Richard Weiner - Blending metaphysical questions with farcical humor, bizarre twists, and acute psychology, The Game for Real is a riveting exploration of who we are — and why we can’t be so sure we know

Richard Weiner, The Game for Real, Trans. by Benjamin Paloff,  Two Lines Press, 2015.         excerpt




Compared to Kafka and a member of the Surrealists, Richard Weiner is one of European literature’s best-kept secrets. The Game for Real marks the long overdue arrival of his dreamlike, anxiety-ridden fiction into English.
The book opens with The Game of Quartering, where an unnamed hero discovers his double. Surely, he reasons, if he has a double, then his double must also have a double too, and so on . . . What follows is a grotesquely hilarious, snowballing spree through Paris, where real-life landmarks disintegrate into theaters, puppet shows, and, ultimately, a funeral.
Following this, The Game for the Honor of Payback neatly inverts things: instead of a branching, expanding adventure, a man known as “Shame” embarks on a quest that collapses inward. Slapped by someone he despises, he launches a doomed crusade to return the insult. As the stakes grow ever higher, it seems that Shame will stop at nothing — even if he discovers he’s chasing his own tail.
Blending metaphysical questions with farcical humor, bizarre twists, and acute psychology, The Game for Real is a riveting exploration of who we are — and why we can’t be so sure we know.   
                      

“Richard Weiner is considered to be one of the most important Czech writers of the 20th century.” — Alfred Thomas

Jindřich Chalupecký, among Richard Weiner’s earliest and most enthusiastic readers, entitled one of his later studies of the Czech Modernist simply Nesrozumitelný Weiner: “incomprehensible Weiner.” The title is more than a little ironic. Better than most, Chalupecký knew that Weiner could be understood, as well as that people would turn to critics and theorists like himself for help along the way. Still, there is an honesty in this description that strikes me as refreshing, given that the dominant rhetoric of Anglo-American scholarship acknowledges the kernel of an author’s inscrutability, if at all, only after waves of explanation, whereas Chalupecký begins with inscrutability and works his way toward insight. Imagine a world where academic monographs bore titles like What Is Up with That?: The Novels of X, or I Have No Idea: The Poetry of Y, or simply WTF?! At the very least, it would strike a good blow against public anti-intellectualism, since anyone who claims not to be a bit bewildered by writers like Richard Weiner is inherently untrustworthy. My desire to have a better grasp of Weiner is the second reason I am motivated to translate him; I’ll get to the main reason in a moment. Weiner has been a focus of my scholarly work for about a decade, during which time I have frequently been required to translate discrete passages, a sort of groundwork for the interpretive process. But that’s not the same as embracing an entire book, let alone one as knotty as The Game for Real. Besides the obvious (and admittedly daunting) difference of scale, there’s the fact that one cannot hope to understand the functions of an organ without first mapping out its connections and relations to all the other organs. Translation provides a gross anatomy of the text.It also proceeds through a purely poetic activity, and this, for me, is the principal attraction of translation in general, and of translating Weiner in particular. When I translate, many of the compositional dilemmas that might vex me in another area of my writing life just don’t apply. Characterization, action, image, structure—all of these decisions have already been made before I even open the book. All I have to do is get the right words in the right order. And while Weiner makes even this task as difficult as it can be, its attendant pleasures grow in direct proportion with its challenges and frustrations. I like a good story as much as the next fella. Weiner does, too. The Game for Real gives us thematically intertwined detective stories whose basic setup calls to mind The Big Clock, Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 noir masterpiece about a man racing against time to find a stranger who happens to be himself. But what really keeps me turning the pages is rich language, language like Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream: dense as it is, each spoonful only makes me want the next. That these calories, delectable to the point of being dangerous, are not empty—that Weiner has given me so much to chew that, ten years on, I’m still chewing—makes the leap from reading Weiner to writing him all the more natural. - Benjamin Paloff


When he went out the next morning and headed for the square, he knew, even before he looked up, that he was no longer there: he had been replaced by his legend. A legend without beginning or end, a narrative as yet illegible, but therefore almost more credible than him, than the banal mediocrity of his impoverished existence.
Written between November 1929 and February 1931, The Game for Real (Hra Doopravdy in its original Czech) is a marvelously strange and inventive novel whose narrator is suspicious that life might be nothing more than the absurd theater of his own imagination. Deeply anxious about language and certain that he is guilty of something, the book’s narrator is nameless – “and rightly so, since his name is Shame.”
The Czech writer Richard Weiner (1884-1937) lived in Paris for a few years before World War I, then served in the Czech military before returning to Paris again in 1919. During this second stay, he joined with a small group of French writers that included Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, René Daumal, and Roger Vailland who called themselves Le Grand Jeu (The Big Game). Between 1928 and 1932, while Weiner worked on The Game for Real (which sounds suspiciously like an homage to the group), Le Grand Jeu published several issues of a magazine titled, appropriately, Le Grand Jeu. The Game for Real apparently remained unpublished until 1998, and, rather remarkably, this book, which will be issued by Two Lines Press in a few weeks, is the first of Weiner’s books to be translated into English. Martin Tharp, of Prague’s Charles University, says of Weiner: “he really is a kind of European mind, that brings in the experience of trench warfare in Serbia, of cafés of a provincial capital of the Hapsburg Empire and a close connection with the Parisian avant-garde, as well as just the fact that his stories are just so enjoyable to read.”
In “The Game of Quartering” – the first section of The Game for Real – the narrator boards an empty metro, only to have the train’s next passenger sit directly across, facing him. “I don’t know what prayer is,” he thinks. “But, having seen him, I was quick to compose one.” When the narrator disembarks at his station, the man follows him. By the time the narrator has reached his apartment, a woman has joined the stranger. “They were from the same team – not like spouses, not like lovers,  not like friends, not like acquaintances, not like castaways on a raft, but they went with each other.” Fast forward a few dozen pages and the narrator abandons his apartment and the two strangers to visit his two friends, Fuld and Mutig (see the link to an excerpt from the book below).
Here they were as if on stage, each with his assignment and in his appointed place. They were acting. A new act had begun with my entrance, they had known about it from their past rehearsals. I understood right away that I, too, was acting, and I settled into it quickly. As if at the instruction of an invisible director I headed without hesitation for the far side of the table.
Fuld, Mutig, a woman named Giggles, an unnamed “blackamoor,” and the narrator proceed to act out a play that continually morphs like scenes within a dream. The Game for Real is littered with references to the theater, to acting and the stage. Objects often strike the narrator as mere “props.” It is even possible, he thinks, that he is playing all of the roles himself.
It was in this room. In this room where today, in the summer morning, he is allowed to play whatever he wants (God only knows whether he’ll abuse it): the innocent accused; the avenger of the righteous and the weak; the public prosecutor; the good judge; the magnanimous man who has taken on the worst bit; the desperado who soldiers hopelessly on; the downtrodden man who smiles for no reason but to give heart to those nearby, though they are less unfortunate than he; the lamb who has assumed others’ guilt upon himself; the angel who begged for his own banishment…He’s allowed, but by whose will, by whose power?
The longer second section, called “The Game for the Honor of Payback,” revolves around the accusation that the narrator has stolen a bracelet. The narrator awakes from a dream in which he has been swimming through a sewer to find himself staring at the cheap wallpaper of his room, which depicts a bird-of-paradise and tropical plants.  He occasionally studies himself in the mirror and seems to interact with other people that come and go in his room, although it is not clear if these events are anything more than figments of his imagination. “They were alone,” he thinks,  before correcting himself, “that is, he was alone.” Is this even the same narrator as the first section? We don’t know for sure. Eliminating ambiguity is of no concern to Weiner. The narration is, in fact, so deeply interiorized that the exterior world (if there really is one) cannot be distinguished from the narrator’s imagination. “He caught on that he was dreaming, or that he was in regions bordering on dream.”
In spite of his own fluency with language, Weiner sees that language is yet another trap for the unwary. “Between the thought and its correlate a broad land stretches, overgrown with seductive realities.” The narrator “sees himself as a conjuror spinning an endless paper ribbon with signs of Morse code from his maw.” To some extent, Weiner’s narrator welcomes the rich imaginative opportunities that open up when the boundary between the interior world of dreams and the exterior “real” world is shattered. “He was drowning in incongruities, he knew it, but nothing in him opposed them.” Like so many Surrealists, Weiner was determined to see if the dismemberment of the perceived structures of ordinary “reality” might lead to a higher and richer – or at least more interesting – level of consciousness. But the new reality that Weiner finds is in equal parts dazzling and guilt-ridden, life-giving and deadly. Crossing Paris in a taxi, his narrator suddenly realizes that his taxi driver is Charon, carrying his fare across the Lethe. When it comes to the narrator’s lingering sense of shame, the absence of a clear boundary leads directly to paranoia. He is positive that other people, even complete strangers, see right through to his shameful core, and thus avoid and detest him, even though it is just as likely that he might be projecting his own thoughts upon everyone he encounters. To my mind, Weiner’s obsession with guilt and shame, contempt and defiance, power and cruelty, aligns him as much with Kafka as with his coterie of French Surrealists. - sebald.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/a-narrative-as-yet-illegible-the-games-of-richard-weiner/

Richard Weiner: a European mind by David Vaughan  

In this edition of Czech Books we look at the work of Richard Weiner, a Czech writer of the first half of the twentieth century, who was immensely influential on his own and later generations of writers and yet today is little read and little known outside the Czech Republic. Even within the country, among the writers of the period of the First Republic, he is far from being a household name. This neglect is very much undeserved, and one person who has been trying to draw attention to Richard Weiner and his legacy is the translator and literary scholar, Martin Tharp.

                       

Martin Tharp
What made you interested in this almost forgotten Czech writer?
“I would first say that he is not almost forgotten, but he is definitely a kind of minority taste. He was officially neglected during the years of “normalization”; not that they disapproved of him for anything that he wrote. He was not in any way a programmatic anti-communist, or even have much of a definite political position most of the time. However, they did disapprove of him simply for being Jewish, cosmopolitan and modernist.”
And that was enough to be going against the grain of socialist realism of virtually the whole period of the post-war.
“That’s true. At the same time I think it is not so much even a question of communist ideology, but he went so much against even a kind of Czech national self-conception. For one thing, he was very closely tied to artistic life within Paris, where he lived as the Lidové noviny correspondent throughout the 1920s up until the late 1930s.”
I think this is an important point to make. He was a Czech writer, but he spent most of his active life and career outside the country.

Richard Weiner
“That’s true… mostly in Paris and what is also interesting is that at the time when Czech literature and art looked towards Paris for their chief inspiration, he was actually there, and he knew people. Every time that a new book by Proust would come out, he would review it in Lidové noviny for that very week, even before it was translated. At the same time though, he was writing his own literary work, which is what his reputation is built on – even though his journalism makes such wonderful reading that you don’t want to pick up one of today’s newspapers!”
Here is a short extract from one of his newspaper articles:
In a single life the average person reads many a stupid book, sees countless bad theatre productions and hears endless hours of poor music, and so often trembles in convulsions before all sorts of colour imprints. Likewise he sees films that are foolish, falsely comic, falsely tragic. Indeed, so many types of tastelessness saturate our lives, let this be taken as fully valid coinage. If, though, one meets with the most stupid of stupidities that knows whereof it is and nonetheless hopes to amuse one, the reaction is to rise up in indignation against such a suggestion. For there is for me nothing more unbearable than when a fool has the daring to take me for a greater one. As far back as my memory can reach, I cannot remember having met with a greater idiocy than now exists in the cinema. That it precisely transpired in cinematography pains me, since up to now I have held it in esteem.
(trans.: Martin Tharp)
So we can see that he was an outspoken critic…

René Daumal, Roger Vailland, Roger Gilbert Lecomte, Robert Minet“
Very definitely. But at the same time as this, his own writing, both in prose and in poetry, is very different. He started out as a poet, and I should add that, though he was from a Jewish family, much like that of Kafka, he was not from Prague, but from the provincial town of Písek in South Bohemia, an area where almost exclusively Czech was spoken – even though he was by-and-large bilingual in German. Secondly, when he started off as a poet before World War I, most of his poetry was still fairly lyrical and romantic, celebrating the strength of nature. That all lasted up until he was mobilized, first in 1913 to Bosnia - then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - and then again, after the attack in Sarajevo he was sent back to the front. He suffered a nervous breakdown, was invalided out of service, and during that time he wrote what I would consider to be his first truly mature work. It is a series of stories from his experience of the war, the horror of modern trench warfare.
“And after that, also in the immediate post-war years, he completed his second volume of short stories, called “Škleb” (The Grimace), which is in my view probably one of the finest things he wrote. Then he stopped. He stopped his creative work altogether, went to Paris, wrote his pieces for Lidové noviny, and did not seem to want to do anything more than that.”

Josef Sima
This changed when Weiner introduced his friend, the Czech painter Josef Sima, to some of his French artist and writer acquaintances, most importantly René Daumal and Roger-Gilbert Lecomte, who were interested in the ideas of the surrealists, but at the same time had doubts about the Marxist and anti-religious tone of André Breton’s surrealism. Unlike Breton they felt that they could reach other poetic realms not just through the dream but even through mysticism or religious ecstasy. This encounter led to the emergence of a group called Le Grand Jeu (The Big Game). From the start Weiner played an important role in the group, in the process falling in love with the much younger Lecomte. The encounter was to influence his literary career.

'Le Grand Jeu'
“He returned to writing poetry and eventually to his last volume of prose. But the one thing to remember is that after his two final prose volumes, he increasingly suffered from stomach trouble, which turned out to be cancer of the stomach. In 1936 he left Paris, returned to Prague, moved in with his sister and within a year he was dead, almost as if he knew what was coming.”
As someone of Jewish origin, he would have been unlike to have survived the Holocaust.
“I have chosen an extract from one of his stories called ‘The Voice in the Telephone’, from the volume, ‘The Grimace’. I should begin by explaining the plot of it. It is the story of a man who refers to himself as a hermit of the metropolis, a solitary confirmed bachelor. One day, sitting in his usual chair in the café, he is called to the telephone. A mysterious female voice on the telephone says to him, ‘I’m in love with you, but I can’t reveal who I am.’ In fact, throughout the story, he never finds out who this person is. This extract is from the middle of the story:"
Fourteen days had passed since that encounter in the café, and I had seen no persons unknown to me. Today, however, the voice again spoke into the telephone, and into that instrument for which we had made our agreement – so laugh, if you so wish. In any event, you may think whatever thought you find preferable.
“What is it that you demand? That I had promised, while making my invitation, that I would come as well? If I had wished to reveal myself, would I have chosen so convoluted a path? And if I love you, of which you have no doubt, fearing all the while to appear before you, would I have wished upon you such an awkward situation? I never have seen that woman whom you describe.”
“Such a turn of phrase is one we occasionally use if we speak of ourselves. But this joke has gone a bit stale. I know that the unknown woman was you.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“More than believe: know!”
“Then all that I can now do is to disappear forever. For you have betrayed me.”
“I betrayed you?!”
“Yes, for you do not believe the only thing that is reality: the word.”
“You promised me a sign. Now give it!”
“I have given you countless signs for you to believe that I am who I am.”
“I never noticed a one of them, and asked you in vain for a sign that was apparent. In addition, I have no doubts that you are who you are.”
After a pause, she spoke:
“There is no time for jesting. Was it not I who started this fermentation in your mind? Was not I the cause of it, when upon that one day you noticed how long the path may be towards others, yet for all that a path of which you had never known before? Was I not the cause of it, when you began to notice with much closer attention things diminutive and subordinate? Who else but I whipped up within you the desire, and the question of whether you are indeed attractive to women? And why, then, do you persist along that course that leads nowhere, unless it is to death.”
(trans.: Martin Tharp)
There is a very distinct similarity to Kafka in this writing.

Richard Weiner
“I would say very definitely that it is similar to Kafka, but at the same time, you could also find so many other references in this, because he bore so much of the world of Habsburg Vienna within himself, and at the same time was able to touch upon equally the world of French modernism, of the great importance of the dream and the unconscious, and the unknowable. The way that he was able in his life to bring these two elements together really does mark him out as a kind of genius of the twentieth century. But at the same time, he really is, because of it, outside of even the main currents of Czech modernism, which were -most of them – born around 1900 and too young to be called up for military service. They simply saw the new world, the post-war order, as a kind of ecstatic liberation, which Weiner never did. He never could have. And of course for that reason their ecstatic liberation included an enchantment with Marxism and later, in the case of many of them, they turned into complete cultural functionaries after the communist coup of 1948, a form of mental coarseness which Weiner never had. This made him perhaps more influential for dissident literary life in the 70s and 80s. He was to a certain extent rediscovered during that time as someone who did not succumb to these siren-songs of modernity.”
And he has never been translated into English.
“That is something I have always found strange – that no one has yet taken him up, possibly because his own command of Czech is very unusual. He had a great love for archaic forms of grammar, even deliberate archaisms of style that at the time when he wrote must have sounded more than a bit strange or backwards.”
You have taken up the challenge of translating some of his work.
“I have done so, I think, because he really is a kind of European mind, that brings in the experience of trench warfare in Serbia, of cafés of a provincial capital of the Habsburg Empire and a close connection with the Parisian avant-garde, as well as just the fact that his stories are just so enjoyable to read at the end of the day.”

Richard Weiner (1884–1937), Czech poet, prose writer, and journalist. Weiner’s parents ran a distillery and confectionary in southern Bohemia; Richard, the oldest of five children, studied chemistry and was expected to take over the family business. At the age of 27, however, he abandoned this promising career to devote himself to writing; in 1912 he moved to Paris, where he would launch his journalistic career, and soon published two volumes of poetry.
In the summer of 1914 Weiner was sent to the Serbian front, where he saw action but then suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged in 1915. He returned to Paris and entered one of his most productive periods, publishing three volumes of short stories: Lítice (Furies; 1916), one of the first Czech books about World War I; Netečný divák (The Apathetic Watcher; 1917); and Škleb (Grimace; 1919). These stories, many of them masterpieces, display the hallmarks of Weiner’s style: highly poetic prose, founded on complicated syntax, unexpected diction, and intricate patterns of repeated sounds; an expressionist focus on extreme psychic states rather than external events; and a fascination with the unacknowledged, unconscious, and often cruel depths of human personalities (sometimes revealed to characters by their own doubles—one of Weiner’s lifelong themes).

After these works, however, Weiner devoted himself solely to journalism for many years. As the Paris correspondent for Lidové noviny, he wrote thousands of feuilletons on Czech and French culture and politics. His collection Třásničky dějinných dnů (Fringes of Historical Days; 1919) chronicles the first year of Czechoslovak independence as well as the Paris Peace Conference, focusing on marginal but eloquent details rather than the grand historical narrative. Weiner’s journalism also touched occasionally on questions of Jewish and national identity. In the 1918 essay “Kde moje místo?” (Where Is My Place?) he called himself “a Czech writer and a Jew,” but scorned the Czech Jewish movement as artificial and counterproductive; he suggested that national allegiance is a conscious, albeit complex, choice that should be made by individuals rather than groups. His poetry and fiction, however, dealt rarely with Jewish themes, and his own sense of Jewish identity seemed to weaken over time. In a 1928 letter he wrote that he refused to be baptised, but that “otherwise I am a Christian, if not a Catholic.”

Weiner’s second period of creative activity began in 1927, coinciding with his intense involvement with the grouping of French and Czech artists known as Le Grand Jeu. Weiner published another three poetry collections, including Mezopotamie (1930), and the phantasmagoric prose works Lazebník (The Barber; 1929) and Hra doopravdy (A Game for Real; 1933), in which characters turn into puppets and exchange faces in the midst of elliptic debates about guilt and identity. Weiner’s explorations of a dreamlike unconscious were reminiscent of the surrealists; unlike them, however, he strove for precise description and rational analysis of nonrational states. At other times, his fascination with limit situations, and the ways in which we are objectified by the expectations of others, can be seen as forerunners of existentialism—a strand of his thought that influenced, among other Czech writers, Jiří Orten.
Weiner again fell silent after 1933, frustrated by the lukewarm reception of his difficult writings, and increasingly tormented by the debilitating symptoms of stomach cancer, which was misdiagnosed by doctors until shortly before his death. He died in Prague in 1937. - Jonathan Bolton