Nezval's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
The Perfect Film Treatment
Nezval’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders borrows heavily from the Gothic tradition; it is the theory of surrealism applied with the flair of the Gothic novel. Nezval borrows symbols, objects, themes, and rhetoric from the Gothic tradition in the novel in accordance with many of the other surrealist artists who were a part of the Czech New Wave at the time, and who began to see that elements of horror could in fact be the bearer of beauty. This introduction of darker elements in the avant-garde movement of the 1920s in Czechoslovakia was a marked shift from the beginning part of the movement that was notably focused on pursuing lighter, more ordinary, and optimistic subject matter.
As someone who has been interested in adaptation for quite some time, I was delighted to learn that the novella was made into a film several decades after its publication by the Czech director Jaromil Jireš.
After finishing the novel, I felt like I went into it with higher expectations than I should have had. I think this is because I wanted it to do something that it never tried to do, which is offer an explanation as to why the transition from girlhood to womanhood is often suffused with traumas for women. But this was my mistake for expecting something concrete from this genre. The film companion helped me to appreciate the powerful work that the book was doing, it was incredibly enriching, and while I would not recommend experiencing one without the other, if you only had the option of one, I would say choose the film.
At the start of the novel, Valerie confronts menstruation for the first time, naturally symbolizing her transition from girl to woman. The material that ensues in her “week of wonders” is a fragmented schema of interruptions to this new stage of life that appears to be a waking dream, although whether this week (and the entirety of both works) is nothing more than a dream, a reality, or a combination of the two is not clear in either the novel or in the film. The film renders this moment beautifully with the imagery of blood lightly staining daisies along the path that Valerie treads. The potential for beauty that may be missed in Nezval’s novel is made up for in Jireš’s film, for the work is an idea that requires a rich imaginative interpretation for productive comprehension. Even a reader with a vivid imaginative capacity would not be able to compile a full-scale interpretation upon a first read because the plot is so dense and also so scattered, and the film does pose a cohesive manner to interpret Nezval’s pattern at once, as it is Jireš’s vision of Nezval’s work distilled.
Nezval writes, “Raising the liquid against the moonlight, she thought it looked like that very evening, thin and volatile” (35). The dimensionality of Nezval’s descriptive language, and his use of descriptors that are unexpectedly analogous with objects in the narrative is a high point of his fiction and too his expertise working in this surrealistic genre. I select this sentence here for several reasons. First, to highlight the quality of the prose. I find it distinctively resonant because of its surprising comparison that echoes things in the chambers of the mind like, Can an evening really be thin? What does that look like? What about if it is both thin and volatile?
Second, to use it as a door to discuss how Jireš’s film takes a definitive stab at these uncanny analogies, a definitiveness that is easy for the reader to fail at because layering these analogies while traversing this long form written narrative is exasperating. While experiencing the novel the reader might let the interrogating echoes resound and then immediately, they will settle once the reader encounters a new and altogether different startling analogy. However, in the film, the descriptive imagery that is cardinal to appropriately translating the substance of the novel is holistically built into the entirety of the film’s vision, as these varying analogies overlap and appear in and out of vision over the course of the scenes and sequences. They aren’t forgotten about like they are when reading the book; the sense of an atmosphere that is “thin and volatile” pervades the film throughout by means, for instance, of diaphanous materials and objects, while other aspects of the setting are added to this overarching atmosphere like a patina.
In the essay “On Valerie, Nezval, Max Ernst, and Collage: Variations on a Theme” by Giuseppe Dierna, an addendum to the novel, Dierna mentions Nezvals’s interest in and speech on the horror film Nosferatu and what Nezval thought that the Gothic lent to the work and the aim of Surrealism. Dierna writes:
“In his Nosferatu speech, Nezval outlined the elements of analogy found in poetry and dream that were used to elicit fear in the viewer – ‘the miraculous in contrast to logic’ and the ‘highly absurd display of the principle of causality.’”
This sense of fear, or rather I would say enigma, is elicited in Valerie and its filmic version, precisely through this attempt at isolating the miraculous and the violation of a logical ordering of cause and effect. In the novel the disjointed plot unfortunately becomes tiresome at times perhaps because a reader becomes so reliant upon chronology to pick up where they left off. Something that experiencing these two works together has brought to mind is the consideration that chronology may be less important in film than in literature, that viewers don’t rely upon a coherent series of events to deem a film worthwhile. I actually wouldn’t call Nezval’s Valerie a novel at all, but rather a perfect film treatment for a script. I think scenarists have a lot to learn from surrealist “novellas” (another example being Breton’s Nadja) because of the way that the language held within them can assist in crafting intensely poignant mise en scene. Films are far more like dreaming, so it makes sense that Valerie the film was much better.