Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/6

 control game whose major players never tire of announcing in noble-sounding prose and stirring poetry the importance of the structure and its alleged purpose but who, in their daily practice, show no signs of any significant humanity in dealing with subordinates or those whom the bureaucracy is supposed to serve. That target is something we all understand (because we have to deal with it, no matter where we live), and thus the impact of this satire extends well beyond the particular social and political realities of the world it depicts.

Before going into more detail on this point, it’s important to notice the Central European nature of this bureaucracy. It is all-encompassing and powerful—with agents in every pub, judicial panels to pass sentence on mere suspicion, prisons and lunatic asylums to take care of trouble makers, and the authority to send people off to war. The opening scene in the pub may be humorous enough, but we learn later, almost casually, that the trivial incident has sent the landlord to jail for ten years on the accusations of a police informer. We are not dealing here with some variety of genial incompetence which we can turn our back on much of the time if we find it frustrating or which we can fight against with a meaningful legal apparatus (as is possible, for example, in some Western countries, at least in fiction). This bureaucracy reaches into all aspects of life, ready to seize the powerless citizen at any moment and consign him to some rubric determined by the incomprehensible machinery by which it works, and individuals are powerless to change or even to challenge it (Hašek is a very different writer from his contemporary Kafka, but in this respect their fictional worlds are recognizably similar). Hence, the army and its activities behind the lines symbolize a good deal more than simply military procedures in the initial stages of combat. The military structure of authority and its characteristic way of acting here are a manifestation of modern social authority itself—and Hašek’s attack on the idiocy of what’s going on has set in its sights a great deal more than simply the officious fools of 1914.

Those people who wanted the novel banned in the newly independent Czechoslovakia (after World War I) and elsewhere, some of whom succeeded, were quite correct to see it as more than a satire on war and militarism (although it is that, as well, of course)—the book is a very funny but