Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/15

 together with his brains lay right underneath. A chap doesn’t even notice how it happens to him.”(346)

And as the troops passed through and camped in the neighbourhood there could be seen everywhere little heaps of human excrement of international extraction belonging to all peoples of Austria, Germany and Russia. The excrement of soldiers of all nationalities and of confessions lay side by side or heaped on top of one another without quarrelling among themselves.(598)

Such an emphasis, it should be clear, is not seeking to reduce life to some scatological lowest common denominator but rather to insist that life is essentially a shared physical experience which transcends rank, nationality, religion, and any dogmatic attempt to impose artificial differences on people with arbitrary classifications (the essence of bureaucratic thinking). The physical reality of life (symbolized most graphically by shit and shitting) is what unites us—all other verbal definitions, especially those from some official history or myth are simply lies.

That may well be the reason why in this book the moments which register as the most relaxed and most truly human interactions tend to take place when people are enjoying the most basic physical pleasures—drinking, preparing food, eating together, or sharing a cigarette. At such times, for example, a Czech and a Hungarian can forget their ethnic and political differences and share their resources to prolong the moment which, for all the language differences that make any normal conversation impossible, insists upon their common situation and nature. And if that means they miss several trains they are supposed to catch in order to carry out the instructions of superiors, well, too bad.

Even the comradeship of the prison cell arises from the inescapable sense of each other’s physical intimacy, an unavoidable recognition of a shared humanity which in this place, permeated by the sights and smells of physical life, cannot be concealed behind the customary labels or uniforms people are given to distinguish them from one another, making some more important than others: