Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/23

 But certainly I shan’t see it tomorrow” (29). That indicates as clearly as anything an underlying scepticism, not just about official versions of history, but about written accounts about anything. Švejk lives too much in the moment to anchor his faith on any coherent accounts of the past or the future.

But Švejk’s stories have a wider significance. In a sense, they are reminders of something linked to the point I made about the various attempts to construct official narratives of imperial greatness or military heroism or Czech ethnic identity. Švejk’s inexhaustible collection of tales about ordinary people keeps reminding the reader that the realities of life cannot be reduced to a single narrative uniting all people, because life consists of an infinite number of unique narratives, each of which is more persuasive and interesting than any bureaucratic propaganda. Cumulatively, Švejk’s stories (whether true or not) reinforce an impression of the complex anarchic realities of life—anarchic in the sense that the simplest details of ordinary experience are always escaping out from under the desire of official narratives to shape, define, and classify life in simpler unambiguous terms. And there is an infinite number of such stories, which are not sentimental reflections or illustrations or parables celebrating the virtues of the simple life but rather straightforward accounts of generally very mundane details of how people really live. Many of them (whether true or not) arise out of often painful realities. Perhaps that’s what compels the attention of the listeners (including eventually Lieutenant Lukáš)—in the entirely artificial and apparently ordered world created by the official prose of bureaucratic departments (where one has to live for a lie) there is a fascination with the unruly details of ordinary human experience.

AN ANARCHIST VISION OR BLACK COMEDY?

Traditional satire, even the harshest, generally arises out of a firm conviction of a moral alternative or a moral standard against which the folly of the satiric targets is measured. The presence of this standard offers a vision of how we ought to live our lives and, in the midst of a work which is always attacking and tearing down human pride, pictures a more meaningful alternative. In that sense, attempting to