On Jaroslav Hašek

Literature has a long and beautiful tradition of celebrating idiocy. Literary fools walk through the world without being formed by it, so that their mere presence in a story comes to feel like a judgment on everyone around them. Think of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, whose weakness before even the most benign forms of daily iniquity drives others furious—and him mad. So, too, Faulkner’s Benjy, protected from the rot at the heart of the Compson family by his own inability to recognize it. While other characters struggle to reconcile their knowledge of how to operate successfully in the world with an uneasy sense of how that world ought to be, literary fools exist in another realm, floating through stories that might batter and damage their bodies but cannot corrupt their souls.