Negativní román

Jan Švankmajer's new work is a "contribution to the wait for the great Czech novel," a wait that periodically returns to the local basin, as if that "great Czech novel" were to be the salvation of all literature, and ultimately of us "poor" Czechs ourselves. In Švankmajer's case, there could be no greater irony. This is a book that arose from play, not from an ambition to lay a literary work at the reader's feet. It is a remarkably free text, but in certain respects it does resemble a novel. The initial inspiration came from a group game in which a poem by one author was transformed into its semantic opposite. This resulted in so-called "negative poems," but perhaps it would be more accurate to use the term "tonally inverted" poems. Švankmajer then develops his new novelistic opus based on this game principle. His starting point is the first part of Jean-Paul Sartre's unfinished novel tetralogy The Roads to Freedom: The Age of Reason, which he randomly pulled out of the library one day.

Švankmajer "tonally reverses" the plot and characters of Sartre's novel—where Sartre has a man, Švankmajer has a woman, and so on. Surprisingly, however, the initial situation and dilemmas remain the same as in Sartre's book: an unwanted pregnancy is the center around which everything revolves. The decision whether the woman will keep the child or have an abortion then influences the rest of her life. Both Sartre's book and Švankmajer's film raise the question of the degree of freedom that is destined for us in this world and how this freedom, or lack thereof, limits our existence. However, Švankmajer approaches the question of freedom differently than Sartre and existentialism in general. For him, freedom is definitely not the result of our personal "project," but is largely determined. The epilogue to the novel is a game with "ChatGPT," so even the currently touted "artificial intelligence" gets a say here. This negative novel defies everything that can currently be found on the "Czech prose book market," and there are several surprising ways to enter it...