‘You wouldn’t believe how many mice there are in a cellar like mine, two hundred, five hundred maybe, most of them friendly little creatures born half blind, but there’s one thing we have in common, namely, a vital need for literature with a marked preference for Goethe and Schiller in Morocco bindings.’
Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the subsequent reforms enacted by the authoritarian Communist Party, Bohumil Hrabal was banned from publishing and his books were placed on the all-engulfing conveyor belt of the eternal Soviet Trash Compactor, destined to the void. In the West, their reputation has never quite recovered and despite their survival, the shreds are still being re-assembled. Luckily enough for those who knew him, Hrabal was an insatiable raconteur and his stories, when not put down on paper, echoed through numerous Prague pubs, drawing hungry crowds and creating memories destructible not by politics, nor it seems by death.
The dada-esque rant of Too Loud A Solitude can be read as more than a simple soviet parody. It is perforated with absurd nihilism, political critique, and meditations on the human spirit communicated with the bawdy humour of a pub story-teller and the blistering leaps of a philosopher. The story follows a simple man, an alcoholic waste-paper baler whose passion for his menial job has led him to believe in himself as part of the essential force of the universe – destruction. Day upon day in his dark gloomy cellar, drooling on his leg and mumbling obscenities, he packs tons and tons of bales into his hydraulic press, a sisyphean cog in the world’s machine. However there is one catch to his idiocy, his bizarre and unwitting education; at the same time as pushing books into the jaws of his compactor, he also rescues the more precious among them, absorbing the written word as fast as he destroys it and finely toe-ing the line between eternalness and ephemerality. He, the ‘beer soaked idiot’ can quote Jesus, Lao-Tzu, Kant and Hegel, and thus a quite serious thread (hidden carefully from Soviet censors behind the all-obscuring worker’s generality) is exposed in Hrabal’s work: the triumph of the individual, of ideas, of joy, in the face of ideological destruction.
It would be wrong however, to relegate the story to just this theme. Hrabal toys with Nihilism and Absurdism just as much as Sovietism, and his never-ending barrage of jokes seems intended firstly and foremostly to achieve a human response, laughter. Too Loud A Solitude is primarily a meditation on humanity, on ‘the small joys’ in all of their glorious, fleeting triviality. Their production and veneration defies Sovietism and Nazism as it does all repressive forces (save death), therefore indirectly ridiculing them; Hrabal slates and denigrates everything of perceived value in the world whilst simultaneously lifting up only the playful and the useless as worthy of praise, writing with an a-moral comic style not far at times from Larry David or Woody Allen.
‘But then I pricked up my ears and what did I hear sailing out over the waters but the whooping of warrior rats, the gnawing of meat, the keening, rejoicing, the lapping and gurgling of bodies in combat, sounds from a distance, yet I knew I could remove an manhole cover in the city and climb straight down into the life-and-death struggle, the rat war to end all rat wars, and I knew it would end with a celebration lasting only till they could find a motive to start fighting again’.
Hrabal’s world is a festering rat’s nest, the world is a dismal trash compactor. The joy of the Prague Spring was short-lived. Try as they might, Hegel and the likes cannot change this uncomfortable fact (even he too was only searching for a ‘worthy grave’), and yet they manage to bewitch even nihilists, and are a spark in the most dull rubbish heap. Triflingly inconsequential, Jesus is re-imagined as a Wimbledon Champion and Lao-tze as an ignoramus. Their exact words are compacted along with a tire company’s latest reports, but their human impressions somehow live on, triumphing over anything theoretical. As much as the tale is ‘anti-ideology’, it is also ‘ant-ideology’: behind the hunched and grey old philosopher whose ‘thick ashtray glasses’ stare you down like a ‘double-barrelled shotgun’ is a timorously laughable ‘hydraulic press filled with compacted thought’ whose smallness and specificness is what makes him human – and great.
Making humanity humorous and its member’s ratty and goblin-esque, Bohumil Hrabal also takes a (comedic) knife to the self-seriousness of Sovietism, parodying it almost as an after-thought. Rather than direct himself at Sovietism as a target to spear, he, through a process of spiritual reverse shading, ridicules it. The blistering pace of the novel halts on certain one-liners. Describing communism as ‘the dream I never dreamt’, the narrator is unimpressed by new-fangled Soviet trash compactors that vastly outweigh his own manual one in size and efficiency. They take all the joy out of mindlessness. One cannot even drink on the job and instead must ‘keep slurping milk and working, working, inhumanly and unfeelingly’ for the good of the state’s health. He calls for a divinity degree as a spiritual requirement for all such crushing menial labour, later remarking ‘they (the Soviets) need a good lecture on suicide!’ – the unfortunate fate of the author himself (and the regime tried to take even that away from him, claiming an accident).
Flying through the story at break-neck speed, gag after gag, the work is saved from vacuity (but not from humour) by mortally serious undertones, with death acting as both the main allegory, but also the punchline. The ending of the text is the perfect coming together of these themes. The character makes a ‘little bed for himself’ in his press, and chooses to ‘follow Seneca and Socrates’, refusing to be ‘driven out from his own Paradise’ and ‘folding up like a pen-knife’ ,with a final groan, and a smile, is engulfed. The compactor is his heaven, it is his final small joy, his human fate that ties him to the immortals. It is also his death camp, his political exile, and his final destruction, but ultimately, a joke.
‘Not until we’re crushed do we show what we’re made of’.
Boruhmil Hrabal’s work is a soberingly humane work of philosophy, satire and political critique. It is subtle, ephemeral, but infused with the sturdy immortality of the philosopher’s thoughts who make it up. If we leave something behind at all, it is small, and just as ideology is art’s enemy, so is life. We may be ‘no more than mice’, but we are at least in Hrabal’s eyes, funny mice (and mice with a penchant for good, and perhaps eternal literature).
Leon Friedman
Keeping up with Yesterday 
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