The everyday "chiliastic" world in novel Spas by Ivan Matoušek The everyday "chiliastic" world in novel Spas by Ivan Matoušek The everyday "chiliastic" world in novel Spas by Ivan Matoušek
2016
Abstract
Published in 2001, Ivan Matoušek's novel Spas depicts the everyday world of "chiliasm". Despite the term's religious meaning, the novel ironically portrays life in the post-modern society that has lost traditional values.
The image of everydayness constructed by the ironic, self-conscious narrator is quite ambivalent; the description of everyday triviality helps build the universal modern myth, while exposing the grotesque behavior of bizarre and colorful fictional characters. That tension can be seen as "ironic ambivalence", inherent to the novel; interpreting the novel's central conflict in this way, we are indebted to Vladimir Jankélévitch's 1936 concept of irony.