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6. Resumé: Other: In Your Title (The Problem of the Literary Character in Prosaic Text)
These three texts, the analyses of Nabokov´s Hrôza, Kafka´s Opis zápasu and Horváth´s Zrurirorizozi, are mutually independent, they do not affect each other. Our work doesn´t proceed in linear chaining from text to text. These textual analyses should be perceived as some levels or platforms that do not overlap. They represent the layers connected by certain links or ties which should be understood as the specifications of our problem of the literary character and its manifestations. By exploring this problem we are able to move from one concrete place in the text to another one.
By examining the cathegory of the literary character in particular texts we have been able to find certain links which can be futher concretized as the notions of face, composition and fight. These notions represent above mentioned links that exist among given texts: face as the literary character as well as the literary character as face, precise and refined composition of the text that determines the process of shaping the character and vice versa. The character becomes the determining component of the composition of the text which is the aesthetic construction. A character must become the character by means of fight, struggle with Other who is indispensable for the verification of the difference/identity of the character. Fight is the ethic construction of the artificial text, the character needs a face to communicate, symphatize, love, it means to fight with Other.
Nabokov´s short story Hrôza is narrated by a story-teller in six scenes or events, or situations and each situation has its specific motifs. Their fusion results into constructing the short story or the motivic structure of the text. The chief role is played by an emotion – the anxiety or dread that affects the narrator.
We could observe that whereas in the first four scenes he experiences the transient states of anxiety, in fifth scene in the street of the unknown city he completely gives in to it, suddenly he can see the world as it really is, the plain world without meaning. The sixth scene displays the description of the death of the narrator´s girlfriend, here the narrator´s dread is replaced by sorrow.
The first four scenes are reduplicated, but the same reduplication process also touches the characters. The motifs that establish the character in one scene are reduplicated and the same motifs are used to form another character in third scene. The protagonist can see himself in the mirror as a different person and in third scene he sees a different person in his girlfriend. In the second scene he has a vision of being in a theatre and in fourth scene he finds himself in a real theatre together with his girlfriend. All these scenes are accompanied with an emotion of a transient nature that slowly cummulates and culminates in fifth scene: the narrator experiences dread which gives the name to whole short-story.
Nabokov´s description of the narrator´s dread in fifth scene is identical with the analysis of anxiety in Heidegger´s works. In the state of anxiety the narrator is not able to reveal its reason, its source is unidentifiable, anxiety opens up to the narrator the world, plain world deprived of everyday meaning in which he is faced with the authentic and non-authentic modus vivendi. The sixth scene of the short story in which the narrator comes to his dying girlfriend is identical with Heidegger´s analysis of fear: the source of fear is concrete, the narrator is afraid for his girlfriend, for their fellow existence. With her death their fellow existence that was shared by the narrator stops to exist. The fear is presented as the non-authentic escape from everyday world in which the narrator´s attention dissolves into things, he is no longer confronted with his own face as it was in the state of anxiety.
The typical narrator´s response to the world is the reaction through the prism of the inner part of his personality, in the sense of both the reflection and speculation. By means of reflexion the narrator achieves the sensibility and experiences anxiety from the existing world.
The narrator´s girlfriend is the paradoxical type of a female character that can be found in Dostoyevsky´s short story Krotká. Outwordly she is totally passive figure but she plays a crucial role in the composition of the text: she is the source of anxiety and at the same time hand she is paralysed by it; in the fifth scene it is her who evokes anxiety and in sixth one her death saves the narrator when his anxiety is replaced with sorrow.
The novelette by Franz Kafka Opis zápasu consists of three parts in which compositionally dominates the motif of insertion that not only holds the plot but also defers it. This motif has two different meanings: 1. deferment as the writing process – fragmentariness and 2. deferment as the moral attitude – patience.
The second part of the story presents the form of the life, in which we have given up Other - it is the loneliness, the life without struggle which just describes – pure state. The life appears as a dream in which no courage or effort is necessary. It is the deceptive desire to reveal the „essence“ that dominates, but paradoxically, at the same time we give up the responsibility, because the truth is too burdensome. In such a way people are just the siluets, which lean from side to side as the wind blows.
The first and third part of the story bring the struggle between „me“ and the Known, it is the fight for power and self-recognition. In this fight the female character has the role of the function, the link. At first „me“ stands in subordinate postion to the Known, who is succesful in dealing with women, but also helps „me“ to participate in the society. Later on, the roles are shifted: „me“, who is engaged, suceeds over the the Known. The destruction of the Known means ironically self-destruction for „me“: „me“ looses not only the links with the society, but also something that was the aim of the fight: self-assesment – the existence.
The life depicted in the first and third part of the story is the fight: by means of the movement, happening and so – becoming. In this life I am placed above the ambivalence of the things, the victory varies with defeat so that life keeps its relevance and in Kafka also its paradoxical „impossibility“. In this fight I gain the body, as I accept the responsibility and the burden of the „truth“. In such a way I am faced with Other and I am hold up to the sight of another people. Fight, struggle with Other is the dialogue with another person .
The character in the texts by Tomáš Horváth is dissolved, the subject looses the core or the centre which would help us to identify the character in the text, to reveal the speaking character.
Our thesis as well as starting point are concerned with the fact that if the content of the notion of the literary character has been changed, it results in the situation when the character looses possibility to be grasped and becomes the field for transformations, the place that can be filled by another character. The character functions as a standpoint or tendency that constantly changes.
By the notion of the transformation we understand the transformation or reshaping of the character into another character at the same position. These transformations don´t occur at the text junctures, but they come unexpectadly, they are „unwelcome“. To transform the character means to shift it to another position of the text and its position is occupied by another character. The character fulfills the function of the transformation that occurs at the unlimited surface. Horváth´s texts are the sets of the transformations of the intensities, the shifts of energy of the literary character.
His texts are not only aesthetic transformations or schemes, they comprise certain ideas or a message. Nevertheless, their ethic backround is not hidden behind the meaning of the text. His message (to say it in pathetic way) can be revealed in the form of the text, in the method of his writing.
The character from the short story Zrurirorizozi is deprived of the consistent and permanent description. Its charcteristical attributes or the sense of its commitment is depicted in a minimal way. In Horváth´s texts a character becomes the character – the character represents perfectly smooth form, surface and has to achieve the face to exist, to be different and to acquire the identity – the corporeality. The character is perfectly shapable matter, which acquires its form in the process. The character is a process of becoming.
The character in Horváth´s texts moves on the chessboard and the rules are permanently changed so that he/she becomes a multiple agent. We can say that the character functions by means of transformations, that are generated on the basis of the stylistics of the text.
1 Preložila Martina Ivanová.
