"This idea is reinforced by the sense we get of Hašek’s intense dislike of any of the traditional justifications for organized control of human beings, whether judicial, religious, political, or military (and, perhaps more importantly, his assault on people’s faith in such justifications). His narrative is constantly mocking symbols for such control—everything from crucifixes and prayers to official images and law books (the novel begins with a discussion about a fly shitting on a portrait of the emperor). These signs of authority are all officially sanctioned, but no one believes in them; people simply use them as instruments of their own authority in a system which reinforces itself by reflex appeals to such traditions. This point is obvious enough in the lengthy treatment of Otto Katz in Part I, where the drunken Catholic priest (an ex-Jew) desperately scrambles for anything at all to use as the holy symbols necessary for the religious service over which he has to preside—a sporting cup for the chalice, machine oil for the last rites, and so on—these are essential to what he does, but fake materials will do just as well as the real thing because what matters is the bureaucratic public ritual and people’s faith in it—any genuine spiritual or ideal meaning has long since disappeared.
This continued mocking of official symbols emerges time and again in particular moments. Here, for example, is the description of Judge Advocate Ruller’s office:
A volume of the legal code lay before him, and a half-consumed glass of tea stood on top of it. On the table on the right stood a crucifix made out of imitation ivory with a dusty Christ, who looked despairingly at the pedestal of his cross, on which there were ashes and cigarette stubs.
To the renewed regret of the crucified Jesus Judge Advocate Ruller was at this very moment flicking the ash from another cigarette on to the pedestal of the crucifix. With his other hand he was raising the glass of tea, which had got stuck to the legal code. (388-9)
Here Jesus is once again before the judge—but there’s no drama in the confrontation, because Jesus has become nothing more than a dusty accessory of a soulless bureaucracy. If the statue is part of the official trappings, it might as well serve as an ashtray, since whatever sense of religious commitment or social justice it once communicated (if it ever did) has long disappeared from this environment. For the same reason, the legal code might as well be a coaster—if it is now incapable of protecting people in a world of bureaucratic directives, at least it can protect the table top from stains. Interestingly enough, the book which really interests the judge at this point is one full of pictures of male and female sexual organs “with appropriate rhymes which the scholar Franz S. Krause discovered on the walls of the W.C.s of the West Berlin railway station” (389).
[Incidentally, the number of references to the story of Jesus in the novel is interesting and significant. There’s no doubt that Hašek is extremely hostile to organized religion, particular to Roman Catholicism, which he never tires of attacking as hopelessly corrupt, and, at times to the very idea of religious belief. But the network of references to Jesus (and to Pontius Pilate) suggests that his attitude to Christianity as exemplified in the story of Jesus might be quite different]."
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