Knowing through Feeling: The Aesthetic Structure of a Novel and the Iconic Experience of Reading

Jan Váňa[1]

Abstract

Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a “literary turn” in cultural
sociology in order to recognize literary texts “as relatively autonomous cultural entities” endowed
with their own agency. This article is part of a larger project connecting cultural sociology with
the sociology of literature and literary theory to develop a strong program in the sociology of
literature that would be a powerful alternative to mainstream paradigms in sociological studies of
literature. I advocate an epistemological shift in the sociological treatment of literature.
Instead of approaching literary fiction as an object of analysis, sociology and literature can
contribute to social knowledge in a symmetrical way, where fiction is not devalued as less
“objective” than social scientific inquiry. Just the opposite: by recognizing the specificities of
literary communication, we can access textures of social life that are only hardly graspable by
sociology. A crucial step is to examine how social knowledge comes into existence when reading a
fictional text. Embracing the structural aesthetics of Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský, I develop
a modified concept of iconicity to capture the iconic experience of reading through which
literature mediates social experience that is iconic of broader social phenomena. In the empirical
part of the article, I demonstrate my approach by analyzing the Czech novel Bliss was it in Bohemia
by Michal Viewegh (1992). Tracing out the novel’s aesthetic structure, I seek the relation between
the text’s form and the socio-historical background it accounts for. The aesthetic dimensions of
the text allow for capturing and channeling the uncertainty, openness, and indeterminacy of social
experience as something essential for the 1970s and 1980s communism. The task for the strong
program in the sociology of literature is to provide an intelligible analytical framework for
accessing this social knowledge mediated by literature while making sure that literary texts are
not gutted by sociological theory. Only when “speaking for itself” can literature enter a dialogue
with sociology to bring unique social knowledge that is robust, explanatorily powerful but also
sensitive to emotional, inarticulate, and non-discursive dimensions of social experience.

Key Words

Sociology of literature, cultural sociology, strong program, iconicity, structural aesthetics,
Roman Jakobson, post-communism

Introduction

“In the absence of an adequate social science, critics and novelists, dramatists and poets have
been the major, and often the only, formulators of private troubles and even of public issues. Art
does express such feelings ... but still not with the intellectual clarity required for their
understanding or relief today.” (Mills 1959, p. 18)

In the citation above, Charles W. Mills expresses a common belief of social scientists that
literature often does a better job in mediating social life than social sciences but lacks the
proper “intellectual clarity” to understand it. Historically, various authors agreed that
literature is a “mode of knowledge” (Levin 1965, p. 149), which to a great extent has “autonomous
power ... in analysing its contemporary social scene” (Pincott 1970, p. 180). Austin Harrington
(2004, p. 3) even claims that literature “can tell us about society that social science cannot tell
us”. Trevor Noble (1976, p. 212) agrees with him that “[n]ovels tell much more about society than
any sociological commentary”. Also, Robert Nisbet (1962, p. 69) recognizes that literature adopts a
specific “mode of knowledge … by which man arrives at an understanding of his environment” and is
of no less importance than sociological inquiry. However, despite the longstanding enthusiasm
toward literary texts, sociologists fail to embrace the unique social knowledge mediated by
literature in its full scope. Literature renders the view of societies “from the inside” which is
“formally distinct from either non-fiction or theoretical argument” (Felski 2008, pp. 88–91;
emphasis mine). To deal with this difference, sociological studies often subsume literary fiction
into the sociological frameworks, approaching literature as data to be translated or converted into
sociological discourse (Váňa 2020a, p. 184). As an inspiration, an example of a sociological issue,
or a source of sociological imagination (Váňa 2020b, pp. 6–7), literature has been treated as
sociology’s powerless sidekick lacking the “certified knowledge” (Coser 1963, p. 3; cf. Watson
2016, p. 433).[2]

My research model seeks to make up for this deficiency. Following the strong program in cultural
sociology (Alexander and Smith 2003), I propose a “literary turn” in cultural sociology in order to
recognize literary texts “as relatively autonomous cultural entities, ‘independent variables’
resisting the judgmental eye of an analyst while allowing strong explanatory theories to infer
knowledge about general social phenomena” (Váňa 2020c, p. 15). Therefore, I suggest an
epistemological-theoretical shift to form an alliance between literature and sociology—a mutually
respectful partnership where both sides contribute to the social knowledge in a symmetrical way.
Following Alexander’s and Smith’s (2003, p. 13) inspiration by the “strong program” in science
studies, I go a step further. David Bloor (1976, p. 5) famously defined the third principle of the
strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge as the principle of symmetry: “It would be
symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain, say, true and false
beliefs”. I introduce the symmetry principle into the sociological studies of literature. To be
symmetric “means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among” (Latour 2005, p. 76;
emphasis original) fictional and non-fictional.[3] Literary fiction should not be treated as less
“objective” because of its literariness or fictitiousness. Just the opposite: the strong program in
the sociology of literature will access literature as an autonomous source of social knowledge,
which due to its aesthetic aspects can mediate textures of social life that are only hardly
graspable by sociology.

My model is based on three main principles. First, and most importantly, I seek ways to let
literature “speak for itself” (Váňa 2020a, p. 195). Therefore, I focus on what is going on during
the reading. I conceive reading as a dynamic interaction between the text and the reader, through
which social knowledge is mediated as a part of the aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience
does not exist besides the communicative and cognitive aspects (cf. Thumala Olave 2020, p. 2), but
it makes communication possible in the first place. I approach the aesthetic experience of reading
as the central analytical unit of my model. The point of departure is the phenomenology of reading
of the Constance School of Reception Aesthetics (Iser 1972; Jauss 1982) informed by the hermeneutic
phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur (1976; 1978). Second, I probe into the text’s insides, exploring how
it communicates by means of aesthetic devices. Since “all forms of knowing ... rely on an array of
formal resources” (Felski 2008, p. 83), I do not narrow the text to its content or informational
value. My model employs the structural aesthetics developed by linguists Jan Mukařovský (1971;
1978) and Roman Jakobson (1960) within the Prague Linguistic Circle.[4] I explore how the text
triggers and maintains particular aesthetic experience through sentence structure, narration, plot,
and specific metaphors but also pace, rhythm, and the phonetic aspects of the text. Third, to
strengthen the aesthetic does not mean to reject the social. Literary communication varies and
shifts between different reading publics and periods. Therefore, I confront the aesthetic structure
of the text with the evolving socio-historical background of its production and its reception in
the sense of the hermeneutic circle. The goal of the hermeneutic dialogue between the literary work
and its social milieu is to grasp the social knowledge mediated by literature in a comprehensive
and historically situated way. When the interpretive potential is exhausted, the result is a
contextually-rich but also explanatorily powerful social knowledge about the inquired social
phenomena as well as various ways these phenomena were codified, communicated, and understood (Váňa
2020a, pp. 186–190).

A substantial part of the model is the discussion of the “iconic turn” in cultural sociology
(Alexander 2015; Alexander et al. 2012; Bartmanski 2016) and its possible benefits when
sociologically approaching the aesthetic dimensions of a literary text—i.e., the aesthetic/iconic
experience in the reading process. Thanks to the “iconic augmentation” (Ricoeur 1976, p. 40) and
“iconic condensation” (Bartmanski 2016, p. 542), literary fiction can capture “sensuous” and
“existential” (Harrington 2004, p. 207) aspects of social life and posit them into a “bigger
picture” of the whole societies that is often called Zeitgeist.

I claim that we can make literature “stronger” in the sociological analysis because we interpret it
in its meaningful surroundings, not despite that. The contextually-rich interpretation of a
literary text—as in the sense of Geertzian thick description (Reed 2011, pp. 89–121; cf. Alexander
and Smith 2003, p. 13)—allows for understanding how literature both captures and communicates
social knowledge.

In the empirical part, I demonstrate my model by analyzing the Czech novel Bliss was it in Bohemia
by Michal Viewegh (2015 [1992]). Particularly, I investigate how the novel mediates social
knowledge of continuity and discontinuity of the year 1989 in Czechoslovakia through the iconic
experience of reading. In the historical as well as public discourse in Czechoslovakia and the
Czech Republic, the era after 1989 has been depicted as an ideological anti-thesis of the
normalization[5] (Buden 2013, p. 42). For the post-Soviet “grand narratives”, it has been important
to clearly define the old regime as evil, regressive, and evolutionary lower than the new one.
Often, the Communist epoch is narrated as a deviation, or anomaly, in the otherwise progressive
pathway of Czechoslovak history towards democracy and humanism (Holý 2010, pp. 86–87, 123). This
reductionism of the “binary socialism” (Yurchak 2006, pp. 4–8) has been recently contested by
studies highlighting the continuity of everyday life over the grand narrative of the historical
discontinuity. In the Czech historiography, Michal Pullmann (2011, p. 13) inspected the discourse
of Czechoslovak perestroika,[6] seeking the roots of continuity between the regimes, which “have
much more in common than the demonstrators of 1989 would imagine”. Communist societies are framed
as a part of the larger (post-)modern Western development (Kolář and Pullmann 2016; Sommer et al.
2019). This research goes in line with a recent set of studies exploring the historical continuity
of European post-communism through the concepts of “legacy” (Kotkin and Beissinger 2014),
“contextual holism” (Kubik 2013), and “vernacular memories” (Hilmar 2021).

Unlike these approaches, I am not interested in stressing either continuity or discontinuity of the
historical experience. Instead, I employ the iconic experience of reading as a key methodological
feature to grasp the ambivalence—the permanent and dynamic interplay between dis/continuities,
which is expressed through routinized, inconsistent, and even contradictory practices of everyday
life during normalization. I follow the proposition of James Krapfl (2013, p. 2), who focuses on
the recent “cultural history … from below, foregrounding the experiences of the citizens of
Czechoslovakia”. Unlike the historical and social scientific analyses, however, Bliss was it in
Bohemia allows for capturing the people’s experiences in the sense of “totality” as introduced by
Lucien Goldmann (1980): by means of a limited number of textual signs, the novel mediates social
life as a meaningful whole through its form. Mapping out the aesthetic structure of the novel,
then, is “a way to access deeper understanding of social phenomena, which is representative of the
collective life in a broader socio-historical milieu” (Váňa 2020c, p. 24).

Aesthetic/Iconic Experience as a Source of Knowledge

Proposing a “cultural sociology of reading”, M. Angélica Thumala Olave (2018, p. 418) conducted a
qualitative study with female readers and participated in women’s reading groups to “capture why
reading matters to people”. Interestingly, Thumala Olave is not mainly interested in symbolic
structures, codes, and discourses, as is typical for the strong program. Instead, she looks at how
“subjective and existential meanings” emerge in the process of reading as a part of the reader’s
aesthetic experience (Thumala Olave 2018, p. 418). Thumala Olave (2018, p. 426) makes an important
point when she recognizes reading fiction as inherently social, even when practiced individually.
Reading is a source of “the ethical reflection and knowledge about the world” and it is valued by
the readers for its “capacity to allow for social mobility, to enhance social connections, and to
offer knowledge about the times” (Thumala Olave 2018, p. 426). Through the aesthetic experience,
reading connects cognitive and aesthetic to mediate emotions and understanding as two inseparable
aspects. The reflection, understanding, and knowledge are not just latently waiting in the text,
but they emerge as the reader “engages in active and creative exercise of the imagination” in order
to “group together the various components of the text to form a consistent whole” (Thumala Olave
2018, p. 428).

Nevertheless, by “placing the experience and agency of readers at the center of the analysis”,
Thumala Olave (2018: 418) plays down the active role of the text that “enchants” the readers and
allures them to read. Thumala Olave (2018, pp. 429–435) stresses three main areas of understanding:
“self-understanding”, “ethical reflection and social bonds”, and “self-care”, all of which focus
primarily on the reader. Reflecting upon the reader’s emotional, ethical, and social situation, it
seems as if the novels themselves were meaning-less—merely passively waiting to be given meaning by
their readers. However, it is the convergence of text and reader—and not just the reader—that
brings literary meaning into existence. Unlike the cultural sociology of reading advocated by
Thumala Olave, I strive to reinvigorate and employ the part of the aesthetic experience of reading
that is on the textual side of literary communication.

In this regard, Wolfgang Iser (1972, p. 284) speaks about the so-called “sentence-thought”
(Satzdenken) as a basic building unit of literary meaning. The “sentence-thought” operates as an
ongoing interplay between the constantly changing “horizon of expectation” (Jauss 1982) of the
reader and the dynamic set of language signs and their meaning perceived during reading. The text
itself steers the reading by “a repertoire of familiar literary patterns and recurrent literary
themes together with allusions to familiar social and historical context” as well as “strategies
used to set the familiar against the unfamiliar” (Iser 1972, p. 293). Consequently, there is a
perpetual “oscillation between consistency and ‘alien associations,’ between involvement” and
distance (Iser 1972, p. 291) that incites the aesthetic experience of reading. Iser (1972, pp.
294–295) puts an example from Ulysses (Joyce 1992 [1922]) where the character Mr. Bloom holds a
cigar that simultaneously narrated it as if it was a spear. Equating two usually unrelated
entities, the narrative technique forces the reader to ask questions about possible meanings of
such connection. The text, here, is an active agent in the meaning-making process.

It is impossible to fully describe and categorize literary meaning in scientific language, as there
is always something beyond the language that can only be felt. Ricoeur (1976, pp. 45–46) speaks
about the “surplus of meaning”, which points “beyond the linguistic sign” and opens up the space
for “semantic ambiguity”. This ambiguity, importantly, can refer to several meanings simultaneously
while the “reader is not required to choose among them” (Ricoeur 1976, p. 52). What occurs here is
a split of reference into two parts, one of which “cannot be said in a direct descriptive way but
only alluded to” (Ricoeur 1976, p. 37). Like in the case of Mr. Bloom’s cigar/spear introduced
above, there is no rational way to decide the “true” meaning of the reference. As the readers try
“to impose a consistent pattern on the text”, they might find out that meaning “cannot be
formulated at all” (Iser 1972, p. 295). The most flagrant case is a textual device of ellipsis,
where the literary meaning is constructed by the omission of words. With ellipsis, the very
condition of the meaning is the non-existence of its verbal signification. The power of literary
meaning-making, then, stems from its ability to keep the unresolved ambiguity as an inherent part
of the meaning. The surplus of meaning, which is “the residue of the literal interpretation”
(Ricoeur 1976, p. 55), is not an unnecessary noise that should be cut off by rigid analytical
categories. Just the opposite, the surplus of meaning is the very center around which the literary
understanding forms and circulates.

Cultural sociology deals with the aesthetic experience through the concept of iconicity. The
so-called “iconic turn” in cultural sociology marks an effort of the strong program “to connect the
experience of cultural texts … with structures of aesthetic sensibility” (Alexander 2015, p. 3). We
can understand iconic experience as analogous to aesthetic experience, which brings literary
understanding as an indivisible amalgam of cognitive and aesthetic aspects.[7] Within the original
conception of iconic experience, Alexander (2008a; 2008b) conceives these parts as a dichotomy: As
the reader approaches the aesthetic surface—words, sentences, and paragraphs combined in a certain
style and artistic form— the text opens access to its discursive depth—condensed meaning encoded
within the text that can be mediated only through the iconic experience. My research model,
however, is established on a proposition that is not entirely coherent with one of the cornerstones
of the original strong program, and that is the arbitrariness of the sign based on Saussurean
structuralism. To make cultural meanings “autonomous”, the strong program asserts that “meanings
are arbitrary and are generated from within the sign system” (Alexander and Smith 2003, pp. 23–24).
The so-called “iconic turn” as proposed by Alexander (2008a, p. 783) follows the arbitrariness
argument that “[p]ure sound is only a signified; its meaning is determined by internally organized
signifiers, self-regulating relations of concepts”—i.e., the relation between a sensuous experience
(e.g., sound) as a signifier and cultural meaning signified by this experience is arbitrary.[8]

Interestingly, in his article on iconic consciousness, Alexander (2008a) connects in a single
paragraph ideas of Saussure and the chief critic of Saussure’s dichotomies, linguist and member of
the Prague Linguistic Circle Roman Jakobson. On the one hand, Alexander (2008a, p. 783) contends
that “Saussure rightly insisted that the sound of language, in itself, carries no meaning”, on the
other hand, he believes that “[t]he science that Jacobson called poetics concerns the internal
sounds and rhythms of speaking and hearing, and how they affect the construal of meaning”.
Alexander’s invocation of Jakobson’s theory on poetics, nevertheless, is only partial. In fact,
Jakobson dedicated a large portion of his scholarly endeavor to argue that the relation between
phonemes and language signs is not arbitrary but “motivated” by “a factual similarity relation
between signans and signatum” (Waugh 1980, p. 71). This similarity is iconic[9] in the Peircean
sense, i.e., based on the perception of the signifier’s sensuous quality (the aesthetic surface in
Alexander’s sense). The argument of similarity lies in the core of Jakobson’s well-acclaimed
concept of poetic function. Jakobson shows that people make decisions about the structure of their
utterances based on their similar aesthetic qualities.[10] On a famous example of the political
slogan “I like Ike”,[11] Jakobson (1960, p. 357) further demonstrates how aesthetic devices such as
rhyme, paronomasia, and alliteration[12] take part in the meaning-making. Although the slogan
refers to a political campaign, the mediated meaning comes from the sound of the words themselves
rather than the extra-textual references.

The case here is not to decide which part of the binary surface/depth (Alexander 2008a) is more
significant for attributing the meaning but rather to dismiss the dichotomy in the first place. The
text in literary fiction does not merely represent the extra-textual world and its deeper symbolic
logic. Authors who write a piece of literary fiction have only a limited number of textual signs
and aesthetic devices at their disposal to account for the unlimited stream of their lived
experience. They necessarily employ what Ricoeur (1976, p. 40) calls an “iconic augmentation”, that
is, they use iconic condensation “to resist the entropic tendency of ordinary vision and to
increase the meaning … by capturing it in the network of its abbreviated signs”. Jakobson (1960,
pp. 368–370) shows this by applying the principle of “parallelism”, which stands for entanglement
of textual entities—words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc. up to the whole of the
book—based on their phonetic and semantic attributes. The field of possible links among intra-,
inter-, and extra-textual entities is hypothetically infinite, yet it is by no means arbitrary.
Literary texts enforce their agency through “iconic affordances” (Bartmanski 2016, p. 547) that
direct the reader through the aesthetic/iconic experience of reading. In this regard, Binder (2018,
pp. 404–405) brings forth Peirce’s idea that “[i]cons ‘excite’ their interpretants via resemblance
to their objects; and even the meaning of symbols is partially ‘determined’ by the objects to which
they refer”.[13] Even though following Saussurean legacy has proven itself immensely fruitful when
investigating “code, narrative, performance, and so forth” (Alexander and Smith 2010, p. 16), it
falls short when it comes to acknowledging “concrete entanglements themselves, without reducing
them to analytically distinct components” (Bartmanski 2016, p. 550).

Aesthetic Structure as a Methodological Framework

Leaving the arbitrariness argument and Saussurean structuralism behind does not mean to resign in
an effort to provide an explanatorily powerful model. The structural aesthetics of the Prague
Linguistic Circle (PLC) (Mukařovský 1978; Jakobson 1960) serves as a mediating layer between the
iconic experience of reading and its social surrounding. Unlike Saussure and Russian Formalists who
focused on ahistorical—synchronic—aspects of language,[14] PLC understands poetics as historically
and socially grounded. The structural analysis explores how particular aesthetic devices refer to
the extra- and intra-textual entities involved in the iconic experience of reading. How can the
aesthetic structure of a novel help us to access the social knowledge mediated by the iconic
experience of reading?

When immersing readers, literary fiction ceases to be a mere codification of the author’s
experience. Through iconic augmentation, the novel mediates social knowledge about various social,
cultural, and aesthetic norms, moral and ethical paradigms but also conceptions of bodily
perception, sexuality, etc. The text draws the reader into a cognitive and emotional dialogue with
the socio-historical background of its creation and various socio-historical backgrounds of its
reception (see the double arrow in Figure 1). By enticing the reader, the aesthetic textual devices
channel these backgrounds in iconic experience, thus becoming iconic of social phenomena. That is
when reading the novel becomes “iconic in its grasp of an entire social order” (Nisbet 1962, p.
72).

[insert Figure 1.]

             Figure 1. Social knowledge mediated by the iconic experience of reading.

The overall purpose of my model is to make explicit this implicit social knowledge mediated by the
iconic experience of reading. Because we cannot access it directly through the reading experience,
we need to extrapolate the iconic social knowledge from the interaction between the text and its
meaningful surroundings. Such a process requires two steps. First, the investigator conducts a
formal analysis of the text focusing on the aesthetic devices and their role in conjuring the
text’s meaning, as in Jakobson’s example in the previous section. Second, the investigator relates
the meaning-making to the socio-historical backgrounds involved in the particular reading, that is,
the socio-historical background of the text’s production, the text’s career[15] outside of its
production, and the socio-historical background of the respective interpretive community. The
investigator further sensitizes this insight through the hermeneutic circle wherein the first and
the second step repeatedly inform and navigate each other (cf. Harrington 2002, p. 56). We end up
with a tentative (never fully completed) description of dynamic meaning-making relations, i.e., the
aesthetic structure (see Figure 2).

[insert Figure 2.]

                          Figure 2. The aesthetic structure of the text.


The model strives for a contextually rich interpretation that “thickly describe[s]” (Reed 2011, p.
17) various connections between formal analysis of the text, its extra-textual referents—concrete
socio-historical realities—and the ways they coalesce into the complex, ambiguous, and often
counter-intuitive meanings. Here, it is instructive to recall the idea of explanation as
interpretation (Reed 2011, pp. 123–162; cf. Ricoeur 1981, pp. 91–156). Such an analytical approach
involves a “double reading” in the sense of Reed and Alexander (2009, p. 33). Structural
aesthetics, via studying aesthetic devices vis-à-vis their meaningful surroundings, enables us to
read how the readers potentially read the concerned texts. Through the aesthetic structure, we can
simulate the iconic experience of reading and identify the iconic social knowledge without
translating it into social scientific discourse.

Following the example of Mukařovský (1971), I claim that the necessary part of my model is its
demonstration via empirical cases. In the following sections, I demonstrate how sociologists can
enter a dialogue with a novel to acquire genuine social knowledge. First, I outline the aesthetic
structure of Bliss was it in Bohemia through my reading navigated by the public and scholarly
discourse about the novel (literary critiques, radio debates, readers’ comments, social media
discussions, etc.) as well as an inquiry into the novel’s production (interviews with the author
and the publisher, biographical information, etc.). Second, I confront the aesthetic structure with
the socio-historical background it refers to, which I access through the historical and social
scientific accounts of the normalization era. This allows me to identify two main characteristics
of the novel’s aesthetic structure: Focus on the ambivalence of daily life; and formal
experimentation combining realistic and linear narration with flashbacks, introspections, varying
perspectives of the narrator, and most of all—alternating and mixing up various genres such as
irony, drama, comedy, tragedy, and satire. Both features operate as aesthetic mediators through
which the author’s experience of normalization is encoded within the text in the form of iconic
condensation and consequently invoked as an iconic experience of reading. Only thanks to these
aesthetic mediators, the novel can provide social knowledge, which is iconic of what I call the
poetics of the late socialism in Czechoslovakia. That is, the indeterminate, interactional, and
emotional aspects of everyday social experience, which tend to fall through the filter of social
scientific discourse.

My analysis of the novel is divided into three sections according to the three “iconic moments”
representing significant and often disputed topics of Czechoslovak normalization. Each section
includes short excerpts from the novel showing how the specific aesthetic devices allow for iconic
condensation of these iconic moments. Beginning with Václav Havel’s (1978) famous figure of the
greengrocer, the first section deals with the analytical reductionism of popular binaries used to
understand late socialism. The second section offers a way to understand “social semiotics” of
normalization as a form of “Baudrillardian hyper-reality” (Yurchak 2006, p. 77)—a seemingly chaotic
and unpredictable socio-cultural system in which the poetic function dominates over referential
function (Jakobson 1960, p. 357). The third section probes the moral and ethical intricacies of
confronting abstract ideals such as “living within the truth” (Havel 1978, p. 73) with practical
issues of day-to-day encounters. Before diving into the actual text, I will briefly introduce Bliss
Was It in Bohemia and the reasons why sociologists should be interested in social knowledge
mediated by this novel.

Bliss Was It in Bohemia by Michal Viewegh

Born in 1962, Michal Viewegh is one of the authors who were socialized during normalization and
spent most of their adult life in a democratic society. A son of university-educated parents,
Viewegh studied the Czech language and pedagogy at the Charles University in Prague to become an
elementary school teacher. Already in the early 1980s, Viewegh was offering his short stories to
literary magazines and publishers. In 1991 in the literary review Tvar, Viewegh (1991) published an
advertisement looking for a publisher for his book with a tentative title “Kvido’s family:
melancholic grotesque”. He tried to attract publishers by the following text: “A humoristic novel
about a slight rise and not too sharp fall a common Czech family in the last thirty years. A
tragicomic story of people who live—just like all of us, in a metaphorical sense—in the
neighborhood of a famous dissident and who hypochondriacally create bigger troubles than they have.
220 pages”. A year later, the book was published with unprecedented success, having sold over
200,000 copies. It also received exceptionally positive reviews and earned Viewegh the prestigious
Jiří Orten Award for young Czech authors, thus granting him a prominent place in the Czech literary
canon. Since then, Viewegh became “the most widely read Czech author”[16] (Fialová 2018) and one of
those very few Czech authors who could make a living only by writing fiction.[17] Overall, he wrote
30 books[18] translated into 23 languages, of which about 2 million copies were sold in the Czech
Republic alone.[19] The Encyclopedia of Czech literature labels Viewegh as one of “the [three] most
significant talents of the post-November literature” (Gilk 2015, p. 144).

The novel’s main storyline follows a traditional linear narration chronologically organized into
seventeen chapters and an epilogue. The general narrative structure is defined by the two
historical milestones of the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, focusing on the main
character Kvido and his parents. The story’s central driving force is a perpetually emerging
conflict between the family and social conditions established in Czechoslovakia after 1968. Two
primary features ensured the novel such an extraordinary reception: an effort to narrate the
everyday life of a “common Czech family” focusing on ambivalence rather than the naïve
anti-communism (Balaštík 2011; Fialová 2018; Schindler 2002); and formal experimentation
elaborating on the “middle-brow” aesthetic style, which appealed to “high-brow” literary
gatekeepers as well as those who prefer leisure reading (Lukeš 2001; Trávníček 2009). The post-1989
Czech literature either rejected the position of authority[20]—often through adopting
post-modernism and withdrawal to the sphere of privacy and psychologization (Chitnis 2005)—or
followed the 1989’s “myth of origin” with its black-and-white anti-communist rhetoric (cf.
Noordenbos 2016, pp. 6–25). The nationwide anti-communism established a universally accepted belief
that communism is inherently ideological while democracy based on a free-market economy and
capitalism is “value-free”, and therefore “ideology-free” (Kolář and Pullmann 2016). Most Czech
authors after 1989 “despised all ideologies” (Balaštík 2011), which led them to uncritically
embrace the grand narrative of the historical discontinuity. Avoiding naïve anti-communism and
capturing the ambiguous textures of daily life allowed Viewegh to mediate the experience resonating
with a broad spectrum of readers, who were neither dissidents nor active proponents of the regime
but something in-between. “[H]is characters make a trade-off with the totalitarian regime, but he
does not judge them; he merely shows that everything is more complex than how it looks on the
surface” (Schindler 2002). Most of the reviewers highlighted that “there is no pretension against
the previous regime and no political moralizing” (Knapp and Chuchma 2005) because “the author looks
at the recent history without diabolizing or mythologizing it” (Karfík 1993).

The key to the novel’s overall success is its multilayered aesthetic structure employing an
abundance of connections between various intra- and extra-textual entities and cultural artifacts.
Viewegh approaches post-communist memory as ruins in the sense of David Williams (2013)—an
indefinite mixture of emotions and aesthetic qualities spanning between melancholia and nostalgia,
romanticism and cynicism, as well as the lust for freedom and skepticism towards the “Western” way
of life. Importantly, the highly aestheticized postmodern form and genre experimentation allow for
expressing the late socialist experience as inherently ambivalent and polysemic, accepting all the
contradictions as potentialities with open meaning rather than trying to resolve them (Williams
2013, p. 14). The ambivalence of social life during normalization is already condensed in the Czech
title of the book Báječná léta pod psa,[21] sometimes translated as Blissful Years of Lousy Living
and Those Wonderful Years that Sucked.[22] Through the aesthetic, the novel makes the reader
experience this polysemy with all its unsettling, unnerving but also ironic nature. That is why
Bliss was it in Bohemia was unanimously acclaimed “as the voice of a generation” (Pehe 2016, p.
92), which “brilliantly and with a wit depicted mingling of the ‘big’ and ‘small’ history”
(Schindler 2002). As a compelling case study of the post-communist “ruins”, it became iconic of the
ambiguous social experience before 1989 and the post-socialist remembering of this experience.

The Poetics of the Late Socialism

“All that red is just protective coloration”: Negotiation with the Regime

In his seminal piece The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel (1978) coined the term
“post-totalitarian” to distinguish the political system of 1970s socialism in Czechoslovakia from
the traditional conception of dictatorship. The post-totalitarian ideology, claims Havel, was
embodied in daily routines and rituals, so the widespread support of the political system to a
great extent relied on the citizens’ desire to simply cope with their daily lives. Havel’s famous
figure of the greengrocer, who displays the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!”[23] in the window
of his corner store, is not a passionate supporter of the international communist movement.
According to Havel, the greengrocer declares an utmost desire to live a calm life undisturbed by
any political agenda. The ideology in a post-totalitarian system manifests itself through a
“complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of
manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime” (Havel 1978, p. 8). This
ideology needs to be accepted and excused by the citizens and integrated into their lifeworld on a
daily basis. In the following paragraph, Kvido’s father ponders upon a similar idea during one of
the numerous kitchen-talks with his wife:

“That’s the nature of the times. They’ are our competitors—and with competitors you have to employ
tactics, otherwise it’s just tilting at windmills. An animal survives by merging with its
environment. All that red is just protective coloration.” (BB 55–56)[24]

The scene is preceded by Kvido’s mother encouraging the father to visit Šperk, one of the
high-ranking communists in his work. She justifies the suggestion by referring to the father’s
colleague and friend Zvára, who has been recently given a decent flat, even though he and his wife
have only one baby, not two like Kvido’s parents. Although the father uses the quixotic analogy
(“tilting at windmills”) to excuse Zvára’s loyalty to Šperk, he himself is not capable of “merging
with the environment”. In the dialogue between parents, there occurs a shift of meaning regarding
Zvára’s behavior. It starts with surprise and tabooization, implicitly indicating condemnation of
Zvára’s visit to Šperk as an expression of loyalty with the regime. However, when such behavior is
related to the material benefits (getting the flat) for Zvára’s family, it is reframed as a
“tactic”. The act of betrayal suddenly becomes an act of cunning “self-preservation” and the
loyalty with the regime is “just protective coloration” (cf. “preference falsification” in Kuran
1997, p. 15). Joining the Communist Party was generally perceived as an utmost expression of
loyalty.[25] Besides that, the space to demonstrate loyalty was unclear and ambiguous and kept
people in a permanent state of alertness. In the sphere of everyday life, such negotiation was held
in order to secure basic needs and maintain some degree of family and individual well-being.

Then, the mother continues ranting: “And you’re not doing anything about it! How on earth am I
supposed to respect you?” (BB 57). In the family dispute, diverse values contest each other, so
that finally, the preference shifts from the private subversion against the Party to the value of
family well-being and its securing in the practical sense. As an iconic experience, this scene
relates to one of the most controversial themes in the ongoing debate on the Czech post-communist
memory, and that is the negotiation with the communist regime.[26] Havel developed the greengrocer
metaphor into his famous concept of “living within the truth” (Havel 1978, p. 18) as opposed to
life in lie and hypocrisy.[27] The logic of “double life”, where citizens publicly perform their
acts in contradiction to their private opinions, should have served as a corrective to the
simplistic explanation of totalitarian ideology as a straightforward indoctrination of a citizen’s
life in its totality. However, the danger of methodological reductionism is that the complex,
ambiguous, and highly messy process of legitimization and negotiation in daily life is reduced to a
dichotomy between a few dissidents—those “living within the truth”—and the passive general society
(Klíčová 2018, p. 11).[28]

The depiction of the family dispute is followed by a scene describing the father’s visit to Šperk’s
office:

“‘You haven’t registered for an evening course in Marxism-Leninism, you don’t attend meetings, you
hold no official positions, you simply don’t show any kind of commitment!’

Kvido’s father just shrugged.

‘I’m not asking for miracles, Comrade,’ said Šperk. ‘It would be enough if you joined the National
Front. How about the volunteer fire brigade?’” (BB 69)

In practical terms, the negotiation with the regime occurred between private and public: to reach
scarce resources such as a fulfilling job or housing, one had to manifest loyalty to the “sociality
of the so-called ‘normal people’” for which Yurchak (2006, pp. 108–114) uses the Russian term
“svoi”. “I’ve decided … that we should give you one more chance” (BB 67, emphasis mine) says Šperk.
Loyalty to the Party is linguistically normalized through personal pronouns “us” and “we”, which do
not operate as a usual constructor of the us-vs-them polarity. In the shared space of the
“Comradery”, everybody is a “Comrade”. Belonging to the community of “svoi” is based on the tacit
knowledge of “how things are”. Rather than “living a lie” (Havel 1978, pp. 18–20), the majority of
citizens, similar to Kvido’s parents, was oscillating somewhere between the truth-lie
polarization—in the “grey zone” (Šiklová 2004 [1990]), or “second society” (Machonin 2005). They
did neither openly support the regime nor stood up against it. The ritualistic discourse and
performances were adopted as a “protective coloration” (BB 55–56) by which citizens simply
demonstrated their belonging among “normal people”—those who want to live decent lives, have a
decent job, and most of all, want to have peace for their private activities that are typically
related to the family.

In the end, Šperk lends Kvido’s father not the key from the promised flat but keys from a whole
house with a big garden. He takes the keys from his desk drawer and throws them at Kvido’s father
right away. Kvido’s father must promise he will register for the evening course in
Marxism-Leninism.

“‘And one more thing,’ he [Šperk] said to Kvido’s father finally, ‘You’ll be needing a dog—now
you’ve got a garden. … I’ll sell you a puppy. … Complete with full documentation. I breed them. Did
you know?’

‘Yes, but I —’

‘Three thousand crowns. Stop by one time.’

‘Can’t be done,’ Kvido’s father tried to protest. ‘I don’t mean the money, but it would drive my
wife mad. She’s terrified of dogs.’

‘She’ll get used to it,’ said Šperk. ‘Mine did. …’” (BB 70–71)

Šperk’s jovial but also paternalistic tone represents a parent-child relationship of the Party to
Czechoslovak citizens. Šperk makes it clear that he is the one to decide about the living
conditions of Kvido’s family. Yet, at the same time, Kvido’s father can influence Šperk’s decision
if he acts accordingly. In the first place, Kvido’s father was expected to recognize the social
norms of “acting accordingly” by himself. As he did not, the family was penalized by demeaning
living conditions. Now Šperk gives Kvido’s father a “second chance”, making the norms of expected
behavior more explicit. Also, by showing a “good will” of a patronizing parent, Šperk makes Kvido’s
father indebted in the sense of the “economy of gift”, as described by Možný (2009 [1991], pp.
68–70). The whole transaction is camouflaged as an expression of disinterested affection, even
though the receiver of the gift (the flat) is unspokenly expected to give something back (to
manifest loyalty). Importantly, the value of the gift is never clearly defined, so it is never
quite clear whether the debt has been paid off or not. This obscurity inaugurates a long-term
relationship in which both sides try to balance the approximate height of their mutual debts. Šperk
discreetly suggests that if Kvido’s father wants to keep the gift, he should accept it with a dog.
As if by accident, Šperk is a dog vendor, so, in the end, buying a dog is implied as Kvido’s
father’s “gift” in return for Šperk’s “generosity”.

Possible frictions in the interaction are prevented by the generally accepted script of
performance. Potential moral burden Kvido’s father might experience is transferred to the sphere of
pretending, rather than believing. It does not matter, whether he exclaims the utterance “Comrade”
sincerely—whether he truly believes in the “comradeship”. By acting “accordingly”, Kvido’s father
reproduces the authoritative discourse of the Communist Party regardless of what he truly thinks.
That allows him to cherish his inner beliefs in privacy, so they do not manifestly contravene the
performance. The introduced scenes operate as icons of the obscure—but also somehow smoothly
running—system of gift economy of the early 1970s, as witnessed through the ritualized actions and
performative dimension of language. The aesthetic dimensions of the text allow for channeling the
openness and indeterminacy of the “negotiation” with the regime. Also, through the iconic
experience of reading, the aesthetic dimensions can mediate the emotionally loaded moral
ambivalence that stems from the discrepancy between the scripted performance (the formally accepted
behavior) and subjective perception of such performance (hesitation, confusion, guilt, etc.).

“All I want is to land a decent job”: Social Semiotics of Hypernormalization

The key methodological feature of studying normalization through a novel is the idea of the
inherent ambiguity of language, which allows social actors to be inconsistent and even
self-contradictory but also meaningful at the same time. As Alexei Yurchak (2006, p. 22) suggests,
there is no essential personal attitude “behind the mask”, but the persons are performatively
co-constituted by their acts, including speech acts. This claim has a significant impact on the
interpretation of everyday life during the late socialism in Czechoslovakia. A vast proportion of
politically motivated actions and proclamations were devoid of informational value—the constative
dimension—yet they were reproducing the authoritative discourse on a performative level. For
example, participation in parliamentary elections did not express any opinion about the candidates
or the Communist Party. However, its performative dimension confirmed the legitimacy of the
authoritative discourse.[29] In the following scene, we can see a sharp contradiction between the
performative and constative dimensions of Kvido’s father’s decision to buy Šperk’s puppy. The
performative dimension of making a deal with Šperk earns material benefits for the family.
Simultaneously, the constative dimension as the dog’s actual presence in the family is a source of
conflict and moral burden.

“‘So it’s only you who wants a dog in the house!’

‘I don’t, though,’ her husband tried to disabuse her. ‘All I want is to land a decent job.’

‘… So actually no one wants one – and yet we’re to have one?? And so you’re going to bring one
home, tomorrow?? Why??’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to explain: so I can do my proper job.’

‘And for that you have to buy a hairy work permit from Šperk for three thousand crowns!’

‘Oh, my dear God!’ he wailed. ‘It’s not as if I can help it!’” (BB 85)

Owning the dog operates as a performance of the Party’s presence in the family’s everyday life in
both senses of the expression: first, it is a performative act of reproducing authoritative
discourse through the family’s loyalty to Šperk; and second, taking care of the dog is a
high-performance activity, which the family needs to keep up in order not to lose the benefits
earned from the barter. The discrepancy between the constative and performative dimensions is
further stressed by the original dog’s name “Něha” literally meaning tenderness.[30] The connection
between a real word reference (the dog) and its verbal representation (tenderness) here is purely
symbolic in the Peircean sense: even though the father tries to persuade the mother that the dog’s
name expresses its cuddliness and soft fur, the “wild, stubborn and extremely disobedient” (BB 89)
German Shepherd does not seem to bear any attributes of its name. “Like stroking a dead rat” (BB
89), says Kvido’s mother in disgust, debating why Něha should stay with the family in the first
place.

Another example of the tension between performative and constative dimensions of behavior is
Kvido’s recitation. As a precocious child who trained his rhetorical skills alongside famous
Czechoslovak actors,[31] Kvido makes a great impression at the meeting of the local Communist
organization. Accidentally, Kvido, who sees “little sense” in the revolutionary verse, concentrates
his effort on the performative dimension of language, thus articulating meaning-less poems with the
most sincere passion. The meaning, in the end, is not delivered by the content of the poems but by
their performative effect. Kvido’s recitation is performatively effective on two levels: First,
despite the lack of the poems’ meaning, it is an authentic experience of a child who integrates it
into his meaningful lifeworld and makes it a part of his biography (Kvido perceives it as a great
success); second, this experience becomes formally (from Kvido’s perspective unintentionally) an
expression and a reproduction of the authoritative discourse. The performative dimension of the
authoritative discourse feeds upon anyone who can fill it with “authentic” content. Reciprocally,
the performer is rewarded by social recognition and prestige. In this case, Kvido’s performance is
rewarded by his father’s promotion.

To describe the widespread presence of the utterly ritualized authoritative language, Yurchak
(2006, pp. 74–76) borrows Baudrillard’s (1994) term “hyper-reality”. The so-called
“hypernormalization” stands for a state of affairs in which nor the “authoritative discourse”
neither any “competing description of reality” could “provide an accurate constative description of
reality”, so the reality had no grounding and “became reduced to discursive simulacra” (Yurchak
2006, p. 75). It became relatively unimportant “which statements represented ‘facts’ and which did
not”, since “Soviet people engaged with authoritative language at the level of the performative
dimension” (Yurchak 2006, p. 76). The performative dimension, which made up for the lack of the
constative dimension, created a “hyper-reality”: a reality where “nothing about the representations
of the world was verifiably true or false, the whole of reality became ungrounded” (Yurchak 2006,
p. 77).

Later, Kvido comments on his parents’ reaction when they find out that he was chosen by the teacher
for his reciting skills:

“[I]t suited Father’s plans, and so he didn’t try to prevent it—and that’s the very word for it,
they simply didn’t try to prevent me from doing it. … I did their dirty work for them …

It might sound stupid to you, but I’m still convinced that my recitations for the Communists, the
purchase of Šperk’s dog and my father’s playing football were, so to say, the three sources and
three conditions of his subsequent short career.” (BB 82–83; emphasis original)

Kvido’s reflection refers to the gift economy mentioned in the previous section (Možný 2009
[1991]). His manifestation of belonging to the socialist “Comradery” has a positive impact on his
family’s well-being, just like in the case of Šperk’s dog and the father playing the hated football
in Šperk’s team.[32] Participation in these activities follows the logic of the hypernormalized
language, that is: the constative value is substituted by performative—the content is surpassed by
the form. In this sense, the “hyper-reality” of normalization to a great extent gives precedence to
the poetic function over the referential function as defined by Roman Jakobson (1960, p. 357). The
same principle can be applied to the whole socio-cultural system of normalization.[33] In a
language system where the poetic function is dominant, such as in poetry, the meaning relies more
on the character and combination of the language signs than their reference (Jakobson 1960, pp.
358–359).[34] Similarly, in the semiotics of social life, when the poetic function predominates, it
is much more important how the signifiers operate in the meaning system, rather than what is their
reference to the life-world. If we conceive the recitation and purchasing of a dog as experiential
referents or signifieds in the social semiotic system, the meaning of these activities is not
primarily designated by these referents. Rather, the meaning is primarily rendered by collective
representations of these experiences—the signifiers—which are coupled with the referents. As a
result, the hypernormalized social semiotics of late socialism is, to a large extent,
self-referential and autonomous in relation to their referents.

However, it is not to say that the relation between referents and signs within the system of social
semiotics is arbitrary, football being a cogent example. As a popular collective sport during
normalization, football played an important role in structuring time and social activities,
especially in small towns. The regular weekend matches could have had a disciplinary function in
the Foucauldian sense: whoever participated as a player or a fan was under the surveillance of
other community members—not only manifesting allegiance to the collectivity but also establishing
an alibi that they were not committing an anti-regime activity.[35] Nevertheless, the connection
between an activity and its political/social meaning, as perceived by the actors themselves, was
often rather unclear, non-intuitive, and ambiguous. This experience of ambiguity is also the cause
of Kvido’s father’s confusion: he mistakenly attributes meaning to the concrete activities, not
recognizing that it is their form—their poetic function—that matters the most. The “recitations for
the Communists, the purchase of Šperk’s dog and [Kvido‘s] father’s playing football” (BB 83)
compose a larger semantic unit. Through this semantic unit, Šperk and other superiors test Kvido’s
father’s will to be “politically visible” and “committed” and therefore deserving a promotion (BB
69). It is in this sense that the hypernormalized social semiotics of late socialism resemble
Baudrillardian hyper-reality. It is “the map that precedes the territory” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 1):
the signs and their arrangements play a leading role in assigning meanings to the events (cf.
Yurchak 2006, p. 75). Through the effect of iconic condensation, the excerpts in this section are
iconic of this hyper-reality as a general condition of the 1970s Czechoslovak normalization.

“Living a Lie”, Resigning into the Truth

On the level of everyday life, the ungrounded hyper-reality of normalization was often perceived as
“arbitrary” (Świrek and Pospech 2020) in the sense of vast unpredictability, non-transparency, and
complexity.[36] In many cases, the indeterminate constative dimension of ritualized acts enabled
the actors to endow these acts with new meanings. These were not necessarily subversive as in the
case of dissidents but allowed for creative interpretation of the authoritative discourse to pursue
private goals. As a result, the world of hypernormalization also had a certain, mostly implicit,
set of rules which one could try to master and benefit from them. Following these “rules”, however,
was not equally possible for everyone (unequal access to different sources of capital) and many
found it morally disputable, which, according to Świrek and Pospech (2020, p. 2), led to “a sense
of shared guilt”. For example, Něha’s presence in family life is a permanent reminder of the
omnipresence of the Party’s power, which makes family members succumb to it and brings upon them
the burden of moral guilt. The tangible material benefits such as a higher salary and a better
living place are outweighed by permanent and visible evidence of a moral failure as subjectively
perceived by Kvido’s parents. Simultaneously, the interactional dynamics allow the actors to
delegate the moral burden between each other. The mother repeatedly emphasizes that it was the
father who morally failed by bringing the dog—even though it was she who urged the father to bend
the knees to raise the family’s living standards. Similarly, in Kvido’s recitation, the moral
burden is delegated to the sphere of the interactional dynamics between Kvido and his teacher.
Instead of the active manifestation of loyalty, Kvido’s father’s action is limited to “not
preventing” Kvido from reciting the poems (BB 82).

As already mentioned, to perform loyalty with the socialist collectivity, one has to make a
constant effort. Through manifold aesthetic devices, the novel mediates a condensed iconic
experience of performing the Comradery as a high-performance activity. Once he reached satisfactory
well-being for the family, Kvido’s father cannot simply stop behaving as a pro-active member of the
normalization sociality. The ritualistic discourse must be performed repeatedly and unquestionably.
However, the father’s idea of a hard-working, self-made man conflicts with the socialist conception
of work as a source of collective identity, which during normalization sedimented into ritualized
manifestations of belonging to the collectivity and enjoying undisturbed “peace for work” (Kolář
and Pullmann 2017, pp. 60–72). Feeling trapped between two “systems of preferences” (Kuran 1995,
pp. 3–21), he gets into an argument with Zvára and activates sarcasm as a coping mechanism:

“‘Do you know why it’s not you going even though you’re better? … Because you’re an idiot!’

‘Well I never! Said Kvido’s father in a slightly strangled voice, ‘and all the time there was silly
me thinking it was because I hadn’t joined the Communist Party’” (BB 94)

After the interaction gets heated, Kvido’s father manages to calm down and turns the situation into
a joke. Later at home, he gets into a quarrel with his wife:

“‘And you’re never once going to tell him,’ his wife would badger him, ‘exactly what you think of
him? … doesn’t it worry you that you’re living a lie?’

‘Yes it does,’ said he. ‘But it worries me less than having someone in the office creating a
shindig because he’s taken offence. It scares the wits out of me. It brings me out in a rash’

‘So you live in a lie because of a rash.’

‘And you’re not living a lie?’

‘Of course I am. We all are. Only I try to fight against it’ in my own way, not perhaps very
obviously, but I do.’” (BB 95–96; emphasis mine)

Here, the question of moral integrity is brought up through the rhetorical device of irony. The
dialogue between parents is an unequivocal reference to Havel’s (1978, p. 18) concept of “living
within the truth”. By transferring the concept from an essayistic/intellectual exegesis into
satirical fiction, Viewegh inspects the abstract notions of truth and lie in concrete situations of
everyday life, most significantly represented by the “kitchen table talks” among Kvido’s mother and
father. The most striking difference is shifting Havel’s binary truth-vs-lie to the volatile sphere
of ambivalence and interactional dynamics. Havel’s (1978, p. 73) inquiry conceives the existential
dimensions of the “post-totalitarian” society primarily as a potential space for “existential
revolution” and “political reconstitution of society”. Here, living within the truth becomes a
moral maxim completely torn out of the whimsical and obscure social experience. Above all, the
existential struggle of Kvido’s parents does not happen as a one-time decision but takes place
recurrently, and usually unconsciously, on an everyday basis. Most of the social actions occur in
the “extraordinary space in between the opposites … that transcends the successful ordering and
splitting of the world into neat binaries” (Giesen 2011, p. 788).

Long-term living in the regime of ambivalence where performative and constative dimensions of
actions are in a permanent conflict might lead to the state Yurchak (2006, p. 132) describes as
internal emigration: “the inherent ambivalence” of “being inside and outside at the same time”.
Most notably, internal emigration accounts for the “lifestyle, when one is actually quite involved
in many activities of the system, but nevertheless remains partial to many of its constative
meaning” (Yurchak 2006, p. 133). This ambivalence finds expression in the most mundane activities
and micro situations, such as shopping at the local grocery store, as described in the following
scene.

It happened one Saturday morning while they were shopping at the local department store. … Kvido’s
father conceded that she might have first noticed him by the milk crates, be he insisted that
Kohout was facing the crates—the logical direction to be looking anyway—and therefore with his back
to her, so she had plenty of time to turn her trolley round calmly, like someone who’s suddenly
realized that they’ve forgotten to get something from an earlier shelf, like—for the sake of
argument—oat flakes.” (BB 153–154; emphasis original)

In the paragraph above, a suspenseful description with an ironic undertone precedes an encounter
with the “controversial dissident” Pavel Kohout. Introduced as a complex interplay of various
motivations, expectations, and social norms, this dramatic encounter is retrospectively narrated by
Kvido as the initial point of the family’s tragical decline.

“‘Hi, Pavel,’ Kvido’s mother had said back then, smiling radiantly at Pavel Kohout, giving the
staff, the purchasing public and, last but not least, herself to know that she wasn’t afraid to
speak to such a controversial dissident in such a busy place.

…

‘Hi!’

Almost at once he checked himself and lapsed into the tone of restrained affability that he had
long adopted for meetings of this kind and which had no other purpose that to evince a specific
kind of consideration for whoever he was talking to. The radiant smile on Kvido’s mother’s face
showed no sign of fading even after several minutes, so eventually he decided to utter the social
cliché that he had rarely uttered of late, well aware that, coming from him, it exposed the
addressee to crude psychological pressure.

‘So stop by sometime – when you have a moment,’ he said rather guardedly.

…

‘And there it was. The fateful moment,’ Kvido told the editor.” (BB 155–156)

The spontaneous reaction to seeing a good old friend—the “radiant smiling” of Kvido’s mother—is
retrospectively reflected as a potential threat, but also as a source of positive personal
self-evaluation by overcoming the fear of being spotted “in such a busy place”. Kohout, who is at
first pleasantly surprised by Kvido’s mother’s irresistible excitement, quickly “lapses into the
tone of restrained affability” in order to create the appearance that they are not, after all, so
good friends. The dissident is aware that in the hypernormalized social code, his mere presence
functions as a performance of symbolic pollution. Interestingly, Kohout’s effort not to cause
“crude psychological pressure” has two motivations: first, it gives Kvido’s mother some maneuvering
space, so she can decide whether she is willing to take the risk of becoming polluted herself; and
second, if she decides not to take the risk, it can ease the potential guilt she might feel by
performing conformism. Further, Kvido reflects on this situation:

“‘If the invite had been in writing, I’m a hundred per cent certain they’d have turned it down,’
Kvido asserted. ‘They’d have countless arguments to draw on. But the way it was, face to face…’”
(BB 156–157)

Kvido’s parents agreed with Kohout’s invitation not because of any inner persuasion to “live within
the truth”. Quite the contrary, their long-term endeavor was to maintain the “protective
coloration” (BB 56) by avoiding activities potentially seen as anti-regime. The sphere of
interactional ambivalence, which opened in front of them unexpectedly, became the playing field of
uncountable motivations, feelings, and aspirations. Kvido’s father even feels a “sharp pricking
sensation beneath his breastbone” (BB 157) as a bodily warning preventing him from further contact.
However, the dynamics of the face-to-face interaction result in the family’s visit to the
dissident’s house and consequently lead to a police interrogation. Kvido’s father loses his job and
the family members are penalized by a rapid decrease of well-being and social status, which again
take place on a daily basis—through stigmatization and segregation slowly developing into
resignation and complete closing off from the world. In the end, the new living conditions make
Kvido’s parents finally “live within the truth” free from any moral burden caused by negotiation
with the regime. However, it seems they have nothing to live for anymore. Due to the text’s
aesthetic dimensions, we can follow maneuvering between moral, ethical, and practical values in
everyday micro-situations and interactional dynamics. The scenes introduced in this section are
iconic of the inherent ambivalence of such maneuvering. The detailed descriptions are iconic as
they “trigge[r] a process of typification” by their “very uniqueness” (Alexander 2008b, p. 6). This
typification, however, does not refer only to collective representations and symbolic orders. More
importantly, thanks to the iconic experience excited within the reader, the individual descriptions
in the novel mediate social knowledge of emotional, tacit, and sensorial dimensions that are iconic
of the social life during the 1970s normalization in general.

Implications and Prospects

The chief motivation for establishing the strong program in the sociology of literature is to
rehabilitate literary fiction in sociological analysis. Following this emancipatory purpose has,
however, three significant, and perhaps even more critical, implications for cultural sociology and
sociological theory in general. The first deals with theorizing as a fundamental activity of any
sociological inquiry, the second relates to the textual representation of social phenomena, and the
third concerns explanation as a process of achieving social knowledge. I suggest that to unlock the
wealth of social knowledge in literature, the “literary turn” in cultural sociology must reconsider
these three fundamentals.

First, the idea to use the aesthetic experience as a basic analytical unit in social theory is far
from a new one. Most famously among sociological classics, it is usually attributed to Georg Simmel
(1968 [1896]) and his “Soziologische Aesthetik”, which “heralds an approach to the social that is
attentive to the felt experience of social actors” (Highmore 2012, p. 157). In the last decade,
this orientation was most visibly adopted by the approaches converging under the umbrella of the
“social aesthetics” (Born et al. 2017; Highmore 2012; Martin 2011; Martin and Merriman 2016) but
also as a basis for “a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production” (Born 2010) or even for an
“aesthetic conception of culture” per se (Jacobs and Hanrahan 2005, pp. 10–12).[37] These
approaches share with Simmel’s original conception the ambition to redeem the aesthetic from a
“narrowly defined sociology of Culture” focusing on cultural products (Martin and Merriman 2016, p.
132) and “extend aesthetic categories to forms of society as a whole” (Simmel 1968 [1896], p. 74,
cited in Highmore 2012, p. 157).

Here, the phenomenological imperative of grounding social aesthetics within the actors’ everyday
experience follows the post-positivist idiom of social theorizing (i.e., creating and using social
theories) as a general human ability to make sense of the world (Joas and Knöbl 2009, pp. 1–19).
Social theories created by sociologists, just like non-scholarly ones, are heterogeneous
assemblages of empirical observations, feelings, correlations, and generalizations (see
“epistemological continuum” in Alexander 1982, p. 2) grounded in broader cultural patterns, social
conventions, institutional rules, etc. Social theory is more or less useful based on its ability to
enhance understanding of a social experience so it simultaneously “makes sense” to a respective
interpretive community (Reed 2011, p. 115; Martin 2011, p. 13). That said, it does not “make much
sense” to measure the usefulness of social theory encoded in literary fiction by the criteria of
social scientific texts, as they follow norms bound to different genres. Just like sociological
text, “[f]iction is the selective ordering of experience rendered in a unique story” (Banks 2008,
p. 160). To understand it properly, we need to find an appropriate interpretation key.

Second, to decode the implicit social theory in literature, we must understand how it transforms
the social experience into a text. The complexities of social aesthetics always appear as a unity
to those who experience them (Martin and Merriman 2019, pp. 136–137). Thus, the textual accounts of
this aesthetic experience that strive for “phenomenological validity” (Martin 2011, p. 105) must
encode the complexity and subtlety as well as unity and generality. Both sociology and literature
developed various strategies for how to do it. While, for example, realistic fiction and
ethnography proceed through “thick descriptions” (Becker 2007, p. 284), more lyrically oriented
texts adopt the way of metaphors and stylistic impressions (Abbott 2007). Many literary and
sociological texts have in common their ambition to grasp what Highmore (2012, p. 158) calls “moods
and modes of modernity”. That is why Goldmann (1980) adopted and de-ontologized György Lukács’ term
“totality” referring to the spirit of an epoch (or Zeitgeist) as a meaningful whole mediated by
literary texts. The principle is analogous to the process of “bracketing-out” suggested by
Alexander and Smith (2003, p. 56n55) in their strong program manifesto: “[T]he ontological reality
of perceived objects is temporarily repressed in order to search for those subjective elements in
the actor’s intentionality that establish the sense of verisimilitude”. Usually, however, both in
sociology and literature, it is the combination of thick descriptions and skillful use of
“brackets” that creates compelling social knowledge such as in The Man Without Qualities by Robert
Musil (Harrington 2002), Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Smith 2004), Clifford Geertz’s
(1973) “Deep Play”, or, returning to social aesthetics, Georgina Born’s (2010) sophisticated
approach to music production. Even though literature often employs fictional worlds or
intentionally disrupts our sense of reality, as a referential system it relates to
intersubjectively shared life-worlds in the same way as social sciences (cf. Pavel 1986, p. 25).
The strong program in the sociology of literature offers tools to make this reference more visible,
so sociologists can once and for all abandon the false hierarchy between “real” and “fictional” and
treat social theory in literature with due respect (see also Watson 2021, p. 3).

Third, and perhaps most intriguing when it comes to the aesthetic experience and lyrical/aesthetic
style of writing—whether we call it social aesthetics (Born et al. 2017; Highmore 2012; Martin
2011), lyrical sociology (Abbott 2007), sociological fiction (Watson 2021), or just literary
fiction (Banks 2008)—is the problem of explanation. In social theorizing, there is no mere
representation of reality, but it is always its re-presentation—“re-writing of reality” (Ricoeur
1976, p. 42), which connects the text with a concrete socio-historical milieu while at the same
time re-arranging it, re-naming it, adding something new to it (cf. Reed 2011, p. 162).[38] Social
aesthetics proposes to base the “verisimilitude” (see Atkinson 1990, pp. 39–42) of such
re-presentations on the coherence with the sensorial experience of the social phenomena
(“phenomenological validity”, Martin 2011, p. 105) rather than the intellectual authority granted
by scientific institutions and standardized procedures. For social aesthetics, an interpretation
can become an explanation if it informs us beyond the interpreted case (typically answering the
“why” question) while remaining “in the same phenomenological world as the actions … explain[ed]”
(Martin 2011, p. 336).

The idea of explanation as finding “regularity … in the realm of the concrete” (Martin 2011, p.
344) is coherent with Reed’s (2011, pp. 123–162) conception of explanation via interpreting the
meaningful surroundings of the inquired social fact as a general principle for interpretive
sociology. Both approaches, however, understate the role of the text as the paramount mediator of
the explanation. In this article, I focused on the emergence of social knowledge when the text
immerses the reader in the reading process. By iconic augmentation, the authors encode within the
text not only their own experience but also more stable patterns through which the social
experience is filtered both cognitively and emotionally. These stable patterns are then enlivened
again once the text absorbs the reader in the iconic experience of reading. Thanks to iconic
augmentation, aesthetically oriented texts (regardless of the genre) excel in channeling those
patterns of social life that are “affective” rather than “effective” (Watson 2016, p. 437). Ashley
Watson (2016, p. 437) introduced sympraxis as a semiotic concept wherein “the mimetic side of
signs” is complemented by “energetic, emotive, involving, and creatively engaged”. And this is
exactly when the lyrical comes into play.

Lyrical sociology proposed by Andrew Abbott (2007, pp. 82–96) uses “lyrical stance” to account for
the phenomenological situatedness of social actors in time, space, and their “emotional engagement”
with the world, thus fulfilling the criteria of explanation in social aesthetics (see “first-person
explanations” in Martin 2011, p. 23). Simultaneously, lyrical sociology mediates this account
through a text by means of figurative language that is both emotionally engaged—the lyrical
sociologist, as well as social actors, are “un-ironically engaged” (Abbott 2007, p. 74) in the
situation—and engaging—the lyrical sociologist strives to engage the reader by the text. The goal,
then, is to capture the social experience so that it does not lose its indexical emotional spin
even when textually codified and eventually read. “Re-presenting” the ontological reality through
lyrical style can mediate the sympractic dimensions of social life—together with inarticulate and
non-discursive social experience—in a condensed and patterned way, along the lines of what Raymond
Williams called a “structure of feeling” (1977, pp. 128–135). It is because the act of reading
itself becomes an “experiential signifier” (Bartmanski 2016, p. 546), which arouses a specific mode
of meaning-making and ignites the iconic social knowledge.

Since the foundation of sociology, social theories use metaphors and figurative style to account
for discrepancies, ambiguities, and ever-going flux that are iconic of social life. Weber’s “shell
as hard as steel”, Marx’s “womb of the old society” or master metaphors “in which society ‘itself’
is imagined ‘as’ something: organism, cybernetic or autopoietic system, drama, game, text” (Turner
2010, pp. 2–3) did not become famous despite they employ aesthetic style but rather because of
that. When encountering the aesthetic in literature, however, sociologists often shy away as if
from the fear of “mysterious” and “sacred” poetic forms. This “syndrome of lyrical exceptionalism”
(Váňa 2020c, p. 31) usually results in the ignorance of literary meaning in favor of studying
production and reception or translating the aesthetic into neat sociological categories. My
suggestion is that through reconsidering how both literary and social scientific texts 1) theorize,
2) represent, and 3) explain social life, we can more accurately trace out the fruitful social
knowledge mediated by these texts.

We can consider Abbott’s argument for lyrical sociology the other way around: Why should we invent
new sophisticated metaphors and lyrical sociological accounts when we have, in fact, an abundance
of lyrical texts at our disposal, but we ignore or misuse them? As I showed in the empirical
analysis, mobilizing literature for social knowledge is especially useful when it comes to grasping
the “grey zone” of social experience. The great strength of literature is capturing uncertainty,
ambivalence, and indeterminacy through detailed descriptions and dynamic micro-situations, which
are at the same time iconic of broader socio-historical frames. For example, Bliss was it in
Bohemia depicts the semiotics of social life during normalization through daily small talks and
random encounters. Having archetypal features of a “common Czech family” (Viewegh 1991), the
characters go through situations that are unique and generally identifiable at the same time. The
upcoming challenge for the strong program in the sociology of literature is to further elaborate on
methodological intricacies of the relation between literary form/aesthetic structure of a
particular text and various social milieus within which this text was produced, received, and to
which it refers. Here, the traditional approaches of the sociology of literature, such as Lucien
Goldmann’s (1980) genetic structuralism, might be a worthwhile choice.

Acknowledgments

This research was financially supported by a Specific research project at Masaryk University,
project number MUNI/A/1475/2020.

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________________________________

[1] jan.vana@mail.muni.cz

[2] Lewis Coser’s (1963) Introductory Reader being a classic example; see also a more recent reader
by Edling and Rydgren (2010).

[3] Perhaps paradoxically, Latour brought the idea of “non-human actors” as a basis for the
Actor-Network Theory from literary science. Now is the time for this concept to return where it
once originated (Váňa 2020b, p. 7).

[4] Founded in 1926, the Prague Linguistic Circle was an association of linguists theoretically
based on, and critically reflecting upon, Saussurean structuralism and Russian formalism.

[5] The so-called “normalization” in Czechoslovakia refers to a period between the Warsaw Pact
invasion in August 1968 and the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The term originally comes from the
official document published by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia reporting on the events of
Prague Spring and the post-1968 as “consolidation” and “normalization” (ÚV KSČ 1970, p. 127, 135)
as of returning the country to the “normal” state of issues before 1968.

[6] Meaning reconstruction, this term promoted by the Communist Party’s General Secretary Mikhail
Gorbachev refers to the political reformation taking place in the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s.

[7] Whereas Iser (1972) refers to the “aesthetic experience” only in relation to the experience of
reading, Alexander (2008b) understands “iconic experience” as a sensuous experience of any
aesthetic surface. Thus, I conceive the aesthetic experience as a subset of iconic experience.

[8] For Alexander (2015, p. 5), the claim that “surface and depth combine arbitrarily” is also of
high political and ideological importance as it supports the idea of the “emancipating power of
culture” (Alexander 2011, p. 92). “The conflation of surface and depth is … dangerous” because
iconicity “makes meaning seem natural, as if it grows out of appearance, as if the meaning can only
be that appearance” (Alexander 2015, p. 5). Admitting that surface and depth were not connected
arbitrarily would make ideological space for conservative and essentialist thinking.

[9] To be precise, Jakobson also introduced the so-called “artifice”, which stands for “imputed
similarity” (Waugh 1980, p. 71): non-arbitrary connections between parallelisms, repetitions, and
equivalencies, which are made “artificially”—typically in poetry.

[10] “’Why do you always say Joan and Margery, yet never Margery and Joan? Do you prefer Joan to
her twin sister?’ ‘Not at all, it just sounds smoother.’” The “smooth sound”, explains Jakobson
(1960, p. 357), comes from the fact that “the precedence of the shorter names suits the speaker …
as a well-ordered shape of the message”. Another example is a word choice: We say “horrible
Harry”—and “not dreadful, terrible, frightful, disgusting”—because of the poetic device of
paronomasia, that is, a grouping of words that sound similar but have different meanings (Jakobson
1960, p. 357).

[11] A well-known linguistic example comes from the 1951 political campaign of Dwight Eisenhower,
playing a pun on his nickname. The success of using this linguistic principle was repeated in a
1992 popular commercial “Be Like Mike” featuring American basketball player Michael Jordan.

[12] A connection of words based on the repetition of initial consonants.

[13] Binder (2018, p. 404) understands Peirceian “interpretants” as the “act of articulation” that
stands for an “idea produced in the mind” by the Saussurean signifier.

[14] Saussure was concerned with the langue/parole interaction in the present moment. Russian
Formalists studied literary works as separate from their socio-historical background.

[15] Literary texts achieve independent “career outside its original context of production”
(Santana-Acuña 2014, p. 98). This adds an important diachronic aspect to the interpretation of the
text. Diverse interpretations influence each other between various interpretive communities.

[16] In 2002, around 200 000 copies per every published book by Viewegh were sold on average
(Ciglerová and Viewegh 2002).

[17] Even authors who sell tens of thousands of copies of their novels must keep their other job
(Hartman 2012).

[18] Seventeen novels, six collections of short stories, three autobiographical books, two
collections of newspaper columns, and two collections of literary parodies.

[19] On the Czech book market, titles exceeding 10 000 sold copies are considered bestsellers. Very
few of the most successful books cross the line of 100 000 sold copies.

[20] In the Czech literary sphere during communism, this idea was epitomized in conceiving the
author as “conscience of the nation”; i.e., someone who provides the reader with a moral and
ethical compass (Wachtel 2006, pp. 14–43).

[21] British translator of the novel David Short (2015, p. x) says that translating the title was a
“HUGE problem”, so he finally resorted to paraphrasing Wordsworth’s poem “The French Revolution”.
Even though the British title has a poetic quality, it does not, however, capture the original
meaning.

[22] This title was used for a popular movie based on the novel.

[23] A more precise translation of the Czech original would be “Proletarians of all countries,
unite!”, which is also more in line with the German original of the Communist Manifesto:
“Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!”

[24] Henceforth, the acronym “BB” refers to Viewegh (2015 [1992]).

[25] Out of 15 million citizens of Czechoslovakia, some 2 million were members of the Party.

[26] This thesis is based on the idea that the Communist Party did not have “total” control over
the citizens, thus leaving some maneuvering space for people’s agency (Blaive 2017; Kolář and
Pullmann 2016).

[27] Originally in Russian “zhit’ ne po lzhi”, the term was coined by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in
1974.

[28] The notion of “living within the truth”, as vocally advocated by Havel, earned a prominent
position among Czech dissidents. Most significantly, the idea was disseminated through unofficial
(or “underground”) philosophy seminars promoting the phenomenology of philosopher Jan Patočka. The
existentialist narrative, however, has a long history reaching back to the fifteenth century when
the myth of Jan Hus has been established as a symbol of national martyrdom.

[29] Because there was a single ballot, the elections were not a matter of political choice but a
manifestation of supporting the Party.

[30] Due to its phonetic features, the English translation “Sweetie” captures this meaning only
partially.

[31] Kvido’s mother used to work as an actor in the National Theater before 1968.

[32] Šperk urges Kvido’s father to join his football team in order to be “visible” (BB 83) as in
the sense of belonging to the socialist community.

[33] For the application of linguistics and semiotics in cultural sociology, see Binder (2018).

[34] According to Jakobson (1960, p. 358), the “empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic
function” is that the “poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection into the axis of combination”. That is, the way how words and sentences are combined
(syntagmatic relation in linguistics) is more important than what words selected to convey the
meaning (paradigmatic relation).

[35] Personal consultation with Radim Marada, August 2020.

[36] I am aware of the danger of conceptual confusion between two conceptualizations of
“arbitrariness”. However, it should be clear that “arbitrariness” as a subjectively perceived
quality of life during normalization refers to the phenomenological lifeworld, while “arbitrariness
of the sign” stands for a conventional sign system derived from linguistics.

[37] I owe a great deal of gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their
suggestion to discuss social aesthetics, which I find immensely fruitful in comparison to my
approach and to Reed’s (2011, p. 10) notion of “interpretive epistemic mode”.

[38] See also Felski’s (2008, p. 85) conception of literary mimesis as a “re-description”, “a chain
of interpretive processes rather than … an imitation”.