The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký

First published:Pribeh inzenýra lidských dusí, 1977 (2 volumes; English translation, 1984)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: Winter, 1976, to spring, 1977

Locale: Toronto, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Daniel Smiricky, a forty-eight-year-old Czech emigre, a writer and Edenvale College literature professor
• Irene Svensson, the affluent nineteen-year-old student at Edenvale who becomes Smiricky’s lover
• Larry Hakim, a student in Smiricky’s sophomore literature class, an intense Socialist ideologue
• Veronika Prst, a student at Edenvale, a Czech exile who chooses to return to her homeland
• Nadia Jirouskova, Smiricky’s teenage love who died in Czechoslovakia on January 23, 1946, at age twenty-one
• Prema Skocopole, a friend of Smiricky and the teenage leader of the Kostelec underground during the German Occupation, who later emigrated to Australia
• Jan Prouza, Smiricky’s friend, a poet who remained in Czechoslovakia, battling the constraints of Socialist Realism until he committed suicide in August, 1972
• Vachousek, Smiricky’s foreman in the Messerschmitt factory during World War II, a lifelong resistance leader, captured and executed in the 1970’s
• Milena Cabricarova, the Czech emigre known as Dotty, Smiricky’s dearest friend in Toronto, who marries a businessman and happily adjusts to Western life

The Novel

Daniel Smiricky, the narrator of The Engineer of Human Souls, writes by force of circumstance. He fled his native Czechoslovakia at the time of the Russian invasion, in 1968, and resettled in Toronto, Canada. Although he feels “utterly and dangerously wonderful in this wilderness land,” he is, nevertheless, a man on the margins of two cultures, East European and Western, belonging totally to neither. In 1976, he finds himself in the anomalous position of a Czech teaching American and English literature to blase Canadian and foreign students who are generally ignorant of world history and politics and largely insensitive to any language. As a writer, he is without a literary audience; as a teacher, he is without literary proselytes. Sadness pervades his life. Smiricky laments his disconnection from his past and dwells poignantly on the days of his ardent youth, days full of precious friends, loves, adventures, and delights. He mourns the plight of his homeland under German, then Russian, domination since World War II.

As Smiricky’s mind continually scans his own life, past and present, East and West, his personal narration constructs a historical, literary, and political picture of the last thirty years of international events. The Engineer of Human Souls’ unusual narrative structure consists of brief segments of experience, each only a few pages in length, each isolated like the separate frames of a film before it comes to life as a “moving picture.” Punctuated by black dots at the center of the page, these discrete segments about different times, places, and people cumulatively build separate and distinct narratives, unified through Smiricky’s consciousness. The present-tense frame narrative of the novel depicts Smiricky teaching his classes, meeting with his academic colleagues, participating in the Czech emigre community, attending holiday parties, and starting an affair with one of his students. Although unendingly interrupted by moments from the past, this frame narrative proceeds in discernible chronological order: from the dreary opening sophomore literature class on Edgar Allan Poe in the winter of 1976 to the novel’s comic resolutions in the spring of 1977, when Smiricky’s friend Dotty marries a prosperous businessman, and Smiricky goes on a romantic excursion to Paris with his new lover, Irene Svensson.

In the course of his day-to-day activities, Smiricky’s mind returns to his youth in his hometown, Kostelec. This set of recollections creates, within the frame narrative, an emotionally intense memory narrative covering a brief time, from 1942 to 1944, thirty years in the past. Against a horrifying backdrop of world war, bombings of Europe, concentration camps, and random local instances of Nazi brutality, Smiricky’s enthusiastic skirt chasing, raucous camaraderie, and amateur heroics shine in memory’s spotlight. The ugly face of his uncertain future, the closure of Czech universities and his subsequent machining of parts for Messerschmitt fighter planes, pales in the rosy hues of the memories of his first love, Nadia Jirouskova. These Kostelec youths are unmindful of the ghastly historical moment they endure. As Smiricky ironically observes, “we were young and free in that awful dictatorship, and we had no respect for its glories.”

Another memory narrative reveals Smiricky’s more mature awareness of personal fears and political atrocities. Loosely linked experiences from the time of his postwar departure from Kostelec through the development of his writing career, his expatriation, and his first years in Toronto are unified by accounts of secret agents, informers, political persecution, censorship, and the ongoing resistance to Communist control within and beyond Czech borders.

A narrative of letters, individually fixed in time and space but appearing out of chronological order, provides biographical sketches of Smiricky’s hometown friends since World War II. Since 1942, their lives have taken diverse courses. Jan Prouza, the poet, stayed in Czechoslovakia, futilely resisting censorship. Prema Skocopole escaped to Australia, where he was plagued by homesickness for the rest of his life. Nadia died of tuberculosis shortly after the war and Rebecca survived a concentration camp and emigrated to Israel, only to lose her family to a terrorist’s bomb. In chapter 7, “Lovecraft,” this epistolary narrative becomes a necrology, a record of the deaths of most of Smiricky’s friends. The last letter shows Lojza, a Czech Babbitt, thriving in his homeland, benightedly singing the praises of socialism for peasants such as himself.

These four narratives alternate with irregular rhythms through the seven chapters of the novel. Each chapter is identified with a well-known literary figure: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, and H.P. Lovecraft. These “heroes of the pen” provide literary rubrics for Smiricky’s history, and classroom discussions of their works establish his preoccupations of mind and spirit: war and peace, oppression and freedom, horror and beauty, fear and hope, loss and love, death and life. Although Smiricky’s forty-eight years have been more eventful than most lives, conventional plot and action are minimized by continuous narrative disjunctions and implied associative leaps. The drama of a man, “a living stream of consciousness,” is constructed with bits of thinking, feeling, and remembering—in response to life, death, love, fear, and art. The motion of a life is not to be captured in a linear plot or a single crystal of meaning. Like the world, like this novel, Smiricky’s life is a plethora of sensations, reflections, and experiences. His life eludes definition but is replete with significance. There is no one meaning in The Engineer of Human Souls for “something written well, as Ernest Hemingway once said, can have many meanings....”

The Characters

In many ways, the life of the narrator of The Engineer of Human Souls resembles that of his creator, Josef Škvorecký. Škvorecký also survived the German Reich protectorate, earned a Ph.D. after the war, and became a nationally renowned but officially banned writer. Relocated in Toronto after the Soviet invasion of August 21, 1968, Škvorecký became a literature professor at Erindale College, University of Toronto, and an active member of the Czech emigre community. His lifelong interests in swing music, cinema,mystery novels, and world literature are also shared by his protagonist. Smiricky’s personality, however, seems to more closely resemble that of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock. Aging, no longer easily set on fire, self-absorbed, and plagued by vestigial fears, Smiricky is a man nearly drowning in his own memories. By his own estimation, he is prone to sentimentality, full of grief, and dependent on women. He is not above consciously exaggerating both the “heroic connotations” of his war experiences and the dangers of his writing activities to add allure to his image.

Several groups of characters from Smiricky’s past and present are shown through his consciousness. Many of those with whom he grew up in Kostelec are now dead, irretrievably lost and painfully unforgotten, and they haunt him. A large part of Smiricky’s story is written by and for these dead. Re-creating their shared moments of love, humor, friendship, bravery, and cowardice, Smiricky elegizes his friends: Nadia, the honest, simple girl from a lower social class; Benno, the musician; Jan, the poet; Prema, the saboteur; Vrata, the artist; and Vachousek, the factory foreman.

The spys, informers, and paranoid citizens of communist-controlled Czechoslovakia encountered by Smiricky during the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s constitute a second set of characters. Most are shown in wonderfully farcical anecdotes, for “the alchemy of time transforms everything into comedy.” The long arm of totalitarianism is demonstrated by the alleged and real defections of Dr. Toth and the trap sprung by Uher, the malicious Czech secret agent, to force Smiricky to inform on a Czech tourist during one of his literary tours. Critical commentary on Czech literary production and censorship is implicit is Smiricky’s hilarious efforts to get the frightened Czech book smuggler, Novak, to turn over a contraband book to him in the Toronto airport toilet. On a university visit, a Czech poet, Vokurovski, arrives accompanied by a secret agent “translator” who speaks no English. Burlesque tales such as these disclose the inherent absurdities of the sophisticated terrors of modern totalitarianism.

At Edenvale, Smiricky deals with students guilty of “Blessed ignorance! That unforgivable sin of transatlantic civilization!” Most see the world through television and glossy magazines and maintain their parochialism by resisting acquaintance with history, literature, and politics. Fellow emigres, Dotty Cabricarova, Milan Fikejz, Mrs. Santner, Mr. Pohorsky, Bocar and Margitka, and Veronika Prst (among others) are torn between East and West. Many are sick with longing for their homeland yet appalled by its state. They are at once enchanted by the freedoms of the West and terrified of being “infected” by its political obliviousness and its commercialism. These groups of characters share Smiricky’s experiences in different ways at different times over several decades. Together, they display a spectrum of ideologies, ethics, and emotions which counterpoints and amplifies Smiricky’s perceptions.

Critical Context

Josef Škvorecký won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980, and The Engineer of Human Souls was awarded the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Literature in 1984. Since he emigrated to Canada, Škvorecký’s reputation as a novelist has grown rapidly in the West. His warm, humorous, and melancholy treatments of life, love, and politics are frequently compared to the cool ironies of his countryman Milan Kundera, to the autobiographical narratives of Czesaw Miosz, or to the depictions of terror and totalitarianism in the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Daniel Smiricky is also the protagonist of several other Škvorecký novels: Zbabelci (1958; The Cowards, 1970) and Prima sezona (1975; The Swell Season: A Text on the Most Important Things in Life, 1982) and two untranslated, Tankovy prapor (1971; the tank corps) and Mirakl (1972). Škvorecký’s first novel, The Cowards, though banned for depicting both Germans and Russians as less than heroic, established his reputation in Czechoslovakia. When he left in 1968, Škvorecký was one of the nation’s most popular novelists and a prolific editor, translator, essayist, and screenwriter as well.

Both The Cowards and The Swell Season are set in the dramatic closing days of World War II, and both follow youthful Danny Smiricky, then an innocent amid chaos, chasing beautiful girls relentlessly and blowing his saxophone in rebellion. The narratives of both novels are limited to narrow parameters of time and space and provide more straightforward exposition of plot and more conventional treatment of characters than does The Engineer of Human Souls.

The protagonists of the two novellas in Bassaxofon (1967; The Bass Saxophone, 1977) and the young hero of Lvice (1969; Miss Silver’s Past, 1973) each bear a strong family resemblance to Smiricky with their respective enthusiasms for jazz, beautiful women, and literary freedom. The seemingly improvisational narrative flow of The Bass Saxophone anticipates the subtle emotional and intellectual fusions of The Engineer of Human Souls.

With its innovative narrative techniques and challenging visions of life, art, and politics, The Engineer of Human Souls has taken its place among outstanding postmodern novels. Like most major works of world literature, its art reaches beyond national borders, transcends cultures, soars over Iron Curtains, and defies ideological dogmatisms to address an international audience, all humanity.

Bibliography

Hames, Peter. The Czechoslovak New Wave, 1985.

Hancock, Geoffrey. “An Interview with Josef Škvorecký,” in The Canadian Fiction Magazine. Nos. 45/46 (1982/1983), pp. 63-96.

Library Journal. CIX, July, 1984, p. 1349.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. July 1, 1984, p. 1.

The Nation. CCXXXIX, August 4, 1984, p. 86.

The New York Review of Books. XXXI, September 27, 1984, p. 49.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, August 19, 1984, p. 9.

The New Yorker. LX, October 15, 1984, p. 175.

Newsweek. CIV, August 13, 1984, p. 63.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, May 18, 1984, p. 143.

Škvorecký, Josef. “Why the Harlequin?” in Cross Currents. III (1984), pp. 259-264.

Solecki, Sam. “The Laughter and Pain of Remembering,” in The Canadian Forum. XXXIX (1984), pp. 39-41.

Time. CXXIV, July 30, 1984, p. 97.

The Wall Street Journal. CCIII, June 19, 1984, p. 26.

World Literature Today. LIV (1980). Special Škvorecký issue.