Róbert Gál is a Prague-based Slovakian writer. Known for his aphorisms and innovative narrative forms, his work is playful, philosophical, and interrogates the limits of language and communication. In this essay, Seth Rogoff examines the English translations of his work.
What to make of an author who distrusts language, who questions the necessity or the ability to communicate? These might be the central questions one faces when approaching the works of the writer Róbert Gál. Two recent translations from Slovak, Agnomia (Dalkey Archive, 2018) and Naked Thoughts (Black Sun Lit, 2019), bring the total number of Gál’s books available to English readers to four. Naked Thoughts is a continuation of the aphoristic form Gál demonstrates in his first two English editions, Signs and Symptoms (Twisted Spoon, 2003) and On Wing (Dalkey Archive, 2015). Agnomia is a departure among these titles—it consists of a 79-page prose fragment, narrated in one unbroken paragraph. The slimness of these four volumes only emphasizes their literary and philosophical weight. Gál’s project is an ambitious one. He builds his literary oeuvre on a fundamentally unstable foundation: a language that is continuously breaking down in varying ways. This breakdown puts pressure on a whole host of social pillars, like truth, reason, progress, purpose, and meaning. On the one hand, such an assault on the stitches that hold society together leads, in Gál’s work, to isolation and desperation, eventually pushing toward death—and the motif or theme of death hangs low over these works. At the same time, for Gál the failure of language to hold the social fabric together opens up something new at its frayed end, new possibilities for a kind of truth that lies below or alongside “Truth,” for an understanding that is overshadowed by reason, and for an even deeper type of communication that is prevented by quotidian language games.
At the beginning of On Wing, Gál provides two different anecdotes that both gesture toward the limits of language and the difficulty of communication. In one, Gál cautions a younger cousin against attempting to extrapolate lessons from his writing. Gál’s “notes,” the narrator tells the cousin (and us), are “meant for myself alone.” The section continues, “I have in the meantime come to regard it as a waste of time trying to explain anything to anyone . . . ” This echoes an aphorism from the opening of Signs and Symptoms: “The most common way of overcoming a misunderstanding is by another misunderstanding.” In a vignette that follows the cautioning of his cousin in On Wing, Gál tells of a friend who meets a woman for a blind date in a small Czech village. The woman is twenty-one years old and already divorced. The friend asks her why she got divorced, but the woman doesn’t know how to answer the question. The result is a communicative impasse, which leads to the point when the friend and the woman rush to “their bus stops and never saw each other again.”
In Signs and Symptoms, Gál relates the difficulties of communication to the breakdown of affinity or communion between speaking subjects. He writes, “The primary sign of incommunicability is incommunion, occurring always as a direct consequence of: the false reproduction of identity (and thus becoming diversity).” Is Gál right—does identity block understanding? On the everyday level, it would seem like reproduced identity constitutes the very basis of most human relationships. On the other hand, it could be that this everyday communion is not real communion after all, at least in the sense of containing authenticity. Gál’s work opens up this important question.
While proposing the limits of language and communication, Gál doesn’t hesitate to subject language to a series of provocative experiments. These experiments come in many forms in the three books of aphorisms. In Signs and Symptoms, the task seems to be one of re-contextualization. Here, Gál redefines words in unorthodox and revealing ways. In a discussion of “time,” for example, Gál disconnects the word from its usual temporal framework and instead writes, “Time is a permanent argument, the core of which is unknown. One part of its movement inclines toward affirming, the other toward repudiating. Nonetheless, this unknown seems to be at times repudiated by the haste of expectation.” Notions of time contain temporal links, causal chains, and dialectical movement—in short, logic. At the same time, one moment replaces or “repudiates” the next, in a sense erasing the previous one. Time, then, contains both logic and erasure—an interesting definition. A simpler example of Gál’s strategy of re-contextualization (and his humor) is the following: “Pondering any actual difference between a Platonic Academy . . . and a nuthouse.”
On Wing introduces another of Gál’s communicative experiments: the building of neologisms through combinations of prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Here is a small sampling of Gál’s invented vocabulary: “overreduction,” “antiretouching,” “uninfinity,” “eruptionality,” “decommunication,” “unacheivements,” and “deshadowing.” These constructions work to shift a common concept outside of its typical zone of meaning, thereby opening up space for contemplation. The reader (or listener) of these words must labor to come to terms with them—a demanding but highly rewarding work.
Gál’s writing is peripatetic in multiple senses. The setting (or placing) of his work jumps from city to city—primarily between Prague, New York, Berlin, and Jerusalem. This geographic mixture could be a metaphor for the writing itself. The books move from one style to the next—from prose vignette to aphorism to poetry to wordplay—at a rapid pace. The thematic shifts are also dizzying. This is especially true of On Wing.
In the most recent work, Naked Thoughts, however, Gál presents a more cohesive collection of aphorisms. Here, Gál seems to have moved away, at least in part, from more extreme notions of alienation and solitude—from incommunion. To be sure, communicative difficulties remain, and language continues to be a problematic tool for making connections (“There is nothing so inverisimilitudinous as a verity”), but the overarching impulse of the book is toward the risk of communication. It is in this risk, in a sense, that life exists. The following lines speak to this: “Only things actually said can be passed over in silence”; “Standing between the solitude of an author and the solitude of readers is the bridge of literature”; and, “Sequestered thoughts have no existence.” The narrative voice of Naked Thoughts seems less desperate than that of On Wing and Signs and Symptoms. If Signs and Symptoms was written, as its narrator says, from the “bottom,” it could be said that Naked Thoughts is written from a peak (or at least a slight elevation). Here, Gál’s earlier decadent melancholy gives way to a more Nietzschean confidence. The results are often profound and glorious, for example: “To give life meaning means to make something of it deliberately—and thereby go against it”; “A failure is a first draft. And a first draft needs no motives”; “The defenselessness of a raindrop”; “A miracle sought after is not a miracle. A life sought after is not a life”; “Once walls turn into mirrors, they come apart”; and, “To cast swine before pearls,” my personal favorite!
Agnomia moves away from Gál’s aphoristic structure, even if its second half contains a healthy amount of aphoristic writing. The book consists of a long, unbroken paragraph that shifts locations and times, moving between mundane scenes and philosophical propositions. Agnomia opens with Róbert Gál, the narrator, remembering a scene from his days as a young man in New York City. This beginning gestures toward the promise of storytelling, but the story has, in a sense, no place to go. It falls apart, fractures, hesitates, and interrupts itself. Gál, as narrator, presents the tension between his desire for a story and his inability, or resistance, to conjuring a coherent narrative: “For the author wants to tell his tale, but doesn’t know where to begin, and he doesn’t even know if there is a tale to be told at all.” The narrator is right. There is no “tale to be told” in Agnomia. Early in the book, Gál describes being at a party in Brno. A person asks him what he does. Gál replies, “‘I’m looking for a story.’” Agnomia contains building blocks of narrative storytelling. It has a narrator, Róbert Gál. It has some sparsely developed characters—L., D., Jan, Ben. It has a present—the author at work. These components, however, remain only pieces of a possible story, and one way of thinking about Agnomia is that the narrator is searching for a story that never coheres. The task of the artist, Gál implies, is not the story (and not, by extension, a recreation of reality) but the (impossible or infinite or inherently partial) attempt. Gál tells us, “As in music, here, too, it’s not about ideas, it’s about the permanent tension arising from the need to think . . . ” This “tension” draws disparate elements together: fragments of memory, dreams, sensual experiences, philosophical inquiries, and reactions to creative influences—most notably the musician John Zorn and the writers Thomas Bernhard and Georges Bataille. Through such an interweaving of elements, a layered composition emerges that tells a fundamentally different kind of story, “story” in the sense of portraying (the life, the complexities of, the history of, the neuroses of) an individual case of artistic expression.
The appearance of two new English translations of works by Róbert Gál is cause for celebration. We have intrepid, talented translators to thank for this. Madelaine Hron translated Signs and Symptoms. Mark Kanak translated On Wing. Both Agnomia and Naked Thoughts were translated by David Short. In this age of ease and distraction (leading to catastrophe), amid our mind-numbing culture of social media and the endless stream of useless “information,” Gál labors to guide our attention to core questions and prompts us to think deeply.
Seth Rogoff is the author of the novels First, the Raven: A Preface (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2017) and Thin Rising Vapors (SMP, 2018). He is a professor of academic studies at Maine College of Art and a faculty member in the history department at the University of Southern Maine. He lives in Prague. His website can be found here.
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