In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. That idealistic tradition may be (like Havel's reputation) at present somewhat on the wane, and yet Havel remains, even out of office now, a reminder that, for all the absurdity, one has to keep going and hang onto one's faith in the challenge of taking responsibility for life. And yet Havel's political writings have also made him famous as a spokesperson for an enlightened international humanitarian understanding among all people. He made his name as a playwright inspired by Theatre of the Absurd (especially Ionesco), and some of his best known plays depict the absurdity of a world in which language itself is constantly invented and re-invented to serve some bewildering and oppressive bureaucracy. The work of Havel is interesting in this respect. The latter are not, as so often in the West, merely a fashionable response to personal angst or a convenient protest against conformity, but earned insights into the realities of the world where the secret police can arrive in the middle of the night and arrest and even execute someone for something which was not only permitted but approved of a short while before, all in the name of some ideology announced in the latest "official" language. Hence, alongside the Slav idealism of Mucha, the fervent hopes for a humanitarian and democratic Czechoslovakia of Karel Čapek and Tomáš Masarak, and the idealistic socialist dreams of two generations of young people in the 1930s and 1940s, we also see the black comedy of Hasek, the extreme sense of alienation of Kafka, and the bitter ironies of Kundera. The most important of these is the most obvious: this history has been marked by a strong tradition of national idealism and heady new hopes which have been repeatedly broken by the brutal realities of history, a repetitive cycle which has contributed to a strong sense of paradox and absurdity. But we can, I think, make a couple of observations. To set down some easy connections between such a turbulent history and the works we will be studying is, no doubt, rash. Some Reflections on the Narrative of Czech History
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