Garbage as Literature in Too

Garbage as Literature

In Too Loud a Solitude, the garbage collector and compactor Hanta works to retrieve culture in the form of books from the compactor. How is this action simultaneously about matter and knowledge?

In communist Czechoslovakia, printed matter was destroyed as garbage, merely because the material it contained within its covers was deemed to be subversive to the ruling regime. This form of cultural erasure and annihilation through the compacting of books into garbage may have been erased through the institution of democracy, but clearly the hurt this process did to the human heart remains. This hurt was inflicted not simply upon the hearts of those who created art, but the unwilling participants in the destruction of such literature.

Yet ironically, the garbage-collecting and trash-compacting hero Hanta, of the novel by Bohumil Hrabal entitled Too Loud a Solitude, who was given the civil service occupation to destroy such printed matter acts as both a preserver and destroyer of the words of others. Hanta complies with is bidden task of the destruction of matter, of words, and of the art of others. But during his labors he also engages in the practice of reading the books he was bound to destroy, thus essentially becoming a witting or unwitting preserver of culture, preserving the words of others within the fabric and texture of his own mind and mourning the loss of such printed matter to society as the books are compacted into trash. "For thirty-five years now, I've been in wastepaper," he writes, "and it's been my love story," not because he loves his work, but because he loves what he destroys, (2) The book's plot or dramatic propulsion is achieved by Hanta's fear of being discovered before he can retire and relax and retreat in peace, far from the worries the government poses to his mental stability, "into a high-stress situation, crossing off every year, every month, every day in the month until we both retire, my press and I. I've been bringing home books every evening in my briefcase, and my two-floor Holesovice apartment is all books." (16)

Thus, the self-proclaimed love story of the text is between a man and waste, the wasted words of other authors whose ideas have been destroyed, and the man's accumulation of the facts and information encompassed in such print sources. Hanta, as well as a mourner of lost words, writes of himself as a receptacle or jug, filled with words of others as if the words are matter, or water that he is storing for a later time, but is not given the venue to pour them out. The humble worker retrieves, stores, and digests culture within his won body as well as presses culture to death.

However, this action of storing or retrieval also suggests that even though culture is indeed a physical artifact in need of preservation, for it can be easily destroyed as trash, culture can also be quite durable. Without Hanta's physical actions of storage and reading the words on the pages would no longer exist as culture, merely exist as garbage. Thus, culture is not merely physical -- but because it has a physical existence, the man can take it home in private and ingest it much as he does his beer. The intervention of the human mind through the physical, verbal process and action of reading is an additional preserving mechanism that saves trash from the garbage compactor and the willed act of state-sanctioned destruction. "I don't really read," writes the man Hanta in protest to the idea that what he does has any value, in reading the compacted words -- rather he writes of reading as an act of sucking the words down, ingesting them like matter or food. (3) But clearly the words echo in his mind, and affect the man's inner, if not his outer life in a repressive land.

The material impact of his labors is also evidenced in the fact that Hanta clearly dislikes his work, even though it pays for his bread and beer. The fact that his labors are more often than not, fortified by beer, to steel him to the unpleasant task of destruction, underline Hanta's futile attempts to disengage himself from the physical, material act of cultural destruction through drug-inducted dissociation. (2) Hanta records, particularly during the first part of the book, in excruciating detail the masses and masses of words he has rendered for the scrap heap, and his solitary existence and life of labor that is compelled by a domineering government. He lives and works in a material world of cultural destruction, but a world so horrible, he does all he can to shut it out -- and one of his tools is to read, read, read, and ingest material deemed to be wrong.

The paradox is that as much as Hanta destroys, he can still appreciate that for "fifteen generations" his people have dwelled in a cultured land, noted for its refinement, yet the tyranny of all-encompassing ideology has reduced the high culture of words to a waste product. Only through small, human interventions such as reading, even a material and physical intervention done in private, does the culture of words survive and transcend its status as pure waste. Through the reading of one man, the words are no longer a mere physical excreta reduced to what can be compacted by the pushing of Hanta's fingers on red and green buttons -- they remain a culture, even if only a private culture of Hanta's imaginary life.

Hanta is continually, throughout the book, haunted by the specter of culture, like the eyes of the "infant Jesus." (42) Although Hanta professes he has lost his Christian as well as his communist faith, he clearly does retain a faith in the written word, despite his protestations. He would not read if he did not have some belief in the integrity of his people to love and live and preserve their language, even faced with "dying wood, hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes," of a culture that is continually being destroyed by his presser. In the hydraulic press of Hanta and within Hanta's reading itself, lives and thoughts are continually smothered yet resurrected. (8)