear.” Gass begins with this list, which he returns to over and over again.

Read it out-loud for all to hear! (No, really…give it a try.) The first blue words of this book seem to form “a soft quality in the air, a color, a flutter: permanent in their passage.” Like starling murmurations on cold winter mornings, for Gass, blue is a thought without a centre; meaning softly gathers around the word the way lint collects and, at the turn of a forgotten page, takes flight. In this sense of the word, Gass writes in blue with the language of birds—but I’ll return to this.

Now listen. Blue. Sound it out slowly. I hear a stone dropped in water as someone blows dust off a book jacket; it’s a wet syllable caught in flight between the lips that the stumbling tongue elbows. When we speak we seem to spit blue. While ink fills blank spaces with form and meaning between nouns and verbs, the physicality of the word, Gass reminds us, with tumbling breath over pursed lips, comes from the heart of language and is released into the world.

Yet of all the colours worth the ink and all the words of breath’s embrace, why choose blue? Let’s not mix words here . . . or let’s, Gass certainly does: “Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.” The country of blue that Gass takes us to is an inner world, unfolding in language: flung past milky tooth and watered sanguine gum, dragged behind dripping nib, and tossed by battered key.

If Gass offers us a lesson here it’s that feelings, like colours, do exist; and not entirely without words, which flock and swarm and come to rest upon the world. Blue is spoken seen felt read and thought, in the world and the heart and the mind, and in all the places in-between where words collect.

Gass, a writer’s writer, chronicles this pursuit of language, which seems to dwell everywhere and nowhere and in-between the two in that place he calls blue. It’s the in-between he’s after. Just as the sky touches the ground, but only in the distance and only on clear days: it’s a shade of blue he can’t quite put his finger on. Thankfully, many writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers seem to have journeyed there or thereabouts, and some appear in Gass’s thick, dark prose.

Yet it’s the blue-hue of his own writing that caught my eye. He writes blue lists that transcend nowhere: “blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese.” Tongue-in-cheek, his rambling voice follows the booming, brazen blue smear his hand drags across the page, painting a vivid picture of all the blues that fill the world. Other times, he wrestles with language for sheer sport, producing a fearless literary slapstick between the covers. And as for the blue we find there, well . . . it’s “appropriate that blow and blue should be—at our earliest convenience—utterly confused.” It takes an author like Gass to tackle words with such rough wit and yet embrace the very sound of writing as if it were a lover’s howl.

It’s the literary equivalent of a wink and a nod, but he makes his point. Reading Gass, words get mixed up with each other and with the things they describe. But Gass is unapologetic. On Being Blue is no guide for the perplexed. Language is not so cut and dried; it’s wet and torn, coffee-stained, beaten, broken, and scorned, twisted and crumpled, contorted, thrown away, and then forgotten, lost near the tip of tongue, found by index finger and thumb, and set flying with a flick of the wrist. That is, for Gass, it takes a great deal of confusion to say or write anything that truly means something. And that’s not a criticism. Nor does it imply that great writing must be complex. It celebrates the way language sets things in relation to one another and utterly confuses words, feelings, thoughts, colours, and things.

So Gass doesn’t hold too tightly to words, but lets them fly: “blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies . . . dumps, mopes, Mondays . . . watered twilight, sour sea.” They’re all blue when spoken in the language of birds. On Being Blue will have you coughing up feathers, picking words from your teeth that don’t stick to your tongue, and, by the end, chirping like a madman until you’re blue in the face.

—Sebastian Ennis

 

Sebastian Ennis
 
Sebastian Ennis is a future law student living in Vancouver. He has a background in Classics and contemporary French and German philosophy.
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