Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/25

 different from traditional sources of amusement. Here everything was equally ridiculous (the war, king, country, officialdom, concepts of duty and patriotism, and so on). The laughter, in a sense, was the last-ditch antidote to despair, a human response to something that simply could not be confronted directly or even understood (not unlike whistling in the dark). The theatre of the absurd and a lot of modern humour (from Monty Python to Saturday Night Live) stem directly from this very new sense of the ultimate absurdity of any system of meaning, any inherited values. There is no exit from the absurdity (of the sort, for example, that Yossarian finds in Catch-22 or Gulliver discovers at the end of his voyages), so the laughter is not taking us anywhere. But it does serve to pass the time and affirm something momentarily shared (like the humour in Waiting for Godot).

Much of Hašek’s novel would seem to fit into this tradition. Certainly, if we look for alternatives in the story to this pervasive sense of absurdity, there’s not much to build on. From time to time we do derive a sense that among themselves the common people have a way of dealing with each other which is much more human than anything that goes on in the bureaucratic system. Ordinary people here share food, drink, money, tobacco, and each other’s company freely, often under difficult circumstances. There’s a spontaneous generosity at work, and on at least one occasion we hear about an informal network of peasants helping those who have run foul of the system (243). We are told that Lieutenant Lukáš, one of the very few officials who is not entirely ridiculous, is a “decent” man because he’s originally a peasant. And so on. Thus, there may be a sense from time to time that the problem lies with the bureaucracy rather than with human nature and that if we could only live in a much more anarchic way, letting ordinary people be themselves, human beings could get along. Perhaps there’s a hint of some corrigible historical reasons for the present situation in the title of the book used as the basis for military codes, The Sins of the Father (466).

There is, however, very little sense that such a freedom from the system is possible. For there is no underground exit from the bureaucratic labyrinth. It’s there to stay, in one form or another, and the novel has nothing to suggest or