Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/7

 unrelentingly savage assault on the very idea of bureaucratic officialdom as a human enterprise conferring benefits on those who live under its control and, equally important, on the various justifications such bureaucracies offer for their own existence. What Hašek is ridiculing here lies close to the heart of any complex modern institution. It’s not difficult to see why it should create such resentment and alarm in a state whose major concern was to foster among its citizens a new sense of their collective Czechoslovak identity and cooperation with the new government.

Hašek’s satire on the bureaucracy is, for the most part, energetic and relatively simple. He pictures almost all of its practitioners, from the emperor, to the clergy, to the lowest of petty officials, as stupid incompetents, drunks, full of their own importance, often explicitly racist in their dealings with particular ethnic groups, and hopelessly venal. Their major concern appears to be to protect and personally benefit from their positions, and to do that they will play by the rules of the game whose larger purpose (if it has one at all) they can only articulate with various versions of the official line. To this enterprise they bring no special talents and no wider vision whatsoever. In many cases, they cope with any challenge or obstacle to their authority with mere aggression (there is a great deal of causal verbal and physical abuse in the treatment of subordinates and the general public here) and repetitive formulations of rhetorical slogans or official procedures (there’s a strong sense here that the officials simply cannot think beyond such aggressively asserted formulaic defences of their own positions).

So thoroughgoing is this satirical critique that it seems clear Hašek is not attacking a particular version of state bureaucracy nor seeking to correct its defects with some alternative vision of how things should be organized more effectively: this book is taking aim at bureaucracy itself—at the very idea that such a way of doing things confers any benefits whatsoever. We are not dealing here with a foolish state of affairs created by the outbreak of war; rather, the war is simply an extension of what always exists in a complex modern state (perhaps the war is simply one more manifestation of that way of thinking). The condition of war simply makes the system’s cruel absurdities more obvious.