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A P R I N C E L O N G I N G F O R T H E S TA R S

by Josef Zumr

One needs no lengthy introduction to Ladislav Klíma after hav-ing read “My Autobiography.” Given his acute ability to examinehimself objectively, it would be difficult to find words that weremore authentic than his own. Therefore, I will add here only afew brief comments to provide some context and to point out afew things that Klíma neglects to mention.

Ladislav Klíma was in every way an exceptional individual. Hemade a deliberate effort to set himself apart from the social con-ventions of his time, both in his opinions and his lifestyle, andthat was how he was perceived by his contemporaries. While theyunderstood his exceptional character, they were not prepared toaccept his thinking. When he died in 1928 of tuberculosis —the poor man’s disease — at the age of forty-nine, Karel âapek,liberal and democrat, eulogized: “Next to Klíma, Diogenes in hisbarrel was a homeowner.” Indeed, for a third of his life Klíma

lived in hotel rooms on the outskirts of Prague where he did notpossess even a table. He wrote his essays while lying on the floor.He spurned the amenities of “civilization” on philosophicalgrounds, not because he was fond of living a bohemian life. Asthe literary critic Julius Fuãík noted: “[Klíma’s] death marks thepassing of the most outstanding, perhaps we should say the onlyCzech philosopher . . . In a country where pedantic moralists aredeclared philosophers and chattering journalists poets, he was apure metaphysical poet whose consciousness embraced the entireworld and whose magical words penetrated the depths of the inef-fable. In a society where the single idea of a birdbrain suffices tolaunch a shameless career, he stood absolutely on his indepen-dence . . .”

Klíma, in fact, had no desire whatsoever for a career as eitheran academic philosopher or established writer. A large part of hiswork, that which he did not destroy, remained in manuscript.So it was that The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, his first workof fiction, was not published until just a few weeks after his death.Consequently, he did not live to see the scandal it caused. Thepublisher had included it in a limited edition of important Czechauthors, and a number of schoolmarms who subscribed to theseries cancelled in outrage because, as they put it, they did notpurchase pornography merely because it had a pretty cover.

It was not until the latter half of the 1920s that Klíma returnedto his “romanetto,” which is what he called his narrative of PrinceSternenhoch, and gave it its final form. The first version was writ-ten between 1906 and 1909, and it was one of thirty novels anda slew of novellas that he wrote during that time. This was a period

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of creative excess, when after the publication of his first work ofphilosophy in 1904, The World as Consciousness and Nothing, hedevoted himself entirely to writing fiction, simply for the pleasureof it and as a break from the mental strain of contemplating deepmetaphysical problems.

The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, which Klíma claimed tohave “carefully worked out in detail,” provides us with valuableinsight into his skill as a writer of fiction. Of course the jadedreader of today will hardly be shocked by those scenes that led theschoolmarms to cancel their subscriptions. Compared to themodern horror film, Klíma’s horror will hardly disturb our sleep,though episodes in the book rank with those found in Hitchcockand could certainly have served as a model for his films. Indeeda film version was made in 1990 by Jan Nûmec, entitled V Ïárukrálovské lásky [In the Flames of Royal Love]. Regardless, therestill remains the question of how to categorize the novel.

On first sight it would seem to be a satirical work pokingfun at Prussian militarism and the degenerate Junker class, forwhich Klíma harbored deep contempt. This aspect of the book iscertainly in evidence, yet it also bears a striking resemblance tothe “gothic” or horror novel. Klíma deliberately tries to evokepowerful emotions and feelings of terror in the reader. Suddenreversals are attended by a mix of motifs both fantastical andrational, and the reader’s attention is cleverly engaged by myste-rious phenomena. One could believe, if not establish, that Klímawas influenced by Walpole, Lewis, Scott, Hoffmann, and Poeand directly inspired by Lautréamont, in whose wake he foundhimself in close proximity to the Surrealists. This is suggested by

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another conspicuous feature of the work: black humor. It is a dras-tic, sardonic, grotesque humor, the harshness of which is leavenedby subtle irony and self-irony. Klíma’s place in literary historyshould properly be located, then, amid all the related currents thatflowed into Modernism and that through Surrealism grew intoabsurdist literature.

Yet these analogies relate to the external aspects of Klíma’swork. The author himself gives us a deeper understanding of hisintent and the true meaning of all the novel’s blackness: “Thefinale of everything isn’t ‘nothing’ but something more horrible,more incomprehensible, shapeless, monstrous, black — and acelestial refulgence. — I invoke the heart of the world as ‘BlackRadiance,’ ‘Black Illusion.’” From this we may conclude that heconceived the novel primarily as philosophical, that most impor-tant were the ideas he wished to convey.

Klíma greatly enjoyed writing fiction, and he devised severalliterary techniques that, thanks to other authors, later becamepart of the collective heritage of twentieth-century prose. Behindall these experiments, however, stood his philosophical thinking,skillfully encoded under a fictional veneer. He does not disownhis philosophy, rather, he is of one mind with the dictum of hisgreat paragon, Nietzsche: “I write my works with my entire bodyand life.”

The reader unfamiliar with Klíma’s philosophy likely will notsuspect that his game of constantly shifting dream and reality,fantasy and reality, illusion and lucidity is not just whim or lit-erary experiment, but the expression of his metaphysical thinking.His is a vision of extreme subjectivism: the world is the creation

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of the individual’s imagination, his plaything; in relation to theworld man is a god, is God, directing everything; his will is thehighest law, he himself is absolute will. This produces a dialecticof paradoxes. Everything can change into its opposite: truth intolies, lies into truth, logic into illogic; no fixed border existsbetween dream and reality, life and death. The reader is alwaysleft in doubt as to whether Helmut is dreaming or is awake, per-ceiving reality or suffering from hallucinations, and whether Helgais dead or alive. “At one moment lunacy can seem like reason, atanother, reason seems like lunacy,” Klíma writes. It is only slightlyinconsistent and an obvious concession to literary convention thatat the close of the novel the protagonist — who is in essence anironical and parodic variant of Klíma’s god-man longing for thestars — is revealed to have indeed gone mad. All the tempestu-ous events and horrifying visions have only been the figment ofhis diseased mind. In Klíma’s other work the endings are usuallyleft open, a metaphysical question mark hanging over them — asit did over his life’s thought.

Even with all its idiosyncrasies and conceptual difficulty, Klíma’swork has gained several generations of appreciative readers inhis native country. Despite the fact that publishing his books wasprohibited by dictatorial regimes for decades, the rare copy wouldcirculate among readers until it was completely in tatters, andmore than one self-sacrificing person took the time to transcribehis work, and in multiple, typewritten copies. His non-conformistattitude, his absurdist vision of the world, and, last but not least,his sense of humor helped people overcome the adversity theyfaced during those trying times. Numerous artists of all stripes —

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novelists, poets, painters, dramatists and musicians — have foundin his work a constant source of inspiration, and several philoso-phers have taken up his thought. Since the 1960s, Klíma’s workhas also attracted a foreign audience, and The Sufferings of PrinceSternenhoch has been published in many European languages.

• • •

“Philosophy is the poetry of the intellect,” Klíma wrote. Hisphilosophy is certainly not an exact science and it cannot be eval-uated as such. His thought has a poetic dimension as well as alyrical charm. But above all there is his wisdom of life. His para-doxes cast light into the very depths of the soul. “It is necessaryto love — to love everything; even that which is most revolting.Love is the cruelest, most difficult thing of all. Herein, however,lies the Mystery: that which is most revolting is more likely tomelt into love than that which is only half revolting — —”

“Beauty is love kissing horror.”

Prague, June 2000

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