Slovenska Literatura (Oct 2011)
The author and his critics: two decades (Comparison of the 1960s and 1970s critical reflexions of Vincent Šikula’s works)
Abstract
The article compares critical reflexions of Slovak prose writer Vincent Šikula´s production written in two periods of his creative work. It is an attempt to write a preliminary typology of the 1960s and 1970s literary reflexions based on partial resources. It seeks similarities and differences between literary criticism´s discourses of the time in question. The 1960s, especially the second half, saw liberating tendencies in the Czechoslovak society, which also affected literature and its reflexion. The outcome of the changes was gratually emancipating criticism and its separation from the ideology. The process can be tracked through the dominant means of expression of critical reflexion: in comparison with the previous period of time there is no historical interpretation of a literary work of art based on historical materialism of the Marxist provenance and what gets to the forefront is the individual – „a human“. In the following decade, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, under radically different social and cultural conditions, which are nowadays called Normalization, the reflexion of literature returns to the previous concepts (1950s) and tries to adjust them to the new situation. The article builds on one type of „evidence“ – the voice used by the criticism of the time in question. Wider cultural-political and historical contexts have deliberately been avoided in the article: original organization of the material based on meaning similarities and differences have been preffered to uncovering reasons, while contrast and similarity have been used to shape the two chosen periods of time. An attempt to track certain words appearing and disappearing or their meaning transformations has been made: the absence of „history“ or aversion to it in the 1960s, its strong presence in the following decade; dominance of „human“ in the former period and his subsequent dilution in history or in the concept of "people" in the latter; hypertrophy of art´s cognitive function (noetics) in the 1960s and its withdrawal from the literary discourse in the 1970s; as well as an attempt to revive certain concepts (socialist realism) connected with the inability to fill them with a meaning and functional definition.
