Stop Making Sense: An introduction to “I”

I first came across Vojtěch Mašek and Džian Baban’s work over a decade ago in Prague when I picked up a copy of Sloni v marienbadu (2004) (literally, Elephants in Marienbad) in the Řehoř(Gregor) Samsa bookstore. This discovery was more than fortuitous, since it contains witty references to Franz Kafka (which you can read here), and is at home among the Kafka-themed drawings and décor.

This graphic novel, the first in Masek and Baban’s Monstercabaret trilogy, is part of what is called “Generation Zero”—graphic narratives produced by a generation of writers and artists post-1989 that were more daring, more experimental than any comics previously released in the Czech Republic under Communism. The Monstercabaret trilogy and various spin-offs (including the comic strip Conversations from the Residence of Hermann Schlectfreund in the literary newspaper A2) won five Muriel prizes—the highest prize for comics in Czechia—between 2007 and 2009. While they were students at Prague’s prestigious film school, FAMU (where Masek is now a lecturer), Masek and Baban cowrote Sloni v Marienbadu (which is also a word play on “Last Year in Marienbad,” the film by Alan Resnais, and the word elephant in Czech [slon]—a very specific kind of film school joke). Since the “Elephants in Marienbad” pun doesn’t play well in English, the authors titled the translation “The Metamorphosis of Damian Trunk” as a tribute to Kafka.

Mašek has written the scripts for a dozen films, including most recently Occupation (2021) and Arved (2022), the latter of which he also directed (unfortunately neither film is available yet in English). He frequently collaborates on comics projects where he writes the script and someone else illustrates it, as with the graphic novel Svata Barbora (Saint Barbara) whose script he coauthored with Marek Šindelka, with art by Marek Pokorny. In this case, the script is actually a translation of a Schnitzler story made by his friend Marek Přibil, which Mašek and Baban included because it fits the larger theme of their book so well. What you will read here is an English translation of a Czech translation of the German original, which means that there are some features to the text that are distinctly “Czech.”

I embarked on this translation project with my collaborator, David Randl, a native Czech speaker who majored in German at Brown University, over six years ago. We spent many afternoons debating the nuances of the text, enjoying its odd digressions and unique phrasing. In Czech, the imperfective tense indicates a repeated action in the past. We don’t really have this in English, and I’ve chosen to exaggerate the strangeness of this shift by using the conditional: “Every morning he would wake up at seven…” This choice emphasizes that we are gazing into a hall of mirrors, in a dizzying sequence where Huber drinks his coffee every morning. Most sentences are long, unwieldly, excessively “proper” and stilted, like the social constraints Schnitzler, and in turn Mašek, are tacitly mocking. It can be challenging to read—you might lose track of where you began, but this confusion is deliberate. Mašek’s work turns on questions of identity, fact and fiction, and doubling, and if this excerpt intrigues you, you can see the full range of his talents, this time in color, in his masterpiece of a graphic novel, The Sisters Dietl (2023).

Let’s consider how Schnitzler’s short story “I” is set within the larger graphic novel in which it appears.The Metamorphosis of Damian Trunk is divided into “acts” that take the narrative “stage” one by one—the story is near the book’s conclusion. In the first pages, we see the audience impatiently waiting for Fred Brunhold (the fictional impresario behind Monstercabaret) to begin the show; nestled among the various bureaucrats, misfits, and bourgeois families, is Josef Huber, the protagonist of Schnitzler’s story. Two other plotlines alternate as the various “acts” advance; in the first, writer Josef Lipnik and editor Hermann Schlectfreund (“bad friend”) have repeated conversations in which Josef tries, in vain, to enlist Schlectfreund’s help. Josef’s pitiful attempts to earn praise result in fragmented, absurd dialogues that traverse references to Kafka, Chekov, Kundera, and Dali, all of which pathetically sputter to an inevitable, and inconclusive, halt. The second plotline follows office bureaucrat Damian Trunk, who—reminiscent of K. from Kafka’s The Trial—is dramatically abducted for no apparent reason. In Masek and Baban’s sci-fi horror remix of this nightmare, Damian is seized by ominous thugs in gas masks and subjected to a grotesque operation where a “trunk” is grafted onto his face (also an allusion to Lynch’s film The Elephant Man).

At first, these two plots seem an unlikely frame for the graphic narrative before you.“I” is an obscure story, as yet untranslated into English, written by the Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler in 1927. Monstercabaret (with a nod to Cabaret Voltaire), has the flavor of the early twentieth century avant-garde that mocks the bourgeois propriety of bowler hats and petticoats, and aligns well with Schnitzler’s aesthetic. “I” was written two years after the Dream Novella (Traumnovelle), better known to English-speaking audiences in director Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999). And like the Dream Novella, Schnitzler’s story frequently shifts between reality and dream; scholars debate about whether Freud influenced Schnitzler, or vice versa. Our protagonist Josef Huber is, on the surface, “a completely normal man,” comfortably ensconced in his bourgeois routine with his pretty wife and two young children. However, during a walk, he encounters a sign that simply reads, PARK, and the apparent obviousness of the sign leads him to a series of reveries that make him anxious and unhinged, rather like the other characters in the Monstercabaret.

In this dreamlike state, Huber senses that words are becoming detached from their referents (as if the signifier were ripped from the signified) and hover disconcertingly, rather like the mayfly he notices in the park. For Huber, ordinary details of daily life—observing people in a café, reading a newspaper—are suddenly stripped of their meaning. Artist Mašek represents this epistemological breakdown through collages of torn photocopies and fragments of paper, remixing them with his own drawings and lettering. Consequently, the reader must swing from one piece of text to another like a trapeze artist, replicating the confusion of Huber himself. Words in the captions are repeated in the extradiegetic space of the page among the drawings, creating an odd echo that is humorous and yet bewildering. Even Huber’s domestic space becomes suspect as he vainly attempts to pin down meanings by labeling his surroundings with slips of paper. As the story hurdles towards its oneiric conclusion, I can almost hear David Byrne exclaiming, “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife” in his 1981 version of an existential crisis from the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.”

My sincere thanks to “Vojta” Mašek, who allowed me to visit his studio in the fall of 2023 while I was in Prague for the FRAME festival. It felt a little like visiting Jan Švankmajer’s cabinet of curiosities to see the desk where the magic is conjured.