Róbert Gál: We Can Only Identify the Border Once We Step Over It

Róbert Gál is a phenomenal figure in the field of current Czech-Slovak prose. He is an unusual experimenter with language, a master of the snap shot and philosophical meditation. His books have more reviews in the United States than in his homeland of Slovakia. The publisher Agite/Fra has prepared his prose On Wing and Agnomia for publication as translations from the Slovak [into Czech], though the author has lived in Prague since 1991, and has started to write  in Czech. In June he will speak at the twentieth anniversary of the international Prague Writers’ Festival.

Václav Kovář: You write with a relatively specific style. Can you outline how you´ve achieved that? I have in mind your aphorisms and the contemplative setting of your writing, which is relatively unusual in contemporary prose.

Róbert Gál: The genre of aphorism is related to the fact that I have studied philosophy for a long time and in philosophical literature I am most fascinated by creation in which philosophic thought is linked with poetry, with inspiration outside of philosophy. It is veritably the genre of aphorism. And many philosophers whom I have liked, like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Schopenhauer also wrote aphorisms. Aside from the fact that their thoughts interest me, I am interested in the form of their communication.

VK: But in your latest books there is a perceptible movement towards both denser and more voluminous texts.

RG: I have gradually moved from philosophical aphorism to other genres – first to prose poetry, which I applied in the book Signs and Symptoms, and later also to a form of experimental prose, in which the last book, Agnomia, was written.

VK: Ladislav Šerý in the preface to the Czech translation of Agnomia emphasizes your “investigation of transience, which is fundamental to our relationship to reality.”

RG: That doesn’t apply only to my writing. When I speak about the world, I often speak more about myself – in that I am perhaps influenced by existential philosophy. Sometimes I don’t see the difference between the world as is, and the one I perceive. When I write, mostly it is under the influence of perpetual inspiration, which means that I don’t have time to think over every word – sentences in a given moment are formulated quite accurately and it doesn’t interest me if they are truths or lies.

VK: In On Wing, you employ the phrase of “interactive silence.” How can silence be interactive?

RG: Word play. When I thought about that sentence, the first thing that occurred to me is interactive exclamation, and then I said, why couldn’t it be interactive silence? A person can sometimes scream with silence, and vice versa. Things blend together, depending on a concrete moment, a concrete situation. The theme of silence interests me, it is relevant, as is similarly the theme of noise, which is its antithesis – silence and noise, silence and outcry. For years I have intensively listened to avant-garde music. I listened to John Zorn, who aside from free jazz also uses noise. Noise fascinates me precisely as it is the antithesis to quiet or silence. A then there is the relationship of silence and quiet.

VK: Do you miss quiet in today’s world?

RG:Today’s world is very noisy, but it is always possible to still deafen it. If you listen to a live concert by John Zorn, to the most extreme pitches of his saxophone play, it is such a type of noise that deafens all else – it is the simulation of an extreme experience.

VK: You interested in extreme experiences.

RG: Extreme experience interests me from an existential viewpoint.

VK: Is it related to the fact that you aspire to a language that perpetually bends and reforms?

RG: Yes, some would even say that in it I even aspire to rape. When you look for the boundary of the possibilities of language, you must sometimes step over it, so that you know how to identify it.

VK: The twentieth Prague Writers’ Festival has the theme “Heresy and Rebellion.” Do you feel sometimes like a heretic or a rebel?

RG: Definitely. I feel like that in most of my life.

VK: You revolt?

RG: In part, perhaps, against my father—and in my books my relationship to my father is also outlined. But you can’t take all of it as autobiography. I use that like a model—it is not entirely my father, but a modeled figure, which serves the function of a catalyst here.

But I can also revolt against the entrenched stereotypes of society, revolting against all encompassing images, how one is to write, think, and even live. I think that our generation, this generation of people, which lived through the revolution that took place when I was around twenty, are lucky—or unlucky—that in one’s productive life one doesn’t have to rebel against any monstrous regime, as was communism. Today a different type of rebellion grows, than that which operated in the era when people like Václav Havel or Ivan Martin Jirous sat in prison. Today’s forms of rebellion are more sophisticated. By living through the Velvet Revolution, we were largely pacified out of a natural need for rebellion, because the regime fell and with that we lost our motivation for authentic political rebellion. Our rebellion then became like petty joking, which is also one of my themes, permeating the novella On Wing or Agnomia—rebellion was all of a sudden like pissing in the streets of Brooklyn at 2am, for example. A kind of rebellion, but at the same time a parody.

VK: I am interested in the relationship of the author to his own ego. Take your sentence: “it is possible to reign only with that which does not belong to us.” Can one reign over his own ego—one’s own words?

RG: In the process of writing, yes. Then, when a book is written and published, you can no longer influence how it will reflect, how other people will react to it. But in the process of writing – in so much as the author is honest to himself – you reign over every single word.

VK: Do you write deliberately in opposition to your ego?

RG: I don’t know what the ego is precisely. Can we formulate that another way?

VK: Do you sometimes feel that you are in the captivity of your words?

RG: No. Perhaps I sometimes feel in captivity to the intrinsic ideas of mine I express in words.

VK: Your books encompass many questions, compared to the small amount of answers. Do you cover them up deliberately?

RG: No. That's the way how I think. For me a well-posed question is more valuable than a well-answered question. Philosophy is, for me, the art of posing questions.

VK: Is Agnomia in and of itself the answer to the unspoken questions—to which you have progressed by the end of the text? Followed by a period and not a question mark?

RG: Agnomia is a response and at the same time a question. It is a response, but also it is my neologism, which is possible to understand differently. Therefore it provokes other questions. Yes, at the end of the book there is indeed a period following the word agnomia, but there is no need to assume that there are no more questions to ask. It is in its own way a structural figure. I started with the word agnomia and I ended with that word – I circumscribed a circle and then I made a period. Nothing more, but also nothing less. And that circle, ex definitione, I had to fill in.

VK: Your texts are really quite meditative, but seem to contain some rather fundamental banalities.

RG: Undoubtedly. In so far as there is something banal in my texts, that is very likely the place which comes most from life.

For the Prague Writers’ Festival, 9 February, 2010
Translation from the Czech by Meghan Forbes