|
Together with Jarmeritz (Jaromeřice), Otokar Březina’s place of residence, and the small town of Altreisch (Stará Říše), Josef Florian’s hometown, the Moravian village of Tassau (Tasov), where the suspended Catholic priest and poet Jakub Deml lived, formed the cornerstones of a Moravian cultural area from which outstanding works of Czech literature emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite Deml’s cultured and aesthetically appealing texts, Deml research is currently in a precarious situation: On the one hand, interpretations of single works are far and few between; on the other, a “Deml community”, the so-called “demlovci” or “Demlologs, has emerged over the years in the Czech Republic. For years, these admirers have been publishing notes on their personal meetings with the poet, their correspondence, or newer biographical and smaller circumstantial findings. Any non-Czech and non-native speaker daring to undertake serious work on Deml would appear to be almost undesirable. While Deml’s texts were read increasingly during the First Republic, such interest largely came to a standstill during the Protectorate and the first years of socialism. It was not until after 1968 that Deml became a cult figure amongst Moravian dissidents; young rebels conspired and began to publish either hand- or typewritten samizdat [= the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature] excerpts of his heterogeneous and manifold complete works. On account of the rather inadequate communication between Deml’s admirers and because almost every text exists in many handwritten variants, attempts to publish his Complete Works have been hitherto unsuccessful, even though eight concrete attempts have been made in the past. Regrettably, the planning for such efforts has often failed to take into account the insights of scholarly editing and established methodological procedures. This study devotes a separate chapter to distilling Jakub Deml’s origins, life and work from his texts and letters, since virtually all his texts were shaped by his life. Since real historical persons recur throughout his work, a comprehensive index of persons has been added at the end of this study. Moreover, Deml is virtually unknown in German-speaking Europe; neither a complete study nor any comprehensive journal articles have been published in German so far. The lack of previous work has made it necessary to pay due attention to Deml’s biography and to reflect upon the differences between distinct autobiographical groups of text in terms of style, genre, and theme. Subsequent chapters interpret both exemplary texts and examine the culture of Deml’s time and its influence on his life and work. The rhetoric of Deml’s texts is shaped by anthropomorphisms. Through the unusual use of tropes and stylistic devices, which transpose cosmic forces into everyday life, Deml surprises his readers by displaying a persuasive, independent, and original poetic force. Here, poetry is meant to be nothing other than itself; language focuses on itself and on its inwardness. Unlike the avant-garde, Deml’s work does not focus on borderlines at points of rupture or montage. He is fascinated by a linguistic world which transcends boundaries to bring down to earth an ineffable cosmic numinousness. He rejects any one-dimensional reification aimed at calculated, modern rationality. Rather, his world is replete with sensuous magic. To my mind, such modernity closely approximates what is usually called “Late Modernity”, except that “Late Modernity” focuses exclusively on the here and now and ends there, understanding such limits in positive terms, whereas Deml’s work also reveals elements of decadence, neo-romanticism, neo-baroque (as in a revival of baroque traditions), symbolism, and the avant-garde. Notwithstanding the fact that many of Deml’s texts deconstruct myths and thus assume at least partly a didactic function, he strictly rejected such functionalisation of literature. Deml invented a new genre for himself, the Šlépeje [footprints], where he furnished a collage-like paste-up by piecing together invoices, newspaper cuttings about his books, letters, and placard texts of official announcements. These texts, however, are only true to life at first sight. Reading them for mimetic references to the lifeworld remains too attached to their surface. Besides the footprint genre, Deml’s work also comprises a range of bleak texts and stories written in the style of the gothic novel. A streak of horror runs through almost all of these pieces; while they depict enclosed spaces and evoke oppressive feelings, they also imply – albeit ambivalently and by way of counterbalance – the sense of security afforded by closed-in spaces. Jakub Deml embraces visions of femininity. His contemporary readers must have found it fairly difficult to retrace the complex line of occidental iconography evident in his imagery for this theme, particularly since he associates this tradition with the conceptual world and symbolism of other religions. The reader encounters a surprisingly individual view, indeed with a revolutionary enlargement of the tradition of images which transcends the ecclesiastical framework. His unconventional and astounding combinations of distinct thematic areas and groupings are equally difficult. These metaphors and metonymies therefore call for detailed and painstaking analysis. In rhetorical terms, many of these texts are prayer-like hymns addressed to the Virgin Mary. Today, most Czechs know Deml as the author of his most popular book Moji přátelé [My Friends], that is, almost only as a master of the nature idyll. Moji přátelé is often mistaken for a sentimental and idyllic book of flowers. The reading audience has created its own Deml; in doing so, they have suppressed all his dark, morbid, and German-language texts. To this day, the heterogeneity of his texts drives a fundamental wedge in the “Demlovci”, who adore him and cannot stop reading him, and an equally large faction of Deml haters who reproach him for his egocentrism, his “darkness”, and his anti-semitism. Such a view often overlooks Deml’s particular development, at the end of which his diary-like books faded into the background and he committed himself entirely to writing prose poems. Deml increasingly left behind the naturalism of comparing distinct flower elements and instead transported the reader to fantastic, dreamlike, allegorical image worlds with the help of exactly those elements. The “presentistic character” of these worlds is largely non-narrative and atemporal. Order the book! Böhlau-Verlag: |
