Negativní Román

Jan Švankmajer’s new work is “a contribution to the waiting for the great Czech novel,” a waiting that periodically returns in our local basin, as if that “great Czech novel” were to be the salvation of all literature, and ultimately, of us “poor” Czechs ourselves. In Švankmajer’s case, there could be no greater irony. This is a book that arose from play and not from the ambition to lay a literary work at the reader’s feet. It is a considerably free text, but in certain parameters, it truly approaches a novel. The initial inspiration lay in a group game where one author’s poem was transformed into its semantic opposite. This resulted in so-called “negative poems,” but perhaps it would be more apt to use the term “tonally inverted” poems. Švankmajer then develops his new novelistic opus on this playful principle. His starting point is the first part of Jean Paul Sartre’s unfinished novel tetralogy The Roads to Freedom: The Age of Reason, which he randomly pulled from a library one day.

Švankmajer “tonally inverts” the plot and characters of Sartre’s novel – where Sartre has a man, Švankmajer has a woman, and so on. Surprisingly, the initial situations and dilemmas remain the same as in Sartre’s book: an unwanted pregnancy is the focal point around which everything revolves. The decision of whether a woman keeps the child or undergoes an abortion then influences her entire future life. Both Sartre’s book and Švankmajer’s are permeated by the question of the degree of freedom allotted to us in the world and how this freedom, or its absence, limits our existence. However, Švankmajer approaches the question of freedom differently from Sartre and existentialism in general. For him, freedom is certainly not the result of our personal “project,” but is considerably determined. The afterword to the novel is then a game with “ChatGPT,” so even the currently revered “artificial intelligence” gets a say here. Negative Novel defies everything that can currently be found on the “Czech prose book market” and can be entered through several surprising entrances…

The book is in Czech.