Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/20

 freedom to be whoever they want to be and to say whatever they want to say are obviously “insane.”

But while Švejk willingly accepts the labels the system places on him, he is impervious to what they mean. He doesn’t allow the way he is classified to alter how he goes about his work or his attitude toward others. He’ll accept that he’s now a batman or a prisoner or a certified lunatic or an orderly or whatever—he’ll even boast about it—and he’ll follow the orders he’s given. But the position has no effect on how he thinks of himself or how he interacts with his superiors or his fellow soldiers. He will carry out orders in his own manner, and if things go wrong, well, that’s just how it is. Hence, he’s always in difficulty when he has to deal with the life blood of the bureaucracy—paperwork or phone calls or precise timetables, things which demand that he pay close attention and care about a particular outcome for the sake of a larger enterprise. In that sense, he ironically subverts the bureaucracy by accepting its authority, sometimes enthusiastically, and continuing to be himself within the limits imposed. So he is both a willing servant and a subversive agent.

That point is made clear enough in the continuing attacks throughout the novel on the major tool of bureaucratic control—the language of official business as manifested in the various rules and regulations and the endless flow of instructions from higher up the structure. The function of this language is to impose order and standardize procedures, in order to reduce human activity to a coordinated and efficient response in obedience to a superficially rational system. As the captain of the gendarmerie at Pisek explains: “If we want to win the war ‘a’ must be ‘a', ‘b’ ‘b’; and everywhere there must be a dot on the ‘i’” (279). But the attempt always fails, at least with Švejk, in part because the bureaucratic instructions are often incomprehensibly complex (as with the system of codes) and in part because his very human nature simply ignores them or is too involved with something else to pay sufficient attention or else because he takes the instructions so literally that the result is counter-productive (for example, when he eagerly provides so many dogs to the police spy that the man ends up being eaten by them).