A Searchlight for Their Times and Ours
Joseph Škrovecky on Memory, Art, War, Freedom, and Nostalgia
Josef Škvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls is a polyphonic tsunami; a smouldering fever-dream of a novel constructed out of Eisensteinian montages of nostalgic reminisces and fleeting memories. It represents not only an attempt to understand the role of the artist in free and unfree societies, but a broader endeavour to understand what is universal. How do we make meaning and construct our identity? What role does memory and the past play in this process? How are our feelings and perceptions influenced by ideas and ideologies? Those uncertain, hazy approximations of reality which are at once so potent yet so illusory. It is a work which, in the words of its protagonist Danny Smiricky, acts as “a sounding board amplifying the dark pulsing powers of bloody experience”.
Škvorecky himself is something of a forgotten master. Born in 1924, in rural Czechoslovakia in a town then part of the Sudetenland, he experienced both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. He was conscripted as a slave labourer in a Messerschmitt factory during the War and served as a minor member of the local resistance. In the aftermath of the conflict, he studied literature and began to release a succession of highly popular and critically lauded works of a broadly satirical bent which fell afoul of communist authorities. As a consequence, he became one of the leading voices of a group of Czechoslovakian intellectuals including Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Václav Havel, and Ludvík Vaculik who played a pivotal role in the birth of the Prague Spring. However, in the aftermath of the Soviet Invasion in mid-1968, he was forced to flee Czechoslovakia for Canada. Here, he became a literature professor at the University of Toronto and founded a publishing house, 68 Publishers, which published the works of Czechoslovakian dissidents until the collapse of communism.
As a novel, The Engineer of Human Souls is far more conceptual than narrative-driven. Each of the work’s seven brilliant chapters vacillates around a lecture the protagonist, Smiricky, delivers to his students as a middle-aged Toronto university professor. These lectures are, ostensibly, literary reflections on the works of choice writers within the canon, namely Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad, and Lovecraft. Yet, for Škrovecky and his thinly veiled alter-ego, Smiricky, they function as a meditative canvas. He flits, at times seamlessly and at others with a deliberate, jarring impact, between literary critique and nostalgia so potent it borders on incapacitating. Letters from émigré friends’ which history has cast across the world arrive. He socialises with the local Czech diaspora, a group of dislocated and despairing eccentrics. And the mannerisms of his students evoke agonising pangs of what could have been.
Of course, the central thematic concern of the book probes the function and value of art in both free and unfree societies. Yet, for Škrovecky this question cannot be disentangled from much more profound questions about meaning, history, and identity. His protagonist lives in a world of associations — “all [his] thoughts are memories, everything reminds him of Czechoslovakia. The title, of course, alludes to one of Joseph Stalin’s — a man who quite palpably inhabits the margins of the novel — most oft-cited remarks:
The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Stalin, as many tyrants do, distrusted writers and intellectuals for numerous reasons. He feared their capacity to challenge simplifying narratives and ideologies. Their willingness to embrace complexity. And, most of all, their capacity to sculpt human emotion and tap into the memories from which, with hammer and anvil, we forge who we are and what we value. As demonstrated in the following passage, Škrovecky is at his core a sceptic:
I look up from the book. In Hakim’s eyes I see the scorn the men of the future hold for the men of yesterday, men to whom today still provides a brief respite before they are branded the betrayers of Hakim’s tomorrows. ‘Steer clear of the jugglers of concepts and feelings as carefully as you would avoid leprosy and the plague.’
Škrovecky seeks not to discredit ideas altogether. He does, however, see that the “nakedness of power” is all too often concealed by “a whore’s G-string of ideology”. He understands imperatives encoded within human nature better than the totalising ideologies and better than all too many modern observers; that, to most of us, “what we feel is more important than what we know” and that we all too often delude ourselves by thinking we live for wisdom when we really live “for the pleasure that wisdom brings us”. Perhaps then, the following ideas approximate more closely to the role of the artist in contrast to that of the man of action:
Why do people write books in the first place? They want ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.’ This particular kind of torch carrying, however, is an incurable disease, and one of its symptoms is an attempt to improve the world. But men and women of the pen rarely succeed at this, because they are not men and women of action. Still, they feel — quite mistakenly — that all you have to do is show men of action the truth, and they will understand and know that the men of the pen are their allies. But the men of action, to act at all, have to ignore this manifold truth. To silence it with their own, singular, one-and-only begotten truth. Simplified truth. That is why ‘those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.’
Škrovecky’s style is ironical, at times jaded and cynical, at others warm, blue-eyed, and glowing. His is a book about memory and how it shapes us, its paradoxes, its power. The Engineer of Human Souls is genuinely touching and poignant because it is infused with human feeling. The tragic life and death of Danny’s wartime love, Nadia, who’s dark “burning” eyes seem to peer off the pages and into the reader’s soul, is the conscience of the book. Marie and Irena, his other adolescent loves, act as his feminine ideal; the women who enkindled his capacity to love and continue to shape who is he able to love. Danny yearns for his youth despite its privations and brutality. And his is a paradox that all too many of us face as we ache for yesteryear in spite of the unreliability of our memory, the fact that, what yearn for is a chimera.
However, where this moments of hope and humanity, there remains a nagging fear. Škrovecky fears indifference among us all. Among his students, tragicomic caricatures, who neither understand nor care about the injustice beyond the Iron Curtain. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the chapter on Conrad for Kurtz, as Škrovecky so adeptly puts it, is no singular phenomenon, but an all too human — and real — portrait of what we as individuals and societies are capable of:
‘I think that fits very well with Conrad’s description of genuine revolutionaries. Idealists. People who are drawn to violence by what is best in them…’ ‘Because there is no other way to exterminate the savage customs of the old society than by violence,’ cries Hakim…Now I am silent. For a long time… ‘Customs cannot be exterminated at all,’ I say quietly. They do not exist apart from people. Only people can be exterminated.’
Critically, the book also functions as a commentary on the art of the novel, offering what I believe is one of the most thought-provoking passages on how we ought to assess and comprehend great literature:
Faulkner once said that all novels are shipwrecks. Derelicts. and he was right. There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone without exception, has weaknesses and is trapped in his age and environment, and may even be ridiculous. But if he is an honourable man and if it is an honourable book, no one has the right to ridicule it or heap contempt upon it. Genuine lovers of literature will instead feel sorry that the author was not up to some things, and will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism. Such treasure is there, far more often than the snobs know, or are prepared to admit.
Where it comes to style, Škrovecky is marked by his erudition and polyphony while the parallels with Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk are marked. The book is intricate and littered with metatextual, historical, and philosophical discourse. Yet, erudite as it may be, it is also beautiful. It flows with verve and zeal. Škrovecky does not write a joyful book, but effervescently renders life’s joys. Similarly, he also has the capacity to portray life’s sorrows with great beauty, embracing a sort of tired acceptance:
Man will be free by not trying to be free. He will make a dialectical leap from Engels to Epictetus… Do not desire that everything happen as you wish, but desire that everything happen as it in fact does happen, and you will be free…
The Engineer of Human Souls is not light reading, but it is rich, rewarding, mirthful, and discerning; a searchlight turned on ourselves and the societies we create. As one critic put it, the text never loses sight of “what is concretely human beneath the abstractions of ideology and history”. It is, in my humble view, an underacknowledged and unmissable masterpiece.
