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...

In the hydraulic press of Hanta and within Hanta's reading itself, lives and thoughts are continually smothered yet resurrected. (8)
But perhaps the most persuasive evidence offered by the text that culture is both a material object by virtue of necessity in print, yet transcends its status as state-mandated material garbage in words is that even in his own solitude, Hanta makes poetry in his own mental thoughts, of his own work. This poetry is not simply in the digestive act of reading and drinking to quell his misery, despite what he says. The reader apprehends this in the trash-compacter's unspoken poetic observations of the world around him, as he notes: "in their free time the mice" near the press "are as playful as kittens, climbing up and down the sides of the press and pattering along the horizontal shaft." (15)

This poetry is carried with Hanta throughout his mental life, a mental life that is ironically never translated into print over the course of the text, even while it appears to the reader as print" One day I went to see my uncle to find a place for my press, and as night fell, and the train, its lights aglow, rounded the apple- and pear-tree bends at top speed." (16) Ultimately Hanta stands as a frustrated artist, a consumer of cast-off art who creates art in his mind, and thus a kind of cast-off artist by the regime himself. He is unable to translate his own subversive observations or reading into living prose consumed by others, partly because of the draining nature of his work, his own inevitable depression, as well his own ruthlessly compelled part in destroying art, part of his job under a soul-destroying regime.