THE TENUITY BETWEEN PROGRESSION AND REGRESSION IN BOHUMIL HRABAL’S TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE

Haňt’a, the narrator of Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s novella, Too Loud a Solitude (1976), often reflects on the duality of permanence and intangibility of ideas. This paper attempts to explore how the author resolves the tension between this duality through an understanding of the intermittency between progression and regression. First published in 1976 and translated in English by Michael Henry Heim, the short novel relates the story of an eclectic and dim-witted old man, Haňt’a, who works as a paper crusher in Prague. Haňt’a is portrayed as a recluse having an encyclopedic range of knowledge. He collects a huge number of rare and banned books by rescuing them from the compacting machine and thus goes against the book-censoring regime in his own unique way. To comprehend the nature of the resolution, progress and regress are seen in juxtaposition with the opposition between ‘I’ and ‘other’ as explicated by Julia Kristeva in her essay on abjection and with the opposition between order and disorder as discussed by Walter Benjamin in his work Illuminations.