Patrik Ourednik, Case Closed

It all began with a late night hyperlink clicking session, and it ended with reviews of all of Patrik Ourednik's books that have been translated into English: The Opportune Moment (here), Europeana (here), and now Case Closed (Dalkey Archive, 2010).

In a letter to his friend Philip Pendleton Cooke, dated August 9th, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe commented on the popularity of his Dupin stories, such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.

Passages such as these serve as important reminders of the rules of the detective story genre. For a detective novel to work qua genre, the author must be able to deploy a series of devices to maintain not only suspense, but she must also be able to give good reasons as to why the mystery unravels. As much fun as the reader might have in the process, the author must have all the loose ends tied up. That is, if we're talking about the genre.

In Case Closed, Patrik Ourednik seemingly takes up Poe's gauntlet, and writes a detective story in which the author/narrator (if we can equate them--or am I falling into Poe's trap?) doesn't know how the web unravels, leaving several intrigues to begin only to be left in suspense by the end of the novel. The story--at least most of it--follows the convergence of two characters, Viktor Dyk, a retiree and failed novelist, and Vilém Lebeda, a police inspector in Prague, who not only is charged with following up on a suicide with a few suspicious circumstances, but also pursues with extra-curricular interest a forty-year old murder case that, while out of Lebeda's jurisdiction, seems to have ties to the members of Dyk's retiree's club.

Ourednik drops a few hints about how the suspicious death and the forty-year old murder case tie together, but he's mostly interested in undermining the expectations of the reader who might just get lured into the intrigues--there's also an abundance of red herrings, if it's even possible to separate between lures and leads. And, given that a group of retirees are at the center of the non-action, there's lots of curmudgeonly behavior, as if Ourednik were attempting to master the aches, pains, and casual bigotry of a cynical post-communist generation. At one point, Viktor Dyk reflects on adolescence:

Adolescents were the worst. Formerly known as youth, the vanguard of our society, striding forth in the footsteps of their fathers, who themselves had only managed to make it as far as the rearguard (13).

Though amidst some pointless retiree-banter (and some of that aforementioned casual bigotry), Dyk leaves us a clue:

"Don't you have something to say, Mr. Dyk?"
"Silence is a form of speech," replied Mr. Dyk.
Mrs. Prochazka looked puzzled.
"And the reverse." He couldn't resist.
"The reverse?"
"Speaking is just another form of silence."

It's the first indication that for all the talk and narration, the mysteries and intrigues may never be unraveled.* By the time we get to Chapter 37:

We are born into a novel whose meaning escapes us, and depart from a novel we have never once understood. Now or never! The author has established with his customary skill that he is equally at home in any genre; he has piled plot twist upon plot twist without so much as a second thought; stacked varying styles side by side; stung readers with bitingly sarcastic asides and trenchant social critique; and generously tossed in a thumbnail psychological sketch. Now or never! No one's understood a thing, and even if they had...

When I read passages like these, I want to point out Simone de Beauvoir's distinction between absurdity and ambiguity. I'll let it pass for now, because this passage--especially the part surrounding what I've quoted--seems to be the master key for interpreting the story. Detective novels have long relied on the ingenuity of the author to unravel the case. And while this is hardly going to sound like praise, in subverting expectations in the genre, Case Closed requires the ingenuity of the reader** to follow the clues.

*

** This might sound like I'm complimenting myself, but I'm not. It's just that you've got to build your own case, which is why I placed the first footnote--given that it's a spoiler--below.
* We'll call this the SPOILER asterisk: I think the statement is also revealing of the failed author Dyk and his role in the intrigues.

Patrik Ourednik's "Europeana"

Patrik Ourednik's Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (Dalkey Archive, 2005) is an unusual book. It's not quite a brief history of the 20th century, and it's not quite a novel. However, it does discuss the 20th century, and it is told by an unreliable narrator, who sometimes jumbles disparate topics and misreports events.

In fact, this book is all about the narrator, and the rhetoric of the narrator, which is dispassionate, detached, and more concerned (if we could even say "concerned") with accounting for the century in statistics and numbers than recounting a story of the century. I think it's necessary as well to say "the narrator" rather than "Ourednik" because I don't think that the book provides any clue into Ourednik's own stance on the 20th century until the final sentence of the book. And, if I tell you what that sentence is, it will probably deflate the exercise or experience of reading it. 

And while you are reading it, you are going to wonder why you decided to. For the Europeana century is marked primarily by war, genocide, and body counts. And statistics. The first few sentences set the tone:

The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans. 

The next 120 pages continue in the same vein--the statistics, the quick leaps between events (in the above, how did we jump from the Second to the First World War?), and detached cynicism. The book is more than a criticism of the idea that human history is a story of progress, it's also a critique--or at least, I think, on the basis of the end of the book that I can't discuss, that it is a critique--of the attempt to "survey" or "look over" history from a standpoint that is able to definitively account for it. As Ourednik states in an interview with Context (also published by Dalkey Archive):

The primary question wasn’t to know what events, what episodes were characteristic of the twentieth century, but which syntax, which rhetoric, which expressiveness belonged to it, in what sense was it redundant, etc.  

Thus it strikes me the book is a critique of its own rhetoric and "expressiveness," an 'auto-reductio ad absurdum' of the attempt to quantify historical change and void the subjectivity of historical agents. Sure, your patience will be tested by the statistics, the body counts, and the repeated references to Nazism (which appears over and over and over in the narrative, sometimes leaving the reader feeling as if nothing happened in 20th century Europe other than World War II). Nevertheless, those final few pages, with their critique of the smug arrogance of late twentieth century chroniclers of political power, are edifying enough to warrant a trip through the 20th century of Europeana.

(See also my review of Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855)

Patrik Ourednik, The Opportune Moment, 1855

It was a late night hyperlink clicking session that led me to Patrik Ourednik. I don't know exactly where it started, but it ended with me acquiring two of his books: The Opportune Moment, 1855 and Case Closed, both translated by Alex Zucker and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Here's some brief background on Ourednik, which I've taken from Context (a journal published by Dalkey Archive as well):

Patrik Ouredník was born in Prague‚ but emigrated to France in 1984‚ where he still lives. He is the author of eight books‚ including fiction‚ essays‚ and poems. He is also the Czech translator of novels‚ short stories‚ and plays from such writers as François Rabelais‚ Alfred Jarry‚ Raymond Queneau‚ Samuel Beckett‚ and Boris Vian. He has received a number of literary awards for his writing‚ including the Czech Literary Fund Award.

I started with The Opportune Moment, 1855, which tells the story of the failure of an utopian commune founded by Italian anarchists in Brazil. It opens with a letter by one of the protagonists (who I will call the epistolary narrator), to his unrequited love, many years after the failure of the new society. At once it becomes clear that Ourednik is writing, in a way, a historical novel and satire. Here are the opening lines (also from the DA website), which convey that 19th century epistolary mood:

Madam, however strong my distaste at the thought of deferring to your whim after so many years, I have not found within myself the courage to resist it, and am left with no choice but to submit, albeit I do so at the expense of my repute. To oblige you means to confess to my love for you, that transient conflagration, that involuntary clouding of the senses, which renders less persuasive all that I have professed and proclaimed; and as much as you know it, in your selfishness you ask of me a sincerity which I could not show anyone else. For if in life I have resisted your God and his depraved demands, if I have resisted unfreedom and shallowness, if I have faced ridicule and human baseness always with calm and determination—I have lost my struggle with love; and what is more, my love has been embodied by you, a woman unworthy of true emotion. Still today, when I find in you nothing which would be worth attention, when I marvel at the fact that I ever could have loved you, still today a word from your mouth knocks me defenseless to my knees, returning me to the days of immaturity and youthful fumbling, to days past and past perfect, to the juvenile schoolboy who carried out directions and instructions he did not understand. But the schoolboy in the end revolted and made up his mind to submit only to that which appeared sensible and good to him, whereas the aging man takes pen in hand and hastens to satisfy your vanity. 

The narrator then recalls the desires and reasons to attempt to create a new society in rural Brazil, his conflicted feelings over his paramour, and the shortcomings of the commune and his youthful enthusiasms. This particular participant is the founder that searched out its location and returned to Europe to propagandize for its creation, who nevertheless fails, due to his delay at sea, to arrive before the settlement self-destructs. All that is left, aside from the deserted settlement, is a journal that is given him by the Brazilian policeman. 

The journal takes the reader back to 1855, and is told by an Italian anarchist named Bruno (who is not the same as the epistolary narrator, who, as far as I can tell, is referred to by Bruno as "Older Brother"). The journal is split into two parts, the first describes Bruno's trip across the Atlantic, the second of the decline of Fraternitas settlement. During the trip across the Atlantic, Bruno captures the hopes and anticipations of the voyagers, their squabbles, and, unwittingly, their exploitation at sea by the ship's captain (for example, when the captain chooses to land temporarily at Cape Verde rather than the Canary Islands, one of the voyagers "didn't see why we hadn't filled up on fresh water when we were in the Canary Islands, where it was free"). In the squabbles, many of the limitations of their enthusiasm are revealed: the group argues over whether non-Europeans should be admitted to the group, they seem oblivious to the problems of being settlers in relation to indigenous peoples, etc. 

After this section, there is a six month gap in the journal, and it resumes as the Fraternitas settlement collapses, and narrator becomes completely unreliable (that's all I can say without spoiling anything).

With novels such as The Opportune Moment, 1855, I find it impossible to ignore considering the political subtext. A story of a failed utopian project suggests, of course, that  Ourednik views all political change with cynical eyes, meaning that all attempts at change end in defeat (but, then, why translate the book? We've got plenty of cynics and conservatives in the English language). 

Or, it could accent the importance of the hopes opened by such a project despite their flaws. If the epistolary narrator is any indicator, Ourednik opts for the latter possibility. In his letter, the narrator rejects the smug liberalism of his former lover, choosing to resign himself to the absurdity of life rather than to the absurdity of bourgeois world.