Garbage, Knowledge, and Culture in Too Loud a Solitude

Introduction: Culture as Garbage in Communist Czechoslovakia

In communist Czechoslovakia, printed matter was destroyed as garbage simply because the material within its covers was deemed subversive to the ruling regime. This form of cultural erasure — the compacting of books into waste — may have been ended by the institution of democracy, but the hurt it inflicted on the human heart clearly remains. That hurt fell not only upon those who created art, but also upon the unwilling participants compelled to carry out its destruction.

Bohumil Hrabal's novel Too Loud a Solitude centers on exactly this predicament. Its hero, the garbage collector and book compactor Hanta, is given the civil-service task of destroying printed matter — and the novel asks how that act is simultaneously about matter and about knowledge.

Hanta as Destroyer and Preserver

Ironically, Hanta — the trash-compacting hero assigned to destroy printed matter — acts as both a preserver and a destroyer of the words of others. He complies with his appointed task: he destroys matter, words, and the art of others. But during his labors he also reads the books he is bound to destroy, essentially becoming a witting or unwitting custodian of culture, preserving the words of others within the fabric of his own mind and mourning their loss to society as each book is compacted into trash.

"For thirty-five years now, I've been in wastepaper," he writes, "and it's been my love story" — not because he loves his work, but because he loves what he destroys (2). The book's dramatic propulsion comes from Hanta's fear of being discovered before he can retire in peace, far from the anxieties the government imposes on his mental stability: "into a high-stress situation, crossing off every year, every month, every day in the month until we both retire, my press and I. I've been bringing home books every evening in my briefcase, and my two-floor Holesovice apartment is all books" (16).

The self-proclaimed love story of the text is thus between a man and waste — the wasted words of authors whose ideas have been destroyed — and the man's accumulation of the knowledge contained in those printed sources.

The Body as Receptacle of Lost Words

Hanta writes of himself as a receptacle or jug filled with the words of others, as though words are matter — or water — that he stores for a later time but is never given the venue to pour out. The humble worker retrieves, stores, and digests culture within his own body even as he presses culture to death.

This action of storage and retrieval also suggests that while culture is indeed a physical artifact in need of preservation — easily destroyed as trash — it can also prove remarkably durable. Without Hanta's physical act of taking books home and reading them, the words on those pages would cease to exist as culture and become merely garbage. Culture is not purely physical, yet because it has a physical existence, Hanta can carry it home in private and ingest it much as he does his beer.

The intervention of the human mind through the physical, verbal act of reading is thus an additional preserving mechanism — one that rescues trash from the compactor and from the willed act of state-sanctioned destruction. "I don't really read," Hanta protests, as if to deny that his ingestion of compacted words carries any value; he describes reading instead as an act of sucking words down, taking them in like matter or food (3). Yet the words clearly echo in his mind and shape his inner life, even in a land that suppresses all outer expression.