Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/24

 destroy or correct old ways can be a way of encouraging us to create something better.

However, if we ask what creative moral vision underlies The Good Soldier Švejk, we cannot arrive at an answer as readily as we can with, say, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Aristophanes’ Frogs (not that these works are entirely unambiguous, of course). For in Hašek’s novel, we are not given any very clear direction on how we ought to live our lives. There is certainly a very strong sense of human folly, greed, and cruelty, but is there anything in the novel beyond that?

Švejk himself is not too much help here, since (as mentioned) he brings no “philosophy” or faith in anything to his experience. Nor, it seems clear, does he change in any significant way. In this picaresque novel, the hero is not learning as he goes or developing a more critical awareness of himself or society or even displaying a desire for anything very different. He’s coping as he has always done, moment by moment, and is surviving with his sense of himself and his interest in life intact.

In fact, it is possible to see in Švejk one of the most famous examples of a very modern form of comedy, what has come to be called “black humour,” a sense of the hilarity deployed in the face of a world which is basically absurd. This form of satiric humour arises, not from the discrepancy between how we ought to behave and the way we do behave, but from a pervading sense of the ridiculousness of everything. It’s a response to life which affirms no coherent moral alternative simply because there is no such thing: the very faith in such a possibility is as absurd as everything else. The laughter we share is simply a way of imposing some human awareness on the total absence lasting values. It’s a way of “retreating with style from the chaos” (a phrase Tom Stoppard, interestingly enough another writer with a Czech ancestry, uses to describe some of his work).

In his remarkable book The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell discusses the origins of black humour in the trenches of World War I. He describes how observers visiting the front and expecting to see a vision worthy of hell were often astounded to discover that the soldiers were howling with laughter. But the humour was something