Interplay of Ontological and Non-Ontological Discourses in Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude
Interplay of Ontological and Non-Ontological Discourses in Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude
Interplay of Ontological and Non-Ontological Discourses in Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude
Arindam Nandi
M.Phil 2018-19
Department of English
University of Calcutta
5 April 2019
Abstract
Bohumil Hrabal's novel Too Loud a Solitude is seen to comprise of two parallel narrative
discourses which follow different epistemological principles. Whereas the first of the narrative
voices which formulate the ontological discourse relies heavily upon Hrabal's use of intertextual
references to canonical western texts, authorial figures and allusions to the Descartian Cogito,
the alternate non-ontological discourse tries to understand the experiences and encounters of the
These two discursive voices exist simultaneously in Bohumil Hrabal's novel, and interact
with each other to create a complex narrative structure which goes on to provide, both the novel
Furthermore, the non-ontological voice in the text which traces the traditional ideals and
notions of Western art and metaphysics is used by the narrator Hanta as a mode of digression, to
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conceal and deviate from the absence of his lost lover. An absence which becomes the central
problematic in Hanta's life, which in turn is revealed and assessed by the non-ontological strain
in the novel, through the Derridean metaphors of cinders and ashes, thereby intertwining the two
ashes]
Introduction
“Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder- the starry firmament
above me and the moral law within me," but, changing my mind, I leafed through the
younger Kant, and found an even more beautiful passage: “When the tremulous radiance
of a summer night fill with twinkling stars, and the moon itself is full, I am slowly drawn
into state of enhanced sensitivity, made of friendship and disdain for the world and
Bohumil Hrabal's novel Too Loud a Solitude can be said to follow the simultaneous
presence of two narrative voices. That is, the storytelling mechanism in the text displays a double
voicedness which goes on to create a parallel and divergent narrative. While one of the voices
shuffle through the cross cultural currents in the history of Western metaphysics, the other voice
tries to trace the event-like nature of real life insights which epitomize the narrative moment of
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the narrator Hanta - unlike the first, this second voice understands life not through ‘philosophy’,
‘literature’ or ‘aesthetics’, but partakes directly in the flow of existence through instances of
1. The subjective orientation of being and knowledge on the one hand, and
However, before we undertake this comparative study between these two prevalent
ontological2 and knowledge-oriented first voice and the non-ontological3 and event-centric
What will entail the ontological sense in this paper is a more traditional and subject
oriented comprehension of the meaning of human life and history as is illustrated by Hanta's
constant divergences into literary, philosophical and theological works. This would be discussed
in the paper by constructing a narrative made out of the many intertextual references which the
narrator of the novel frequently resorts to, from the selection of rare manuscripts which he finds
The books and works which he refers to go on to construct a coherent narrative discourse
of its own in the novel which formulates a particular way by which human history and life can be
The non-ontological sense on the other hand can be understood by the narrator's
understanding of his own life as a series of discreet yet thematically connected moments or
These events occur only as pure phenomenon and do not implicate any kind of latent
meaning which can be interpreted or gotten at. Subsequently, these moments of pure
phenomenon not only provide the narrator with a more instinctual and intuitive understanding of
life in its present and fleeting moment, but also mark a particular way of knowing the world and
the events which take place inside it, events which remain irreducible and render themselves as
Therefore, whereas the historical and knowledge oriented voice in Hrabal's novel would
depict its narrator's continual reliance on ontological modes of knowing through a number of
intertextual references which he makes, references of works that remain emblematic of Western
literature and metaphysics, and references which thereby always trace themselves back to a
subject, an author or a philosophical doctrine, the immediate and untraceable nature of the non-
ontological would on the other hand, be investigated by Jacques Derrida's metaphor of ‘cinders
and ashes’, which he takes up in his book Cinders, to illustrate the ultimately irreducible and
intransitive nature of being and experience. This idea of intransitivity in Derrida's book would
relate directly to certain encounters which Hrabal's narrator goes on to experience throughout the
course of the novel, experiences which Jacques Derrida would consider, "as the better paradigm
for...the trace- something that erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself" (Cinders 1).
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Such wisdom as I have has come to me unwittingly, and I look on my brain as a mass of
The first chapter of the novel itself introduces us to the related questions of ‘Will’ and the
‘Subject’, and how reality needs the both (simultaneously) to exist at all. The narrator displays
his epistemological strength, his ‘will to power’, to constitute how he envisions the world around
him by explaining why he has been drinking beer for thirty five years,
“I, who live in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations, drink so that
what I read will prevent me from falling into everlasting sleep” (Hrabal 3), immediately
assigning a greater philosophic depth to his otherwise pedantic banter by citing Hegel's
Philosophy of Right- “...because I share with Hegel the view that a noble hearted man is not yet a
In the second part of this treatise named On Morality, Hegel emphasizes the role of
human subjectivity in the construction of the universe, thereby assigning the world an undisputed
locus in the name of the subject and its being. Stating man's ability to be simultaneously aware of
Subjectivity is the conception made definite, differing therefore from the abstract, general
will. Further, the will of the subject, though it still retains traces of self-involved
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simplicity, is the will of an individual, who is an object for himself. Hence subjectivity is
This subject orientedness of both the narrator and as well as the novel allows the former
to formulate a system of epistemological representations which not only privileges the way the
narrator Hanta views life in the working class underbelly of post-war Prague, but also depict how
his personal history as a compactor of old books makes him interpret the world around him in a
As a compactor of wastepaper and old books Hrabal's narrator remains very clear about
his tendencies to correlate his thoughts to the world around him, a correlation which is not at all
unmediated but always according to him, related to the unorthodox education he has obtained
from the books he has come across at the press in which he works. In fact the ‘freeplay’ of
subjective thoughts based on his experiences on the one hand and epistemological doctrines
which he gathers from his life as a worker in the hydraulic press on the other hand, provide the
narrative surface of the novel with two different discourses which constantly relate and refer to
Using a metaphor of his workplace Hanta stresses upon this very notion of
‘interdiscursive’ freeplay4 which is presented in the text, claiming at the very beginning of the
novel that,
I [he] am a jug filled with water both magic and plain...My education has been so
unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my
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and ‘mortality’ as a destroyer of old and discarded manuscripts, the values of which remain
universal, and his simultaneous familiarity with many of those works, makes his narration sway
between the metaphors of digestion and decomposition, the philosophical and the experiential
and the sacred and profane, as he goes on to describe the functioning of the hydraulic press in the
…the wastepaper, piled to the ceiling, wet and mouldy, ferments in a way that makes
This psychological blending of high and low culture is seen again as he refers to the
works of Carl Sandburg and more particularly to his poem Momus while leaving the
crematorium after the death of his mother, associating both the event and the text in an
epistemological interplay,
I watched the smoke rising from the chimney into the sky, watched mama making her
way upward to the heavens, but before leaving I decided to...stand there and think of the
lines from Sandburg about how all that remains of a man is the phosphorus for a box of
The reference made is to emphasize the limits of human mortality and the transient nature
of the human flesh, a similar theme which the poet expounds in his poem Momus. In the poem, a
classical symbol of satire and mockery is used by Sandburg to epitomize the face of wisdom in
an anthropocentric universe that is always and forever consumed by conflict, war and death. In
his poem, the figure of Momus is represented as a bronze statue which stands erect in the face of
continuous adversity through the course of human history. It survives through the many changing
fortunes of human joy and misery, the cycles of life, which always ends in despair, war and
bloodshed; yet Momus maintains his smiling face of everlasting wisdom through every such
alteration in Man's fate, knowing completely well the undeniable and equally futile tendencies
present in us as a species, and consequently, offering an ironical yet vivid and in depth critique
I wonder, Momus,
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look with deep laughter
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known, solemn repetitions of history.
A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from your kindliness of bronze,
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple, silent; (Sandburg 103).
towards the irrefutable presence of conflict, war and deterioration in the history of Man, and the
wise man's self alienating course from such a predestination, Hanta's closely packed allusions in
the third chapter to the ‘Marxist Theory of the State’, Hegel's idea of a ‘dialectically eternal
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progression’, and Arthur Rimbaud's poem A Season in Hell reinstates the narrator's vision of
man's political predicament and offers a close critique of utopian socialism, stating the former's
close proximity to human sentiments, which are ultimately selfish and centered around the fear
I was always amazed at Hegel and what he taught me, namely, that the only one thing on
earth worthy of fear is a situation that is petrified, congealed, or dying, and the only thing
worthy of joy is a situation where not only the individual but also society as a whole
Furthermore, the reference to Rimbaud introduces into the novel and within the narrator a
more internal and spiritual sense of conflict, finally reversing the interior-exterior dialectic by
introducing Christ's assertion of war from Mathhew 10:34, stating how "I could grasp the true
nature of Christ's words, I come not to send peace but a sword"(Hrabal 23).
The narrator at this particular juncture in the novel presents/reiterates the theme of
perpetual conflict by juxtaposing historical and political battles with the battle of the human soul.
The juxtaposition is not just a superficial one, but runs through the context of his own life. Hanta
imagines, below his rat infested apartment "two tightly organized rodent factions engaged at this
very moment in a life and death struggle for supremacy of the sewers, a great rodent war over the
rights to all the refuse and fecal matter flowing through the sewers to Podbaba" (Hrabal 22). This
Hegelian metaphor of historical conflict is further accentuated by turning the ordinary and
everyday conflict between rats into including universal values, cultural ethics and a deep rooted
Today however my friends made an even deeper impression on me with reports of a war,
a total, humanlike war, between white rats and brown, which though it ended in an
absolute victory of the white, had led to their immediate breakdown into two groups, two
With the metaphor finally coming a full circle when the narrator cites Hegel from the
The winning side would again break down, like gases and metals and all organic matter,
into two dialectically opposed camps, the struggle for supremacy bringing life back to
life, the desire for conflict resolution, promising imminent equilibrium, the world never
The reference to Rimbaud's A Season in Hell completes the final extension of the
Hegelian conceit. The poem, composed by Arthur Rimbaud on the verge of psychological
madness and a spiritual impasse, follows the two voices of the poet. Much like Hrabal's narrative
the poem construes a spiritual journey which begins with a descent into the poet's mind and
concludes with the section named Farewell where the poet humanizes such an internal conflict,
imparting it upon the universal man relating it to our history of violence, and reminding his
readers that, "A spiritual battle is as brutal as the battle of men" (Rimbaud 303).
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A testimony which remains reminiscent of the narrator's view of his own life in Prague
(and also of many others like him) as he mentions at the end of the third chapter; a life that is as
…my mind is clear by the thought that I am not alone, that there are thousands like me in
Prague working underground...and that they have love, living, life-giving thoughts
This constructivist undercurrent (of conflict, war, violence and decay) which the narrator
of the novel uses, by his employment of citations, references and allusions to great European
writers and texts constitutes the ontological discourse in Hrabal's novel. This ontology,
elaborated upon by the narrator of Too Loud a Solitude, functions purely in the realm of
and Western philosophy's overriding obsession with the superior status of the author and the
subject on the one hand and with the related themes of conflict, war, death and decay on the
other hand- an obsession with which the narrator Hanta is able to identify himself and therefore
subsequently embark upon a philosophical-literary journey to understand and locate his existence
as a working class individual living in late twentieth century Prague, within the political and
cultural world around him and inside the nature of the universe as a whole.
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“... how in the silence, the absolute silence of the night, when the senses lie dormant, an
immortal spirit speaks in a nameless tongue of things that can be grasped but not described”
(Hrabal 40-41).
The narrator of Too loud a Solitude, Hanta, displays a particular proclivity towards
describing ‘occurrences’ and ‘experiences’ in his life that refuses to be broken down into
encounters with any kinds of meaning or truth, both in the ‘immediate sense’ and also in the
‘universal epistemological sense’. That is, the narrator Hanta focuses on specific ‘events’ from
his life that remain irreducible yet contribute heavily to how the readers understand the narrator's
journey inside the novel, his desires and wishes and the most intimate driving forces which
constitutes how he thinks, what he thinks about and the eventual outcome of these thoughts.
understanding of life and meaning, with respect to the narrator of the novel. That is, unlike the
ontological strain in the narrative, which focuses more on traditional euro-centric literary and
philosophical works, this non-ontological development and analysis tries to illustrate and
understand how the narrator's one true yet unfortunate experience of love with the initially
unnamed gypsy girl dominates his obsession to understand life and interpret its meaning from
old books which he discovers in his press - a meaning which is suffused with the ideas of
‘decomposition’, ‘death’, ‘decay’ and ‘everlasting conflicts’, thereby compensating for his
rejection in love and his constant desire to consequently cultivate an asymptomatic death drive.
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This section of the paper strives to understand the ‘event-oriented’ nature of this specific
discourse that runs throughout the context of the novel by the double metaphors of ‘cinders’ and
‘ashes’ which Jacques Derrida presents and uses in his book Cinders.
Jacques Derrida describes in his book how certain ‘irreducible’ and ‘unfixed’ events can
be used to understand particular aspects of reality, aspects which in this scenario helps us
interpret the nature of Hanta's life and his innermost obsessions and passions.
According to Derrida, pure event-like occurrences (much like the burning cinder) point to
1. Traces without any origins. A ‘traceless trace’ that does not trail back to an origin ‘Subject’ or
‘Being’, but refers back upon the nature of the ‘trace-event’ itself.
2. The transitory nature of things, and therefore the ‘absence of being’ and the ‘presence of non-
being’, and
3. How events reveal the conditions of the possibility of their own existence. That is, they
‘realizations’ on the part of the narrator, each of which fulfill the conditions of the ‘irreducible
event’ set by Jacques Derrida in Cinders. These moments of epiphany and insight occur abruptly
and at unexpected places in the novel, where the narrator is immediately able to grasp the innate
nature of a specific moment, not through his sense of acquired knowledge but by intuition alone,
It is Chapter five of Hrabal's novel which introduces the readers to the unnamed gypsy
girl for the first time, as the narrator recollects, in one of the many drunken visions he has
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throughout the novel, the only time he has ever fallen in love. This is one of the few instances
where Hrabal's narrator is seen contemplating on love, sensuality and beauty rather than
destruction and death although his sequence of recollection ends on an abysmal note,
..as usual, when I drift off, I was joined by a tiny gypsy girl in the form of the milky Way,
the quiet innocent gypsy girl who was the love of my youth...all things were more
beautiful bathed in twilight...by the flames in the stove's open door the gypsy girl stood
up naked, as she moved I saw her body outlined in a yellow halo..one evening I came
home to find her gone...later I learned that she had been picked up by the gestapo and
sent with a group of gypsies to a concentration camp, and whether she was burned to
tiny gypsy girl whose name I'd never quite known (48-49).
It is this unknown and unnamed gypsy girl who haunts the narrator and his life at the
hydraulic press as a compactor of books. And this namelessness of his only lover and her sudden
and heartbreaking disappearance from his life becomes the central absence in the novel, an
absence which the narrator constantly tries to compensate for by his nihilistic knowledge of
universals. As Derrida says in his essay Psyche: Inventions of the Other, it is these unknown
‘absences’ and ‘spaces’ in one's life which end up determining how his or her desire for the
Other is constituted, and in Cinders, the same thought is followed up and extended upon by the
ubiquitous and pervasive nature of the event that leads to this creation of a ‘nameless absence’.
Derrida claims that it is the trace of the nameless subject, the absent being, the alleged non-being
which assumes importance in constructing the very nature of reality itself. Just like the narrator
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of the novel would never successfully come to know the real name of his long lost gypsy girl, a
girl which he can only conjure in fleeting moments of vision, the ‘cinder’ presents itself only as
trace, the trace of a subject that can never be known, but a trace that is powerful enough to
construct and create life, experience and reality. Ned Lukacher explains this double bind, in the
A cinder is a very fragile entity that falls to dust, that crumbles and disperses. But cinders
also name the resilience and the intractability of what is most delicate and most
vulnerable (Cinders 2)
Here in Hrabal's narrative, it is not the name of the gypsy girl that is important therefore,
but the event-like nature of her existence in the narrator's mind. She exists not as a name but as a
complete story, and therefore in the form of a ‘pure event’ in the mind and memory of the
narrator. She cannot be designated by a proper noun, but only by a place and space inside the
Il y a là centre literally means "it has ashes there,there." By rendering the idiomatic il y a
by "there is," we install the intransitive verb "to be" where, properly speaking, it does not
belong, for in the French idiom what is in question is not the "being" of the entity but it's
This ‘there-ness’ of the event is highlighted at the very beginning of the novel when the
narrator Hanta describes the incorporeality of a well written book in the shape of a brilliantly
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formed insight- "When my eye falls on a real book, and looks past the printed word, what it sees
is disembodied thoughts flying through air...because in the end everything is air" (Hrabal 2).
It is this claim that “everything is air” which forms the crux of the insight, an insight
which is irreducible, because here air itself is thought of as irreducible matter into which all
reducible matter eventually turns, providing it with an untraceability that is beyond analysis.
Christopher Butler in his book Modernism: A Very Short Introduction defines epiphany
as a revelation, which lies beyond the grasp of discursive thinking, but achieved only "the close
In chapter three of Hrabal's novel, the narrator, while roaming around on the streets of
Prague and on his way back to his cellar, while contemplating upon "the melancholy of a world
eternally under construction"(Hrabal 23), looks up to the cityscape around him and undergoes an
epiphanic moment, in which he envisions the classical model of civilization come to life. He
reflects that,
..through my tears I noticed something I never noticed before, namely, that the facades,
the fronts of all the buildings, public and residential - I could see them all the way up to
the drainpipes- were a reflection of everything Hegel and Goethe had dreamed of and
aspired to, the Greece in us, the beautiful Hellenic model and goal (Hrabal 24).
Similarly, later on in the same chapter, he is able to compare and associate in a moment
of realization, the conflicting forces at play in the immediacy of his life and within the universe
at large. He says, "I compact wastepaper, and when I press the green button the wall of my press
advances, and when I press the red button it retreats, thereby describing a basic motion of the
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world, like the bellows of a concertina, like a circle, which must return to its point of departure"
(Hrabal 28).
This duplicit and karmic force which cancels each other out in a contradictory motion of
infinite embrace is repeated again at the beginning of chapter five where he upholds the sanctity
and the education that is required for one to work in a hydraulic press. For the narrator Hanta,
working in the press is a mere appearance oriented facsimile for the actual and inner functioning
of the universe (of an infinite expansion and an infinite regress), the workings of which must be
understood by the worker if he has to acknowledge the work that he does and the labor which he
expends. Using classical terminology Hanta reiterates using a similar metaphor to that of the
bellows of a concertina,
futurum meets regressus ad originem, and I experience it first hand (Hrabal 37).
These moments of insights and epiphanies, as talked about earlier point to a central
incapacity in the narrator and therefore in the way he lives and conducts his life. The incapacity
which has followed from him being stuck within the memory of the nameless gypsy girl, an
incapacity which has rendered his life a mere compensation for a loss from which he can never
recover, and which condemns him to a loud and inescapable solitude. It is this self realization of
a static and petrified life within which he exists, which marks the central problematic in the
novel,
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It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having
had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and
soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurling
This regression into the other side of life, and a prolonged death drive, exhibited in the
narrator's choice of profession and his constant deciphering of the universe in terms of
decomposition and waste, and especially his attempted suicide at the end of the text can be
understood by Derrida's metaphor of the ‘burning fire’. Hrabal's narrative becomes inferential of
a figurative fire which burns into the life of the narrator, erasing him at every moment in the text,
and simultaneously taking him back towards the very origin where the erasure had begun - the
memory and event of the unnamed gypsy girl, "and it is there a cinder burns" (Cinders 3).
It is her fire which burns him up towards his own ‘erasure and death’, a fire whose
presence he had once noticed and realized during his limited time with her,
"At first I thought she put so much wood on the fire just to win me over, but then I realized it
was in her, the fire was in her, she couldn't live without fire" (Hrabal 45)
This insight becomes the primary realization for Hrabal's narrator in the novel, for it is in
the gypsy girl within whom he locates the crux and the fire of his very existence. His paradise.
And on the verge of a delirious death he finally accepts his vocation and predicament. As he
"I am entering a world where I have never been and holding a book open to a page that says
As the novel ends with Hanta's implied death, and therefore his complete erasure from
life, the driving force of his life, a force which has been concealed and had remained hidden and
elusive throughout the whole narrative finally reveals itself in the penultimate sentence of the
novel. This final revelation which brings forth the sacrifice of the one who writes and produces
the very text, is what for Derrida constitutes the ‘cinder’, a "name among others for these
remains without a remainder" (Cinders 1), that something that erases itself totally, radically,
…and the gypsy girl sends me a message from the ground, I see it making its way up the
cord, I can almost reach it now, I stretch out my hand, I read the large, childlike letters:
Conclusion
This interplay between the visible, the traceable and the ontological in the novel on the
one hand, and the invisible, intransitive and the non-ontological on the other hand, not only
makes Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, a complicated and problematic novel in terms of
its intended meaning and the many motivations behind the narrator's life and experiences, but
also demands a critical reflexivity on the part of the one who reads.
This narrative and ‘interdiscursive’ buffering and interrelatedness culminate within the
novel in the many moments of vision, dreams, intoxication and subliminal haze which the
narrator experiences, pointing to the novelist's ability to construct a narrative that allows a
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While I was on my fourth mug of beer, I noticed a pleasant looking young man next to
the press, and I knew then and there that it was Jesus Himself. And soon he was joined by
an old man...and I knew on the spot it could only be Lao-tze...my grandfathers and great-
grandfathers had visions too when they drank, and they saw fairy tale characters (Hrabal
32-33).
I saw Jesus as a playboy and Lao-tze as an old gland abandoned bachelor...I saw Jesus as
a romantic, Lao-tze as a classicist, Jesus as the flow, Lao-tze as the ebb, Jesus as spring,
(Hrabal 40).
And although it is the ontological sense which gives the novel and all the instances of
deconstructive tendencies present in the text provide it with a dimension that helps us get closer
to the psychological and emotional intricacies of the narrator, and also makes us look at Bohumil
Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, as one single irreducible event which is to be experienced and felt
Notes
2. Ontological here would concern chiefly western metaphysics’ emphasis on the subject of
3. The non-ontological would concern (a) the post-structuralist poetics of absence and non-
4. Jacques Derrida uses the word ‘freeplay’ in his essay Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences to designate the radical freedom of signs within a
signifying system (he also simultaneously questions the structurality of such systems as
well).
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Works Cited
Camuf, Peggy and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg, eds. Psyche: Inventions of the Other. By Jacques
Butler, Christopher. Modernism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press
Dyde, S.W, trans. Philosophy Of Right. By G.W.F. Hegel. Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001.
Print.
Fowlie, Wallace, trans. Rimbaud Complete Works, Selected Letters. By Arthur Rimbaud.
Henry Heim, Michael, trans. Too Loud a Solitude. By Bohumil Hrabal. New York: Harcourt
Lukacher, Ned, trans. Cinders. By Jacques Derrida. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Print.
Sandburg, Carl. Chicago Poems. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916. Print.