Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/11

 educated tone.

Hašek is determined that in the literature of the new republic the people’s voice, even at its most colloquial, ungrammatical, vituperative, scatological, and shocking, will be heard in their own idiom and will not be ignored or sidelined by an national agenda dominated by intellectuals and modernist artists publishing manifestoes in lofty prose.

[In this respect I’m reminded of certain arguments in French-Canadian culture in decades past about the relative importance of official French and the language of the common people in Quebec, joual. These arguments were decisively affected (in some places put to rest) by the work of Michel Tremblay, whose plays not only celebrated joual but (in translation) became internationally famous and popular (particularly in Scotland, interestingly enough).]

But Hašek’s assault on the “salon” he refers to involves more than bringing the expressive idioms of the streets to the centre of human interactions. It also means going after many of the hallowed Czech myths so zealously promoted in the language of high culture in the previous fifty years (at least) by those hoping to create a “lofty” historical identity for the emerging Czech nation. It’s as if he deliberately intends to mock those traditions as completely meaningless to the modern realities of Czech working-class life.

For example, putting invocations to St John of Nepomuck, the Catholic saint whose cult worship was a major element in Czech Catholicism (especially among the peasants), in the mouth of a drunken venal priest, an ethnic German who was once a Jew and whom Švejk is trying to beat into compliance (114) or calling a Czech patron saint a “robber” who spent his time “murdering and exterminating the Baltic