"Finally I have the word...": The effect of the obscene between excess, revenge and melancholia in the underground literature of the 1950ies
Abstract
Against the backdrop of the outright phobic tabooisation and removal of eroticism and sexuality from the arts and from all areas of public life in the "socialist society" following February 1948, the erotic texts of Jana Krejcarová represent a "total" provocation and subversion of the sexless socialistic realism and its petty prudishness. The extreme obscenity of Jana Krejcarová's erotic texts, which also contain elements of parody and irony, coupled with the high degree of aggressivity and fierceness (especially the "Letter" addressed to Egon Bondy from the year 1962), can be read and interpreted also as "revenge" for the devaluation of physicality and sexuality.
Nevertheless, the subversive excesses in her "poetry of the obscene" constitute another, latent plane, on which obscenity appears as an ambivalent phenomenon: as an excess and the tearing down of all boundaries it refers to its "opponents": order, the setting of boundaries, and melancholy.