K poetice Vyvolávání Daniely Hodrové

This essay considers stylistic changes in Daniela Hodrová’s last novels – Théta, Komedie, and Vyvolávání (Evokings). These works share the stylistic features of the repetition and blending of motifs, whose meeting and interplay give rise to a distinctive vision of the world. ‘Flow’, ‘web’, and ‘textile’ are metaphors the author uses to characterize her own writing in Citlivé město (Sensitive city, 2006), a book-length essay. Here she gives hints of much that distinguishes her recent novels from classic works of fiction and what was probably most consistently achieved in Vyvolávání: ‘the reeling of the text, particularly the woven, into its inner being, into a narrative abyss’. The author first considers the structurally complex action of this text and then indicates the significant countervailing role of the rhythmic articulation into sections of utterance, which preserve the requisite fluency of the author’s sentences. The motifs here always address the reader in certain configurations, whether they are events (fictive or factual), the telling of dreams, or the retelling of myths. Certain characters also appear in them, presenting their actions, thoughts, and feelings. All these epic elements are preserved in Vyvolávání, but each receives its distinctive treatment. Wholeness is disrupted; elements are regrouped, again mixed up in quasi-eternal returns. Arrangements of higher semantic units, in characters’ portraits and stories, always take place with discontinuities, as if it were necessary to search again and again for their unapparent inner links. To keep both creative forces in equilibrium, the clarity of naming and the play of imagination and dreams were clearly the author’s goal during the creation of the work, where one usually talks about the world of characters and composition. The author’s novel has not relinquished these, though it conceives them in its own way. Her aim continues to be the meshing and blending of motifs and the flow of life, its oneiric river.