„VYSOKÉ“ A „NÍZKÉ“ U JOSEFA VÁCHALA (GOETHE, BACHTIN A SMÍCHOVÉ ASPEKTY VÁCHALOVSKÉHO KARNEVALU)
„HIGH“ AND „LOW“ IN THE WORK OF JOSEF VÁCHAL (GOETHE, BACHTIN AND LAUGHTER ASPECTS OF VÁCHAL’S CARNIVAL)

Summary/Abstract: With two quotations from J. W. Goethe – one is from his evaluation of a poem in prose Nature and the other from his popular book of interviews with J. P. Eckermann – we via detourget to the grotesque nature of Váchal’s view of the world. The detour through the carnival aspect of the world is called M. M. Bachtin and conception of folk laughter culture: “grotesque” canon versus “classic” canon. Also at Váchal we find besides nearly identical “naturphilosophy” also a grotesque nature of his crazy, inversive, carnival view of the world. A long time before modern “postmodern” and “deconstruction” Váchal’s clown-like view “up-side-down” did not acknowledge neither in the art nor in the science the hierarchy of the “high” and “low”. In Váchal’s works we can document ambivalent, half-serious, half-laughter parody view not only from his well-known works but also from not-known archival sources. For example from his private notes and private classification of reading (when except from Richard III Shakespeare failed by him, similarly to Czech lyrics Hálek, Heyduk or S. Čech who received regularly Ds at Váchal while books of folk reading, penny dreadful, horrors and books on Faust received As). Illustrative and scientifically not processed material for forming the carnival conception of the world at Josef Váchal is his magazine Hodnodle nadšená where to please both himself and his friends the then sixteen-year-old teenager supplied the whole copy by his verses, aphorisms, dramas and drawings. We can label the magazine, although affected by adolescent dilettantism, as a little grotesque “gesamtkunstwerk”. In our region it actually is a rare example of a typically Váchal-like artistic form of a view of the world that we can name pre-Dadaism.

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