Milan Kundera: Preface for The Ceiling

Řezníček is the son (or rather the grandson) of surrealism. Thissaid, it is necessary to prevent a certain misunderstanding. First, inFrance, surrealism was a revolt against the Cartesian tradition. But,unfortunately, surrealism impressed French cultural memory (alwayssolidly Cartesian) far less with its incomparable poetry than with itsideology. Řezníček’s surrealism is furiously anti-ideological. It is“Power to the imagination!” not as an abstract slogan written on wallsbut as an artistic reality which cannot be more concrete: you aredazzled by the outpouring of his fantasy.

Second, French surrealism lived to the end under the hypnoticpromise of a great future, a revolutionary promise. Řezníček’ssurrealism is disenchanted, skeptical, macabre, with neither illusionsnor future. And I would add: what he recounts is the Apocalypse.

For the last half-century, the art of Central Europe has beenobsessed with the image of the Apocalypse, by “the last days ofMankind”, to quote the title of Karl Kraus’ great work. In effect, allthe characters of Le plafond (The Ceiling), one after another, end upin a little swamp in the middle of a courtyard, and continue to liveunder the ceiling of mud like the drowned. “In this courtyard, nothingcould happen anymore”, this is the novel’s last sentence.

But when I say Apocalypse, you would imagine something quitedifferent from this ridiculous vaudevillian, stupid, vacuous, wonderfulburlesque along with wanting to laugh until you die. Yes, don’t beastonished, this is it, the true face of Apocalypse. When you face thegreat moment of the Great End, this is the last surprise you wouldexpect: you will listen to a laugh. And don’t be consoled by it. Thiswill not be a metaphysical laugh, the ceremonial laugh of the Devil,but a laugh that could not be more vulgar.

Reading Řezníček you will perhaps understand that you have notunderstood the great filmmaker Makavejev: vulgarity is not the sign ofan artist’s bad taste, it is an aspect of the human creature that thepoet tries to root out, uncover, discover. For that matter, don’tforget that with Řezníček you neither in France nor in Russia, you arein Bohemia, in Prague, the home town of Franz Kafka who didn’t eatmeat, of Jaroslav Hašek, a drunk who traipsed from café to cafélistening to the stories of other drunks, from which he composed hisimmortal Chveik. And don’t forget, in addition, that Řezníček freelyrefused a false intellectual career and he always remained aconstruction worker. The word “the people” is not a magic sound to him,but signifies a reality he knows by heart.

So, getting on to the third aspect of Řezníček’s surrealism: it isan anti-snobbish, popular, plebian surrealism: it is surrealism of thebistro. The story being told is populated by three workers, a seductivepapermaker, his spermatozoid who plays a flute atop an armoire, amurderous sexton, and while their universe is entirely down to earth,it is miraculously elevated to the heights of playful fantasy (yes,absolutely playful, by all means don’t search here for cheapallegories!) so that it is difficult to compare this to anything else.

And concerning the Sexton’s abysmal crimes, don’t talk to me aboutsadism! If there is a Sade, it is a Sade without class, with neither acastle nor a Bastille prison, a Sade buffoon. Řezníček’s black jokesare not here to reveal cruelty as the essence of life, instead theyunmask the slapstick foolishness that is the essence of cruelty. (PolBury, one of the greats of contemporary sculpture, knows how to graspin Řezníček’s fanciful portraits this ambiguous poetry of the cruel andthe stupid. His Řezníček is the Laurel and Hardy of darkness, thetricky clown, as tricky and slow and elusive as Bury’s sculpted works.)

For many years the surrealist adventure is achieved in France; itmoves on to Prague in a forbidden, clandestine manner. (Or course,since Řezníček has never been published in his homeland, it is not hisworry.) But his work is absolutely not a mummification of thesurrealism of yesteryear. The surréalisme praguois reaches a remarkable“Umwertung der Werte”, values revalued, from those of the avant garde;he rebuts the naivety of the hopes of his bygone days, hisrevolutionary lyricism, his historical optimism, his Marxist utopia; hebecomes “something else”.

But, in this case, what authority do we have to speak again ofsurrealism, or, to be more precise, of the surrealist heritage? It isthe aesthetic, the one founded on the shocking freedom of theimagination. It is the spirit, the one of absolute disrespect.

Through a Brechtian or Sartrian (or Soljenitsyian) conception ofengaged art, western journalism searches for an art behind the IronCurtain that focuses on the denunciation of totalitarianism. Theyignore the value of a work that does not militate for or againstsomething (oh, how the people of a country where nothing happens love afight!), but proclaims our ability to prolong the artistic adventureand say what cannot be said.

It is a true miracle, the euphoria that emanates from this book born in the saddest corner of Europe.

Milan Kundera

Paris, October, 1982

Translated from the French by Paul Kahn and Dominique Negel