CRIMINAL APPREHENSIONS: PRAGUE MINORITIES AND THE HABSBURG LEGAL SYSTEM IN JAROSLAV HAŠEK’S THE GOOD SOLDIER ŠVEJK AND FRANZ KAFKA’S THE TRIAL
JENIFER CUSHMAN
In their seminal work on Franz Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari classify the writings of Franz Kafka as “minor literature,” works that challenge the hegemony. Like the German-Jewish- Bohemian-Austrian Kafka, the Czech nationalist Jaroslav Hašek experienced difficulty negotiating Prague’s “territories,” the multiple geographic, lin- guistic and national terrains of the Habsburg-dominated area. Germans, Czechs, and Jews met in unequal terms at the turn of the last century, how- ever, and Hašek and Kafka move from different starting points in opposing directions through their theoretical spaces of Prague. As a result, while both Hašek’s Švejk and Kafka’s The Trial expose absurdities within the Habsburg legal system, the kind of humor and method of criticism indicated in the texts are quite dissimilar. Indeed, there is a sanctuary space in Hašek’s text for those “in the know,” a comfort zone that Kafka does not provide in his “deterritorialized” writing; Josef Švejk is able to evade public authority through word play, but Josef K. is ultimately convicted by his “criminal apprehension,” his guilty conscience in the inhuman system. An examina- tion of portrayals of representatives of legal authorities (police officers, guards, and soldiers) in the two novels provides insight into the question as to whether Hašek’s novel, like Kafka’s, meets the criteria of minor literature.
In “Hašek and Kafka,” Karel Kosík postulates a near convergence of appre- hended criminals in two unfinished Prague novels of the early 1920’s, namely Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk 1 and Franz Kafka’s The Trial.2
1 Hašek completed four of the intended six volumes of Švejk between 1921 and 1923, or from the time he returned to Prague after the war until his death. 2 According to Max Brod, he obtained the disordered manuscript in 1920 and “immediately put it in order.” From Max Brod’s postscript to Franz Kafka, The Trial (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 334. 52 Jenifer Cushman
“[Josef] Švejk’s “odyssey under the honorable escort of two soldiers with bayo- nets” takes him from the Hracdany garrison jail along Neruda Street to Malá Strana and over the Charles Bridge to Karlín. It is an interesting group of three people: two guards escorting a delinquent. From the opposite direction over the Charles Bridge and up to Strahov, another trio makes its way. This is the threesome from Kafka’s Trial: two guards leading a “delinquent,” the bank clerk Josef K., to the Strahov quarries, where one of them will “thrust a knife into his heart.” Both groups pass through the same places, but meeting each other is impossible.” 3
As executors of an inconsistent legal system, Josef Švejk’s soldiers and Josef K.’s guards unflatteringly represent the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, especially in its treatment of “minorities,” or non-German and non-Hungarian national groups. By extension, Švejk and K., both of whom bear the middle, or minor, name of Emperor Franz Josef, signify the Czech and, less obviously, Jewish minorities in Prague at the turn of the last century respectively. Although the status of minorities was ostensibly protected under the Dual Monarchy, Germans, Czechs and Jews met on unequal terms as the German hegemony felt increasingly threatened by the rise of Czech nationalism. Like the German-Jewish-Bohemian-Austrian Kafka, the Czech nationalist Hašek experienced difficulty negotiating what Scott Spector identifies as Prague’s “territories,” the multiple geographic, linguistic and national terrains of the Habsburg-dominated area.4 In their seminal work on Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari postulate three character- istics of minor literature, namely “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assem- blage of enunciation.” 5 Both Kafka and Hašek were members of minor national groups, and both exposed absurdities inherent in the Austro-Hungarian system through their writing, but can both The Trial and The Good Soldier Švejk be considered examples of minor literature? A close examination of the biographies and texts of the two authors in terms of their portrayals of repre- sentatives of legal authorities (police officers, guards, and soldiers) may shed light on this question. According to Hans Peter Hye in Das politische System in der Habsburger Monarchie, paradox was inevitable in an empire that asserted unity among the multiple lands, nations, beliefs, and political traditions that had developed in
3 Karel Kosík, “Hašek and Kafka: 1883–1922/23,” transl. Ann Hopkins, Cross Currents 1 (1983), 127. 4 Scott Spector, Prague Territories. National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), ix. 5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory of History and Literature 30 (Minneapolis: U of MN, 1986), 18.