Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/9

 nothing more than a dusty accessory of a soulless bureaucracy. If the statue is part of the official trappings, it might as well serve as an ashtray, since whatever sense of religious commitment or social justice it once communicated (if it ever did) has long disappeared from this environment. For the same reason, the legal code might as well be a coaster—if it is now incapable of protecting people in a world of bureaucratic directives, at least it can protect the table top from stains. Interestingly enough, the book which really interests the judge at this point is one full of pictures of male and female sexual organs “with appropriate rhymes which the scholar Franz S. Krause discovered on the walls of the W.C.s of the West Berlin railway station” (389).

[Incidentally, the number of references to the story of Jesus in the novel is interesting and significant. There’s no doubt that Hašek is extremely hostile to organized religion, particular to Roman Catholicism, which he never tires of attacking as hopelessly corrupt, and, at times to the very idea of religious belief. But the network of references to Jesus (and to Pontius Pilate) suggests that his attitude to Christianity as exemplified in the story of Jesus might be quite different].

THE ATTACK ON OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

What’s particularly intriguing about this sustained attack on the ways in which the state apparatus controls the common people is Hašek’s attention to language itself, the official use of words to impose on the people a false idea of what’s going on and of themselves. This point is obvious enough in the ridiculous details of army directives, the mockery of the systems of classification, the artificial, strained rhetoric of heroism used by the newspapers and army dispatches to “glorify” the enterprise and justify the deaths, and so on—all standard fare in any satire of warfare.

This aspect of official narratives is satirized throughout the book, especially in the newspaper reports of heroic valour and, above all, in the figure of the volunteer soldier Marek, who has been assigned the official role of battalion historian. He spends his time “writing up in advance the heroic deeds of the battalion” (581). His work can impose on the chaotically absurd flux of events a “systemized