Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/10

 systematic system of writing the battalion’s history” which exemplifies the highest virtues of traditional military heroism, but only because he’s writing the narratives as hyperbolic fictions, composed in advance of the events, without regard to any of the realities of war. He can do that, of course, because what matters in such history is that the rhetoric be consistently celebratory. The facts of the case are irrelevant. Once history gets divorced from what really goes on, it might as well be written in advance of the events:

Hašek’s, however, is concerned with more than simply army prose. He’s attempting to undermine any official narrative whatsoever, that is, any use of language handed down from above which is designed to get people to accept a particular vision of their own identity.

We know from the “Epilogue to Part I” that one of Hašek’s intentions in this novel is to make sure that the Czech colloquial vernacular—warts and all—gains a foothold in modern Czech prose, so that the language of the people does not somehow get relegated to an inferior position by those who wish the development of modern Czech culture (an urgent political priority at the time in the newly independent state) to adopt an exclusively polite and well